Did Humans and Neanderthals speak to each other?

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word Neanderthal? If you’re like most people you probably muster up an image of lumbering grunting brutes who are just less developed versions of ourselves. You wouldn't be blamed for thinking that either, it’s the image that has been engraved into our psyche since their discovery almost 200 years ago. However, in the last 10 years our perception of Neanderthals has changed considerably, and we now know them to much smarter than we ever gave them credit for.

The main reason for this change in our perception is the availability of ancient DNA, which is capable of giving us a much clearer and concise image of how the Neanderthals lived, and what they were capable of.

The latest piece of information to be gained in this way suggests that Neanderthals may have been capable of producing much more complex speech than we previously believed, whereas before we would have assumed that the most they were capable of were primitive grunts.

This has put a spanner in the works of most language experts who have always stuck to the theory that our ability to speak came about incredibly quickly, and due to very few mutations in our genome. If this were the case, it would mean that speech began development only around 50,000 years ago.  However, this new evidence means that the development of language must have happened over a much longer period of time, and originated more than a million years ago through a combination of genetic and cultural influences.

This could give us some big clues about the interaction between Neanderthals and our ancestors, who coexisted together for a long period of time. Could humans and Neanderthals have communicated with each other? Many assume that we out competed the Neanderthals, and that’s why they died out. However, there have been suggestions over the years that Neanderthals and humans interbred with each other, a theory supported by this new revelation.  

Can you imagine if Neanderthals were around today, with us being able to chat with them whenever we liked? Texting and emailing and calling whenever we pleased.

It would be a weird world, but one that I’d definitely enjoy living in.

What do you think about this story? Write below with your comments or questions and sign up for the mailing list at the top right of this page for notifications of whenever I leave a post. And don’t forget, if you enjoyed this post please +1 and reshare! 

Spiders use electrostatic attraction to suck in their prey.

It has been shown that a spiders web is attracted to electrically charged objects, a fact which could help in the capture of its prey.

I’m not going to lie, I hate spiders. I feel like they’re always planning something, sneakily running around, making webs in corners and acting suspicious. And let’s be honest, who really needs that many legs?

Well it turns out my suspicions may have been founded, as new evidence has suggested that spiders are smarter than we give them credit for.

It has been shown that spider webs are attracted to objects that are electrically charged, causing the threads of the web to distort towards each other. This is important when you consider that some insects such as bees are capable of generating an electric charge when they flap their wings – causing the whole bee to be seen as electrically charged.  

That means that positively charged insects would only have to fly near a spider web, and they could be sucked in towards the web which deforms around them. This deformation dramatically increases the likelihood that they will be trapped and that the spider will get its next meal.

This is a really interesting piece of research, and could give us some insight into how we could adapt other materials to be of benefit to us. What isn’t known however is whether all insects are capable of producing a charge when flying, which could be the next stage in this investigation.

This is usually the point where I put up a picture of a spider. However, I’m going to skip that s

tep for this post, mainly because if I have to upload a picture that means I’ll have to look at a spider, something I try pretty hard to avoid, especially after knowing how sneaky they are.

What do you think about this discovery? Write below with your comments or questions and sign up to the mailing list on the right of this page to get notifications of whenever I leave a post. 

Moths send sonic blasts from their genitals.

Hawkmoths have been shown capable of producing ultrasound as a defence against bats. This on its own isn’t unique, what is unique is the source of that ultrasound – their genitals.

Have you ever casually glanced down at your genitals and wished that they had more functions? Well if you have this story might make you pretty envious. That’s because recent evidence has suggested that Hawkmoths (found mainly in the tropics) are capable of using their genitals to produce a loud beam of ultrasound.

Whilst I wish there wasn’t any purpose to this, there unfortunately is.

For millions of years, bats and moths have been competing against each other in an epic battle against one another. Each have been adapting and evolving in an attempt to outdo the other, and this genital sonic blast seems to be just the latest in a long list of adaptations.

Whilst the purpose of this behaviour hasn’t been fully confirmed, it was observed that the moths produced this ultrasonic sound whenever bats approached. It can therefore be assumed that the hawkmoth’s ultrasound either gives a warning to the bats to stay away, or is capable of jamming the sonar that the bats use to visualise their environment, thus preventing the bats from ‘seeing’ them.

This is a great little discovery, and just goes to show how far evolution can push a species, and the methods that they use to defend themselves.

If you’ve like to know more about how prey and predator both evolve alongside each other, then read about the Red Queen Hypothesis here.

Also, just in case any of you have ever played Pokemon, yes, one of venomoths moves was supersonic. Maybe we should look to Pokemon for more future discoveries about animals?

What do you think about this discovery? Write below with your comments or questions and sign up for the mailing list at the top right of this page for notifications of whenever I leave a post. 

New method of bacterial communication discovered.

Antibiotic resistance is one of the major health risks of the modern age, and could set our health care system back by decades. Much research has been geared towards preventing this problem, including the use of silver which I described in a recent post which you can find here. 

New research may have given us the foothold that we need in the fight against antibiotic resistant bacteria. This research suggests that resistant bacteria within a population are capable of communicating with bacteria that are less resistant, through chemical communication using small amino acid molecules. This can then be used in turn, to make those bacteria resistant, spreading that resistance throughout the population. 

These small molecules can also be produced by almost all forms of bacteria, which suggests that they are a form of universal communication. Therefore, if we were able to block these small amino acids, we may be able to prevent the rapid spread of resistance between groups of bacteria. 

What do you think about this research? Write below with your comments or questions. 

Building a heart from scratch: A how to guide.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called ‘How can you mend a broken heart?’ which you can find here, and now i find myself being able to talk about the extraordinary feat of actually building one from scratch.

There has always been a shortage in the amount of heart transplants available for those patients who need them, mainly due to damage through illness or resuscitation attempts. Whilst some efforts to resolve this problem have involved trying to get more people to donate their hearts after they die, one lab in America is attempting to circumvent this problem completely, by growing them from scratch instead.

It’s an easy enough thing to say, but in practice the growth of whole human organs has proven incredible difficult. Some success has been achieved with the growth of the most simple, hollow organs like the trachea and the bladder, but the amount of coordination required between dozens of different cell types within a complex organ makes it near impossible.

Because of this, researchers quickly realised that they would need an already functioning biological scaffold to build their heart around. That scaffold came in the form of a different recently deceased heart which had been stripped of its cells (decellularization). This left behind only the supporting extracellular matrix and collagen which could then be repopulated by new cells (recellularization). Now, that might not seem to make much sense. Why would you take an already functioning heart and strip it of all its cells, only to then later replace those cells? To answer that we need to think about the main problem facing tissue transplants, which is tissue rejection.

If any of you have ever watched ER or House, and a patient in need of an organ transplant is being treated, you’ll probably have heard the phrase ‘is there a tissue match?’ That means that for an organ to be transplanted into a patient, that organ needs to be similar enough to the patient so that their immune system doesn’t reject it. This results in a lot of people who need an organ being left without, due to the fact that any available organs aren’t a ‘tissue match’.

With this new method of organ growth, tissue rejection isn’t a possibility. This is because of the source of cells that are used to regrow the heart tissue – the patient needing the transplant.  By using adult cells from the patient, and reprogramming them into thinking that they’re stem cells (turning them into induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells), the cells of the new heart will be an identical genetic match to the patient, ensuring that the new organ won’t be rejected.

If that were the end of the story then we would have solved the problem of organ shortage and a lot of people would be much better off. However, in science things don’t always go to plan. It might be easy to say ‘let’s use stem cells to regrow the heart’, but in reality the number of factors that contribute to the growth of an organ are exponential, all of which need to be recreated to grow an organ in the lab. Cells are able to sense the environment around them, including the pressure being forced upon them from other cells, the beating action of a functioning heart, as well as the nutrients and oxygen around them. To try and recreate these conditions, researchers placed the heart in a bioreactor that attempts to mimic the hearts natural environment. This provided some positive results, with organs being transplanted into rats and fully functioning, even if only for a short period of time.

This marks a monumental step forward in our ability to grow organs that are specifically tailored to the needs of a patient. However, there are some sceptics.  Many believe that there are too many complications in the field of tissue regeneration for this to ever be a viable source of organs, and that the most we can ever hope to achieve is the generation of parts of an organ, such as lobes of a kidney or valves of a heart. Well, let’s just hope that they’re wrong. 

What do you think about this research? Write below with your comments or questions, and join the mailing list at the top right of this page to get emails every time I leave a post. 

New research could take your breath away.

A new method has recently been developed that has allowed the visualization of the lungs of asthma sufferers.

Asthma is a disease which affects the airways in our respiratory system that carry the air in and out of our lungs. During an asthmatic attack these airways become inflamed and contract, resulting in their narrowing and thus preventing air from passing through them.

 Lots of you reading this would have experienced what this can feel like – the  tightness in your chest? The coughing and wheezing? It’s something that sufferers always dread, and always has us clutching for our inhalers.  It affects millions of people around the world and there is currently no cure. However, the development of a new technology could give us a much clearer insight into this infliction.

This new method requires asthma sufferers to inhale the harmless gas helium-3, and then be scanned by an MRI machine. The helium-3 can be visualised by the MRI scan, with an image produced like the one below.

The coloured areas represent parts of the lung where air can easily permeate, with black areas indicating portions of the lung where air cannot reach. In healthy patients the whole of the lung can be visualised. However, in patients with asthma the amount of black on the scan is much higher, giving us a much clear image of which areas of the lung are most affected.

This method gives us much more information of asthma, and could one day help develop the long awaited cure for asthma.

What do you think about this research? Write below with your comments or questions, and sign up for email notifications of whenever I leave a post at the top right of this page.

Email – newsinscience@gmail.com with any questions or post suggestions.