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Fiction Science Club

How de-extinction could change our destiny

Illustration: Woolly mammoth and calf
A woolly mammoth and her calf are shown trudging through frozen steppes in a promotional video from Colossal Biosciences.

It may sound cool to bring back the woolly mammoth after thousands of years of extinction — but Douglas Preston, the author of a novel that features the revival of the mammoths, has his doubts.

“If you take this and game it out to its logical end, you’re going to end up with something really terrifying,” Preston says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

That realization led him to write “Extinction,” a fictional tale that wraps the genetic resurrection of woolly mammoths and other extinct species from the Pleistocene Era into a murder mystery.

“‘Extinction’ does not have any science fiction in it,” the 67-year-old author insists. “This really is actual science that’s being done right now. It is here, and the ability to resurrect these extinct animals is here. … Maybe in my lifetime, we are going to see a de-extincted woolly mammoth, or a creature that looks a lot like a woolly mammoth.”

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Cosmic Science

Pompeii dining hall got Romans talking about Trojan War

Helen and Paris in Pompeii fresco
A wall painting shows Helen of Troy meeting Paris, with a handmaiden and a dog between them. (Credit: Archaeological Park of Pompeii)

Archaeologists in Pompeii have unveiled an ancient Roman banquet hall featuring a cleverly conceived set of frescoes inspired by tales of the Trojan War.

The 50-by-20-foot (15-by-6-meter) room was recently unearthed as part of a project aimed at shoring up the front of a perimeter between the excavated and not-yet-excavated areas of the Pompeii site near Naples, Italy. Pompeii’s archaeological park preserves sites that were buried in ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79.

During Pompeii’s heyday, the “Black Room” opened onto an open courtyard with a long staircase leading up to the home’s first floor.

The banquet room’s frescoes — portraying heroes and deities associated with the Trojan War — were apparently meant to entertain banquet guests and serve as conversation starters. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said the frescoes took advantage of painterly tricks to serve that purpose.

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Scientists back AI principles for biomolecular design

Visualization of protein molecule
AI technologies now allow scientists to generate biomolecules unlike any seen in nature. (Illustration by Ian C. Haydon / UW IPD)

More than 90 researchers — including a Nobel laureate — have signed on to a call for the scientific community to follow a set of safety and security standards when using artificial intelligence to design synthetic proteins.

The community statement on the responsible development of AI for protein design is being unveiled today in Boston at Winter RosettaCon 2024, a conference focusing on biomolecular engineering. The statement follows up on an AI safety summit that was convened last October by the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“I view this as a crucial step for the scientific community,” the institute’s director, David Baker, said in a news release. “The responsible use of AI for protein design will unlock new vaccines, medicines and sustainable materials that benefit the world. As scientists, we must ensure this happens while also minimizing the chance that our tools could ever be misused to cause harm.”

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Scientists take a freeze-frame look at excited electrons

Illustration: X-ray pulses blasting water molecules
Scientists used a pair of X-ray pulses (shown in pink and green) to study the energetic response of electrons (gold) in liquid water on attosecond time scales, while the hydrogen (white) and oxygen (red) atoms are ‘frozen’ in time. (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory / Nathan Johnson)

An international team of scientists has blazed a new trail for studying how atoms respond to radiation, by tracking the energetic movement of electrons when a sample of liquid water is blasted with X-rays.

The experiment, described in this week’s issue of the journal Science, required “freezing” the motion of the atoms with which the electrons were associated, on a scale of mere attoseconds. An attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second — or, expressed another way, a millionth of a trillionth of a second.

Attosecond-scale observations could provide scientists with new insights into how radiation exposure affects objects and people.

“What happens to an atom when it is struck by ionizing radiation, like an X-ray? Seeing the earliest stages of this process has long been a missing piece in understanding how radiation affects matter,” Xiaosong Li, a chemistry professor at the University of Washington and a laboratory fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said in a UW news release. “This new technique for the first time shows us that missing piece and opens the door to seeing the steps where so much complex — and interesting — chemistry occurs!”

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Cosmic Science

Image revives hopes of solving Amelia Earhart mystery

Comparison of sonar image and aircraft diagram
A sonar image shows a shape similar to that of Amelia Earhart's lost airplane. (Credit: Deep Sea Vision)

What happened to Amelia Earhart, the famed aviator whose plane disappeared in 1937 as she was trying to fly around the world? After surveying 5,200 square miles of the Pacific Ocean, searchers say they may have picked up the sonar signature of Earhart’s sunken aircraft.

If their hypothesis holds up, the find could well solve one of the aviation world’s greatest mysteries. But if it doesn’t hold up, it wouldn’t be the first dead end in the 87-year-long search.

The 90-day sonar survey was conducted last year by Deep Sea Vision, a team of underwater archaeologists and robotics experts led by Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer who reportedly sold his  real estate investments to fund the $11 million expedition.

In a news release issued today, Deep Sea Vision said it made use of a customized underwater robot to search wide swaths of the ocean floor with side-scan sonar. As the survey was winding up, the team identified a blurry shape that appeared to match the dimensions of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.

“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one; and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft,” Romeo said on NBC’s “Today” show.

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Scientists visit the kind of lake where life may have arisen

Scientists walking across Last Chance Lake
Researchers walk across Last Chance Lake’s crusty surface in September 2022. (UW Photo / Zack Cohen)

Several years ago, scientists at the University of Washington theorized that key ingredients for life could have built up billions of years ago in special kinds of environments known as soda lakes.

At the time, their hypothesis was based on previously published research, computer modeling and lab experiments. But now the same scientists say they’ve found a shallow lake that just might fit the requirements — and it happens to be just a few hundred miles north of their home base in Seattle.

Their findings, focusing on Last Chance Lake in British Columbia, were published this month in Communications Earth & Environment, an open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal.

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Fiction Science Club

Why scientists are mesmerized by the multiverse

Illustration: Visualization of our universe in the multiverse
An artist's conception shows our cosmos amid other universes in the multiverse. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt (IPAC)

The multiverse may be a cool (and convenient) concept for comic books and superhero movies, but why do scientists take it seriously?

In a new book titled “The Allure of the Multiverse,” physicist Paul Halpern traces why many theorists have come to believe that longstanding scientific puzzles can be solved only if they allow for the existence of other universes outside our own — even if they have no firm evidence for such realms.

It’s easy to confuse the hypotheses with the hype, but Halpern says there’s a huge difference between the multiverse that physicists propose and the mystical realm that’s portrayed in movies like “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

“Some people accuse scientists of trying to delve into science fiction if they even mention the multiverse,” Halpern says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “But the type of science that people are doing when they talk about the multiverse is real science. It’s far-reaching science, but it’s real science. Scientists are not saying, ‘Hey, maybe we can meet another Spider-Man and attack Kingpin that way.'”

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Fiction Science Club

How rowing has changed since ‘The Boys in the Boat’

Scene from "The Boys in the Boat" showing rowers in racing shell
"The Boys in the Boats" recounts the saga of the University of Washington's rowing crew in 1936. (Image Copyright © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

Thanks to tectonic shifts in technology and training, Olympic-level rowing has come a long way since the University of Washington’s eight-man crew pulled off the ultimate underdog win at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany — the achievement celebrated in the brand-new movie adaptation of “The Boys in the Boat.”

On paper, the performance of the rowers at the center of the movie — and at the center of the bestselling book on which the movie is based — pales in comparison with current Olympic and world records. Today, the world’s fastest time for a 2,000-meter course is just under 5 minutes and 20 seconds, which is more than a minute faster than the time that won the gold medal for the Boys in the Boat in Berlin.

One of the big reasons for that speedup can be found at Everett, Wash.-based Pocock Racing Shells. The company’s founder, George Pocock, built the Husky Clipper — the boat in which the Boys won their Olympic gold. In the movie, Pocock (as portrayed by Peter Guinness) plays a role similar to Yoda in the Star Wars saga, performing wizardry with wood and dispensing wisdom at just the right moment.

Today, wood just doesn’t cut it for championship-level racing shells. “The boats have no wood,” says John Tytus, the current president of Pocock Racing Shells. “These boats are all built out of advanced composites, mainly carbon fiber — which, for its weight, is the strongest material available.”

Lightweight materials are just part of the equation. Hydrodynamics and computer modeling have helped Tytus and other boatbuilders tweak their designs to an extent that would impress even George Pocock.

Science has also transformed how today’s rowing men and women are being trained to outperform the Boys in the Boat. “As stark as the difference between wood and carbon fiber might be, the training volume that the crews do now, compared to what the Boys did in ’36 — that’s actually a bigger quantum leap,” Tytus says.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Tytus explains how innovations have taken athletic performance far beyond what moviegoers see when they watch “The Boys in the Boat.”

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Scientists unveil complete cell atlas for mouse brain

Mandala combining visualizations of cell distribution in mouse brain
This mandala combines visualizations of cell types in the mouse brain. (Illustration via Allen Institute)

Neuroscientists have unveiled their most comprehensive and detailed map of cell types across the entire mouse brain, delivering the latest results of a six-year-long scientific effort in which Seattle’s Allen Institute has played a leading role.

Nine studies published today in the journal Nature document the identification of 5,322 different types of brain cells, and trace the similarities and differences found in a variety of mammalian species — including humans.

The work expands upon previous studies from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, including earlier surveys of cells in various regions of the mouse brain, as well as cross-species comparisons of cell functions. Researchers from the Allen Institute joined forces with colleagues from the Broad Institute, Harvard, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the University of California at San Diego, UC-Berkeley and other institutions to add to their “parts list” for the brain.

“Now we have the cell-type atlas of all the cells in the brain,” Hongkui Zeng, executive vice president and director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said in an explanatory video. “This is really a landmark achievement. … It marks the completion of a kind of work that strives for completeness. But it also marks the beginning of the next phase of the journey. It just opens up the door for the next generation of investigations.”

Zeng, who is the senior author of one of the papers in Nature and a co-author of five others, said the next step will be to figure out exactly what all those different cell types do, how their functions are affected by disease, and whether there might be yet-to-be-discovered ways to restore those proper functions.

“It’s not just about a catalog, a list of cell types and where they are — reference information which by itself is already important — but we begin to see how a brain is organized,” Zeng said.

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Scientists team up to turn cells into tiny recording devices

Cell lineage map
A small section of a cell lineage map produced using DNA Typewriter. (Allen Institute / UW Image)

The Allen Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the University of Washington have launched a collaboration called the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, with the goal of using genetically modified cells to capture a DNA-based record showing how they change over time.

If the project works out as hoped, it could lead to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind cellular processes — including, for example, how tumors grow — and point to new methods for fighting disease and promoting healthy cell growth.

Over the next five years, the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology will receive $35 million from the Allen Institute, and another $35 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

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