May 24: How to live forever, and more...
The Archaeopteryx, a 150-million-year-old bird-like dinosaur, is known from about a dozen fossils found in Germany. A new one recently studied at Chicago's Field Museum may be the best preserved yet. It's giving researchers, like paleontologist Jingmai O'Connor, new insights into how the ancient animal moved around the Jurassic landscape. The research was published in the journal Nature.
Inspired by the structure of bone, researchers have created limestone-like biomineralized construction materials using a fungal-scaffold that they seeded with bacteria. Montana State University's Chelsea Heveran said they demonstrated they could mould it into specific shapes with internal properties similar to bone, and that it remained alive for a month. It's early days yet, but she envisions a day when they can grow living structural material on site that may even be able to heal themselves. The study is in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.
Scientists have created a clever combination of physical sensors and computer technology to produce a flexible Band-Aid-like device that can accurately read emotions when it is stuck to the face. It's not quite mind reading, but it could give physicians better insight into the emotional state of their patients. Huanyu Cheng of Penn State led the work, which was published in the journal Nano Letters.
Do you want to live forever? As he noticed himself showing signs of aging, immunologist John Tregoning decided to find out what he could do to make that possible. So he explored the investigations that scientists are doing into why we age and die — and tried a few experiments on himself. Bob speaks with him about his new book, Live Forever? A Curious Scientists' Guide to Wellness, Ageing and Death.
Tregoning dutifully documents everything he discovers as he undergoes testing for his heart, gets his genes sequenced, has a bronchoscopy, and follows an extreme diet, among other experiments. But he comes to the conclusion that "when it comes to improving life outcomes, exercise considerably trumps nearly everything I am planning to do whilst writing this book."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBC
a day ago
- CBC
Chimps are sticking grass and sticks in their butts, seemingly as a fashion trend
A group of chimpanzees in Zambia have resurrected an old fashion trend with a surprising new twist. Fifteen years after a female chimpanzee named Julie first stuck a blade of grass into her ear and started a hot new craze among her cohort at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage, an entirely new group of chimps at the refuge have started doing the same thing. "We were really shocked that this had happened again," Jake Brooker, a psychologist and great apes researcher at Durham University in England, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. "We were even more shocked that they were doing their own spin on this by also inserting the grass and sticks in a different orifice." The chimps, he says, have been putting blades of grass and sticks into their ears and anuses, and simply letting them dangle there for no apparent reason. The study, published in the journal Behaviour last week, sheds new light on how social-cultural trends spread and change among our primate cousins, much like they do among humans. They learned it from us. Some of it, anyway In fact, the researchers suspect the chimps learned the behaviour from people — the ear part, that is. The two groups of chimps who display the behaviour don't have any contact with each other. But they do share some of the same human caretakers. And those caretakers, the study notes, reported that they sometimes use match sticks or blades of grass to clean their ears when working at the animal sanctuary. The chimps, Brooker says, "have potentially copied it from a human who was walking by the enclosure, or one of the caregivers who was just going about their daily lives." "Like with all cultures, things change over time and they get refined and new quirks and new traditions pop up," he said. Chimpanzee influencers In this case, the team traced the "new quirk" to a male chimp named Juma, who seems to have originated the grass-in-butt variation. From there, the study shows, it spread rapidly to most of his groupmates within a week. The same thing happened to Julie's group. She started putting grass in her ear in 2010, and pretty soon, seven other chimps were doing the same. The phenomenon even continued after Julie died in 2013. The researchers observed Julie's group again for this new study, and found that two chimps, including Julie's son, were still wearing grass in their ears. Much like humans, Brooker says the chimps appear to be willing to suffer for the sake of fashion. "You see when they're learning this behaviour that it's quite uncomfortable," he said of the ear grass. "They shake their head and they rub the ear a little bit as if they're trying to get used to it." Once they adjust, he says, they appear largely unbothered. He likened it to people getting their ears pierced. "There's not a clear benefit that wearing earrings really brings, but some kind of social cultural reason," he said. "I feel like it's similar with the grass in the ear." It's an apt comparison, says Julie Teichroeb, a primatologist at the University of Toronto who wasn't involved in the study. "It just looks like an earring, you know, like a fashionable way to present yourself," she said. 'They spend a lot of time looking at each other's butts' And as for Juma's grass-in-butt variation? Teichroeb says it's possible they're doing it to make themselves more attractive to potential mates. Females, in particular, she noted, display a swelling on their rear ends to indicate when they're receptive to a little hanky panky. "They spend a lot of time looking at each other's butts," she said. "So it's kind of not surprising maybe that they were innovating this way to sort of decorate their butts." Cultural differences are common among primates, and other animals too, but they often boil down to different methods of accessing food and other resources. Because the Chimfunshi chimps have human caretakers who feed them, Teichroeb says they may have more free time to develop purely social trends. "We think of, like silly, little pointless cultural ideas that spread amongst people," she said. "Learning that animals have these kinds of same, pointless little behaviours that become fads and become viral, I think it really shows how closely related we are to them, how much kinship we actually share." Brooker says it reminds him of the orcas who have recently been spotted wearing salmon on their heads like a hat — a behaviour last reported in the '70s. "It re-emerged 40 years later, like flared jeans," Brooker said. In that case, scientists also theorize the trend could be related to an abundance of food after many years of scarcity. Weird as this study was, Brooker says it's only the second most surprising behaviour he's observed in chimpanzees. The most surprising, he says, was when he happened upon two male chimps engaging in "."
CBC
2 days ago
- CBC
Chimpanzees follow fashion trends just like humans, study suggests
Chimpanzees follow fashion trends just like humans, study suggests | Hanomansing Tonight News Duration 3:24 Chimpanzees living in a sanctuary in Africa have been observed following 'fashion trends' by dangling blades of grass or sticks from their ears and their behinds. A new study suggests this behaviour mirrors how cultural fads develop among humans.
CTV News
04-07-2025
- CTV News
125,000-year-old ‘fat factory' run by Neanderthals discovered in Germany
An AI-generated impression of what the fat factory site may have looked like 125,000 years ago. (Scherjon/LEIZA-Monrepos via CNN Newsource) Stone Age humans living by a lake in what's now Germany systematically processed animal carcasses for fatty nutrients — essentially running what scientists describe as a 'fat factory' to boil bones on a vast scale, according to new research. Archaeologists uncovered the factory by analyzing some 120,000 bone fragments and 16,000 flint tools unearthed over several years at a site known as Neumark-Nord, south of the city of Halle, they reported in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. Excavators found the artifacts alongside evidence of fire use. The researchers believe that Neanderthals, an extinct species of human known to have lived in that area as far back as 125,000 years ago, smashed the marrow-rich bones into fragments with stone hammers, then boiled them for several hours to extract the fat, which floats to the surface and can be skimmed off upon cooling. Since this feat would have involved planning hunts, transporting and storing carcasses beyond immediate food needs, and rendering the fat in an area designated specially for the task, the finding helps paint a picture of the group's organization, strategy and deeply honed survival skills. 'This attitude that Neanderthals were dumb — this is another data point that proves otherwise,' said Wil Roebroeks, study coauthor and professor of Paleolithic archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. A string of archaeological discoveries in recent decades have showed that Neanderthals were smarter than their original brutish stereotype might suggest. The ancient humans lived across Eurasia and disappeared 40,000 years ago, and previous studies have found they made yarn and glue, engraved bones and cave walls, and assembled jewelry from eagle talons. Details in the new research suggest that Neanderthals may have been unexpectedly sophisticated in their approach to nutrition, too. Threat of protein poisoning The Neanderthals living at the German site over a 300-year period also clearly understood the nutritional value of the bone grease they produced, according to the study. A small amount of fat is an essential part of a healthy, balanced diet. The substance was even more essential for hunter-gatherers, such as Neanderthals, who likely depended heavily on animal foods. A diet dominated by lean meat and deficient in fatty acids can lead to a debilitating and sometimes lethal form of malnutrition, in which the capacity of liver enzymes to break down the protein and get rid of excess nitrogen is impaired, the researchers noted in their paper. Known today as protein poisoning, the condition earned a reputation among early European explorers of North America as 'rabbit poisoning' or 'mal de caribou.' Hunter-gatherers such as Neanderthals, with average body weights between 50 kilograms and 80 kilograms (110 pounds and 175 pounds), would have had to keep their consumption of dietary protein below 300 grams (about 10 ounces) per day to avoid the condition. That amounts to around 1,200 calories — a level of intake far short of daily energy needs, according to the research. As a result, the Neanderthals likely needed to source the remaining calories from a nonprotein source, either fat or carbohydrate. Cuts of meat from animal muscle contain very little fat, making bones — which contain marrow and other fatty tissue even when an animal is malnourished — a more important resource. The researchers discovered that the overwhelming majority of remains at the site came from 172 individual large animals, including horses, deer and aurochs, large cow-like creatures that are now extinct. Neanderthals had selected the longest bones that would have contained the most marrow, the study found. Neanderthal fat factory The archaeological site in Germany was excavated from 2004 to 2009. (Roebroeks/Leiden University via CNN Newsource) A dash of acorn, a pinch of sloe plum Exactly how the Neanderthals processed the bones isn't clear, according to the study authors. The ancient humans likely fashioned containers or pots from birch bark, animal skins or other body parts such as stomach linings, filling them with water and hanging them over a fire, Roebroeks said. Neanderthals could have consumed the fat they produced as a 'greasy broth' to which plants may have been added for flavor as well as nutritional value, suggested study coauthor Geoff Smith, a senior researcher in zooarchaeology at the University of Reading. The charred remains of hazelnut, acorn and sloe plum were also found during the excavations, he noted. 'These weren't simple hunter-gatherers just getting by day to day — they were master planners who could look ahead, organise complex tasks, and squeeze every last calorie from their environment,' Smith said. The findings are 'exciting,' according to Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France. Slimak wasn't involved in the study. Neanderthal fat factory Researchers believe that Neanderthals smashed animal bones into fragments before boiling them to extract the nutrients. (Kindler/LEIZA-Monrepos via CNN Newsource) 'They finally offer clear archaeological confirmation of what many of us had long suspected: that Neanderthals not only valued within-bone lipids but developed specific strategies to extract and process them,' said Slimak, who is the author of the 'The Last Neanderthal,' which will be published in English later this year. 'This aligns closely with the broader archaeological record, which shows Neanderthals as highly skilled big-game hunters with a refined sense of ecological adaptation,' he added. The Neumark-Nord site is 'the best example yet of bone-grease rendering,' from this period of the Stone Age, said Bruce Hardy, the J. Kenneth Smail Professor of Anthropology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Hardy also was not involved in the research. 'The combination of evidence presented here at Neumark-Nord is impressive,' Hardy said. 'It may well represent the smoldering gun, or simmering bone broth, of Neanderthal bone-grease rendering.' By Katie Hunt, CNN
