ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 612

Potential New Particle Shows Up at the LHC, Thrilling and Confounding Physicists

A little wiggle on a graph, representing just a handful of particles, has set the world of physics abuzz. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the largest particle accelerator on Earth, reported yesterday that their machine might have produced a brand new particle not included in the established laws of particle physics known as the Standard Model. Their results, based on the data collected from April to November after the LHC began colliding protons at nearly twice the energy of its previous runs, are too inconclusive to be sure—many physicists warned that the wiggle could just as easily represent a statistical fluke. Nevertheless, the finding has already spawned at least 10 new papers in less than a day proposing a theoretical explanation for the particle, and has the halls and blackboards of physics departments around the world churning.

“This is something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” says Adam Falkowski, a physicist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Warsaw and a member of the CERN Theory Group. “Of course we are aware this could be nothing. But for my generation, this is the first time there is a very large, quite reliable signal of physics beyond the Standard Model, so it’s definitely very exciting.” Of course, others echoed the usual refrain of caution: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is not that,” Columbia University physicist Peter Woit wrote on his blog.

If the LHC truly has seen a new particle, however, the question looming large is: What is it? From its signature at the LHC, the particle must weigh roughly 750 giga-electron volts (GeV), around 750 times the mass of the proton, and would fall into the class of bosons, meaning its spin has an integer value. Some theorists say the newcomer looks like a heavier cousin of the Higgs boson, which similarly first showed up at the LHC as a highly intriguing blip in the data about four years ago. Or it could be a kind of portal particle into the dark matter sector—because this particle decays almost immediately, on its own it cannot account for the invisible matter that seems to be ubiquitous in space, but it may be a messenger that communicates with the dark matter particle, theorists suggested. Another hypothetical alternative is that it is a graviton, the predicted carrier particle for the force of gravity.

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U.S. Navy Recruits Gut Microbes to Fight Obesity and Disease

In his lab at Rice University synthetic biologist Jeff Tabor is creating a kind of Lilliputian naval academy. The midshipmen are so small they can’t be seen with the naked eye. But they’re part of a vital mission to protect U.S. naval forces from internal enemies, ranging from metabolic disorders to anxiety and depression.

In 2014 Tabor received a three-year grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) to genetically modify a harmless species of Escherichia coli bacteria normally found in the human gut. The goal is to create an edible probiotic organism that can hone in on developing disease and stave it off, even before symptoms take hold. He has recently succeeded in engineering E. coli with sensors that can detect the presence of chemicals signaling disease—at least in the mouse gut.

His ultimate aim is to design “a precision gut bacterium that manipulates the intestinal environment in humans to keep it healthy,” he says. This involves rewiring the genes of E. coli to transform the cells into predictable and reliable microbial medics loaded with engineered genetic circuits that can sense specific chemical disturbances and fire off a battery of molecules to neutralize them.  The cells would live only a short time in the gut, perhaps six hours or so, “just long enough to do their job,” Tabor says. Then they would die naturally or self-destruct.

Tabor’s initial target: obesity and related metabolic issues. “We want to use a genetically engineered E. coli cell to sense the chemicals that signal gut disturbances linked with obesity,” Tabor says, “and then deliver beneficial molecules to prevent weight gain.”

Tabor’s work represents the fruitful collision of two hot fields:  synthetic biology, the engineering of microorganisms to make useful products; and microbiomics, the study of the microbes living on and inside humans and other animals, collectively known as the microbiome. "There's great potential in this area because there are so many widespread chronic diseases associated with the gut," says Pamela Silver of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, which published report of the first synthetic engineered gut microbe in 2014.

The 100 trillion bacterial cells that reside in our guts play a major role in nearly every aspect of human biology—digesting food, guiding the immune system, even dictating mental health by sending signals to the brain that affect mood, cognition and behavior. It’s not surprising, then, that disruption of these gut microbial communities can lead to disease, including obesity and related problems.

Tabor’s project is part of a larger program on the microbiome funded by the ONR to help U.S. naval forces be more robust in the face of stressors—changes in diet or environment, fearful situations, sleep loss or disrupted circadian rhythms from shifting time zones or living in a submarine. “We’re interested in how gut microbiota respond to these stresses,” says Linda Chrisey, program officer in the ONR’s Warfighter Protection and Application Division. “Are they contributing to the host’s response? If so, can we tweak the microbiota to insulate the host from the stress?”

Tabor chose to focus on obesity “because we already know a lot about it at the molecular level,” he says, “so it’s a good model to test the concept.” Our microbiota act like a kind of metabolic ‘organ,’ that affects calorie and nutrient absorption, manages energy balance and controls body weight. (Scientists aren't sure what shapes microbiomic composition. Increasing evidence suggests that it’s determined before birth and has to do with genetics, maternal diet and mode of delivery.) It’s clear that some bacteria make molecules that disrupt the balance within, causing obesity and other disorders. Studies have shown that the gut bacteria of healthy people churn out compounds that strengthen the intestinal wall but those of obese people make compounds that weaken the wall. This allows bacterial molecules to pass into the bloodstream where they do not belong, triggering an immune response. The resulting chronic inflammation is correlated with a laundry list of ailments, from inflammatory bowel disease to mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression.

It’s still early in the game, but Tabor has already isolated several sensors, reengineered them and put them into a single E. coli bacterium. He has fed the modified cells to mice and shown that the sensors have been activated inside the mouse gut, suggesting they have detected the target chemicals.

Tabor plans to have a single E. coli bacterium carry up to a dozen sensors so it can detect multiple signals at one time for a more accurate diagnosis. Ultimately, he plans to engineer these cells to produce drugs when and where they’re called for—highly targeted antibiotics designed to bind with and deactivate those bacterial chemicals that might otherwise leak into the blood from the intestine—thereby preventing the changes that lead to obesity, inflammation and associated ills. Delivering these drugs to the exact tissue in the body where they’re needed and nowhere else would both decrease side effects and increase efficacy.

However, "these are genetically engineered organisms, so there will be a long debate about them," Silver says. "We'll have to weigh the risks versus the potential benefits. But we're working to develop ways to make these organisms inherently safe. And I think the concern over risks will be neutralized by the benefits, especially for people who suffer from chronic disease.”

So far, Tabor has altered only mouse microbiota. But, he says, “it’s hard to imagine a future where we aren’t diagnosing and treating, possibly curing, many diseases in humans by manipulating gut bacteria in this way—diabetes, autoimmune disorders, cancer, neurological disorders,” and, yes, weight issues.

In fact, the Navy may find creative ways to deploy these synthetic probiotics not just to avoid obesity and its attendant problems but to quickly shift body weight and metabolism as necessary, Tabor suggests. “Imagine you have a team of marines going from a temperate environment, say, at sea level, to a really cold environment, like up on top of a mountain, in a short period of time. You want them to be able to put on some fat quickly to be more robust in the cold environment.”

The solution? A dose of yogurt laced with synthetic probiotics that change warfighters’ metabolism to increase fat for a couple of weeks—and after that another dose to take it off when they return to sea level.

Potential New Particle Shows Up at the LHC, Thrilling and Confounding Physicists

A little wiggle on a graph, representing just a handful of particles, has set the world of physics abuzz. Scientists at Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle accelerator on Earth, reported yesterday that their machine might have produced a brand new particle not included in the established laws of particle physics known as the Standard Model. Their results, based on the data collected from April to November after the LHC began colliding protons at nearly twice the energy of its previous runs, are too inconclusive to be sure—many physicists warned that the wiggle could just as easily represent a statistical fluke. Nonetheless, the finding has already spawned at least 10 new papers in less than a day proposing a theoretical explanation for the particle, and has the halls and blackboards of physics departments around the world churning.

“This is something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” says Adam Falkowski, a physicist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Warsaw and a member of the CERN Theory Group. “Of course we are aware this could be nothing. But for my generation, this is the first time there is a very large, quite reliable signal of physics beyond the Standard Model, so it’s definitely very exciting.” Of course, others echoed the usual refrain of caution: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is not that,” Columbia University physicist Peter Woit wrote on his blog.

If the LHC truly has seen a new particle, however, the question looming large is: what is it? From its signature at the LHC, the particle must weigh roughly 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), around 750 times the mass of the proton, and would fall into the class of bosons, meaning its spin has an integer value. Some theorists say the newcomer looks like a heavier cousin of the Higgs boson, which similarly first showed up at the LHC as a highly intriguing blip in the data about four years ago. Or it could be a kind of portal particle into the dark matter sector—because this particle decays almost immediately, on its own it cannot account for the invisible matter that seems to be ubiquitous in space, but it may be a messenger that communicates with the dark matter particle, theorists suggested. Another alternative is that it is a graviton, the predicted carrier particle for the force of gravity.

“There’s a long list of possible things it could be beyond what we already know the universe contains,” says Jim Olsen, a Princeton University physicist who presented the CMS results. “Before today there was no theory paper that predicted we would find this.” Many scientists have been hoping the LHC would manifest proof of a theory called supersymmetry, which predicts many additional “partner” particles to match the ones we already know of. The 750-GeV particle, however, would not be one of these partners. “Even if this signal turns out to be right, it does not yet obviously tell us anything about whether there is supersymmetry,” says Peter Graham, a theorist at Stanford University.

The most striking thing about the results, scientists say, is that two experiments at the LHC—ATLAS and CMS—which use different setups and conduct wholly separate analyses of their independent sets of data, saw signs of roughly the same thing. “It’s a significant excess in ATLAS alone and that would be interesting by itself, however additional credence is given by the fact that two experiments see it in the same place,” Falkowski says. “It reduces the chance that it’s a random fluctuation by a large factor.” There is still cause, however, for skepticism. “If you look in a lot of places there’s a decent chance you’ll see a fluctuation in at least one place,” says Ken Bloom of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a member of the CMS team. “My own personal guess is that it’s most likely a fluctuation. We see relatively low-significance things like this all the time.” Physicists also say that such a particle probably should have shown up in the earlier runs at the LHC. Although those runs were operating at lower energies, they still would have been sufficient to create a particle in the 750-GeV mass range, but researchers saw only a very minor hint of anything there. Statistical flukes, however, go both ways, and perhaps those runs just happened to come up relatively empty.

The signal ATLAS saw amounted to about 10 particles more than would be expected from “background”—that is, normal particles within the standard canon—after around a billion proton collisions. CMS saw roughly three. Those tallies may sound meager, but the experiments are so sensitive, and have such precise predictions for the number of particles of any given mass they expect to see, that the results were statistically significant. Still, “it is not a discovery—it’s a potential discovery,” Olsen says.

Impatient physicists will not have to wait long to learn the truth. The data coming back from the LHC next year should soon either confirm or disprove the possible new particle. “I certainly hope we’ll get something interesting in the future, but we don’t know,” Bloom says. “If these results turns out to be the first hint of that, then we’ll look back on this day a few years from now and say, ‘that’s when we first started seeing things.’ I consider this something of a teaser.”

The Real Reason Donald Trump Will Win the Republican Nomination

Donald Trump knows his audience. He is astoundingly talented when it comes to this one thing.



He knew his audience in the Manhattan business community when he rose to become an enormously successful real estate developer. He knew his audience when he gave NBC one of its biggest hits, The Apprentice, knowing exactly what people wanted, and delivering in droves. And now, in the Republican nomination race, he is the only candidate who has recognized, very honestly, the kind of audience he's dealing with. And the bigoted, xenophobic rhetoric he is giving them is exactly what they want.



This deterioration of the GOP base is something the other candidates, and even media pundits, are still in denial about. That is why they're losing. Trump is the only one who has recognized it, and he's right. The proof is in the numbers. He has had a substantial lead in the polls for five straight months now, plus in every single state (although Cruz is now inching up in Iowa). Today, Trump's lead is higher than ever.



But it isn't Trump that is the issue. It's his audience. And every time we or the media attack Trump, it emboldens and strengthens his schtick: "See? These clueless liberals and the mainstream media hate me! Are you with them? Or do you want to make America great again?" And inevitably, the crowd goes wild. This is his badge of honor.



Watch him in debates versus his stump speeches -- he's remarkably less combative and much more restrained. It's the same when he's on Meet the Press, or anything else with a national, bipartisan audience. He retains his brand, but appears much more measured about it.



Remember, this is a man who until recently was pro-choice, pro-single payer healthcare, and whose daughter is close friends with Hillary Clinton's daughter. Watch how he effusively praised -- praised -- Hillary Clinton as recently as 2012, here.



Trump is an astute opportunist who is incredibly smart, recognizes his audiences, and plays to their ignorance -- capitalizing on their anger, fears, and sense of victimization to further his political stature. It's classic, dictionary-definition demagoguery. (There's no comparison, of course, but this is exactly the kind of thing leaders like Hitler were so good at.) His victimhood-peddling allows him to disguise hate and prejudice as hope and justice for poor, anxious Americans.



What's more concerning is that I've come across several liberals in the last few weeks who don't like Trump, but support him because they feel the Democrats are in denial about Islamic terrorism, refusing to even name it. Sadly, this is true, and the Democratic leadership is largely to blame. The ex-radical Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz calls "The Voldemort Effect": failing to name the problem makes it harder to fight it, and worse -- this is key -- fails to differentiate peaceful American moderate Muslims from radical jihadists. This is dangerous. If liberals had taken on this problem honestly and channeled the anxiety of the post-Paris/San Bernardino public from a position of moral strength, Trump would've been less able to jump in and channel it from a position of xenophobic bigotry.



Here's what Trump wrote in his book, The Art of the Deal, back in 1987:

"The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular."

And:

"One thing I've learned about the press is they're always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational, the better. It's in the nature of the job, and I understand that. The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you."

(More Trumpian wisdom from his book that you'll undoubtedly recognize is collected here.)



The electorate for the general election will be completely different. Trump knows, and has proven time and time again, that people today don't seem to care when politicians blatantly switch positions, as long as they do it with a lot of confidence and bravado. So, even in the general election, you will see people fall for it. If Trump gets the nomination, which is now more likely than ever, watch him completely change course and adjust to his new audience.



There is a slightly positive side to this for liberals: Trump is the only GOP candidate who is likely to move a bit to the left once he's in front of a general election audience. After all, he did hold several liberal positions until a few years ago. This is not something you can expect as reliably from a Cruz, or even a Rubio. Both men seem infinitely more reasoned and well-mannered, but make no mistake: they hold positions that are just as extreme, if not more, than those of Trump; and they're more likely to hold on to them.



It's still very unlikely Trump can win the general election. But how many seriously thought he had any real shot at winning the primary, or even holding such a substantial, steadily increasing lead over fifteen of the GOP's supposedly best and brightest candidates for five straight months -- in both national and state polling across the United States?



Be skeptical, but be cautiously skeptical: the more this man is attacked by liberals and the media, and the more he angers the mainstream with his outlandish statements, the more his lead grows. His audience thrives on the you-and-me-against-the-world rhetoric, and we are giving it to them. We are all Donald Trump's oxygen, and he knows it.

CERN Reveals Hints Of A New Particle

Physics





Photo credit:

An energetic event with two photons (in green) in the LHC. ATLAS/CERN

Forget the Higgs, there’s a new boson in town. At least, this is what is hinted at by the latest data coming from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The potential discovery has sent theoretical physicists into a frenzy, with nine papers explaining the data already uploaded on arXiv hours after the results were presented.

North American Beaver Invasion Occupies Forests and Steppes in Southern Chile and Argentina

In 1946 the Argentine Navy imported 10 beaver couples from Canada and set them free in Isla Grande, the deep south of Tierra del Fuego, with the intention of “enriching” the native fauna—and the local fur industry.

The consequences of such initiative were disastrous: Protected from hunting for 35 years, and devoid of natural predators, the beavers grew over 5,000 times their initial population, caused irreversible changes in the forest ecosystem, and started advancing over the continent. Now, a study published in Chilean Natural History suggests that the demographic explosion of those beavers could be bigger than suspected because it can take years or even decades for local inhabitants to notice the rodents’ presence and their impact on the surrounding ecosystems. “There could be populations of beavers moving around in the continent and in the islands we don’t know anything about,” biologist Giorgia Graells, of the Institute of Patagonia at Magallanes University and lead author of the study, told Scientific American.

In order to accurately determine whether a beaver has arrived or has recently been to a certain area, Graells and colleagues Derek Corcoran and Juan Carlos Aravena reconstructed the date in which trees from different sites across a continental region in southern Chile were attacked by the rodents. The team worked by counting growth rings in the fallen trunks. “It is the first time the technique, known as dendrochronology, is used to date the presence of invasive species,” Graells says. The felling of trees is one of the beaver’s most damaging habits. The telltale signals from their dirty work are unmistakable: teeth marks around a trunk that has been carved like a pencil tip. You can tell that the attacker was a beaver even if there are no nearby dens.

Next, researchers matched the ages of the attacked trees with the earliest date where beavers were observed across the region. The results were disturbing: The beavers in Tierra del Fuego had already jumped to the continent in 1968, 26 years before they were seen for the first time. “It was quite a surprise,” admits Graells, who now believes there might be a true “invisible” expansion of the species, perhaps more pronounced than previously estimated. The find, she adds, could accelerate the need to put control measures in place.

Nonhuman ecosystem engineers

The beaver is the second-largest rodent on Earth: Adults can weigh up to 30 kilograms and measure more than one meter long. Two species of beaver exist today: Castor fiber, from Eurasia; and Castor canadensis, which evolved in North America, the same species that was introduced in Tierra del Fuego. Both species are great ecosystems engineers, modifying their environments by cutting branches and entire tree trunks in order to build dams, canals and dens.

Since the arrival of the beaver the Patagonian Magellanic forest has never been the same: Many of the fallen trees, even if they have been partially cut, are not able to survive the attack whereas North America’s trees are more resistant to this kind of damage and can rebound. Beaver-built dams can reach around 100 meters in length and cause floods which have serious impact on acres of native vegetation. And even if a dam is destroyed, the accumulated mud buries the seeds that normally allow for forest regeneration. “Studies have shown that after 20 years the forest is not able to go back to its original state, and it is replaced by introduced grass-loving species,” Graells says. The beaver’s action also affects roads, sewers, bridges and fences.

When beavers go out of control, their activities can transform the landscape for decades or centuries, even indefinitely, says Marta Lizarralde, a researcher with the Molecular Ecology Laboratory at the Southern Center for Scientific Research (CADIC) in Ushuaia, Argentina. Out of the original population of 20 individuals, it is estimated that today there are between 100,000 and 150,000 beavers in the Fuegian archipelago alone, even though that number is only an indirect approximation, she says.

Could beavers continue to expand north? Recent evidence seems to support that possibility. In a yet-to-be-published fitness model that takes into account the climatic conditions favoring the species propagation, Graells and colleagues forecast that beavers could colonize South America at least up to 43 degrees south latitude, some 1,300 kilometers north of their latest proved location. The expansion would mainly take place west of the Andes Mountains, on the Chilean side.

Another factor feeding this fear is the beaver’s ability to reproduce in different habitats, a skill that is surprising researchers. A study in the Patagonian region led by Duke University biologist Alejandro Pietrek showed that the size of the beavers’ colonies and the yearly number of offspring are larger in the steppe than in the forest environment. “Beavers are typically associated with forests, but this turns out to be a more plastic species able to populate semiarid regions,” Pietrek told Scientific American.

Scientists today know the effects that introduced animal or plant species can have in an ecosystem. But the beaver expansion in Tierra del Fuego out of so few initial specimens represents an extraordinarily successful and unprecedented biological invasion. For example, seven American beavers were freed in Finland in 1937 and a decade ago it was estimated that their number had “only” reached 12.000.

The invasive capacity of the beavers at the end of the world “is huge,” Lizarralde notes. Yet, she says there is still no evidence they can advance much farther north on their own “imminently or in the midterm.”

But, how can we be sure? According to Graells, the accurate dating of the damaged trees can be useful to assess the rhythm of expansion of these rodents as well as to monitor efforts to contain their numbers. Several specialists think it is impossible to completely eradicate the beaver, except on smaller islands, and that the most practical measure would be to control them with selective traps that can also be used commercially to sell the skins. “We must ameliorate the problem before it is too late,” Graells says.

Tracking Dr. Traas, Part 3

Anti-evolutionEvolution denialHistory

I’m looking at Oscar Fraas’s Vor der Sündfluth! Eine Geschichte der Urwelt (1866)—that’s Before the Deluge! A History of the Ancient World—because, ultimately, I tend to be suspicious. Seeing a quotation in William A. Williams’s The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved (1925) from “a famous paleontologist” identified only as “Dr. Traas,” I set about the task of searching for its source, expecting to find mischief, or at least carelessness, afoot. I wasn’t disappointed: Dr. Traas turns out to be Dr. Fraas, with an F rather than a T (see part 1), and in fact to be Oscar Fraas (1824–1897), the curator of the department of mineralogy and paleontology at the Royal Württemberg museum of natural history in Stuttgart (see part 2). Vor der Sündfluth! was intended as a popularization of contemporary geology, which Fraas (a former pastor) understood to be consistent with the history of creation in scripture. “Fraas’s vision of the deep past,” explains M. J. S. Rudwick in his Scenes from Deep Time (1995), “is explicitly framed in terms of the divine purpose embodied in the ascent of life toward Man.” Beyond that I don’t intend to go, in part because my German is not good and in part because the book is set in a blackletter font, making it even harder to read.

It was, of course, highly misleading for creationist writers of the 1920s—such as William A. Williams, T. T. Martin, Theodore Graebner, and William Bell Riley—to quote the passage from Fraas as though he were on the leading edge of paleontological opinion. After all, Fraas was writing for a popular audience in 1866, just seven years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin and just as Darwin’s ideas were beginning to influence paleontology. It was perhaps a little misleading for Karl Ernst von Baer to quote the passage from Fraas in his “Über Darwins Lehre” (1876), although since he describes the remark as “etwas derb”—a little rough, a bit uncouth, a tad strong?—it’s unclear how much weight it was supposed to carry. Certainly von Baer would have welcomed paleontological support for his anti-Darwinian view that species cannot evolve beyond the general limits of the types to which they belong, but appealing generally to Fraas’s lifetime of study of prehistoric fauna not having convinced him of evolution, as von Baer did in “Über Darwins Lehre,” is not especially persuasive—especially considering that Fraas was only forty-one when Vor der Sündfluth! was published.

The link between the Germanophone Fraas and von Baer and the Anglophone creationists was, again, Elie de Cyon (1843–1912)—born Ilya Fadeyevich Tsion, also known as Elias von Cyon—who quoted Fraas in his Dieu et Science (1910). De Cyon turns out to be a fascinating, if unappealing, character in his own right. In The American Scholar in 1986, George F. Kennan—yes, that George F. Kennan—describes him as having two identities: as “a young physiologist of startling brilliance and promise” but also as “a different figure: a shadowy one…appearing in a whole series of guises: journalist, secret agent, publicist, propagandist for a Franco-Russian alliance and historian of the alliance finally dying in Paris in 1912 in poverty and neglect.” If that weren’t enough, it’s also alleged that de Cyon’s writings formed the basis for the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In addition to other evidence connecting de Cyon to the forgery, Frank Fox observes in his “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Shadow World of Elie de Cyon” (1997), “criticisms in the Protocols of Darwinism echo ideas long held by [de] Cyon, whose opposition to the evolution theory was well known.”

I’m not going to try to unravel the tangle of de Cyon’s life here, and my French is not much better than my German, so I’m disinclined even to make a study of Dieu et Science to understand de Cyon’s position on evolution. Instead, let me end on a happier—if ironic—note. Oscar Fraas may have been skeptical about human descent from a “simian” species; he may indeed have been skeptical about any macroevolutionary transition at all. Today, of course, there are excellent examples of macroevolution documented in the fossil record. Among them, as J. G. M. Thewissen and his colleagues explain in a marvelous review published in Evolution: Education and Outreach in 2009, are the cetaceans, where the transition from terrestrial to aquatic forms of whale is exquisitely documented. One of the earliest discovered animals in the transition is Protocetus atavus, found in forty-five-million-year-old limestone deposits in modern-day Egypt in the first decade of the twentieth century. (Brian Switek discussed Protocetus for Wired in 2011.) And the paleontologist who described it, was, as it happens, Oscar Fraas’s son, Eberhard Fraas (above, 1862–1915).

Here’s What Happens To Your Brain And Body If You Don’t Sleep

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

Jef Safi/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

You’ll be pleased to hear that science has got your back if you want an excuse to get more sleep. There are many health effects linked to a lack of sleep, both physical and psychological.

Lifting the Visor on Virtual Reality

Ken Perlin, a New York University computer science professor and virtual reality pioneer, talks with Scientific American tech editor Larry Greenemeier about the state of virtual reality, its history and where it's heading. Full transcript to come.

 

Extinct Galapagos Giant Tortoises Could Be Brought Back To Life

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Lonesome George, pictured, was thought to be the last of his kind, but this might no longer be true. Fotos593/Shutterstock

When Lonesome George died in 2012, it was thought that so did the last Pinta Island giant tortoise. Discovered roaming the rocky island in the Galapagos archipelago on his own in 1972, it was believed that he was the last of his subspecies.