Funny how all this just somehow happens even though “ There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws’. If the “fixed laws” produce all this communication, they are clearly intelligence operating under the name “laws.” This is just not what laws do.
Cell biology
Researchers: Cells have a repair crew that fixes local leaks
Such intricate systems just happen to fall into place in cells via Darwinian evolution even though we know that nothing else happens that way without intelligent direction. Fancy that.
Life form’s environment so extreme is has never been cultivated in a laboratory
The more we know, the more insights we can have, sure. But it’s not always clear what specific things truly extreme life forms can tell us about the more common ones. Maybe the message is more general, that life forms try their hardest to survive every circumstance. But what is it they have that rocks don’t?
Researchers: How the immune system “thinks”
They can say that “thinks” is “just an image” if they like. But at what point does it become clear that somehow something must have been doing something that we would normally describe as thinking or else this wouldn’t be happening.
Researchers: Male Y chromosome not a genetic wasteland after all
The Y chromosome has been notoriously difficult to sequence due to repetitive elements. Junk, right? Now, researchers from the University of Rochester have found a way to sequence a large portion of the Y chromosome in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster—the most that the Y chromosome has been assembled in fruit flies. The research, published […]
Paul Davies: The really tough question is how life’s hardware can write its own software
Davies, author of The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life thinks we overlook the difficulty and offers a solution: Nature got there first.
Suzan Mazur’s new book details how mechanobiology Dooms Darwin
Suzan Mazur has made a career of covering the gradual way in which Darwinism is being replaced in biology—whether anyone admits it or not—by other ways of looking at the journey of life through time.
The centriole as just another instance of random accumulation in cells
Also: 2+2=5. Don’t forget that now, when the authorities ask.
New type of blood vessel discovered, hidden in bones
We are still finding new, complex, interlocking systems in our bodies and still hearing pundits like Nathan Lents insist, as in his Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, that they are badly designed. But then why should fact matter so much in the face of fashionable opinion?
How do cells in a body know where they are supposed to be?
Is it just imagination or do people increasingly write in such a way as to simply abandon the pretense that there is no design, without wanting to discuss it?
In a world of supposedly random life, even muscles have their own clocks
Twenty years ago, we didn’t know that muscles had their own circadian clocks. They turn out to be important to health. Evolution, it turns out, while entirely unintelligent, can even plan your day.
New find sheds light on how and when DNA replicates
“If you duplicate at a different place and time, you might assemble a completely different structure,” Gilbert said. “A cell has different things available to it at different times. Changing when something replicates changes the packaging of the genetic information.”
Fossilized bird lung tissue controversial; Big if true
Here’s an interesting premise for science finds of 2018: Big, If True. Among them, Bird breathAre white speckles in the chest cavity of a 120-million-year-old bird fossil traces of a respiratory system similar to that of modern birds (SN: 11/10/18, p. 12)? If so, the fossil, found in China, could be the first to preserve […]
Remarkable vid of a mouse embryo developing
This series of videos from McDole et al. shows the development of a mouse embryo, captured using adaptive light-sheet microscopy, and highlights cell division (part A), cell movements (part B) and tissue dynamics (parts C, D) during embryogenesis. Paper. McDole, K., Guignard, L., Amat, F., Berger, A., Malandain, G., Royer, L.A., Turaga, S.C., Branson, K., […]
At Oscillations: How we go from a sphere to a torus
At her blog, Oscillations, Suzan Mazur reports on the lecture series Simons Center for Geometry and Physics has been hosting at Stony Brook University, on Nonequilibrium Physics in Biology: Among the more interesting presenters is Kim Sneppen, a professor of complex systems and biophysics at Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, who addresses the diversity of […]