This bizarre new dinosaur has something in common with modern sloths
Described in the journal iScience today, the new dinosaur comes from rocks in Mongolia's Gobi Desert that are over 90 million years old. Back in 2012, paleontologists from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences initially unearthed parts of the spine, ribs, hips, and shoulders, and finally found two complete hands. They immediately recognized the fossils as those of a therizinosaur, but its status as a new dinosaur would take time to fully uncover.
When Hokkaido University paleontologist and lead study author Yoshitsugu Kobayashi first saw the fossils the following year, he was immediately surprised that the dinosaur only had two fingers on each hand. Until the new find, all known therizinosaurs had three fingers with large claws at the end of each. 'Not only that, but one of the fingers had a preserved keratinous sheath and I was like 'Holy crap,' Kobayashi recalls.
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Medscape
4 days ago
- Medscape
Women's Scent Has Psychological Effects on Men
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Welcome to Impact Factor , your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I'm Dr F. Perry Wilson from the Yale School of Medicine. We live in a world of sight and sound. That is the human experience. But most other mammals live in a very different world, a world of smells. Evolution has atrophied our sense of smell to the point that, in social situations, we don't really think about it unless an odor is particularly offensive. But it turns out that, somewhere deep in the recesses of our brains, we still respond to smell cues from other humans. And, for men at least, certain smells from women can make us more calm and less hostile, and make them seem more attractive. And now, thanks to some rigorous research, scientists may have identified exactly the chemical compounds that have this effect on the male of our species. What chemistry makes up the scent of a woman? Let's find out. The study we're discussing today, appearing in iScience , is not the first to note that smells can have physical and psychological effects on people. But it may be the most detailed. Researchers recruited 21 female volunteers to be scent donors. They used a special silicone material, placed under the armpits, to capture the molecules that, under ordinary circumstances, float through the air and into our nostrils and up to our olfactory bulbs. They did this across the four phases of the female menstrual cycle to figure out if and how scent changes with hormone level changes. Then they exposed 21 men to these samples and asked them to rate them all in terms of pleasantness. You can see the results here. While all the smells were rated slightly less pleasant than a 'no odor' control, the scents collected during ovulation were rated by men to be significantly more pleasant than those during other phases of the menstrual cycle. 'Pleasant' is a rather subjective term, of course. The researchers asked the men to describe the odors across a spectrum that would be familiar to any perfumer or sommelier. During ovulation (labeled "O" here), men described women's scents as more citrus, more 'grassy,' and more 'fragrant,' while being less 'vinegary,' 'musty,' or 'stinky.' But what exactly is making those smells? This is where the study starts to get really interesting. The researchers put those silicone patches through a mass spectrometer to identify all the volatile compounds present. They then identified compounds that were more uniquely present during ovulation compared with other times during the cycle. In this case, there were three big hits. These three chemicals are the likely candidates for those pleasant aromas that men reported from the first set of experiments: (E)-geranyl-acetone, tetradecanoic acid, and (Z)9-hexadecanoic acid. These are really interesting compounds. (E)-geranyl-acetone is formed by the breakdown of squalene, which is a substance on our skin. It is described as having a green or floral quality, similar to what the men in the first set of experiments described. You can find it in tomatoes, mint, citronella, passionfruit, and quite a few other places. Tetradecanoic acid (myristic acid) has a waxy or creamy odor. In humans, you find this in breast milk, amniotic fluid, and saliva, in addition to the skin. Human babies will actually start a suckling reflex when exposed to tetradecanoic acid. In the natural world, the richest source of tetradecanoic acid I could find was in nutmeg butter, but despite being from the Nutmeg State, this is one foodstuff that has not yet graced my table. Still, the picture of exactly what makes the pleasant scent of a woman pleasant is becoming more clear. We have green grass, we have citrus, and something creamy that — perhaps — evokes breast milk. But the third compound was a bit harder to understand. (Z)9-hexadecanoic acid is also known as palmitoleic acid. It is, apparently, odorless. It does, however, break down into (E)-2-nonenol which is a compound known to carry that 'old age' smell that you sometimes hear about. I am unclear how this precursor to an old-age smelling compound plays into the bouquet we are describing, but it is there. Data don't lie. Here's where the study gets cool. With these three compounds isolated, the scientists created their own version, a mix of the three, perhaps the most scientifically based perfume in history. Men were brought into a room and given a headset with a microphone. Unbeknownst to them, the microphone cover had been dosed with either nothing or one of three scents: the ovulation cocktail, the 'baseline' armpit smell, or a combination of these two scents. Then the men were asked to take some surveys. Nothing about smell this time; they were about mood. Unaware of what scent they were smelling, the men were not even aware they were supposed to be smelling something. The men exposed to the ovulation cocktail reported less feelings of hostility, increased 'liveliness,' better concentration, and less boredom. The researchers stop short of calling this 'signaling via pheromone,' but it is hard not to conclude that a simple scent, in this case a purely synthetic one, can induce specific feelings in men. The experiments didn't stop there. They next had the men rate faces of various women. Shown a face, they were asked to rate them in terms of whether the person was beautiful, elegant, and intellectual, someone they want to spend time with, and someone they want to keep gazing at. These four categories were all quite correlated, actually. It turns out that if a man thinks a face is beautiful, he also thinks he wants to spend time with that woman. In any case, for women rated very high on the attractiveness scale, the scent didn't seem to make a difference; they always scored well. But for women who, overall, were rated lower on the attractiveness scale, they scored better when the men doing the rating were exposed to that ovulation cocktail. It's sort of crazy to me to think of how our perceptions can be influenced by sensations we aren't necessarily fully conscious of. And, of course, this research leads to some very interesting questions. Probably the first on people's minds is: Does any perfume have these compounds in it? And the answer is, yes, absolutely, but since perfume ingredients are not always listed, I have no idea which one. If you're looking, aim for something that has notes of nutmeg, citrus, and tea, perhaps. Of course, as a man, I wonder if this works the other way. We don't have hormonal cycles with quite as profound physiologic ramifications as women do, but I do wonder if there are compounds in our natural body odor that might affect the feelings or thoughts of the fairer sex. This study reminded me of an embarrassing period in high school when a relationship with my then girlfriend felt like it was on the skids and, desperate to hold things together, I changed my cologne. It turned out, as you might expect, that that was not the secret to long-lasting happiness. This research won't unlock that secret either. But what we see here is the way in which we are starting to decode a new language, the language of smells, one that many thought humans were no more capable of speaking than dogs are of speaking English. But perhaps, like a dog recognizing the word 'walk,' somewhere, in the recesses of our brains, we still understand the language of scent. Sorry for being nosy.
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Yahoo
100-Million-Year-Old Rock Reveals 40 Never-Before-Seen Squid Species
The high seas of the dinosaur era were teeming with a plethora of squids, a new study has found. Using a new technique for analyzing fossils locked away in chunks of rock, paleontologists in Japan and Germany have discovered a huge number of fossilized cephalopod beaks in a 100-million-year-old rock. That included 263 squid samples – and among these samples lurked 40 species of ancient squids that scientists had never seen before. It's a finding that reveals just how numerous squids were in the Cretaceous ocean, even though their fossilized remains are rarely found. Related: "In both number and size, these ancient squids clearly prevailed the seas," says paleobiologist Shin Ikegami of Hokkaido University, first author of the research. "Their body sizes were as large as fish and even bigger than the ammonites we found alongside them. This shows us that squids were thriving as the most abundant swimmers in the ancient ocean." To make a fossil, you generally need body parts that take a long time to decay, so that the long, often rigorous fossilization process has time to take place without destroying the remains. Most fossils are bone, tooth, shell, and claw; soft body parts require exceptional fossilization circumstances. Squids consist mostly of soft body parts. The one exception is their hard, chitinous beak. Squid beaks that manage to survive on the fossil record of Earth's history would be vital for understanding how these fascinating cephalopods – a group of animals that includes octopuses, nautiluses, and cuttlefish – emerged and evolved over their 500 million years on this Earth. Prior to this study, only one single fossilized squid beak had been found. Many small marine fossils, however, are deposited in jumbled assemblages that are difficult to extract and study. To discover their remarkable beak assemblage, the researchers turned to a technique called grinding tomography. Basically, scientists gradually sand away a rock sample, thin layer by thin layer, imaging each layer in high resolution as they go. The sample itself is destroyed. But the resulting images can then be compiled digitally to reveal the interior contents of the rock in three dimensions – including highly detailed, 3D reconstructions of the fossils therein, which usually would only be accessible in two-dimensional slices. Ikegami and his colleagues used this technique to reconstruct a piece of fossil-riddled rock dating back to around 100 million years ago. Inside was a dense assemblage of animal remnants, including some 1,000 cephalopod beaks, among which the squid beaks emerged. These beaks were tiny and thin, ranging in length from 1.23 to 19.32 millimeters, with an average length of 3.87 millimeters, about 6 percent of the size of the only previously known fossil squid beak. The minimum thickness of these beaks was always less than 10 micrometers, the scientists found. "These results show that numerous squid beaks are hidden as millimeter-scaled microfossils and explain why they have been overlooked in previous studies," the scientists write in their paper. Based on these results, the researchers inferred that the Cretaceous squid biomass would have far exceeded the biomasses of fishes and ammonites, and that squid diversification had absolutely exploded by around 100 million years ago. This is in stark contrast to the previous assumption that squids only began to thrive on Earth after the mass extinction that brought about the end of the dinosaur age, some 66 million years ago. "These findings change everything we thought we knew about marine ecosystems in the past," says paleontologist Yasuhiro Iba of Hokkaido University. "Squids were probably the pioneers of fast and intelligent swimmers that dominate the modern ocean." The research has been published in Science. Sea Slugs Steal Body Parts From Prey to Gain Their Powers Earth Is Pulsing Beneath Africa Where The Crust Is Being Torn Apart Strange Cellular Entity Challenges Very Definition of Life Itself
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Yahoo
Your Brain Is Glowing, and Scientists Can't Figure Out Why
Life, for the most part, is bathed in light. The sun immerses the planet in energy that supports the vast majority of ecosystems that call Earth home. But life also generates its own light—and not just the bioluminescence of glowworms and lamp-headed anglerfish or the radiation produced by heat. In a phenomenon scientists refer to as ultraweak photon emissions (UPEs), living tissues emit a continuous stream of low-intensity light, or biophotons. Scientists think that this light comes from the biomolecular reactions that generate energy, which create photons as by-products. The more energy a tissue burns, the more light it gives off—which means, of our body's tissues, our brain should glow brightest of all. In a new study published in the journal iScience, researchers detected biophotons emitted by the human brain from outside the skull for the first time. What's more, emissions of biophotons from the brain changed when participants switched between different cognitive tasks—though the relationship between brain activity and biophoton emissions was far from straightforward. The study authors think this may be hinting at a deeper role these particles of light might be playing in the brain. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] On some level, all matter emits photons. That's because everything has a temperature above absolute zero and radiates photons as heat, often with longer wavelengths (infrared light) than can be seen with our eyes. UPEs are orders of magnitude more intense than this thermal radiation, with wavelengths in the visible or near-visible light range of the electromagnetic spectrum. As living cells generate energy through metabolism, they create oxygen molecules with excited electrons as by-products. When these worked-up electrons return to a lower energy state, they emit photons through a process called radiative decay. Researchers studying biological tissues, including neurons in petri dishes, can detect this as a weak but continuous stream of light—from a few photons to several hundred photons per square centimeter each second. 'Scaling this up to humans, we wanted to know if those photons might be involved in some information processing or propagation [in the brain],' says senior author Nirosha Murugan, a biophysicist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Scientists have been proposing that biophotons play a role in cellular communication for at least a century. In 1923 Alexander Gurwitsch conducted experiments where he showed that photon-blocking barriers placed between onion roots could prevent the plant from growing. In the past few decades, a handful of studies have added weight to the possible role biophotons play in cellular communication, which influences an organism's growth and development. With this work in mind, Murugan and her team wanted to see if they could detect hints of this phenomenon at the level of the human brain. First, they needed to see if they could measure UPEs emitted by a working brain from outside the skull. In a blacked out room, 20 participants wore head caps studded with electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes to measure the brain's electrical activity. Photon-amplifying tubes to detect UPEs were positioned around their head. The photon detectors were clustered over two brain regions: the occipital lobes in the back of the brain, which are responsible for visual processing, and temporal lobes on each side of the brain, which are responsible for auditory processing. To distinguish brain UPEs from background levels of photons in the room, the team also set up separate UPE detectors facing away from the participants. 'The very first finding is that photons are coming out of the head—full stop. It's independent, it's not spurious, it's not random,' Murugan says. Next, she wanted to see if the intensity of these emissions would change depending on what sort of cognitive task people were performing. Because the brain is such a metabolically expensive organ, she reasoned that UPE intensity should increase when people were engaged in tasks that required more energy, such as visual processing. This is roughly what happens to neurons in a dish—more neural activity means more UPE emissions. But while biophotons coming from participants' heads could be easily distinguished from background levels of photons in the room, increased EEG activity in a given brain region didn't result in higher levels of biophotons being captured by the closest detector. Clearly, something changes when you move from a few cells on a petri dish to a living brain. 'Maybe [UPEs] are not getting picked up by our detector because they could be getting used or absorbed or scattered within the brain,' Murugan suggests. The researchers did find, however, that changes in the UPE signals came only when participants changed cognitive tasks, such as opening or closing their eyes, suggesting some link between brain processing and the biophotons it emits. This leaves researchers with more questions than answers about what these UPEs are doing in the brain. 'I think this is a very intriguing and potentially groundbreaking approach [for measuring brain activity, though] there are still many uncertainties that need to be explored,' says Michael Gramlich, a biophysicist at Auburn University, who was not involved in the new study. 'The essential question to address,' he says, is whether 'UPEs are an active mechanism to alter cognitive processes or if UPEs simply reinforce more traditional mechanisms of cognition.' Daniel Remondini, a biophysicist at the University of Bologna in Italy, points to another open question: 'How far can these photons travel inside biological matter?" The answer could shed some light on the lack of clear relationship between brain activity and photon detections in different regions, he says. To answer these new questions, Murugan and her team want to use more precise sensor arrays to find where in the brain these photons are coming from. Scientists at the University of Rochester are also developing nanoscale probes to determine whether nerve fibers can transmit biophotons. Even if our brain's steady glow doesn't play a role in how it works, the technique of measuring biophotons alongside electrical signals—what Murugan and her colleagues call photoencephalography—could still one day be a useful way to noninvasively measure brain states. 'I suspect the technique will become widely adopted in the coming decades even if the theory that UPEs support cognition proves not to be true,' Gramlich says.
