It’s hard to say what’s crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles’ tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles could actually see out of the eyes on their tail.

As you know, this is not the way vision is supposed to work—your eyeballs are supposed to be connected to a big fat nerve that carries incoming signals back to your brain, which combines the information from both your eyes into a 3D picture of the world in front of you. Without that direct link to the brain, your eyeballs are useless.

At least, that’s the way scientists have thought about it for the last several centuries. But over the past few decades, experiments in animals and humans have repeatedly shown that the central nervous system—including the brain and spinal cord—is a lot more flexible and adaptable than people used to think it was. If one part of the brain gets damaged, for instance, the information that used to flow to the damaged sector is often re-routed, and another part of the brain takes on the job of processing it.

So these newer findings got the Tufts University researchers wondering: could the optic nerve really be the only route for incoming visual signals? And could a different part of the nervous system, like the nerves further down the spinal cord, process those signals on their own, without help from the brain?

Tadpoles, they realized, would be a good way to test this question: they would perform surgery at a time when the tadpoles were still developing, so that the transplanted eyes would have time to put down nerve roots that could potentially hook up to the rest of the tadpoles’ nervous systems.

The surgeries were painstaking, but the researchers were able to successfully graft eyeballs onto the tails of over 200 tadpole embryos.  When the altered tadpoles hatched, the researchers went to work testing their subjects’ vision. Here’s the Journal of Experimental Biology’s description of the experiment:

While the blind tadpoles never developed a preference for one side of the dish or the other, seven of the tadpoles with transplanted eyes learned to stay in the blue light, demonstrating that they could see through their grafted eyes.

 The researchers’ findings seem to indicate that the neurons in the spinal cord are capable of doing at least some of the tasks as the brain. If that’s true, scientists could someday exploit the spinal cord’s smarts for a number of medical treatments, like restoring movement to paralyzed limbs.

From Popular Science

The most recent Gallup poll found that 46 percent of Americans believe Earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that humans were created in that time.

This basic belief is based on an estimation made in 1650, by the Archbishop of Ireland James Ussher  that the Earth was created on Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. Ussher’s work continues to be cited by many creationists — including the Christian group Answers in Genesis — as evidence that the Earth is only thousands of years old.

Science does not have all the answers about precisely how life came to be on this planet, but we can definitively state the Earth is far older than 10,000 years, and is in fact 4.5 billion years old.

The issue recently became news because Marco Rubio said that he didn’t know how old the Earth was, and wasn’t sure if the scientists were right. It baffles me how someone can fill their tank with gasoline but have no concept of how old the Earth is, or the chemical processes that were necessary to make petroleum happen.

Enter Pat Robertson, who appears to have become the voice of reason. Here’s what he said in response to a question from a viewer on his Christian Broadcasting Network show “The 700 Club.”

“You go back in time, you’ve got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things, and you’ve got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas,” Robertson said. “They’re out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth, and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don’t try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That’s not the Bible.”

Before answering the question, Robertson acknowledged the statement was controversial by saying, “I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this.”

“If you fight science, you are going to lose your children, and I believe in telling them the way it was,” Robertson concluded.

It will be interesting to see what kind of discussion this sparks within the religious community that does not accept evolution nor the scientific view that the Earth is billions of years old.

And Robertson is exactly right. Plenty of adults feel that it’s fine to go toe to toe with scientists when their beliefs contradict with the scientific facts. Their children are not so likely to feel the same.

This is an important moment for religion and science, I believe. There’s plenty of common ground between science and religion. Perhaps now is the time to find it.

Eric Berger for the Houston Chronicle, November 30th 2012

Human-like species migrating out of their African homeland had mastered the use of fire up to 790,000 years ago, the journal Science reports.

The evidence, from northern Israel, suggests early hominids may have been surprisingly sophisticated in their behaviour.

Researchers from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan excavated a waterlogged site at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov. They discovered clusters of burnt artifacts, which date to between 790,000 and 690,000 years ago, indicating the sites of ancient camp fires, or hearths, made by either Homo erectus or Homo ergaster.

Professor John Gowlett, of the University of Liverpool, UK, said that the find was “very significant”.

“Until now we only had two groups of early fire evidence: one in Africa that is more than a million years and one in Europe and Asia that’s half a million years,” he said.  ”People were rather inclined to say, well, the early group’s is probably a natural fire and the later group’s is probably a controlled fire.

“The thing about this find is that it lands right in the middle between those two, both chronologically and in area. It’s going to make people sit up and think - it blows away any idea that you’ve got a distinction between the early group and the late group.”

Plant remains at the site suggest the humans burned six types of wood, three of which - olive tree, wild barley and wild grape - are edible.  There is always the possibility the fires could have been natural. But the authors say a number of lines of evidence make this unlikely.

Wood and other material around the site and is not all burnt, refuting the possibility of some big general fire.  The fires also occur in lots of layers at the site, suggesting they are close together in time. 

New research distinguishes for the first time a key reason for declining muscle repair during aging and a way to stop this process in mice using a certain drug.  This groundbreaking study, published in Nature, explains why muscle mass decreases with age, an important factor in weakness, causing lack of mobility and falls in elders.

Previous research has told us that stem cells can play a crucial role in stimulating muscle regeneration. This particular study looked at stem cells found in muscles that are responsible for repairing injuries and why the muscles’ capacity of regeneration deteriorates with age.

An inactive supply of stem cells is present inside every muscle, ready to be put into action by exercise or injury to fix any damage. When these stem cells are needed, they can divide into hundreds of new muscle threads and repair the injured muscle. At the end of the repairing process, a few of these cells refill the supply of dormant stem cells, enabling the muscle to carry on repairing itself continuously.

Researchers used elderly mice to conduct this study and found the number of inactive stem cells in the extra pool decreases with age, explaining the decline in the muscle’s ability to regenerate and repair as the body gets older. When these muscles were examined, the scientists found high levels of FGF2, a protein that has the capacity to trigger the division of cells. While stimulating inactive cells to split and repair muscle is a normal and vital process, they found FGF2 could awaken the dormant stem cells even when they were not needed. Continuous activation of the dormant stem cells meant depletion of the surplus, leaving the muscles without necessary stem cells when repair was really needed.

After this finding, the team attempted to obstruct FGF2 in old muscles in order to prevent the stem cell surplus from being activated unnecessarily. By giving the mice a common FGF2 inhibitor drug, they were able to slow down the decline in the number of muscle stem cells.

Preventing or reversing muscle wasting in old age in humans is still a way off, but this study has for the first time revealed a process which could be responsible for age-related muscle wasting, which is extremely exciting. The finding opens up the possibility that one day we could develop treatments to make old muscles young again. If we could do this, we may be able to enable people to live more mobile, independent lives as they age.

From Medical News Today 

 Our universe has more stars than words spoken or written by all of mankind throughout the total sum of human history.  This is especially impressive if you consider that over the course of an 80 year lifespan a human will speak around 400 million words.