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Or the mind, or the immateriality or consciousness or the resurrection of the dead… From Helen Thomson at New Scientist: “WE’RE taking people to the future!” says architect Stephen Valentine, as we drive through two gigantic gates into a massive plot of land in the middle of the sleepy, unassuming town that is Comfort, Texas. The scene from here is surreal. … After years of searching, Valentine chose this site as the unlikely home of the new Mecca of cryogenics. Called Timeship, the monolithic building will become the world’s largest structure devoted to cryopreservation, and will be home to thousands of people who are neither dead nor alive, frozen in time in the hope that one day technology will be Read More ›

That would make it and other very ancient documents possibly decipherable. From Bruce Bower at ScienceNews: The world’s earliest alphabet, inscribed on stone slabs at several Egyptian sites, was an early form of Hebrew, a controversial new analysis concludes.Israelites living in Egypt transformed that civilization’s hieroglyphics into Hebrew 1.0 more than 3,800 years ago, at a time when the Old Testament describes Jews living in Egypt, says archaeologist and epigrapher Douglas Petrovich of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. Hebrew speakers seeking a way to communicate in writing with other Egyptian Jews simplified the pharaohs’ complex hieroglyphic writing system into 22 alphabetic letters, Petrovich proposed on November 17 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. More. Read More ›

From Robby Berman at BigThink: While it’s true that every chromosome contains some of 25,000 genes, it now turns out to be the case that this is only a little more than half the story. Computer modeling has revealed that up to 47% of each chromosome is an enigmatic sheath-like substance called the “chromosome periphery,” something about which little is known. That’s because it’s almost impossible to get a good look at in actual chromosomes. … It looks like chromatin do make up from 53% to 70% of chromosomes, but the rests is the mysterious chromosome periphery. Earlier research by Booth suggests that the chromosome periphery requires the presence of the protein Ki-67 that’s believed to act as a surfactant Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have developed a computer model which takes into account hundreds of genes, chemical reactions, and compounds required for the survival of Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic microbe on the planet. They found that Prochlorococcus has made extensive alterations to its metabolism as a way to reduce its dependence on phosphorus, an element that is essential and often growth-limiting in the ocean. … Microbes are known to employ three basic strategies to compete for limiting elemental resources: cell quotas may be adjusted, stressed cells may synthesize molecules to make more efficient use of available resources, and cells may access alternatives or more costly sources of the nutrient. In the case of phosphorus, a limiting resource in vast oceanic Read More ›

From Kerry Grens at The Scientist: Researchers continue to fail in reproducing a new gene-editing technique called NgAgo, for Natronobacterium gregoryi Argonaute, an endonuclease. In a report published last week (November 15) in Protein & Cell, scientists from the U.S. and China working independently found no evidence that NgAgo could manipulate DNA sequences.“Some of us have even sent visiting researchers to [Chunyu] Han’s laboratory but they were not allowed to perform genome editing experiments involving mammalian cells when they were there,” the authors, led by Shawn Burgess of the National Human Genome Research Institute, wrote in their report. … More. The publisher is said to be investigating. The good news is that recent serious interest in replicability is making it Read More ›

From Avi Loeb at Nature, on the achievements and limitations of Mayan astronomy: So why, I wondered, didn’t the Mayans go further and infer aspects of our modern understanding of astronomy? They determined the orbital periods of Venus, Mars and Mercury around the Sun, but Earth was at the centre of their Universe. I came to appreciate how limiting prevailing world views can be. … I noticed this bias recently while assessing a PhD thesis. The student was asked to test whether a data set from a large cosmological survey was in line with the standard cosmological model. But when a discrepancy was found, the student’s goal shifted to explaining why the data set was incomplete. In such a culture, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The researchers conclude that already the least common ancestor of caseids and mammals had a diaphragm more than 300 million years ago — that is about 50 million years earlier than previously assumed. An efficient respiratory system is intertwined with the evolution of warmbloodedness, which in turn molded our entire behavior. This assumed early origin of the diaphragm now demands a reevaluation of these developments.A fossil diaphragm probably will never be found, simply due to its bad chances to become preserved. Science, according to Prof. Perry, therefore depends on functional approximations to trace the origin of this important evolutionary novelty. Dr. Lambertz: “We still don’t know that much about these animals. It has been a long way towards Read More ›

From Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: From 1989 to 2000, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) operated an atom smasher called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), in which particles were sent crashing into one another at near light speed. A restudy of the data from the now-dismantled LEP collider could prove a hint or just a fluke. When the original LEP experiments were done, the muons were produced in particle collisions (also called “events”) that occurred at certain energies. A graph of particle mass (expressed as energy, per Einstein’s famous E = mc^2) against the number of events per billion electron volts, or GeV, shows a peak at about 10 to 15 GeV and a long “tail” that trails off Read More ›

From John Hands at Science Focus: At a landmark international conference recently [7-9 November] organised by the Royal Society and the British Academy, several speakers called for a revision of the theory of biological evolution that has been largely unquestioned in the UK and the USA for around 70 years. This paradigm – a combination of Darwinism, population genetics, and what Francis Crick called the central dogma of evolutionary biology – is known as NeoDarwinism, or the Modern Synthesis. Popularised by Richard Dawkins in his bestselling 1976 book The Selfish Gene, it is a statistical model validated not by observation or experiment, but by simplistic games models borrowed from 1940s economics. Those speakers drew attention to several empirically supported mechanisms, Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: Wow, congratulations to Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton! He has won richly deserved praise in the London Spectator. In a feature highlighting “The best and worst books of 2016,” with choices from a panel of contributors, the distinguished literary critic A.N. Wilson selects Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis  as his best nonfiction work of the year: Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (Discovery Institute Press, £16.80). A sequel to his 1985 book — Evolution: A Theory in Crisis — this takes us up to date with the dazzling developments of life sciences over the past 30 years. Denton is a sceptic about Darwin’s theory of evolution on purely scientific Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: Anyone not committed to Darwinian survival of the fittest cannot be ‘alt right’. I wrote the piece because I had been following the alt right (human biodiversity studies, etc.) for a while on account of a curious incident: An alt right group was promoting a book, Troublesome Inheritance, by a retiring science writer. Their promos landed in my box. They understood the book to be a defense of classic Darwinian racism. At the time I was mainly interested in the way in which popular science media treated Inheritance respectfully but very cautiously. The science writers are all supposed to be pro-Darwin, you see, but anti-racist. It is not clear that the two concepts Read More ›

By 2076. From Michael Brooks at New Scientist: Will we still love technology when robots have taken our jobs, or when insurance companies demand huge premiums because humans are the most dangerous drivers on the roads? Will people smash up self-driving taxis, just as Luddites attacked automated looms? In some small, angry pockets, the backlash is already in full swing. Former mathematician Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, has just published a book called The Anti-Tech Revolution. (paywall) More. It’s helpful that the Unabomber is an entirely average American (“Kaczynski killed three and injured 23 people over the course of an 18-year bombing campaign that often targeted universities and airlines.”) Like all the other rubes, boobs, bubbas, hicks, and hillbillies… Note Read More ›

More meetings planned. Snatches from science writer Carl Zimmer at Quanta: While Noble was struggling to respond, Shuker went back to the paper on an iPad. And now he read the abstract in a booming voice. ‘Our results demonstrate that natural selection can rapidly rewire regulatory networks,’” Shuker said. He put down the iPad. “So it’s a perfect, beautiful example of rapid neo-Darwinian evolution,” he declared. Shuker distilled the feelings of a lot of skeptics I talked to at the conference. The high-flying rhetoric about a paradigm shift was, for the most part, unwarranted, they said. Nor were these skeptics limited to the peanut gallery. Several of them gave talks of their own. More. Goodness, the relief that must have Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The ice layer, which spans a greater area than the state of New Mexico, lies in Mars’ mid-northern latitudes and is covered by just 3 feet to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) of soil. It therefore represents a vast possible resource for future astronauts exploring the Red Planet, study team members said. More. One suspects we’ll have to go there to really find out. There are volunteers. See also: Researchers: Life could only exist on Mars far beneath surface Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Jennifer Ouellette at Quanta: The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain — which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer. … isher’s hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. Read More ›