Sagittarius A* is a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Now that astronomers have imaged it, they can begin to learn more about black holes within other galaxies across the universe.
Source: Say hello to Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy
Stones that were incised with artistic designs around 15,000 years ago have patterns of heat damage which suggests they were carved close to the flickering light of a fire, a new study has found.
Source: Prehistoric people created art by firelight, new research reveals — ScienceDaily
“Those that we find in the Alps are really kind of ghosts,” said the study’s lead author. “We know they are there. We know they’re giant.”
Source: Remains of Ancient Giant Sea Creatures Found In Swiss Alps
The microbes lived between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years ago, only 300 million years after Earth formed—a blink of an eye geologically.
Source: Oldest Fossils Yet Suggest Life on Earth Began Much Earlier Than We Thought
Our background was right in front of us.
Source: There’s a Massive Hidden Factor in The Evolution of Humans Over 2 Million Years
This could mean big things for canine medicine.
Source: We Finally Know Where Dingos Sit in Dogs’ Evolutionary Family Tree
The endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria during eukaryogenesis has long been viewed as an adaptive response to the oxygenation of Earth’s surface environment, presuming a fundamentally aerobic lifestyle for the free-living bacterial ancestors of mitochondria. This oxygen-centric view has been robustly challenged by recent advances in the Earth and life sciences. While the permanent oxygenation of the atmosphere above trace concentrations is now thought to have occurred 2.2 billion years ago, large parts of the deep ocean remained anoxic until less than 0.5 billion years ago. Neither fossils nor molecular clocks correlate the origin of mitochondria, or eukaryogenesis more broadly, to either of these planetary redox transitions. Instead, mitochondria-bearing eukaryotes are consistently dated to between these two oxygenation events, during an interval of pervasive deep-sea anoxia and variable surface-water oxygenation. The discovery and cultivation of the Asgard archaea has reinforced metabolic evidence that eukaryogenesis was initially mediated by syntrophic H2 exchange between an archaeal host and an α-proteobacterial symbiont living under anoxia. Together, these results temporally, spatially and metabolically decouple the earliest stages of eukaryogenesis from the oxygen content of the surface ocean and atmosphere. Rather than reflecting the ancestral metabolic state, obligate aerobiosis in eukaryotes is most probably derived, having only become globally widespread over the past 1 billion years as atmospheric oxygen approached modern levels. For decades, the origin of mitochondria during eukaryogenesis has been viewed as a response to Earth’s oxygenation, but this has been challenged by more recent research. Here, the authors review recent literature, concluding that eukaryogenesis and the rise of oxygen were decoupled, and obligate aerosis in eukaryotes has only become widespread in the past 1 billion years
Source: Eukaryogenesis and oxygen in Earth history | Nature Ecology & Evolution
Whether via music, dance or prayer, the trance state was key to human evolution, forging society around the transcendent
Source: How trance states forged human society through transcendence | Aeon Essays
Our entire lives are built around time. We plan for the future in light of what we know about the past.
Source: Time Might Not Exist, Physicists Say; Causation Is the Basic Feature of Our Universe
Traits from RNA molecules passed between multiple generations of worms can work with genetic changes to influence future evolution.
Source: In Worms, Inheritance Beyond Genes Can Help Evolution | Quanta Magazine
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