The team released their study in Science journal this week that reveals the "DNA switches" that animals have used to control their genes and regenerate parts of their body.
Science & Technology
The team released their study in Science journal this week that reveals the "DNA switches" that animals have used to control their genes and regenerate parts of their body.
© Discovery Institute
Still from the film: Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines
Still from the film: Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines
Does he decide to set his ideas on paper for the whole world to see? This guarantees fierce opposition and sometimes personal attack. To choose this path requires a willingness to face that opposition and stand firm. Such intellectual courage is rare but not vanishingly so. This is the story of a man who has that courage.
The Concept of Irreducible Complexity
By the early 1990s, Dr. Michael J. Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, had come to doubt the efficacy of Darwinian evolution. (Behe uses the term Darwinian evolution to distinguish it from evolution meaning simply change over time, which is not controversial and which he accepts. Darwinian evolution, on the other hand, is claimed to be the result of unguided, naturalistic processes of random mutation and natural selection, which he sees as severely limited.)
© SpaceNews/KREMLIN.RU
Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin
Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin
"Now we are entering a new stage of a certain competition with leading space powers, related to future manned programs, including in deep space," Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said Friday. Rogozin also revealed that he recently talked to the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeev and discussed the details of the Moon program and specifications of payloads needed for that.
The first Russian cosmonauts are expected to walk on the surface of the Earth's only natural satellite by 2030. The Moon program involves development of a super-heavy lifter and landing/ take-off module.
© EPFL
Robotics spies capable of interspecies translation helped groups of bees and fish talk to each other.
Robotics spies capable of interspecies translation helped groups of bees and fish talk to each other.
Scientists developed robots to translate and deliver signals from groups of bees and schools of fish. The robots traded signals across an international border, allowing bees in Austria to talk to fish a few hundred miles away in Switzerland.
"We created an unprecedented bridge between the two animal communities, enabling them to exchange some of their dynamics," Frank Bonnet, a robotics engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, or EPFL, said in a news release.
Previously, researchers at EPFL's Mobile Robots Group have designed and deployed "spy" robots that blend in with groups of animals. Most recently, the team used a robot to infiltrate a school of zebrafish and influence its swimming direction.
For the latest experiment, scientists decided to use the fish spy to help different species communicate.
© Getty Images/IStock
"This research identifies a specific neuronal population in a deep region of the brain that is activated during alcohol withdrawal and which controls alcohol drinking in a rodent model of alcoholism," Olivier George, an associate professor at Scripps Research, told Digital Trends. "We also identify by which downstream pathways these neurons control the rest of the brain to produce addiction-like behaviors. What is so exciting about these findings is that we were able to control the motivation to drink alcohol in severely dependent individuals with the flip of a switch. By implanting fiber optics deep in the brain and turning on a laser that inhibits these neurons specifically we could dramatically decrease alcohol drinking and the physical symptoms of withdrawal."
© Getty
Should we be sending more messages to aliens?
Should we be sending more messages to aliens?
What is the Fermi Paradox and the "Great Silence?"
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked 'where is everybody?' back in 1950 in what's now called the Fermi Paradox. It addresses a contradiction in astronomy, and can be summarized thus: if extraterrestrial life and even intelligent alien civilizations are not just likely, but highly probable, then why have none of them been in contact with us? Are there biological or sociological explanations for this "Great Silence?"
"We are very interested in the scientific approach used in the analysis of the Fermi Paradox and the search for intelligent life in the universe," said Cyril Birnbaum and Brigitte David at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (Cité), the science museum in Paris that's hosting today's meeting. "The question 'Are we alone?' affects us all, because it is directly related to humanity and our place in the cosmos."
Comment: It's rather curious that it's often supposed that the overseers of this zoo are benevolent. Particularly when other notable, although much less publicized, perspectives have been put forward, and with supporting evidence:
- The invisible hand of the Cosmic Trickster: High strangeness and the paranormal nature of the UFO phenomenon
- Alien Abduction, Demonic Possession, and The Legend of The Vampire
- UFOs, Aliens, and the Question of Contact
- Hostage to the Devil
- The Truth Perspective: Powers, principalities and UFOs
- Behind the Headlines: Hyperdimensional Planet Earth - Are human beings really at the top of the food chain?
© Yang Zhao
The holotype specimen of Daihua sanqiong.
The holotype specimen of Daihua sanqiong.
Of interest, given the recent release of Michael Behe's new book, Darwin Devolves, is the following statement:
The study shows how comb jellies evolved from ancestors with an organic skeleton, which some still possessed and swam with during the Cambrian. Their combs evolved from tentacles in polyp-like ancestors that were attached to the seafloor. Their mouths then expanded into balloon-like spheres while their original body reduced in size so that the tentacles that used to surround the mouth now emerges from the back-end of the animal.
"With such body transformations, I think we have some of the answers to understand why comb jellies are so hard to figure out. It explains why they have lost so many genes and possess a morphology that we see in other animals," added co-author Dr. Luke Parry.
Comment: That's kind of a problem for Darwinism isn't it? What is known so far is that anything resembling Darwinian evolution involves loss of a function or genes. See also:
- For Dreams of Darwinian Evolution, First Rule of Adaptive Evolution Is an Insuperable Problem
- Another shoddy review of Behe's new book on the limits of Darwinian evolution shows the limits of the Darwinian intellect
- Why Darwinism Is Wrong, Dead Wrong - Part 1: Intelligent Design and Information
© NASA
The rapidly-growing sunspot AR2736.
The rapidly-growing sunspot AR2736.
© Captain Roger Wilson/NOAA
60-foot wave hitting tanker off Alaska.
60-foot wave hitting tanker off Alaska.
Scientists have, for the first time, used long-term data from a wide expanse of ocean to investigate how these rare, unexpected and hazardous ocean phenomena behave. Their findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Waves are classed as 'rogue' when they are over twice the height of the average sea state around them. From trough to peak, past observations have put some at over 30 metres high. The fiercest are capable of damaging or sinking ships, can wound or kill crew members and on occasions have swept people off the shoreline and out to sea.
A team of engineers and oceanographers from the University of Southampton, together with researchers from The National Oceanography Centre (NOC), examined over 20 years of information (sourced between 1994-2016) from 15 buoys which provide surface data along the US western seaboard - stretching from Seattle in the north, to San Diego in the south.
The data showed instances of rogue waves vary greatly, depending on the area of sea and time period focused on. On average though, the team found instances of rogue waves (across the two decade window) fell slightly, but that rogue wave size, relative to the background sea, increased by around one per cent year-on-year.
© Demin Liu and Damien Woods
Computer scientists at UC Davis, Maynooth University and Caltech have created DNA molecules that can self-assemble by carrying out a Boolean logic computation. Highlighted in green is the “circuit diagram” made up of DNA tiles that fit together according to inputs and outputs. Below is an atomic force microscope image of a self-assembled DNA ribbon that carried out the same computation. In the background are other ribbons, with different barcode labels, that carried out different computations.
Computer scientists at UC Davis, Maynooth University and Caltech have created DNA molecules that can self-assemble by carrying out a Boolean logic computation. Highlighted in green is the “circuit diagram” made up of DNA tiles that fit together according to inputs and outputs. Below is an atomic force microscope image of a self-assembled DNA ribbon that carried out the same computation. In the background are other ribbons, with different barcode labels, that carried out different computations.
"The ultimate goal is to use computation to grow structures and enable more sophisticated molecular engineering," said David Doty, assistant professor of computer science at UC Davis and co-first author on the paper.
The system is analogous to a computer, but instead of using transistors and diodes, it uses molecules to represent a six-bit binary number (for example, 011001). The team developed a variety of algorithms that can be computed by the molecules.
"We were surprised by the versatility of algorithms we were able to design, despite being limited to six-bit inputs," Doty said. The researchers were able to design and run 21 algorithms over the course of the experiments, demonstrating the potential of the system, he said.
Working initially as postdoctoral scholars with Professor Erik Winfree at Caltech, Doty and co-lead author Damien Woods, now at Maynooth University, Ireland, designed a library of short pieces, or tiles, of DNA. Each DNA tile consists of 42 bases (A, C, G or T) arranged in four domains of 10-11 bases. Each domain can represent a 1 or 0 and can stick to some of the domains on other tiles. No two tiles are a complete match.
Comment: Watch: Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines - to get a better glimpse of who Behe is and just what he's been up against: