Chuck's photo corner to Aug. 9th 2026

It's been a hot muggy couple of weeks. Way more rain than we usually get this time of summer. I even had to use the ac a few nights. Mainly to dry out the air in the bedroom, but a little cooler was nice as well. Still on average it's been a cooler summer especially some nights. Lawn cutting has been quite the chore with all the rain. Even some of the veggy garden is complaining about too much water.

hot peppers coming along

garden phlox

my fav red daylily washed out by yesterday's heavy rain storm

rudbeckia going crazy

rain pouring off the roof

rain and more rain

a misty morning

merlin came to look in at us during supper

dahlias with a long family history given to my by an old friend a few years ago

.

Up in the mountains earlier this week

day lily

choke cherry outside the dining room window,

looks like a variety of nicotina

this colour of bee balm was very popular with the bees

the thistle was a bee favorite as well

crossing the Ottawa river on the ferry, I spotted this boat one of the largest I have seen on the Ottawa.

Enjoy the day

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

What if The Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness? Scientist Proposes It Might Be The Fabric of Reality Itself

09 Aug. 2026, By E. ÖZ

https://www.sciencealert.com/what-if-the-brain-doesnt-create-consciousness-scientist-proposes-it-might-be-the-fabric-of-reality-itself

(Mevans/E+/Getty Images)

For decades, neuroscientists have searched the brain for the biological basis of consciousness, assuming our thoughts, emotions, and subjective experiences emerge from networks of neurons.

But what if that assumption is incomplete?

That's the provocative question explored by neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute in Seattle.

Koch recently presented his 'challenges' to our understanding of consciousness at the Bial Foundation's 'Behind and Beyond the Brain' symposium in Porto, Portugal, in April 2026 – building on a body of published work that includes this 2016 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Koch explained to ScienceAlert that it may be time to rethink one of neuroscience's deepest assumptions: that consciousness is something the brain produces.

Koch does not dispute the brain's essential role in conscious experience.

Decades of research have shown that injuries, disease, anesthesia, and electrical stimulation can profoundly alter – or even eliminate – awareness.

Instead, he asks a different question: Does the brain create consciousness, or could it be shaping something more fundamental?

Despite remarkable progress in understanding how the brain processes information, neuroscience still faces a profound mystery, Koch argues.

Scientists can increasingly identify the neural circuits involved in perception, memory, emotion, and decision-making. Yet those discoveries still cannot explain why physical brain activity is accompanied by subjective experience.

As Koch writes in a new, as-yet unpublished essay shared with ScienceAlert: "Nothing in science explains how three pounds of matter, a piece of furniture of the Universe like any other, subjects to the same natural laws, can love, hate, dream, imagine, fear or hope for its future."

It isn't the first time Koch has grappled publicly with this puzzle. In 2023, he conceded a 25-year bet with philosopher David Chalmers, admitting neuroscience was no closer to pinning down consciousness's neural mechanism than when he made the wager in 1998.

(Ashley Batz/Unsplash)




To address that question, Koch turns to a philosophical framework known as analytic idealism, which proposes that consciousness may be a fundamental feature of reality rather than something generated by the brain.

Within this framework, the brain is viewed less as a producer of consciousness and more as a filter or shaper of conscious experience.

The ideas did not emerge from a single scientific experiment. Instead, Koch describes a deeply personal experience that fundamentally changed the way he thinks about consciousness and reality.

Several years ago, while sitting alone on a beach, he recalls the boundary between himself and the world dissolving, describing the experience as a timeless and universal reality.

In his essay, Koch describes the experience as "the most meaningful of my life," writing that it "flipped my view of reality".

Koch is careful not to present the experience as scientific evidence. Instead, he writes that it gave him "a view of Mind-at-Large" and prompted him to re-examine the metaphysical assumptions that had guided much of his scientific career, taking alternative philosophical perspectives more seriously.

He also acknowledges that such experiences are inherently subjective. But he argues they should not be dismissed simply because they are difficult to explain, suggesting they, too, are part of the phenomenon science is ultimately trying to understand.

(Dmitry Berdnyk/Unsplash)

In the essay, he points to developments in modern physics as another reminder that some of science's deepest assumptions have already been revised. He does not argue that quantum physics explains consciousness. Rather, he suggests that the history of physics shows scientists have repeatedly been forced to rethink the nature of reality when new evidence emerged.

Koch argues that "our understanding of reality must be rebuilt on a simpler foundation, compatible with both the 'objective' outcome of empirical science as well as with 'subjective' experience."

Koch argues that if current assumptions about consciousness prove incomplete, neuroscience itself may eventually require a similarly profound conceptual shift.

The ideas also have implications for artificial intelligence. If consciousness is not simply the product of increasingly complex computation, the path toward conscious machines may be more complicated than simply building increasingly powerful AI systems.

That does not mean future AI systems could never become conscious. Rather, he argues that the debate cannot be settled simply by making computers more intelligent or more computationally sophisticated.

Koch acknowledges that analytic idealism is not an established scientific theory but a metaphysical framework whose future depends on whether its ideas can be translated into empirically testable hypotheses.

As he writes, "The most important task for the future is to take these insights and translate them into empirically testable hypotheses."

He argues that consciousness remains one of science's greatest unsolved mysteries, and that understanding it may require researchers to rethink long-held assumptions about the relationship between mind, brain, and reality.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Cave Discovery Suggests Neanderthals and Modern Humans May Have Shared Culture

BY KYOTO U., AUG. 8, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/cave-discovery-suggests-neanderthals-and-modern-humans-may-have-shared-culture/

A distant view of the Üçağızlı II Cave in southern Türkiye. 

Credit: KyotoU / Naoki Morimoto

Modern humans and Neanderthals may have shared more than land and genes. They may have also shared culture.

Modern humans and Neanderthals may have shared more than territory, tools, and genes. New evidence from a cave in southern Türkiye suggests the two groups may also have exchanged ideas and developed similar symbolic traditions over thousands of years.

The discovery comes from Üçağızlı II Cave, a site near one of the most important migration routes in human history. The Levant connected Africa with Eurasia, making it a natural passage for Homo sapiens leaving Africa and a likely meeting ground with Neanderthals already living farther north.

Despite the region’s importance, human remains from this period are extremely rare. An international team involving researchers from Türkiye, France, Japan, and Kyoto University spent five years excavating the cave with exceptional precision.

Their work revealed that Neanderthals and modern humans used the site across a period of more than 20,000 years. Both groups made similar stone tools and appear to have relied on comparable methods to survive in the same environment.

The research team performing excavations at the cave site in 2024. 

Credit: KyotoU / Naoki Morimoto
Ancient Shells Hint at Shared Symbolic Culture



The most revealing finds, however, were not tools or food remains.

Both groups deliberately collected the same type of marine shell, even though it offered virtually no nutritional value. Such objects may have been worn, displayed, exchanged, or valued for their appearance, although their exact purpose remains unknown.

That detail is important because symbolic behavior has often been treated as a defining feature of modern humans. Evidence that Neanderthals selected the same unusual shells raises the possibility that cultural preferences passed between the two populations, or that they participated in a shared regional tradition.

“Our findings indicate a deep level of cultural interaction,” says corresponding author Naoki Morimoto of KyotoU. “These two distinct but closely related human groups were not just adapting to the same environment: they were probably sharing symbolic preferences.”

The research team at the excavation site in 2024.

 Credit: KyotoU / Naoki Morimoto

What the Fossils Reveal About Early Migration

The cave also contained modern human fossils dating to approximately 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, placing them near a crucial stage in the spread of Homo sapiens beyond Africa.

These individuals may have been closely related to the founding population that eventually gave rise to today’s non-African populations. Another possibility is that they belonged to an earlier migration whose descendants remained in the Levant longer than scientists previously recognized.

Drone footage of the Üçağızlı II Cave in southern Türkiye.

 Credit: KyotoU / Naoki Morimoto

The findings add to a growing picture of Neanderthals and modern humans as populations whose lives repeatedly overlapped. Their encounters may have involved competition and interbreeding, but the shells suggest something more subtle: the movement of tastes, traditions, or meaning across species boundaries.

Üçağızlı II Cave therefore offers more than a record of two human groups occupying the same place. It provides a rare glimpse of a world in which different kinds of humans may have watched, learned from, and influenced one another.

The birth of modern Man

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Avocados Switch Sex on a Daily Basis, And Researchers Finally Know How

08 Aug. 2026, By I. FARKAS

https://www.sciencealert.com/avocados-switch-sex-on-a-daily-basis-and-researchers-finally-know-how

Persea americana avocado fruit, as analyzed in this research.

  (B.navez/Wikimedia Commons)

At some point in evolutionary history, possibly around 400 million years ago, things started having sex.

This adaptational (and sensual) advance introduced multiple benefits by allowing increased gene sharing, thereby helping to prune deleterious mutations and boost general fitness.

Avocado trees also ostensibly like to have sex, but face a problem: Each tree's flowers have both female and male reproductive organs, so they must somehow avoid self-pollination to derive such sexual benefits.

They do this through a clever evolutionary trick called temporal dichogamy, where the flowers of avocado trees (and many other angiosperms) functionally 'switch sexes' each day.

Yet the underlying genetic basis has fascinated and frustrated botanists and growers for over a century.

In a new study, a team of ecologists and agricultural engineers combined field observations with genetic analyses to finally crack the conundrum of avocado sexuality, revealing their dichogamy-defining gene variants.

"Our study provides a genetic explanation for a century-old mystery of avocado pollination," says Jeffrey Groh, an evolutionary geneticist now at the University of California (UC) Berkeley.

At any moment, an avocado tree may be functionally female or male, with its flowers either receiving or releasing pollen, respectively.

They also display complementary sexual schedules.

"A-type" avocado trees open their female flowers in the morning and their male flowers in the afternoon, while a basically equal population of "B-type" avocado trees do the opposite – avoiding perils of self-pollination.

An image showing an avocado tree's flowers being both open and closed.

  (Jeffrey Groh/UC Davis)



"Flowers are not just static decorations; they are highly evolved and dynamic structures. We can see this in the pulsating rhythm of avocado flowers opening and closing throughout the day," says Groh.

"Through the power of genetics, we can detect traces of this rhythm far into the ancient past."

To approximate an avocado gender reveal, the researchers mapped the genomes of hundreds of avocado trees in varying detail, including the activity of genes at specific times of the day.

They also conducted an avocado 'sex watch,' spending days and nights documenting the hour-by-hour opening and closing of thousands of flowers that react to tiny changes in temperature and light.

The researchers discovered evidence that the activity of a single gene, named SDMYB, oscillates like a clock and controls A- or B-type flowering behaviors.

Researchers tracked the flowering phases of A- and B-type avocado plants over consecutive days. 

Flowers of Persea americana in the female (B) and male phase (C) are also shown. (Groh et al., PNAS, 2026)

The SDMYB gene comes in two variants, known as alleles. A-type trees carry one of each gene variant, while B-type trees hold two copies of the recessive version, providing a revelation that promises to supercharge avocado science.

"These genetic markers will greatly speed up avocado breeding and research," explains Graham Coop, an evolutionary geneticist and professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis, as well as the study's senior author.

"This has been a major impediment for avocado breeders. Previously, you could not tell whether a plant was an A- or a B- type until it flowered, and avocado plants may take up to 10 or 15 years to flower in the first place."

Unveiling these genetic blueprints, which appear to have emerged more than 42 million years ago, can pay immediate dividends.

"This is something we can begin using right away," says Marllon Soares dos Santos, an agricultural engineer at UC Riverside and one of the study's co-authors.

For example, California avocado growers may stock 10 percent of an orchard with B-type pollinizer trees to help their neighboring A-type trees produce more fruit.

Yet the fruit of B-type trees is commercially undesirable, unlike the world's favorite, supermarket-stocked Hass avocado, an A-type treat.

"Instead of planting hundreds of seedlings and waiting years to see which flower type they become," Soares Dos Santos explains, "we can make those decisions at the beginning. That makes breeding much more efficient."

So, given the creative cultivation of other popular plants, like grapes, might we be making cotton-candy-flavored guacamole anytime soon?

Alas, gene editing applications may remain many years away. But the genetic markers illuminated in this work will allow breeders to select the plants they want without having to wait for them to flower – saving them time, labor, and orchard space.

"People have wondered about this trait since avocado breeding began in California," concludes Eric Focht, a botany-and-plant-sciences researcher at UCR and one of the study's co-authors.

"Now we finally understand the genetics behind it, and we can use that knowledge to build the next generation of avocados."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Meet the 30-Million-Year-Old Dog That Climbed Trees Instead of Chasing Sticks

BY M. SHERBURNE, U. OF MICHIGAN, AUG. 6, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/meet-the-30-million-year-old-dog-that-climbed-trees-instead-of-chasing-sticks/

Anne Kort, an assistant professor in the Museum of Paleontology and a Michigan Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar, excavates a horse leg bone at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Oregon.

 Credit: Nicholas Famoso, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument

A nearly complete fossil shows that one early dog combined climbing ability with a body unlike those of modern running canids.

For more than 30 years, a fossil roughly 30 million years old remained sealed inside rock in an Oregon museum collection. When paleontologists first recovered it, they believed it might belong to an oreodont, an abundant group of extinct mammals related to sheep, camels and pigs.

Researchers later recognized the specimen as an early dog. University of Michigan paleontologist Anne Kort has now identified it as one of the most complete pre-Ice Age dog fossils ever found in North America. The animal belongs to Mesocyon coryphaeus, a species named in 1879 that had previously been known only from individual skulls.

Kort was asked to study and describe the fossil for a special issue of the Journal of Paleontology marking the 50th anniversary of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, known as JODA. The specimen was discovered in the late 1980s on Bureau of Land Management property near the Oregon monument.

Kaori Chambers, University of Michigan graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology, created an artistic representation of Mesocyon coryphaeus. U-M paleontologist Anne Kort identified a fossil as one of the most complete Mesocyon coryphaeus specimens found yet. The specimen was a fossil dog the size of a coyote. 

Credit: Kaori Chambers, University of Michigan



Paleontologists removed the fossil together with the rock surrounding it, then enclosed the entire block in a protective plaster jacket. During the 1990s, researchers separated the skull for display and determined that it came from a dog. In 2012, park paleontologists, including study coauthor Jennifer Cavin prepared the rest of the skeleton and recognized how much of the animal had survived.

“They thought at first it was an oreodont, which we like to call sheep-camel-pigs,” said Kort, who was a postdoctoral scholar at U-M’s Museum of Paleontology. “This was the most magical, fun project to just be handed on a silver platter.”
Multiple clues confirm an early dog

Paleontologists usually identify an ancient dog by comparing its skull, teeth and other anatomical features with those of known canid fossils. This specimen contained another revealing clue: a hereditary bone growth at the end of the wrist called an osteochondroma. The same condition occurs in approximately 60% of the earliest known dog fossils.

University of Michigan paleontologist Anne Kort identified a fossil as one of the most complete Mesocyon coryphaeus specimens found yet. The specimen, a fossil dog the size of a coyote, had an elbow joint suggesting it could climb and grapple, according to Kort. 

Credit: Anne Kort, University of Michigan



“It’s just this really cool direct hereditary link that we wouldn’t normally find,” Kort said. “This is another line of evidence, and that gives you an idea of how great this fossil is.”

Nearly the entire skeleton is preserved. Only the tail and portions of the hands and feet are missing. Its completeness also allowed the researchers to determine the animal’s sex without relying on indirect anatomical estimates.

“The other fun thing is, it even had the baculum, so, the penis bone,” Kort said. “That means we definitely know this was a male.”
This dog had not mastered running

According to Kort, dogs originated in North America approximately 40 million years ago. Their common ancestor was a canid called Hesperocyon. At that time, much of the continent was covered by dense forests resembling rainforests, and Hesperocyon was probably a “pretty good climber,” unlike dogs living today, Kort says.

A fossil of Mesocyon coryphaeus was found on Bureau of Land Management land in the 1980s, near the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. 

Credit: Image courtesy of National Park Service. Mural created by Roger Witter




Mesocyon appeared about 10 million years later as the global climate cooled. Dense forests were gradually replaced by more open woodlands and, in some places, shrublands. Kort examined the unusually complete skeleton to determine whether Mesocyon had already developed the running adaptations seen in modern dogs.

“The answer is pretty definitely no,” said Kort, who studies the interaction between environment and running adaptations in mammals. “Mesocyon also just has more robust bones in general. It’s shorter and stockier.”

The shape of the elbow joint indicates that Mesocyon could rotate its forearms, an ability that would have helped it grapple and climb, Kort says. The animal also retained a large first toe, represented by the dew claw in modern dogs. This anatomy suggests that Mesocyon sometimes placed its heel on the ground rather than walking entirely on its toes as dogs do today.

University of Michigan paleontologist Anne Kort identified a fossil as one of the most complete Mesocyon coryphaeus specimens found yet. Kort said the dog, which was about the size of a coyote, likely at least occasionally walked from heel to toe and was not adapted for running, whereas modern dogs walk on their tip toes and are adapted for running. 

Credit: Anne Kort, University of Michigan



Extinction erased a different dog ecology

Kort says the specimen also illustrates a broader consequence of extinction. When a species and its relatives disappear, the distinctive way they lived disappears with them.

“This fossil is not our current dogs’ great-great-great uncle, because this whole line went fully extinct. And with that extinction, we did lose a whole kind of dog ecology that we just don’t see anymore,” she said. “I think sometimes there’s an assumption that life finds a way if something goes extinct. It will be replaced, or something will magically bounce back.

“But evolution never finds a perfect fit, it finds good fits. So when we lose things, they’re gone forever. They’re never going to be perfectly replaced, and I think that’s an important lesson to take away when we’re thinking about extinctions today.”

JODA paleontologist Ted Fremd originally found the fossil, made its recovery a priority, and completed the first preparation work that exposed the skull. JODA paleontologist Joshua Samuels assigned Cavin to remove the remaining skeleton from its protective jacket in 2011. Nicholas Famoso, now the chief paleontologist at JODA, later proposed that Kort study the specimen. Xiaoming Wang of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is also a coauthor of the research.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Wild Boars in Brazil Are Spreading Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, Scientists Warn

08 August 2026, By S. VARTAN

https://www.sciencealert.com/wild-boars-in-brazil-are-spreading-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria-scientists-warn

(Raimund Linke/The Image Bank/Getty Images)

If it feels like there are wild boars everywhere now, you're not imagining things.

Feral pig populations are rapidly expanding in North America (especially Texas and Arizona), Europe, and South America.

Now, besides causing damage to agricultural crops and invading suburban backyards, these wild boars could also be helping to spread antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to a new study from Brazil.

Public-health officials in Brazil have been concerned that the commercialization of wild boars, which are being bred for food there, may harbor zoonotic and antimicrobial-resistant bacteria.

But they didn't have good data, just a strong hunch.

So to find out if their suspicions were true, researchers collected rectal swabs from 100 healthy European wild boars (Sus scrofa scrofa) raised on two commercial farms in Goiás State, Brazil.

A wild boar (Sus scrofa) in the Lainzer Tiergarten nature reserve in the southwest of Vienna, Austria.

 (Valentin Panzirsch/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)



They screened the samples for Salmonella and E. coli, tested the bacteria against a panel of commonly used antibiotics, and searched for genes linked to virulence – the traits that can make bacteria better at infecting hosts.

The good news is that the researchers found very little evidence of Salmonella, but the bad news is that more than half of the animals carried E. coli, and almost every one of those bacterial strains was resistant to multiple antibiotics.

Although the one sample of Salmonella that turned up was resistant to several antibiotics, it lacked the virulence and resistance genes the researchers examined, suggesting the immediate Salmonella risk was relatively low.

E. coli painted a much more concerning picture.

The bacterium was isolated from 56 of the 100 wild boars, and 55 of them – a whopping 98.2 percent – qualified as multidrug resistant, meaning they could withstand antibiotics from multiple drug classes.

Resistance was particularly common against sulfonamides, tetracycline, amoxicillin, ampicillin, and doxycycline. If you recognize some of those names, it's because they are the most common, inexpensive frontline antibiotics.

A baby wild boar (Sus scrofa) in a wildlife park in the Netherlands.

 (Sander van der Wel/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0)



Nearly all of the isolates remained susceptible to ceftriaxone, a critically important antibiotic in human medicine, but the researchers caution that even the small amount of resistance they detected deserves close monitoring.

Overall, they called the prevalence of drug-resistant E.Coli a "striking finding", which is as close to a 'yikes' as you can get from a scientist.

The team also looked for genes associated with bacterial virulence. Nearly 30 percent of the E. coli isolates carried the tsh gene, while fewer possessed papC and iss – genes linked to adhesion, survival in the bloodstream, and successful colonization of hosts.

Several bacteria carried more than one of these genes – combinations that could potentially increase their ability to cause disease.

According to farm managers, the wild boars were not routinely given antibiotics. That raises an obvious question: where did all this resistance come from?

The researchers suspect the environment itself may be the answer.

Antibiotic resistance genes can persist in soil and water, circulate among environmental microbes, and move between bacteria via mobile pieces of DNA.

Wild boars are also highly mobile, opportunistic animals that frequently interact with livestock, wildlife, and human-modified landscapes, creating all kinds of opportunities for resistant bacteria to spread even without direct antibiotic use.

Thinking holistically about the environment surrounding animals, even those in agricultural settings, is part of Brazil's One Health approach, which recognizes the "intersectoral health challenges" of human, animal, and environmental health.

Rather than viewing antibiotic resistance as purely a medical problem, One Health considers how resistant bacteria can move across ecosystems – from farms to forests, wildlife to livestock, and ultimately to people.

This systems thinking is why the researchers are looking at these wild boar-antibiotics issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUKIyXc37Ug

As commercial wild boar farming expands in Brazil and escaped animals continue to establish wild populations, these invasive pigs could become an increasingly important reservoir for antimicrobial-resistant bacteria.

The researchers argue that captive wild boars should now be considered part of the health-surveillance network.

European wild boars weren't always part of South America's landscape.

Domestic pigs arrived with European settlers centuries ago, while wild boars were introduced in the early 1900s by an Argentine rancher for hunting. Since then, escaped animals have spread across the continent, interbred with domestic pigs, and established thriving populations.

In Brazil, their success has been fueled by a landscape that offers the best of both worlds: forest fragments that provide shelter alongside agricultural fields full of calorie-rich crops like corn and sugarcane.

Their continued spread has turned them into one of the country's most successful – and controversial – invasive mammals.

The study does come with important caveats. The samples were collected between 2014 and 2017, so the scale of the issue may have changed in the years since.

The researchers also relied on farm managers' reports that antibiotics were not routinely used, rather than independently verifying those records, and they examined animals from only two farms.

Even so, the work provides some of the first detailed data on antibiotic resistance in wild boars in Brazil – and a timely reminder that the fight against antimicrobial resistance won't be won in hospitals alone.

Sometimes it starts by paying attention to what's wandering through the woods.

The Life of Earth

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This Ancient Grain Could Help Transform Children’s Gut Health

By Cornell U., August 7, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/this-ancient-grain-could-help-transform-childrens-gut-health/

A biofortified pearl millet containing substantially more iron and zinc produced measurable changes in toddlers’ developing gut microbiomes.

 Credit: Shutterstock

Iron-rich pearl millet may improve toddler nutrition without disrupting the developing gut microbiome.

Each day, hundreds of toddlers in Mumbai’s urban slums ate porridge, soft curry, or freshly baked foods prepared for young children. Some meals contained ordinary pearl millet, an ancient grain widely eaten in India. Others used a specially bred millet with almost three times as much iron and more zinc than conventional grain. The foods tasted much the same, but the fortified grain was producing measurable changes inside the children’s developing gut microbiomes.

Iron deficiency is the world’s most common nutritional disorder, affecting about one quarter of the global population. Without enough iron, the body cannot make sufficient hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood. The resulting iron-deficiency anemia can interfere with physical health, brain development, and cognitive function.

Researchers at the Cornell Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition and Health, working with collaborators in India and at the University of California San Diego, studied toddlers who ate iron- and zinc-biofortified pearl millet for nine months. They found none of the adverse effects commonly associated with higher iron intake. Instead, the children developed distinct gut microbial changes that may be beneficial.

Published in Nature Communications and presented at the American Society for Nutrition’s annual meeting, the research is believed to be among the first studies to examine how eating a biofortified crop affects the human gut microbiome.

“We thought that a food-based approach could help us move away from one-size-fits-all supplementation strategies to address population health, while also being a way to personalize nutritional interventions,” said Dr. Saurabh Mehta, founding director and Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor at the Jacobs center in the College of Human Ecology, and the principal investigator on the study. “So, we decided to test it.”

Iron deficiency affects approximately one in four people and can be especially damaging during early childhood, when it may slow brain development and weaken resistance to infection. Iron supplements can correct the deficiency, but previous research has identified an important drawback. Because the body absorbs only part of a large supplemental dose, excess iron can reach the colon, encourage harmful pathogens, and restrict beneficial microbes. Supplements may also cause diarrhea, constipation, and tarry stools. Those effects are particularly concerning in infants and toddlers because their gut ecosystems are still developing and remain highly sensitive to outside influences.
A staple crop tests a safer approach

The trial included 223 children between 12 and 18 months old living in Mumbai’s urban slums, where iron deficiency and anemia remain widespread. Half received meals prepared with biofortified millet containing 8.7 mg of iron per 100 grams. The remaining children ate standard millet containing 3 mg per 100 grams. Researchers collected rectal swabs before and after the intervention, then sequenced the samples to chart each child’s gut microbial community.

“We had to work with growers to develop the millet. Then we procured 38 tons of millet, split between the two types, and we had to identify storage facilities with the proper temperature and humidity,” said Samantha Huey, research associate in the Jacobs center and co-first author of the study. “We tested it for contamination and to make sure it had the iron and zinc we wanted it to have.”

SNDT Women’s University in India helped create the millet recipes and foods. Working with the Mumbai-based Centre for the Study of Social Change, researchers distributed the meals across 20 locations. At every feeding center, a research assistant recorded how much each child consumed twice daily, with another meal sent home. The schedule continued six days per week for nine months.

Microbial genes reveal what changed

“The sequencing technique that was used allowed us to delve deeper than just describing the types of bacteria present in these children’s guts – we could also understand what they were actually doing,” said co-first author Nathanial Cole, a postdoctoral associate in the Jacobs Center.

“We compared the DNA from these children’s gut communities to reference DNA from other species with known functions, allowing us to predict what these microbes were doing based on genetic similarities,” he said. “This approach enabled us to track how the gut microbiome developed over time and how it responded to the biofortified pearl millet.”

The biofortified millet was associated with increased activity in microbial pathways involved in resisting pathogens. These included pathways that produce natural antibiotic-like compounds, along with antioxidant metabolism that helps support a healthier intestinal environment. By the end of the trial, the children who received the fortified grain also had fewer microbial markers associated with harmful bacteria.

The researchers observed another pattern in both groups. As the toddlers grew older, their gut microbiomes became more diverse and developed a broader range of metabolic abilities, making them better prepared to process different foods. This progression is expected as a healthy gut ecosystem matures during the first years of life.

Biofortification could scale beyond supplements

“Iron supplementation is usually given at high doses because it isn’t well absorbed, but excess ends up in the colon and can allow harmful bacteria to proliferate,” Huey said. “Biofortification increases the nutrient density of the plant via genetic engineering, agronomic practices or – what we used – traditional cross breeding.”

Supplements depend on reliable distribution systems and consistent individual use. Biofortified crops could instead be cultivated, prepared and eaten in the same ways as ordinary staple foods. That could make them a more self-sustaining strategy, Huey said.

Larger studies involving more diverse populations will be necessary before biofortified crops can be recommended as a gut-friendly alternative to supplements. Even so, the approach may have value in lower and middle-income countries as well as wealthier nations. Iron deficiency remains a significant problem in the United States, where biofortification could strengthen agriculture while providing climate-smart, high-yield staple crops with nutrients the body can readily absorb.

The strategy also reflects a broader shift in nutrition guidance toward minimally processed foods.

“The latest dietary guidelines are now stressing eating whole foods and limiting ultra-processed foods and additives,” Huey said. “Growing crops that are naturally more nutrient-dense, rather than relying on adding micronutrients back in during food manufacturing, aligns with these recommendations.”

The Life of Earth

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'Barbarians' Have Been Misunderstood For Centuries, Researchers Explain

06 August 2026, By D. NIELD

https://www.sciencealert.com/historys-barbarians-were-far-more-sophisticated-than-we-give-them-credit-for

(Lorado/E+/Getty Images)

The word 'barbarian' comes to use from the ancient Greeks: Originally meaning simply 'foreigner', its connotations quickly drifted towards savagery, wildness, and violence.

Those historical associations linger: These days, the term is most commonly used to suggest people who are primitive and aggressive.

In a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Research, a team of researchers from the US and Sweden breaks down how those labeled as barbarians throughout history aren't quite as disorganized and unsophisticated as narratives might have us believe.

The history, after all, was most often written by those under attack from these so-called barbarians, rather than the 'barbarians' themselves.

The Haudenosaunee were one of the groups studied, shown here fighting the Algonquian near Lake Champlain in the US 

(Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)

Four case studies are used to advance the authors' argument: the Vikings who raided fleets over centuries; the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy in North America, which reached its peak around 1700; the Sea Peoples of the Mediterranean; and the Comanche tribe of the American Southwest (most active in the 17th and 18th centuries).

"Historical knowledge about these groups comes largely from colonial or imperialist outsiders who mischaracterized them as irrational and violent," anthropologist Jennifer Birch of the University of Georgia and colleagues write in their published paper.

"This characterization masks the fact that these decentralized groups achieved large-scale strategic coordination in the absence of centralized power."

Digging into historical records and past studies, the researchers built up a framework that draws together commonalities between these various groups.

For example, decentralization was used as a deliberate strategy, making these groups – without a single leader or capital city – much harder to defeat.

The Comanche Meeting the Dragoons oil-on-canvas painting by US artist George Caitlin.

 (Wikimedia/Public domain)



Rather than looking to top-down leadership, these 'barbarians' relied on social ties with other clans and tributes, as well as trading partners, to further their interests.

The process of raiding was more strategic and less haphazard than it has been portrayed as well: The researchers acknowledge these activities as coordinated ways of amassing wealth, resources, and prisoners for the overall benefit of these groups.

"We propose that the decentralized, militarized nature of so-called 'barbarians' were conscious political strategies, often undertaken in opposition to encroachment on the part of pre-modern states and empires," write the study authors.

These strategies could be modified over time, the researchers point out, as the contemporary context changed. Resources could still be amassed, but the distribution was different.

However, this wouldn't necessarily have been evident to the Greeks, Romans, and other communities who encountered 'barbarians'. What outsiders described as uncoordinated was actually a careful mix of autonomy among groups and the pursuit of collective gains.

"This was accomplished by drawing down upon and augmenting a repertoire of institutions, resources, and strategies that allowed them to scale up their activities without the development of centralized power structures," write the researchers.

"The successful strategies of these groups involved balancing the actions and roles of multiple sets of institutions – clans, nations, and confederacies; kin groups, fleets, and nascent polities – in coordinated socio-political structures."

This helps reframe the historical narrative of how warfare and politics evolved in the past. It's also a reminder that history has largely been told by civilizations that wrote things down, yet that one-sided perspective rarely captures the full picture or nuances of different communities.

All of these groups were forced to adapt as more centralized powers with greater numbers took over the regions they lived in.

However, there's still a lot that we can learn from them – and the team is keen to see their framework applied to other groups too.

"Additional systematic cross-cultural comparison would offer much to the discussion of how large-scale decentralized collective societies functioned as well as identifying and explaining variation and change in the same," write the researchers.

We know that many cultures shared oral histories – and continue to do so to this day – histories that enrich the archaeological record, or even challenge what scientists and historians have drawn from it.

"Archaeological data alone may not be sufficient for observing and documenting the kinds of collective behaviors – e.g., alliances, strategic compacts, and military campaigns – that such groups engaged in," the researchers conclude.

The birth of modern Man

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Two Mysterious ‘Ghost’ Ancestors Are Hiding in Our DNA

By R. Sanders, U. of California Berkeley, August 6, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/two-mysterious-ghost-ancestors-are-hiding-in-our-dna/

A new genomic technique has revealed ghost ancestry from two unknown human lineages hidden in modern DNA. 

Credit: SciTechDaily.com



Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with the ancestors of modern humans, leaving recognizable traces in our DNA. Evidence now suggests that modern humans also interbred with two much older, unidentified ancestral groups.

Hidden within the genomes of people alive today are fragments of DNA from two unidentified human ancestors. Researchers at UC Berkeley traced these genetic regions to ancient episodes of interbreeding involving modern humans and at least four archaic human groups.

Earlier studies had suggested that modern humans mixed with hominins beyond the now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans. The new analysis goes further by locating the DNA inherited from these unknown populations and estimating when the interbreeding occurred. To uncover those relationships, the researchers developed a method that reconstructs ancient genealogies from hundreds of present-day human genomes.

Using genealogical relationships in DNA, TRACE uncovers hidden contributions from extinct human populations that left no sequenced genomes. 

Credit: Meaghan Marohn

Two unknown lineages entered our DNA

One unidentified population, described as a ghost ancestor, interbred with modern humans in Africa before 50,000 years ago. This happened before the most recent migration of Homo sapiens from Africa into Europe and Asia.

DNA from this lineage accounts for around 1% of the modern human genome, roughly comparable to the amount inherited from Neanderthals. The ghost lineage separated from the ancestors of modern humans around 800,000 years ago, near the time when Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged, although its interbreeding with modern humans occurred earlier.

“Previous publications suggested that there might be ghost ancestry — ancestry from unknown archaic lineages in modern humans — but they hadn’t concluded whether this unknown ancestry is present only in Africans or not, and when this introgression event happened,” said Berkeley graduate student Yulin Zhang, one of two first authors of the study. “We were actually able to find and map genomic locations in modern humans that are from this ghost lineage and show that this ghost ancestry is in all modern humans, not only in Africans.”

A timeline showing four separate instances (colored arrows) of archaic hominins interbreeding with early Homo sapiens. The dates were inferred from a genealogical analysis of present-day human genomes using TRACE, a technique developed at UC Berkeley.

 Credit: Yulin Zhang and Priya Moorjani/UC Berkeley

The second unidentified population, called a super-archaic ancestor, belonged to a hominin lineage dating back 1.8 million years. It interbred with Denisovans in Eurasia, and Denisovans later passed some of that super-archaic DNA to modern humans through interbreeding with Homo sapiens.

“The super-archaic finding is particularly exciting because it reveals genetic contributions from a human lineage that lived over a million years ago, despite the absence of any sequenced DNA from that population,” said Arjun Biddanda, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University and a co-first author of the study

The results reinforce a growing view of human evolution in which early modern humans repeatedly encountered related hominin populations across Africa and Eurasia. These groups were genetically similar enough to produce offspring together throughout much of the past million years.

“With ancient DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans and with these new genealogical methods, we are learning that mixture among human populations has been very pervasive across time, and that this is also likely to be true at ancient time scales,” said Priya Moorjani, a Berkeley associate professor of molecular and cell biology. “We often think of human evolution as a branching tree, but new genomic data and analytical methods reveal a much more interconnected history — more like a complex web of populations connected by repeated episodes of migration and mixing.”

The identities of the ghost and super-archaic ancestors remain uncertain. However, their estimated divergence dates overlap with Middle Pleistocene Homo groups living in Africa about 800,000 years ago and Homo erectus populations in Eurasia around 1.8 million years ago.

Zhang, Biddanda, Moorjani and their colleagues published their findings July 30 in the journal Science.
Known fossils revealed only part

Modern humans leaving Africa approximately 50,000 years ago encountered and interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia. Both older lineages eventually disappeared, but parts of their genomes survived in their modern human descendants.

Researchers uncovered that history by extracting and sequencing ancient DNA preserved in Neanderthal and Denisovan fossils. Yet the human genome also contained signs of interbreeding that appeared to be much older.

Identifying the source of those signals was difficult because no DNA has been recovered from the other extinct hominins that might have contributed them.

TRACE reconstructs ancestry without fossils

Moorjani’s group created TRACE (TRacking Archaic Contributions via ARG Estimation), a method that searches for archaic DNA using complete genomes from living people rather than genetic material from ancient fossils.

The researchers analyzed genomes from populations around the world and reconstructed an ancestral recombination graph (ARG), which charts how segments of DNA connect through shared ancestry across time.

“Genealogies preserve a record of our evolutionary past,” said Moorjani. “TRACE reconstructs those histories across the genome. By identifying regions whose ancestry extends unusually far back in time, we can uncover genetic contributions from extinct human populations, even in the absence of ancient DNA.”

As an initial test, TRACE identified some exceptionally old regions that matched the sequenced Neanderthal genome. Neanderthal ancestry accounts for about 1% of the modern human genome.

When the researchers focused on people from Asia and Oceania, the populations with substantial amounts of Denisovan ancestry, the method also correctly located known regions of Denisovan introgression.

Many other ancient DNA segments matched neither Neanderthals nor Denisovans. The researchers concluded that these regions came from two separate lineages that entered the human family at different times.

Ghost ancestry appeared in both African and non-African populations. That widespread distribution indicates that the interbreeding occurred before modern humans made their final major departure from Africa and expanded around the world.

“We discovered that about 2% of the modern human genome is from archaic hominins,” Zhang said. “In the case of the ghost lineage, modern-day Africans and non-African populations both inherited similar amounts of ghost ancestry. Each individual has about 0.5 to 1% of their genome inherited from this ghost lineage.”

To recover evidence of the second lineage, the researchers examined genomes from people in Oceania, where Denisovan ancestry can reach as much as 4%.

The super-archaic signal appeared inside regions inherited from Denisovans, suggesting that Denisovans first acquired this DNA and later passed it to modern humans. Denisovan genomes contain between 3% and 5% super-archaic ancestry, but only a small portion of that DNA reached people living today, Moorjani said.

“TRACE allowed us to contextualize how the ancestry segments from these previously uncharacterized hominins are distributed throughout the human genome,” Biddanda said. “We found that these contributions are widespread throughout the genome, and ghost ancestry is detected even in regions previously thought to be intolerant of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry.”

Ancient mixing may shape immunity

Moorjani said many of the inherited archaic segments are concentrated in genomic regions associated with immune and metabolic functions.

“This pattern is not entirely surprising,” she said. “Adaptation to new pathogens and food sources has been one of the strongest selective pressures in human evolution. Interbreeding with other human groups introduced new genetic variation, providing additional raw material for natural selection. Beneficial variants could then be retained and spread over many generations.”

As global genome databases become more representative of human diversity, Moorjani hopes TRACE will uncover weaker signals from still more unknown lineages.

Additional Denisovan genomes would also improve the analysis, since only one has been published. Recently sequenced proteins from Homo erectus fossils may even help researchers determine the identity of the super-archaic ancestor.

“I think these new computational methods that allow us to reconstruct genealogical relationships are really the next frontier in this field because they are allowing us to uncover hidden episodes from our past without requiring ancient DNA,” she added.

Moorjani noted that TRACE should also work with other species, “allowing us to also uncover really different patterns across the tree of life.”

The birth of modern Man

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/