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Archive for the ‘biological’ category: Page 30

Jun 1, 2023

Fish evolution takes place in decades — not millions of years

Posted by in categories: biological, evolution, genetics, singularity

Given this new information humans could modify their genetic code to rapidly accelerate their evolution aswell leading to a biological singularity of evolution.


Codfish have been telling a story of rapid fish evolution, reshaped by human activity more swiftly than previously assumed, reveals a cutting-edge study led by Rutgers University.

This evolutionary tale, illuminated during the latter half of the twentieth century, signifies the impact of human-driven overfishing. The findings suggest that evolutionary changes, once thought to span millions of years, can be catalyzed within mere decades.

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May 31, 2023

Can We Move PLANET EARTH Across the Universe?

Posted by in categories: biological, physics, space travel

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May 31, 2023

Taming the swarm

Posted by in categories: biological, robotics/AI

Radhika is a professor at Harvard and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She studies collective behavior in biological systems and how such behaviors can be applied to computing and robotics.

Radhika Nagpal is the Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute.
for Biologically Inspired Engineering. At Harvard, she leads the Self-organizing Systems Research Group (SSR) and her research combines.
computer science, robotics, and biology. Her main area of interest is how cooperation can emerge or be programmed from large groups of.
simple agents. Radhika Nagpal is a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, where she heads the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group in the study of collective behavior in biological systems and how such behaviors can be applied to computing and robotics. A professor at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), her research draws on inspiration from social insects and multicellular biology, with the goal of creating globally robust systems made up of many cooperative parts.

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May 31, 2023

Beyond the Horizon: Transhumanism at the Nexus of Technology and Biology #006

Posted by in categories: biological, robotics/AI, transhumanism

Embark on a journey Beyond the Horizon, as we unravel the intriguing blend of Transhumanism, technology, and biology, revealing a potential future where human evolution and AI are inseparably linked.

May 28, 2023

Genes point to how some bacteria can gobble up electricity

Posted by in category: biological

Year 2021 😗


A new study shows how some microbes absorb and release electrons — a trait that may point to new fuels or ways to store energy.

May 28, 2023

Forging a dream material with semiconductor quantum dots

Posted by in categories: biological, computing, quantum physics, solar power, sustainability

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have succeeded in creating a “superlattice” of semiconductor quantum dots that can behave like a metal, potentially imparting exciting new properties to this popular class of materials.

Semiconducting colloidal quantum dots have garnered tremendous research interest due to their special optical properties, which arise from the quantum confinement effect. They are used in , where they can improve the efficiency of energy conversion, biological imaging, where they can be used as fluorescent probes, , and even , where their ability to trap and manipulate individual electrons can be exploited.

However, getting to efficiently conduct electricity has been a major challenge, impeding their full use. This is primarily due to their lack of orientational order in assemblies. According to Satria Zulkarnaen Bisri, lead researcher on the project, “making them metallic would enable, for example, quantum dot displays that are brighter yet use less energy than current devices.”

May 26, 2023

Scientists provide first field observations of coccolithophore carbon extraction

Posted by in categories: biological, chemistry

Coccolithophores, a globally ubiquitous type of phytoplankton, play an essential role in the cycling of carbon between the ocean and atmosphere. New research from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences shows that these vital microbes can survive in low-light conditions by taking up dissolved organic forms of carbon, forcing researchers to reconsider the processes that drive carbon cycling in the ocean. The findings were published this week in Science Advances.

The ability to extract carbon from the direct absorption of dissolved organic carbon is known as osmotrophy. Though scientists had previously observed osmotrophy by coccolithophores using lab-grown cultures, this is the first evidence of this phenomenon in nature.

The team, led by Senior Research Scientist William Balch, undertook their experiments in populations of coccolithophores across the northwest Atlantic Ocean. They measured the rate at which phytoplankton fed on three different organic compounds, each labeled with chemical markers to track them. The dissolved compounds were used by the coccolithophores as a for both the organic tissues that comprise their single cells as well as the inorganic mineral plates, called coccoliths, which they secrete around themselves. Uptake of the organic compounds was slow compared to the rate at which phytoplankton can take up carbon through photosynthesis. But it wasn’t negligible.

May 25, 2023

Researchers transform our understanding of crystals

Posted by in categories: biological, chemistry, engineering, nanotechnology, particle physics, solar power, space, sustainability

When most people think of crystals, they picture suncatchers that act as rainbow prisms or the semi-transparent stones that some believe hold healing powers. However, to scientists and engineers, crystals are a form of materials in which their constituents—atoms, molecules, or nanoparticles—are arranged regularly in space. In other words, crystals are defined by the regular arrangement of their constituents. Common examples are diamonds, table salt, or sugar cubes.

However, in research just published in Soft Matter, a team led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Sangwoo Lee, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, discovered that crystal structures are not necessarily always regularly arranged. The discovery advances the field of materials science and has unrealized implications for the materials used for semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicle technologies.

One of the most common and important classes of crystal structures is the close-packed structures of regular spheres constructed by stacking layers of spheres in a honeycomb arrangement. There are many ways to stack the layers to construct close-packed structures, and how nature selects specific stacking is an important question in materials and physics research. In the close-packing construction, there is a very unusual structure with irregularly spaced constituents known as the random stacking of two-dimensional hexagonal layers (RHCP). This structure was first observed from cobalt metal in 1942, but it has been regarded as a transitional and energetically unpreferred state.

May 24, 2023

Researchers Discover New Ancestral Mechanism of Defense Against Nanoparticles

Posted by in categories: biological, nanotechnology

Scientists from the Finnish Hub for Development and Validation of Integrated Approaches (FHAIVE FHAIVE) and Tampere University have uncovered a novel response mechanism related to nanoparticle exposure that’s shared across various species.

A species is a group of living organisms that share a set of common characteristics and are able to breed and produce fertile offspring. The concept of a species is important in biology as it is used to classify and organize the diversity of life. There are different ways to define a species, but the most widely accepted one is the biological species concept, which defines a species as a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce viable offspring in nature. This definition is widely used in evolutionary biology and ecology to identify and classify living organisms.

May 24, 2023

Designing synthetic receptors for precise cell control

Posted by in categories: biological, chemistry, computing, engineering

Biosensors are artificial molecular complexes designed to detect the presence of target chemicals or even biomolecules. Consequently, biosensors have become important in diagnostics and synthetic cell biology. However, typical methods for engineering biosensors focus on optimizing the interactions between static binding surfaces, and current biosensor designs can only recognize structurally well-defined molecules, which can be too rigid for “real-life” biology.

“We developed a novel computational approach for designing protein-peptide ligand binding and applied it to engineer cell-surface chemotactic receptors that reprogrammed cell migration,” says EPFL professor Patrick Barth. “We think that our work could broadly impact the design of protein binding and cell engineering applications.”

The new biosensors developed by Barth’s group can sense flexible compounds and trigger complex cellular responses, which open up new possibilities for biosensor applications. The researchers created a , which is a computer-based system, for designing protein complexes that can change their shape and function dynamically—as opposed to the conventional static approaches. The framework can look at previously unexplored protein sequences to come up with new ways for the protein’s groups to be activated, even in ways that are different to their natural function.

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