Science Megathread

[certified hummus supporter 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

For the first time in one billion years, two lifeforms truly merged into one organism

https://www.popsci.com/science/two-lifeforms-merged-into-one/

"Evolution is quite a wondrous and lengthy process, with some random bursts of activity that are responsible for the diversity of life on our planet today. These can happen on large scales like with the evolution of more efficient limbs. They also occur at microscopic cellular level, such as when different parts of the cell were first formed.

Now, a team of scientists have detected a sign of a major life event that has likely not occurred for at least one billion years. They’ve observed primary endosymbiosis–two lifeforms merging into one organism. This incredibly rare event occurred between a type of abundant marine algae and a bacterium was observed in a lab setting. For perspective, plants first began to dot our planet the last time this happened. The results are described in two papers recently published in the journals Cell and Science."

"With this latest endosymbiosis event, it’s possible that the algae is converting nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia that it can use for other cellular processes. However, it needs the help of a bacterium..."

"...In the paper published in Cell, a team of scientists show that this process is occurring yet again. They looked at a species of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii. The algae engulfed a cyanobacterium gives it a bit of a plant superpower. It can “fix” nitrogen straight from the air and combine it with other elements to form more useful compounds. This is something that plants normally can’t do. 

Nitrogen is a very important nutrient for life to exist and plants normally get it through mutual relationships with the bacteria that remain separate from the plant or algae. The team first thought that the B. bigelowii algae had this kind of symbiotic relationship with a bacterium called UCYN-A. The relationship had actually gotten much more close and serious."

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Along those lines, there was an article in Scientific American a few months back about the "voids" in the universe (the dark spots in the above map) where there is almost nothing at all (except dark energy, which is mostly constant) for truly vast distances. They are understudied but may be extremely important to understanding the evolution of the universe.

Do you think you could find it?

How Analyzing Cosmic Nothing Might Explain Everything
Huge empty areas of the universe called voids could help solve the greatest mysteries in the cosmos

Computational astrophysicist Alice Pisani put on a virtual-reality headset and stared out into the void—or rather a void, one of many large, empty spaces that pepper the cosmos. “It was absolutely amazing,” Pisani recalls. At first, hovering in the air in front of her was a jumble of shining dots, each representing a galaxy. When Pisani walked into the jumble, she found herself inside a large swath of nothing with a shell of galaxies surrounding it. The image wasn't just a guess at what a cosmic void might look like; it was Pisani's own data made manifest. “I was completely surprised,” she says. “It was just so cool.”

The visualization, made in 2022, was a special project by Bonny Yue Wang, then a computer science undergraduate at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. Pisani teaches a course there in cosmology—the structure and evolution of the universe. Wang had been aiming to use Pisani's data on voids, which can stretch from tens to hundreds of millions of light-years across, to create an augmented-reality view of these surprising features of the cosmos.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-analyzing-cosmic-nothing-might-explain-everything/

[Torrain]

Some very promising trials for personalised vaccines against melanoma in those with a high risk or history of early-stage cancer.