It occurred naturally, and scientists know this for certain.
Category: science – Page 64
NASA’s newest Mars rover is beginning to study the floor of an ancient crater that once held a lake.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has been busy serving as a communications base station for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter and documenting the rotorcraft’s historic flights. But the rover has also been busy focusing its science instruments on rocks that lay on the floor of Jezero Crater.
What insights they turn up will help scientists create a timeline of when an ancient lake formed there, when it dried, and when sediment began piling up in the delta that formed in the crater long ago. Understanding this timeline should help date rock samples – to be collected later in the mission – that might preserve a record of ancient microbes.
Some thoughts about the genetic code aliens would use in the 2nd part of the series: The Science of Aliens:
Alien life would likely have different biochemistry, which may change the way it reproduces.
Consciousness remains scientifically elusive because it constitutes layers upon layers of non-material emergence: Reverse-engineering our thinking should be done in terms of networks, modules, algorithms and second-order emergence — meta-algorithms, or groups of modules. Neuronal circuits correlate to “immaterial” cognitive modules, and these cognitive algorithms, when activated, produce meta-algorithmic conscious awareness and phenomenal experience, all in all at least two layers of emergence on top of “physical” neurons. Furthermore, consciousness represents certain transcendent aspects of projective ontology, according to the now widely accepted Holographic Principle.
#CyberneticTheoryofMind
There’s no shortage of workable theories of consciousness and its origins, each with their own merits and perspectives. We discuss the most relevant of them in the book in line with my own Cybernetic Theory of Mind that I’m currently developing. Interestingly, these leading theories, if metaphysically extended, in large part lend support to Cyberneticism and Digital Pantheism which may come into scientific vogue with the future cyberhumanity.
Mice fed every other day in another study lived, on average, 12% longer than mice fed every day, largely due to the delay of cancerous diseases.
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According to the International Food Information Council’s 2020 Food and Health Survey, you most likely know someone who is practicing intermittent fasting. The survey of 1000 adult Americans found that one in ten were putting down the fork during specified periods of time, making it America’s most popular “diet.”
It’s no surprise that the diet has charmed so many Americans. Intermittent fasting is the preferred diet of celebrities, from Kourtney Kardashian to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and is reportedly a staple of Silicon Valley culture. Fox News reported that it’s “hailed by trainers [and] doctors as [an] easy weight loss program that works.”
The dirt scattered across the floor of an ancient, remote cave in Mexico has yielded a new source of viable ancient DNA.
For the first time, scientists have sequenced ancient DNA from soil samples — and it’s all thanks to the Upper Paleolithic bears that prolifically used the cave as their toilet around 16000 years ago.
The scientists describe their work as “the Moon landing of genomics”, as the breakthrough means fossilized remains are no longer the only way of obtaining ancient DNA. Further, it shows ancient DNA can now be studied in the context of populations, rather than scattered, fragmentary individuals.
As the first papers under these mandates are published, Plan S supporters say it’s the start of a journey towards open science. But most research funders haven’t signed up yet, and negotiations over the plan have produced a complex landscape of options to avoid paywalls. Here’s what the initiative means for scientists and journals — and some of the controversies that will play out in 2021 and beyond.
The push to remove journal paywalls officially started this year. Here’s how it works.
Commentary: We like to imagine an AI-driven future, but it’s machine learning that will actually help us to progress, argues expert Michael I. Jordan.
Would aliens be friendly or a threat? — Part I of a new series.
Any advanced alien species would have a social structure, but would also likely have predatory roots.