Happy Winter Solstice
Axial Tilt is the Reason for the Seasons.
Gene drives are an exciting new technique that could allow genetic engineering at the population level. They have the potential of changing entire ecosystems with a engineered gene that will promote its own odds of multiplying throughout the population. A definite “selfish gene”.
If Professor Jeremy England is right, then far from The Second Law of Thermodynamics being a repressor of complexity, it may more accurately be described as an engine of the spontaneous production of organization, complex systems, and life itself.
If the second law of thermodynamics tells us that things tend towards increasing disorder, then how can complex systems, like living cells exist and evolve? We’ll see that these process are not forbidden, but must be accompained by an increase in disorder some where else.
read more How can we be so complex if the second law of thermodynamics is true?
CRISPR is like a gene editing device that is being used in the lab, but may have huge potential for gene therapy.
The Clumping Effect is a cognitive bias that demands that when three of more people on the trail pass, they all pass at the same time.
Carl Sagan Day is November 14th 2015. Carl helped instill a love of science and learning in me and gave me my first lesson in scientific skepticism.
a being with a vastly higher level of consciousness than ourselves would never forget that they exist, what they are feeling, or any of their internal thought processes.
read more What Would A Higher Level of Consciousness Look Like?
In the Dialogs the Robot from Lost in Space and Speed Racer find themselves suddenly transported to a distant location to discuss a topic of philosophy of science. This has happened on many occasions. They don’t know how they come to this place or if some intelligent being is behind it. When they return to their own worlds no one else is aware that they have even been gone.
To paraphrase Jane Austin, when referring to the RNA that lays hidden at the core of many of our most rudimentary metabolic processes, which may have served a grander role in a far distant past, and which now has relinquished it’s primary role for one of a more modest, behind the scenes assistant, “The sweetest and best of all molecules, faultless in spite of all her faults”.
read more EMMA knows the secrets of your past – but will she tell?: