March in science!
Wow I am two weeks late, between business trips and FCN (which was awesome, despite the long drive to the chilly Detroit)
Still no time to page through JACS or PNAS, so just the big news items and a couple oddities:
The 4th natural mechanism of oxygen production was discovered (did you think photosynthesis was the only one?).
The pungent smell of wasabi, mustard, garlic, or acrolein is the oldest sense we have, our common ancestor with insects had it, 500 million years ago.
We finally know why do people die from SIRS after severe trauma (SIRS is just like sepsis, but without infection) – apparently our own mitochondria still look enough like dangerous bacteria when they enter blood stream en masse from the damaged tissue, and our immune system goes into overdrive. So now doctors can treat it, as long as they are really sure there is no infection.
Sex differentiation for birds (namely, chicken) was found to be cell-autonomous. Meaning, unlike humans, where embrios are sexless until 7 weeks old and tissues can change under hormone therapy, every cell of a chicken is male or female from the start (or from about 18 hours after fertilization). And to study that, they had to find three bizarre hermaphroditic chickens where half of the body was male and half was female.
DNA analysis of a 40k year old finger from Siberia found the fourth line of ancient humans, besides modern, neanderthal, and the “hobbits” from Flores, who all lived only that recently, having diverged over a million years ago.
Male pipefish (a kind of seahorse), who become pregnant from their female partners, can, it turns out, selectively abort the embryos from unattractive mothers, talk about pro choice!
The sixth taste was probably discovered in humans – in addition to sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and umami, some humans were shown to taste fat, and those who can taste it really well, eat less of it, too.
For non-biological news, the “Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” based on the awesome 248-dimensional Exceptionally Simple Lie group E8, was conclusively dismantled.
Good old General Relativity was confirmed to hold true for at least as far as 3.5 billion light years from Earth by a survey of 70,000 galaxies, which also disproved one of the alternative theories, TeVeS, and left another competing theory, f(R), without a distinct ruling. They want to survey a million galaxies when BOSS is done in 5 years to narrow down the expirimental errors.
And, finally, to the amusement of astronomers, thermal map of one of Saturn’s moons looks like a giant Pac-Man eating the Death Star.
Crossposted from LiveJournal