A 407 million-year-old mushroom declared the oldest pathogen

 

A funncial plant pathogen preserved in the fossil collections of the Natural History Museum has been identified as the oldest disease-causing fungus.

Potteromyces asteroxylicla, who is 407 million years old, has been named after the celebrated author of Peter Rabbit’s history and mushroom enthusiast, Beatrix Potter. The discovery is published in Nature Communications.

Beatrix’s drawings and his study on the growth of fungi, which in some cases advanced decades to scientific research, have earned him the reputation of being an important figure in mycology.

Potteromyces was discovered in fossil samples from Rhynie Chert, a fossil site in Scottland. The site is known to a community of early devonic plants and animals, including bacteria and fungi.

The new study, completed in collaboration with mycologists from the Royal Botanic Garden of Kew, suggests that fungi that cause diseases, such as ash, that currently decimate native ash in the United Kingdom, and fungi that can circulate the nutrients on which plants and other organism depend to survive, have a historical precedent in Potteromyces.

The Dr. Christine Strullu-Derrien, a scientist associate at Natural History Museum and lead author of the study describing the new species, say in a statement: “Although other fungal parasites have been found in this area before, this is the first case of one that cause a disease in a plant. Moreover, Potteromyces can provide a valuable point from which to date the evolution of different groups of fungi, such as Ascomycota, the largest fungal edge”.

Strullu-Derrien found the first Potteromyces specimen in 2015. Their reproductive structures, known as coniioforos, had a unusual shape and formation as had never been seen before.

Equally unusual was the fact that this mysterious fungus was found attacking an old plant called Asteroxylon mackiei. The plant had responded by developed dome-shaped growths, proving it must have been alive while the fungus attacked.

In order for the team to determine that it was indeed a new species, another case of the fungus needed to be found. This is because the nature of fungi differs greatly among individuals.

Confirmation was achieved when a second specimen was found in the collections of the National Museums of Scotland in another slide from Rhyne Chert.

Climate activists throw mud onto the facade of the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice

 

A group of environmental activists threw mud on Thursday on the facade of the Basilica of Sant Mark in Venice, in a protest that has resulted in the arrest of at least six people.

Several of these activists have used fire extinguishers to throw the mud on the south façade and a column of the basilica, located in the central Sant Mark square. Then several more have come together to display a banner on which you could read “Reparation Fund”, the campaign promoted by organization Last Generation.

The maintenance staff of the church itself have been able to clean up much of the dirt, although the architect of the basilica, Mario Piana, who has arrived at the site shortly after the incident, has harshly condemned this protest action, according to the RAI network.

The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, has also expressed on social media his discomfort at an action he considers “very serious and shameful”, “it is legitimate to express discrepancies, but always with respect for the law and our cultural and religious heritage”, said Brugnaro, who criticized “vandalism” as a method of “finding solutions” in the field of the environment.

A WORLD OF “KNIT ROBOTS” AND THE NEED TO THEM ANTICIPATED

 

The possibility of early deployment of autonomous lethal weapons on battlefields presents an urgent need to take global action to regulate these technologies

 

It is the conclusion of a new book entitled “The Military Carrer of AI: Good Common Governance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” written by Dennise Garcia, professor of political science and international affairs at the University of Northeastern, who was part of the International Panel for the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons from 2017 to 2022.

As artificial intelligence progresses, weapons of was increasingly become capable of killing people without meaningful human supervision, raising troubling questions about how today’s and tomorrow’s wars will take place, and how autonomous weapons systems could weaken accountability when it comes to possible violations of international law accompanying their deployment.

In his book, Denise Garcia condenses these bleak realities and explores the challenges of “creating a global governance framework” that anticipates a world of unbridled AI weapons systems in the context of the deterioration of international law and norms. Thus, he highlights that military AI applications have already been implemented in the ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, one of the most famous examples of this is the Iraeli Iron Dome.

“The world must come together and create new global public goods, which I would say should include a framework for governing AI, but also commonly agreed rules on the use of AI in the military” Garcia said in a statement from his university.

This expert warns that speeding up militarized AI as such is not the right approach and risks adding more volatility to an already very unstable international system. “Simply pit, AI should not be trusted to make decisions about war”, he says.

Some 4,500 AI and robotics researchers have collectively said AI should not make decisions about human murder, a position, Garcia says, which is in line with European Parliament guidelines and European Union regulation. But U.S officials have pushed for a regulatory paradigm of rigorous testing and designs so that humans can use artificial intelligence technology “to make the decision to kill”.

“This seems good on paper, but it’s very difficult to achieve in reality, as algorithms are unlikely to assimilate the enormous complexity of what happens in war”, Garcia says.

AI weapons systems not only threaten to alter accountability standards under international law, but also make war crimes prosecution much more difficult because of problems associated with the attribution of “combat status” to AI’s “counterbeth” Garcia says.

“International law has evolved to focus on the human being”, he says. “When a robot or software is inserted into the equation, who will be responsible?”.

He continues: “The difficulties of attribution of responsibly will accelerate the dehumanization of war. When humans are reduced to date, human dignity will dissipate”:

Existing AI and quasi-AI military applications have already caused sensation in defense circles. One of those applications allows a single person to control multiple unmanned system, according to a source, such as a swarm of drones capable of attacking by air or under the sea. In the war in Ukraine, marauding munition have sparked a debate about exactly how much control human agents have over decisions on targets.

Some dinosaurs slept in the same posture as birds

 

The posture of a new species of almost complete fossil dinosaur dug in Mongolia reveals that it curled up to sleep in a similar way of that of modern birds.

With the creature’s head tucked into her limbs and the tail comfortably wrapped around her body, her cosy posture resembled that of modern birds at rest, hinting that these dinosaurs not only looked like birds, but could also have behaved like them.

Paleontologists dug the dinosaurs skull and almost complete skeleton in the Gobi Desert, in the Goyo Barun Formation in Mongolia, and most of the bone were still arranged in the animal’s original death pose, which had to lose its life while sleeping, researchers reported in the journal PLOS ONE.

The animal’s long neck wrapped the right side of its trunk and its head was stuck to its side, leaning on the right knee. The rear limbs were bent underneath and most of the tail curved around the left side of the body.

The study authors identified him as an Alvarezsaurid, a type of small theropod (carnivorous bipedo adipine) with long tail and legs and short front limbs. Alvarezsauridos are part of a larger group of dinosaurs  called mainraptorans, which includes bird-like birds and dinosaurs that were their closest relatives.

The new fossil suggests that this sleeping behaviour may have been more common than expected among non-avian relatives of the first birds, the researchers reported.

A rise in the North Sea 4,000 years ago ended large forests

 

The swamps of eastern Engand, a low and extremely flat landscape dominated by agricultural fields, were once a vast forest full of huge yedes

Scientists at Cambridge University studied hundreds of tree trunks unearthed by farmers as they plowed their fields. The team discovered that most of the old wood came from yedes that died suddenly about 4,200 years ago, when the trees fell under the peat and were preserved to this day.

In a study published in the Quaternary Science Review, researchers hypothesize that a rapid rise in sea levels in the North Sea flooded the area with salt water, causing large forests to disappear.

The yave trees (Taxus baccata) are one of the longest species in Europe and can reach up to 20 meters high. Analysis by the Cambridge Tree Rings Unit (TRU) showed that the yeys unearthed in the fields of Fenland (the local name of the swamps) were very old: some of these ancient trees were 400 years old when they died.

Much of the swamps in eastern England formed a wetland until it was drained between the 17^th and 19^th centuries through artificial drainage and flood protection. Today, the area is one of the UK’s most productive agricultural land, thanks to its rich peat soil.

The climate and environmental information contained in these unearthed trees could be a valuable clue to whether this weather event could be related to other events that occurred in other parts of the world at the same time, including a mega-dry in the Middle East that may have been a factor in the collapse of the ancient Kingdom of Egypt.

The “ten” jumper who contracted HIV and lived for years with Seoul 88’s remorse

 

On World AIDS Day, Greg Louganis, the greatest jumper in history, is one of the greatest activists

On World AIDS Day, athletes who contracted HIV, such as Magic Jonhson. The most visible face, or tennis player Arthur Ashe, flood the minds. Surely none with a history as powerful and Hollywood as the jumper Louganis (California,1960), double Olympic champion in Los Angeles 84 and Seoul 88 on platform and on a 3m springboard, who from 1982 until his retirement in 1989 had no rival and created school, as recalled by the technician of the Royal Spanish Swimming Federation Donald Miranda: “His aesthetic was unique. It was the example of the ten”.

That aura of Nadia Comaneci, the first gymnast to achieve that score at the Montreal Games in 1976, where Louganis, at the age of 16, already hung a silver on platform, accompanied him during his tormented life away from a trampoline. It is paradoxical that the American felt more secure on the heights, about to throw himself head at 50 km/h into the pool, a courage that defines his history, than in other places a priori safer.

A few days after seeing the light, Louganis had to live the first difficulty. His parents were 15. He was from Samoa and she was of Nordic descent, a genuine mestizo. Without the ability to give him a training and take care of him, the Louganis family, made up of Peter and Frances, adopted him. If the mother was protective and help, the father barely took interest in his son until he understood that he had innate sports skills, as Louganis explains in his biography Breaking the Surface.

As a child, Louganis had problems at school. He was dyslexic, so he didn´t read fluid, which led him endure the bullying of his companions. He found refuge in gymnastics, also loved dancing and applied what he learned on his parents’ house trampoline. Which led hi to specialize in trampoline jumps, where in age category he already achieved tens. And he arrived at his first Games in Montreal, where he hung a silver. The beginning of a success that is defined with four other Olympic golds and five world golds.

In between, Louganis fought everything and everyone. Admired on top of the trampoline, life was only injured when he stepped on the mainland. Fellow and public people laughed at him for his dawn at a time when one was leaving the closet, while his manager and boyfriend Jim Babbitt abused him (he even threatened him with a knife) and in 1987 contracted HIV. Louganis took the test before the Seoul Games and also tested positive.

Possible explanation for Hubble tensión

 

Cosmologists attribute Hubble’s tension -discrepancies in the speed at which the Universe expands- to irregularities in the distribution of matter and not to an error in the calculation method.

The study, which uses an alternative theory of gravity, has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

The expansion of the universe causes galaxies to move away from each other. The speed at which they do is proportional to the distance between them. For example, if galaxy A is twice as far away from Earth as galaxy B, its distance to us also grows twice as fast. American astronomer Edwin Hubble was one of the first to recognize this connection.

Therefore, to calculate at what speed two galaxies are left one from each other, it is necessary to know how far they are. However, this also requires constant by which this distance must be multiplied. This is the constant call of Hubble-Lemaitre, a fundamental parameter in cosmology. Its value can be determined, for example, by observing regions far from the universe. This gives a speed of almost 244000 kilometers per megaparsec away (a megaparsec equals just over three million light years).

But you can also see celestial bodies that are much closer to us, the so-called category 1a supernovae, which are a certain type of exploding star” explains Professor Pavel Kroupa of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn, co-author of the study. It is possible to determine with great precision the distance of a supernova 1a to Earth. We also know that bright objects change colour when they move away from us and the faster they move, the stronger the change. This is similar to an ambulance, whose siren sound deeper as it moves away from us.

If we now calculate the speed of supernovae 1a from their colour change and correlate it with its distance, we reach a different value for the constant of Hubble-Lemaitre, that is, just under 264,000 kilometres per hour per megaparsec distance. “Therefore, the universe seems to expand faster in our environment, that is, up to a distance of about three billion light-years, than in its entirety” says Kroupa. “And that shouldn’t really be the case”.

Recently, however, there has been a comment that could explain this. According to this, the Earth located in a region of space where there ir relatively litter matter, comparable to an air bubble on a cake. The density of matter is higher around the bubble. From this surrounding matter emanate gravitational forces that attract the galaxies from the bubble to the edges of the cavity.

This is because the standard model does not provide for such sub densities or “bubbles”; in reality, they should not exit. On the other hand, matter should be evenly distributed in space. However, if this were the case, it would be difficult to explain which forces propel galaxies at their high speed.

“The standard model is based on a theory about the nature of gravity proposed by Albert Einstein” says Kroupa. “However, gravitational forces can behave differently from what Einstein expected”. The working groups of the universities of Bonn and St. Andrews used a modified gravity theory in a computer simulation. This “modified Newtonian dynamic (MOND) was proposed four decades ago by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom. Even today it is considered an external theory. “However, in our calculations, MOND accurately predict the existence of this type of bubble” says Kroupa.

If it were assumed that gravity actually behaves according to the assumptions of Milgrom, Hubble’s tension would disappear: in reality there would be only one constant for the expansion of universe and the observed deviations were due to irregularities in the distribution of matter.