In Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Edison discovers that dogs are intellectually superior beings. They’re so smart, in fact, that the canines found the easiest possible way to survive: endearing themselves to humans. When Edison confronts his own dog about this revelation, the dog says, “Look, Mr. Edison. Why not keep quiet about this? It’s been working out to everybody’s satisfaction for hundreds of thousands of years. Let sleeping dogs lie.”
It’s true that humankind’s close relationship with canines spans millennia (SN: 7/18/17). This long-term interspecies friendship is a topic of intense scientific study, though where, when and even why it began remains murky (SN: 7/6/17). Short a talking dog, scientists have had to rely on archaeological and genetic evidence for clues (SN: 6/2/16). But the similarities between wolves and early domesticated dogs can make it challenging for researchers to tell them apart. In the earliest days, before wolves were fully domesticated, perhaps the most notable difference is simply the animals’ involvement with people. That’s where storytelling can help, says historian Julien d’Huy of the College of France in Paris. Our penchant for mythologizing canine companions may be just as ancient as our relationship with them, so d’Huy is turning to these stories in a bid to shed more light on the history of dog domestication.
Some historians argue that using mythology to track human migration and the spread of information is unreliable because stories change quickly (SN: 1/19/16). D’Huy disagrees: Dogs play a starring role in many cultural origin stories, and since these myths are central to identity, that gives them stability over time, he says.
“With mythology, we can have explanations of archaeology, we can have reasons for domestication, we can test hypotheses,” he says. D’Huy found three core storylines for the earliest myths related to dogs: The first links dogs with the afterlife, the second relates to the union of humans and dogs, and the third associates a dog with the star Sirius. Versions of these stories are found in many cultural regions around the world. He then borrowed statistical tools from biology to create family trees of myths, showing how the stories evolved as they followed humans from one region of the world to another.
Folktales about dogs stemmed from Central and Eastern Asia and spread to Europe, the Americas and later Australia and Africa, d’Huy reports in the June Anthropozoologica. This mythological travel route parallels a proposed path of dog domestication borne out by genetic and fossil evidence (SN: 3/1/21).
“This was a surprise,” d’Huy says. He wasn’t sure if dogs and our mythology about them would migrate together.
“It is certainly arguable that dogs were first domesticated in Asia,” says Pat Shipman, a retired paleoanthropologist and author of Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs. Using mythology is a clever way to peer into the past, she says, because it can provide insight into how ancient humans valued dogs.
The prevalence of ancient myths identifying dogs as guides to the afterlife hint that our ancestors initially domesticated wolves not for hunting partners, as commonly believed, but for spiritual and symbolic reasons, d’Huy argues. This hypothesis fits with certain archaeological finds, he says, such as a 14,000-year-old grave in Germany containing a couple and two dogs. The woman was found with her hand resting on one of the dogs’ heads.
D’Huy is applying these methods to study how ancient myths can inform what we know about our connection with other animals such as sheep — their mythological link with the sun could have led to domestication. Symbolic, rather than utilitarian, reasons for domestication could explain a lot of data, he says.
“Comparative mythology has something to say in the world of research,” he says. “Something very precious to say, I think.”
Art historian Erin Griffey is a bit of a beauty maven. “I’m one of those people who reads the backs of beauty products,” she says. That’s why, while working on a book about beauty culture in Renaissance Europe, Griffey experienced déjà vu.
She noticed that many ingredients in beauty recipes from the 16th to 18th centuries — compiled from books, cosmetic recipe collections, medical texts, health regimen manuscripts, herbals and pharmacopeias — also appear on modern beauty packaging. For instance, rosewater is used in modern skin-hydrating mists and sulfur is found in some over-the-counter acne creams. Such similarities are clues to what Renaissance-era people used the products for and how the products worked. But they are not the whole story. That’s because the ancient recipes often also list bizarre or even dangerous ingredients, from bile acids and calves’ hooves to lead and the poisonous bryony plant. To get a better understanding, Griffey wanted to re-create the recipes. So she turned to her colleagues at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Thus the Beautiful Chemistry Project was born.
The team started with what Griffey calls “sticky recipes” because they’re found in many sources throughout the Renaissance period: rosemary flowers in white wine, myrrh powder with egg white, and the velvety covering of newly grown deer antlers with bean flour.
The recipes tend to be vague and varied. So chemist Michel Nieuwoudt and her team experiment with the measurements and procedures while Griffey searches various sources for more clues to ingredient types and ratios.
“We knew we could not re-create it exactly as is,” Griffey says of the recipe for rosemary flowers in white wine. “We do not have access to the rosemary plants that grew 500 years ago or the wines and whatever their chemical makeup was.” But this legwork “enabled us to get closer to an approximation.”
Nieuwoudt and her team boiled rosemary flowers in round-bottom flasks each filled with a different solution: sweet white wine, dry white wine, ethanol in water or aqua vitae. Once the researchers filtered out the flowers and analyzed the resulting mixtures using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, they found chemical compounds that are common in today’s skin care products, including soothing camphor, eucalyptol and the fragrant alcohol linalool (SN: 7/22/02).
The Renaissance-era recipe stated the potion would “make the face fair.” Nieuwoudt’s findings suggest how: by toning and moisturizing skin. The team has also made progress on unlocking the secrets of myrrh powder and egg whites. Experiments suggest that myrrh draws out proteins from egg whites and the egg whites extract resins, sugars and volatiles from the myrrh. That results in a serumlike product that has antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties and probably stimulates collagen growth, Nieuwoudt says. “It seems there’s a synergy between all of these different ingredients, and this is why it works.”
As for what deer velvet and bean flour may have been used for, the researchers are still teasing out results. And they have yet to tackle recipes with dangerous ingredients.
Eventually, the researchers hope to perfect their re-creations and bring the products to drug store shelves — minus, of course, any unsafe ingredients. “I think people will want to go back to something that is natural, and it’s also appealing for people to think they’re using Renaissance products,” Nieuwoudt says. Until then, the beauty for the researchers lies in “digging [the recipes] out and understanding them.”
If whole organs could be frozen and stored … surgeons would be able to perform far more transplants…. For all their efforts, though, cryobiologists (biologists who study the effects of cold on life) have not been very successful with organ freezing…. Nobody to date has cooled whole mammalian hearts any lower [than −20° Celsius] or longer [than six hours] and revived them.
Update Scientists still struggle to keep donor hearts on ice for longer than six hours, but it is now possible to store a different organ — the liver — at below-freezing temperatures for more than a day. The challenge has been figuring out how to stop ice from crystallizing and damaging cells. In 2019, scientists reported successfully warming up several human livers after supercooling them for 27 hours (SN: 10/12/19 & 10/26/19, p. 10). This and other preservation methods such as freezing at high pressures or thawing using nanoparticles aren’t yet ready for the operating room, but they have the potential to keep thousands of lifesaving organs from going to waste each year.
For some people, including President Joe Biden and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, the relief of vanishing COVID-19 symptoms and a negative test is fleeting. Biden, Fauci and many others have seen their tests turn positive again or have unwelcome symptoms return after taking a five-day course of the antiviral Paxlovid. Other people, including my husband, have had their infections rebound even without taking the drug.
Multiple studies have described cases of “Paxlovid rebound” after treatment. In one, seven Paxlovid-treated patients had the virus rebound to high levels after treatment ended, and symptoms returned for six of them, virologist Jonathan Li and colleagues reported in June in Clinical Infectious Diseases. Samples from three patients even carried infectious virus, a clue that some people who rebound might infect others. Another study that has yet to be peer-reviewed by other researchers found that fewer than 6 percent of people in the study who’d been prescribed Paxlovid had rebound infections in the month after finishing treatment. It’s unclear why Paxlovid rebound happens, says Li, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Studies show that people given the drug still develop a strong immune response to the virus after five days of treatment. “I think what’s happening in that situation is that you’ve got virus replication that’s been inhibited. All of a sudden, the drug has disappeared and the virus has a momentary opportunity to replicate. And it replicates to high levels,” Li says. But by then, the immune system has learned to fend off the coronavirus. If the recently trained immune cells encounter newly made viruses and set off alarm bells, symptoms may briefly come back.
Some people might not want to take the drug because they’re worried about rebound, Li says. But Paxlovid itself probably isn’t the cause. The drug’s not failing. It is still highly effective in preventing severe disease. “I would not hesitate to give my patients Paxlovid,” Li says. “I do tell them to be on the lookout for rebounding symptoms. But it doesn’t dissuade me in terms of prescribing it.”
Fauci took another course of Paxlovid in the wake of his rebound. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says that there’s no evidence that 10 days of treatment is any more effective than five days, or that patients need a repeat. But, researchers are testing whether taking the drug for a longer period of time might prevent rebound.
Rebounding COVID-19 isn’t limited to patients who take Paxlovid. Li recalls that even in the early days of the pandemic, some patients would come to him in the hospital saying that they’d started to feel better but got worse again. It’s hard to know how to interpret such anecdotal reports, he says. Researchers are still learning what an untreated viral infection can look like in the body. While the virus’s (hopefully) brief invasion may appear straightforward on average — with virus levels in the body increasing to a peak before slowly declining as the person recovers — not everyone follows that pattern. My husband got COVID-19 two months ago. His symptoms lasted about a week, and he was delighted to see the line on his antigen test getting fainter. Even so, despite feeling perfectly healthy, the line was suddenly back at full strength almost immediately after he added his sample to a new test days later. He was frustrated and, as a social person, lamented having to stay isolated.
Studies show he’s not alone. When Li and colleagues studied the course of disease in COVID-19 clinical trial participants who received a placebo treatment, 1 in 8 people experienced a rebound, with symptoms coming back for 1 in 4 people. That rebound, however, typically lasted about a day, and few had both high viral loads and returning symptoms, the team reports in a preliminary study posted August 2 at medRxiv.org that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed by other scientists.
In this case, there’s no disappearing drug. Any returning symptoms without a positive test might be from something else such as allergies or a different respiratory virus, Li says. It’s also possible that the virus is replicating in different parts of the body at different times. Some tests might end up negative when the body eliminates virus from the throat, for example, but it’s still replicating at low levels in the nose.
That latter scenario may have happened with my husband. In a confusing twist, he tested negative on two saliva PCR tests while continuing to test positive on nasal antigen tests. A PCR test is far more sensitive, so we expected the opposite to happen. Since experts say to consider a positive antigen test as a sign you’re still contagious, he stayed isolated until he finally tested negative on an antigen test two weeks after his first symptoms appeared.
Luckily, he’s fully recovered now, and not at all eager for a repeat experience. That means we’re both still masking in public spaces and taking other precautions. We know we’re not done with this pandemic.
Potential hints of weird new particles in a dark matter detector have evaporated with new data.
Following up on a beguiling result from its predecessor experiment, the XENONnT experiment found no sign of extra blips that could point to new particles or another phenomenon, scientists report July 22 in Vienna at the International Conference on Identification of Dark Matter.
The XENONnT experiment (pronounced “xenon n ton”), at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, uses 5.9 metric tons of liquid xenon to search for dark matter, an elusive substance that so far has been seen only via its gravitational effects in the cosmos (SN: 10/25/16). The detector is designed to look for dark matter particles crashing into xenon atoms’ nuclei, causing them to recoil. But the detector can also spot recoiling electrons. In 2020, a smaller version of the experiment, called XENON1T, reported greater-than-expected numbers of those ricocheting electrons (SN: 6/17/20). “This caused a lot of stir when we published it,” says physicist Rafael Lang of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
That surplus, some scientists suggested, could have been explained by some unexpected new physics, such as hypothetical lightweight particles that may originate from the sun called solar axions. But the excess wasn’t large enough to be convincing, so more data were needed.
In the new analysis, which uses about 97 days of data, XENONnT spotted as many electron recoils as expected due to known particle interactions, the researchers also reported in a paper posted on the experiment’s website. Scientists don’t know what caused the extra detections in the previous experiment, but it’s possible it was merely a statistical fluke, Lang says. Or it may have been due to small amounts of tritium — hydrogen atoms with two neutrons in their nuclei — in the detector.
With the red herring out of the way, XENONnT researchers are now combing through their data for nuclear recoils, in hopes of detecting the real deal.
It may soon be too late to end the global monkeypox epidemic.
“We are losing the window to be able to contain this outbreak,” Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases doctor and virologist at Emory University in Atlanta said July 21 during a seminar sponsored by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
On July 23, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the World Health Organization declared the global outbreak of monkeypox is a public health emergency of international concern, the organization’s highest state of alert. The WHO committee evaluating the matter was split on whether the outbreak constitutes an international emergency, but Ghebreyesus decided that enough conditions were met to warrant the designation. Monkeypox has infected more than 15,700 people since the beginning of May, according to Global.health (SN: 5/26/22). More than 2,800 cases have been reported in the United States as of July 22, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
“Although I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern, for the moment this is an outbreak that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners,” Ghebreyesus said in a statement. “That means that this is an outbreak that can be stopped with the right strategies in the right groups.”
Monkeypox has caused outbreaks for decades in some parts of Africa, Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said at the Harvard seminar. But the virus “has been neglected by the global health community.” Monkeypox “has been giving us warning signals” for years in Congo, Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, but has only gotten attention once it recently started causing cases outside of the continent, Rimoin said.
There has been no concerted global effort to contain the virus, which is related to smallpox, Titanji said. Each country has been left to set its own policies.
That has led to disparities. Well-resourced countries have had at least some access to testing, vaccines and medications, which may help limit the spread of the virus or the severity of the disease. Resource-poor nations often lack that access, leaving them with limited ability to track or control the virus. Continued spread of monkeypox in resource-poor countries could leave places that do manage to contain an initial outbreak vulnerable to reintroductions, Jay K. Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response in New York City, said in the seminar. The WHO emergency declaration may lead to a more concerted international effort that could make more resources available to contain the spread of the virus.
Even for the wealthiest countries, containing the outbreak is a challenge. Questions abound about how the virus is transmitted, and whether vaccines and treatments — when people can get them — can halt its spread. Even diagnosing the disease can be tricky, with testing often hard to come by and missed diagnoses potentially leading to more cases.
The vast majority of monkeypox cases in the global outbreak have been among men who have sex with men. Of 528 people infected with monkeypox in 16 countries, 98 percent identified as gay or bisexual men, researchers report July 21 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In some countries with outbreaks, “gay men are criminalized,” Kai Kupferschmidt, a correspondent for Science magazine, said during the seminar. In those countries, “people cannot access good information to help them keep from getting infected and cannot access health care if they do get infected. In these countries, it becomes really difficult to even see the problem,” he said.
Ghebreyesus urged all countries to “work closely with communities of men who have sex with men, to design and deliver effective information and services, and to adopt measures that protect the health, human rights and dignity of affected communities. Stigma and discrimination can be as dangerous as any virus,” he said in a statement.
Doctors might also miss cases of monkeypox because of the unusual presentation of the illness in this outbreak, compared with earlier outbreaks. For instance, in the NEJM study, only a quarter of patients had monkeypox lesions on their faces and only 10 percent had the sores on their palms or soles of their feet. Those body parts have been among some of the most affected in other outbreaks.
Instead, 73 percent of people in the study had lesions in the anal and genital regions and 55 percent on the trunk, arms or legs. Some people also had lesions in their mouths and throats. Most of the people in the study had fewer than 10 lesions, with 54 people having only a single lesion on their genitals, making confusion with herpes or syphilis possible, even easy.
Seventy people in the study were admitted to the hospital. Of those, 21 were hospitalized because of pain, mostly severe rectal pain. Others had eye lesions, kidney damage, inflammation of the heart or throat swelling that prevented them from taking in liquids.
Those complications fit with what health officials across the United States have been seeing. “While mortality appears very low, which is great, morbidity has been much higher than any of us expected,” Mary Foote, the medical director of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said July 14 in a news briefing sponsored by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
“A lot of people with this infection are really suffering, and some may be at risk of permanent damage and scarring. We see many people with symptoms so severe that they are unable to go to the bathroom, urinate or eat without excruciating pain,” Foote said.
A small number of women and children have also gotten monkeypox in the outbreak. Two children in the United States have been diagnosed with monkeypox, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said July 22 in an interview with the Washington Post. Both children were social contacts of men that have sex with men, she said.
A child in the Netherlands who had no contact with anyone known to be infected with the virus also got monkeypox, researchers report July 21 in Eurosurveillance. His case raises the possibility that monkeypox may be spreading undetected more broadly in communities than realized.
“I don’t think it’s surprising that we are occasionally going to see cases in individuals who are not gay, bisexual or other men who have sex with men. The social networks we have as humans mean we have contact with a lot of different people,” Jennifer McQuiston, deputy director of the CDC’s Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology said July 22 during a White House news briefing.
Exactly how the child in the Netherlands became infected is a matter of speculation. Monkeypox typically spreads among people through close contact with infected people or with clothing, bedding or towels used by people with the disease. Examination of viral DNA showed that the boy isn’t connected to any of the known cases in the Netherlands. He traveled to Turkey in June and may have gotten infected there or while traveling.
The boy has very low levels of IgA antibodies, which patrol mucous membranes and help prevent infections there. Low levels of the antibodies could make him vulnerable to respiratory infections. People can get infected with monkeypox through droplets given off by infected people during close face-to-face interactions, such as close conversation, kissing or during medical exams. But patterns of infection clearly indicate that monkeypox isn’t airborne the way COVID-19 or other respiratory viruses are, Kupferschmidt said.
Details of how monkeypox spreads are still unknown. For instance, researchers don’t know whether the virus can be transmitted through semen as a sexually transmitted disease. Researchers have found evidence of viral DNA in semen, saliva, urine and feces, but that may just be inactive remnants of the virus. So far, no researchers have reported finding infectious virus in genital body fluids that might be exchanged during sex. Also unknown is whether getting infected through mucous membranes during sexual contact would shield against catching the virus later, Rimoin said.
Scientists are questioning whether the monkeypox virus has changed or whether it has simply found a niche social-sexual network among gay and bisexual men that may enable the virus to spread more efficiently, Titanji said. It may be that there are different transmission patterns in historically affected countries and newly affected countries that require different strategies to stop the spread, she said.
Researchers also need to do good studies to figure out how well vaccines and therapeutics work and under what circumstances, Rimoin said. WHO’s emergency declaration includes recommendations for increasing testing and surveillance and for seeding up research on vaccines, treatments and other virus containment measures.
One thing is clear, Rimoin said. “We’re giving this virus room to run like it never has before.” People have passed the buck, leaving others to work out the problem of monkeypox, she said. But now, “it’s everybody’s problem to solve.”
How descendants of cannibals evolved abilities to share a home mostly without killing each other — never mind the rare oopsie snack — resonates after several pandemic years.
Among the many kinds of velvety Delena huntsman spiders, four species from Australia show what for their kind is a downright freaky tolerance between a mom and her live-in offspring. “Cannibalism might happen occasionally, but with Delena cancerides, it’s almost never,” says behavioral ecologist Linda Rayor of Cornell University, who has studied them in the wild and in her lab for 20 years. Not eating their own kind isn’t really the oddity here: Cannibalism varies a lot among spider species, Rayor says, but overall, it’s mostly a move of solitary kinds of spiders if they meet outside of flirting or baby-guarding demands (SN: 4/25/22).
A small number of Delena species, however, generally tolerate their own kind. The only exception Rayor sees in D. cancerides are a wild-caught female’s takedown of a full-grown male still in her cage after she lays eggs. “Wild-caught females are very intolerant of males who stick around too long,” she says.
What’s really strange, at least in the arachnid world, is these spiders’ shared family life. Out of the more than 50,000-plus known spider species, biologists classify fewer than 80 as truly social. In the most complex, hundreds or even thousands of females spin a great airy silken city, where some stay their entire lives. However, Rayor says, “my huntsman don’t do that.”
Some other biologists wouldn’t consider the Delena spiders Rayor studies as fully social — no spun-silk Sydney. Yet these spiders are not truly solitary either. A female doesn’t spin a web but shelters in a crevice, perhaps behind peeling bark on an acacia tree or under a slab of rock. These crevice-dwellers’ bodies look unusually flattened in profile: “a credit-card spider,” one scientist called the species, with some poetic license.
When a female triumphs in finding real estate, the kids can linger for months in her splendid mom cave — the kids with no sex life yet, that is. Never mind that older offspring already go out hunting on their own at night, or that often one or two later clutches of little ones hatch before the older ones leave. Spider moms guarding poppyseed-tiny hatchlings are common. Living with capable, nearly grown offspring, is strange in the arachnid world. The most sociable of these sort-of tolerant moms, D. cancerides, lets a cohort of youngsters hang around the home for about a year after hatching. That’s a good portion of life for spiders that live only two and a half years. One of the reasons for doing so may sound familiar: Suitable housing can be hard to find.
Rayor once thought hanging with mom was an Australian thing, but she has now learned about tolerant moms from Madagascar in a Damastes species. To study the evolution of traits that add up to family life in the five species, Jacob Gorneau, now at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and his Cornell colleagues used four genes from spiders in 37 huntsman genera to create the most ambitious genealogical tree yet of the family. Then Rayor turned to her decades of data to see what behaviors appeared on branches leading to lingering kids.
For instance, a form of egg sac called “plastered” — not drunk but spun like a firmly anchored splat on a surface of spider retreats — shows up in branches with the family-tolerant behavior, the researchers report in the September issue of Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.
Spiders spin various shapes of outer sacs that discourage egg raiders. Spiders in a fixed retreat can conveniently anchor a sac, unlike some other moms that carry eggs with them. Also the more spread-out, plastered form might — Rayor emphasizes this is speculation — fit better in tight crevices than the puffier throw-pillow styles of egg sacs would.
Delena spiderlings still carry abundant egg yolk with them when they clamber out of the egg sac. They don’t eat until after their first molt. “They’ve got these big, fat, green abdomens,” Rayor says. “They don’t have long legs, so they waddle.”
Once they molt, one benefit of this family lifestyle could be table scraps for the littles. Very young spiderlings are “ridiculously small,” Rayor says, and can handle food only about the size of a fruit fly. The chance to sneak extra shreds of meat from an older sib could greatly boost nutrition. Older sibs probably would rather not share, but Rayor sees “tolerated theft.”
Cute babies may not matter to a spider mom, but maybe they should to humans. Gorneau, once “very afraid of spiders,” wants to fight the stereotype of spiders as aggressive dangers. Rayor’s spiders strike him as “stoic,” mostly sitting quietly. Rayor’s lab full of spiders in their homes, he now finds, is a “calming environment.”
Dinosaurs might have been endothermic, or warm-blooded…. The combination of large size, endothermy and naked skin may explain the extinction of dinosaurs. About 65 million years ago there was a sharp drop in temperature…. Dinosaurs, lacking skin insulation and too large to burrow underground … could not survive. Meanwhile, evidence has come that … the shells [of their eggs] became progressively thinner … too fragile to support the growing embryo.
Update Some dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded and some could have laid soft-shelled eggs (SN: 7/12/14, p. 6). But neither trait led to the reptiles’ demise. In the late 1970s, geologists proposed that an asteroid strike triggered a mass extinction (1/25/92, p. 56), killing more than 75 percent of life on Earth. That theory is now widely accepted. Scientists have even found the killer’s calling card: a crater about 180 kilometers wide on the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The asteroid probably crash landed there in the springtime 66 million years ago, fossils hint (SN: 3/26/22, p. 8).
A century from now, when biologists are playing games of clones and engineers are playing games of drones, physicists will still pledge their loyalty to the Kingdoms of Substance and Force.
Physicists know the subjects of these kingdoms as fermions and bosons. Fermions are the fundamental particles of matter; bosons transmit forces that govern the behavior of the matter particles. The math describing these particles and their relationships forms the “standard model” of particle physics. Or as Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek calls it, “The Core Theory.” Wilczek’s core theory differs from the usual notion of standard model. His core includes gravity, as described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. General relativity is an exquisite theory of gravity, but it doesn’t fit in with the math for the standard model’s three forces (the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism). But maybe someday it will. Perhaps even by 100 years from now.
At least, that’s among the many predictions that Wilczek has made for the century ahead. In a recent paper titled “Physics in 100 Years,” he offers a forecast for future discoveries and inventions that science writers of the future will be salivating over. (The paper is based on a talk celebrating the 250th anniversary of Brown University. He was asked to make predictions for 250 years from now, but regarded 100 as more reasonable.)
Wilczek does not claim that his forecast will be accurate. He considers it more an exercise in imagination, anchored in thorough knowledge of today’s major questions and the latest advances in scientific techniques and capabilities. Where those two factors meet, Wilczek sees the potential for premonition. His ruminations result in a vision of the future suitable for a trilogy or two of science fiction films. They would involve the unification of the kingdoms of physics and a more intimate relationship between them and the human mind.
Among Wilczek’s prognostications is the discovery of supersymmetric particles, heavyweight partners to the matter and force particles of the Core Theory. Such partner particles would reveal a deep symmetry underlying matter and force, thereby combining the kingdoms and further promoting the idea of unification as a key path to truth about nature. Wilczek also foresees the discovery of proton decay, even though exhaustive searches for it have so far failed to find it. If protons disintegrate (after, on average, trillions upon trillions of years), matter as we know it has a limited lease on life. On the other hand, lack of finding proton decay has been a barrier to figuring out a theory that successfully unifies the math for all of nature’s particles and forces. And Wilczek predicts that:
The unification of gravity with the other forces will become more intimate, and have observable consequences.
He also anticipates that gravity waves will be observed and used to probe the physics of the distant (and early) universe; that the laws of physics, rather than emphasizing energy, will someday be rewritten in terms of “information and its transformations”; and that “biological memory, cognitive processing, motivation, and emotion will be understood at the molecular level.”
And all that’s just the beginning. He then assesses the implications of future advances in computing. Part of the coming computation revolution, he foresees, will focus on its use for doing science:
Calculation will increasingly replace experimentation in design of useful materials, catalysts, and drugs, leading to much greater efficiency and new opportunities for creativity.
Advanced calculational power will also be applied to understanding the atomic nucleus more precisely, conferring the ability…
to manipulate atomic nuclei dexterously … enabling (for example) ultradense energy storage and ultrahigh energy lasers.
Even more dramatically, computing power will be employed to enhance itself:
Capable three-dimensional, fault-tolerant, self-repairing computers will be developed.… Self-assembling, self-reproducing, and autonomously creative machines will be developed.
And those achievements will imply that:
Bootstrap engineering projects wherein machines, starting from crude raw materials, and with minimal human supervision, build other sophisticated machines (notably including titanic computers) will be underway.
Ultimately, such sophisticated computing machines will enable artificial intelligence that would even impress Harold Finch on Person of Interest (which is probably Edward Snowden’s favorite TV show).
Imagine, for instance, the ways that superpowerful computing could enhance the human senses. Aided by electronic prosthetics, people could experience the full continuous range of colors in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, not just those accessible to the tricolor-sensitive human eye. Perhaps the beauty that physicists and mathematicians “see” in their equations can be transformed into works of art beamed directly into the brain.
Artificial intelligence endowed with such power would enable many other futuristic fantasies. As Wilczek notes, the “life of mind” could be altered in strange new ways. For one thing, computationally precise knowledge of a state of mind would permit new possibilities for manipulating it. “An entity capable of accurately recording its state could purposefully enter loops, to re-live especially enjoyable episodes,” Wilczek points out.
And if all that doesn’t sound weird enough, we haven’t even invoked quantum mechanics yet. Wilczek forecasts that large-scale quantum computers will be realized, in turn leading to “quantum artificial intelligence.”
“A quantum mind could experience a superposition of ‘mutually contradictory’ states, or allow different parts of its wave function to explore vastly different scenarios in parallel,” Wilczek points out. “Being based on reversible computation, such a mind could revisit the past at will, and could be equipped to superpose past and present.”
And with quantum artificial intelligence at its disposal, the human mind’s sensory tentacles will not merely be enhanced but also dispersed. With quantum communication, humans can be linked by quantum messaging to sensory devices at vast distances from their bodies. “An immersive experience of ‘being there’ will not necessarily involve being there, physically,” Wilczek writes. “This will be an important element of the expansion of human culture beyond Earth.”
In other words, it will be a web of intelligence, rather than a network of physical settlements, that will expand human culture throughout the cosmos. Such “expanded identities” will be able to comprehend the kingdoms of substance and force on their own quantum terms, as the mind itself merges with space and time.
Wilczek’s visions imply a future existence in which nature is viewed from a vastly different perspective, conditioned by a radical reorientation of the human mind to its world. And perhaps messing with the mind so drastically should be worrisome. But let’s not forget that the century gone by has also messed with the mind and its perspectives in profound ways — with television, for instance, talk radio, the Internet, smartphones and blogs. A little quantum computer mind manipulation is unlikely to make things any worse.
With delicate hues of purple and pink, a lab technique called gram staining has reliably characterized bacteria for more than a century. Yet many scientists are mistaken about why the vivid method works, new research finds.
Contrary to standard scientific texts, the purple dye called crystal violet, a main ingredient in gram staining, does not actually enter bacterial cells, researchers report April 27 in ACS Chemical Biology. Instead, the dye gets trapped in a tight package of sugar-filled polymers, called peptidoglycan, which envelops bacterial cells. The thickness and integrity of the sweet bacterial armor determines whether crystal violet leaves a cell purple or not. That royal shade, or lack of it, reveals a cell’s type of outer structure. Published by Hans Christian Gram in 1884, gram staining distinguishes gram-positive bacteria (purple) from gram-negative bacteria (pink). Gram-positive critters, such as staph, have a thick peptidoglycan layer that shields an inner cellular membrane. Gram-negative cells, such as E. coli, have a thin peptidoglycan layer sandwiched between a porous outer membrane and an inner membrane. Microbiologists thought that crystal violet could easily pass through membranes and into both cell types, says microbiologist Moselio Schaechter, an emeritus professor at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. A subsequent harsh shower of alcohol could then corrode both cell types’ membranes. This particularly clobbers gram-negative cells’ outer structures, including the thin layer of peptidoglycan which is bound to the outer membrane, allowing the purple dye to flush away. Meanwhile, gram-positive cells’ sturdier layer of peptidoglycan warps a bit but stays largely intact, keeping the microbes purple. The colorless gram-negative cells can then be stained with another dye, such as safranine, tinting the cells pink.
But that explanation is incorrect, says physical chemist Michael Wilhelm of Temple University in Philadelphia. Using a recently developed spectroscopy technique that monitors molecules as they traverse membranes, Wilhelm and colleagues found that crystal violet doesn’t cross the inner membrane of either cell type.
Instead, crystal violet seeps into the cracks of peptidoglycan, which acts like a “brick wall of sugar,” Wilhelm says. A gram-negative cell’s thin wall crumbles in the alcohol wash and releases the dye, he explains. In gram-positive cells, crystal violet slowly drains from the thick peptidoglycan barrier, but not quickly enough to leave the cell colorless during the protocol.
The study is fascinating, says microbiologist Rita Moyes of Texas A&M University in College Station. Scientists should continue to use new technologies to study old techniques, she says.
“Who’d have thought gram stain lecture material needed an update?” says microbiologist Mark Forsyth of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. But, he says, “it may take a while to convince old professors like me to actually change their shtick about how this historic stain works.”
