a weekly look at stories of note

Capturing Carbon with rocks? Whatever we said about antibiotics in our last blog, climate change remains the number one problem. And we welcome any idea to ameliorate it, however outlandish. Latest wheeze is to try the carbon-absorbing properties of rocks such as basalt, as the BBC explains:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65648361

A whole world explained Funghi are a whole separate kingdom, quite different to plants and animals. We’ve had one or two blogs alluding to their practical uses recently. Regular reader Gaynor Lynch recommends this general overview from that marvellous site BBC sounds

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m00132xn?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Surprising ancestor We will never forget our first site of a wild comb jelly whilst snorkelling in the sparkling waters off of Mojacar in Spain. Now it seems these oddball creatures may be very important indeed in the wider evolutionary scheme of things Nature Briefings: The Ancestor of all animals

Ctenophores, also called comb jellies, are the sister group of all living animals, scientists have discovered. The team compared the comb jelly Bolinopsis microptera to sponges — another contender for the most ancient creature on Earth — along with three unicellular relatives of animals. The pattern of genes on the jellies’ chromosomes revealed that they evolved first. That means that early animals were surprisingly complex: they had a well-developed nervous system, and could probably swim around freely. “We have to rethink the function and the structure of the early ancestor of animals. It wasn’t like a simple sponge,” says evolutionary biologist Paulyn Cartwright.Scientific American | 6 min read
Reference: Nature paper

Saving Nature saves you It’s hard to explain to some people, who seem to want to build a highway by-pass through everything, that saving rare creatures saves their habitat. Which in turn sequesters tonnes of deadly carbon dioxide. So next time you meet someone of that sort, try this syllogism on them, with the tiger as your endangered species. From h The Conversation:

https://theconversation.com/tiger-protection-in-india-also-saved-1-million-tonnes-of-carbon-emissions-new-study-206283?utm_medium=em

So Farewell, Tina Turner A remarkable woman, with a remarkable voice. We are glad that she overcome horrendous abuse to achieve success. Many such victims do not-remember that. Her output was huge and varied, but younger readers might want to sample this, a stalwart of many a school discothèque in the summer of 1973. It’s called Nutbush City Limit, and we have never understood the words, or what it was supposed to be about. But it used to get your grandparents dancing!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/ike-tina-turner-nutbush-city-limits-1973/vi-AA1bEweg

#carbon capture #global warming #funghi #comb jellies #ctenophores #tiger #climate change #global warming #tina turner

“Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away/If you can use some exotic booze, there’s a bar in far Bombay.” So sang Frank Sinatra in one of his more memorable ditties. We’re going to make a confession here tonight. We quite like airports. Maybe it’s the sense of transience, with everyone rushing everywhere. The lists of far-flung destinations on the boards, ever evocative of palm trees, sunny beaches and cocktails at sundown. The cold antiseptic glamour of the duty free concessions. Or just to stand in awe at the marvellous technological achievement that a modern airport represents, and also at the skills of so many staff-aircrew, cabin crew, engineers, cleaners and so many more. OK, OK, we’re not oblivious to the real and present danger that so much flying represents to our environment. But, as it’s Friday Night, can we please leave that to a better season?

Because we are glad to note that our enthusiasm for aeronautical booze-ups is shared by more sagacious and experienced minds. To this end we present a delightful piece by Brad Japhe of the admirable Travel and Leisure website. This site is a treasure trove for holiday and business folk alike. Brad’s article is a mere surface scratcher of the cornucopia of goodies they present. That said, here’s his list of six great airport lounge bars [1] There’s three from the USA, one in Singapore, one in Amsterdam and one in Tokyo. But it’s far from exhaustive, gentle reader. If you know a better one let us know. We’ll be happy to showcase it.

So, even if you’re grounded tonight, why not look at Brad’s list, and mix yourself up something therefrom? Maybe it won’t be very long before you too are sitting with your feet tucked under a stool, savouring a last delicious drop on home soil before you lift off once again to blue skies and blue seas, Enjoy.

[1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/best-airport-bars-in-the-world-7376778

#travel and leisure #brad japhe #cocktails #airports #flying

Could Artificial Intelligence be our way out of antibiotic resistance? Old hands on LSS will instantly recall a blog of ours (LSS 28 4 2020) in which we reported the use of AI to develop a new antibiotic called Halicin. Today we’re happy to report that it’s been done again, this time to produce a really exciting new compound called abaucin.

We’ve got two links for you. James Gallagher of the BBC has a nice layman-friendly explanation, but it’ll be on your media feeds somewhere today [1] But, for those who like a drop of the hard stuff, we reproduce the original paper from Nature Chemical Biology [2] The summary’s got some good graphics which explain what the authors have been up to rather well, we suggest.

Do we think this is significant? Yes, we do. That’s at least twice that AI has been trained up to produce a result. And when you consider that abaucin is due to be targeted at Acinetobacter baumannii, one of the top three on the WHO list of dangerously resistant organisms, we’re even more cheered. But for us the real good news is in the methodology. Read what James says here

……To find a new antibiotic, the researchers first had to train the AI. They took thousands of drugs where the precise chemical structure was known, and manually tested them on Acinetobacter baumannii to see which could slow it down or kill it.This information was fed into the AI so it could learn the chemical features of drugs that could attack the problematic bacterium.The AI was then unleashed on a list of 6,680 compounds whose effectiveness was unknown. The results – published in Nature Chemical Biology – showed it took the AI an hour and a half to produce a shortlist. The researchers tested 240 in the laboratory, and found nine potential antibiotics. One of them was the incredibly potent antibiotic abaucin…..

In other words, it’s repeatable. Potentially the AI techniques could be used to design other compounds. We’ve had a few blogs talking about the alpha-fold programme and protein design.(LSS passim) Potentially, we may be about to witness one of those intellectual explosions where progress crosses rapidly between different areas, and the there is an exponential leap in design and technique. We’ve been on the antibiotics story for years now, and this time it feels as if something may be about to change.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65709834

[2]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-023-01349-8

#AI #antibiotic resistance #abaucin #medicine #alphafold

No one can find praise enough for the heroic people of Ukraine, whose struggle against aggression and tyranny will one day take their place in the finest annals of human history. And we thank our lucky stars that western democracies have seen the danger and are stepping up to the plate with supplies of all kinds. Yet in one important area our efforts are lacklustre at best, and floundering at worse. Diplomacy, and its associated trope of sanctions. Why are countries like South Africa, India and China so wary of what at first sight seems a clear-cut case of right and wrong?

Before we condemn, let’s see the arguments from their point of view. The current state of play is admirably summarised by Jose Caballero in this incisive article for The Conversation. Inequalities in access to things like the IMF are still firmly skewed the West’s way, And structures like the UN Security Council are frankly decrepit, reflecting a world pecking order more akin to 1945 than 2023. [1]

We at LSS think there are deeper, historical reasons why the West no longer asserts the diplomatic and above all moral pull that it once did, say around its apparent moment of triumph back in 1991. In reverse order these are:

1 The Capitol riots of 2020 If you wanted to run a TV advertisement to show that the Enlightenment values of Reason and rational enquiry were dead, this would scoop all industry awards. Didn’t this country once have someone called Thomas Jefferson, or something?

2 The Election of Donald Trump 2016 If a political system can throw up operatives of this quality, what’s the point of Democracy anyway?

3 Brexit 2016 An old and mature democracy went through a whole referendum and produced this outcome of -how shall we say?-suboptimal economic success. It even did the exact opposite to the wishes of its most fervent supporters, with immigration now far higher than it was in EU days

4 The Financial Crash 2007-2008 So what’s so good about western capitalism if this is what it does?

5 The Iraq war 2003 Most of the above flowed from this catastrophic decision, which we have discussed before. See LSS 18 3 2023 and its references to the analysis by Jonathan Freedland. Particularly the bit about the more boastful hangers on of the Bush Administration who seemed to hint that Beijing was next on the list after Baghdad.

None of which exactly inspires admiration, does it? Especially of you throw in more general themes like inequality, global warming and antibiotic resistance, all of which have their roots in the political and economic systems designed and run by western corporations. It’s not that we deeply love or admire the countries named above, or wish to emulate their political and state security systems. But they are made up of people. Some of them intelligent people, who understandably take a jaundiced view of the above list, and cannot be expected to rush to our support with wide eyed, naive enthusiasm.

“Physician heal thyself” is a sound maxim. We really do need to put our own house in order before we can once again expect our ideals to flourish once again. At base, they are the right ones, and it would be a pity if they were lost.

[1] https://theconversation.com/why-the-west-needs-to-offer-brazil-india-and-south-africa-a-new-deal-204321?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%2

#india #china #brazil #south africa #un #ukraine war #russia #united states

Pity the residents of 53 Agar Grove, Camden, in London. For they live in a block which appears to be falling down around them. And it’s taking their life savings, even hope itself, in the process.

This is not the place to ascribe blame. This story by Harry Low and Morgan Hammond of the BBC goes into the whys and wherefores of the whole sorry mess.[1] We still hope the legal and insurance processes will one day resolve matters to the just satisfaction of all parties. But have deep and abiding sympathies with the residents. Because we believe that their story will one day be our story.

For they are us. The same aspiring sorts of hard working people who only wanted a little property because it represented long-term security. OK, maybe a little richer than most of us. But being rich does not necessarily make you a bad person (LSS is a Whig blog, not a Socialist one) And until recently, aspiring to a high consumer lifestyle was a perfectly ordinary-even understandable-thing to do.

Yet that lifestyle has its costs. Which brings us to our second story, this time from Nature Briefings. For once, we reproduce their summary below our text [2] But the message is simple. We’re starting to break the 1.5⁰ C temperature limit with ominous regularity. Parts of the world are now doing it every year. And if we smash through 2⁰ C then you you may rest assured that the consequences will make the travails at 53 Agar Grove look small by comparison. For all of us.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-65668790

[2] What 1.5⁰C of global warming really means

Last week, meteorologists predicted that the global average temperature for a single year is likely to hit 1.5 ℃ above pre-industrial levels within the next five years. The landmark evokes the Paris climate agreement’s aspirational goal: to keep global warming below 1.5 ℃. But the two milestones are not the same. The Paris goal is defined as the midpoint of the first 20-year period when the average global surface air temperature is 1.5 ºC warmer than the 1850–1900 average.A global stocktake in preparation for the next United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting (COP28), in November, found that, for a 50% chance of achieving the goal, global greenhouse-gas emissions need to peak before 2025; this hasn’t happened yet.Because global warming is uneven, more than one-fifth of the world’s population currently live in regions that have already exceeded 1.5 ºC of warming in at least one season.More important than when Earth will hit 1.5 ºC is what amount of warming the planet will peak at, and when that will happen. “With every tenth of a degree above 2 ºC, you’re looking at more-sustained, more-systemic impacts,” says geographer William Solecki. Those numbers won’t be apparent for decades.Nature | 5 min read

#global warming #climate change #agar grove #lifestyle #consumer

lasting themes from this week’s news

Watch this space The ISS is one of those rare examples of successful international cooperation that still surprises us every time it whizzes through the evening sky. Sadly its days are numbered. This piece from the BBC discusses what may come next

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230512-what-will-replace-the-international-space-station

You were warned Hats off to Canadian scientist Gilbert Plass. In May 1953 he was the first to join the dots and realise the simple fact that carbon dioxide traps heat had the potential to land us with problems indeed. We didn’t realise it was this long ago. Good old Conversation!

https://theconversation.com/climate-change-first-went-viral-exactly-70-years-ago-205508?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20T

We like our mushrooms CRISPR The new CRISPR technique is an old theme of this blog. A more recent one was mushrooms. Which is why itm was nice to see the two brought together in htis piece from the inimitable Nature Briefings CRISPR zeroes in on death cap antidote.

The CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing tool might have cracked the mystery of how death cap mushrooms (Amanita phalloides) kill — and it led researchers to a potential antidote. Using the gene-editing technology, researchers created a pool of human cells — each with different genetic mutations — and exposed them to the mushrooms’ toxin. The toxin could not enter cells that lacked a functional version of an enzyme called STT3B, and cell survival increased. The researchers then sifted through thousands of chemical compounds to find one that would block the action of STT3B. They uncovered indocyanine green, a dye developed by the photography company Kodak in the 1950s and used in medical imaging. Indocyanine green has not yet been tested as an antidote in humans, but it reduced deaths when given to mice.Nature | 3 min read
Reference: Nature Communications paper

A la parilla Anyone who has enjoyed a delicious grill on a Spanish holiday will warm to this piece from the Guardian. It seems early Iberians were warming their chuletas de cordero 250000 years ago, What a pity there was none of that delicious Rioja to partner the meat!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/18/scientists-find-oldest-known-evidence-of-humans-in-europe-using-fires-to-cook

y aqui:

https://www.eltiempo.com/vida/ciencia/el-fuego-ya-se-usaba-en-europa-cerca-de-madrid-hace-250-000-anos-769855

Back to the Future with Pulp Ah, the far off days of 1995. A competent technocrat leads a shaky Conservative Government while his party is torn by faction. No internet to speak of, but no food banks either. Which is why Jarvis Cocker’s angry denunciation of the whole sorry mess is still relevant. Only more so

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=Pulp+Common+People+Top+of+the+Pops&&mid=42C371CE997BF014CF5C42C371CE997B

#CRISPR #mushrooms #ISS #climate change #global warming #use of fire #uso de fuego #cocinar

It’s the transience of railway bars that appeals. Everyone is passing through. So are you. The rigid hierarchies and regular sameness of the local pub are left behind. There’s a rough democracy at the railway bar. Everyone is who they are at that moment, no more, no less. You never know who you are going to meet in these brief encounters. We’ve bumped into Government Ministers, fashion designers, forensic scientists and even someone who looked like the footballer Ian Wright (it really wasn’t Ian). In theory there is nothing for the staff to do but serve drinks. Which is why we applaud it when someone contrives to make something special out of one of them, by some trick of architecture, service or location.

Greater minds than our own have long since perceived this truth. So today we’re going to point you to an excellent piece from The Guardian, but written by 10 of its readers. [1] The platforms here are world wide: Shimla, Madrid, Hull, Kyoto, Augsburg and Stalybridge, to name but a few. Try it-and see if your own station deserves a place on the list.

Our own thoughts? There’s something ineffably Victorian about railways, even if they no longer use steam. To stand amid the brick-and- wrought iron cathedrals of some northern English station (York comes to mind) on a cold misty day is somehow to be transported back in time and place to a bygone age, just over the horizon of living memory. And only one drink will suffice-an old English real ale, dark and woody as the dense furnishings all around. “the train now arriving…” bellows the tannoy. Let someone else catch it. Pause, and enjoy your reverie.

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/may/03/readers-train-railway-cafes-bars-restaurants

#train #railway #station bar #real ale

Yesterday we published a slightly peevish piece on early human migration. We pointed to all the different species, all the different tool assemblages and all the scattered sites across Eurasia, and bemoaned the implausibilities of the various theories which have been adduced to try to link them all up.

About an hour later a regular update from Nature Briefings dropped into our in-box. And what it contained blew us away. Read this:

Humans did not emerge from a single region of Africa, but from several populations that moved around the continent one million years ago and intermingled for millennia. The widely held idea of a single origin of Homo sapiens is based in part on fossil records. Computer modelling and genome data from modern African and European populations revealed that “our roots lie in a very diverse overall population made up of fragmented local populations”, says evolutionary archaeologist Eleanor Scerri. This means human evolution looks more like a tangled vine than a ‘tree of life.’Nature | 4 min read
Reference: Nature paper

OK, the authors are talking about the situation 1 million years ago and the emergence of Homo sapiens in particular, not 2 million years and the emergence of the Homo genus. But the message is the same for both. If you spend your time looking for this specimen, which made that tool kit, which makes your discovery the key ancestor of us all, you are wasting your time. It looks like our tree is a ramifying bush of wondering tribes, some of whom may have changed shape a bit in response to various ecological and environmental pressures. Rivers flooded, volcanoes went off, droughts scorched the earth. The survivors were driven into the arms of other groups-and genes and ideas flowed as they have always done. After all it took humans and chimpanzees about three million years to finally give up interbreeding. What was to stop a few Homo habilis types getting up to monkey business with some itinerant Denisovan folk, if the mood took them?

We suspect the real problem arose from the fact that early investigators were trained in the old school. Where every new discovery, plant, animal or fungus had to be given a new species name, with a Latin binomial- Felis domesticus, Quercus robur, or whatever. Don’t get us wrong: naming things is incredibly important and useful. We think Linnaeus was one of the all time greats. But there comes a point at which getting hung up on names and labels is no longer helpful. In fact it affords the opposite of true understanding. Locally that’s true in human evolution. We hope people might laern this lesson a little more widely. And thanks to Nature Briefings for showing the point to us.

#nature briefings #human evolution #homo sapiens #homo erectus #classification #tool cultures #acheulian #oldowan

For those who like their truths cut and dried, the story of the wanderings of our earliest ancestors[1] is a bewildering mess. So much so that all we can do is start with a sort of fairy story and then ask a series of rather wistful questions. We hope this blog will act as a sort of inoculation against anyone who tells you confident, otiose stories and try to give the impression that they have spoken the last word on any subject. Especially economics and holiday villas.

A Fairy Story (for children) Once upon a time a group of nasty little apemen in Africa called Australopithecus invented stone tools. Somehow they evolved into another little creature called Homo habilis, which made them better. Then somehow, still in Africa, a much larger, altogether more noble fellow called Homo erectus evolved. They made magnificent Acheulian tools and marched out to conquer the world. Reaching as far as places like Java and Flores.

The truth has to be rather different, as we wonder below

1 The Dmansi finds[2] (Homo georgicus?) are alleged to be an early form of H erectus up in the Caucasus(1.8m years bp) But they were rather small, primitive looking people. Would classic Homo erectus like the Turkana boy really recognise them as being the same people? And why is their technology of the old fashioned Oldowan type, beloved of the Austraolopithecines?

2 Ubeidiya If the Dmansi people came out of Africa, they must have passed through the Middle East. The only site on the route of any significance is at Ubeidiya in Israel. The date and location are about right. But the only bone suggests a bigger creature, in line with the classic Turkana Homo erectus. Are we really implying this species started small (H habilis), got bigger(Turkana boy) marched off north, then got small again in the Caucasus? [3]

3 Name me a name What exactly is Homo erectus any way. And what is Homo ergaster? It’s a concept that is profoundly fuzzy round the edges

4 Dear Little Hobbits Homo floresiensis is often held to be a last offshoot, on the extreme geographical range of Homo erectus. Yet some researches assert it has skeletal resemblances to Australopithecus rather than Homo. What was it doing there?

5 China Crisis Who or what made the incredibly early assemblages in Gongwangling in China?

6 Out of Africa, 2-and the sequel And finally-why do all the migrations seem to start in Africa? First Homo erectus. Then Homo Heidelbergensis. Then Homo sapiens. Always one way, spreading a more advanced way of doing things every time. Or were there larger populations of hominins spread right across Africa and Eurasia, for much longer than we suspect? Much more digging is needed, in places which haven’t been tried, Until that happens, believe nothing.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmanisi_hominins#:~:text=The%20Dmanisi%20hominins%2C%20Dmanisi%20peop

[3]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05712-y

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus

[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis

#human evolution #paleoanthropology #homo erectus #pleistocene #stone tools

A look at the week’s news stories

Genes are here to stay Older readers, especially those from scientific and medical backgrounds will recall the excitement back in 2000 when the first human genome map came out. Now it gets better, so much so that we have two links for you. This one is going to be important!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12067557/Worlds-human-PANGENOME-released-Enormous-genetic-database-combines-genomes-47-people.html

The first draft of a human ‘pangenome’ has been published. Unlike the first complete human genome sequence, which was derived mostly from the DNA of just one person, the pangenome is drawn from 47 people from around the globe, including individuals from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. More genomes are being added — 350 will be analysed by mid-2024. They will allow geneticists to identify variations in the genomes of diverse populations and investigate links between genes and disease. “This is like going from black-and-white television to 1080p,” says genome scientist Keolu Fox.Nature | 5 min read
Read more: discover related research and analysis in the Nature Portfolio Collection of Human Pangenome Ref

Help me if you can News of the UK Coronation’s big help out came from regular contributor Gary Herbert who may be seen cleaning the chalk lion which overlooks Whipsnade, the country arm of London Zoo. A worthy day out indeed! he claims to be at the front

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-65482925

Mushrooms and the mind Not the first time we’ve alluded to the amazing properties of fungi this week. Today, more on our running theme of how researches may be using fungal products to investigate the mysteries of the human mind

https://theconversation.com/brain-altering-fungi-could-lead-the-next-frontier-in-mental-health-care-203371?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%2

Neanderthal Nose best Apparently our Neanderthal cousins used their huge conks to warm the air in their glacial environments. As their genes passed down to us, the hooters came with them. Here’s how.

ttps://metro.co.uk/2023/05/09/a-larger-nose-could-be-due-to-neanderthals-in-your-family-tree-18750919/

Mushroom dance as it’s been fungi all week on this blog, we’ll leave you with the famous Mushroom dance from Disney’s 1940 Fantasia. The music of course was from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite

#fugi #genome #coronation #fantasia