Science (mostly bio, this time) Forges Ahead. Even empowering... citizenship!

I'll avoid political hollering, this weekend. Especially as we're all staring with bemusement, terror -- and ideally popcorn -- at the bizarre displays of toddler-hysteria foaming from D.C. In fact, some wise heads propose that we respond by rebuilding our institutions - and confidence - from the ground up. And hence:

 #1   I gave a series of lectures about National Resilience for the Naval Postgraduate School, that resulted in this interview about neglected and needed boosts to RESILIENCE.   

#2   And in a related development: philanthropist Craig Newmark supports a program seeking to get modern citizens more involved in ‘resilience.’ A great endeavor, needed now more than ever.  

#3   Also resilience related! As a member of CERT - the nationwide Community Emergency Response Team I urge folks to consider taking the training.  As a bottom-level 'responder' at least you'll know some things to do, if needed. *

*The FEMA site has been experiencing... 'problems'... but I hope this link works. Fortunately the training is mostly done by local fire departments, but your badge and gear may come slower than normal.

#4   Giving blood regularly may not just be saving the lives of other people, it could also be improving your own blood's health at a genetic level, according to a new study.  An international team of researchers compared samples from 217 men who had given blood more than 100 times in their lives, to samples from 212 men who had donated less than 10 times, to look for any variance in blood health. "Activities that put low levels of stress on blood cell production allow our blood stem cells to renew and we think this favors mutations that further promote stem cell growth rather than disease." (Well, I just gave my 104th pint, so…)  

#5 Nothing prepares you for the future better than Science Fiction! I started an online org TASAT as a way for geeky SF readers to maybe someday save the world!

...And now let's get to science!  After a couple of announcements...

== Yeah, you may have heard this already, but... ==

Okay it's just a puff piece...that I can't resist sharing with folks, about an honor from my alma mater, Caltech. It's seldom that I get Imposter's Syndrome. But in this case, well, innumerable classmates there were way smarter than me! 

Also a couple of job announcements: First, Prof. Ted Parson and other friends at UCLA Law School are looking for a project director at UCLA’s new Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, with a focus on legal and social aspects of ‘geo-engineering’… the wide range of proposals (from absurd to plausibly helpful) to perhaps partially ease or palliate the effects of human-generated greenhouse pollution on the planet’s essential and life-giving balance. 

 

To see some such proposals illustrated in fiction, look at Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For the Future  (spreading cooling atmospheric aerosols) or in my own novel Earth (ocean fertilization.)

And now… science forges ahead!

== Life… as we now know it… ==

Complexity can get… complicated and nowhere more so than in braaaains! For some years, the most intricate nervous systems ever modeled by science were varieties of worms or nematodes (e.g. C.elegans). But advances accelerate, and now a complete brain model – not just of neurons but their detectable connections (synapses) has been completed for the vastly larger brain of the Drosophila fruit fly!  (Including discovery of several new types of neurons.) 

And sure, I maintain that neurons and synapses aren’t enough. We’re gonna need to understand the murky, non-linear contributions of intra-cellular ‘computational’ elements. Still… amazing stuff. And the process will get a lot faster.

Meanwhile… Allorecognition in nature is an individual creature’s distinction between self and other. Most generally in immune response to invasion of the self-boundary by that which is non-self. Almost all Earthly life forms exhibit this trait, with stong tenacity. An exception, described in the early 20202, is Mnemiopsis or the “sea walnut,” a kind of comb jelly (‘jellyfish’) that can be divided arbitrarily and combine with other partial mnemiopses, merging into a new whole.

(And elsewhere I dive into how this allorecognition - or distinguishment of self  - is utterly vital to incorportate into artificial intelligence! Because only in that way can we apply incentives for AI to incorporate notions of reciprocity that underlay both Nature and Civilization!)

How do tardigrades survive heat, cold, desiccation and even vacuum?  

“LUCA, a common ancestor to all organisms and not the first life form, has been a controversial topic. Fossil evidence goes back as far as 3.4 billion years, yet this study proposes that LUCA might be close to being the same age as the Earth. The genetic code and DNA replication, which are two of the vital biological processes, might have developed almost immediately after the planet was formed.”   

 == Weird Earth life! ==

Sea Robins have the body of a fish, the wings of a bird, and multiple legs like a crab, in what appears to be another case of “carcinization” – life constantly re-inventing the crab body plan. Like the Qheuens in Brightness Reef. And yeah, it seems likely that the most common form of upper complex life we’ll find out there will look like crabs.

Marine biologists in Denmark discovered a solo male dolphin in the Baltic who appears to be talking to himself. They analyzed thousands of sounds made by the dolphin and what they learned.

In 1987, a group of killer whales off the northwestern coast of North America briefly donned salmon “hats,” carrying dead fish on their heads for weeks. Recently, a male orca known as J27, or “Blackberry,” was photographed in Washington’s Puget Sound wearing a salmon on his head. 

(I’m tempted to cite Vladimir Sorokin’s chilling/terrific short scifi novel – in a league with Orwell – Day of The Oprichnik – in which the revived czarist Oprachina regime-enforcers go about town each day with a dog’s head on the roofs of their cars, and all traffic veers aside for them, as in olden times. (“That is your association, this time, Brin?” Hey, it’s the times. And a truly great - and terrifying - novel.)

Beyond life and death... Researchers found that skin cells extracted from deceased frog embryos were able to adapt to the new conditions of a petri dish in a lab, spontaneously reorganizing into multicellular organisms called xenobots. These organisms exhibited behaviors that extend far beyond their original biological roles. Specifically, these xenobots use their cilia – small, hair-like structures – to navigate and move through their surroundings, whereas in a living frog embryo, cilia are typically used to move mucus.  

Two injured jellyfish can merge to make one healthy one?  Sounds like a Sheckley story where this is the actual point of sex, trying to make a mighty beast with two backs.   

== Even farther back! ==

3.2 billion years ago, life was just perking along on Earth and starved of nutrients… which were apparently provided in massive generosity by an asteroidal impact vastly bigger than the much-later dinosaur bane.  

Analysis of 700 genomes of bacteria, archaea, and fungi -- excluding eukaryotes such as plants and animals that evolved later -- have found 57 gene families… though I think using modern genetic drift rates to converge those families backward may be a bit iffy. Still, if life started that early… and survived the Thea impact… then it implies that life starts very easily, and may be vastly pervasive in the universe.

And possibly even bigger news. Genes themselves may compete with each other like individual entities, in somewhat predictable ways: “…interactions between genes make aspects of evolution somewhat predictable and furthermore, we now have a tool that allows us to make those predictions…”. 

== And maybe beef should be a... condiment? ==

“Today, almost half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, an astounding 80% is dedicated to livestock grazing and animal feed. This means 40% of the planet’s total habitable land is dedicated to animal products, despite the fact that meat, dairy and farmed fish combined provide just 17% of humanity’s calories. “Only a fraction of agricultural land (16%) is used to grow the crops that we eat directly, with an additional 4% for things like biofuels, textiles and tobacco. Just 38% of habitable land is forested, a slice of the pie that continues to shrink, primarily in diverse tropical regions where the greatest number of species live.”  

Meanwhile.... This article talks about new ways to make food “from thin air.” Or, more accurately, ‘precision fermentation’ from hydrogen and human and agricultural waste. 

== And finally...

An interesting interview with genetic paleontologist David Reich. 60,000 years ago the explosion of modern homo sapiens from Africa seemed to happen almost overnight. 

As Reich points out, we had two new things. 1. Dogs and 2. an ability to reprogram ourselves culturally. 

There followed - at an accelerating pace - a series of revolutions in our tool sets, cultural patterns and adaptability. Of course, I talked about this extensively in both Earth and Existence.