Monthly Report - March 2025

`There’s an old saying that goes like this: Only two things are certain in life, death and taxes. However, research often works in mysterious ways to prove that what we assume may be wrong, and this saying is just as susceptible to being disproved as anything else. In fact, scientists have recently set out to prove that only one of the two things is certain, and it’s unfortunately the one that you’d rather not have. Sorry, tax evasion is still illegal.

Besides proving that death may not be the end, research has been hard at work going after some other things that we take for granted in daily life. From the snails we see crawling along the road, to the way we taste food in every meal, we’re taking a look at some fundamentals of our world that science has been pushing the boundaries on. Let’s head into our monthly report!

Life and death aren’t everything

A team led by Noble & Pozhitkov have conducted groundbreaking research on Xenobots, multicellular organisms designed by artificial intelligence that repurpose old cells into new functions, for instance by using cilia of what would otherwise have been dead cells separated from their home tissues to move around instead of transporting mucus.

This provides evidence that cells may be able to form "life beyond death", or even exist in a third state wherein life and death are not useful definitions for them anymore. After all, what does death mean when functional cells can be brought out of dead organisms and revived to continue living? Of course, this doesn’t mean that would happen in nature – specific man-made designs allow for this seeming miracle to happen. Yet, this nonetheless challenges what we mean by “life.”

William Miller even argues that this is part of a growing body of evidence that cells are conscious. If cells are able to work together to surpass the death of a larger host, and they can induce changes in one another to survive and continue to multiply, would this imply a separate consciousness?

Lincoln Taiz, however, is not so certain. Taiz co-authored a letter in EMBO reports criticising these lofty conclusions, stating that cells being cultured in vitro can have abnormal growth induced via what Wendy Ann Peer says is simply a variation in gene expression. This is common knowledge, he argues, and trying to pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. Claiming that consciousness is occurring cannot be tested, nor can it be falsified, because we don’t even have a solid definition of what consciousness is, meaning there is no scientific way to answer this question. However, these critics still agree that altering cell behaviour via AI construction of xenobots can be useful for a variety of purposes, for instance by delivering highly personalised medicine.

Mollusc histories

Have you ever stopped to think about the ancestors of the clams you eat? Probably not, but these scientists have.

New research on 8 groups of mollusk species (including oft-forgotten groups such as the deep sea monoplacophorans and underground solenogastropods) has yielded fresh results using new genomic methods to investigate the origin of these hardy, versatile creatures. Chen Zeyuan and his team have used data from a wide range of species to trace the molecular inheritance of this phylum.

According to Chen, the common ancestor of all mollusks likely had a "hard shell, one large foot, no eyes, and a radula (a sort of spiral feeding organ)". Early on in their history, he says, mollusks experienced a divide into class Aculifera with needle-like spicules, or even shells, and the rest became conchifera. This massive grouping contains our familiar snails, clams, and cephalopods. The oldest group here would be the monoplacophorans, followed by cephalopods, then finally the megalopdifera (big footed mollusks), which include our well-known scaphopods, bivalves and gastropoda.

Why study mollusks? These small but vital species show an unusually high diversity and survivability, having distributed themselves amongst a wide variety of habitats worldwide, and can teach us about how life evolves over time to adapt to movements into new environments. This gives astounding amounts of information on how we can better design strategies for conservation of different species worldwide, but also actually serves to advance biotechnology research. Why? Many mollusc species, weirdly enough, are used to predict models of human health. By studying the way they have developed over millions of years, we can in fact gain insight into how our own bodies have developed.

Tasting from a distance

VR games have been a rising force in the entertainment industry as of late, and entertainment science is never at rest, constantly finding new ways to enhance our experience with these novel technologies.

One often thinks of VR as an experience where sight and sound combine in brand-new, highly immersive ways to simulate the most realistic possible gaming scenarios. Chen et al. have taken this one step further. Through their research, they have managed to engineer a device that works together with VR systems to deliver a third sense into the game. Meet the “e-Taste”.

The “e-Taste” works with a very simple principle in mind. Wireless communications with the VR system can tell the device when to activate, and trigger electric impulses that activate the pumps contained within it. Each pump contains a substance that corresponds to one of the five known tastes: glucose for sweet, citric acid for sour, sodium chloride for salty, magnesium chloride for bitter, and glutamate for umami (the famous taste of soy sauce). Through combining these substances into gels that get fed into a space under the user’s tongue, the taste of various complex foods such as cake or roast chicken can be simulated (albeit without the same texture or aroma.)

The lack of an aroma is quite telling, in fact. A great deal of the taste that we experience when eating comes from our sense of smell, rather than taste. Losing this means that much of the taste palette we enjoy is severely diminished, not to mention the device being unable to recreate flavours such as spice.

Nonetheless, the e-Taste is an excellent demonstration of how technology and science can enhance and create new dimensions to an artistic work. In a world where the two are becoming increasingly intertwined, something as simple as our sense of taste can make all the difference in how we approach any game.

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Well, that’s a wrap for our monthly report! We hope you’ve gained a little more appreciation for the small things we tend to take for granted in our daily lives, and perhaps learned something that piques your interest too. See you in the next issue!

References

1. Orf, Darren. A “third state” exists between life and death—and that suggests your cells are conscious, some scientists say, February 26, 2025. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a63917106/cells-conscious-xenobots/.

2. Zeyuan Chen et al. ,A genome-based phylogeny for Mollusca is concordant with fossils and morphology.Science387,1001-1007(2025).DOI:10.1126/science.ads0215

3. Shulin Chen et al. ,A sensor-actuator–coupled gustatory interface chemically connecting virtual and real environments for remote tasting.Sci. Adv.11,eadr4797(2025).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adr4797