April 24, 2024: The surprising ways that human actions spur disease transmission, molecules that can sort information, and can we delay menopause? —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Disease Ecology Butterfly Effect | When their preferred trees to chew on were cut down for the tobacco trade, chimpanzees in Uganda began consuming bat guano instead. Researchers recorded videos in the Budongo Forest Reserve between 2017 and 2019 and observed 839 instances of guano consumption, not only by chimpanzees but also by black-and-white colobus monkeys and red duikers, a type of forest antelope. The guano provides the chimps with essential minerals like sodium, potassium, magnesium and phosphorus that they would normally have gotten from the felled trees.
Why this matters: In addition to essential nutrients, the bat guano contained 27 unique viruses, including a novel coronavirus, the researchers found. Illnesses transmitted from animals to humans, called zoonotic diseases, account for about three quarters of new infectious diseases around the world. Those pathogens have a higher chance of jumping from an animal to a human when people encroach on ecosystems and disrupt relationships among species.
What the experts say: "This is the butterfly effect of infectious disease ecology," says senior study author Tony Goldberg, a wildlife epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. "Far-flung events like demand for tobacco can have crazy, unintended consequences for disease emergence that follow pathways that we rarely see and can't predict." | | | A research team designed a small group of artificial strands of DNA that could form tile-like mosaics when mixed into solution and cooled, snapping together like a self-assembling jigsaw puzzle. Next the researchers wanted to know if DNA like this could sort external information–a group of grayscale photographs in this case. They found that the artificial DNA successfully sorted 18 photographs into categories.
How it works: The researchers programmed the DNA tiles to assemble into three different shapes in test tubes based on the proportions of each tile, in which each image pixel corresponded to a particular "shape" of DNA tile. The lighter a pixel, the more of its corresponding DNA tile would be present in the solution. Depending on the specific pixels present in each image, the DNA tiles assembled into one of the three shapes, thereby sorting the images.
What the experts say: The fact that information can be stored implicitly through the interactions of large groups of molecules, similarly to how it's stored in large groups of neurons in a neural network, "is something that I have never seen before," says biomolecular engineer Rebecca Schulman of Johns Hopkins University. | | | • Extracting, freezing and retransplanting slices of hormone-producing ovarian tissue could postpone menopause. | 8 min read | | | • Geothermal energy is poised to become more mainstream thanks to next-gen technology. | 7 min read | | | A deep-sea bioluminescent soft coral called Iridogorgia magnispiralis. NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research/Deepwater Wonders of Wake | | | • Philosopher Daniel Dennett died on April 19. Dennet made the case that human consciousness doesn't exist, notably in his 1991 bestselling book Consciousness Explained. In 2017, science writer and author (and longtime columnist for Scientific American), John Horgan took on Dennett's claim. "When he argues, passionately, brilliantly, against consciousness, he not only demonstrates how hyperconscious he is," Horgan wrote, "he also rouses the rest of us from our zombielike torpor and makes us more conscious. Call it the Dennett paradox." | 5 min read | | | • A global network of repair ships keeps the ocean Internet cables in working order. | The Verge | • We're facing an impending chocolate shortage because of climate change. | The Atlantic | • Data privacy laws don't apply to consumer neurotechnology. | STAT | | | The adage "six degrees of separation" posits that you could connect any two people on Earth through six or fewer social connections. The accuracy of the concept hasn't been backed by real-world findings, but the sentiment has become a popularized embodiment of network theory, which examines the interconnectedness within systems (economic markets, biological systems, particle statistics). The butterfly effect of infectious disease ecology described above seems to be another example of degrees of separation. We are not living in isolation, and human demands for cigarettes and other resources can activate a chain of connections that might launch the next pandemic. | You and I are one degree of separation apart. Make use of it and email me your thoughts on Today in Science: newsletters@sciam.com. Until tomorrow! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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