Clipmarks | Mohir's 'life' clips

Scientists Develop New Computational Method To Investigate Origin Of Life

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:33:15 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: "Retroelements are an ancient and highly diverse class of proteins; therefore, they provide a rigorous benchmark for us to test our approach. We are happy with the results we derived, even though our method is in an early stage," said Patterson. The team plans to make the algorithms that they used in their method available to others as open-source software that is freely available on the Web.
Scientists map out the evolutionary histories of organisms by comparing their genetic and/or protein sequences. Those organisms that are closely related and share a recent common ancestor have greater degrees of similarity among their sequences.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Scientists at Penn State have developed a new computational method that they say will help them to understand how life began on Earth. The team's method has the potential to trace the evolutionary histories of proteins all the way back to either cells or viruses, thus settling the debate once and for all over which of these life forms came first.

"We have just begun to tap the potential power of this method," said Randen Patterson, a Penn State assistant professor of biology and one of the project's leaders. "We believe, if it is possible at all, that it is within our grasp to determine whether viruses evolved from cells or vice-versa."

The team is focusing on an ancient group of proteins, called retroelements, which comprise approximately 50 percent of the human genome by weight and are a crucial component in a number of diseases, including AIDS.

Tags: life, computers, science

Is our universe fine-tuned for life?

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:06:08 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: Claims of fine-tuning have generally been based on what happens when you vary a single characteristic of the universe, say the strength of gravity, while holding all others constant. That, says Adams, is too artificial a scenario to tell you anything about whether there are other universes that can support life. "The right way to do the problem is to start from scratch," he says. "You have to turn all the knobs and find out what happens."

Clip Source: space.newscientist.com

DON'T take our starry skies for granted. If you were unlucky enough to be living in some other universe, you might have nothing to stare at but black holes.

At least, that's the view of a new study that examines the nature of other universes that might support life and suggests that our cosmic habitat is nothing special after all - wondrously starry skies apart.

The idea that certain aspects of our universe make it uniquely suited to life has never been properly tested, says Fred Adams of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "You hear people say our universe is fine-tuned for life, that stars are rare and couldn't form if certain things were different," he says. "The truth is, no one has done the calculations." Adams has now rectified that situation and found that it is not unusual for stars to form that can support life.

Tags: life, universe

Next big VC Market: life extension?

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:37:28 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: futurememes.blogspot.com

Life extension is a growing market and could be the next significant industry targeted by Venture Capitalists and private investment as alternative energy and clean tech eventually wane. The opportunity is made obvious by continuous soaring costs in the world’s largest industry, healthcare, unfunded Medicare type liabilities in every industrialized country, and the demographic aging of populations and below replacement fertility rates together with massive demand and willingness to spend on longevity remedies.

What is the Life Extension Market?

he life extension market is the commercialization of scientific findings from stem cell, immunology, cancer, regenerative medicine and other areas of research.

The research linkage between products and research will hopefully become stronger and more standardized.

Tags: vc, life extension, longevity

Dust Storms In Sahara Desert Sustain Life In Atlantic Ocean

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:02:07 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Research at the University of Liverpool has found how Saharan dust storms help sustain life over extensive regions of the North Atlantic Ocean.

Working aboard research vessels in the Atlantic, scientists mapped the distribution of nutrients including phosphorous and nitrogen and investigated how organisms such as phytoplankton are sustained in areas with low nutrient levels.

They found that plants are able to grow in these regions because they are able to take advantage of iron minerals in Saharan dust storms. This allows them to use organic or ‘recycled’ material from dead or decaying plants when nutrients such as phosphorous – an essential component of DNA – in the ocean are low.

“These findings are important because plant life cycles are essential in maintaining the balance of gases in our atmosphere. In looking at how plants survive in this area, we have shown how the Atlantic is able to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the growth of photosynthesising plants.”

Tags: ecology, shara, life, atlantic

Bio-Earth: Are Planets Living Super-Organisms?

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:48:23 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: He believes that expanding the study of life sciences to the core of our world and the depths of outer space will help us find distant relatives of our own Earth -- planets that could also sustain life.
To explain why contintental plates drift on the surface of the Earth's molten mantle, Maruyama argues that continents actually have life cycles. Old, cold plates on continental fringes sink to “plate graveyards” deep in the Earth’s mantle, and then rise again, creating volcanoes fueled by three-dimensional convection movements deep below the surface.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Japan's Maruyama Shigenori, one of the world's leading geophysicists, is working on a global formula for a vast new field of study that would include dozens of disciplines collaborating to produce an overall picture of the Earth.

Maruyama is creating a new institute called the Center for Bio-Earth Planetology will be launched in 2009 and fully dedicated to creating a new conception of life in space.He wants to find out if the continents will merge again in 250 million years to form a single super-continent; how meteorites change the chemical composition of the Earth; and what the connection is between the temperature of a planet and its magnetic field, which protects plants and animals from being bombarded with cosmic radiation, which in turn influences the rate of mutations and thus the development of new forms of life.

As he connects the dots from astronomy to life sciences, the outlines emerge of an all-encompassing image of entire planets, which appear as living super-organisms.

Tags: planet, gaia, geophysics

Unintelligent Design

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:14:29 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth.
The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Lost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design -- including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's decision this past Friday to sign a bill that allows teachers in his state to "supplement" classes on evolution with talk of creationism -- is one simple basic fact. The human species isn't intelligently designed.

When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.

Take, for instance, human memory, and the trouble we often have in remembering even the most basic facts -- where did we put our keys? Where did we park our car? Because our brains so often blur our memories together. Human eyewitness testimony is often no match for even a low-rent survelllance camera, and memory can fail even in life-or-death circumstances. (6% of all skydiving fatalities, for instance, are from divers that forgot to pull their ripcords),

Tags: evolution, creationism, intelligent design

Paralysed man takes a walk in virtual world

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:21:18 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: It is the first time a paralysis patient has succeeded in meeting a person and having a conversation in an Internet virtual world, they added.

Researchers are now studying a system that would let patients create text messages by mentally selecting certain letters, said Junichi Ushiba, associate professor at the biosciences and informatics department of Keio Universty's Faculty of Science and Technology.

"In the near future, they would be able to stroll through Second Life shopping malls with their brain waves... and click to make a purchase," Ushiba said.

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

A 41-year-old paralysed man uses brain waves to control his character in 'Second Life'.

A paralysed man using only his brain waves has been able to manipulate a virtual Internet character, Japanese researchers said Monday, calling it a world first.

The 41-year-old patient used his imagination to make his character take a walk and chat to another virtual person on the popular Second Life website.

The patient, who has suffered paralysis for more than 30 years, can barely bend his fingers due to a progressive muscle disease so cannot use a mouse or keyboard in the traditional way.

In the experiment, he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.

He was then able to have a conversation with the other character using an attached microphone, said the researchers at Japan's Keio University.

Tags: computers, second life, brain, virtual

Huge hidden biomass lives deep beneath the oceans

Sun, 25 May 2008 18:02:34 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: They found simple organisms known as prokaryotes in every sample. Prokaryotes are organisms that often have just one cell. Their peculiarity is that, unlike any other form of life, their DNA is not neatly packed into a nucleus.

Clip Source: environment.newscientist.com

It's the basement apartment like no other. Life has been found 1.6 kilometres beneath the sea floor, at temperatures reaching 100 °C.

The discovery marks the deepest living cells ever to be found beneath the sea floor. Bacteria have been found deeper underneath the continents, but there they are rare. In comparison, the rocks beneath the sea appear to be teeming with life.

John Parkes, a geobiologist at the University of Cardiff, UK, hopes his team's discovery might one day help find life on other planets. He says it might even redefine what we understand as life, and, bizarrely, what we understand by "age".

Parkes has been hunting for deep life for over 20 years. Recently, he and his colleagues examined samples of a mud core extracted from between 860 metres and 1626 metres beneath the sea floor off the coast of Newfoundland.

Tags: life, sea, ocean

Early life could have relied on 'arsenic DNA'

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:29:01 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

A deadly poison, arsenic is best known for snuffing out life. But could it have played a key role in the origins of life on Earth?

Felisa Wolfe-Simon of Harvard University thinks so because the toxin behaves so similarly to phosphorus, an essential ingredient in nearly all living things. Much more arsenic would have been available in Earth's primordial oceans than phosphorus. And while microbial activity was necessary later to unlock phosphorus from rocks, arsenic could have dissolved in water from hydrothermal vents.

"If you put arsenic in a test tube with adenosine, you immediately get lots of adenosine monoarsenate," which is structurally similar to adenine, the "A" letter in DNA's code of A, C, G and T, says Wolfe-Simon.

If early life did use arsenate, single-celled organisms with arsenate-based DNA may still be around today wherever phosphorus is scarce.

Tags: life, dna, evolution, arsenic

Academics find formula for 14 extra years of life

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:42:17 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

People who adopt four principles for a healthy lifestyle can add as much as 14 years to their lives, a study revealed today.

Researchers found that not smoking, taking exercise, drinking in moderation and eating five servings of fruit and vegetables a day can have a huge impact on life expectancy.

Academics at Cambridge University monitored the health of 20,000 men and women aged between 45 and 79 from Norfolk between 1993 and 2006.

The study concluded: "The results strongly suggest that these four achievable lifestyle changes could have a marked improvement on the health of middle-aged and older people, which is particularly important given the ageing population in the UK and other European countries."

The research showed that a person's social class or body mass index (BMI) had no role to play in life expectancy.

The study, published in the journal The Public Library of Science Medicine, is one of the first to look at the combined impact of the four factors on life expectancy.

Tags: health, longevity

10 Minutes Of Staring at Boobs Daily Prolongs Man's Life by 5 Years...

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:00:37 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: "Sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves blood circulation. There's no question: Gazing at large breasts makes men healthier. Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of stroke and heart attack in half." said Weatherby, who even recommended that men aged over 40 should spend at least 10 minutes daily admiring breasts sized "D-cup" or larger.

She said that this was as healthy as going to the gym for 30 minutes daily and prolonged a man's life by five years.

Clip Source: news.softpedia.com

10 Minutes Of Staring at Boobs Daily Prolongs Man's Life by 5 Years...

A German research published in New England Journal of Medicine said that men staring at women's breasts in fact prolong their lives with years.

"Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female such as Baywatch actress Pamela Lee is equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out," said author Dr. Karen Weatherby, a gerontologist.

The team led by Weatherby was made up of researchers at three hospitals in Frankfurt, Germany, and found this results after monitoring for 5 years the health of 200 male subjects, half of whom were asked to look at busty females daily, while the other half had to abstain from doing so.

For five years, the boob oglers presented a lower blood pressure, slower resting pulse rates and decreased risk of coronary artery disease.

Tags: man, health

Are Aliens Among Us?

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:35:22 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Are Aliens Among Us?

In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms

he origin of life is one of the great unsolved problems of science. Nobody knows how, where or when life originated. About all that is known for certain is that microbial life had established itself on Earth by about three and a half billion years ago. In the absence of hard evidence of what came before, there is plenty of scope for disagreement.

How can scientists determine which view is correct? The most direct way is to seek evidence for life on another planet, such as Mars. If life originated from scratch on two planets in a single solar system, it would decisively confirm the hypothesis of biological determinism. Unfortunately, it may be a long time before missions to the Red Planet are sophisticated enough to hunt for Martian life-forms and, if they indeed exist, to study such extraterrestrial biota

Tags: biology, life, aliens

When To Have A Child? A New Approach To The Decision

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 18:51:45 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: The example of a 20-year-old college student illustrates the situation when a woman claims she does not want to have a child until she reaches a certain age, say 35 years old. The model suggests that, especially in cases where both family life and career are important to the woman, having a child much earlier may be a better long-term solution than waiting until she is more established in her career.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

When To Have A Child? A New Approach To The Decision

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2007) — Women seeking to balance career, social life and family life in making the decision on when to have a child may benefit from applying formal decision-making science to this complex emotional choice.

"This decision is too complex to logically consider all the relevant aspects intuitively in one's head," write Professor Ralph Keeney and doctoral student Dinah Vernik of Duke's Fuqua School of Business. "Yet, for many, it is too important and consequential to simply go with one's feelings."

The pair have demonstrated that using a formalized approach to this very personal decision may help a woman evaluate her options regarding the optimal time for her to attempt to conceive a first child.

Their analysis, which was published in the current issue of the journal Decision Analysis, also reveals that women may have more options than they realize.

Tags: baby, child, birth giving, women, career

Bacteria of the Living Dead

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:23:47 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

Halloween Science: Bacteria of the Living Dead

Chop up their DNA and the buggers still keep comin' back to life.

A team of scientists melted five samples of ice from Antarctica in hopes of reviving the oldest known frozen bacteria—millions of years older than any previously brought to life. And, in fact, the bacteria, ranging in age from 100,000 to a stunning 8 million years old, came groaning back in the culture flask. The younger the bacteria, the more quickly the resurrection occurred. It took the younger bacteria just seven days to reproduce; the oldest samples took up to 10 times as long.

The finding could have a profound effect on microbial life (see “The Last Hidden Place on Earth,” page 44). As Antarctic ice melts, the bacteria frozen inside may revive and be taken up by microbes in the ocean, says Paul Falkowski, a Rutgers University biologist who directed the bacteria project.

Tags: bacteria, biology, evolution, global warming

The Top Ten of the world's wackiest scientific experiments

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:07:28 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: elephants on LSD
you have to read this to believe
it is worthwhile reading the whole article

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Revealed: The Top Ten of the world's wackiest scientific experiments

Elephants on LSD... sexual turn-ons for turkeys... attempts to restore corpses to life: all feature on the list of the "craziest scientific experiments of all time," New Scientist reports.

ELEPHANTS ON ACID: In 1962 US researchers, curious about what might happen to an elephant injected with LSD, fired into a tusker a syringe-full of the drug, about 3,000 times the maximum dose for a human being.

REVERSING DEATH: Seeking to restore life to the deceased, Robert Cornish, a University of California scientist in the 1930s, seesawed corpses bodies up and down to circulate the blood while injecting adrenalin and anti-coagulants.

Thomas McMonigle, a prisoner on death row, volunteered to be Cornish's guinea pig, but was turned down by the State of California, which worried that if McMonigle came back to life, he would have to be freed.

Tags: science