Lifeboat Foundation

Iron is one of the world’s most abundant elements and a primary component of the Earth’s core. Understanding the behavior of iron under extreme conditions, such as ultra-high pressures and temperatures, has implications for the science of geology and the Earth’s evolution.

In a study conducted by a team led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. researchers combined lasers and X-ray diffraction methods to examine how different crystal structures of iron are related to each other and what happens when it melts at ultrahigh pressures and temperatures. The paper was published in the journal Physical Review B.

Using the Dynamic Compression Sector beamline at Argonne National Laboratory, researchers applied nanosecond laser shock compression to iron at pressures up to 275 gigapascals (GPa) — more than 2 million times atmospheric pressure — and used in situ picosecond X-ray diffraction to study the structure of the iron under these extreme conditions. Authors said the ability to gather this novel data on iron provides insights into materials science and the internal dynamics of Earth and other terrestrial exoplanets.

The study hypothesizes that ‘pre-digested’ foods contributed to the development of larger brains. The large, capable human brain is a marvel of evolution, but how it evolved from a smaller primate brain into the creative, complex organ of today is a mystery. Scientists can pinpoint when our evolutionary ancestors evolved larger brains, which roughly tripled in size as human ancestors evolved from the bipedal primates known as Australopithecines.

The random nature of genetic mutation implies evolution is largely unpredictable. But recent research suggests this may not be entirely so, with interactions between genes playing a bigger role than expected in determining how a genome changes.

It’s known that some areas of the genome are more likely to be mutable than others, but a new study now suggests a species’ evolutionary history may play a role in making mutations more predictable too.

“The implications of this research are nothing short of revolutionary,” says University of Nottingham evolutionary biologist James McInerney.

Studies show that humans have among the most precise and subtle awareness of both musical tonality and ‘beat’, or rhythm.

The evolution of beat perception likely unfolded gradually among primates, reaching its pinnacle in humans.

By Henkjan Honing & The MIT Press Reader

New research reveals key factors behind the changing sizes of certain animals over time, challenging traditional evolutionary theories with its findings on species ’ size variations.

The mystery behind why Alaskan horses, cryptodiran turtles, and island lizards shrunk over time may have been solved in a new study.

The new theoretical research proposes that animal size over time depends on two key ecological factors: the intensity of direct competition for resources between species, and the risk of extinction from the environment.

One of the fundamental and timeless questions of life concerns the mechanics of its inception. Take human development, for example: how do individual cells come together to form complex structures like skin, muscles, bones, or even a brain, a finger, or a spine?

Although the answers to such questions remain unknown, one line of scientific inquiry lies in understanding gastrulation — the stage at which embryo cells develop from a single layer to a multidimensional structure with a main body axis. In humans, gastrulation happens around 14 days after conception.

It’s not possible to study human embryos at this stage, so researchers at the University of California San Diego, the University of Dundee (UK), and Harvard University were able to study gastrulation in chick embryos, which have many similarities to human embryos at this stage.

An international scientific team including more than 40 authors from seven different countries, led by a researcher at the University of Malaga Juan Pascual Anaya, has managed to sequence the first genome of the myxini, also known as hagfish, the only large group of vertebrates for which there has been no reference genome of any of its species yet.

This finding, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, has allowed for deciphering the evolutionary history of genome duplications that occurred in the ancestors of vertebrates, a group that includes humans.

“This study has important implications in the evolutionary and molecular field, as it helps us understand the changes in the genome that accompanied the origin of vertebrates and their most unique structures, such as the complex brain, the jaw and the limbs,” explains the scientist of the Department of Animal Biology of the UMA Pascual Anaya, who has coordinated the research.

By Viviane Callier

New Compounds for Organometallic Chemistry – Sandwich Complexes in the Form of Rings Are Kept Together by Their Own Energy.

Sandwich compounds are special chemical compounds used as basic building blocks in organometallic chemistry. So far, their structure has always been linear. Recently, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Marburg were the first to make stacked sandwich complexes form a nano-sized ring. Physical and other properties of these cyclocene structures will now be further investigated.

Evolution of Sandwich Complexes.