Ancient Blueprint For Human Bodies Discovered in Sea Anemones
Sea anemones may look alien, but scientists just found out they're hiding an ancient body 'blueprint' – one that most animals, including humans, still follow. The discovery could shake up the timeline of evolution.
You might not be familiar with the term 'bilaterian,' although you are one. These are creatures with a body plan that's symmetrical along a single plane: from worms to whales, ants to elephants, and humans to hummingbirds.
Another major animal body plan is radial symmetry, meaning these creatures organize their bodies around a central axis. Picture a jellyfish, and then try to figure out which side is the 'front', and you'll likely understand.
Most animals belonging to the cnidaria phylum, which includes invertebrates like jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals, have this body plan.
But the categories aren't as neat as biologists might like them to be. Although it's a cnidarian, the sea anemone shows bilateral symmetry, which raises the question of when the feature evolved, and how many times.
To find out, researchers at the University of Vienna in Austria conducted experiments on starlet sea anemones (Nematostella vectensis) to see how they develop as embryos.
Bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) is crucial to how bilaterians build their bodies. Essentially, a gradient of BMP tells developing cells what tissues they should become, based on where in the body they are.
In some bilaterians, like frogs and flies, this gradient is created thanks to another protein called chordin shuttling BMP around the body.
The team found that sea anemones also use this BMP shuttling mechanism. That suggests that the mechanism evolved before bilaterians and cnidarians diverged, more than 600 million years ago.
"The fact that not only bilaterians but also sea anemones use shuttling to shape their body axes tells us that this mechanism is incredibly ancient," says developmental biologist David Mörsdorf, first author of the study.
"It opens up exciting possibilities for rethinking how body plans evolved in early animals."
The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
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WIRED
an hour ago
- WIRED
Student Solves a Long-Standing Problem About the Limits of Addition
Jun 29, 2025 7:00 AM A new proof illuminates the hidden patterns that emerge when addition becomes impossible. Illustration: Nash Weerasekera for Quanta Magazine The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The simplest ideas in mathematics can also be the most perplexing. Take addition. It's a straightforward operation: One of the first mathematical truths we learn is that 1 plus 1 equals 2. But mathematicians still have many unanswered questions about the kinds of patterns that addition can give rise to. 'This is one of the most basic things you can do,' said Benjamin Bedert, a graduate student at the University of Oxford. 'Somehow, it's still very mysterious in a lot of ways.' In probing this mystery, mathematicians also hope to understand the limits of addition's power. Since the early 20th century, they've been studying the nature of 'sum-free' sets—sets of numbers in which no two numbers in the set will add to a third. For instance, add any two odd numbers and you'll get an even number. The set of odd numbers is therefore sum-free. In a 1965 paper, the prolific mathematician Paul Erdős asked a simple question about how common sum-free sets are. But for decades, progress on the problem was negligible. 'It's a very basic-sounding thing that we had shockingly little understanding of,' said Julian Sahasrabudhe, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge. Until this February. Sixty years after Erdős posed his problem, Bedert solved it. He showed that in any set composed of integers—the positive and negative counting numbers—there's a large subset of numbers that must be sum-free. His proof reaches into the depths of mathematics, honing techniques from disparate fields to uncover hidden structure not just in sum-free sets, but in all sorts of other settings. 'It's a fantastic achievement,' Sahasrabudhe said. Stuck in the Middle Erdős knew that any set of integers must contain a smaller, sum-free subset. Consider the set {1, 2, 3}, which is not sum-free. It contains five different sum-free subsets, such as {1} and {2, 3}. Erdős wanted to know just how far this phenomenon extends. If you have a set with a million integers, how big is its biggest sum-free subset? In many cases, it's huge. If you choose a million integers at random, around half of them will be odd, giving you a sum-free subset with about 500,000 elements. Paul Erdős was famous for his ability to come up with deep conjectures that continue to guide mathematics research today. Photograph: George Csicsery In his 1965 paper, Erdős showed—in a proof that was just a few lines long, and hailed as brilliant by other mathematicians—that any set of N integers has a sum-free subset of at least N /3 elements. Still, he wasn't satisfied. His proof dealt with averages: He found a collection of sum-free subsets and calculated that their average size was N /3. But in such a collection, the biggest subsets are typically thought to be much larger than the average. Erdős wanted to measure the size of those extra-large sum-free subsets. Mathematicians soon hypothesized that as your set gets bigger, the biggest sum-free subsets will get much larger than N /3. In fact, the deviation will grow infinitely large. This prediction—that the size of the biggest sum-free subset is N /3 plus some deviation that grows to infinity with N —is now known as the sum-free sets conjecture. 'It is surprising that this simple question seems to present considerable difficulties,' Erdős wrote in his original paper, 'but perhaps we overlook the obvious.' For decades, nothing obvious revealed itself. No one could improve on Erdős' proof. 'The longer it went without people being able to improve on that simple bound, the more cachet this problem acquired,' said Ben Green, Bedert's doctoral adviser at Oxford. And, he added, this was precisely the kind of problem where 'it's very, very hard to do any better at all.' Confronting the Norm After 25 years without improving on Erdős' original result, mathematicians finally began inching forward. In 1990, two researchers proved that any set of N integers has a sum-free subset with at least N /3 + 1/3 elements, more commonly written as ( N + 1)/3. But since the size of a set is always a whole number, an increase of 1/3 is often inconsequential. For example, if you know that a sum-free subset has to have at least 5/3 elements, that means its size is guaranteed to be 2 or more. If you add 1/3 to 5/3, your answer is still 2. 'It's funny, it means that it doesn't actually always improve it,' said David Conlon of the California Institute of Technology. 'It's only when N is divisible by 3 that it improves it.' In 1997, the mathematical legend Jean Bourgain nudged the bound up to ( N + 2)/3. The result might have seemed hardly worth mentioning, but buried in Bourgain's paper was a startling breakthrough. He described an idea for how to prove that the biggest sum-free subsets would be arbitrarily bigger than that. He just couldn't pin down the details to turn it into a full proof. 'The paper's almost like, here's how I tried to solve the problem and why it didn't work,' Sahasrabudhe said. Jean Bourgain devised a creative strategy for proving the sum-free sets conjecture. Photograph: George M. Bergman, Berkeley Bourgain relied on a quantity called the Littlewood norm, which measures a given set's structure. This quantity, which comes from a field of mathematics called Fourier analysis, tends to be large if a set is more random, and small if the set exhibits more structure. Bourgain showed that if a set with N elements has a large Littlewood norm, then it must also have a sum-free set that's much larger than N /3. But he couldn't make progress in the case where the set has a small Littlewood norm. 'Bourgain is famously competent,' said Sean Eberhard of the University of Warwick. 'It's a very striking marker of how difficult this problem is.' Bourgain ultimately had to use a different argument to get his bound of ( N + 2)/3. But mathematicians read between the lines: They might be able to use the Littlewood norm to completely settle the conjecture. They just had to figure out how to deal with sets with a small Littlewood norm. Illustration: Nash Weerasekera for Quanta Magazine There was reason to be optimistic: Mathematicians already knew of sets with a small Littlewood norm that have massive sum-free subsets. These sets, called arithmetic progressions, consist of evenly spaced numbers, such as {5, 10, 15, 20}. Mathematicians suspected that any set with a small Littlewood norm has a very specific structure—that it's more or less a collection of many different arithmetic progressions (with a few tweaks). They hoped that if they could show this, they'd be able to use that property to prove that any set with a small Littlewood norm has a large sum-free subset. But this task wasn't easy. 'I certainly tried to prove the sum-free conjecture using [Bourgain's] ideas,' Green said, but 'we still don't understand much about the structure of sets with small Littlewood norm. Everything to do with Littlewood is difficult.' And so, though mathematicians continued to have faith in Bourgain's Littlewood-based strategy, nothing happened. More than two decades passed. Then, in the fall of 2021, Benjamin Bedert started graduate school. Notorious Problems With Green as his doctoral adviser, it was inevitable that Bedert would come across the sum-free sets conjecture. Green's website lists 100 open problems; this one appears first. Bedert perused the list shortly after he began his graduate studies. At first, he shied away from the sum-free sets problem. 'I was like, this is super difficult, I'm not going to think about this,' he recalled. 'I'll leave this for the future.' The future arrived soon enough. In summer 2024, Bedert decided he was ready for a riskier project. 'I'd proved some reasonably good results in my PhD so far, and kind of put a thesis together already,' he said. 'I started thinking about these more, I guess, notorious problems.' Benjamin Bedert, a graduate student at the University of Oxford, has resolved a decades-old problem that tests the role of addition in sets. Photograph: Romana Meereis He read Bourgain's 1997 paper and began to muse about how to implement the Littlewood blueprint. Almost immediately, he had an idea for how he might approach the problem of sets with a small Littlewood norm. So far, it had been too difficult to show that sets with a small Littlewood norm always resemble collections of arithmetic progressions. But Bedert thought it might be useful to prove something more attainable: that even if these sets aren't literally built from arithmetic progressions, they share certain key, progression-like properties. In a recent project, Bedert had come across what he saw as a good candidate for a property to focus on. In arithmetic progressions, there are many groups of numbers that have the same sum. For instance, in the set of even numbers (which is an arithmetic progression), 4 + 8 has the same sum as both 2 + 10 and 2 + 4 + 6. Bedert thought it might be enough to show that sets with a small Littlewood norm always obey this property. Within a couple of weeks, he'd succeeded in proving that the property was true. But would the result give him the level of similarity to arithmetic progressions that he needed to prove the sum-free sets conjecture? 'I was definitely excited,' he said. 'Then I realized there was still so much more work to do.' Waves of Progress First, Bedert showed that any set with a small Littlewood norm could be 'mapped' to a second set that bore an even closer resemblance to arithmetic progressions. He suspected that it was in these new sets that he would find large sum-free subsets. Illustration: Nash Weerasekera for Quanta Magazine The final task was to actually show what the size of such a sum-free subset would be. 'Over the Christmas break, I was obsessively thinking about this problem,' Bedert said. 'By New Year's, I still hadn't found the final piece of the puzzle.' Then, a few days after he returned to Oxford in January, it came to him. 'I'm not sure where it came from,' he said. 'Maybe these ideas stir in your mind for a while, and then [you] finally get something out that works.' He represented the structure of his sets using a tool called the Fourier transform, and then modified a 1981 proof to show that some of the individual components of that representation must have a large Littlewood norm. Since Bourgain had already shown how to handle sets with large Littlewood norms, that completed the proof. In the end, Bedert showed that any set of N integers has a sum-free subset with at least N /3 + log(log N ) elements. For many values of N , this gives you a sum-free subset that's only slightly bigger than Erdős' average size of N /3. Even if N is as large as 10100, for example, log(log N ) is only around 5. But as N inches toward infinity, so does the difference in Bedert's and Erdős' bounds—thus settling the conjecture. 'It's a really amazing result,' said Yifan Jing of Ohio State University. Jing, who was also mentored by Green, credits the achievement to Bedert's intense focus. 'Benjamin really went in depth to modify Bourgain's proof and make it work,' he said. 'He spends much more time than other people on the same problem.' There's still more to understand about sum-free subsets—and therefore about the extent to which addition influences the structure of the integers. For instance, Bedert's result resolves the question of whether the largest sum-free subset gets infinitely bigger than N /3. But mathematicians don't know precisely how fast that deviation can grow. Thanks to a 2014 paper by Green and two colleagues, they know that the deviation is slower-growing than N . But, Green said, 'there remains a massive gap' between that upper bound of N and Bedert's lower bound of log(log N ). The work also provides new insight into sets that have a small Littlewood norm. Such sets are fundamental objects in the field of analysis but are very difficult to study. Bedert's result has helped mathematicians better understand their structure, which Green and others now hope to continue to explore. 'It's beautiful, it's interesting, it feels natural,' Eberhard said. 'You want to solve a mystery, don't you?' For Sahasrabudhe, the takeaway is simple. 'Old and difficult problem solved by brilliant kid,' he said. 'The stuff he's building on, it's subtle and hard to work with. It's a really pretty result.' Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Gizmodo
2 hours ago
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How to Slow Down Your Biological Clock
Death is inevitable. But the journey getting there is far from universal. The average life expectancy at birth worldwide is now around 73 years but varies widely between countries and even between individual states in America. I, and presumably many readers, know some people who have barely lost a step as they've gotten older, as well as people who sharply declined as they entered their golden years. These realities invite the question: How can we significantly slow down our biological clock? And will we get any closer to a fountain of youth in the near future? There's some good and bad news. First, the bad news. There's probably a hard limit to our longevity. A study last year found that, while life expectancy has continued to grow pretty much everywhere since the start of the 20th century, the rate of increase has substantially sunk in the U.S. and other high-income countries over the past 30 years. 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Many of these shouldn't come as a surprise, like physical activity. Any amount and form of exercise, whether it's jogging, weightlifting, or flexibility training, is good for you, no matter your age. 'There is no question that regular exercise is associated with improved lifespan and healthy lifestyle,' Sanjai Sinha, an associate professor of clinical medicine at the Mount Sinai Health System and a physician at The Health Center at Hudson Yards, told Gizmodo. 'There are data that link exercise to decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, cancers, and neurodegenerative diseases.' Want to Know How Well You're Aging? Try Standing on One Leg Diet, too, plays a pivotal role in slowing the clock. Many different diets have been linked to longevity and general health, but the most consistent, according to Sinha, is the Mediterranean diet. 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Sure, you can browse online pharmacies and store shelves and spot dozens of supplements or other products that claim to have anti-aging effects, but upon closer inspection, the data supporting these claims is generally spotty or very preliminary. Just this month, NIH scientists failed to find evidence that aging is linked to declining levels of taurine, a semi-essential amino acid commonly sold as a supplement, contrary to earlier research. 'While they may have positive impacts on certain genes and proteins that have been linked with aging, these supplements have not been proven in any well-designed human trials to prolong lifespan,' Sinha said. 'I don't believe any of these products or substances stand out over the rest.' Longevity-Obsessed Tech Millionaire Discontinues De-Aging Drug Out of Concerns That It Aged Him This doesn't mean there aren't any promising longevity drugs in the works. 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Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Archaeology student used a computer model to predict a Roman army camp's location — and it worked
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The remains of an ancient Roman army camp have been discovered in the Netherlands, beyond the empire's northern frontier, after researchers used a computer model to pinpoint its location. The "rare" find, at a site called Hoog Buurlo, shows that Roman forces were venturing beyond the Lower German Limes, the boundary that ran along the Rhine roughly 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) south of the camp. "For the Netherlands this is only the fourth Roman temporary camp, so quite a rare find," said Saskia Stevens, an associate professor of ancient history and classical civilization at Utrecht University and the principal investigator of the "Constructing the Limes" project that found the fort. "The fact that it was discovered north of the Lower Germanic Limes, beyond the border of the empire, tells us that the Romans did not perceive the Limes as the end of their Empire," Stevens told Live Science in an email. The fort was likely a temporary marching camp, which troops used for only a few days or weeks, according to a statement from Utrecht University. It's also possible that the camp was a stopover on the way to another camp about a day's march away. Constructing the Limes, a project led by Utrecht University, aims to understand how the Roman border functioned and to unearth temporary Roman camps north of the boundary. Related: Remains of 1,600-year-old Roman fort unearthed in Turkey As a part of the investigation, Jens Goeree, an archaeology student at Saxion University of Applied Sciences, developed a computer program to help predict the location of temporary Roman camps in Veluwe, a region of nature reserves filled with woodlands, grasslands and lakes. This program was based on probability and used data from elevation maps and lidar (light detection and ranging), a technique in which a machine shoots lasers from an aircraft over a site and measures the reflected waves to map the landscape below. "He reconstructed possible routes of the Roman army across the Veluwe area, calculating the number of kilometers an army could travel per day," Stevens said. The program also took into account roads and water availability, and looked for the "typical playing card-shaped camps" that Romans constructed, she said. The computer program didn't disappoint: It led them to the site in Hoog Buurlo within the Veluwe in 2023. In January 2025, the team visited the site to dig archaeological trenches and confirm that the site actually held an ancient fort, according to a statement. The fort was large — 9 acres (3.6 hectares) — and shaped like a rectangle with rounded corners. It had a V-shaped ditch that was 6.6 feet (2 meters) deep, a 10-foot-wide (3 m) earthen wall, and several entrances, Stevens said. However, the team found only a few artifacts at the site, including a fragment of Roman military armor. "The limited number of finds is not surprising as the camp was only in use for a short period of time (days, weeks) and the soldiers would have traveled light," Stevens said. Image 1 of 2 An outline of the newfound fort in the Netherlands. Notice that like many other Roman military forts, it's shaped like a playing card. Image 2 of 2 A lock pin artifact found at the temporary military fort. The small number of finds made it hard to date the camp. But by examining the armor and comparing the newfound site to a camp found in 1922 at another site in the Netherlands, the team dated the newly discovered temporary camp to the second century A.D., Stevens said. RELATED STORIES —1,900-year-old Roman legionary fortress unearthed next to UK cathedral —Possible 'mega' fort found in Wales hints at tension between Romans and Celtics —'Lost' 2nd-century Roman fort discovered in Scotland The finding shows that the Romans "were clearly active beyond the border and saw that area as their sphere of influence," Stevens said. The region north of the limes was likely an important place to take cattle, hides and even enslaved people. The people who lived in the area, the Frisii and the Chamavi, already had ties with the Romans. "The Frisians were generally on good terms with the Romans," as they traded with them, Stevens said. Historical sources mention a treaty in which the Frisians paid taxes in the form of cow hides, and they also provided soldiers for the auxiliary troops and members of Nero's (ruled A.D. 54 to 68) imperial bodyguard.
