Well, it's been a while since I did one of these! But there's so much good science out there at the moment. This week's theme seems to be 'Humans are not all that', which I particularly enjoy hearing about. So let's dig in!

Monday: Emotional Fish

Have you ever met one of those weird vegetarians that are like 'Oh I won't eat any meat, it's totally cruel. I only eat vegetables, fish, fruit an - ' what? FISH?

They argue that it's ok because fish don't have feelings like we typically think of things, and they cannot feel pain, so it's totally fine.

Aside from this being blatantly untrue, new collaborative research has found that fish have observable emotions. That is not to say we can simply look at a fish and notice how sad it seems by the hopelessness in its eyes, but:

(emotions are) characterised by behavioural, physiologic, neurologic and genetic changes.

With those factors in mind, it becomes possible to make a scientific analysis of emotions when run through particular stimuli. When testing, they found that fish do indeed respond in the parts of the brain expected, those associated with emotion, as well as showing a release of cortisol - a stress hormone - when put in adverse conditions compared to those in favourable ones.

But this study wasn't an agenda to stop people eating poor fish, but it was to see how the cognitive capacity for emotion is much simpler than we first thought. Typically, we would assign emotions to mammals - primates and the like, but the reality is that this computational ability of emotion may have evolved 375 million years or more ago in creatures as simple as fish!

You can read more here

This ties in with the next day's post quite nicely, so:

Tuesday: Human brains are not so special after all

Another example of us not being as special as we are desperate to be. I love these kinds of discoveries, from the heliocentric model of the Universe, to the fact that there is no God, there's just something satisfying about kicking humanity when it's down.

Now it's the thing we cherish and hold to the highest esteem of all; our brains. We typically think of our brain as the thing that separates us from the rest of the plebian animals; it's bigger, bigger ratio to body size, better, more ruffled and consumes more of the total energy the body gets.

The story goes that our brain is barely 2% of our body mass yet it gobbles up a massive 25% of our body's energy input just to get along. But now it turns out we don't actually use more energy for our brains than everything else, and so this cannot be a determining factor as to what made us unique.

Looking at merely 22 other species, researchers looked at how energy travels to the brain: glucose travelling via blood vessels. They demonstrate that the 'bony canals' surrounding cranial arteries are bigger in those that deliver more blood, which therefore also delivers more glucose, more energy.

When looking at animals such as treeshrews, lemurs, rabbits and more, they found that humans do indeed use up a whole lot more calories than many animals - more then double that of a chimp, and over 4 times that of a rabbit.

But a pen-tailed tree shrew, a lemur, a pygmy marmoset and others turned out to have just as expensive a brain. A tree shrew!

Simply put, having such a calorie-expensive brain is not something that arose at the dawn of humanity, but was actually around millions of years before we were even thought of. So I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you ain't nothing special, time to accept it!

You can read more here (paywall)

Wednesday: Neanderthal Doom

Our idea of the fate of Neanderthals seems to change every year. I remember as a kid it was something along the lines of 'they couldn't hack the cold and we invented fire and wouldn't give it to them'. At some point more recently it became 'we simply interbred and they became a part of us'. There were many more, from disease culture, stealing their jobs and whatever else.

Well now it turns out none of them are really necessary to explain the disappearance of our heavy-headed friends (that is not to say dumb. They had big, heavy brains). One of the deciding factors in their inevitable demise was actually

IMMIGRANTS

Yes, those bloody immigrants from Africa came over to Europe and wiped 'em out. And now look at the state of us!

Ok that's not entirely accurate. But there was indeed a slow and steady trickling supply of humans moving up from Africa, constantly replenishing human numbers in Europe, whereas Neanderthals were all there, unprepared to compete with such numbers, and statistically speaking, they just faded into obscurity. So although us Europeans can often find some Neanderthal DNA withing us, it makes sense that thee's such a small percentage, something like 2% I'm too lazy to check.

You can read more here

Thursday: We are all primordial slush

Reminiscing over my old birthplace

The main debates when it comes to science vs anti-science tend to end at the beginning. What came before the big bang? Nothing? well that's obviously not true then. When was God born? Forever ago? Well that's obviously nonsense. How was life first made? The proliferation of RNA molecules in a pool of goo? Nonsense.

We can forever reach the frontier of any given path of knowledge and then dismiss the whole field on the basis that it has a frontier at all. But knowledge is an ever-evolving tool, one that has no end. And that's how it should be.

Abiogenesis is the bane of existence for those arguing evolution against anti-science people. If we all evolved from something before us, what came first??

The most popular idea has been the 'RNA-world' hypothesis, in which, as stated above, a relatively simple molecule, Ribonucleic Acid managed to become self replicating (just managed? how??) with abilities to store information, create chemical reactions, methylate and more before evolving into DNA and proteins.

But this may be getting an update. More convincing research suggests Nucleic acids and peptide proteins worked together in an RNA-peptide hypothesis.

It's basically a much more probable scenario for complex life to have arisen in, with the RNA-protein partnership creating a kind of 'self-reinforcing feedback system', allowing a much easier path to genetic diversity.

Without peptides, RNA lacks the tools to go through 'reflexivity' - the process of enforcing its own rules. This theory includes certain enzymes that are so deep inside life that it can be found in viruses, cells, mitochondria and all, and they all work with the 'building block' proteins, linking amino acids to RNA.

Basically, the idea includes things that are at the very core of our being into the hypothesis, while at the same time lifting a limitation on the RNA-world hypothesis making the whole idea more feasible and likely.

You can read more here

Friday: Alien Brothers and Sisters

When we think about alien life we are often made to consider things beyond our wildest imaginations, creatures that don't adhere to our DNA system, creatures that follow a whole different set of rules, perhaps they thrive in methane instead of water! And so on.

But when you look at the Universe on the whole you notice a pattern. The most abundant elements out there, in order are:

• Hydrogen
• Helium
• Oxygen
• Carbon

After this you get, oddly, Neon, Iron, Nitrogen and Silicon. But looking at the top 4, you may notice something. They are the same things our bodies are made up of (except Helium)! Clearly it's no coincidence that all life just happens to exist in various combinations of those top three elements; Hydrogen and Oxygen to make H₂0, and Carbon for basically the rest.

Carbon is basically the most flexible element in the Universe, with a practically unlimited ability to bond to each other due to its special electron configuration. Nothing else comes close to it in that regard. So when we think of discovering aliens, perhaps we really should be thinking more along the lines of earth-like organisms.

New research provides even more reason for this way of thought: Major Transitions.

As far as life here has gone, the increase in complexity has only been able to arise from these transitions that come as a result of extreme conditions. When single celled organisms come together to create a more complex, muti-cellular organism, this is considered a transition.

If this is taken into consideration then there's a degree of predictability into how organisms would form around the Universe, starting with a need to reduce and remove conflict among individuals. By doing so, single cells can cooperate better and together function as a higher life form like, say, a jellyfish. Or a human.

This is very oversimplified but you can Read more about it here, and you should. This paper is particularly interesting and an easy read!

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