In recent articles, I have summarized lectures at CELS (Conference on Engineering in Living Systems) that described an engineering model for adaptation and explained how adaptation derives from organisms' internal capacities (here, link). Now I will summarize another CELS lecture that expanded upon these themes by outlining a second complementary engineering model for adaptation.

Comparing Models

Standard evolutionary theory assumes that genetic variation expands through DNA mutating or otherwise altering randomly. Concurrently, natural selection and other processes transform species over time gradually through numerous, successive, slight modifications. The results are unpredictable, and in different subpopulations they can vary greatly.

NASA's Mars InSight lander has detected its three most powerful quakes yet.

On 25 August, InSight detected two quakes, at magnitude 4.1 and 4.2. Then, on 18 September - the lander's 1,000th Mars day of operation - it picked up the rumbles of another magnitude 4.2 quake.

These new quakes blow the previous record of a magnitude 3.7 quake detected in 2019 out of the water. Fascinatingly, the largest of the August quakes was the most distant detected yet, with an epicenter some 8,500 kilometers (5,280 miles) from InSight.

Analysis is still ongoing, but scientists are excited about the possibility of learning something new about the interior of the red planet.

Using mathematical models, a quartet of Chinese scientists has argued that the first case of Covid-19 appeared between April and November 2019 in the northeastern US, long before the outbreak in Wuhan, China.

"The calculation results show that the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States has a high probability of beginning to spread around September 2019," says the 14-page paper published on Wednesday at ChinaXiv, a repository operated by the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The quartet set out to "infer the origin time of pandemic" based on "a data and model hybrid driven method." They modeled the positive test rate to fit the actual trends and used "the least squares estimation to obtain the optimal model parameters," before applying the "kernel density estimation...to infer the origin time of pandemic given the specific confidence probability," according to the paper.

Officially, the first case of Covid-19 was registered in the US on January 20, 2020 - about a month after the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The Chinese researchers, however, argue that there is a 50% probability of first cases in 11 US states and the District of Columbia prior to that - as early as April 2019 in Rhode Island and as late as November that year in Delaware.

Much of the paper focuses on Maryland, the location of Fort Detrick - a US Army base used to research bioweapons during the Cold War, and now hosts the US biological defense program.

Northwestern University engineers have added a new capability to electronic microchips: flight.

About the size of a grain of sand, the new flying microchip (or "microflier") does not have a motor or engine. Instead, it catches flight on the wind — much like a maple tree's propeller seed — and spins like a helicopter through the air toward the ground.

By studying maple trees and other types of wind-dispersed seeds, the engineers optimized the microflier's aerodynamics to ensure that it — when dropped at a high elevation — falls at a slow velocity in a controlled manner. This behavior stabilizes its flight, ensures dispersal over a broad area and increases the amount of time it interacts with the air, making it ideal for monitoring air pollution and airborne disease.

As the smallest-ever human-made flying structures, these microfliers also can be packed with ultra-miniaturized technology, including sensors, power sources, antennas for wireless communication and embedded memory to store data.

The research is featured on the cover of the Sept. 23 issue of Nature.

A relatively new type of computing that mimics the way the human brain works was already transforming how scientists could tackle some of the most difficult information processing problems.

Now, researchers have found a way to make what is called reservoir computing work between 33 and a million times faster, with significantly fewer computing resources and less data input needed.

In fact, in one test of this next-generation reservoir computing, researchers solved a complex computing problem in less than a second on a desktop computer.

Using the now current state-of-the-art technology, the same problem requires a supercomputer to solve and still takes much longer, said Daniel Gauthier, lead author of the study and professor of physics at The Ohio State University.

"We can perform very complex information processing tasks in a fraction of the time using much less computer resources compared to what reservoir computing can currently do," Gauthier said.

"And reservoir computing was already a significant improvement on what was previously possible."

The study was published today (Sept. 21, 2021) in the journal Nature Communications.

Reservoir computing is a machine learning algorithm developed in the early 2000s and used to solve the "hardest of the hard" computing problems, such as forecasting the evolution of dynamical systems that change over time, Gauthier said.

Dynamical systems, like the weather, are difficult to predict because just one small change in one condition can have massive effects down the line, he said.

One famous example is the "butterfly effect," in which - in one metaphorical example - changes created by a butterfly flapping its wings can eventually influence the weather weeks later.

Previous research has shown that reservoir computing is well-suited for learning dynamical systems and can provide accurate forecasts about how they will behave in the future, Gauthier said.

A study published in the journal Geology rules out that extreme volcanic episodes had any influence on the massive extinction of species in the late Cretaceous. The results confirm the hypothesis that it was a giant meteorite impact what caused the great biological crisis that ended up with the non-avian dinosaur lineages and other marine and terrestrial organisms 66 million years ago.

The study was carried out by the researcher Sietske Batenburg, from the Faculty of Earth Sciences of the University of Barcelona, and the experts Vicente Gilabert, Ignacio Arenillas and José Antonio Arz, from the University Research Institute on Environmental Sciences of Aragon (IUCA-University of Zaragoza).

K/Pg boundary: the great extinction of the Cretaceous in Zumaia coasts

The scenario of this study were the Zumaia cliffs (Basque Country), which have an exceptional section of strata that reveals the geological history of the Earth in the period of 115-50 million years ago (Ma). In this environment, the team analyzed sediments and rocks that are rich in microfossils that were deposited between 66.4 and 65.4 Ma, a time interval that includes the known Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary (K/Pg). Dated in 66 Ma, the K/Pg boundary divides the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras and it coincides with one of the five large extinctions of the planet.

This study analysed the climate changes that occurred just before and after the massive extinction marked by the K/Pg boundary, as well as its potential relation to this large biological crisis. For the first time, researchers examined whether this climate change coincides on the time scale with its potential causes: the Deccan massive volcanism (India) ─one of the most violent volcanic episodes in the geological history of the planet─ and the orbital variations of the Earth.

"The particularity of the Zumaia outcrops lies in that two types of sediments accumulated there ─some richer in clay and others richer in carbonate─ that we can now identify as strata or marl and limestone that alternate with each other to form rhythms", notes the researcher Sietske Batenburg, from the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics of the UB. "This strong rhythmicity in sedimentation is related to cyclical variations in the orientation and inclination of the Earth axis in the rotation movement, as well as in the translational movement around the Sun".

These astronomic configurations ─the known Milankovitch cycles, which repeat every 405,000, 100,000, 41,000 and 21,000 years─, regulate the amount of solar radiation they receive, modulate the global temperature of our planet and condition the type of sediment that reaches the oceans. "Thanks to these periodicities identified in the Zumaia sediments, we have been able to determine the most precise dating of the climatic episodes that took place around the time when the last dinosaurs lived", says PhD student Vicente Gilabert, from the Department of Earth Sciences at UZ, who will present his thesis defence by the end of this year.

As an addendum to my piece yesterday on the evidence for variants driving Covid surges, a comparison between India and neighbouring Bangladesh is illuminating. Once again, the curves below are the positive test rate and they are superimposed on the graphs of variant proportions over time from the CoVariants website.

India

India has had one large surge in 2021 so far, occurring in spring and associated with the Delta variant (which was first identified there; in dark green). It has had no summer surge, and no new variant since.

Dr. Pierre Kory, an American pulmonary and critical care specialist and founding member of FLCCC, is "thrilled as the pandemic for much of India is over." Cases are rare, deaths near zero - in Indian states which use ivermectin in early treatment protocols.

In Uttar Pradesh, India, 33 districts have been declared "Covid-free." With a combined population of 241 million there are only 199 active cases and the positive test rate is 0.01% - statistically zero. It is a poor state and worse, the most-populous in the nation and has extremely high-density cities — the most-fertile environment imaginable for a pandemic virus — yet they defeated Covid with a cheap, widely-available drug.
Last month, The Desert Review wrote: "The New York Times reported India's colossal drop in Covid cases was unexplainable, while the BBC declared that Kerala's rise was also a mystery. While new cases of Covid in Uttar Pradesh are rare as million-dollar lottery tickets, in Kerala, a tiny state located in southern India, new daily cases are the same as the United States, nearly one case per thousand. Yet, as we have seen in this series, there has been a curious media blackout on India's overall success against Covid ... So, what could Kerala be doing wrong? Hint: Over-reliance on vaccines and under-reliance on ivermectin."

Last year, India developed a "miraculously" effective and safe Covid treatment kit - containing zinc, doxycycline and ivermectin - costing merely $2.65 (£1.93) per person. As early as March 2020, India recommended hydroxychloroquine ("HCQ") in its national guidelines affirming it "should be used as early in the disease course as possible." But following the June 2020 discovery of ivermectin's efficacy in treating the virus, Uttar Pradesh announced in August 2020 that it was replacing their HCQ protocol with ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of Covid.

Satellite images show the exact moment a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, one of the most deadly weapons in the United States' military arsenal and worth $2billion, crash landed at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri yesterday.

Sources said the B-2 experienced a hydraulic failure during a routine training and had its port main landing gear collapse during landing. As a result, the B-2 was sent off the runway with its wing dug into the ground.

While it hasn't been confirmed this was the cause, satellite images seem to coincide with theory of the gear collapse/wing down aspect of the incident.

A decades-old method called the "bootstrap" is enabling new discoveries about the geometry underlying all quantum theories.

In the 1960s, the charismatic physicist Geoffrey Chew espoused a radical vision of the universe, and with it, a new way of doing physics. Theorists of the era were struggling to find order in an unruly zoo of newfound particles. They wanted to know which ones were the fundamental building blocks of nature and which were composites. But Chew, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, argued against such a distinction. "Nature is as it is because this is the only possible nature consistent with itself," he wrote at the time. He believed he could deduce nature's laws solely from the demand that they be self-consistent.

Scientists since Democritus had taken a reductionist approach to understanding the universe, viewing everything in it as being built from some kind of fundamental stuff that cannot be further explained. But Chew's vision of a self-determining universe required that all particles be equally composite and fundamental. He conjectured that each particle is composed of other particles, and those others are held together by exchanging the first particle in a process that conveys a force. Thus, particles' properties are generated by self-consistent feedback loops. Particles, Chew said, "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps."