Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: evolution – Page 33

“Of all currently known temperate exoplanets, LHS 1,140 b could well be our best bet to one day indirectly confirm liquid water on the surface of an alien world beyond our Solar System,” said Charles Cadieux.

The search for Earth’s twin just got a little closer as astronomers recently presented findings regarding a potential icy or watery “super-Earth” called LHS 1,140 b, which is located approximately 49 light-years from Earth and whose radius is approximately 1.7 times our planet, along with orbiting within its star’s habitable zone. What makes this finding unique is LHS 1,140 b was previously hypothesized to be a mini-Neptune and astronomers speculate could be completely covered in either ice or water.

The findings were recently accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters and hold the potential to help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets, and specifically Earth-sized exoplanets within their star’s habitable zone.

Read more | >

The largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains — with humans bucking this trend — a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution has revealed.

Researchers at the University of Reading and Durham University collected an enormous dataset of brain and body sizes from around 1,500…

We use cookies on reading.ac.uk to improve your experience. Find out more about our cookie policy. By continuing to use our site you accept these terms, and are happy for us to use cookies to improve your browsing experience.

Read more | >

The largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains—with humans bucking this trend—a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution has revealed.

Researchers at the University of Reading and Durham University collected an enormous dataset of brain and body sizes from around 1,500 species to clarify centuries of controversy surrounding brain size evolution.

Bigger brains relative to are linked to intelligence, sociality, and behavioral complexity—with humans having evolved exceptionally large brains. The new research reveals the largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains, challenging long-held beliefs about brain evolution.

Read more | >

A research team has constructed a coherent superposition of quantum evolution with two opposite directions in a photonic system and confirmed its advantage in characterizing input-output indefiniteness. The study was published in Physical Review Letters.

The notion that time flows inexorably from the past to the future is deeply rooted in people’s mind. However, the laws of physics that govern the motion of objects in the microscopic world do not deliberately distinguish the direction of time.

To be more specific, the basic equations of motion of both classical and are reversible, and changing the direction of the time coordinate system of a dynamical process (possibly along with the direction of some other parameters) still constitutes a valid process.

Read more | >

Treating cancer can sometimes feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole. The disease can become resistant to treatment, and clinicians never know when, where and what resistance might emerge, leaving them one step behind. But a team led by Penn State researchers has found a way to reprogram disease evolution and design tumors that are easier to treat.

They created a modular genetic circuit that turns cancer cells into a “Trojan horse,” causing them to self-destruct and kill nearby drug-resistant cancer cells. Tested in human cell lines and in mice as proof of concept, the circuit outsmarted a wide range of .

The findings were published today, July 4, in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The researchers also filed a provisional application to patent the technology described in the paper.

Read more | >

This research highlights that both early melting-volatilization and late accretion of volatile-rich materials are integral to understanding the distribution of nitrogen in silicate Earth. These insights open new avenues for understanding the origins of volatiles on Earth.

A team of researchers led by Professor Wang Wenzhong from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School of Earth and Space Sciences, in partnership with international experts, examined how nitrogen isotopes fractionate during the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets. Their findings were published in Nature Communications.

Currently, the academic community primarily holds two models regarding the accretion of volatiles on Earth: the “Late Veneer” model and the “Early Evolution” model.

Read more | >

Summary: Researchers made a significant discovery in the study of human brain evolution, identifying epiregulin as a key factor in the expansion of the human neocortex. By comparing brain development between mice and humans and utilizing 3D brain organoids, the team found that epiregulin promotes the division and expansion of stem cells, crucial for neocortex development.

This study, which utilized cutting-edge 3D culture technology, suggests that the quantity of epiregulin, rather than its presence or absence, distinguishes human brain development from that of other species, including primates like gorillas. The research offers new insights into what makes the human brain unique and underscores the value of innovative methodologies in understanding complex evolutionary processes.

Read more | >

This essay addresses Cartesian duality and how its implicit dialectic might be repaired using physics and information theory. Our agenda is to describe a key distinction in the physical sciences that may provide a foundation for the distinction between mind and matter, and between sentient and intentional systems. From this perspective, it becomes tenable to talk about the physics of sentience and ‘forces’ that underwrite our beliefs (in the sense of probability distributions represented by our internal states), which may ground our mental states and consciousness. We will refer to this view as Markovian monism, which entails two claims: fundamentally, there is only one type of thing and only one type of irreducible property (hence monism). All systems possessing a Markov blanket have properties that are relevant for understanding the mind and consciousness: if such systems have mental properties, then they have them partly by virtue of possessing a Markov blanket (hence Markovian). Markovian monism rests upon the information geometry of random dynamic systems. In brief, the information geometry induced in any system—whose internal states can be distinguished from external states—must acquire a dual aspect. This dual aspect concerns the (intrinsic) information geometry of the probabilistic evolution of internal states and a separate (extrinsic) information geometry of probabilistic beliefs about external states that are parameterised by internal states. We call these intrinsic (i.e., mechanical, or state-based) and extrinsic (i.e., Markovian, or belief-based) information geometries, respectively. Although these mathematical notions may sound complicated, they are fairly straightforward to handle, and may offer a means through which to frame the origins of consciousness.

Keywords: consciousness, information geometry, Markovian monism.

Read more | >