August 2022 Brain Candy
In which we munch on some ideas
There goes summer, traipsing by on its petalled feet. If you’ve had a holiday recently, I hope it was a good one. If you haven’t had a holiday, I hope all is well nonetheless. Here are some hybrid brains, human hips, shy birds, and exploding bacteria you might have missed last month.
Science
Hips don’t lie. One of the key changes in human evolution is the transition to bipedal locomotion. We walk on our two legs. This freed our hands, allowed us to move more efficiently for longer, and so on. As we modern people with posture issues know, standing tall isn’t always straightforward. A new study untangles the genes underlying the wide basin shape of the human pelvis that aids in upright walking.
The personality parable of the clever zebra finch. Once upon a time, I did research on animal personality. More and more, we’re realizing that individual animals have distinct personalities - some are shy, some are bold, for example. We’re also learning that different personality traits correlate with different abilities. Here, for example, is a nice recent study that shows how zebra finches that are less dominant and more obstinate (stubborn introverts?) are better at problem-solving.
Dark matter is black holes? My astrophysics may be rusty, but this made my brain go boink for a second. It’s the hypothesis that dark matter - that big chunk of the universe we can’t see - is nothing more or less than:
… primordial black holes (PBHs) that emerged from the Big Bang.
(A long time ago, I wrote a very short science fiction story about dark matter creatures and imploding universes and such things.)
Bacteria go boom. No comment.
(Bio)technology
Talking to animals. Can artificial intelligence help us talk to animals? The Earth Species Project certainly hopes so. This Guardian article gives a nice overview and tries to separate hope from hype.
The ethics of hybrid brains. We study human disease in model organisms. This has its uses and its limits. Studying Alzheimer’s disease in mice, for example, can teach us a lot, but it also forces us to acknowledge that a mouse brain is not a human brain. A relatively new approach is the generation of so-called hybrid brains. Genetic and molecular tools now allow researchers to grow human brain cells in mice. As this long-read points out, that’s not without its ethical challenges.
…researchers will have to consider what proportion of human brain tissue might begin to approach cognition in a dish or evoke human characteristics in a mouse — and when that might add emotional distress or pain for the animal.
Philosophy (of biology)
Holobiont bonanza. The gut microbiome is a bit of a hype at the moment, but it does give us a crucial insight. We contain multitudes. And many other organisms do as well. This has led to the concept of the holobiont: the organism (e.g. a human) and all its associated microbial communities. There is still some discussion about how delineated and/or evolutionarily important this holobiont unit is. This is a cool paper that argues that whether or not a holobiont is an organism in itself depends on the perspective you take, but that these different perspectives can be reconciled once we start focusing on processes (changes in things) rather than substances (the things themselves).