EP 23 · 35:36

The Rundown begins — quick hits from science this week

From JWST's "Little Red Dots," TimeVaults, and the Dawn of Math

Episode
7/21
JWST's Little Red Dots and the early black-hole puzzle, Harvard/Broad's TimeVaults for time-series gene expression, Halaf pottery that may encode geometric sequences—and a quick Cloud9 dark-halo follow-up.
Transcript

476 words · auto-generated from the episode video

35:38>> Yeah. Because apparently the wolf died like pretty soon after having dinner. This wolf pup. Okay. And they don't think that it like died from predation or something like that. They think a landslide just came and like knocked its home. >> And so it had just had dinner and then the wolf pup died along with its sister and it was found like right next to each other. And what's really cool is the >> the hair and all of this biological material was actually intact in the the gut of this wolf pup. Okay. So from there we can we can do genetic >> sequencing. Yes. >> And find the genetic remnants of this woolly rhino. And the key thing is if

36:19the woolly rhino went out because the population dwindled, right, and there were not that many viable individuals in the population, then what you would expect is a lot of inbreeding. And that would leave markers in the genomics. [clears throat] >> But what they found was there was no evidence of inbreeding, which means that there was a healthy population even as >> recent as 14,000 years ago. And that's right around the time when all of them died off. And that's also right around the time when the ice age ended. Right. >> So, it's probably due to climate change that this massive massive species that used to roam Siberia and Canada is now is now

36:59gone. >> I didn't even know the woolly rhino was a thing. >> Yeah, it's pretty crazy. It's a rhino but like >> like hair like hair. Yeah. I mean, it's a mammal, so it's got hair, but this has a lot of hair because it lives in the, you know, the winter. Did this I just found this might be totally nonsense. >> A pig can become a wild boar if you leave it in the wild. Like like like there's it's it's about the environment that transitions them from being like >> a generic domesticated >> domesticated pig versus like what we think of as a wild boar. Like they're not necessarily different geni or whatever. >> Oh, really? I this look someone in the

37:39comments please correct me if I'm wrong. I saw it scrolling and I was like this makes >> that's pretty crazy. So that mean that means that like certain genes turn on and off based on environment, >> right? >> Wow. >> Which >> story for another day. Yeah. >> Uh number two in the rundown. Uh and we're going to be doing a lot of this Aremis story because we're coming up on our return to the moon. NASA rolled out an 11 million pound moon rocket in preparations for the astronaut's launch. There's no journal or institution here, just one of our favorite government

From the episode
  1. EP 23

    JWST's "Little Red Dots," TimeVaults, and the Dawn of Math

    Little Red Dots, TimeVaults biology, and ancient math in Halaf pottery.

    JWST's Little Red Dots and the early black-hole puzzle, Harvard/Broad's TimeVaults for time-series gene expression, Halaf pottery that may encode geometric sequences—and a quick Cloud9 dark-halo follow-up.