GoKawiilTreatments to regrow the peculiar immune organ could also help to prevent cancer. Plus, a four-carbon sugar found in the stars and the name of an important Maya mathematician revealed.
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Researchers found a four-carbon sugar called erythrulose in a cloud of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way (image from Spitzer Space Telescope shown here).Credit: NASA, Caltech, Susan Stolovy (SSC, Caltech)
Astronomers have detected a four-carbon sugar molecule in a cloud of gas and dust near the centre of our galaxy. The molecule, erythrulose, is the most complex sugar detected outside of our Solar System, the team says. If erythrulose exists in these molecular clouds, it could be transferred to passing asteroids and comets as a star system forms. Such bodies could have brought sugars — the feedstock for early versions of DNA and RNA — to Earth during a period of heavy asteroid bombardment around four billion years ago, suggests astronomer and study co-author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra.
Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Nature Astronomy paper
Researchers taught people to write with their elbows to show that practice helps to make people left- or right-handed, not just the innate preference. People with pens taped to their arms wrote no better or worse on their dominant and non-dominant sides, the team found. And training helped them to improve, regardless of which side they used. “The dominant arm isn’t more capable because one hemisphere of the brain is simply better at controlling movement,” says neurologist and study co-author Ahmet Arac. “It is because we've spent a lifetime practicing the specific, complicated movements that tools and handwriting demand.”
ScienceAlert | 5 min read
Reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper
A mathematical formula inscribed on a wall at the Maya site of Xultun in Guatemala has revealed the name of an important Maya mathematician-astronomer. Sak Tahn Waax, or ‘White-Chested Fox’, was a scholar comparable with mathematical giants of the past, researchers suggest. The calculations inscribed in this set of hieroglyphs expresses the relationships between several calendar systems in a playful manner that hasn’t been seen before in Mayan texts, says archaeologist and study co-author Heather Hurst. “I think it was a mathematical flex,” she says.
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