Gene therapies that let deaf children hear bring hope —and many questions
The past few months have brought electrifying news that, for the first time, a gene therapy has provided some hearing to children born with mutations that left them deaf. Eli Lilly
announced
this week, for example, that a profoundly deaf boy from Morocco given its treatment as part of a clinical trial in Philadelphia can now hear. And five children in China treated similarly at younger ages gained hearing with some able to verbally communicate without their cochlear implants. Their hearing recovery, first covered by the
press
in October 2023, is described in detail this week in
The Lancet
...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 26, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Watch a robot made of muscle and steel turn on a dime
Some of today’s most advanced robots can leap over obstacles, crawl through tight spaces and swim gracefully—as long as they’re traveling in straight lines. Making turns, however, often poses a challenge to so-called biohybrid machines, which combine living tissue with robotic materials. Now, scientists from Japan report today in
Matter
that
they have created a bipedal biohybrid bot that can turn on a dime
, albeit slowly. If the technique can be made to work in other biohybrids, it could help these machines maneuver more adeptly for search and rescue operations or exploring inhospitable deep-sea ...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 26, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Microbes that gave rise to all plants and animals became multicellular 1.6 billion years ago, tiny fossils reveal
A new study describing a microscopic, algalike fossil dating back more than 1.6 billion years supports the idea that one of the hallmarks of the complex life we see around us—multicellularity— is much older than previously thought. Together with other recent research, the fossil, reported today in
Science Advances
, suggests the lineage known as eukaryotes— which features compartmentalized cells and includes everything from redwoods to jellies to people—
became multicellular some 600 million years earlier than scientists once generally thought
.
“It’s a fantastic paper,” says Michael...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 24, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
News at a glance: ‘Lobster eye’ space telescope, psychiatrists’ conflicts, and elusive common sense
ASTRONOMY
‘Lobster eye’ in space promises new look at x-rays
China last week launched an x-ray observatory with an unusual telescope inspired by the structure of lobster eyes to gather new data on gamma ray bursts, supernovae, and stars being swallowed by black holes. The Einstein Probe (illustration above)—a joint project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the European Space Agency, and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics—will also capture x-rays from violent events that generate gravitational waves, such as two neutron stars colliding. The telescope features a survey inst...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 18, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds
Related podcast
Paper mills bribe editors to pass peer review, and detecting tumors with a blood draw
BY
Sarah Crespi
,
Richard Stone
,
Zakiya Whatley
One evening in June 2023, Nicholas Wise, a fluid dynamics researcher at the University of Cambridge who moonlights as a scientific fraud buster, was digging around on shady Facebook groups when he came across something he had never seen before. Wise was all too familiar with offers to sell...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 18, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Slimy hagfish help solve mysteries of genome duplication
With an eyeless face and slimy body that only a mother could love, hagfish fascinate many biologists. These eel-like, jawless vertebrates have now helped scientists solve a major evolutionary mystery: When did vertebrate genomes double in size and what happened as a result?
It’s long been known that in the past, various plants and animals duplicated all their genes in one fell swoop. By sequencing hagfish genomes for the first time, two teams working independently have clarified when two of these genomic upheavals occurred in the early history of vertebrates. In addition to helping explain some of the hagfish’s u...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 17, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
What does your dog ’s tail wag really mean?
When your dog greets you with a furiously wagging tail, are they happy to see you—or is there more going than meets the eye? Wagging, which is mainly confined to domestic dogs, may represent a whole canine language that we are only beginning to understand.
A new review article in
Biology Letters
pulls together more than 100 studies covering why dogs wag their tails and what those wags mean
.
Science
spoke with three of its authors—bioacousticians Silvia Leonetti of the University of Turin and Taylor Hersh of Oregon State University, and evolutionary cognitive scientist Andrea Ravignani...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 17, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Explosion of violence in Ecuador shuts down science
Quito
--The explosion of criminal activity that shocked Ecuador this week, including car bombings, shootings, arson, and prison riots, has also shaken the country’s researchers and academics. Universities, as well as schools, government offices, and stores, were suddenly shut down on Tuesday, and scientists had to work from home, cancel fieldwork, and contemplate new security protocols.
The events unfolded a day after Ecuador’s newly elected president, Daniel Noboa, declared a nationwide state of emergency when the leader of one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels escaped from prison. Much of the v...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 13, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
EPA scraps plan to end mammal testing by 2035
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has abandoned a controversial plan to phase out all use of mammals to test the safety of chemicals by 2035. The hard deadline—imposed in 2019 to accelerate a move toward nonanimal models such as computer programs and “organs on a chip”—made EPA unique among U.S. federal agencies. But it
divided scientists
, some of whom say animals remain the gold standard for assessing the safety of chemicals that could harm humans and wildlife.
Removing the deadline is a “good move,” says Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council w...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 12, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
This fossilized reptile skin from an Oklahoma cave is the oldest on record
Skin gives animals a sensitive, flexible, waterproof barrier to the world. But after death, it doesn’t hold up for long, so it’s hard to study how this remarkable organ evolved in ancient creatures. Now, a team of researchers has
identified a fragment of fossilized reptile skin
that is more than 20 million years older than previously described examples. The fragment, reported today in
Current Biology
, dates back to the late Paleozoic Era, when many species began to emerge from the water to live on land.
How animal skin adapted to cope with this dramatic transition has long been a “bl...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 11, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Tectonic plate under Tibet may be splitting in two
The towering peaks of the Himalayas are a geologic battleground—a slowmotion collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates. The crunch began some 60 million years ago as India, then an island, plowed into Eurasia, buckling the surface and forming the highest mountains on Earth. But the peaks are just the noise and smoke of the battle; tectonic maneuvers tens of kilometers below them drive the clash—and hold mysteries.
Continental tectonic plates, unlike their dense oceanic cousins, are thick and buoyant, so they don’t easily sink, or subduct, into the mantle during collisions. Some scientists believe the...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 10, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Mysterious seismic swarm foreshadowed monster Japan earthquake
Big earthquakes sometimes bring big surprises. The magnitude 7.5 earthquake that struck Japan on New Year’s Day, killing more than 160 people, is no exception. Over the past 3 years, tens of thousands of small to moderate earthquakes, most barely noticeable, had rattled the Noto Peninsula, a finger of land that juts 100 kilometers into the Sea of Japan from the west coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island. Such earthquake swarms occur throughout the world, typically in areas of volcanic or geothermal activity. But the swarms almost always taper off and end with a whimper. The Noto Peninsula swarm produced a bang.
...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 9, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
2023 was the hottest year on record —and even hotter than expected
It comes as no surprise to anyone who sweated through it: 2023 was the hottest year in human history. Average surface temperatures rose nearly 0.2°C above the previous record, set in 2016, to 1.48°C over preindustrial levels, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service
reported today
. Only Australia was spared record-setting heat. The extreme conditions are a “dramatic testimony of how far we now are from the climate in which our civilization developed,” said Carlo Buontempo, Copernicus’s director, in a statement.
Yet 2023’s record temperatures—likely to be confirmed later this wee...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 9, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Even warmer than expected, 2023 was the hottest year on record
It comes as no surprise to anyone who sweated through it: 2023 was the hottest year in human history. Average surface temperatures rose nearly 0.2°C above the previous record, set in 2016, to 1.48°C over preindustrial levels, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service
reported today
. Only Australia was spared record-setting heat. The extreme conditions are a “dramatic testimony of how far we now are from the climate in which our civilization developed,” said Carlo Buontempo, Copernicus’s director, in a statement.
Yet 2023’s record temperatures—likely to be confirmed later this wee...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 9, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Massive study of dog aging likely to lose funding
Scientists who study aging are howling about the possible demise of one of the field’s biggest studies, the Dog Aging Project. The effort has been probing cognitive and physical aspects of aging in about 50,000 dogs and is running a clinical trial to test a drug that may boost the animals’ longevity. But organizers say the project will probably lose funding this year from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), which has furnished at least 90% of its annual budget, now about $7 million.
“It is a big loss if this project in dogs does not continue,” says gerontologist João Pedro de Magalhães of the University ...
Source: ScienceNOW - January 8, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
