Anonymous - Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 - 9:00 AM
WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
"Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a geobiologist, is interested in the lake not for its scenery but because it may be harbouring alien life forms, or “weird life”. Mono Lake, a basin with no outlet, has built up over many millennia one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth. Dr Wolfe-Simon is investigating whether, in the mud around the lake or in the water, there exist microbes whose biological make-up is so fundamentally different from that of any known life on Earth that it may provide proof of a shadow biosphere, a second genesis for life on this planet."
This discovery really wasn't as big as it was hyped to be. It's an organism that survives far higher concentrations of arsenic than most other organisms and use arsenate in place of phosphate in its DNA. Both of those things could've arise from natural selection in high arsenic environments, so there's no reason to assume that these things didn't evolve from the same ancestors of the rest of life on Earth. It's an interesting find, but nothing as Earth-shattering as a completely new type of life.
Anonymous - Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 - 11:13 PM
This is an idea I've been playing around with recently. Consider the problem of perpetual motion. If we were to have perpetual motion, then we could have an infinite energy source. Of course this doesn't really exist, but there are some things that are very close. No, I'm not talking about things that can go for minutes, hours, or days before stopping.
Now consider the average human. Human's are the perfect example of the closest anything will ever get to perpetual motion that is controllable. Human's can live for around 80 years easily. About a third of that they are asleep for. How much energy do you think human's could generate if that was their job? For example, instead of going to a desk job for 8 hours, one could go to basically exercise(use generators to create energy) for the same amount of time.
Sure, one person probably couldn't produce that much energy, but how about a few million? If the numbers were good enough, it's completely free and "renewable" energy. Only byproduct we would have to deal with is shit, literally. I'm not saying that we could save the world through this new energy...
Prelucid - Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 - 10:44 PM
Easily one of the most beautiful experiences for people who come from scientific leanings. The sheer visualization is hardly one of a hollywood quality, but it does the job so perfectly that it's hard not to appreciate just how insignificant we are compared to things both larger and smaller than us all.
Anonymous - Thursday, September 30th, 2010 - 2:02 AM
So there's this Earth like planet in our galactic neighborhood. It's the right conditions. I say we send a pod of Earth life there and see what happens.
You've started getting a little bivalent on the issue. First you're saying humans are always selfish and abusive, but then you go on to say that you want to segregate the people who believe the things you do from all the other human trash, effectively creating two sides with differing goals, which to me sounds like it will culminate in either war or genocide. Good going on proving that even the humans who hate their own race are still kind of screwed up, chief.
But again, your belief that we'll fuck up another planet is rooted in the belief that we're bound to make the same mistakes again -- which, given the fact that we are actually so lucid regarding the issue that we - some dudes on a forum - are discussing it, makes it seem somewhat less likely to happen on a new planet. Being green is coming to the forefront of a lot of political parties nowadays, has become incorporated into living strategies throughout the world, and has become a buzzword among even the working class: from here, it looks like it would take something pretty special for us to suddenly go, "You know what?...
No. 16840 - Anonymous - October 23rd, 2010 - 1:08 AM
"stop being ecofriendly."
To do that we'd have to START being ecofriendly. It's still only a buzzword. Nothing has changed since when we 'were' destructive, other than the fact that we now know it's 'wrong'.
is this true? - Monday, October 18th, 2010 - 3:37 AM
i read an article and im not sure what to think of it. it states that CERN (people building the hydron collider) have lied to us about the collider having a small chance destroying the world.they state that it has a 70% chance of producing an "Ice-9" effect on thw world ultimately destroying it. heres the link has http://www.cerntruth.com/?p=125 what are science's thoughts on this?
No. 16495 - Anonymous - October 18th, 2010 - 5:53 AM
That site looks like more Christian propaganda scare tactics. Don't believe a word of it.
No. 16498 - Luinbariel - October 18th, 2010 - 8:18 AM
I don't know if I'd buy it. I'd like to know specifically who owns or who has registered the site; it says at the very bottom:
"C. This Web belongs to a 'Net of truth' of Complex Sciences spinned By Luis Sancho: www.unificationtheory.com (Complexity and the fractal Universe=All sciences), www.cerntruth.com (physics), www.economicstruth.com (economics & History)
Its material can be freely reproduced with references. Images are owned by Taboo pictures or under fair use law (non-profit, news, transformative) "
but that's not enough for me. I guess it appears to be one in a series of "www.xtruth.com" sites, so I'm not really sure if they have an actual motivation involving the knowledge behind what's being made or if they're just against stuff in general.
In a burst of science-is-fun educational invention, a Brooklyn dad built a carrier for an iPhone (the current model, with video camera) out of a takeout box, tied it to a weather balloon, and let it go with the camera running. It reached a height of nineteen miles, or about 100,000 feet, which is high enough to show the earth's curvature and a black sky above the atmosphere.
No. 16496 - Anonymous - October 18th, 2010 - 5:56 AM
Nice video,I saw a UK guy doing the same a while back and got NASA all worked up and interested in how he did it. I guess this guy copied his plans.
What I tend to think is that there is something beyond "infinite" and "growing and shrinking". Maybe different dimensions: in one respect (space) it is infinite, and in another it is still growing. Since the universe is "everything", I think that makes every dimension a part of it, as well.
>>96
What could be a more pressing issue than the destruction of our environment to the point where we are literally changing the climate of the earth? Do you tell your landlord that you don't need to pay your rent now - you've already got more pressing issues? I think that excuse has been used long enough.
I'm not saying that you would, but for some people, it would take a major disaster for them to wake up to green technology. I mean something like 100 million people dying as a result of a biological catastrophe. Or a modern day plague. Current affairs such as an occasional oil spill, nuclear explosion, modern-day african war or the latest gossip on Jennifer Lopez's heels just don't even come close to something as massive as planetary ecological collapse.
Tax sucks, yes, but we can either pay now or pay later. And if we pay later it won't be in taxes.
I think the title "artificial life" is misleading. He didn't engineer it from scratch, he didn't make anything all that indistinguishable from what already exists. He didn't make something that is technically living out of electronic components.
They've been doing all the pieces of this for years, and it hasn't been a big deal. We've replaced DNA in embryonic cells to clone animals. We've been using computers to sequence, even re-sequence DNA for some time in bacteria.
I don't think this guy is all that special for "printing" DNA of a known species, but with a special marker (and we're not talking Blade Runner-style markers here), and using that to replace the DNA of a bacteria.
The only thing special about it was how small the bacteria was, *maybe* even his method for wiping the DNA out of the bacteria to begin with. That's all.
So, my thing is this: why give him all that much friggin attention? He sounds like a guy with too much to prove, and willingness to bank on a technicality for the word...
