Missing Law of Evolution

A new “law of increasing functional information” reveals that complex natural systems, beyond just life on Earth, evolve towards higher complexity. This discovery expands traditional evolutionary theory, offering insights from cosmology to astrobiology.

Evolution of plants, animals: “A very special case within a far larger natural phenomenon.” Similar marvels occur with stars, planets, minerals, other complex systems; When a novel configuration works well and function improves, evolution occurs.

A paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today describes “a missing law of nature,” recognizing for the first time an important norm within the natural world’s workings.

In essence, the new law states that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity, and complexity. In other words, evolution is not limited to life on Earth, it also occurs in other massively complex systems, from planets and stars to atoms, minerals, and more.  READ MORE...

Decrease Your Risk of Dementia

Research demonstrated that what older adults do when they are sitting influences their risk of dementia.

According to a recent study by the University of Southern California and University of Arizona researchers, those 60 and older who spend a lot of time watching TV or partaking in other passive, sedentary behaviors may be more likely to develop dementia.

Additionally, their research demonstrated that the risk is reduced for those who engage in activities while seated, such as reading or using a computer.

The study was published recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It also revealed that even among those who engaged in physical activity, the connection between sedentary behavior and the risk of dementia persisted.

“It isn’t the time spent sitting, per se, but the type of sedentary activity performed during leisure time that impacts dementia risk,” said study author David Raichlen, professor of biological sciences and anthropology at the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

“We know from past studies that watching TV involves low levels of muscle activity and energy use compared with using a computer or reading,” he said. “And while research has shown that uninterrupted sitting for long periods is linked with reduced blood flow in the brain, the relatively greater intellectual stimulation that occurs during computer use may counteract the negative effects of sitting.”   READ MORE...

A Branch of the Nile Reveals...

The Sphinx at the Giza Pyramids on November 20, 2019. KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty Image

A 4,500-year-old architectural marvel that still baffles scientists

Researchers have uncovered a now-dried-up branch of the Nile that came right up to the great pyramid complex of Giza about 4,500 years ago.

Awesome in size, with perfect geometry, and adorned with intricate decorations, the pyramids at Giza, on the outskirts of modern Cairo, served to demonstrate the power of the pharaohs in Egypt's golden ageResearchers have uncovered a now-dried-up branch of the Nile that came right up to the great pyramid complex of Giza about 4,500 years ago.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, explain how ancient Egyptians were able to haul millions of the tons-heavy building blocks to the site of the iconic pyramids over four miles of what is now a desert landscape.

"It was impossible to build the pyramids here without this branch of the Nile," study author and geographer Hader Sheesh said, per The New York Times.       READ MORE...

Ancient Methane Release

A group of scientists this week said they have discovered new evidence of how methane deposits stored deep in the seafloor can break free — and they are now trying to figure out what this could mean for our climate future.

The research published Monday suggests a major destabilization of seafloor methane off the coast of Africa around 125,000 years ago, after a global shift in currents warmed the middle depths of the ocean there by 6.8 degrees Celsius, or 12.2 degrees Fahrenheit — a massive rise.

Several scientists who reviewed the study said they weren’t ready to raise major alarms about the planet’s ample stores of subsea methane in the form of what are called hydrates. 

While most experts agree that this methane could cause tremendous warming if it somehow hits the atmosphere, many say that the gas would be unleashed only slowly as the planet warms, and that the ocean itself would protect us by absorbing most methane before it can escape to the air.

Still, the new findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscore how little we still know about how the planet will respond to our uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions — and how unpredictable that response may be.

The new sample of sediment unearthed from the seafloor paints a picture of tumultuous events during a period of Earth’s history around 125,000 years ago, called the Eemian. 

The era has often stirred scientists’ fears about the future, for while the Earth was not much warmer than it is today, seas were 20 feet or more higher. Some suspect the West Antarctic ice sheet may have collapsed at that time — and a few have even postulated superstorms powerful enough to lift boulders atop cliffs in the Bahamas.  READ MORE...

Understanding Color Perception

A new study corrects an important error in the 3D mathematical space developed by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger and others, and used by scientists and industry for more than 100 years to describe how your eye distinguishes one color from another. 

The research has the potential to boost scientific data visualizations, improve TVs and recalibrate the textile and paint industries.

"The assumed shape of color space requires a paradigm shift," said Roxana Bujack, a computer scientist with a background in mathematics who creates scientific visualizations at Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

Bujack is lead author of the paper by a Los Alamos team in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the mathematics of color perception.

"Our research shows that the current mathematical model of how the eye perceives color differences is incorrect. That model was suggested by Bernhard Riemann and developed by Hermann von Helmholtz and Erwin Schrödinger—all giants in mathematics and physics—and proving one of them wrong is pretty much the dream of a scientist," said Bujack.

Modeling human color perception enables automation of image processing, computer graphics and visualization tasks.

"Our original idea was to develop algorithms to automatically improve color maps for data visualization, to make them easier to understand and interpret," Bujack said. 

So the team was surprised when they discovered they were the first to determine that the longstanding application of Riemannian geometry, which allows generalizing straight lines to curved surfaces, didn't work.  READ MORE...

Prehistoric Egg Identified

The only almost completely intact Genyornis eggshell ever discovered. It was located by 

N. Spooner and collected by Gifford H. Miller, South Australia. The presence of four 

puncture wounds on the egg indicates that it was predated by a scavenging marsupial. 

Credit: Gifford H. Miller

A years-long scientific controversy in Australia about what animal is the true mother of gigantic primordial eggs has been settled. In a recent study, scientists from the University of Copenhagen and their global counterparts showed that the eggs could only be the last of a rare line of megafauna known as the “Demon Ducks of Doom.”

Consider living next to a 200 kg, two meters tall bird with a huge beak. This was the situation for the first people who settled in Australia some 65,000 years ago.

Genyornis newtoni, the last members of the “Demon Ducks of Doom,” coexisted there with our ancestors as a species of a now-extinct family of duck-like birds.

According to a recent study by experts from the University of Copenhagen and an international team of colleagues, the flightless bird lay eggs the size of cantaloupe melons, presumably to the delight of ancient humans who most likely gathered and consumed them as an essential protein source. The research was just released in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since experts initially found the 50,000-year-old eggshell pieces 40 years ago, the huge eggs have been the subject of debate. It wasn’t known until recently if the eggs genuinely belonged to the family of “demon-ducks,” also known as dromornithids.

Since 1981, the identity of the bird that lay the eggs has been a source of controversy for scientists all across the globe. While some proposed Genyornis newtoni, others thought the shells were from Progura birds, an extinct member of the megapode group of species. Progura were “chicken-like birds” that only weighed between five and seven kilos and had huge feet.  READ MORE...

Expansion of Universe Nearing End

The universe is not only expanding, but accelerating that expansion, leading most scientists to anticipate it will keep on growing for a very long time, if not forever. However, a trio of Princeton physicists have challenged this view, presenting a model of the universe in which this expansion is nearly at its end. The universe will start to contract in on itself, they claim, and that could happen surprisingly soon. This is a cosmologist’s “soon”, however, of the order of 100 million years, not something most people would recognize as imminent.

The discovery of acceleration in the expansion of the universe has shaken up cosmology perhaps more than anything else this century. Beforehand the primary debate was whether the universe would expand forever, albeit more slowly, or be dragged back into a “big crunch” as gravity overcame the movement apart.

Acceleration, and the Dark Energy used to explain it, appeared to end the possibility the universe would ever contract again, but a minority of physicists aren't ready to let the idea go. Professor Paul Steinhardt, in particular, has proposed “bouncing” models of the universe. Now Steinhardt and co-authors claim in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the turning point from expansion to contraction could be close without us being able to tell.

The authors do not assert certainty. They refer to three models of Dark Energy's nature. One of these would see the universe continue to expand faster and faster forever, while a second would see it slow at an unpredictable point, probably far in the future.  READ MORE...

Limits of Artificial Intelligence

Humans are usually pretty good at recognizing when they get things wrong, but artificial intelligence systems are not. According to a new study, AI generally suffers from inherent limitations due to a century-old mathematical paradox.

Like some people, AI systems often have a degree of confidence that far exceeds their actual abilities. And like an overconfident person, many AI systems don't know when they're making mistakes. Sometimes it's even more difficult for an AI system to realize when it's making a mistake than to produce a correct result.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Oslo say that instability is the Achilles' heel of modern AI and that a mathematical paradox shows AI's limitations. Neural networks, the state of the art tool in AI, roughly mimic the links between neurons in the brain. The researchers show that there are problems where stable and accurate neural networks exist, yet no algorithm can produce such a network. Only in specific cases can algorithms compute stable and accurate neural networks.

The researchers propose a classification theory describing when neural networks can be trained to provide a trustworthy AI system under certain specific conditions. Their results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Deep learning, the leading AI technology for pattern recognition, has been the subject of numerous breathless headlines. Examples include diagnosing disease more accurately than physicians or preventing road accidents through autonomous driving. However, many deep learning systems are untrustworthy and easy to fool.

"Many AI systems are unstable, and it's becoming a major liability, especially as they are increasingly used in high-risk areas such as disease diagnosis or autonomous vehicles," said co-author Professor Anders Hansen from Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. "If AI systems are used in areas where they can do real harm if they go wrong, trust in those systems has got to be the top priority."  READ MORE...

Sixth Mass Extinction Underway

Bruno Kelly REUTERS


It is no secret that extinctions have been happening at an alarming rate in recent decades with human involvement and climate change blamed for creating habitats unsuitable for many species of wildlife.

Even more worrying is the findings of a major study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species and BirdLife International which found that the earth may be on the brink of a mass extinction event.

Worldwide it is thought that more than 500 species of land animal are close to extinction and could be lost within the next 20 years. The report was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and studied 29,000 species of land vertebrate. They estimated that the number of extinctions expected in the next two decades would likely take thousands of years if not for the negative impact of humanity.

What is a mass extinction?
Scientists estimate that 99% of all living organisms that have ever lived on earth are now extinct. The planet’s natural ecosystem is constantly evolving and as the environment changes certain older species will begin to fade away.

However there are some points in the earth’s history when the gradual evolution has become more of a sudden revolution and a majority of the planet’s living species are wiped out in a relatively short space of time. In the last 500 million years, there have been five occasions when 75-90% of all species have gone extinct, in what is called a mass extinction.

It should be remembered that the ‘short period of time’ is described in geological terms, dating back across the vast period of time since the start of life on earth. With this in mind, Earth.org explains that a mass extinction event can take anything up to 2.8 million years.  READ MORE...

Being Happier

Buying things won’t make you happier. But research shows that buying time can, as long as you do it the right way.

In 1930, the influential economist John Maynard Keynes assessed how technological and economic advances had reduced the number of hours the average person worked. He predicted that within two generations, most people would work only three hours a day.

Working hard wouldn’t be a problem. Filling all that free time would, for most people, be the problem.

While Keynes got a lot of things right, he swung and missed on that one. Technological advances have not freed up the average person’s time. Neither have broader economic advances.

Nor has increased wealth. In fact, some studies show that the more money people make, the less time they think they have.Add it all up, and money can’t buy you happiness.Unless, purposefully and consciously, you use a little money to buy a little time.

In a 2017 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers surveyed thousands of people who sometimes paid other people to perform tasks they didn’t enjoy or didn’t want to do. Like mowing the lawn. Or cleaning the house. Or running errands. Stuff they needed to do, but didn’t particularly want to do.

Unsurprisingly, people who were willing to spend a little money to buy a little time were happier and felt greater overall life satisfaction than those who did not.

Correlation isn’t always causation, though. Maybe the people who spend money to buy time are happier simply because they have the money to buy time?

Nope. While relatively wealthy people who spent money to buy a little time were happier than relatively wealthy people who did not, people at the bottom end of the economic spectrum who spent money to buy a little time were happier than those at the bottom end of the economic spectrum who did not.  READ MORE...

Monkeys Have Conscious Experiences Too

 FROM YALE UNIVERSITY...

When humans look out at a visual landscape like a sunset or a beautiful overlook, we experience something — we have a conscious awareness of what that scene looks like. This awareness of the visual world around us is central to our everyday existence, but are humans the only species that experiences the world consciously? Or do other non-human animals have the same sort of conscious experience we do?

Scientists and philosophers have asked versions of this question for millennia, yet finding answers — or even appropriate ways to ask the question — has proved elusive. But a team of Yale researchers recently devised an ingenious way to try to solve this riddle.


Writing on March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they make the case that one non-human species — the rhesus macaque — also has a conscious awareness of the world around it.

“People have wondered for a long time whether animals experience the world the way we do, but it’s been difficult to figure out a good way to test this question empirically,” said Moshe Shay Ben-Haim, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and first author of the paper.

Researchers have known for a long time that people can be influenced by unconscious subliminal cues — visual stimuli presented just outside of our threshold for conscious awareness, said Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale who is co-senior author of the study along with her colleague Steve Chang, associate professor of psychology and of neuroscience, and Ran Hassin of Hebrew University.

“We tend to show different patterns of learning when presented with subliminal stimuli than we do for consciously experienced, or supraliminal stimuli,” she said.

If monkeys show the same “double dissociation” pattern that humans do, it would mean that monkeys probably experience the supraliminally presented stimuli in the same way as people do — as a conscious visual experience.

Ben-Haim, Santos, and their team thought of a novel way to explore whether macaques also exhibit a difference in learning when stimuli are experienced consciously versus non-consciously.

In a series of experiments, they had monkeys and humans guess whether a target image would appear on the left or right side of a screen. Before the target appeared, participants received a visual cue — a small star— on the side opposite of where the target would subsequently appear. The researchers varied whether the cue was presented supraliminally or subliminally. 

When the cue was presented for a few seconds, human participants successfully learned that the target would appear in the opposite location from the cue. But when the cue was presented subliminally — quickly enough that it escaped people’s conscious perception — participants showed a different pattern of performance; they continued to choose the side that was subliminally cued, failing to learn the rule that the cue predicted the opposite side.          READ MORE