Latest news with #CharlesDarwin
Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Science
- Miami Herald
Elusive, endangered predator spotted on trail camera in Chile, photos show
An elusive and endangered predator was recently spotted in Chile, delighting conservation officials. The creature — known as a Darwin's fox — was recorded by a camera trap in the Cutipay Wetland Nature Sanctuary, about 500 miles south of Santiago, according to a May 22 news release from the Ministry of Environment. While reviewing footage from the camera in April, officials noticed three images, dated to Dec. 30, that showed a dark-colored animal trudging through the undergrowth. After officials consulted with experts, it was confirmed to be a Darwin's fox, described as a one-of-a-kind and notoriously hard to spot inhabitant of the South American nation. Iconic and elusive species Distinguished by its dark fur, pointed ears and solitary behavior, the animal has intrigued scientists for generations. The vulpine creature was first described by Charles Darwin in 1834 on Chile's Chiloé Island. According to his notes, he noticed a fox sitting on rocks near the shore, observing nearby officers. 'I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer,' the famous naturalist wrote, according to The Lancet. The specimen was later displayed in a museum. But, in the decades that followed, the animal was believed to be a subspecies of the South American gray fox. It wasn't until 1996 — after biologists studied its DNA — that Darwin's fox was determined to be its own distinct species, according to The New York Times. Nowadays, it is classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. And, the vast majority of the species' population is believed to live on Chiloé, where Darwin encountered his specimen. The populations on the mainland are significantly smaller and more dispersed. But, the recent sighting in Cutipay — a poorly studied region — expands the species' territory. In fact, the area could play a pivotal role in connecting various populations and facilitating the species' movement, officials said. Environment Minister Maisa Rojas applauded the discovery, saying it shows the importance of conservation policies. That said, the recent images of the fox also bring to light new threats that the species could face in the area. The primary threat is the existence of domestic dogs, which could attack the endangered foxes and potentially transmit diseases. Invasive animals — such as mink — as well as deforestation, forest fires and unregulated construction could also negatively impact the species. With this in mind, Alberto Tacon, a regional environmental official, emphasized the need to protect the forests in Cutipay and the animals that inhabit them. Google Translate was used to translate a news release from the Chilean Ministry of Environment.
AU Financial Review
4 days ago
- Science
- AU Financial Review
Charles Darwin's nervous book launch was like no other
In November 1859, the naturalist Charles Darwin was taking the 'water cure' in West Yorkshire and preparing to release his seminal work, On the Origin of Species . His voyage around the world on HMS Beagle, which inspired his thinking on evolution, was 20 years past. Ever since, he had been gathering evidence for his theory in secret.
NDTV
6 days ago
- Health
- NDTV
Managing Drug-Resistant Cancers: Charles Darwin's Theory To The Rescue
Antimicrobial resistance is a major health threat that kills more than a million people each year. But cancer—a non-communicable disease—poses a much bigger challenge to global public health by killing ten times as many. The vast majority of those cancer deaths result from resistance to anti-cancer therapies, a phenomenon that mirrors the fatalities associated with antimicrobial resistance. A perspective shift in the way that the disease is treated, based on the theory of evolution, could change that. Each year, over 40 million people die from non-communicable diseases. Cancer is the second leading cause of death from non-communicable diseases after heart disease. Around 20 million people worldwide are diagnosed with cancer annually. Half of them will die from it. The odds are sobering: one in five of us will face a cancer diagnosis during our lifetime, and one in nine men and one in twelve women will die as a result, based on estimates from the Global Cancer Statistics 2020. The good news is that survival rates are climbing. Over the past four decades, they've risen by as much as 30 percent for several common cancers thanks to screening, early diagnosis, and advancements in surgical and radiation therapies, according to recent reviews. But with global populations ageing and lifespans increasing, cases are projected to surge by 60 percent over the next 20 years. In response, governments and private institutions have poured money into cancer research—over US$7 billion between 2016 and 2020 alone, amounting to 29.2 percent of the total research budget. Yet despite this investment, the disease still carries a reputation as a death sentence. One reason? The treatments themselves. Conventional cancer therapies rely on the 'maximum tolerated dose'—the strongest drug dose a patient can withstand. The goal is straightforward: destroy as many cancer cells as possible. But the result is often something else. These treatments also wipe out healthy cells, leaving patients exhausted and vulnerable. Worse, they can give surviving tumour cells a competitive edge. Like bacteria that become antibiotic-resistant, cancer cells can evolve under pressure, becoming resistant to our most aggressive therapies. It's a grim cycle: high-dose treatment kills off the easy targets, but leaves behind the tough ones. These resilient cells thrive, multiply and return in a more aggressive, drug-resistant form. Combining different treatments can help, but drug resistance remains unavoidable. Around 90 percent of cancer deaths are linked to this kind of evolutionary drug resistance. Yet the standard treatment paradigm remains largely unchanged. This is where Charles Darwin enters the oncology ward. The evolutionary edge Darwin's theory of evolution describes how life adapts over time through natural selection, mutation, and genetic drift. These same forces operate at cellular levels in all living things. Cancers are made up of billions of competing cells, constantly mutating and responding to their environment. This evolutionary process creates a genetically diverse tumour in which drug-resistant cells can emerge and survive. The ability to slice cancerous tissues into thin layers, separate them into individual cells, and sequence their genome has been vital for this revelation. Understanding this dynamic has inspired a new treatment approach, one that borrows more from ecology than from traditional medicine. Known as adaptive therapy, the idea is simple yet radical: instead of trying to kill every cancer cell, we learn to live with the disease, managing it like a chronic condition. The model comes from an unexpected place—agriculture. Since circa 1968, farmers have used a strategy to manage pests that allows some pesticide-sensitive insects to survive. These bugs help suppress the resistant population, slowing the spread of pesticide resistance. Applied to cancer, the same logic suggests we can hold treatment-resistant cells in check by preserving a population of drug-sensitive cells. In practice, adaptive therapy uses fewer and lower doses of drugs, rather than continuously blasting the body with the maximum tolerable amount in an attempt to kill as many cancer cells as possible. The aim is to maintain a balance by shrinking the tumour enough to relieve symptoms, but not so much that resistant cells dominate the field. This strategy rests on three key conditions: The tumour must contain both drug-sensitive and drug-resistant cells in advanced cancers that are unresponsive to traditional therapies. The sensitive cells must have an evolutionary advantage over the resistant cells in the absence of treatment. The lower-dose treatment must still reduce the overall tumour burden while keeping the resistant cell population in check. The approach is gaining traction. Clinical trials are already under way for adaptive therapy in prostate, thyroid, and ovarian cancers, as well as melanoma. Early results are promising. One trial for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida has shown that adaptive therapy can delay tumour progression by over 50 percent compared to the conventional treatment while using barely half the usual drug dose. Most early studies focused on single drugs. But in the real world, cancers are usually treated with combinations. This has led researchers to borrow another tool, this time from mathematics, to design adaptive therapies for multidrug combinations: game theory. Originally developed to model decision-making in economics and military strategy, game theory is now helping oncologists design drug regimens that anticipate how tumours will evolve and respond over time. Still, there are hurdles. One of the biggest is identifying the right patients—those with fewer resistant cells seem to respond best. Another challenge is monitoring tumours in real time and adjusting treatments on the fly. Reliable biomarkers are still lacking, and adaptive therapy demands constant surveillance. These limitations are among the main challenges in implementing evolution-based approaches in practice. Yet the potential is enormous. By treating cancer as an evolving system rather than a static enemy, adaptive therapy could reshape how we manage the disease. The aim isn't to cure cancer outright, but to transform it into something we can live with, like high blood pressure or diabetes. Darwin's old theory might just open a new chapter in the fight against one of humanity's most persistent killers. Dr. Anindita Chakrabarty is Associate Professor, Department of Life Sciences, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi-NCR.
Business Times
23-05-2025
- Science
- Business Times
How to be a great thinker
MOST people are getting dumber. Largely because of the smartphone, we're in an era of declining attention spans, reading skills, numeracy and verbal reasoning. How to buck the trend? I've charted seven intellectual habits of the best thinkers. True, these people exist in a different league from the rest of us. To use an analogy from computing, their high processing power allows them to crunch vast amounts of data from multiple domains. In other words, they have intellectual overcapacity. Still, we can learn from their methods. These can sound obvious, but few people live by them. Read books. A book is still the best technology to convey the nuanced complexity of the world. That complexity is a check on pure ideology. People who want to simplify the world will prefer online conspiracy theories. Don't use screens much. That frees time for books and creates more interstitial moments when the mind is left unoccupied, has freedom to roam and makes new connections. Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Immanuel Kant experienced these moments on walks. The biochemist Jennifer Doudna says she gets insights when 'out weeding my tomato plants' or while asleep. Do your own work, not the world's. The best thinkers don't waste much time maximising their income or climbing hierarchies. Doudna left the University of California, Berkeley to lead discovery research at biotech company Genentech. She lasted two months there. Needing full scientific freedom, she returned to Berkeley, where she ended up winning the chemistry Nobel Prize for co-inventing the gene-editing tool Crispr. Be multidisciplinary. Pre-war Vienna produced thinkers including Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Hayek, Kurt Godel and the irreducible polymath John von Neumann. The structure of the city's university helped. Most subjects were taught within the faculties of either law or philosophy. That blurred boundaries between disciplines, writes Richard Cockett in Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World. 'There were no arbitrary divisions between 'science' and 'humanities' – all was 'philosophy', in its purest sense, the study of fundamental questions.' BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Hayek, for instance, 'trained at home as a botanist to a quasi-professional level; he then graduated in law, received a doctorate in political science from the university, but... spent most of his time there studying psychology, all before becoming a revered economist.' Breaking through silos goes against the set-up of modern academia. It also requires unprecedented processing power, given how much knowledge has accumulated in each field. But insights from one discipline can still revolutionise another. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for economics for his findings on human irrationality. Be an empiricist who values ideas. During World War II, Isaiah Berlin was first secretary at the British embassy in Washington. His weekly reports on the American political situation were brilliant empirical accounts of the world as it was. They mesmerised Winston Churchill, who was desperate to meet Berlin. (Due to a mix-up, Churchill invited Irving Berlin for lunch instead. The composer was baffled to be asked by Churchill himself: 'When do you think the European war will end?') In March 1944, Isaiah Berlin returned from Washington to London on a bomber plane. He had to wear an oxygen mask all flight, wasn't allowed to sleep for fear he would suffocate, and couldn't read as there was no light. 'One was therefore reduced to a most terrible thing,' he recalled, 'to having to think – and I had to think for about seven or eight hours in this bomber.' During this long interstitial moment, Berlin decided to become an historian of ideas. He ended up writing the classic essays The Hedgehog and the Fox and Two Concepts of Liberty. Always assume you might be wrong. Mediocre thinkers prefer to confirm their initial assumptions. This 'confirmation bias' stops them reaching new or deeper insights. By contrast, Darwin was always composing arguments against his own theories. Keep learning from everyone. Only mediocrities boast as adults about where they went to university aged 18. They imagine that intelligence is innate and static. In fact, people become more or less intelligent through life, depending on how hard they think. The best thinkers are always learning from others, no matter how young or low-status. I remember being at a dinner table where the two people who talked least and listened hardest were the two Nobel laureates. FINANCIAL TIMES
Yomiuri Shimbun
21-05-2025
- Science
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Chicago Fossil Yields Insights on Famed Early Bird Archaeopteryx
Delaney Drummond / Field Museum / Handout via Reuters A fossil of the Jurassic bird Archaeopteryx is seen under UV light to show soft tissues alongside the skeleton, in the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago, in this undated photo. Anew analysis of a pigeon-sized Archaeopteryx fossil in the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago is revealing an array of previously unknown features of the earliest-known bird, providing insight into its feathers, hands, feet and head. The specimen, unearthed in southern Germany, is one of the most complete and best preserved of the 14 known fossils of Archaeopteryx identified since 1861. The discovery of the first Archaeopteryx fossil, with its blend of reptile-like and bird-like features, caused a sensation, lending support to British naturalist Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution and showing that birds had descended from dinosaurs. The new study, examining the Chicago fossil using UV light to make out soft tissues and CT scans to discern minute details still embedded in the rock, shows that 164 years later there is more to learn about this celebrated creature that took flight 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. The researchers identified anatomical traits indicating that while Archaeopteryx was capable of flight, it probably spent a lot of time on the ground and may have been able to climb trees. The scientists identified for the first time in an Archaeopteryx fossil the presence of specialized feathers called tertials on both wings. These innermost flight feathers of the wing are attached to the elongated humerus bone in the upper arm. Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs, which lacked tertials. The discovery of them in Archaeopteryx, according to the researchers, suggests that tertials, present in many birds today, evolved specifically for flight. Feathered dinosaurs lacking tertials would have had a gap between the feathered surface of their upper arms and the body. 'To generate lift, the aerodynamic surface must be continuous with the body. So in order for flight using feathered wings to evolve, dinosaurs had to fill this gap — as we see in Archaeopteryx,' said Field Museum paleontologist Jingmai O'Connor, lead author of the study published on May 14 in the journal Nature. 'Although we have studied Archaeopteryx for over 160 years, so much basic information is still controversial. Is it a bird? Could it fly? The presence of tertials supports the interpretation that the answer to both these questions is 'yes,'' O'Connor added. Michael Rothman / Field Museum / Handout via Reuters A life reconstruction of the Jurassic bird Archaeopteryx is seen in this undated image. The delicate specimen, preserved in three dimensions rather than squashed flat like many fossils, was painstakingly prepared to protect soft tissue remains, which glowed under ultraviolet light. Birds are the only members of the dinosaur lineage to have survived a mass extinction 66 million years ago, caused by an asteroid striking Earth. Archaeopteryx boasted reptilian traits like teeth, a long and bony tail and claws on its hands, alongside bird-like traits like wings formed by large, asymmetrical feathers. The soft tissue of its toe pads appears to have been adapted for spending a lot of its life on the ground, consistent with the limited flight capabilities that Archaeopteryx is believed to have possessed. 'That's not to say it couldn't perch. It could do so still pretty well. But the point being that near the beginning of powered flight, Archaeopteryx was still spending most of its time on the ground,' said study coauthor Alex Clark, a doctoral student in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum. The soft tissue on the hand suggests that the first and third fingers were mobile and could be used for climbing. An examination of Archaeopteryx's palate — roof of the mouth — confirmed that its skull was immobile, unlike many living birds. But there was skeletal evidence of the first stages in the evolution of a trait that lets the beak move independently from the braincase, as seen in modern birds. The fossil possesses the only complete Archaeopteryx vertebral column, including two tiny vertebrae at the tip of the tail showing it had 24 vertebrae, one more than previously thought. The museum last year announced the acquisition of the fossil, which it said had been in the hands of a series of private collectors since being unearthed sometime before 1990. 'This specimen is arguably the best Archaeopteryx ever found and we're learning a ton of new things from it,' O'Connor said. 'I consider Archaeopteryx to be the most important fossil species of all time. It is, after all, the icon of evolution, and evolution is the unifying concept of the biological sciences. Not only is Archaeopteryx the oldest-known fossil bird, with birds today being the most successful lineage of land vertebrates, it is the species that demonstrates that birds are living dinosaurs,' O'Connor said.
