Lifeboat Foundation

Last year, the Advanced LIGO-VIRGO gravitational-wave detector network recorded data from 35 merging black holes and neutron stars. A great result—but what did they miss? According to Dr. Rory Smith from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery at Monash University in Australia—it’s likely there are another 2 million gravitational wave events from merging black holes, “a pair of merging black holes every 200 seconds and a pair of merging neutron stars every 15 seconds” that scientists are not picking up.

Dr. Smith and his colleagues, also at Monash University, have developed a method to detect the presence of these weak or “background” events that to date have gone unnoticed, without having to detect each one individually. The method—which is currently being test driven by the LIGO community—” means that we may be able to look more than 8 billion light years further than we are currently observing,” Dr. Smith said.

“This will give us a snapshot of what the early universe looked like while providing insights into the evolution of the universe.”

A new cosmic evolution-based calculation that say that there are likely to be more than 36 ongoing intelligent civilizations throughout our Milky Way galaxy.

For the first time, a complete time-calibrated phylogeny for a large group of invertebrates is published for an entire continent.

In a recent research paper in the open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal ZooKeys, a German-Swedish team of scientists provide a diagrammatic hypothesis of the relationships and evolutionary history for all 496 European species of butterflies currently in existence. Their study provides an important tool for evolutionary and ecological research, meant for the use of insect and ecosystem conservation.

In order to analyse the ancestral relationships and history of evolutionary divergence of all European butterflies currently inhabiting the Old continent, the team led by Martin Wiemers—affiliated with both the Senckenberg German Entomological Institute and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, mainly used molecular data from already published sources available from NCBI GenBank, but also contributed many new sequences, some from very local endemics for which no molecular data had previously been available.

Please listen to the second episode of my new Cosmic Controversy Podcast. This week’s guest is planetary scientist Stephen Kane at the University of California, Riverside, who discusses why Venus is so haunting and beguiling all at once.

In this wide-ranging interview, planetary scientist Stephen Kane of the University of California, Riverside, delves into the mysteries of our neighbor planet Venus. We discuss how Venus went wrong and why understanding its evolution is so important in characterizing extrasolar planetary systems like our own.

Continue reading “Episode 2 --- The Mysteries of Our Planet Venus” »

Every second of every day, countless biochemical reactions take place in our bodies’ cells. The organization of this complex system is the result of billions of years of evolution, fine-tuning our functions since the first primordial organisms.

One such vital reaction is “methylation,” where a methyl group —a carbon atom linked to three hydrogen atoms—attaches itself to a target molecule. Methylation is involved in the regulation of everything from DNA to proteins, and it is so vital that it can be found in all living organisms.

In a recent paper published in Communications Biology, a team of researchers lead by Jean-Michel Fustin and Hitoshi Okamura from Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences has uncovered an intimate connection between methylation and the body’s circadian rhythms: a link that exists even in organisms that don’t traditionally “sleep,” such as bacteria.

Circa 2019 o,.0.

How did the universe evolve from a point of singularity, known as the Big Bang, into a massive structure whose boundaries seem limitless? New clues and insight into the evolution of the universe have recently been provided by an international team of physicists, who performed the most detailed large-scale simulation of the universe to date.

The researchers made their own universe in a box — a cube of space spanning more than 230 million light-years across. Previous cosmological simulations were either very detailed but spanned a small volume or less detailed across large volumes. The new simulation, known as TNG50, managed to combine the best of two worlds, producing a large-scale replica of the cosmos while, at the same time, allowing for unprecedented computational resolution.

Continue reading “Physicists perform the most detailed simulation of the Universe yet” »

Circa 2017

Unlike other animals, cephalopods – the family that includes octopuses, squid and cuttlefish – do not obey the commands of their DNA to the letter.

Instead, they sometimes interfere with the code as it is being carried by a molecular “messenger”. This has the effect of diversifying the proteins their cells can produce, leading to some interesting variations.

Continue reading “Squid and octopus can edit and direct their own brain genes” »

3. Evolution shifts to off-world human colonies.

4. Transhumanism will drive evolution.

Is natural selection still a major force in human evolution? As far back as high school biology, we’ve been taught to think the answer must be yes. But is it really true?

Continue reading “Have humans reached the end of evolution? Not under these 4 scenarios” »

Oligodendrocytes and astrocytes displayed more differences in the human evolutionary lineage than neurons as compared to similar cells in other primates. Credit: Pavel Odinev/ Skoltech.