Happy Winter Solstice
Axial Tilt is the Reason for the Seasons.
Gene Drives: so you want to change the world!
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”.
Entropy as an engine of life’s origins
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.
How can we be so complex if the second law of thermodynamics is true?
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: what’s the big deal?
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
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.
You Must First Invent the Universe…
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.
What Would A Higher Level of Consciousness Look Like?
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?
The Dialogs: Is there a limit to Science?
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.
EMMA knows the secrets of your past – but will she tell?:
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?:
