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Welcome to this edition of Over a Cup of Coffee!

In this newsletter

• Life signs spotted on Mars

• Exercise beats anxiety

• Chimps who learned to say ‘Mama‘

Life signs spotted on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover has come across an arrow-shaped rock on Mars that has strong chemical signatures of microbial life forms possibly billions of years ago.

Scientists have dubbed the rock Cheyava Falls since it also has deposits of calcium sulfate, which suggests that water ran through the rock, once upon a time, when the Red Planet was much more wetter than it is today.

The rover has also found millimeter-sized patterns that look like leopard spots on the Red Planet. Such patterns have also been seen on Earth in areas that are rich in iron and phosphate and see chemical reactions caused by microorganisms.

Of course, the evidence does not suggest that there are life forms on Mars now. To understand if these samples indeed have a biological origin, one would have to return them to Earth for a much more detailed analysis.

This is something, China has successfully done with the Moon. Read our previous edition to know more.

Visit NASA's page on the Perseverance Rover to see more panoramic views of the Red Planet.

Exercise beats anxiety

Anxiety disorders are on the rise among young adults, and due to a lack of knowledge about how to deal with them, many try to self-manage these conditions instead of seeking professional counseling.

This leads to poorer outcomes and even higher treatment costs in later years. However, a small study of students between the ages of 18 and 20 at three universities in China found that regular exercise, better nutrition, and lifestyle habits could help students.

Through extensive surveys about dietary and lifestyle habits as well as the state of mind of the students, the researchers determined that improving diet and lifestyle habits reduced anxiety levels by nearly 25 percent.

However, regular exercise single-handedly helped in the reduction of anxiety levels by 36 percent. Researchers attribute this outcome to increased cerebral blood flow and inhibiting the secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines, alongside stimulating the central nervous system and alleviating anxiety and other negative emotions.

More importantly, it is a low-cost intervention with no side effects.

The research findings were published in Frontiers in Psychology.

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Chimps who learned to say ‘Mama‘

A century ago, scientists were so curious to know why humans could vocalize words, but other animals couldn’t that they began carrying out some strange experiments—like adopting animals into their homes, hoping they would learn the language.

In 1947, Keith and Catherine Hayes at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, Floria, took home a five-month-old chimp called Viki to live with them. After two years, Viki allegedly spoke words like mama, papa, up, and cup.

Check out the video from a black-and-white documentary that appeared a few years later.

Hayes’ peers and the scientific community weren’t impressed, and the introduction of ethical approval for scientific studies meant that such experiments thankfully ended.

Scientists also maintained that chimps' and humans' vocal tracts were structurally different, and therefore, chimps could not replicate what humans could so easily do. However, recent studies have shown that this isn’t the case, and primates’ vocal tracts are actually speech-ready.

This then led to the belief that it was the human brain that was exceptional in being able to regulate speech but that too doesn’t seem to be the case. Primates in captivity as well as in the wild are capable of making specific calls

Researchers at the University of Warwick and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have since found video evidence of multiple chimps such as Johnny and Renata, who can say words like ‘mama’. This shows that we might have underestimated voice production capabilities of chimps.

See Johnny’s video here:

Other scientists in the field are still not convinced that the chimps are actually saying these words, even if they mean something to them. But we know very little about our evolutionarily separated siblings.

So, Planet of the Apes might not be all science fiction, if you ask me.

The research findings were published in Scientific Reports.

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Until next time,
Ameya