Jingszo !

In humans, as in other mammals, females have two X chromosomes and males have a single X and a puny little chromosome called Y. The names have nothing to do with their shape; the X stood for “unknown”.

The X contains about 900 genes that do all sorts of jobs unrelated to sex. But the Y contains few genes (about 55) and a lot of non-coding DNA – simple repetitive DNA that doesn’t seem to do anything.

But the Y chromosome packs a punch because it contains an all-important gene that kick-starts male development in the embryo.

The disappearing Y

Most mammals have an X and Y chromosome similar to ours; an X with lots of genes, and a Y with SRY plus a few others. This system comes with problems because of the unequal dosage of X genes in males and females.

How did such a weird system evolve? The surprising finding is that Australia’s platypus has completely different sex chromosomes, more like those of birds.

In platypus, the XY pair is just an ordinary chromosome, with two equal members. This suggests the mammal X and Y were an ordinary pair of chromosomes not that long ago.

In turn, this must mean the Y chromosome has lost 900–55 active genes over the 166 million years that humans and platypus have been evolving separately. That’s a loss of about five genes per million years. At this rate, the last 55 genes will be gone in 11 million years.

To reproduce, we need sperm and we need men, meaning that the end of the Y chromosome could herald the extinction of the human race.

The new finding supports an alternative possibility – that humans can evolve a new sex determining gene. Phew!

However, evolution of a new sex determining gene comes with risks. What if more than one new system evolves in different parts of the world?

A “war” of the sex genes could lead to the separation of new species, which is exactly what has happened with mole voles and spiny rats.

So, if someone visited Earth in 11 million years, they might find no humans – or several different human species, kept apart by their different sex determination systems.

An insect species that evolved 130 million years ago is the inspiration for a new research study to improve navigation systems in drones, robots, and orbiting satellites.

The dung beetle is the first known species to use the Milky Way at night to navigate, focusing on the constellation of stars as a reference point to roll balls of dung in a straight line away from their competitors.

Insects have been solving navigational problems for millions of years, including those that even the most advanced machines struggle with. And they've done it in a tiny little package. Their brains consist of tens of thousands of neurons compared to billions of neurons in humans, yet they still manage to find solutions from the natural world.

Summary

• The UFO sighting at O'Hare Airport in 2006 was dismissed as a "hole-punch cloud" by an FAA investigation.

• Project Blue Book concluded no evidence of extraterrestrial UFOs or security threats to the US.

• People often mistake ordinary objects or weather phenomena for UFOs.

At around 16:15 on Tuesday, November 7, 2006, a group of United Airlines employees and several other people saw what they believed to be a flying saucer hovering over the airport for several minutes.

While the description of the UFO varies slightly depending on who you asked, they all agreed that the shiny object hovered silently over the apron for several minutes before suddenly disappearing into the sky.

The incident occurred over Gate C-17 in Terminal 1 and was first spotted by a ramp agent pushing back United Airlines Flight 466, which was to depart Chicago for Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) in North Carolina. The ramp agent advised the flight deck that something was hovering over the plane.

The unknown object was then seen by the pilots, cabin crew, a member of United Airlines management, and a mechanic. Despite several people seeing it, no air traffic controller saw the object, and it did not appear on the radar. Several other people outside the airport reported seeing a dark gray disc-shaped craft hovering over the airport and were adamant that it was not a cloud.

The outer shell of our planet is fractured into seven or eight major sections, or tectonic plates, on which the continents sit. We expect to see the continents rise up at the active boundaries of these plates, where volcanism and earthquakes are often concentrated.

The continents we now recognize were once united as single, great "supercontinents." One such example was Gondwana, which existed hundreds of millions of years ago and started to break up during the age of the dinosaurs. We believe that when these supercontinents break apart, it triggers a kind of stirring process under the continents, which we now call a "mantle wave." This motion deep in the Earth ripples slowly across the partially molten underbelly of the landmass, disturbing its deep roots.

When it comes to talk of whether aliens have visited Earth or if UFO sightings are actually not of this world, no event is as iconic or widely debated as that of the Roswell Incident of 1947. This mystery unfolded in the prairie landscapes of New Mexico, just north of Roswell, where an alleged UFO crash sparked an enduring controversy that we continue to talk about today.

The incident fueled conspiracy theories that claimed that the government covered up the debris from an alien spaceship. By 1994, the US Air Force released a report that concluded that the crashed UFO was a top-secret nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul.

When one reporter questioned what would happen if the public didn’t accept this explanation, as they had not accepted the others, the Air Force spokesperson stated that perhaps they would be back with another report. The release of the report only seemed to intensify the public’s curiosity and suspicion surrounding the incident, with many pointing out inconsistencies and gaps in the official narrative

OP.. @Wen@mastodon.scot

Luis Elizondo, a military veteran and intelligence agent, claims US government has retrieved alien technology and bodies from crash sites for 50-plus years

In his memoir, Elizondo makes a number of revelations, including the existence of what he calls a “super-secret umbrella group” composed of government officials and defence contractors who he says have been retrieving technology and biological remains of non-human origin for more than half a century.

AATIP was like “one of those Russian dolls, one tiny secret tucked within another”, he writes. He describes one unit, the Legacy Program, as having black ops “so black they weren’t even black”. “We spoke of ‘purple novas’ — projects and programs so secret that not even the secretary of defence or the president would ever know of them.”

According to the conspiracy theory, the 1947 crash of what was said to be a US Army Air Forces weather balloon near Roswell, New Mexico, was actually a spacecraft.

Elizondo writes that the intelligence he studied pointed to two saucers colliding that day on July 8. “Our primitive EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) device must have somehow disrupted their propulsion bubble, rendering them vulnerable … like a 757 losing all power on its jet engines,” he concludes.

“Four deceased non-human bodies were in fact recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash,” Elizondo claims in the book, which spent a year under Pentagon security review before being passed for publication. Several parts remain redacted.

He writes of at least three other incidents where “non-human cadavers” were recovered from supposed air force crashes, including one in December 1950 in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas, and four in 1989 in Kazakhstan in the former Soviet Union.

King Charles on quest to find aliens and UFOs

King Charles has reportedly got some fascination going on with aliens and their UFOs visiting Earth.

According to a freshly released documentary named The King of UFOs, Your Majesty has inherited a “secret paranormal library,” which has a huge collection of files as well as books on this subject.

There are claims about him further exploring his interest in extraterrestrial life.

One of these suggest that King Charles was seen “piloting an experimental UFO-style craft” during a visit to Canada back in 1975, although there are no publicly released pictures on that moment.

But Your Majesty isn’t the only royal who is engrossed in aliens.

Ufologist Mark Christopher said, “CID detective and owner of Great British UFO Learning Centre, John Hanson, had regular correspondence with Prince Phillip and Queen Elizabeth.”

"They had their own library of UFO and paranormal books,” he gave away.

The expert also told Express UK that letters exchanged between John Hanson and the royal couple were shown in the documentary and a book sent by him will be added later on.

Investigator of UFOs for UK Ministry of Defence said, “The Royal Family has been interested in UFOs for decades, but this was also a matter of extreme sensitivity.”

Humpback whales may not have hands, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t handy. A new study argues the aquarian mammals should be classified as tool users, thanks to their ability to catch krill using nets made of bubbles.

For the next two years, the researchers returned for more expeditions and kept measuring the bubble nets. They ended up documenting hundreds of bubble nets over that time, created by dozens of individual whales. All the documented nets contained multiple circular rings of bubbles, with each successive ring smaller than the last.

They analyzed that data, and found the whales weren’t creating the nets haphazardly. Rather, the whales were manipulating the size and makeup of the nets in several ways, including altering their depth, and the space between bubbles. The whales were able to accomplish this by changing the rate at which they made the bubbles, while still swimming at a constant speed.

The nets created barriers that were used to corral krill, schools of fish, and other food into a small area where the whales could then feast.

The researchers argued that this behavior meets the definition of tool use, which they say is the purposeful use of an “unattached environmental object” to alter, position, or otherwise control another object or organism.

Tool crafting has been found in an assortment of species, including mammals, birds, fish, and insects, but it’s relatively rare among animals. No wonder future aliens are so desperate to talk to humpback whales.

One of the most fascinating questions in science is how life originated on Earth. Specifically, how did nonliving matter transform into living cells that can perform complex functions such as replication, metabolism, and evolution?

Membraneless coacervate microdroplets have long been proposed as model protocells as they can grow, divide, and concentrate RNA by natural partitioning.

However, the rapid exchange of RNA between these compartments, along with their rapid fusion, both within minutes, means that individual droplets would be unable to maintain their separate genetic identities. Hence, Darwinian evolution would not be possible, and the population would be vulnerable to collapse due to the rapid spread of parasitic RNAs.

In this study, we show that distilled water, mimicking rain/freshwater, leads to the formation of electrostatic crosslinks on the interface of coacervate droplets that not only suppress droplet fusion indefinitely but also allow the spatiotemporal compartmentalization of RNA on a timescale of days depending on the length and structure of RNA.

We suggest that these nonfusing membraneless droplets could potentially act as protocells with the capacity to evolve compartmentalized ribozymes in prebiotic environments.

People of ancient Clovis culture could have impaled huge animals on pikes rather than throwing spears, finds study

When it came to taking down giant animals, prehistoric hunters would quite literally have faced a mammoth task. Now researchers have shed fresh light on how they might have done it.

Experts studying sharp stone points made by the Clovis people, who lived in the Americas from about 13,000 years ago, say that rather than hurling spears at enormous animals such as giant bison, mammoths or ground sloths, the tribes could have planted their weapons point-up in the ground to impale charging creatures.

“We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by sudden brightening from stimulated emission of the hydrogen line due to a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR),” the researchers write. Those events are rare and rely on precise conditions and alignments. They can cause clouds of hydrogen to brighten considerably for seconds or even minutes.

The researchers say that what Big Ear saw in 1977 was the transient brightening of one of several H1 (neutral hydrogen) clouds in the telescope’s line of sight. The 1977 signal was similar to what Arecibo saw in many respects. “The only difference between the signals observed in Arecibo and the Wow! Signal is their brightness. It is precisely the similarity between these spectra that suggests a mechanism for the origin of the mysterious signal,” the authors write.

These signals are rare because the spatial alignment between source, cloud, and observer is rare. The rarity of alignment explains why detections are so rare.

The researchers were able to identify the clouds responsible for the signal but not the source. Their results suggest that the source is much more distant than the clouds that produce the hydrogen signal.

Everything about this paper seems legitimate, except for the content of the paper itself. Right away I will dispense with the false claim in the headline from above. The paper is not arguing that that a secret race of beings is living on the moon or in caves underneath us. It is, however, claiming that we should take the possibility of such a claim seriously. They argue, ostensibly, that “in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness” we ought not to dismiss the explanation out of hand. The context of this paper is the popularity that UAPs enjoyed last summer.

This paper was written to buttress the possibility that maybe the UAPs are not coming from above, but from below… or to the side.

The CTH suffers because it rests too much on special pleading. The dinosauroid alternative, for example, requires us to assent to the idea that not only could a 2.5m-long 25kg dinosaur survive and then evolve into a sentient creature, but also that such a creature could create a society with an infrastructure that could create highly advanced flying vehicles. Further, that all of this would remain undetected by the world at large.

For most animals, aging is a one-way street. But not in the sea walnut, a type of comb jelly about the size of a mango that’s native to the eastern Atlantic Ocean. When the going gets tough, the transparent invertebrate ages in reverse, regressing to a tentacled larval form. Then, when conditions improve, it matures back into an adult.

Once they succeeded in completing their initial studies of the species’ nervous system, the team began to push the creature to its limits—depriving it of food or amputating lobes of gelatinous tissue that surround the mouth and make up much of the 2-centimeter-long adult body.

Those starved or injured animals shrunk into blobs just a few millimeters in size, but didn’t die. When the duo began to feed them again, a few came back to life. Thirteen out of 65 animals tested grew two tentacles—a characteristic the animals have in their larval stages. The revived animals used these appendages to hunt microscopic plankton floating by, Soto-Angel and Burkhardt report. It’s possible that the animal in this larval stage has an advantage when it comes to capturing food resource, the authors note, which may explain its invasive success, though that remains to be tested. With enough sustenance, the comb jellies eventually regrew their lobes and even started to reproduce again.

Until now, biologists had found this ability to revert to an earlier life stage and regrow in only two animals: the immortal jellyfish, a type of Cnidarian, and a species of tapeworm, Echinococcus granulosus. Finding it in a third animal, the comb jelly—which despite sharing a similar name with jellyfish, belongs to a different phylum known as Ctenophores—“was quite a surprise,”

How Did Dinosaurs See, Smell, Hear and Move?

New fossils and analytical tools provide unprecedented insights into dinosaur sensory perception

People tend to think of paleontology as a field-­based discipline, focusing on the romantic allure of summers spent in remote desert locales with pickax in hand, collecting fossils of long-extinct animals new to science. But these days paleontologists are just as likely to make their most significant discoveries in the laboratory using cutting-edge technologies from biomedicine and neuroscience. It is the combination of these disparate approaches that allows us to reconstruct what really might have gone down when T. rex encountered Triceratops.

Our own research tells us that like modern predators, T. rex had a proportionally large brain compared with its plant-eating quarry. A substantial part of its brain was devoted to olfaction, so Tyrannosaurus probably did sniff the air to locate its next meal, whether it was the living Triceratops grazing along the tree line or one that was already dead and rotting in the sun. Once the T. rex isolated a scent, it could then scan the horizon with its stereoscopic vision for any sign of potential prey. Its eyes would have been able to fix on that Triceratops obliviously feeding on a cluster of vegetation far from the safety of its herd.

The experiments all involve events happening at low energies, where the predictions of strings, loops, and the like agree, so they aren’t going to tell us which specific theory of quantum gravity is correct. Still, ­experimental evidence that gravity is actually quantized would be groundbreaking.

There is still a long way to go over the next few years to carry out such trials (and there would be an even longer path toward enacting our own thought experiment). But if they can be successfully accomplished, they will test the low-energy domain on which almost all theories agree. If researchers find evidence for space­time in superposition, then they will have the first direct evidence for the basic assumptions of our theories of quantum gravity. We will substantially rule out the possibility that gravity is classical, a significant and previously unexpected step forward. More than that, experimentalists would have reached a new horizon of the physical world, producing a region of spacetime that is observably quantum in a macroscopic laboratory. At last physics will have concretely entered a realm that for now remains a land of hypothesis.

If signs of superposition are notobserved, the experiments will instead support speculations that gravity is intrinsically classical, confounding the expectations of much of the physics community and plunging a huge amount of work from the past 40 years into crisis. Such a result would require a significant revision of our understanding of the world and of the connection between quantum theory and gravity.

In either case, the effect would be momentous.

The Universe is 13.8 billion years old, going back to the hot Big Bang. But was that truly the beginning, and is that truly its age?

Key Takeaways

If we count from the start of the hot Big Bang, we learn that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, with only a very tiny (~1%) degree of uncertainty. 

But what gives us the right to call the start of the hot Big Bang “the beginning,” particularly if we now can confidently state that a period of cosmic inflation preceded it? 

The reality is that we have to make choices, and the start of the hot Big Bang is one of the earliest things we can be certain about. Here’s what the “age of the Universe” actually means.

Multi-proxy archaeological and palaeoecological analyses of the Mololo Cave sequence on the palaeo-island of Waitanta provide evidence for the earliest known peopling of the Pacific region >55 000–50 000 years ago. These humans practised complex plant processing and engaged with both coastal and tropical forest ecologies. 

Capacities for adaptive flexibility and environmental transformation likely stimulated human movements into insular rainforests, previously beyond the range of other hominin species. These settings help us to understand the process of cultural and biological diversification generated as our species dispersed around the planet and began to push the boundaries of novel habitats, and how humans have become enmeshed in these ecologies for tens of millennia.

What is hypnosis? Spanos and Chaves point out that, for most laypeople and many research workers and health care providers, it involves a trance, or at least an altered state of consciousness. It is brought on by some repetitive verbal rituals, known as an induction procedure. The person hypnotised becomes a passive automaton, and comes under the control of the hypnotist.

The vogue began with the German physician Anton Mesmer in the late 18th century. It became entwined with a range of other occult beliefs, and took on a new lease of life. And now here we are towards the end of the 20th century, with the American Psychological Association sheltering a fully-fledged Division of Psychological Hypnosis (are there other kinds?).

.......

The subjects who showed up best in tests of hypnotic susceptibility were those who had been asked to pretend to be hypnotised. And hypnotic performance could be noticeably improved by some training. In other words, what had been thought of as a genetically endowed susceptibility was in fact a skill that could be learned.

In a similar experiment, Spanos and his associates found that subjects all dutifully coughed when they heard the word ‘psychology’ in the experimental situation. But Spanos had arranged for a confederate to pose as a lost student asking for the psychology department. None of the subjects responded to the cue word.

Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable?

MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question.

Just as "magic spells" use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.

The origins of legalese

Gibson's lab is now investigating the origins of center-embedding in legal documents. Early American laws were based on British law, so the researchers plan to analyze British laws to see if they feature the same kind of grammatical construction. And going back much further, they plan to analyze whether center-embedding is found in the Hammurabi Code, the earliest known set of laws, which dates to around 1750 BC.

Even laypeople use legalese

These results further suggest laws can be effectively simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405564121

He's the only living witness to what he calls a one-of-a-kind UFO encounter.

Jose Padilla was 9 years old in 1945 when he says he and his friend witnessed something they'd never forget. But it's not just the details of his story that set his close encounter apart. He says he has a piece of the ship—and you'll see it only on KCAL News, Tuesday at 11 p.m.

The rock art is in a region of Colombia that was off-limits to researchers for decades due to political instability.

Recently discovered prehistoric wall drawings illustrate a complex relationship between humans and animals deep in the Amazon rainforest, where creatures were treated simultaneously as a source of food and as a supernatural wonder.

The artwork was made using red ochre pigments on the rock walls of Cerro Azul, a hill located in Colombia’s portion of the Amazon. While the pictures have yet to be accurately dated, they have been made as far back as 10,500 BC, according to new research. The pictures include vivid depictions of deer, birds, lizards, turtles, and tapir, among other animals.

Some of the art appears to show animal-human hybrids. While it’s uncertain exactly what meaning the artists were trying to express, “They certainly do offer greater nuance to our understanding of the power of myths in indigenous communities .They are particularly revealing when it comes to more cosmological aspects of Amazonian life, such as what is considered taboo, where power resides, and how negotiations with the supernatural were conducted.”

The resulting research has shown that societies that lived in this part of the Amazon were mobile and relied on fishing, hunting, and gathering. But the paintings indicate the relationship between those people and the abundant fauna around them extended far beyond just sustenance, including seeing them as supernatural beings that were the subject of rituals.

In fact the Nahoon site, reported in 1966, was the first hominin tracksite ever to be described.

The situation now is very different. It appears that people were not looking hard enough, or were not looking in the right places. Today the African tally for dated hominin ichnosites (a term that includes both tracks and other traces) older than 50,000 years stands at 14. These can conveniently be divided into an East African cluster (five sites) and a South African cluster from the Cape coast (nine sites). There are a further ten sites elsewhere in the world including the United Kingdom and the Arabian Peninsula.

We found that the sites ranged in age; the most recent dates back about 71,000 years. The oldest, which dates back 153,000 years, is one of the more remarkable finds recorded in this study: It is the oldest footprint thus far attributed to our species, Homo sapiens.

The new dates corroborate the archaeological record. Along with other evidence from the area and time period, including the development of sophisticated stone tools, art, jewelry, and harvesting of shellfish, it confirms that the Cape south coast was an area in which early anatomically modern humans survived, evolved, and thrived, before spreading out of Africa to other continents.

There are significant differences between the East African and South African tracksite clusters. The East African sites are much older: Laetoli, the oldest, is 3.66 million years old and the youngest is 0.7 million years old. The tracks were not made by Homo sapiens, but by earlier species such as australopithecines, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus.

Cosmic surveys suggest the force pulling the universe apart might not be constant after all

Imagine sitting in the center of a firework that has just exploded. After the first flash of light and heat, sparks fly off in all directions, with some streaming together into fiery filaments and others fading quickly into cold, ashy oblivion. After a moment more, the smoke is all that remains—the echo, if you will, of the firework’s big bang.

Now imagine the firework is the universe, which scientists think began with a similar explosion. Where the firework’s expansion is propelled by a chemical reaction, the expansion of the cosmos comes from the energy of empty space itself. From where we sit, it seems that the universe is expanding in all directions, faster and faster at every moment.

This spring scientists announced that something is wrong with the fireworks. For the first time since the discovery of dark energy—the mysterious force that is accelerating our cosmic fireworks show—cosmologists think we may be on the cusp of something new. Two prominent dark energy surveys seeking to measure the nature of this force found evidence that dark energy seems to have weakened over time.

Building sustainable settlements on the water is a feasible option for climate adaptation, as long as people and ecosystems are protected.

The idea of living on water is not new.

It has been traced back to around ad 700 during the Tang Dynasty in China.

On Lake Titicaca in Peru, the Indigenous Uros People have long settled on artificial islands made from roots and reeds.

Homes and villages on stilts are widespread, from Ha Long Bay in Vietnam to Chong Kneas in Cambodia, Ganvie in Benin and Makoko in Nigeria.

Amsterdam, Jakarta, Mexico City and Seattle in Washington have long embraced houseboats and floating markets.

Assure practicality

Planners, engineers and environmental specialists must assess the construction materials, structural integrity, safety, cost, market demand and financial sustainability of climatopia projects.

Amphibious climatopias are relatively cheap. Their proximity to land allows for easy access to electricity, fresh water and waste disposal, which can reduce maintenance costs.

Reclaimed islands, which demand extensive engineering work and lengthy construction times, are the costliest option. The Ocean Flower Island reclamation project, completed in 2020, took 12 years to build and cost $25 billion.

Floating cities need less upfront investment — the one in the Maldives is expected to cost $1 billion, for example — but their maintenance costs can be relatively high, and construction materials are prone to corrosion and damage from tidal waves.

Luis Elizondo discusses new book "Imminent" and the Pentagon's UAP investigations