The New York Times, February 18, 2025
Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words and sentences don’t leave fossils behind for paleontologists to dig up.
A genetic study published on Tuesday offers an important new clue. Researchers found that, between 250,000 and 500,000 years ago, a gene known as NOVA1 underwent a profound evolutionary change in our ancestors. When the scientists put the human version of NOVA1 into mice, the animals made more complex sounds.
The New York Times, February 17, 2025
Louis Pasteur was at his most comfortable when working in his Paris laboratory. It was there that he had some of his greatest scientific triumphs, including experiments that helped confirm germs can cause disease. “Everything gets complicated away from the laboratory,” he once complained to a friend.
But in 1860, years before he became famous for developing vaccines and heating milk to kill pathogens, Pasteur ventured to the top of a glacier, on a remarkable quest for invisible life.
Continue reading “Louis Pasteur’s Relentless Hunt for Germs Floating in the Air”
The New York Times, February 5, 2025
In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote.
Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do English, Hindi and Spanish, along with hundreds of less common languages. Today, about half the world speaks an Indo-European language.
Continue reading “Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language”
The New York Times, February 3, 2025
In early February 2020, China locked down more than 50 million people, hoping to hinder the spread of a new coronavirus. No one knew at the time exactly how it was spreading, but Lidia Morawska, an expert on air quality at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, did not like the clues she managed to find.
It looked to her as if the coronavirus was spreading through the air, ferried by wafting droplets exhaled by the infected. If that were true, then standard measures such as disinfecting surfaces and staying a few feet away from people with symptoms would not be enough to avoid infection.
The New York Times, January 29, 2025
Our solar system contains planets, dwarf planets, asteroids and comets — but only one world is known to harbor life. Scientists have long debated whether Earth is truly unique. Perhaps our planet just happened to have the right combination of ingredients, conditions and timing to allow life to emerge.
But a pinch of grit from a distant asteroid collected by a NASA spacecraft holds hints that our planet may not be so special. A team of researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday that the asteroid, known as Bennu, contains a wealth of organic molecules, including many crucial building blocks of life. The chemistry that produced them might be going on today on the ice moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Continue reading “Lurking Inside an Asteroid: Life’s Ingredients”