Links for July

Germs, Evolution, UFOs, Social Mobility, History, Economics, Suicide

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And now some items of interest from around the web. FYI, any link to Twitter (I’ve labelled them all as such) might not be working for you due to that site’s new restrictions.

Weird Science

Will the giant star Betelgeuse go supernova in the near future? (Astrophysics paper here.) If it happens in our lifetimes, it will be something to see. It would bright enough to show up in daylight. (h/t Ethan Mollick on Twitter).

Regarding the origin of Covid, I’ve lost track of the debate about it being a lab versus a wet market. Regardless, I think lab leaks and gain of function research are definitely worrisome. In case you’re sleeping too well at night, Mike Nielsen (on Twitter) shared this Wiki list of laboratory biosecurity incidents. For instance, the last recorded person to die of smallpox, in 1978, got it from a lab leak in the UK. In 2008 a US researcher died after exposure to the plague. And many researchers think the 1977 flu pandemic came either from a lab leak or human challenge trials.

I also saw a Twitter post about the sheer weirdness of the creatures known as myxosporeans, which have insanely simple genomes and are the only eukaryotes that lack mitochondria. One genus, henneguya zschokkei, is a parasite infecting salmon and the only known multicellular animal that does not rely on aerobic respiration. Since these things are genetically similar to jellyfish, there’s a theory that they started out as a contagious jellyfish cancer that evolved into an into a separate parasitic organism.

Which puts me in mind of this classic West Hunter blog post on cell line infections. On a contagious cancer among dogs:

Although its phenotype differs considerably from dogs (no brain, no bones, no eyes, no fur, asexual) classification by descent clearly implies that it is a canid and mammal – certainly the most unusual mammal ever discovered…. the organism causing canine venereal sarcoma is more closely related to a wolf than a fox is, even though you need a microscope to examine it.