Complex Insight - Understanding our world

The number of observed exoplanets - worlds circling distant stars - has passed 1,000. Of these, 12 could be potentially habitable - orbiting at a distance where it is neither "too hot" nor "too cold" for water to be liquid on the surface. The planets are given away by tiny dips in light as they pass in front of their stars or through gravitational "tugs" on the star from an orbiting world.These new worlds are listed in the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia The tally now stands at 1,010 new exoplanets, bolstered by 11 new finds from the UK's Wide Angle Search for Planets (Wasp). Abel Mendez of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico, said that although the number has rapidly increased in recent years, due to a lack of funding this figure is much lower than it could be. In January 2013, astronomers used Kepler's data to estimate that there could be at least 17 billion Earth-sized exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. They said that one in six stars could host an Earth-sized planet in close orbit.

The challenge: Unlike pottery shards, arrowhead flints, and cave paintings, language does not leave an archaeological trace that can be uncovered by intrepid linguists bearing bullwhips. That makes anything we say about early human speech and language very speculative. (As I've mentioned elsewhere, e.g., How did languages evolve?, it's been deemed so speculative that at one point, the Paris Linguistics Society banned discussion on the topic in the 19th century.)

Dromedary camels could be responsible for passing to humans the deadly Mers coronavirus that emerged last year, research suggests.

... figuring out the universe is tough. There’s all these weird things — dark matter, quasars, cosmological expansion — that are genuinely difficult to get a good handle on. So anything that helps come to terms with how the cosmos works is commendable, and for that reason I really like this new 3-D map assembled by scientists working with the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan using data from the Subaru Telescope. 

New reconstructions of the genetic code of an ancient protein provides clues to the origins of life on Earth.

You wouldn’t know it, but there is an elaborate stealth communication network in the Earth beneath your feet. This smart web acts like a superorganism, fortifying defensive capabilities and coordinating deadly attacks on unsuspecting targets. But it’s not run by the NSA, the CIA, or the military. This web is made of bacteria

Led by Tanja Woyke, a microbiologist at the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, researchers used single-cell sequencing to read the genomes of 201 bacterial and archaeal cells taken from nine diverse environments, such as hydrothermal vents and an underground gold mine. None of the organisms had ever been sequenced or cultivated in a laboratory. The results are published today in Nature1.

"Research papers and data products are key outcomes of the science enterprise. Governmental, nongovernmental, and private foundation sponsors of research are increasingly recognizing the value of research data. As a result, most funders now require that sufficiently detailed data management plans be submitted as part of a research proposal. A data management plan (DMP) is a document that describes how you will treat your data during a project and what happens with the data after the project ends. Such plans typically cover all or portions of the data life cycle—from data discovery, collection, and organization (e.g., spreadsheets, databases), through quality assurance/quality control, documentation (e.g., data types, laboratory methods) and use of the data, to data preservation and sharing with others (e.g., data policies and dissemination approaches). "

Science and art don't intersect nearly as often as they should, but when they do, the results can be an astonishing blend of expression and fact. These are the best science and engineering visualizations from 2013.

If one human evolution paper published in 2013 sticks in my mind above all others, it has to be the wonderful report in the 18 October issue of the journal Science. The article in question described the beautiful fifth skull from Dmanisi in Georgia. Most commentators and colleagues were full of praise, but controversy soon reared its ugly head.

Just a month ago, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that this year's Nobel Prize for Physics would go to two of the original six researchers who proposed the existence of the so-called "Higgs particle" in 1964.

Scientists say there was a widespread extinction of bees 66 million years ago, at the same time as the event that killed off the dinosaurs.

The demise of the dinosaurs was almost certainly the result of an asteroid or comet hitting Earth. But the extinction event was selective, affecting some groups more than others. Writing in Plos One journal, the team used fossils and DNA analysis to show that one bee group suffered a serious decline at the time of this collision.

U.K. scientists find the first biological gears on a jumping insect half the size of a fire ant.

A malaria vaccine has shown promising results in early stage clinical trials, according to researchers.

Health officials are watching in horror as bacteria become resistant to powerful carbapenem antibiotics — one of the last drugs on the shelf.

Dolphins call each other by name using unique signature whistles, a study suggests.