Signature in the Cell

Signature in the Cell This article on Meyer's book is filled with ideas and resources that deserve consideration. I would like to consider them further.

The Journal Science Interviews J. Craig Venter About the first "Syntheti...

Dr. Venter has created a replication of an existing life form from four chemicals sequenced together artifically. The bacteria he created as a copy produces mastitis in goats. The experiment was to prove that life could be created in this manner. It was not to prove the viability of a new life form in addition to the technique of assembling life from discrete parts. Now that the method has been proven, the technique can be used to explore new and creative life designs.

irreligulous: BlueGene Blue Brain Neuron Supercomputer

irreligulous: BlueGene Blue Brain Neuron Supercomputer: "10,000 neurons run by a room full of computers. A new 'Neurogrid' chips is about to come out that puts the same power into one single chip..."

The size of the computers used to simulate a portion of a rat brain tells us we have a fair way to go.

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

If you wish to contact Doug Axe, you can contact Robert L. Crowther, II Director of Communications Center for Science & Culture Discovery Institute, That information is from the Biologic Institute web site http://biologicinstitute.org/contact/ The Discovery Institute has a political and idealogical agenda of promoting intelligent design. They were involve in the Dove School Case where ID was rejected as a scientific viewpoint in court. The Discovery Institute was on the wrong side in that case.

Craig Venter Announces a living synthetic cell

This podcast is possibly one of the landmark announcements of the century. Craig Venter clearly explains the process taken to synthesize a genome from the four chemical components in DNA and insert the resulting DNA in a pre-existing cell that had its own DNA removed previously. The announcement is very lucid with clear definitions of many new terms.

Venter also explains why this approach was taken and what the institute plans to do with the resulting tool

A Samsung Robot In Every Home By 2020? | h+ Magazine

A Samsung Robot In Every Home By 2020? | h+ Magazine

Ray Kurzweil has an article on the convergence of information systems in Korea and their strengths in dealing with them by the year 2020. He also predicts a robot in every Korean home by that time.

New Study Shows Evolution can be Very Rapid.

The practical significance of Magnus Karlsson's discoveries is broad and just as varied as his grasshoppers. He believes this new knowledge can be used in planning preservation projects for threatened species and to improve yields in agriculture.

"But the most important part of the dissertation is that I have shown that evolution sometimes proceeds incredibly rapidly. This is huge," says Magnus Karlsson.

His dissertation is titled Evolution in Changing Environments Revealed by Fire Melanism in Pygmy Grasshoppers.

Singing at America House on Linden Road

We are getting to the point where we have regular fans among the people who watch our shows at America House on Linden Road. It is fun to see them every month or so. It is also fun to try to give them a song which they may not have heard in awhile. I do enjoy going over there.

We have another show at the Pines on Davison Road next Monday. I am looking forward to it. We are doing more four-part harmony. I really have to push my range to do first tenor at this age. *It would be better if I could go to second.

The Hobbit's Predecessors

Long before a 'hobbit' species of human lived on Indonesia's Flores island, other human-like creatures colonised the area. That much was clear.
But scientists have now been able to date their presence to at least one million years ago - some 120,000 years earlier than previously recognised.
The team reports the discovery of these humans' tools in the journal Nature.

Possibly, the hobbit's ancestors were a more primitive humanoid which had migrated out of Africa at an earlier date.

Evolution of Mineral Species

I do, however, want to emphasize one intriguing
insight: most of Earth’s thousands of minerals
owe their existence to the development of life
on the planet. If you think of all the nonliving
world as a stage on which life plays out its evolutionary
drama, think again. The actors renovated
their theater along the way. This observation
also has implications for the quest to find
signs of life on other worlds. Sturdy minerals
rather than fragile organic remains may provide
the most robust and lasting signs of biology.

Scientific American reported on most minerals evolving from life over the last 2 billion years. A few minerals had existed before the Sun's ignition about 4.6 Billion years ago. About 250 minerals formed at that time and still exist. The began to form planetesimals which grew as time passed and collusions took place. Finally, a massive collision took place between the primitive Earth and the Moon.

The Majority of minerals arrived after the great oxidation event about 2billion years ago. This was caused by photosynthesis from blue-green algae. About 2500 new minerals arose.

Then came a billion year period that was relatively quiet. That's called the Boring Billion. About 800 million years ago most of the Earth's continents were clumped along the equator in a land-mass called Rodinia. For the next 200 million years the Earth cycled from snowball to hot box and back. The Glaciation moved minerals around along.

About 460 million years ago, the first land plants, mosses, arose. By the Devonian period, 400 million years ago the Earth had a modern look. Earth's near surface minerology was strikingly modern too.

Conclusions for future research demand that only planets with life would have the oxygen for extensive ocidation.

Viewing minerals in an evolutionary context
also elucidates a more general theme of evolving
systems throughout the cosmos. Simple states
evolve into increasingly complicated states in
many contexts: the evolution of chemical elements
in stars, mineral evolution in planets, the
molecular evolution that leads to the origin of
life, and the familiar biological evolution
through Darwinian natural selection.

From Robert M. Hazen. in Scientific American March 2010

Scientists Program Blood Stem Cells To Become Vision Cells

Scientists Program Blood Stem Cells To Become Vision Cells

University of Florida researchers were able to program bone marrow stem cells to repair damaged retinas in mice, suggesting a potential treatment for one of the most common causes of vision loss in older people.

This cure is almost too good to be true.

DNA and Learning

The Posthuman Marxist

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Creationists declare war over the brain

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026793.000-creationists-declare-war-over-the-brain.html?full=true

New Scientist has raised a flag on a new area of discussion in the ID debate.  The article is filled with names and ideas that could be followed up on.  The discussion might even spread concepts on consciousness.

Tags: consciousness, ID, Mario Beauregard

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Blue Brain has a competitor

 Researchers have recently constructed a new computer model of the cortex of the human brain. This model is similar in principle to the more well known Blue Brain computer model, but it simulates a much larger area of the brain. It actually less detailed at the neuron level when compared to Blue Brain. The BluTags: Brain Simulation, Blue Braine Brain project has already simulated a section of the rat’s brain that is named the neocortex. The Blue Brain computer simulation has successfully modeled approximately 10,000 neurons including near 30 million synapses
This other computer simulation, however, has successfully modeled about a trillion neurons and almost a quadrillion synapses. This specific computer model is able to model the entire thalamo-cortical system of a mammillian brain. Apparently, the researchers have made of simulation of this brain region because is is involved in creating concious awareness.
his computer simulation of the human brain will allow scientists to carry out a variety of different experiments that are not currently possible to do. It will enable researchers to gain a much better insight into the workings of the brain. Things that are normally very hard to do on brain wetware may easily be done on the computer model. Researchers will have much more leeway in carrying out different experiments on this virtual brain. The computer model will allow scientists to carry out experiments that are impossible from a physical or ethical standpoint.
This computer model will enable the simulation of almost any type of brain disorder. This is a very exciting possiblity that could help a tremendous amount of people. Researchers intend to investigate disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other psychiatric disorders. The scientists also intend to investigate the effects of pharmaceutical drugs on this computer brain model. This may lead to faster FDA approval for brain drugs.
The researchers also want to learn more about consciousness and how it is constructed. I have serious doubts as to whether the computer model will actually be able to model consciousness. However, this new computer model will likely give scientists a much greater understanding of how the human brain functions. Overall, the research is extremely interesting and it has quite a few potential benefits in advancing our knowledge of the brain.

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Is a complex, large network likily to become conscious.

I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What’s uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, or does it reach a threshold where something, well, different happens?
My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors.
http://k21st.wordpress.com/

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Darwin's Lab: Scientists on Brink of Creating Life -A Galaxy Classic

 

"When these things are created," Bedau added, "they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen.

"We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."

Darwin's Lab: Scientists on Brink of Creating Life -A Galaxy Classic

 

Never in my imagination, could one man, working for the US Government get control of anthrax and kill people with it.  I have to wonder about the controls on this system.

Robot Fly Could Unlock Secrets Of The Human Brain (from Sunday Herald)

One more step in understanding the Human brain.

THE HUMBLE

fruit fly may not look very clever, but its tiny brain has more in common with humans' than you might think - a fact that has encouraged scientists to attempt to create a "virtual fly brain" in the hope that it will lead to discoveries that could combat neurological diseases.

 

Robot Fly Could Unlock Secrets Of The Human Brain (from Sunday Herald)

 

Technorati Tags: Blue Brain,Dr. Charles Peck

The Frontal Cortex : James and Measurement

This article seems to point at the inexactness of brain function.  This is the other side of the blue brain argument

Notice his emphasis on the inherent unknowability of the mind, the way so many of our thoughts and sensations are constantly falling into the "abyss of oblivion". This was, in part, a reaction to the psychology of the day, which was so eager to measure the mind and quantify our thoughts. James, on the other hand, was convinced that the most interesting aspects of the mind were inherently unmeasurable. As he wrote in his Principles, "It is, in short, the reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention."

And here is how I describe this Jamesian attitude in my book:

James always enjoyed puncturing the pretensions of nineteenth century science. He thought that we should stop thinking of scientific theories as mirrors of nature, what he called "the copy version of truth". Instead, we should see its facts as tools, which "help us get into a satisfactory relation with experience." The truth of an idea, James wrote, is the use of an idea, its "cash-value." Thus, according to the pragmatists, a practical poet could be just as truthful as an accurate experiment. All that mattered was the "concrete difference" an idea produced in our actual lives.

But before he became a philosopher, William James was a psychologist. In 1875, he established one of the world's first psychological laboratories at Harvard. Though he was now part of the medical school, James had no intention of practicing "brass instrument psychology," his critical name for the new scientific approach that tried to quantify the mind in terms of its elemental sensations. What physicists had done for the universe, these psychologists wanted to do for our consciousness. Even their vocabulary was stolen straight from physics: thought had a "velocity," nerves had "inertia," and the mind was nothing but its "mechanical reflex-actions." James was contemptuous of such a crude form of reductionism. He thought its facts were useless.

James also wasn't very good at this new type of psychology. "It is a sort of work which appeals particularly to patient and exact minds," he wrote in his masterpiece, The Principles of Pscyhology, and James realized that his mind was neither patient nor particularly exact. He loved questions more than answers, the uncertainty of faith more than the conviction of reason. He wanted to call the universe the pluriverse. In his own psychological experiments, James was drawn to the phenomena that this mental reductionism ignored. What parts of our mind cannot be measured?

The Frontal Cortex : James and Measurement

Technorati Tags: Blue brain

Rise of the rat-brained robots - tech - 13 August 2008 - New Scientist Tech

 

This is no ordinary robot control system - a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each other.

As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. We know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer screen.

It's these spontaneous electrical patterns that researchers at the University of Reading in the UK want to harness to control a robot. If they can do so reliably, by stimulating the neurons with signals from sensors on the robot and using the neurons' response to get the robots to respond, they hope to gain insights into how brains function. Such insights might help in the treatment of conditions like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and epilepsy.

Rise of the rat-brained robots - tech - 13 August 2008 - New Scientist Tech

 

Technorati Tags: Robots,Rat brain

NASA Mars Phoenix Data More Negative On Potential For Life | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

 

An initial soil test by the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA) instrument indicated that the soil is highly Earth-like. The second test, however, is leading scientists to view the data as more inconclusive.

Other media outlets and websites around the world incorrectly reported that the "potential for life" meant that actual life on Mars had been detected. Coverage by Aviation Week states that the wet chemistry experiment can not detect life, nor can any other Phoenix instrument suchas the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) organics experiment.

NASA disputes that any of the information was provided to the White House in advance. But such data are routinely passed between NASA and White House science staff when briefings are planned, as is the case with the new MECA data. A briefing is set for Aug. 5.

NASA Mars Phoenix Data More Negative On Potential For Life | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference