A chemical reaction that gives food flavour could have helped evolution, one study suggests. According to New Scientist, the Maillard reaction is when the temperature between sugars and amino acids rises above approximately 140°C. It often occurs in food such as toasted bread, meats and roasted vegetables. Caroline Peacock at the University of Leeds wanted to explore whether it could happen at lower temperatures. To do this, scientists added iron or manganese minerals to a solution made up of sugar glucose and the amino acid glycine. When the substance was incubated at 10°C, the process was sped up by around 100 times. The temperature is said to be similar to the seabed at the edges of continents. Peacock and the team discovered that the Maillard reaction also occurs on the ocean floor, where iron and manganese minerals are often found. If this is the case, it could cause the carbon in sugars and amino acids to be stored in "large, complex polymers that microbes find harder to ingest," Peacock said, as per the publication. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter "If you can get your carbon through the 1-metre danger zone [at the top of the sea floor], where carbon generally is attacked and degraded and turned back into carbon dioxide by microbes, that will lock it away from the atmosphere," she explained. The team estimated that the minerals could lock away roughly 4 million tonnes of carbon every year. If this process didn't exist, the atmosphere could have warmed by a further 5°C over the past 400 million years, the study suggested. "This process has such a profound impact on atmospheric oxygen," she says. "Because complex life forms require higher levels of oxygen, as they’re more energetically demanding, we think it’s reasonable to surmise this process had a hand in creating conditions required for complex life." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A supposed “planet nine” that lies hidden at the edge of our solar system could actually be something else entirely, according to scientists. The unexplained movement of objects at the edge of our solar system has led some to propose that they are being influenced by another world, hidden in the dark distance of our planetary neighbourhood, that they have referred to as planet nine. Objects at the far reaches of the solar system behave as if they are being pulled around by an object that we cannot see, which is probably another planet, they suggest. But a new study by researchers Harsh Mathur, a professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University, and Katherine Brown, an associate professor of physics at Hamilton College, say that those movements are instead the result of a modified law of gravity. The scientists plotted what would happen if the objects were being governed by a theory known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND. That suggests that Newton’s usual gravity only works up to a point – that in the outer regions of galaxies, for instance, gravity behaves in unusual ways. They found that the data lined up, and applying the MOND theory to the existing observations seemed to predict them exactly. “The alignment was striking,” said Professor Mathur. They note that the findings do not necessarily rule out planet nine – or another explanation for what is going on. Some researchers have suggested other explanations for what the objects could be, for instance, while others have suggested that the claimed effect is just the result of when the distant objects tend to be observed. “Regardless of the outcome, this work highlights the potential for the outer solar system to serve as a laboratory for testing gravity and studying fundamental problems of physics,” said Professor Brown. The findings are reported in a paper, ‘Modified Newtonian Dynamics as an Alternative to the Planet Nine Hypothesis’, published in The Astronomical Journal. Read More Watch live: Amazon launches first internet satellites aiming to rival Starlink Stargazing in October: A sleeping giant Prada to design Nasa’s next-gen space suits for Artemis astronauts

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We use letters every day of our lives, but apparently, there's one lowercase letter that we do not recognise. Psychologists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that most people aren't aware that there are two types of the lowercase letter g. One of them is the open tail 'g' which most of us would have written out by hand with its image comparable to "a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Then, there is the loop tail 'g' which appears in print form e.g. books and newspapers as well as in Serif fonts such as Times New Roman and Calibri - we've all seen this type of letter millions of times, but it seems remembering it is an entirely different challenge altogether. There were 38 volunteers in the study published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance and they were asked to list letters that they thought had two variations in print. In the first experiment, "most participants failed to recall the existence of looptail g" while only two people could write looptail g accurately. "They don't entirely know what this letter looks like, even though they can read it," co-author Gali Ellenblum said. Next participants were asked to look for examples of the looptail g in the text and were asked to reproduce this letter style after this and in the end, only one person could do this while half the group wrote an open tail g. Finally, those taking part in the study were asked to identify the letter g in a multiple-choice test with four options of the letter where seven out of 25 managed to do this correctly. So how can we know a letter but not recognised it? It could be to do with the fact we are not taught to write this kind of 'g," according to Michael McCloskey, senior author of the paper. "What we think may be happening here is that we learn the shapes of most letters in part because we have to write them in school. 'Looptail g' is something we're never taught to write, so we may not learn its shape as well," he said. "More generally, our findings raise questions about the conditions under which massive exposure does, and does not, yield detailed, accurate, accessible knowledge." In a play-along video on John Hopkin's YouTube channel, four different g's labelled from one to four appear on the screen where it asked viewers to guess which is the correct looptail 'g'. (*Spoiler ahead*) The correct answer is number 3. Meanwhile, this study has also led research to question the impact that writing less and using more devices has on our reading abilities. "What about children who are just learning to read? Do they have a little bit more trouble with this form of g because they haven't been forced to pay attention to it and write it?" McCloskey said. "That's something we don't really know. Our findings give us an intriguing way of looking at questions about the importance of writing for reading..." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

It’s the most unexpected food trend of the year so far, and now McDonald’s has broken its silence on the Grimace shake going viral. In case you missed it, TikTok has been completely obsessed over a limited edition purple-coloured milkshake over recent days. Grimace has been a mascot in McDonald’s marketing for decades and the fast food giant honoured the 52nd birthday of the character by introducing the new item to menus in the US. Only, since then, TikTok users have made it the focus of a strange trend – which sees them drink it, then pretend to be dead after consuming it. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Typically, the clips see someone sip the drink, before cutting to them in a fake crime scene looking like they’ve been poisoned. Gen Z is always finding new ways to surprise us, and the odd trend has racked up millions of hits. @wheresxander the foot twitch… it’s grimace taking over. #grimaceshake #grimacesbirthday Now, McDonald’s has addressed the trend with a lighthearted Tweet. The official account posted a picture of a Grimace mascot, writing: “meee pretending i don't see the grimace shake trendd.” The milkshake is only set to be on the menu for a limited time, but it looks like the trend isn’t going anywhere just yet - and the memes keep coming thick and fast. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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