Humans are the only ultra-social creature on the planet. We have outcompeted, interbred or even killed off all other hominin species. We cohabit in cities of tens of millions of people and, despite what the media tell us, violence between individuals is extremely rare. This is because we have an extremely large, flexible and complex “social brain”.

To truly understand how the brain maintains our human intellect, we would need to know about the state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, as well as the varying strengths with which they are connected, and the state of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point. Neurobiologist Steven Rose suggests that even this is not enough – we would still need know how these connections have evolved over a person’s lifetime and even the social context in which they had occurred. It may take centuries just to figure out basic neuronal connectivity.

Many people assume that our brain operates like a powerful computer. But Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology, says this is just shoddy thinking and is holding back our understanding of the human brain. Because, while humans start with senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms, we are not born with any of the information, rules, algorithms or other key design elements that allow computers to behave somewhat intelligently. For instance, computers store exact copies of data that persist for long periods of time, even when the power is switched off. Our brains, meanwhile, are capable of creating false data or false memories, and they only maintain our intellect as long as we remain alive.

We are organisms, not computers

Of course, we can see many advantages in having a large brain. In my recent book on human evolution I suggest it firstly allows humans to exist in a group size of about 150. This builds resilience to environmental changes by increasing and diversifying food production and sharing.

A social brain also allows specialization of skills so individuals can concentrate on supporting childbirth, tool-making, fire setting, hunting or resource allocation. Humans have no natural weapons, but working in large groups and having tools allowed us to become the apex predator, hunting animals as large as mammoths to extinction.

Our social groups are large and complex, but this creates high-stress levels for individuals because the rewards in terms of food, safety, and reproduction are so great. Hence, Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues our huge brain is primarily developed to keep track of rapidly changing relationships. It takes a huge amount of cognitive ability to exist in large social groups, and if you fall out of the group you lose access to food and mates and are unlikely to reproduce and pass on your genes.

My undergraduates come to university thinking they are extremely smart as they can do differential equations and understand the use of split infinitives. But I point out to them that almost anyone walking down the street has the capacity to hold the moral and ethical dilemmas of at least five soap operas in their head at any one time. And that is what being smart really means. It is the detailed knowledge of society and the need to track and control the ever changing relationship between people around us that has created our huge complex brain.

It seems our brains could be even more flexible that we previously thought. Recent genetic evidence suggests the modern human brain is more malleable and is modeled more by the surrounding environment than that of chimpanzees. The anatomy of the chimpanzee brain is strongly controlled by their genes, whereas the modern human brain is extensively shaped by the environment, no matter what the genetics.

This means the human brain is pre-programmed to be extremely flexible; its cerebral organization is adjusted by the environment and society in which it is raised. So each new generation’s brain structure can adapt to the new environmental and social challenges without the need to physically evolve.

This may also explain why we all complain that we do not understand the next generation as their brains are wired differently, having grown up in a different physical and social environment. An example of this is the ease with which the latest generation interacts with technology almost if they had co-evolved with it.

So next time you turn on a computer just remember how big and complex your brain is – to keep a track of your friends and enemies.

Mark Maslin is a professor at University College London, founding director of Rezatec Ltd, director of the London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership, and a member of Cheltenham Science Festival Advisory Committee.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk wants to link computers to our brains to prevent an existential threat to humanity

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NOW WATCH: A neuroscientist explains how being bilingual makes your brain more robust

Some dinosaur discoveries get coverage equal in size to the animal’s stature. The announcement of “The Titanosaur”, currently looming over visitors to the American Museum of Natural History, was impossible to miss, and just about anything involving Tyrannosaurus rex is going to be crowed by headlines in every science news section. But often the fossils that change our knowledge of the past are tiny and don’t carry the same visual flash as the typically-hyped finds of the giant and the fierce. Consider a tooth found in the Magnolia State.

The isolated fossil, washed out of its resting place of over 66 million years by a modern stream, was spotted by paleontologist George Phillips as he searched Mississippi’s Owl Creek Formation for fossils. The tooth was obviously from some sort of herbivorous Cretaceous dinosaur, but what kind? And so, at the intersection of the ancient and modern, Phillips posted a photo of the find to Facebook.

It didn’t take long for preliminary identifications to start popping up. Colleague Lynn Harrell suggested that the tooth belonged to a ceratopsian dinosaur – think Triceratops and its relatives – and shared the post. And that’s what brought the photo to the attention of Harnell’s mutual friend and ceratopsian expert Andrew Farke. “When I saw the picture there was no doubt what it was!,” Farke recalls. The teeth of horned dinosaurs are distinctive and easy to spot. But here’s the rub – no one had expected to find a horned dinosaur here.

“I got in touch with George nearly immediately,” Farke says, “asking about the fossil and if anyone was studying it.” That’s what kicked off a collaboration that alters the picture of Late Cretaceous North America, and hints at other fossils as-yet-undiscovered.

Up until Phillips’ discovery, no one had ever found a definitive horned dinosaur fossil from the Late Cretaceous rock of the eastern United States. Tyrannosaurs, hadrosaurs, ankylosaurs, ostrich mimic dinosaurs and more have turned up, but no horned dinosaurs. The boundary of a vanished sea was the standard explanation.

During the Late Cretaceous, the Western Interior Seaway divided North America into two subcontinents – Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. Apparently various dinosaurs had spread across North America prior to that division, and, given their absence to the east, it seemed the large horned dinosaurs called ceratopsids stayed to the west. “We had basically assumed that they just didn’t make it over,” Farke says, “and probably hadn’t even evolved as a group before Appalachia was isolated from the rest of North America.”

The tooth changes all that. It’s the first evidence that ceratopsids made it east, after all. And even though it doesn’t seem like much, it would be hard to find a better ceratopsid sign. “In terms of identification,” Farke says, “the tooth is about the best possible piece to find short of a complete skull.” The fact that the tooth’s root is split at the bottom, for example, shows that it once sat in the mouth of a large, quadrupedal horned dinosaur akin to Triceratops.

But how did the dinosaur get to Appalachia? That, Farke and Phillips propose, was a matter of timing.

By the very close of the Cretaceous, the Western Interior Seaway was receding off North America. The landmass was opening up, allowing dinosaurs to travel and intermingle in ways they hadn't for millions of years. Given the timing of when big horned dinosaurs evolved and the occurrence of the tooth, then, the most likely scenario is that some of the last horned dinosaurs were spreading eastward as the seaway drained off the continent, spreading through prehistoric Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas to make their way down to the Mississippi Embayment. Perhaps additional clues to the march of these dinosaurs are hidden in the strata of these states.

“It’s really exciting to have solid evidence that the Western Interior Seaway had retreated at the end of the Cretaceous to the point where ceratopsids could get from western North America to eastern North America,” Farke says. It really is a lucky find. Exposed, accessible Late Cretaceous strata are rare in the east, and most dinosaurs are known from only bits and pieces. To find a single tooth that changes the great ceratopsid story is luckier than finding a needle in a haystack.

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NOW WATCH: A shocking new study just disproved the 130-year-old theory about where dinosaurs came from

The abyss, the deep water off Australia, has given up some of its secrets.

A team of 40 international scientists, including those from Museums Victoria and the CSIRO, have just returned from an expedition on the research vessel Investigator looking at the dark, crushing environment 4000m below the surface.

More than one-third of the spineless critters and some of the fish found during this voyage are new to science.

The finds include worms that live in whale skulls, a red coffinfish with a fishing rod on its head, giant anemone-sucking sea spiders, a blob fish, a shortarse feelerfish, flesh-eating crustaceans, a cookie cutter shark with teeth arranged like the serrated edge of a steak knife and a herd of sea pigs.

The one-month voyage of the Investigator visited seven Commonwealth marine reserves from the Freycinet Peninsula off eastern Tasmania to the Coral Sea off central Queensland.

"The abyss is the largest and deepest habitat on the planet, covering half the world's oceans and one-third of Australia's territory, but it remains the most unexplored environment on Earth," says Dr Tim O'Hara, Museums Victoria's senior curator of Marine Invertebrates.

"We know that abyssal animals have been around for at least 40 million years, but until recently only a handful of samples had been collected from Australia's abyss."

At these depths it is so dark that creatures often have no eyes or produce their own light through bioluminescence. Food is scarce and animals are often small and move slowly.

The researchers used multi-beam sonar to map the structure of the seafloor, and cameras, nets and sleds to sample habitats at 2500 and 4000 metre depths.

In the deepest parts of the ocean it takes seven hours to lower and raise the equipment from the seafloor.

Here are some of the finds:

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The "faceless" fish

The journey rediscovered the "faceless" fish, a deep sea fish with no-visible eyes and a mouth on the underside of its head.

With no eyes and a Mona Lisa smile, the "faceless" fish had the crew baffled when it was brought up from 4km below the surface.

However, John Pogonoski, of the CSIRO’s Australian National Fish Collection, found it while flicking through the pages of the scientific literature aboard.

Faceless fish (in the lab)

It turns out the species was first collected in the northern Coral Sea more than 140 years ago during the Voyage of HMS Challenger, the world's first round-the-world oceanographic expedition.

"Australia’s deep-sea environment is larger in size than the mainland, and until now, almost nothing was known about life on the abyssal plain," says Dr. O’Hara.

"We're really excited about the discoveries that we've made and are thrilled that we can now share them with the Australian and international public."

Blob fish

This fish collected from a depth of 2.5km off New South Wales, has soft watery flesh and is an ambush predator that lies very still on the bottom waiting for unsuspecting prey to pass by.

With most food allergies, it only takes 15 or 20 minutes after being exposed before severe reactions occur. A bite of shrimp or lobster and before long, a person's throat starts to close and parts of their body begin to swell. It's scary and potentially life-threatening, but they can usually seek immediate treatment and pinpoint the food that caused the problem.

The allergy to mammalian meat like beef, pork, and lamb that's spread by a bite from a lone star tick is different.

"The weird thing about [this reaction] is it can occur within three to 10 or 12 hours, so patients have no idea what prompted their allergic reactions," said Dr. Ronald Saff, an allergist in Tallahassee, Florida, and an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the Florida State University College of Medicine.

The symptoms are often severe. Hives and shortness of breath are common, and a dangerous anaphylactic reaction is possible, but these reactions seem to appear out of the blue — often the night after a burger or a steak. "They're sleeping and they have no idea what they could be allergic to because the symptoms occurred so many hours after going to bed," Saff said.

The ticks are spreading to new locations, where they're making people allergic to even a single bite of meat. But since this allergy is still relatively new and not well known, especially outside the Southeast, it's hard to say exactly how common it is so far.

It's new enough that states aren't required to report it to the CDC yet, but Saff says he's now seeing a couple of patients every week who have been bitten by ticks and developed this allergy, known as an alpha-galactose or alpha-gal allergy.

One single bite

The tick that spreads this allergy is called the lone star tick, named for the white splotch on the back of adult females. It's a species that bites humans at all stages of life and can be "quite aggressive,"according to the CDC. Even larvae bite humans, something no other American tick does. The tick also feeds on and may catch a ride on cats and dogs.

The lon star tick is most common in the Southeast, where Saff practices, but in recent years it has spread up the East Coast and into the Midwest, with large numbers being reported all the way up in Maine. Within the last year, outbreaks of alpha-gal allergy have occurred in Minnesota, New Hampshire, and out on the tip of Long Island.

Up to this point, much about the lone star tick and alpha-gal is a mystery. We know something in the tick bite causes changes in people that make them sensitive to a sugar compound (alpha-galactose) that exists in meat from mammals. Some people develop more sensitivity than others and a few can tolerate small amounts of meat, but some become so allergic that they can't even consume meat products like dairy milk. No one knows for sure whether the allergy goes away with time or not. That may be the case, but scientists do think additional tick bites and meat consumption might both worsen the condition.

The distribution, range, and abundance of lone star ticks are all on the rise. And warmer summers could make that situation even worse.

"We expect with warming temperatures, the tick is going to slowly make its way northwards and westward and cause more problems than they’re already causing," Saff said.

SEE ALSO: Scientists have developed a new way to predict when you'll die

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NOW WATCH: A Stanford neuroscientist reveals something 'puzzling' in people who are extremely successful

Millions of strange-looking glowing sea creatures called pyrosomes have started to "bloom" off the coast of the Pacific Northwest of the US and Canada, filling up fishing nets, clogging hooks and research gear, and befuddling scientists who have no idea why populations of the tube-like organisms are exploding, flooding the water column.

"Call it the invasion of the pyrosomes," writes Michael Milstein in a post on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Northwest Fisheries Science Center website.

They started to show up in the spring and in the past month or two, swarms of the animals been spotted all over the region.

Pyrosomes are odd creatures — they're technically tunicates, colonies of individual organisms known as zooids that feed off of plankton and other small organisms. They have little bumps, are about as firm as a cucumber or pickle, and are gelatinous like jellyfish. They're translucent and bioluminescent, which gives them a glow (the word pyrosome means "fire body").

And while they can occasionally be found further north, they typically inhabit tropical waters, which makes the appearance of these massive quantities strange and disturbing to fishermen who worry that they could devastate a fragile food network.

"We have a lot of questions and not many answers," Ric Brodeur of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center’s research station in Newport, Oregon explained in a post on the center's site. "We're trying to collect as much information as we can to try to understand what is happening, and why."

Pyrosomes can grow to massive sizes, potentially to more than 60 feet long, though the ones currently flooding the seas off the coast of British Columbia and Alaska are more cucumber-sized.

It's the numbers that are troubling. Salmon and halibut fishermen haven't been able to access their normal catch, with long lines catching pyrosomes instead of fish on basically every hook, according to reports by the CBC and National Geographic.

One five-minute trawl of a research net off the coast of Oregon dragged in about 60,000 of the creatures. Researchers from Ocean Networks Canada at the University of Victoria released a video showing just how thick the water was with these cucumber-like bodies.

Some think that these populations might come from an anomalous huge "blob" of warm water that hovered in the Pacific from 2014 to 2016, though that warm mass has dissipated.

"It's really weird,"Jennifer Fisher, a faculty research assistant with Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center, told National Geographic. "I've never seen anything like it."

SEE ALSO: Australian scientists just found these mysterious sea creatures more than 2 miles down in the abyss

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For the first time, scientists have recorded DNA replication in real time. The scientists extracted DNA from E. coli bacteria, dyed it, and then watched the DNA replicate itself. The footage, alone, is fascinating. But the real shocker comes with what scientists discovered from the footage. They document their findings in the prestigious scientific journal Cell.

Footage courtesy of UC Davis.

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Woolly mammoths could be coming to a park near you sometime before 2027, thanks to funding from PayPal founder and tech luminary Peter Thiel.

That's according to a new book by Ben Mezrich called "Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive one of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures."

As the MIT Tech Review reported, Thiel made a quiet donation of $100,000 to a de-extinction organization called "Revive & Restore" in 2015.

The project to revive woolly mammoths has been going on for several years, but it gained new attention in February when a team of Harvard scientists said they intend to resurrect the furry creature within a decade.

The woolly mammoth went extinct 10,000 years ago, and in reality, the scientists wouldn't actually be bringing it back. Instead, they aim to create a hybrid animal using genetic material from an elephant and a woolly mammoth. To do that, they'd carefully combine a selection of DNA from both creatures using gene-editing technology Crispr, put the cells into an artificial embryo, and accio! Woolly elephant. Elephammoth. Mammophant. 

Regardless of its name, the resulting animal would essentially be an elephant with mammoth features like long, shaggy hair, subcutaneous fat, and blood uniquely adapted for frigid temperatures.

Mammoths aren't the only animals that people want to resurrect — now-extinct or threatened species of reindeer, bison, wolves, tigers, and horses are also on the list of potential candidates. The movement to "resurrect" these creatures isn't limited to scientists, either; it's become a pet project of people across the globe, including a Russian father and son whose Kickstarter-funded "Pleistocene Park" aims to recreate a "vanished ice-age ecosystem."

Ethical debates about de-extinction projects are intense, with some scientists saying the animals could could help preserve endangered or threatened species and others saying it would destroy existing ecosystems.

Proponents say the project and others could help restore ecosystems and help fight climate change by bringing back plants like grasses and trees that suck up pollution. Other supporters say iconic resurrected animals could serve as a sort of "flagship species" which is used to encourage the public to protect the regions they represent. 

But some scientists disagree. Tori Herridge, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum of London, is one of the scientists who examined the 28,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth uncovered in Siberia in 2014. She wrote in The Guardian that "cloning [a woolly mammoth] would be ethically flawed," since we still don’t fully understand the role that many of these now-extinct animals once played in the wider ecosystem. 

The problem she raises, which has been pointed out by several other researchers as well, is that we don't know how these creatures' modern incarnations would affect other animals, plants, and the planet as a whole. 

"It is unclear still whether the mammoth steppe disappeared as a result of the loss of the mammoth or whether the mammoth disappeared because its habitat was lost, along with its ice age world," Herridge wrote. "It’s a big gamble to put your climate-change mitigation hopes on a herd of woolly mammoths."

SEE ALSO: Some of the scientists aiming to 'bring back' the woolly mammoth originally wanted to do it using 28,000-year-old cells

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NOW WATCH: Scientists have almost discovered how to resurrect a woolly mammoth

Jeanne Calment, the French woman who holds the record for the longest verified lifespan, died in 1997 at 122 years old.

Few people, of course, ever become supercentenarians — 110 years old or older — and even fewer hit 115.

So few people have exceeded that age, in fact, that a group of researchers published an analysis in the journal Nature last year arguing that the human species' lifespan plateaus around 115.

But a number of scientists are now rebutting that analysis with five separate commentaries published in Nature on June 28.

The authors of these pieces argue that the original analysis relied on statistics that were incomplete or analyzed in a way that led to a false conclusion. They suggest two alternatives: We either don't have enough data to know if the human lifespan has a limit, or the plateau is closer to 125 than 115.

"The available data are limited, there aren't that many supercentenarians,"Maarten Pieter Rozing, a professor at the University of Copenhagen who co-authored one commentary, told The Scientist. "And I think there are no strong arguments that show there is a decline [in the rate at which lifespans are increasing]."

Why some think life ends at 115

Life expectancy has crept up fairly steadily over the past 150 years or so. But Xiao Dong, Brandon Milholland, and Jan Vijg, the authors of the original analysis, argue that comparing the life expectancy of supercentenarians to the age at which they died can reveal the natural limit of the human lifespan.

The scientists used data on maximum reported age at death split into two sets based on supercentenarians from the US, UK, Japan, and France. The first set covered deaths from 1968 to 1994 — a period when the maximum age was inching up. But by the time covered in the next dataset, from 1995 to 2006, the age seemed to plateau or even slightly be on the decline (exceptions like Calment aside).

Life expectancy, however, rose throughout both time periods. The scientists therefore concluded that because humans' maximum age didn't keep rising with life expectancy, it appeared a limit had been reached.

Even if we were to cure various diseases like cancer or Alzheimer's, those scientists still claimed that humans would probably be unlikely to live past 115. And they put the chances of a person live past 125 at less than 1 in 10,000.

Limit or illusion?

The authors of the recent rebuttals say that because there are so few supercentenarians out there, the number of deaths for this age group between 1995 and 2006 is too small to yield reliable conclusions. There just haven't been enough supercentenarians to really pinpoint a maximum age.

As people live longer, it's likely that more will push past that supposed limit, the authors of the rebuttals argue — it'll just take time to get there.

"[T]he idea of a set limit to human longevity is not strongly supported by what is being discovered about the biology of ageing," Rozing and his co-authors wrote in their commentary. "The continuing increase in human life expectancy that has occurred over recent decades was unforeseen. It provides evidence for greater malleability of human ageing than was originally thought."

Over the span of human history, many of the lifespan increases we've seen would have been unimaginable at some point. Those living 200 years ago, for example, would have thought it was crazy that people could regularly live to be 80. Yet here we are.

Rozing told The Scientist that there's an easy way to find out whose hypothesis is correct about the maximum lifespan.

"[W]e can just wait and see who's right," he said.

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NOW WATCH: Scientists just discovered the world's oldest shark, and it's ancient

When kids learn about extinction in school, they're told about creatures that have disappeared from the planet, and those that are endangered.

But rarely are they told that we are currently witnessing a mass extinction event — an incredibly rare phenomenon in which the majority of species on the globe die off.

This has happened five times in the history of Earth so far. The one happening now will be the sixth.

According to a study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, populations of animals all over the planet are declining so rapidly that the researchers say a process of "biological annihilation" is now ongoing.

"As much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of populations," the ecologists and biologists behind the study wrote.

It's not just species facing total collapse that we should worry about, they said — local population extinctions (when a species disappears from a specific region but not the whole planet) are a "prelude to species extinctions." In other words, declines in populations of animals that aren't yet categorized as endangered are indicators of a mass extinction. 

This trend is further evidence that the Earth "is already well into a sixth mass extinction episode," the authors of the study wrote.

Global population collapse

For this study, researchers looked at 27,600 vertebrate species — almost half of all the ones we know of — and found that more than 30% of them are in decline. Entire local populations of these animals are becoming extinct in certain areas, even though the overall numbers for many species haven't yet triggered alarms.

The extinction of local populations is reason for alarm, the authors wrote, because the disappearance of essential species from local ecosystems will cause cascading effects that ripple through the entire system. When larger populations of animals disappear, the smaller populations left behind are also much more vulnerable and closer to extinction, as Ed Yong pointed out in The Atlantic. 

For example, if forest elephants disappear from all but one national park in Africa, the ones that used to disperse seeds and create pathways for smaller animals and plant life in other parts of the continent would no longer facilitate those processes. And those changes the ecosystem could in turn wipe out plants that rely on elephants for seed dispersal, and the animals that consume those plants.

The collapse of local populations of pollinators like honeybees could have an even more devastating effect, since fruit-bearing plants rely on those pollinators. If those plants don't survive the bee population losses, that affects the many animals, including humans that rely on those plants for food. (The team behind the study didn't focus on insects, but note that the same population declines are happening to outside the realm of terrestrial vertebrates as well.)

"[B]y losing populations (and species) of vertebrates, we are losing intricate ecological networks involving animals, plants, and microorganisms," the authors wrote. "This suggests that, even if there was not ample sign that the crisis extends far beyond that group of animals, today’s planetary defaunation of vertebrates will itself promote cascading catastrophic effects on ecosystems, worsening the annihilation of nature."

The ongoing cause of this is, of course, humans.

As people have spread across the globe, we've built on top of animal habitats, spread invasive species, hunted populations down to nothing, fished more than 90% of large predators out of the sea, released toxic pollutants, and harvested entire forests.

Plus, since the start of the industrial age, human activity has been releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These have not been the biggest driver of species decline so far, but in the future they could push this mass extinction event into something that can't be reversed, as David Wallace Wells noted in a recent feature in New York Magazine:

"The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas."

Can the sixth extinction be stopped?

The authors behind the new study suggested their work shows how far along the sixth extinction already is. They said their seemingly "alarmist" language is essential in the face of such an alarming situation.

Experts who study mass extinctions agree about the gravity of the present moment. But some disagree that the extinction event is already underway.

Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin told Peter Brannen for a story in The Atlantic that if we were in the midst of such an event, it would be already too late to act. And the data doesn't indicate that's the case yet, though it does suggest we could be about to begin a mass extinction.

That distinction is purely academic for most of us, however, since experts like Erwin and the authors of this new study agree that the world's sixth mass extinction will proceed unchecked unless humans take immediate action. Curbing the trend will require both intensive local efforts to conserve species and habitats, and global efforts to prevent the climate from tipping too far into a danger zone.

As the authors of the study wrote:

"[W]e emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most. All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life."

SEE ALSO: Scientists are questioning the idea that the human lifespan has a limit

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NOW WATCH: Harvard researchers say they can bring the Woolly Mammoth back from extinction

Verily, the life sciences branch of Alphabet (Google's parent company), has started releasing millions of mosquitoes in California.

The team behind the project — made up of scientists from Verily, biotech company MosquitoMate, and Fresno County’s Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District — plans to set a million of the flying insects free each week for 20 weeks.

The mosquitoes are being released into two neighborhoods in Fresno, California as part of a field study for the Debug Project, an initiative that aims to decimate certain mosquito populations.

The mosquitoes were raised by a robot that can produce a million mosquitoes a week. They're all male, so they won't bite anyone — only female mosquitoes bite humans.

The bugs have been specially raised to carry a bacteria called Wolbachia, which has an insidious effect on the reproductive process. Mosquitoes that carry Wolbachia can fly around normally and mate with females, but the eggs those females lay aren't able to hatch — unless the females are infected with the same strain of the bacteria as well.

Setting loose hoards of males carrying the bacteria, then, is like waging biological warfare on mosquitoes.

Wolbachia is common in nature, and scientists have known since 1967 that the bacteria can make certain mosquitoes and other insects sterile. Researchers working to fight mosquito-borne diseases have long been interested in using the bacteria to kill off local mosquito populations, but it wasn't until this year that they discovered how genes in the bacteria cause mosquitoes to produce nonviable eggs.

The ability to kill entire mosquito populations could significantly curb disease transmission. Mosquitoes carry diseases like yellow fever, malaria, dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, among others. They're responsible for more than 800,000 human deaths a year, making them the most dangerous animal on the planet. And in a warming world, the range of some of these disease spreaders is expanding, making population control efforts more urgent than ever.

This Wolbachia approach is promising because it doesn't require genetically engineering or modifying the bugs — a strategy that has triggered opposition from people concerned about releasing modified genes into the wild. (Some researchers are also working on ways to modify Wolbachia or use its sterility genes, but that's not part of this particular effort.)

Wolbachia doesn't infect humans and risk assessments of these tests have said that the potential for harm is negligible.

In the Fresno experiment — the largest one of its kind in the US so far — the Debug Project is targeting the Aedes aegypti mosquito, an aggressive invasive species that can transmit nasty diseases like dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. 

The life cycle for these particular creatures is just over a week. As researchers flood the two areas with these infected male mosquitoes, the females living there will be less likely to find uninfected males to mate with, so each life cycle should lead to far fewer new mosquitoes. In the end, it may be possible to eliminate the bloodsuckers from certain areas completely.

If the trial is successful, it's likely that other related efforts will be carried out around the globe to target the mosquitoes that transmit malaria and other diseases. Similar tests have been carried out or are ongoing in Brazil, Vietnam, and Australia.

"[M]oving our work from the laboratory to the field is not only an important milestone for our group of biologists, engineers, and automation experts, but it’s also a critical step in bringing our long-term vision to reality," Verily scientist Jacob Crawford wrote in a blog post announcing the trial. "Field studies allow us to test our discoveries and technologies in challenging, real-world conditions and collect the necessary evidence to bring them to a broader scale."

SEE ALSO: An inside look at the labs where doctors intentionally infect people with malaria

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Jurassic Park's most iconic scenes should have run a little slower, based on new research suggesting our favourite dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex, couldn't manage more than a walk.

Calculating the top speed of the tyrant lizard king seems to be an obsession for paleontologists, who have debated over the decades whether the giant predator was a sprinter or a stroller. It turns out that while T. rex could still take quick steps, any serious gait would leave it with more than just a bad case of shin splints.

The research, led by scientists from the University of Manchester in the UK, created a detailed computer model that used multi-body system dynamics – which looks at connected solid objects – to analyze the bends and twists applied to different parts of a skeleton.

Their model rex was based on a specimen dug up in 1987 called BHI 3033, also known as Stan to his pals.

CT scans of various fossils provided limits the team could work with to decide the kinds of forces bones could take before they were damaged.

Working out the mass of any dinosaur isn't without its challenges, but the researchers settled on a conservative 7206.7 kilograms (about 15,900 pounds) of meat and bone for their calculations.

From there it was a matter of determining the forces of impact bones would experience as the dinosaur built up speed, taking into account hypothetical soft tissues that could cushion the blow.

Speeds above 27.7 kilometers (17 miles) per hour would have pushed the limits on Stan's bones, which were estimated to have a yield strength of about 200 megapascals (29,000 psi).

For comparison, average human walking speed is around 4.8 km/h (3mph), jogging speed is around 8-9km/h (5-6mph), and Usain Bolt can run 100m in roughly 38km/h (23.7mph).

A more reasonable estimate on bone strength, according to the researchers, would be around half that 27.7 km/h at the upper limit, putting our buddy Stan in the ballpark of someone sprinting to catch a bus.

"Therefore, even if safety factors below the lower limit seen in living animals are allowed, our analysis demonstrates that T. rex was not mechanically capable of true running gaits," the researchers write in their report.

Estimates on an adult T. rex's maximum velocity have ranged in the past have looked at everything from body configurations and muscle attachments to their fossilized footprints, with estimates ranging from 18 km/h (11.2mph) to a very speedy 54km/h (33.6mph).

This research puts some constraints on those higher estimates, suggesting T. rexcould still take some quick steps with those long limbs, but couldn't break into a sprint that would chase down Jeff Goldblum in a jeep.

"Here we present a new approach that combines two separate biomechanical techniques to demonstrate that true running gaits would probably lead to unacceptably high skeletal loads in T. rex," says lead researcher William Sellers from the University of Manchester.

That means the big Tyrannosaur would never have been airborne as it leaped from foot to foot, keeping its speed down to a minimum.

A slower T. rex might make for less thrilling blockbusters, but it could help us understand how the dinosaur's hunting Behaviour shifted as it evolved.

Bigger predators can take down prey that would usually have size on their side, meaning high speed wouldn't need to be an issue.

But what of junior Tyrannosaur rex? Could they have been agile sprinters? The model suggests possibly not, but more research would be needed to validate the idea.

Although limited to T. rex in this study, there's no reason the same model couldn't be applied to any other long-extinct creature we're curious about.

"Tyrannosaurus rex is one of the largest bipedal animals to have ever evolved and walked the Earth," says Sellers.

"So it represents a useful model for understanding the biomechanics of other similar animals."

We still don't advocate trying to outrun a T.rex if ever given the opportunity, but it might help knowing if you get your running shoes on, Stan might not risk the leg pain.

This research was published in Peer J.

SEE ALSO: A dinosaur tooth discovered in Appalachia suggests big horned dinosaurs may have lived in the eastern US

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What is the true longest-living life-form? Tortoises, whales, and trees are all likely to be the winners. However, some microscopic species are the answer for this. They have been alive since before humans even existed — that's more than 200,000 years ago. Following is a transcript of the video.

If you think living to 100 is impressive, think again.

Here's a glimpse at some of the longest-living life-forms on Earth:

The average human lives for 71 years, but the oldest on official record — Jeanne Louise Calment — survived to see her 122nd birthday.

Humans don't even come close to the Galapagos giant tortoise. One of the oldest on record, named Jonathan, is still going strong at 184 years old.

Believed to have hatched around 1832, Jonathan the tortoise was around when Andrew Jackson was still president of the United States.

But tortoise Jonathan's impressive run is nothing compared to what we find under the sea.

Swimming in the frigid Arctic waters is the longest-living mammal on Earth: the bowhead whale, which can survive for over 200 years.

Next, is the oldest vertebrate on record, a Greenland shark estimated to be around 400 years old.

This shark was alive around the same time Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was launching a scientific revolution.

Turning now to invertebrates, we have the edible clam, the ocean quahog. The oldest ocean quahog clam was found to be 507 years old. Around 500 years ago, Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel.

And for even more perspective, Christopher Columbus reached the Americas not long before that. Think about that the next time you eat one!

Now, we get into the life-forms that have been around since the dawn of humankind. First up are the bristlecone pines, which have been found to live for over 5,000 years.

Then there's the King's Lomatia. An individual tree will only live for about 300 years, but this Tasmanian shrub can clone itself, creating younger versions of itself. Estimates suggest it has been living consecutively for over 43,000 years.

In the Mediterranean, a species of seagrass, also known as Neptune Grass, is believed to be 200,000 years old.

Fossil records suggest that's when the first modern humans, or Homo sapiens, started to roam the Earth.

Now, since bacteria are also living forms, they are the true winners.

Bacteria found frozen underground in Siberia are estimated to be about 500,000 years old. Shockingly, its DNA was intact and the bacteria were still alive and active.

So, it looks like the gift of exceptional long life requires you to be spineless and microscopic.

A fair trade? We'll let you decide.

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Evolution has been occurring for billions of years, producing organisms that are perfectly adapted to their environments. And this includes abilities that we would normally consider superpowers if humans were to have them. But these powers really do exist in the animal kingdom.

1. Echolocation

In the superhero world, Matt Murdock, who was blinded by radioactive waste as a child, developed a superhuman ability to sense using sound waves and became the superhero Daredevil. This gives Daredevil a 360-degree field of “vision”, allowing him to precisely locate objects or people in all directions, an obvious advantage over normal vision.

Bats, despite being nocturnal animals, cannot see in the dark. Instead they have evolved a similar ability known as use echolocation to navigate and locate prey at night. The bat emits a very high frequency sound and listens for the echo that bounces off objects. The difference in time between emitting the sound and hearing the echo allows the bat to build up a mental “picture” of its environment. Sounds that take longer to bounce back indicate that the surroundings are further away.

Matt Murdock’s ability may not be too far from reality as humans can also learn to use echolocation. By making clicking noises or stomping their feet some visually impaired people are able to accurately “visualize” their surroundings.

2. Magnetic Sense

The X-Men’s arch-villain Magneto can sense and manipulate magnetic fields with his mind. And some animals have a similar magnetic sense known as “magneto-reception” that they use to navigate and orient themselves. For example, homing pigeons are able to navigate back to their home lofts when visual cues are missing but can’t do so when magnets are nearby. This suggests that they may use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate.

Although we don’t understand exactly how they do this, pigeons have been found to possess a substance called magnetite in their beaks, which becomes magnetized when exposed to magnetic fields. So they may be following their nose, so to speak.

Of course, Magneto’s magnetic powers can produce a much wider range of effects, from lifting and manipulating metal objects to rearranging matter (a power definitely not seen in animals). However, his daughter Polaris has the ability to perceive the world as patterns of magnetic energy, which actually isn’t too dissimilar to the powers present in the animal kingdom.

3. Shape-shifting

The ability to shape-shift and mimic the form of others is a formidable power for a superhero or villain – and has been used by X–Men’s Mystique on many occasions to lure and manipulate her foes. A rare few animals are capable of changing their shape and size in the real world, most notably the mimic octopus.

It can alter its colour, behavior, shape and texture to mimic a diverse range of species, with at least 13 examples recorded so far including sea snakes, jellyfish and sea anemones. Most of the impersonated species are poisonous, and so pretending to be them helps the octopus ward off predators. But this shape-shifter is also able to imitate its prey, possibly in an attempt to lure them in closer before feasting on them.

4. Absorbing powers

The ability to steal the superpowers of another individual is surely the ultimate power, enabling you to have any power in existence. X–Men’s Rogue has the incredible ability to absorb superpowers of anyone she touches – but so do the Pitohui birds of New Guinea (well, almost). The feathers and skin of Pitohui contain a noxious substance, making them possibly the only poisonous birds in the world and giving them defence against predators. But the birds don’t appear to be able to produce the toxic substance directly. Instead, they acquire it by eating Choresine beetles.

Furthermore, scientists think this toxicity might even rub off onto the birds’ eggs and young, making them toxic to predators as well, even though they have never eaten the Choresine beetles. So the infant birds are essentially absorbing the superpower from their parents in the same way that Rogue absorbs powers when she touches other people.

5. Chemical weapons

One animal ability even goes beyond what has been imagined by superhero fiction. Bombardier beetles are noted for their unique defence mechanism that enables them to produce acid gas bombs to deter predators such as ants. In extreme cases they may bombard predators with a lethal dose of these chemical bombs that they kill them. The acid bombs consist of two chemical compounds stored separately in the beetle’s abdomen. When threatened, the beetles combine the two compounds, resulting in the production of a boiling mixture that explodes out of the tip of the directional abdomen as a gas.

You’d think this remarkable “weapon” was surely the precursor for a superpower. And the superheroes Anarchist and Zeitgeist (members of X Force) both have acid generation powers. Anarchist secretes an acid–like sweat, whereas Zeitgeist spews acidic vomit. But these are hardly formidable weapons. Perhaps it is time that some superheroes caught up with the amazing set of powers that have already evolved in the animal kingdom.

This article is an adapted extract from a chapter in “The Secret Science of Superheroes” published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

SEE ALSO: Ancient DNA study suggests that dogs were domesticated just one time

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NOW WATCH: How animals have changed since humans started breeding them

Ever heard someone say their family member "died of old age"?

That's almost never what actually happened, at least from a medical perspective. Aging in and of itself is not a cause of death. When most of us say that someone died of old age, we usually mean they succumbed to an illness that a younger, healthy person would likely have survived, such as pneumonia or a heart attack.

In humans, the probability that one of these events will happen increases as we age. This is what we mean when we talk about mortality.

But not all animals get more likely to die as they get older, according to the book "Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old and What it Means for Staying Young," by theoretical biologist Josh Mitteldorf and ecological philosopher Dorion Sagan. The authors write that some creatures, such as the desert tortoise, actually get less and less likely to succumb to mortality the older they get, while others enter a period of aging and then come out of it.

All of this suggests that aging is genetic, write Mitteldorf and Sagan. That means that in order to counter aging, we need to rethink how we live.

Cracking the aging code: There are no constraints

"Aging is not [always] a relentless process that leads to death," Michael R. Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Irvine, told Business Insider in 2015.

Indeed for some organisms, aging simply "is a transitional phase of life between being amazingly healthy and stabilizing," Rose said. In other words, the period in which they're most at risk of death doesn't necessarily coincide with their later years.

Although Rose disagrees with Mitteldorf and Sagan on many other points, they all appear to agree that humans may not be obligated to experience aging the way we currently do.

Mitteldorf and Sagan point to a study published in the journal Nature that compares how 46 different species live and die. Some organisms, the research found, don't age — their mortality rates stay constant from around the time they're born until the time they die. Other creatures enter a period of aging — when they are the most likely to die — and then come out of it, continuing their lives.

Here's a chart from that study comparing what aging looks like in a modern-day human, a human living in the 1800s, and other organisms. (Mortality rates are in red, fertility rates are in blue.)

See that sharp rise in the modern Japanese person's thin red line? Humans have an incredibly long aging period.

But lots of other creatures' life spans look nothing like this, as illustrated by the chart below. The "immortal" hydra, a tiny freshwater animal that lives to be 1,400 years old (left arrow), is just as likely to die at age 10 as it is at age 1,000. 

The desert tortoise (right arrow) has a high rate of mortality in early life, but that rate actually declines as it ages. This means that the critters lucky enough to survive their early years will likely live out their remaining (healthy) years. Biology determines how many of those years they have.

If we could figure out how and why humans begin to age — something Mitteldorf and Sagan believe will require a much deeper understanding of our genetics — we might be able to change how we experience aging.

"Nature can do whatever she wishes with aging (or non-aging). Any time scale is possible, and any shape is possible," write Mitteldorf and Sagan. "There are no constraints."

SEE ALSO: A UCLA psychiatrist has some counterintuitive advice for dealing with negative people — and it could change how you see the world

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NOW WATCH: Scientists discovered that people who work out the most have a huge advantage when it comes to aging

In a step that some of the nation’s leading scientists have long warned against and that has never before been accomplished, biologists in Oregon have edited the DNA of viable human embryos efficiently and apparently with few mistakes, according to a report in Technology Review.

The experiment, using the revolutionary genome-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9, was led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University. It went beyond previous experiments using CRISPR to alter the DNA of human embryos, all of which were conducted in China, in that it edited the genomes of many more embryos and targeted a gene associated with a significant human disease.

“This is the kind of research that is essential if we are to know if it’s possible to safely and precisely make corrections” in embryos’ DNA to repair disease-causing genes,” legal scholar and bioethicist R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told STAT. “While there will be time for the public to decide if they want to get rid of regulatory obstacles to these studies, I do not find them inherently unethical.” Those regulatory barriers include a ban on using National Institutes of Health funding for experiments that use genome-editing technologies in human embryos.

The first experiment using CRISPR to alter the DNA of human embryos, in 2015, used embryos obtained from fertility clinics that had such serious genetic defects they could never have developed. In the new work, Technology Review reported, Mitalipov and his colleagues created human embryos using sperm donated by men with the genetic mutation that they planned to try to repair with CRISPR. The embryos are described as “clinical quality.” A 2017 experiment, also in China, used CRISPR to edit DNA in normal, presumably viable fertilized eggs, or one-cell human embryos.

Also in contrast to the experiments in China, those led by Mitalipov reportedly produced very few “off-target” effects, or editing of genes that CRISPR was supposed to leave alone. And the experiment avoided what is called “mosaicism,” in which only some cells of an embryo have the intended DNA changes. The embryos were not allowed to develop beyond a very early stage.

Because changing the DNA of an early embryo results in changes to cells that will eventually produce sperm and eggs, if the embryo is born and grows to adulthood, any children he or she has will inherit the genetic alteration, which is called germline editing. That has led to fears that such manipulations could alter the course of human evolution.

It has also triggered warnings about “designer babies,” in which parents customize their IVF embryos by adding, removing, or changing genes for certain traits.

A recent report on genome editing from the National Academies did not call for a moratorium on research into germline editing, arguing that it might one day be a way for some parents to have healthy, biological children, such as when both mother and father carry genetic mutations that cause severe diseases.

“But we anticipated that there would need to be a lot of research to see if you could make these changes without any unintentional effects,”said Charo, who co-chaired the Academies committee. Mitalipov, who did not respond to requests for comment, has now shown that the answer to that might be yes.

Some scholars questioned how important the new study is, however. Stanford University law professor and bioethicist Hank Greely tweeted that “the key point” is that no one has tried to implant any edited embryos. “Research embryos” that are “not to be transferred for possible implantation” are “not a big deal,” he argued.

This story has been updated with additional comments by experts and details of similar experiments.

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Why do we age? It’s a seemingly simple question that nonetheless scientists don’t have a great answer to. Some amount of aging seems to be controlled by our genetic makeup, while other evidence shows that our cells have an upper limit to how many times they can divide.

But a new study points to a different player: a special population of cells in a tiny region of the brain. Middle-aged mice that got an infusion of stem cells to the hypothalamus — the hormone-releasing center of the brain — had less memory loss and longer lives than normal mice, indicating that the hypothalamus plays a role in whole-body aging.

The findings open the tantalizing — though far off — possibility that these same changes could one day be slowed in humans.

“This is a really important study … in the field of aging research,” said Dr. Shin-Ichiro Imai, professor of developmental biology at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study. “It’s getting clearer that a very tiny part of our brain — the hypothalamus — is playing a very important role in controlling age and longevity in mammals.”

The brain’s aging center

The main job of the hypothalamus has long been thought to be secreting hormones that govern our most basic desires: water, food, sleep, sex.

But in 2013, Imai and others came upon a surprising discovery: The hypothalamus plays a major role in controlling aging. Mice that lived longer also had unusually high levels of activity in their hypothalamus.

The finding led to an obvious follow-up question: How does it work?

The current study by Dongsheng Cai and colleagues at Albert Einstein College of Medicine provides an answer to that question: stem cells. Stem cells are found in certain regions of the adult brain, including the hypothalamus, where they replace cells that die off.

To determine the role of the stem cells, researchers did two parallel experiments: killing off hypothalamic stem cells in one group of middle-aged mice, and adding more stem cells to another.

Three months later, behavioral tests showed that mice with depleted stem cells had poorer memory, slower learning, and died sooner. The mice also had issues that went beyond their brains — like poor muscle endurance on a treadmill.

ut those mice that got a boost to stem cells in the hypothalamus showed an opposite, rejuvenating effect. They were more curious, ran farther, and lived about 15 percent longer than normal mice.

But how exactly that was happening was still puzzling, since the effects were too quick to be the result of the stem cells transforming into new neurons. So Cai’s team tested the fluid around the stem cells, and found that the cells released tiny packets loaded with RNA, known as exosomes. So they isolated those exosomes and injected just those into a group of mice — and lo and behold, those mice also lived longer and showed better memory retention, indicating that some signal stem cells are releasing appears to be governing aging writ large. The results were published Wednesday in Nature.

A route to the clinic?

So, could such a finding point a way toward a human fountain of youth?

Grigori Enikolopov, professor of developmental genetics at Stony Brook University, said that they could — though any leap from mouse studies to human therapies comes with, “many, many disclaimers.”

Still, “if you take neural stem cells from a particular person … in principle, you could get them to secrete [exosomes], collect them, and introduce them back into the brain,” he said.

New methods make it possible for researchers to grow brain stem cells from a skin biopsy. Exosomes from these cells could then be administered to a patient. But Imai noted that it is unclear whether the exosomes could pass the blood-brain barrier — a barrier that protects the brain from infection, but also makes it difficult to get drugs into the brain. If the exosomes cross the barrier, scientists may be able to deliver them through a simple intravenous injection — instead of boring into the brain.

Cai’s group is now sifting through the dozens of RNAs released by hypothalamic stem cells to identify which have the strongest anti-aging effects. And they are also trying to figure out where these RNAs end up — in the hypothalamus, other parts of the brain, or far-flung regions of the body.

“[During] the next few years, we still want to understand the whole picture as completely as we can,” said Cai. “Then we can more seriously get to the therapeutic stage.”

DON'T MISS: Here's what it actually means to die 'of old age'

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The announcement by researchers in Portland, Oregon that they’ve successfully modified the genetic material of a human embryo took some people by surprise.

With headlines referring to “groundbreaking” research and “designer babies,” you might wonder what the scientists actually accomplished. This was a big step forward, but hardly unexpected. As this kind of work proceeds, it continues to raise questions about ethical issues and how we should we react.

What did researchers actually do?

For a number of years now we have had the ability to alter genetic material in a cell, using a technique called CRISPR.

The DNA that makes up our genome comprises long sequences of base pairs, each base indicated by one of four letters. These letters form a genetic alphabet, and the “words” or “sentences” created from a particular order of letters are the genes that determine our characteristics.

Sometimes words can be “misspelled” or sentences slightly garbled, resulting in a disease or disorder. Genetic engineering is designed to correct those mistakes. CRISPR is a tool that enables scientists to target a specific area of a gene, working like the search-and-replace function in Microsoft Word, to remove a section and insert the “correct” sequence.

In the last decade, CRISPR has been the primary tool for those seeking to modify genes – human and otherwise. Among other things, it has been used in experiments to make mosquitoes resistant to malaria, genetically modify plants to be resistant to disease, explore the possibility of engineered pets and livestock, and potentially treat some human diseases (including HIV, hemophilia and leukemia).

Up until recently, the focus in humans has been on changing the cells of a single individual, and not changing eggs, sperm and early embryos – what are called the “germline” cells that pass traits along to offspring. The theory is that focusing on non-germline cells would limit any unexpected long-term impact of genetic changes on descendants. At the same time, this limitation means that we would have to use the technique in every generation, which affects its potential therapeutic benefit.

Earlier this year, an international committee convened by the National Academy of Sciences issued a report that, while highlighting the concerns with human germline genetic engineering, laid out a series of safeguards and recommended oversight. The report was widely regarded as opening the door to embryo-editing research.

That is exactly what happened in Oregon. Although this is the first study reported in the United States, similar research has been conducted in China. This new study, however, apparently avoided previous errors we’ve seen with CRISPR – such as changes in other, untargeted parts of the genome, or the desired change not occurring in all cells. Both of these problems had made scientists wary of using CRISPR to make changes in embryos that might eventually be used in a human pregnancy. Evidence of more successful (and thus safer) CRISPR use may lead to additional studies involving human embryos.

What didn’t happen in Oregon?

First, this study did not entail the creation of “designer babies,” despite some news headlines. The research involved only early stage embryos, outside the womb, none of which was allowed to develop beyond a few days.

In fact, there are a number of existing limits – both policy-based and scientific – that will create barriers to implanting an edited embryo to achieve the birth of a child. There is a federal ban on funding gene editing research in embryos; in some states, there are also total bans on embryo research, regardless of how funded. In addition, the implantation of an edited human embryos would be regulated under the federal human research regulations, the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and potentially the federal rules regarding clinical laboratory testing.

Beyond the regulatory barriers, we are a long way from having the scientific knowledge necessary to design our children. While the Oregon experiment focused on a single gene correction to inherited diseases, there are few human traits that are controlled by one gene. Anything that involves multiple genes or a gene/environment interaction will be less amenable to this type of engineering. Most characteristics we might be interested in designing – such as intelligence, personality, athletic or artistic or musical ability – are much more complex.

Second, while this is a significant step forward in the science regarding the use of the CRISPR technique, it is only one step. There is a long way to go between this and a cure for various disease and disorders. This is not to say that there aren’t concerns. But we have some time to consider the issues before the use of the technique becomes a mainstream medical practice.

So what should we be concerned about?

Taking into account the cautions above, we do need to decide when and how we should use this technique.

Should there be limits on the types of things you can edit in an embryo? If so, what should they entail? These questions also involve deciding who gets to set the limits and control access to the technology.

We may also be concerned about who gets to control the subsequent research using this technology. Should there be state or federal oversight? Keep in mind that we cannot control what happens in other countries. Even in this country it can be difficult to craft guidelines that restrict only the research someone finds objectionable, while allowing other important research to continue. Additionally, the use of assisted reproductive technologies (IVF, for example) is largely unregulated in the U.S., and the decision to put in place restrictions will certainly raise objections from both potential parents and IVF providers.

Moreover, there are important questions about cost and access. Right now most assisted reproductive technologies are available only to higher-income individuals. A handful of states mandate infertility treatment coverage, but it is very limited. How should we regulate access to embryo editing for serious diseases? We are in the midst of a widespread debate about health care, access and cost. If it becomes established and safe, should this technique be part of a basic package of health care services when used to help create a child who does not suffer from a specific genetic problem? What about editing for non-health issues or less serious problems – are there fairness concerns if only people with sufficient wealth can access?

So far the promise of genetic engineering for disease eradication has not lived up to its hype. Nor have many other milestones, like the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep, resulted in the feared apocalypse. The announcement of the Oregon study is only the next step in a long line of research. Nonetheless, it is sure to bring many of the issues about embryos, stem cell research, genetic engineering and reproductive technologies back into the spotlight. Now is the time to figure out how we want to see this gene-editing path unfold.

Jessica Berg, Law Dean; Professor of Law; and Professor of Bioethics & Public Health, Case Western Reserve University

SEE ALSO: In a first, scientists have edited the DNA of human embryos that could turn into people using CRISPR

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NOW WATCH: First ever close-up footage of DNA replication will have experts rewriting science textbooks

Doctor Michael Mosley, author of the 5:2 diet and the "Clever Guts Diet", spoke to Business Insider UK and explained why a healthy diet is much more important than exercise when it comes to losing weight. 

Dr Mosley said, "An awful lot of people go to the gym in January in order to lose weight. They think if they go to the gym and cycle a bit and do a bit of running then they will obviously shed some of those kilos. The reality is that that does not happen which is why the vast majority of people give up."

"In order to lose a kilo of fat you would probably have to run two marathons. So in many ways it is obviously much easier simply to reduce the amount of calories you eat rather than trying to run them off because you have to do so much exercise to burn calories."

"What I would recommend is yes, you do exercise because that’s going to improve your mood and it’s very helpful once you’ve lost weight but hoping that simply by doing exercise you’re going to lose weight is really over optimistic."

"You should be aware of these tendencies but as I said if you really want to lose weight the only way to do that is by reducing the calories you eat and switching the sort of food you eat."

Produced Jasper Pickering. Camera by Leon Siciliano. Special thanks to Joe Daunt.

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Although most species of plants on Earth have flowers, the evolutionary origin of flowers themselves are shrouded in mystery. Flowers are the sexual organs of more than 360,000 species of plants alive today, all derived from a single common ancestor in the distant past. This ancestral plant, alive sometime between 250 million and 140 million years ago, produced the first flowers at a time when the planet was warmer, and richer in oxygen and greenhouse gases than today. A time when dinosaurs roamed primeval landscapes.

But despite the fact dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago we have a better idea of what an Iguanodon looked like than of how the ancestral flower was built.

This is partly because these first flowers left no traces. Flowers are fragile structures that only in the luckiest of circumstances can be transformed into fossils. And, as no fossil has been found dating back 140 million or more years, scientists have only had a limited sense of what the ultimate ancestor would have looked like. Until now.

A major new study by an international team of botanists has achieved the best reconstruction to date of this ancestral flower. The research, published in Nature Communications, relies not so much on fossils as on studying the characteristics of 800 of its living descendant species.

By comparing the similarities and differences among related flowering plants, it is possible to infer the characteristics of their recent ancestors. For example, because all orchid species have flowers in which one half is the mirror image of the other (bilateral symmetry), we can suppose that their ancestor must have had bilateral flowers. By comparing those recent ancestors to each other it is then possible to go a step further back in time, and so on, until eventually we reach the base of the flowering plants’ family tree.

So what did it look like?

In some respects, the original flower resembles a modern magnolia: it has multiple, undifferentiated “petals” (technically tepals), arranged in concentric rings. At its center there are multiple rows of sexual organs including pollen-producing stamens and ovule-bearing ovaries. It is hard to resist the temptation to imagine ancient pollinators crawling in this flower, collecting pollen grains while unknowingly helping the plant to produce seeds.

A controversial sex life

The new study helps to settle the controversy about whether early flowers had separate sexes, or whether both male and female reproductive organs were combined in the same flower. Previous evidence pointed to different answers. On the one hand, one of the earliest diverging lineages of flowering plants, represented nowadays only by a rare shrub from the Pacific island of New Caledonia called Amborella, has flowers that are either male or female. On the other, most modern species combine both sexes in the same flower.

The authors of the study settle the question and show that the ancestral flower was a hermaphrodite. This means that early flowering plants could reproduce both as a male and a female. Combined sexes can be advantageous when colonizing new environments as a single individual can be its own mate, and indeed many plant species colonizing remote oceanic islands tend to be hermaphrodite. Maybe the combination of sexes helped early flowering plants to out-compete their rivals.

The devil’s in the detail

Despite the apparent similarity with some modern flowers, their ultimate ancestor has a few surprises up its sleeve. For example, botanist have long thought that early flowers had floral parts arranged in a spiral around the center of the flower as can be seen in modern species such as the star anise.

The new reconstruction, though, strongly suggests that early flowers had their organs arranged not in a spiral, but in series of concentric circles or “whorls”, as in most modern plants. The early flower had more numerous whorls, however, suggesting flowers have become simpler over time. Paradoxically, this simpler architecture may have given modern plants a more stable base upon which to evolve and achieve more complex tasks such as sophisticated interaction with certain insects as in orchids, or the production of “flower heads” made of dozens or hundreds of simpler flowers as in the sunflower family.

Although now we have a good idea of what one of the earliest flowers may have looked like, we still know little about how that flower came to be. The detailed steps leading to its evolution are unknown. Perhaps we will have to wait for the discovery of new fossil flowers spanning the gap around 250 million-140 million years ago, before we can understand the very origin of what is the most diverse sexual structure on the planet.

SEE ALSO: A flower that lived 20 million years ago has been found preserved in amber

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NOW WATCH: A fascinating new discovery is stirring up a huge scientific debate over the origin of life on Earth and beyond

• A team of scientists from the US, China, and South Korea successfully altered the DNA of human embryos that could theoretically become people for the first time in history.
• They successfully altered a mutated gene linked with a heart disease that can cause sudden cardiac arrest.
• The new study is a significant advancement from the first experiments on human embryos using gene-modifying technique CRISPR-Cas9.
• Because their changes were geared toward fixing a problematic gene rather than swapping genes or creating an unnatural one, they see their work as fundamentally different from quests to create so-called "designer babies."

Tweaking the genes of human embryos that could theoretically be brought to term and grown to adulthood is a feat that sounded like science fiction — until this week.

In a historical first, an international team of scientists from the US, China, and South Korea successfully altered the DNA of viable human embryos, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.

Using the cutting-edge genome-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9 on multiple embryos, the researchers corrected a gene known to cause a type of heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that can cause sudden cardiac arrest.

Despite the team's stated goal of working towards disease eradication, much of the attention around CRISPR has focused on the potential for using the technique to create so-called "designer babies"— humans with higher-than normal levels of intelligence or athletic abilities.

But on a call with reporters on Tuesday, the authors of the study firmly distanced themselves from that idea.

Because he and his team simply corrected mutated genes, they don't consider their work in line with efforts to create super-humans.

"We don’t like the word editing because we didn’t edit anything. All we did was modify a mutant gene back to the norm," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a biologist who heads the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health and Science University and was the leading author on the paper, on the call.

Mitalipov added that he believes it's "unlikely" that the technique would be used for genetic modification.

"Our program is toward correcting mutant [i.e. diseased] genes," said Mitalipov. "We have to draw a line and the regulatory agencies have to decide what is it that we have to treat and if it’s something that’s not disease. I think it will be up to them to decide where to draw the line."

The new study is a significant advancement from the first experiments on human embryos using CRISPR. The first, done in China in 2015, involved embryos with serious genetic defects that prevented them from being brought to term. Mitalipov's work, by contrast, involved human embryos that he and his team created with sperm donated by men who had the genetic mutation leading to the heart disease they were trying to edit out of the embryos.

“This is the kind of research that is essential if we are to know if it’s possible to safely and precisely make corrections” in embryos’ DNA to repair disease-causing genes,” R. Alta Charo, a legal scholar and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told STAT News on Monday when word of the forthcoming study leaked.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the disease caused by the genetic mutation that Mitalipov and his colleagues successfully edited out of the human embryos, affects about 1 in every 500 people and involves a thickening of the heart muscle that makes it harder for the heart to pump blood. It can cause shortness of breath, chest pain, and in some cases cardiac arrest, which can be fatal.

The scientists on the call said that while they targeted this particular disease in the experiment, they hope to carry out similar future experiments on other genetic diseases. Unlike other approaches to treating or preventing disease, CRISPR involves permanent changes to cells that will eventually turn into people and produce their own sperm, eggs, and, possibly, children.

Because those children would inherit the same altered genes — a biologic process known as germline editing — some bioethicists have raised questions about its effects on human evolution more broadly.

"None of the embryos we generated in this study were for reproductive purposes but if they were, the idea is that they wouldn’t carry this mutation so the parents wouldn’t have to worry about transferring this to their children, said Mitalipov. "More importantly, the children wouldn’t transmit it further either. This would completely eradicate this disease in this lineage for this family."

SEE ALSO: A surgeon aiming to do the first human head transplant says 'Frankenstein' predicted a crucial part of the surgery

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