Amazing Science

The origin of life is surely one of the most important questions in biology. How did inanimate molecules give rise to the “endless forms most beautiful” that we see today, and where did this event happen? Some of the most popular theories suggest that life began in a hellish setting, in rocky undersea vents that churn out superheated water from deep within the earth. But there is an icy alternative worth considering.

Several million years ago, Plasmodium falciparum – the parasite that causes most cases of human malaria – jumped into humans from other apes. We’ve known as much for decades but for all this time, we’ve pinned the blame on the wrong species. A new study reveals that malaria is not, as previously thought, a disease that came from chimpanzees; instead it’s an unwanted gift from gorillas.

Until now, the idea of chimps as the source of human malaria seemed like a done deal. Just last year, I covered a study which said that a related chimp parasite called Plasmodium reichenowi is the ancestor of P.falciparum.According to Stephen Rich from the University of Massachussetts,P.reichenowi crossed the species barrier from chimps to humans just once in history – a defining moment that gave rise to P.falciparum.

But to Weimin Liu from the University of Alabama, something wasn’t quite right. People seemed to have settled on a chimpanzee conclusion without thoroughly testing for Plasmodium in other apes. Fortunately, Liu’s team was well placed to fill in those blanks. For their research, they had already amassed a massive collection of ape faeces: an unenviable collection of 1,827 samples from chimps, 805 from gorillas and 107 from bonobos. Virtually all of these samples came from wild apes with little human contact; only 28 came from a habituated group of gorillas.

Liu scoured all of these samples for Plasmodium DNA, sequenced what he could find, and built a family tree that charted the evolutionary relationships between them. His results were very clear. For a start, Plasmodium parasites don’t infect either eastern gorillas or bonobos, but they do infect chimpanzees and western gorillas. That narrows down the source of human malaria to these two apes.

Liu also found that all of the samples of P. falciparum taken from humans were most closely related to a single lineage of gorilla parasites. P.reichenowiis an exclusively chimp parasite, belonging to a different branch of thePlasmodium family tree. The answer was clear: P.falciparum did not evolve from P.reichenowi and it didn’t come from chimpanzees. Instead, it jumped into humans from western gorillas.

This is your moment of zen today. Two adventurers set out in a canoe and happened upon a starlings (collectively known as a murmuration) doing their amazing collective dance in the sky.

Watch the video. Just take it in. The starlings coordinated movements do not seem possible, but then there they are doing it. Scientists have been similarly fascinated by starling movement. Those synchronized dips and waves seem to hold secrets about perception and group dynamics. Last year, Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi took on the challenge of explaining the murmuration.

What he found, as ably explained by Brandon Keim, is that the math equations that best describe starling movement are borrowed "from the literature of 'criticality,' of crystal formation and avalanches -- systems poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation." They call it "scale-free correlation," and it means that no matter how big the flock, "If any one bird turned and changed speed, so would all the others."

It's a beautiful phenomenon to behold. And neither biologists nor anyone else can yet explain how starlings seem to process information and act on it so quickly. It's precisely the lack of lag between the birds' movements that make the flocks so astonishing. Having imported a theoretical physicist to model the flock movement, perhaps a computer scientist would be the right choice to describe the individual birds' behavior. Are quantum effects involved?

A frog that can perch on the tip of your pinkie with room to spare has been claimed as the world's smallest vertebrate species, out-tinying a fish that got the title in 2006. But the discoverer of another weensy fish disputes the claim.

Imagine an insect repellant that not only is thousands of times more effective than DEET – the active ingredient in most commercial mosquito repellants – but also works against all types of insects, including flies, moths and ants. That possibility has been created by the discovery of a new class of insect repellant made in the laboratory of Vanderbilt Professor of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology Laurence Zwiebel and published iit in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In preliminary tests with mosquitoes, the researchers found the new class of repellant,  called Vanderbilt University Allosteric Agonist or VUAA1, to be thousands of times more effective than DEET. The compound works by affecting insects’ sense of smell through a newly discovered molecular channel.

“If a compound like VUAA1 can activate every mosquito odorant receptor at once, then it could overwhelm the insect’s sense of smell, creating a repellant effect akin to stepping onto an elevator with someone wearing too much perfume, except this would be far worse for the mosquito,” said Patrick Jones, a post-doctoral fellow who conducted the study with graduate students David Rinker and Gregory Pask.

By the time the next billion people are added to the world's population, it will not only be a more crowded place but a perceptibly different one in terms of geography, age and modes of living on this planet. Yet even a small divergence from the projected fertility rates could spell very different outcomes.

There's still a lot of mystery surrounding Jupiter's moon Europa, but researchers at NASA seem fairly certain that there's a watery ocean lurking beneath its icy exterior. Their theories may finally be put to the test later this decade, thanks to a concept mission crafted by astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

According to Space.com, JPL researchers have come up with a plan that would send a pair of landers to Europa by 2026, in the hopes of finding out whether the rock has ever supported life forms. The endeavor certainly wouldn't be easy, since Jupiter blankets its moon in heavy radiation, but researchers think they can mitigate these risks by sending in an extra lander as backup, and by keeping the mission short and sweet. Under the plan, each 700-pound robot would use a mass spectrometer, seismometers and a slew of cameras to search for any organic chemicals that may be lodged within the moon's ice. Neither craft will sport a protective shield, so they'll only stay around the planet for about seven days, so as to avoid any radiation damage. At this point, the mission is still in the concept phase, though the JPL is hoping to launch both landers by 2020. JPL researcher Kevin Hand was quick to point out, however, that this would be a "habitability mission," and that NASA doesn't expect to find any signs of current life on Europa.