If conditions on a distant planet allowed life to flourish, would it look anything like life here on Earth? It’s a question that’s seen a Darwinian rise of contradictory theories over the years.
Now, in an interview with the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the University of Cambridge, says “with reasonable confidence” that human-like evolution has occurred in other parts of the universe.
Matthew Cobb is a zoologist and author whose background is in insect genetics and the history of science. Over the past decade or so, as CRISPR was discovered and applied to genetic remodeling, he started to get concerned—afraid, actually—about three potential applications of the technology. He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and harnessing CRISPR, is afraid of the same things. So he decided to delve into these topics, and As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is the result.
Summing up fears
The first of his worries is the notion of introducing heritable mutations into the human genome. He Jianqui did this to three human female embryos in China in 2018, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their kids (if they’re allowed to have any) are about four now. Their identities are classified for their protection, but presumably their health is being monitored, and the poor girls have probably already been poked and prodded incessantly by every type of medical specialist there is.
The James Webb Space Telescope has released a spooky new photo of the iconic Pillars of Creation.
In a Thursday release, NASA wrote that the eerie image was taken by the $10 billion-dollar observatory’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, also known as MIRI.
The pillars of gas and Interstellar dust enshroud the thousands of stars that exist in the region.
European Space Agency · The scary sound of Earth’s magnetic field
The resulting five-minute audio includes eerie creaks and crackling sounds, as well as deep breathing-like sounds that listeners on social media described as “petrifying” and “spine tingling freaky.”
Since the discovery was revealed on October 24, loudspeakers at Solbjerg Square in Copenhagen, Denmark, have broadcasted the recording three times a day. Plans are to continue playing it each day at 8 a.m., 1 p.m., and 7 p.m. through October 30.
A newly discovered, “potentially hazardous” asteroid almost the size of the world’s tallest skyscraper is set to tumble past Earth just in time for Halloween, according to NASA.
The asteroid, called 2022 RM4, has an estimated diameter of between 1,083 and 2,428 feet (330 and 740 meters) — just under the height of Dubai’s 2,716-foot-tall (828 m) Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will zoom past our planet at around 52,500 mph (84,500 km/h), or roughly 68 times the speed of sound, according to NASA (opens in new tab).
A joint study by TAU and the Hebrew University, involving 20 researchers from different countries and disciplines, has accurately dated 21 destruction layers at 17 archaeological sites in Israel by reconstructing the direction and/or intensity of the earth’s magnetic field recorded in burnt remnants. The new data verify the Biblical accounts of the Egyptian, Aramean, Assyrian, and Babylonian military campaigns against the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
Findings indicate, for example, that the army of Hazael, King of Aram-Damascus, was responsible for the destruction of several cities—Tel Rehov, Tel Zayit, and Horvat Tevet, in addition to Gath of the Philistines, whose destruction is noted in the Hebrew Bible. At the same time, the study refutes the prevailing theory that Hazael was the conqueror who destroyed Tel Beth-Shean.
Other geomagnetic findings reveal that the cities in the Negev were destroyed by the Edomites, who took advantage of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians.
A study has found that Eurasian jays can pass a version of the ‘marshmallow test’—and those with the greatest self-control also score the highest on intelligence tests.
This is the first evidence of a link between self-control and intelligence in birds.
Self-control—the ability to resist temptation in favor of a better but delayed reward—is a vital skill that underpins effective decision-making and future planning.
Chinese researchers have created the world’s first cloned Arctic wolf — an achievement that could help save other species from extinction and ensure the biodiversity of our planet.
Why it matters: Scottish scientists proved back in 1996 that it was possible to clone a mammal using a cell from an adult animal. Possible — but not easy. Dolly the sheep was the only successful clone in their 277 attempts.
Cloning is still a challenging process — fewer than 25 animal species have been cloned to date, so the first successful cloning of a species is still newsworthy 25+ years after Dolly’s birth.
While we may struggle with the production of electricity and green power now, a recent discovery by the University of Massachusetts in Amherst has discovered something quite amazing. One day, in the not far away future-we may have the ability to create electricity from thin air.
Well, technically we already do, but let me explain how this happened and what that means for us. The study was published in the journal Nature in February 2020. The title is “Power generation from ambient humidity using protein nanowires” and through this study, the researchers stumbled upon something quite amazing.
The project was started by electrical engineering student Xiaomeng Liu, who works in the lab with the study author Jun Yao, discovered a prototype that he had been working on and began doing something he didn’t expect. Even when he wasn’t running the machine, he was picking up on power output. “We were initially very perplexed,” Yao says.
How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter?
This is known as the Hard Problem and this theory gets around this problem by explaining consciousness as electrical activity that is aware of its own electrical potential. This is possible because the light photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force. Because light has momentum and momentum is frame dependent electrical activity in the brain is always in the centre of its own reference frame in ‘the moment of now’ with a potential future that is always uncertain and a past that has gone forever. It is because consciousness is always in the centre of its own reference frame that we have the concept of ‘mind’ with each one of us having our own personal view of the Universe. This is within a process formed by the spontaneous absorption and emission of light a process of continuous energy exchange forming the ever changing world of our everyday life. If our eyes where more sensitive to light we would be able to see that everything is radiating EMR or light continuously because the Universe is never at absolute zero.
In this theory consciousness is the most advanced part of a universal process that can be explained by physics. There are no paradoxes in this theory! We are in the centre of our own reference frame being able to look back in time in every direction at the beauty of the stars. We can also look down into individual reference frames seeing the future unfold photon by photon relative to that frame of reference.
The greatest affect this process of continuous energy exchange has on us is the aging process with photon energy from the Sun cascading down forming greater degrees of freedom for the continuous increase in entropy or disorganization.
But above all this is a creative process with the future coming into existence relative to the energy and momentum or actions of each individual life form. The wave-particle duality of light is acting like the bits or zeros and ones of a computer. This forms a blank canvas for life to form its own future relative to its position and the energy and momentum of its own actions. The Universe is a continuum with spacetime as an emergent property with an Arrow of Time for each object or life form with a future coming into existence relative to their energy & momentum with each new photon electron coupling or dipole moment.
I believe this is what we are seeing when we see an artist at work we are seeing the future unfolding relative to the energy and momentum of the artist!
In this theory creation is truly in the eye and hand of the beholder!
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The Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment Explained by QAT
