Hacker News with Generative AI: Biology

Obelisks (wordpress.com)
Wow! Biologists seem to have discovered an entirely new kind of life form. They’re called ‘obelisks’, and you probably have some in you.
Biology, Science, Discovery, Life Forms
4 points by hackandthink 6 hours ago | 0 comments
The Conundrum of Life's Origin (nautil.us)
How to solve biology’s chicken-or-egg dilemma
Biology, Science, Philosophy
70 points by Brajeshwar 2 days ago | 55 comments
Svalbard's radioactive 'Bear Island' surrounded by cloud swirls and algal bloom (livescience.com)
Environment, Science, Climate Change, Biology
4 points by wglb 2 days ago | 0 comments
Ask HN: Dense Tree Layout Algorithms (ycombinator.com)
I recently bought a poster which features a really beautiful rendering of a phylogenetic tree of the world's bird families (a rooted binary tree).<p>https://lynxnaturebooks.com/product/orders-and-families-of-the-birds-of-the-world-poster/<p>I am sure it was carefully designed by hand. What algorithms could automatically generate a layout like this? The graphviz layout algorithms are poorly suited to the problem because they cannot seem to avoid edge/node coincidence beyond a certain node density.
Data Visualization, Algorithms, Graph Theory, Biology
42 points by bwestergard 4 days ago | 18 comments
Let's talk about bird tongues (2014) (toughlittlebirds.com)
You don’t have to look at many birds to realize that they are very variable in appearance: hawks look different from hummingbirds, and both look different from peacocks. You can spend a lot of time looking at birds, though, before you realize that they are hiding a lot of variation inside their mouths: long tongues, short tongues, spiky tongues, curly tongues, forked tongues, frayed tongues, brush-like tongues.
Zoology, Birds, Anatomy, Biology
69 points by quuxplusone 5 days ago | 6 comments
Across southeastern US, weedy rice steals herbicide resistance from crop rice (phys.org)
Weedy rice is a close relative of cultivated rice that infests rice fields worldwide and drastically reduces yields.
Agriculture, Genetics, Biology, Environmental Science, Invasive Species
7 points by PaulHoule 6 days ago | 3 comments
Male and female brains differ at birth (biomedcentral.com)
Sex differences in human brain anatomy have been well-documented, though remain significantly underexplored during early development.
Neuroscience, Biology, Sex Differences
39 points by niemandhier 6 days ago | 32 comments
Two Waves of Aging: How Midlife Biomolecular Shifts Accelerate Decline (gethealthspan.com)
Aging has long been viewed as a gradual, linear decline, but recent findings suggest a far more dynamic process characterized by distinct biological transitions.
Aging, Biology, Health, Science
23 points by dtawfik1 6 days ago | 4 comments
Testosterone eliminates strategic prosocial behavior in healthy males (2023) (nature.com)
Humans are strategically more prosocial when their actions are being watched by others than when they act alone.
Science, Human Behavior, Biology, Psychology
13 points by Jimmc414 7 days ago | 4 comments
Male and female brains are wired differently (earth.com)
Have you ever found yourself in a heated discussion with someone of the opposite sex and thought – “it’s like we’re wired differently”? Well, a recent study from the University of Cambridge suggests that male and female brains are indeed wired differently from the time of birth.
Neuroscience, Gender, Biology
32 points by isaacfrond 8 days ago | 23 comments
The Ocean Teems with Networks of Interconnected Bacteria (quantamagazine.org)
Tiny bridges, known as bacterial nanotubes, connect the inner spaces of photosynthesizing bacteria throughout the oceans — forming little-known cellular networks of trade and communication.
Science, Biology, Microbiology, Oceanography
3 points by rbanffy 11 days ago | 0 comments
Targeting Mosquito Spit Could Stop Parasites in Their Tracks (the-scientist.com)
A protein found in the saliva of Anopheles gambiae stopped blood from clotting in the insects’ stomachs and aided parasite transmission.
Science, Biology, Medicine, Mosquitoes, Parasites
3 points by gmays 11 days ago | 0 comments
A new way to determine whether a species will successfully invade an ecosystem (news.mit.edu)
When a new species is introduced into an ecosystem, it may succeed in establishing itself, or it may fail to gain a foothold and die out. Physicists at MIT have now devised a formula that can predict which of those outcomes is most likely.
Ecology, Biology, Science, Prediction, Ecosystems
3 points by gnabgib 11 days ago | 0 comments
The Ocean Teems with Networks of Interconnected Bacteria (quantamagazine.org)
Tiny bridges, known as bacterial nanotubes, connect the inner spaces of photosynthesizing bacteria throughout the oceans — forming little-known cellular networks of trade and communication.
Biology, Science, Microbiology, Bacteria
17 points by isaacfrond 11 days ago | 1 comments
Parasitic worms 'manipulate' mantises onto asphalt roads, say researchers (mainichi.jp)
OSAKA -- Every autumn, dead mantises can be seen lying on the asphalt of roads. A type of parasitic worm may be leading the creatures to their deaths there, researchers at Kyoto University and others have determined.
Animals, Science, Biology, Parasites, Research
154 points by anigbrowl 14 days ago | 110 comments
Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life (quantamagazine.org)
Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab.
Science, Biology, Evolution, Microbiology
25 points by isaacfrond 15 days ago | 1 comments
Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life (quantamagazine.org)
Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab.
Biology, Evolution, Science, Microbes
12 points by billybuckwheat 15 days ago | 0 comments
Protocells emerge in experiment simulating lifeless world (elpais.com)
Geologist Juan Manuel García Ruiz still speaks with amazement about how he and his colleagues have created “a proto-world” in their laboratory, located just 1,500 meters from La Concha beach in the Spanish city of San Sebastián.
Science, Biology, Experiments
9 points by NoRagrets 16 days ago | 2 comments
The comb jelly can fuse with another (including nervous and digestive systems) (cnn.com)
Biology, Animals, Zoology, Marine Life
101 points by alok-g 17 days ago | 25 comments
The Anthrobots: a new living entity with much to teach us (thoughtforms.life)
Have you ever wondered what the cells of multicellular organisms are really capable of? We know what they normally do in vivo, building default, familiar tissues and organs under the influence of their neighbors during normal embryogenesis. But what would they do if allowed to reboot their multicellularity – if liberated from the control of other cells that shape their behavior, and allowed to express their baseline forms?
Biology, Artificial Intelligence, Science
61 points by mindcrime 18 days ago | 14 comments
'Obelisks': New class of life has been found in human digestive system (sciencealert.com)
Peering into the jungle of microbes that live within us, researchers have stumbled across what seem to be an entire new class of virus-like objects.
Microbiology, Biology, Human Body, Viruses
476 points by unkeen 19 days ago | 134 comments
Hallucination of closed repeat proteins containing central pockets (2023) (nature.com)
Inspired by these proteins, we devised a deep-learning-based approach to broadly exploring the space of closed repeat proteins starting from only a specification of the repeat number and length.
Proteins, Deep Learning, Science, Biology, AI
8 points by bookofjoe 20 days ago | 0 comments
Epigenetic inheritance of diet-induced and sperm-borne mitochondrial RNAs (nature.com)
Apart from Mendelian inheritance, fathers use alternative routes for intergenerational information transfer. One of these is a complex, dynamic and environment-sensitive pool of sncRNAs that are stored in mature spermatozoa1, delivered to the oocytes at fertilization9, and influence embryonic development10,11 and adult phenotypes1,2,3,4,5,6,7,11.
Genetics, Biology, Science, Epigenetics, Reproduction
3 points by gradus_ad 21 days ago | 0 comments
What is ageing? Even the field's researchers can't agree (nature.com)
Researchers studying ageing disagree on just about everything — including what ageing is, whether it is a disease and when it starts — according to a survey of about 100 scientists working in the field.
Science, Biology, Aging, Research
7 points by nradov 22 days ago | 0 comments
Simulating C. elegans brain, body and environment interactions (nature.com)
The behavior of an organism is influenced by the complex interplay between its brain, body and environment.
Neuroscience, Biology, Simulation, C. elegans
68 points by lamename 23 days ago | 19 comments
Boids, an artificial life program, which simulates flocking behavior of birds (ece.cornell.edu)
Boids is an artificial life program that produces startlingly realistic simulations of the flocking behavior of birds.
Artificial Life, Computer Science, Simulation, Biology
47 points by sebg 24 days ago | 8 comments
Ants vs. Humans: Putting Group Smarts to the Test (weizmann.ac.il)
Anyone who has dealt with ants in the kitchen knows that ants are highly social creatures; it’s rare to see one alone.
Biology, Social Behavior, Animal Intelligence
42 points by thunderbong 24 days ago | 19 comments
Brazilian velvet ant is ultrablack (nytimes.com)
Scientists found that the dark markings on a species of fluffy wasp reflected less than 1 percent of light.
Science, Biology, Animals, Color, Nature
41 points by bookofjoe 24 days ago | 26 comments
How did human butts evolve to look that way? (massivesci.com)
What makes humans different from other animals? Ask any ten people and you're likely to get ten different answers, ranging from our relatively large brains, to our incredible use of language and symbols, to our ability to dramatically modify the world around us.
Human Evolution, Biology, Anthropology
88 points by thunderbong 25 days ago | 54 comments
Viroid-like colonists of human microbiomes (biorxiv.org)
Here, we describe the “Obelisks,” a previously unrecognised class of viroid-like elements that we first identified in human gut metatranscriptomic data.
Microbiology, Genomics, Human Microbiome, Biology, Science
5 points by seslaire 25 days ago | 0 comments