Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: evolution – Page 19

The discovery is the best candidate for a class of black holes astronomers have long believed to exist but have never found—intermediate-mass black holes formed in early stages of galaxy evolution.

Visible to the naked eye as a smudge in the night sky from Southern latitudes, Omega Centauri is a magnificent collection of 10 million stars. Viewed through a small telescope, it resembles other globular clusters —a densely packed spherical assembly of stars where the core is so congested that individual stars blur into one another.

However, recent research conducted by teams from the University of Utah and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has resolved a long-standing debate among astronomers by confirming that Omega Centauri harbors a central black hole. The black hole appears to be the missing link between its stellar and supermassive kin—stuck in an intermediate stage of evolution, it is considerably less massive than the colossal black holes that are typically found in the centers of galaxies. Omega Centauri seems to be the core of a small, separate galaxy whose evolution was cut short when it was swallowed by the Milky Way.

Read more | >

A newly discovered fossil snake species in Wyoming is transforming our understanding of snake evolution. Unearthed from a burrow where four well-preserved specimens were found intertwined, this species, named Hibernophis breithaupti, lived in North America 34 million years ago. This discovery provides valuable insights into the origins and diversification of boas and pythons.

Hibernophis breithaupti has unique anatomical features, in part because the specimens are articulated—meaning they were found all in one piece with the bones still arranged in the proper order—which is unusual for fossil snakes. Researchers believe it may be an early member of Booidea, a group that includes modern boas and pythons. Modern boas are widespread in the Americas, but their early evolution is not well understood. These new and very complete fossils add important new information, in particular, on the evolution of small, burrowing boas known as rubber boas.

Read more | >

Researchers have confirmed the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole in the core of Omega Centauri, a cluster that once formed the heart of a separate galaxy. This finding enhances our understanding of black hole evolution and galaxy dynamics. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com.

Researchers confirmed an intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri’s center, supporting theories of its origin as a distinct galaxy core merged with the Milky Way.

Newly identified fast-moving stars in the star cluster Omega Centauri provide solid evidence for a central black hole in the cluster. With at least 8,200 solar masses, it is the best candidate for a class of black holes astronomers have long believed to exist: intermediate-mass black holes, formed in the early stages of galaxy evolution. The discovery bolsters the case for Omega Centauri as the core region of a galaxy that was swallowed by the Milky Way billions of years ago. Stripped of its outer stars, that galaxy nucleus has remained “frozen in time” since then. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

Read more | >

Could an exoplanet’s that is tidally locked to its parent star exhibit differences in atmospheric behavior at the boundary of its permanent dayside and permanent nightside, also known as the terminator? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated the unique atmosphere of WASP-39 b, whose radius is just under 1.3 times that of Jupiter, orbits in just 4.1 days, and is located just under 700 light-years from Earth. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanet atmospheres, specifically once that are tidally locked to their parent star.

Artist’s rendition of WASP-39 b’s terminator. (Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI))

“WASP-39 b has become a sort of benchmark planet in studying the atmosphere of exoplanets with Webb,” said Dr. Néstor Espinoza, who is an Assistant Astronomer and Mission Scientist for Exoplanet Science at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and lead author on the study. “It has an inflated, puffy atmosphere, so the signal coming from starlight filtered through the planet’s atmosphere is quite strong.”

Read more | >

Apple presents MUSCLE A Model Update Strategy for Compatible LLM Evolution.

Apple presents MUSCLE

A model update strategy for compatible LLM evolution.

Jessica Echterhoff, Fartash Faghri, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Ting-Yao Hu, Chun-Liang Li, Oncel Tuzel, Hadi Pouransari UC San Diego & Apple July 2024 https://huggingface.co/papers/2407.

- Large Language Models (LLMs) are…

Continue reading “MUSCLE: A Model Update Strategy for Compatible LLM Evolution” | >

A long-term study since 1929 has revealed significant insights into barley’s evolution, showing its adaptation to different environments and the substantial impact of natural selection. This research underscores the limitations of evolutionary breeding and highlights the need for further exploration to enhance crop yields.

Utilizing one of the world’s oldest biological experiments, which commenced in 1929, researchers have revealed how barley, a major crop, has been influenced by agricultural pressures and its evolving natural environment. These findings highlight the significance of long-term studies in comprehending the dynamics of adaptive evolution.

The survival of cultivated plants after their dispersal across different environments is a classic example of rapid adaptive evolution. For example, barley, an important neolithic crop, spread widely after domestication over 10,000 years ago to become a staple source of nutrition for humans and livestock throughout Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa over just a few thousand generations. Such rapid expansion and cultivation have subjected the plant to strong selective pressures, including artificial selection for desired traits and natural selection by being forced to adapt to diverse new environments.

Read more | >

LA JOLLA (March 4, 2024)—Charles Darwin described evolution as “descent with modification.” Genetic information in the form of DNA sequences is copied and passed down from one generation to the next. But this process must also be somewhat flexible, allowing slight variations of genes to arise over time and introduce new traits into the population.

But how did all of this begin? In the origins of life, long before cells and proteins and DNA, could a similar sort of evolution have taken place on a simpler scale? Scientists in the 1960s, including Salk Fellow Leslie Orgel, proposed that life began with the “RNA World,” a hypothetical era in which small, stringy RNA molecules ruled the early Earth and established the dynamics of Darwinian evolution.

New research at the Salk Institute now provides fresh insights on the origins of life, presenting compelling evidence supporting the RNA World hypothesis. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on March 4, 2024, unveils an RNA enzyme that can make accurate copies of other functional RNA strands, while also allowing new variants of the molecule to emerge over time. These remarkable capabilities suggest the earliest forms of evolution may have occurred on a molecular scale in RNA.

Read more | >