Scientists Create Early Embryos That Are Part Human, Part Monkey

"For the first time, scientists have created embryos that are a mix of human and monkey cells."

"The embryos, described Thursday in the journal Cell, were created in part to try to find new ways to produce organs for people who need transplants, said the international team of scientists who collaborated in the work. But the research raises a variety of concerns."

"'My first question is: Why?' said Kirstin Matthews, a fellow for science and technology at Rice University's Baker Institute. 'I think the public is going to be concerned, and I am as well, that we're just kind of pushing forward with science without having a proper conversation about what we should or should not do.'"

"Still, the scientists who conducted the research, and some other bioethicists defended the experiment."

"'This is one of the major problems in medicine — organ transplantation,' said Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, Calif., and a co-author of the Cell study. 'The demand for that is much higher than the supply.'"

Wisdom The Albatross, Now 70, Hatches Yet Another Chick

"The world's oldest known wild bird, a Laysan albatross named Wisdom, has hatched yet another chick at Midway Atoll in the Hawaiian archipelago. Biologists first identified and banded Wisdom in 1956; she is at least 70 years old."

"Wisdom's latest chick successfully hatched in February, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's office in the Pacific Islands."

"'Wisdom laid her egg sometime during the last few days of November,' the wildlife agency says. 'Soon after, Wisdom returned to sea to forage and her mate Akeakamai took over incubation duties.'"

"The pair have been hatching and raising chicks together since at least 2012, the wildlife agency said."

"In the past decade, Wisdom has been astounding researchers and winning fans with her longevity and devotion to raising her young. She has flown millions of miles in her life, but she returns to her same nest every year on Midway Atoll, the world's largest colony of albatrosses."

How Fast Are Oceans Rising? The Answer May Be In Century-Old Shipping Logs

"Off the coast of England, there's a tiny, wind-swept island with the remains of a lifeboat rescue station from the mid-1800s. The workers who once ran the station on Hilbre Island did something that, unbeknownst to them, has become crucial for understanding the future of a hotter climate: They recorded the tides."

"The data, scrawled in long, handwritten ledgers, is just one example of the tens of thousands of pages of tidal measurements stored in archives around the world. Now, scientists and historians are racing to digitize them in an effort to understand how fast oceans are rising. The aging notebooks establish a historical baseline to compare with today's changing world."

"Sea level rise is accelerating around the globe, likely to displace millions of people who live in coastal communities. Forecasts show between 3 and 6 feet of rise by the end of the century, or potentially more, depending on how much heat-trapping pollution humans emit."

"Knowing exactly how much inundation to expect and how fast it's happening in each city can be tricky. Sea levels rise at different rates in different places due to the movement of the Earth's crust and ocean currents."

'Minibrains' With A Neanderthal Gene Offer Hints About Human Evolution

"Fossils offer a detailed record of early human skulls but not the brains inside them."

"So researchers have been using genetic material taken from those fossils to search for clues about how the human brain has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years."

"And now they have succeeded in growing human brain organoids, or "minibrains," that contain the Neanderthal variant of a gene called NOVA1, a team reports in the journal Science."

"'The archaic version of the gene changes the shape of these organoids,' says Alysson Muotri, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. Instead of growing into a sphere with a smooth surface, he says, the Neanderthal organoids have an outermost layer that is uneven."

"Organoids with the ancient NOVA1 gene also appear to mature more quickly and remain smaller than their modern counterparts, Muotri says. 'The neurons start to get more active at very early stages,' he says."

"The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that modern humans evolved big brains that continue to develop long after birth in order to navigate complex social systems."

Scientists Identify New Whale Species In Gulf Of Mexico

"Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration believe they have identified a new species of whale in the Gulf of Mexico. The Rice's whale is a filter feeder that can grow to 42 feet. It's also critically endangered. There are believed to be fewer than 100 of them left."

"It was only in the 1990s that scientists first determined that a small whale population was living in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico year-round. Marine biologists thought they were Bryde's (pronounced "broodus") whales, members of a species that lives in warm waters around the world."

"Patricia Rosel, a research geneticist with NOAA Fisheries, says, 'The first clue we had that there might be something unique, really more unique about them came from genetic data we collected in the mid-2000s, 15 years ago.'"

"That genetic data suggested this was a new species. To confirm that, Rosel and her colleagues needed morphological data — information showing that the skulls of the whales in the Gulf were different from those of their close relatives. They finally got that in 2019 when a whale was stranded in southwest Florida."

2020 May Be The Hottest Year On Record. Here's The Damage It Did

"With just a few weeks left, 2020 is in a dead-heat tie for the hottest year on record. But whether it claims the top spot misses the point, climate scientists say. There is no shortage of disquieting statistics about what is happening to the Earth."

"The hottest decade on record is coming to a close, with the last five years being the hottest since 1880. 2020 is just two-hundredths of a degree cooler than 2016, the hottest year ever recorded. The Earth is nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer now than it was in the 20th century, and greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are still rising."

"The future will be even hotter, although humans, through the choices governments, corporations and individuals make, will decide exactly how much."

"That means more years like 2020, with increasingly powerful hurricanes, more intense wildfires, less ice and longer heat waves. The average yearly number of $1 billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. has quadrupled in the last three decades. As of October 2020, there had been 16 climate-driven disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage each."

Beethoven's Life, Liberty And Pursuit Of Enlightenment

"Two-hundred-fifty years ago, a musical maverick was born. Ludwig van Beethoven charted a powerful new course in music. His ideas may have been rooted in the work of European predecessors Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Josef Haydn, but the iconic German composer became who he was with the help of some familiar American values: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That phrase, from the Declaration of Independence, is right out of the playbook of the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that shook Europe in the 18th century."

"'One way to look at it is what happened after Newton created the scientific revolution: Basically, people, for the first time, developed the idea that through reason and science, we can understand the universe and understand ourselves,' says Jan Swafford, the author of Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, a 1,000-page biography of the composer."

"Swafford says the Enlightenment idea embodied in the Declaration of Independence is that the aim of life is to serve your own needs and your own happiness. 'But you can only do that in a free society," he says. "So freedom is the first requirement of happiness.'"

"Other key components of the Enlightenment — including a cult of personal freedom and the importance of heroes — were vibrating in the air in Beethoven's progressive hometown of Bonn when he was an impressionable teenager. 'There was discussion of all these ideas in coffeehouses and wine bars and everywhere,' Swafford adds. "Beethoven was absorbed into all that and he soaked it up like a sponge.'"

California's Ancient Redwoods Face New Challenge From Wildfires And Warming Climate

"After this year's historic wildfires, California's oldest state park — Big Basin Redwoods — looks more like a logging village than an iconic hiking and camping mecca."

"There's a near constant buzz of chainsaws. Rumblings from trucks and logging skidders fill the air as crews busily cut charred, fallen trees and chop down "hazard trees" rangers worry will topple on to the park's roadways."

"It's estimated the wildfire, awkwardly named the CZU Lightning Complex Fire, burned through 97% of Big Basin's more than 18,000 acres, scorching its 4,400 acres of ancient redwoods and obliterating most of the park's infrastructure for camping and recreation."

"'All of the historic structures in the park, totally destroyed, save one residence,' Joanne Kerbavaz says. The California state park senior environmental scientist is standing in ashes and bits of charred beams. This is where a log-cabin-like visitors center and museum once stood, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the New Deal."

"It's truly tragic from the perspective of all of the generations of people who grew up coming here and enjoying this," she says.

A Capsule Containing Bits Of An Asteroid Is Plummeting To Earth

"As you read this, indispensable clues to the origins of the known universe are plummeting from unimaginable heights straight for the Australian Outback. There, somewhere in the desert wilderness of Woomera, a capsule ferrying sample material from an asteroid — the primary goal of a six-year-long mission spanning billions of miles — is set to make its triumphant arrival on Earth."

"The capsule is expected to herald its re-entry to Earth's atmosphere with a brilliant fireball around 2 to 3 a.m. local time (12-1 p.m. ET). The event will be streamed here by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, which is spearheading the mission."

"Inside the capsule is just a little bit of dust and dirt with potentially grand ramifications. It comes from Ryugu, a jet black asteroid roughly one mile wide, which orbits the sun between Earth and Mars, roughly 180 million miles from our planet."

"Researchers expect the sample to contain organic matter similar to the early space rocks that combined to make planets, which, with careful study, may offer a glimpse of the mysterious processes that turned the universe into what it is today. In other words, JAXA explains, scientists hope that by examining the sample, they may 'approach the secrets of the birth of the solar system and the birth of life.'"

Missing Ink: Darwin Notebooks, Long Unseen, Now Believed Stolen

"Have you seen Charles Darwin's missing notebooks? If so, the authorities — and some "heartbroken" librarians — would like to have a word with you."

"That's the bottom line of an appeal issued Tuesday by Cambridge University Library in the U.K. The library, which manages a massive archive of the famed naturalist's work, said it's seeking two notebooks that have been missing for nearly two decades — and that, after an exhaustive search, they fear were stolen."

"Cambridgeshire Police confirmed Tuesday that they have opened a formal investigation into the disappearance. The library says the pair of journals, which it estimates being worth millions of dollars, have also been added to the Art Loss Register in the U.K. and Interpol's database of stolen works of art."

"'It is deeply regretful to me that these notebooks remain missing despite numerous widescale searches over the past 20 years, including the largest search in the library's history earlier this year,' Jessica Gardner, the Cambridge University Librarian, said in a recorded plea for public help."

Scientists Discover Outer Space Isn't Pitch Black After All

"Look up at the night sky and, if you're away from city lights, you'll see stars. The space between those bright points of light is, of course, filled with inky blackness."

"Some astronomers have wondered about that all that dark space--about how dark it really is."

"'Is space truly black?' says Tod Lauer, an astronomer with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona. He says if you could look at the night sky without stars, galaxies, and everything else known to give off visible light, 'does the universe itself put out a glow?'"

"It's a tough question that astronomers have tried to answer for decades. Now, Lauer and other researchers with NASA's New Horizons space mission say they've finally been able to do it, using a spacecraft that's travelling far beyond the dwarf planet Pluto. The group has posted their work online, and it will soon appear in the Astrophysical Journal."

New Horizons was originally designed to explore Pluto, but after whizzing past the dwarf planet in 2015, the intrepid spacecraft just kept going. It's now more than four billion miles from home—nearly 50 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth is.

Deep Sleep Protects Against Alzheimer's, Growing Evidence Shows

"During deep sleep, the brain appears to wash away waste products that increase the risk for Alzheimer's disease."

"A host of new research studies suggest that this stage of sleep — when dreams are rare and the brain follows a slow, steady beat – can help reduce levels of beta-amyloid and tau, two hallmarks of the disease."

"'There is something about this deep sleep that is helping protect you,' says Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley."

"The research comes after decades of observations linking poor sleep to long-term problems with memory and thinking, Walker says. 'We are now learning that there is a significant relationship between sleep and dementia, particularly Alzheimer's disease.'"

"The strongest evidence involves deep sleep, he says. That's when body temperature drops and the brain begins to produce slow, rhythmic electrical waves."

"So Walker and a team of scientists set out to answer a question: 'Can I look into your future and can I accurately estimate how much beta-amyloid you're going to accumulate over the next two years, the next four years, the next six years, simply on the basis of your sleep tonight?'"

For The Birds: Voter Fraud Ruffles New Zealand 'Bird Of The Year' Competition

"Evidence of election rigging has roiled New Zealand's "Bird of the Year" competition after a case of ballot-box stuffing has threatened to derail avian democracy."

"Suspicion began when organizers received more than 1,500 votes sent from the same email address early Monday — each vote was in favor of the little spotted kiwi (kiwi pukupuku), according to a statement from Forest & Bird, a conservation organization that runs the election."

"'That is an amazing bird – it deserves all the support, but unfortunately these votes had to be disallowed and they've been taken out of the competition,' Forest & Bird spokeswoman Laura Keown told NPR's Weekend Edition."

"The annual event is more than just a bird popularity contest. The conservation group Forest & Bird runs the election-based competition to help raise awareness about New Zealand's native bird species, many of which are endangered."

How Humans Domesticated Themselves

"In 1959, Dmitri Belyaev made his way to Siberia to look for the most polite foxes he could find."

"A Soviet geneticist, Belyaev was interested in how animal domestication occurs — and in what happens biologically when the wild canine evolves into the mild-mannered dog. The thousands of fox fur farms stippling the Siberian countryside at the time were ideal grounds for his experiment."

"Belyaev started breeding especially docile foxes and observing the temperament of their pups. Within just three generations they were noticeably less fearful and aggressive toward people. By the fourth generation some pups would even approach their captors, wagging their tails like giddy retrievers. The animals were showing signs of friendliness toward humans. They'd been domesticated."

"Duke anthropologist Brian Hare argues that humans unintentionally experienced a similar process that left us more cooperative than our now extinct human cousins, like Neanderthals and Denisovans."

"While Belyaev's foxes underwent artificial evolution through breeding, Hare and others believe that in Homo sapiens natural selection favored friendliness — that without realizing it we were self-domesticated by our own evolution, and that our more agreeable demeanor is responsible for our success and propagation across the planet."

Gray Wolves To Be Removed From Endangered Species List

"Gray wolves, a species that has long been vilified and admired, will no longer receive federal protections under the Endangered Species Act in the Lower 48 U.S. states, the Trump administration announced Thursday."

"The long-anticipated move is drawing praise from those who want to see the iconic species managed by state and tribal governments, and harsh criticism from those who believe federal protections should remain in place until wolves inhabit more of their historical range. Gray wolves used to exist across most of North America."

"'After more than 45 years as a listed species, the gray wolf has exceeded all conservation goals for recovery,' said Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, announcing the delisting, which will revert management of wolf populations to local wildlife agencies."

"Federal wildlife officials are hailing the move as a success story, similar to endangered species recovery stories such as the bald eagle and American alligator."

Water On The Moon: NASA Confirms Water Molecules On Our Neighbor's Sunny Surface

NASA has confirmed the presence of water on the moon's sunlit surface, a breakthrough that suggests the chemical compound that is vital to life on Earth could be distributed across more parts of the lunar surface than the ice that has previously been found in dark and cold areas.

"We don't know yet if we can use it as a resource," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, but he added that learning more about the water is crucial to U.S. plans to explore the moon.

The discovery comes from the space agency's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA — a modified Boeing 747 that can take its large telescope high into Earth's atmosphere, at altitudes up to 45,000 feet. Those heights allow researchers to peer at objects in space with hardly any visual disruptions from water vapor.

The water molecules are in Clavius crater, a large crater in the moon's southern hemisphere. To detect the molecules, SOFIA used a special infrared camera that can discern between water's specific wavelength of 6.1 microns and that of its close chemical relative hydroxyl, or OH.

If This NASA Spacecraft Can Avoid 'Mount Doom,' It Might Nab A Bit Of Asteroid

"A NASA spacecraft, if all goes well, will soon touch down briefly on a skyscraper-sized asteroid 200 million miles away, in order to collect a small amount of rock and dust that can then be returned to Earth."

"The probe, called OSIRIS-REx, is about as big as a 15-passenger van, and it needs to land for just 5 to 10 seconds on specific spot inside a boulder-strewn crater. The maneuver on Tuesday will be tricky and fraught with peril, as the spacecraft tries to reach a safe area that's only the size of a few parking spaces."

"'It's up to fate and to a little bit of luck at this point as to how the sampling event goes," says Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, the principal investigator for the mission. He says he feels anxious but does yoga to calm his nerves. 'I'm highly confident that the spacecraft will remain safe. My biggest concern is that it will not make it down to the surface of the asteroid.'"

"The spinning top-shaped asteroid, named Bennu, is one of close to a million known asteroids in our solar system. Scientists want to study it in part to improve our planetary defenses against potentially dangerous space rocks. Bennu, for example, has a small chance of someday striking Earth."

Filmmaker Finds An Unlikely Underwater Friend In 'My Octopus Teacher'

"A few years ago, South African documentary filmmaker Craig Foster felt burnt out from years of working on arduous nature films. Needing a reset, he returned to the underwater kelp forests off the southwest tip of Cape Town."

"'My earliest memories, my deepest and most powerful memories were of this incredible coast and diving in what I call 'my magical childhood forest,' ' Foster says. 'It is one of the greatest ecosystems on this planet.'"

"Foster vowed to dive — without a wetsuit or oxygen tank — every day for a year into the chilly waters near where he grew up. The ocean was sometimes as cold as 46 degrees, but his body gradually adapted."

"'Day after day, I slowly started to get my energy back and realized that there was this whole new way of looking at this underwater forest. And I started to come alive again,' he says."

"The waters were teeming with sea creatures, but Foster says his encounters with one particular octopus stood out. Over a series of dives, the octopus began coming out of her den to hunt or explore while Foster watched."

"'That's when I realized: This animal trusts me. She no longer sees me as a threat, and her fear changes to curiosity,' he says. "That's when the real excitement comes and you think, 'Oh, my goodness, I'm being let into the secret world of this wild animal' — and that's when you feel on fire.'"

Pluto Has White-Capped Mountains, But Not Because There's Snow

"Pluto is the only place other than Earth in our solar system that's known to have white-peaked mountains, but these white caps aren't made of snow."

"Instead, they're made of methane frost. And, according to a new report in the journal Nature Communications, these alien mountains get their peaks whitened in a way that's totally unlike what occurs on Earth's summits."

"'Initially, it seemed logical that this high-altitude frost could form like on the Earth,' says Tanguy Bertrand, an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, who was intrigued by how much Pluto's mountains resembled familiar landscapes here at home."

"The mountains that he and his colleagues examined were observed by NASA's New Horizons mission, and they lie west of a big heart-shaped glacier at Pluto's equator. They're about two and a half miles tall."

"'They are comparable to the Alps for Earth, but Pluto is a much smaller object,' says Bertrand. 'So for Pluto, the mountains are really tall.'"

A Coronavirus Vaccine Could Kill Half A Million Sharks, Conservationists Warn

"A conservation group is warning that the development of an effective coronavirus vaccine on a global scale could ravage shark populations worldwide, as researchers race to produce a vaccine using an oil derived from sharks."

"Squalene, a compound that is harvested from the livers of sharks, is a common moisturizing ingredient in cosmetics. It's also used in malaria and flu vaccines as an agent that boosts the immune system's response."

"Shark Allies, a nonprofit that advocates for the protection of sharks, projects that some 500,000 sharks could be killed if a coronavirus vaccine with shark squalene proves to be effective. Already, an estimated 2.7 million sharks are killed annually for their squalene to make cosmetics, according to the group."

"'The problem is that squalene, used as an ingredient in a COVID-19 vaccine, will be seen as something that's unavoidable, and then as it becomes tested, it becomes the normal ingredient, and nothing else will be tested,' Shark Allies executive director Stefanie Brendl told NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday."

"As of Oct. 2, there were 193 coronavirus vaccines in clinical and pre-clinical evaluation, according to data released by the World Health Organization. At least five of those vaccines contain shark squalene, according to Shark Allies."