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Category: evolution – Page 73

“This concept that cells ‘fight back’ against modified RNA is of practical importance, as it suggests how one might improve the effectiveness of RNA therapy.”

Researchers from the Smidt Heart Institute have unveiled a novel concept — they harnessed modified messenger RNA (mRNA) technology used in creating the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines, which can be a significant step in the evolution and creation of biological pacemakers.

Luismmolina/iStock.

The investigators identified how biological pacemaker cells could “fight back” against therapies to biologically correct abnormal heartbeat rates. They’ve also found a new way to “boost the effectiveness” of RNA therapies by controlling the “fighting back” activity, they said in a release.

Continue reading “A breakthrough in mRNA therapies could lead to biological heart pacemakers” | >

How ethical would aliens be?

Ethics derived from biological evolution can be harsh — parasitism, invasiveness, and survival at all costs. Ethics derived from human culture is far more benevolent. Would alien ethics be based more on biology or culture? Let’s hope the latter.

Posted on big think, direct weblink at.

Posted on Big Think.

Continue reading “What Sort of Ethics Would Aliens Practice?” | >

Investigators from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai have identified how biological pacemaker cells—cells that control your heartbeat—can “fight back” against therapies to biologically correct abnormal heartbeat rates. The research also uncovered a new way to boost the effectiveness of RNA therapies by controlling this “fighting back” activity.

This novel concept, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Reports Medicine, is an important step in the evolution and creation of biological pacemakers—which aim to one day replace traditional, electronic pacemakers.

“We are all born with a specialized group of heart that set the pace for our heartbeats,” said Eugenio Cingolani, MD, senior author of the study and director of the Cardiogenetics Program in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai. “But in some people, this natural is too slow, leading to the need for an electronic pacemaker.”

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The Fermi Paradox ask us how in a Universe so vast and ancient we seem to be the only intelligent civilization around, with no older interstellar alien empires visible in the galaxy. But could extinction play a role in that, or might extinction events instead drive evolution forward?

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Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox: Extinction” | >

Summary: Findings support the theory that microRNAs are essential for the development and evolution of intelligent life.

Source: Dartmouth College.

Octopuses have captured the attention of scientists and the public with their remarkable intelligence, including the use of tools, engaging in creative play and problem-solving, and even escaping from aquariums.

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If we re-ran Earth’s clock, would life arise again? Would another civilization eventually evolve? Astrobiology is faced with trying to contextualize our place in the Universe using just a single data point. But even a single data point contains information. The key to unlocking it is a careful understanding of the selection biases at play and intricacies of Bayesian statistics. Today, we’re thrilled to present to you our explainer video of a new research paper led by Prof David Kipping that provides a direct quantification of the odds of life and intelligence on Earth-like worlds, based on our own chronology. Presented & Written by Prof. David Kipping.

This video is based on research conducted at the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University, New York. You can now support our research program directly here: https://www.coolworldslab.com/support.

Previous episodes to catch up on:
► “Watching the End of the World”: https://youtu.be/p9e8qNNe3L0
► “Why We Could Be Alone”: https://youtu.be/PqEmYU8Y_rI

References:
► Kipping, D. 2020, “An Objective Bayesian Analysis of Life’s Early Start and Our Late Arrival”, PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/12/1921655117
► Spiegel, D. & Turner, E., 2011, “Bayesian analysis of the astrobiological implications of life’s early emergence on Earth”, PNAS 109,395 https://arxiv.org/abs/1107.3835
► Carter, B. 2007, “Five or six step scenario for evolution?”, Int. J. Astrobiology 7,177 : https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.1985
► O’Malley-James, J. et al. 2013, “Swansong biospheres: refuges for life and novel microbial biospheres on terrestrial planets near the end of their habitable lifetimes” Int. J. Astrobiology 12, 99: https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5721
► Bell, E. et al., 2015, “Potentially biogenic carbon preserved in a 4.1 billion-year-old zircon”, PNAS 112, 14518: https://www.pnas.org/content/112/47/14518
► Smith, H. & Szathmáry, E. 1995, “The Major Transitions in Evolution”, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
► Schopf, W. et al., 2018, “SIMS analyses of the oldest known assemblage of microfossils document their taxon-correlated carbon isotope compositions”, PNAS 115, 53: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/1/53

Video materials & graphics used:

Continue reading “The Odds of Life and Intelligence” | >

Our default intuition when it comes to consciousness is that humans and some other animals have it, whereas plants and trees don’t. But how sure can we be that plants aren’t conscious? And what if what we take to be behavior indicating consciousness can be replicated with no conscious agent involved? Annaka Harris invites us to consider the real possibility that our intuitions about consciousness might be mere illusions.

Our intuitions have been shaped by natural selection to quickly provide life-saving information, and these evolved intuitions can still serve us in modern life. For example, we have the ability to unconsciously perceive elements in our environment in threatening situations that in turn deliver an almost instantaneous assessment of danger — such as the intuition that we shouldn’t get into an elevator with someone, even though we can’t put our finger on why.

But our guts can deceive us as well, and “false intuitions” can arise in any number of ways, especially in domains of understanding — like science and philosophy — that evolution could never have foreseen. An intuition is simply the powerful sense that something is true without having an awareness or understanding of the reasons behind this feeling — it may or may not represent something true about the world.

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‘I almost died on the way out,’ said the six-foot-two tall archeologist who lost 25 kgs to enter a 17.5-centimeter cave.

Researchers claim to have discovered new evidence of extinct human species who lived in the underground caves of modern-day South Africa.

“We have massive evidence. It’s everywhere,” said Berger, who reported the findings in a press release and a Carnegie Science lecture at the Martin Luther King Jr.

Gulshan Khan/Getty Images.

Continue reading “‘Massive evidence’ on evolution: Extinct human species with tiny brains ‘used fire’ to live underground” | >

Mammals run the gamut of social organization systems, ranging from loose, ephemeral interactions like aggregations of jaguars in the South American wetlands to the antlike subterranean societies of naked mole-rats (SN: 10/13/21; SN: 10/20/20).

But marsupials — a subgroup of mammals that give birth to relatively underdeveloped young reared in pouches — have traditionally been considered largely solitary. Some kangaroo species were known to form transient or permanent groups of dozens of individuals. But among marsupials, long-term bonds between males and females were thought rare and there were no known examples of group members cooperating to raise young. Previous work on patterns of mammalian social evolution regarded about 90 percent of examined marsupial species to be solitary.

“If you look at other [studies] about some specific species, you will see [the researchers] tend to assume that the marsupials are solitary,” says Jingyu Qiu, a behavioral ecologist at CNRS in Strasbourg, France.

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Accelerating particles to relativistic speeds typically requires particle accelerators that are many kilometers in length. Miniature particle accelerators a few tens of centimeters long or smaller also exist. These so-called laser-plasma accelerators are being tested in research facilities for future use in hospitals, where scientists hope the accelerators could generate x rays for cancer diagnostics and treatment. In these devices, particles are accelerated by short laser pulses, so scientists have only a few femtoseconds to track the particles’ evolving properties. Now Simon Bohlen of the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) and colleagues experimentally demonstrate a technique to measure the energy evolution of an electron bunch inside a laser-plasma accelerator [1]. The team hopes that the technique could be used to improve laser-plasma accelerators and ready them to generate x rays for medical applications.

For their demonstration Bohlen and colleagues used a phenomenon called Thomson scattering, which is the scattering of photons by electrons. They split in two the laser beam used to accelerate the electrons, using one part for normal electron acceleration and the other part to create a Thomson laser—a beam of photons the accelerated electrons could scatter. They then overlapped the Thomson laser and the accelerated electrons such that the two interacted at 20 locations over a 400- m distance. The team measured the energy of the photons scattered during these interactions using an x-ray detector. From these measurements, the team reconstructed the energy evolution of the electrons over most of the accelerator length without destroying the electron beam.

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