Year 2022 face_with_colon_three
Recent work has reported a realization of a time crystal in the form of the Bose-Einstein condensate of magnons in superfluid 3He. Here, the authors study the dynamics of a pair of such quantum time crystals and show that it closely resembles the evolution of a two-level system, modified by nonlinear feedback.
Octopuses have fascinated scientists and the public with their remarkable intelligence, from using tools to engaging in creative play, problem-solving, and even escaping from aquariums. Now, their cognitive abilities may provide significant insight into understanding the evolution of complex life and cognition, including the human brain.
An international team of researchers from Dartmouth College and the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) in Germany has published a study in the journal Science Advances.
<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.
Posted in biological, evolution, genetics
Year 2017 face_with_colon_three
Biological molecules, like organisms themselves, are subject to genetic drift and may even become “extinct”. Molecules that are no longer extant in living systems are of high interest for several reasons including insight into how existing life forms evolved and the possibility that they may have new and useful properties no longer available in currently functioning molecules. Predicting the sequence/structure of such molecules and synthesizing them so that their properties can be tested is the basis of “molecular resurrection” and may lead not only to a deeper understanding of evolution, but also to the production of artificial proteins with novel properties and even to insight into how life itself began.
There’s still nothing quite like thumbing the pages of a real-life print magazine, but the latest evolution of E Ink’s color tech is creeping tantalizingly close — at least as far as my eyes are concerned.
You’ve heard it all before: A lifetime of staring at screens has worn out my eyes, leading me down a rabbit hole of lifehacky solutions to ease the fatigue. Some of the tricks I picked up over the years have helped — especially the one where I simply take breaks and go for walks — but one thing hasn’t changed: I still spend more time than I’d like gazing at glossy displays.
I don’t want anything less for videos or gaming, but for reading I typically ignore the latest tech and instead turn to a 2016 Kindle Oasis or old-fashioned books. My hands can obviously tell the difference between the two, but when I’m lost in a story, I don’t think my eyes can. With paper and e-paper alike, a sense of ease washes over me as I read. Is it how the light bounces off the page? Or, is it because I know ads and notifications won’t bombard me at every turn? I’m not sure, and I don’t really care why; I just prefer it, and E Ink reminded me of that when I stepped into its little conference room last week in Las Vegas.
Scientists who watched nerve cells connect inside the eyes of growing squid have uncovered a remarkable secret — the cephalopods’ brains independently evolved to develop in the same way ours do.
.The discovery, made using high-resolution cameras focused on the retinas of longfin squid (Doryteuthis pealeii) embryos, reveals that, in spite of 500 million years of divergent evolution, the basic blueprint for how complex brains and nervous systems evolve may be the same across a wide range of species.
The intelligence of cephalopods — a class of marine animals that includes octopuses, squid and cuttlefish — has long been a subject of fascination among biologists. Unlike most invertebrates, these animals possess remarkable memories; use tools to solve problems; excel at camouflage; react with curiosity, boredom or even playful malevolence to their surroundings; and can dream, if the ripples of colors that flash across their skin as they sleep are any indication.
It seems that the blueprint for complex brain development remains the same, despite 500 million years of divergent evolution.
In this video I showcase a program that I have been working on for simulating evolution by natural selection. I dive into various mechanisms of the simulation and go over some interesting real-life biology in the process. The key aim of this project is to evolve multicellular organisms, starting from single-celled protozoa-like creatures that must collect mass and energy from their surroundings in order to survive, grow and reproduce.
Chapters:
00:00 — Introduction.
00:56 — Life of a protozoan.
02:46 — The start of the simulation.
05:57 — How the cells work.
06:53 — Introducing multicellular colonies.
08:33 — Understanding evolution.
11:38 — Looking at data from the simulation.
13:27 — Evolving epigenetics introduction.
14:14 — Waddington’s Landscape and cell specialisation.
15:22 — The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology.
16:05 — Gene Regulatory Networks.
16:54 — Outro.
17:30 — Watching the simulation.
Find the project on GitHub:
https://github.com/DylanCope/Evolving-Protozoa.
Credits:
Chinese scientists precisely confirmed the latest volcanic activity on moon happened about 2 billion years ago after they studied the lunar samples collected by Chang’e-5 lunar probe in 2020.
The outcome was announced by the China National Space Administration on Monday.
In 2021, a team of scientists carried out researches on the volcanic rock, which is a type of basalt to help indicate the time of volcanic activity occurred, from the lunar samples and proved that the volcanic activity continued until 2 billion years ago, a new refresh for human beings toward the lunar magmatic activity and the lunar evolution.
Could the advancement of ‘Non Player Character’ tech give us a glimpse of being able to bersion ourselves?
Of course, all stars are hot compared with anything we’re used to here on Earth. But while the Sun’s surface chills at a steady 6,000 degrees Kelvin, these stars’ extreme temperatures range from 100,000 to 180,000 degrees.
These are “stars which are a little bit outside the canonical evolution,” Klaus Werner of the University of Tuebingen’s Kepler Centre for Astro and Particle Physics, a co-author of the paper, tells Inverse. “These stars are strange.”
Even among the ultra-hot white dwarfs known by the designation PG1159, the selection that cropped up in this survey lack the helium normally found in their atmosphere: instead, they’ve burned it all away, fusing it into a solar atmosphere of pure carbon and oxygen.
Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) have unveiled a first-of-its-kind map that could help answer decades-old questions about the origins of stars and the influences of magnetic fields in the cosmos.
The map reveals the likely magnetic field structure of the Local Bubble—a giant, 1,000-light-year-wide hollow in space surrounding our Sun. Like a hunk of Swiss cheese, our galaxy is full of these so-called superbubbles. The explosive supernova deaths of massive stars blow up these bubbles, and in the process, concentrate gas and dust—the fuel for making new stars —on the bubbles’ outer surfaces. These thick surfaces accordingly serve as rich sites for subsequent star and planet formation.
Scientists’ overall understanding of superbubbles, however, remains incomplete. With the new 3D magnetic field map, researchers now have novel information that could better explain the evolution of superbubbles, their effects on star formation and on galaxies writ large.
