They know what they are without a membrane, just by being gelatinous.
Cell biology
Cells’ feedback circuitry is all in the math
At Quanta: “What math and engineering and biology have in common, at least modern engineering, is enormous hidden complexity,” Doyle said. Take, for example, a cellphone. It seems simple to operate, but underneath, many layers of control circuits are built atop one another.
James Tour: 1 hr lecture on OoL
on the mystery of the origin of life: From the blurb: Dr. Tour is one of the world’s top synthetic organic chemists. He has authored 680 scientific publications and holds more than 120 patents (here is a partial list). In 2014, Thomson Reuters named him one of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” and in […]
An organism takes shape in 6 min time lapse vid
Watch a single cell become a complete organism in six minutes of timelapse. Hat tip Aeon: See also: Before you go: DNA uses “climbers’ ropes method” to keep tangles at bay DNA as a master of resource recycling The amazing energy efficiency of cells: A science writer compares the cell to human inventions and finds […]
Researchers identify a new sensory organism that detects pain
Assuming this holds up, everywhere we look, more systems, more organization, and it all just sort of happened by magic, oops, Darwinism. One wonders, at what point will the inability to distinguish between Darwinism and magic lead to some sort of re-evaluation of the origin of complex specified information in life forms?
Culturing a tentacled archean in a lab shows eukaryote-like genes from 2 billion years ago
Also, here’s a 2017 Abstract from Nature, noting that “Our results expand the known repertoire of ‘eukaryote-specific’ proteins in Archaea, indicating that the archaeal host cell already contained many key components that govern eukaryotic cellular complexity.” Thus they had that complexity back then. Not so good for Darwinism unless Darwinism is magic.
Who knew bacteria could trap light without chlorophyll?
We are “trained,” if you like, to expect certain discoveries (dark matter, for example). Then we learn something significant that really surprises us and allows for new thinking about, for example, ecology.
Will setting proteins to music help us understand them?
Re proteins: “They have their own language, and we don’t know how it works,” he says. “We don’t know what makes a silk protein a silk protein or what patterns reflect the functions found in an enzyme. We don’t know the code.”
The genes that come to life after you die
The most likely explanation is that death is a process of shutting down, rather than an instant when everything stops. The genes to grow a spinal column, for example, resurfaced but maybe they had been suppressed because the deceased already had one. Still much to learn but that’s a good hypothesis to test.
Researcher: Smartest engineers would be “totally stumped” by a cell
Says Greg Johnson, a computer vision and machine learning researcher at the Allen Institute for Cell Science, on seeing inside living cells.
Yet another new type of intercellular communication discovered
Amazing how often so many life forms have just gotten lucky and tumbled into exactly what they needed via pure randomness.
Researcher asks, Is the cell REALLY a machine?
Nicholson: “The recent introduction of novel experimental techniques capable of tracking individual molecules within cells in real time is leading to the rapid accumulation of data that are inconsistent with an engineering view of the cell.” Cells are more than machines but that only makes any form of Darwinism less likely.
Cells from a billion years ago remarkably preserved
If researchers find cells in a really clear state of preservation, who will be surprised if it turns out that they are a lot like modern cells but somehow that fact doesn’t point to anything. Darwinism, after all, can just happen in the twinkling of an eye…
The remarkable world of virus communication
Do viruses think? Not in the human sense. As with plants, these communications are signals, not abstractions. But the signals raise an important question: If viruses seek to remain in an organized state, why are they not “alive”? If they are not “alive,” what are they?
Is today’s biology missing a Big Idea?
Talbott: Every organism is an entity in which certain ideas and intentions are manifest — observably expressed and realized. We have to be willing to say, as everyone does say, “This cell is preparing to divide.” We would never say (as I mentioned earlier), “This planet is preparing to make another circuit of the sun.”