MetaFilter posts tagged with life

minimal cells

kliuless — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 05:43:08 -0800

Scientists Create Simple Synthetic Cell That Grows and Divides Normally - "New findings shed light on mechanisms controlling the most basic processes of life."[1]

Five years ago, scientists created a single-celled synthetic organism that, with only 473 genes, was the simplest living cell ever known. However, this bacteria-like organism behaved strangely when growing and dividing, producing cells with wildly different shapes and sizes.[2] Now, scientists have identified seven genes that can be added to tame the cells' unruly nature, causing them to neatly divide into uniform orbs... Identifying these genes is an important step toward engineering synthetic cells that do useful things. Such cells could act as small factories that produce drugs, foods and fuels; detect disease and produce drugs to treat it while living inside the body; and function as tiny computers.

also btw...

An on-off switch for gene editing - "New, reversible CRISPR method can control gene expression while leaving underlying DNA sequence unchanged."[3]
The incredible bacterial 'homing missiles' that scientists want to harness - "A Berkeley Lab-led team is digging into the bizarre bacteria-produced nanomachines that could fast-track microbiome science."[4]
Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus - "Collaborating with devoted colleagues, Dr. Kariko laid the groundwork for the mRNA vaccines turning the tide of the pandemic."[5]

Is it time for the four-day work week?

kliuless — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 22:29:03 -0800

A raise or a four-day week; biggest German union seals new deal - "Germany's largest trade union, IG Metall, agreed a 2.3% wage increase, to be paid either in full or as part of a switch to a four-day week, in a key industrial region, setting the benchmark for 3.9 million metal and engineering workers nationwide."[1] also btw...

Spain Is Going to Trial a 4-Day Work Week. Could the Idea Go Mainstream Post-Pandemic? - "What Spain can learn from companies and towns that have experimented with a four-day work week."[2]
Tell Your Boss the Four-Day Week Is Coming Soon - "A century after the invention of the weekend, more companies are adding another day."

and elsewhere on the labor front...

Why Amazon's Union Vote Matters - "The vote in Alabama is a temperature check on beliefs about Amazon and labor unions in the United States."[3]
Worker-Owned Businesses Are Having a Moment - "The co-op—a throwback business model—has gained interest during the pandemic. Thank impact investing."

Ancient Clippy from the Deep

kliuless — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 04:44:11 -0800

Ancient squid-like creature with paperclip-shaped shell may have lived for hundreds of years - "D. maximum was a large, squid-like creature (its shell was over 1.5 meters tall), an ammonite that was part of a now-extinct group of tentacled cephalopods. It went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, presumably for the same reason: the Chicxulub asteroid strike. What made D. maximum stand out was the unique shape of its shell. The top portion bent back and forth, resembling a paperclip."

Evidence detected for life in the clouds of Venus

Major Clanger — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 08:05:31 -0800

An international team of astronomers has detected phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus, in quantities that appear only to be explicable if it is being produced by life.

Amish vacationers

Westringia F. — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 16:05:41 -0800

Where the Amish go on holiday [BBC video, ~7min]: For nearly a century, families from Amish and Mennonite communities around the US have gathered in the small town of Pinecraft, Florida to mingle and relax. Photographer Dina Litovsky [insta] captured beautiful photographs of the Amish at leisure [New Yorker, April 2018]. Pinecraft previously

Scientists resurrect ancient life deep beneath the seafloor

kliuless — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 17:38:59 -0800

Biologists Revive 101.5-Million-Year-Old Microbes - "A team of biologists from Japan and the United States has successfully revived aerobic microbes found in 101.5-million-year-old sediments from the abyssal plain of the South Pacific Gyre." Deep sea microbes dormant for 100 million years are hungry and ready to multiply - "This study shows that the subseafloor is an excellent location to explore the limits of life on Earth."

"Our main question was whether life could exist in such a nutrient-limited environment or if this was a lifeless zone," said the paper's lead author Yuki Morono, senior scientist at JAMSTEC. "And we wanted to know how long the microbes could sustain their life in a near-absence of food." With fine-tuned laboratory procedures, the scientists, led by Morono, incubated the samples to coax their microbes to grow. The results demonstrated that rather than being fossilized remains of life, the microbes in the sediment had survived, and were capable of growing and dividing. "We knew that there was life in deep sediment near the continents where there's a lot of buried organic matter," said URI Graduate School of Oceanography professor and co-author of the study Steven D'Hondt. "But what we found was that life extends in the deep ocean from the seafloor all the way to the underlying rocky basement." Morono was initially taken aback by the results. "At first I was skeptical, but we found that up to 99.1% of the microbes in sediment deposited 101.5 million years ago were still alive and were ready to eat," he said.

Microbes from millions of years ago - "Scientists studying sediments from the Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand have found bacteria that appear to have survived since the time of the dinosaurs. 'They're violating our sense of the [microbial] world as we know it,' says Steven D'Hondt, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island. And it's a finding that might be relevant to the search for life on Mars or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn."

"Basically, they're only getting enough energy to repair their molecules as they break", with none left over to grow and divide. When brought into the lab and given more nutrient-rich diets, however, these bacteria prove to be not just alive, but able to revive, grow and multiply, exactly like normal bacteria. How they can do that, D'Hondt says, is a mystery. Either the individual cells are somehow surviving for "ridiculous lengths of time" or they "are reproducing with less energy than we thought possible". But one way or another "they are starvation artists". One implication is that if Mars once had life, remnants might still exist, not just as fossils or biosignatures, but as living microorganisms that could be revived and studied. "If these things can survive 100 million years, maybe they can survive a billion or three billion," D'Hondt says. [...] What we don't need to worry about, D'Hondt adds, is that digging into these old seabeds might unleash a 100-million-year-old plague here on Earth – an issue of particular relevance in the time of COVID-19. To begin with, he says, if such a plague were possible, it would probably already have been produced by offshore drilling, which has long been stirring up similar sediments on a much larger scale. But the reality is that bacteria in the deep seabed aren't something we need to worry about. "Pathogens are common in harbors," D'Hondt says, noting that these are places easily contaminated by human waste. "But they're not common in the deep ocean or the sediment. It's just the wrong environment for them."

Deep sea microbes dormant for 100 million years are hungry and ready to multiply - "Before looking ahead to future research, D'Hondt took time to reflect on Morono's achievement. 'What's most exciting about this study is that it shows that there are no limits to life in the old sediment of the world's ocean', said D'Hondt. 'In the oldest sediment we've drilled, with the least amount of food, there are still living organisms, and they can wake up, grow and multiply.'"

Mathematician John Horton Conway died yesterday of COVID-19.

Obscure Reference — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 07:41:23 -0800

John Horton Conway, Princeton Mathematician, best know for his Game of Life, has died at 82 from COVID-19. (previously)

For all the love we leave behind

Johnny Wallflower — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 22:15:51 -0800

There is a car, in the hospital parking lot.

It is a faded red, covered with dust.

Other cars have parked and left on either side of it, every day, but this car remains.

I pass by it, as I find parking, on my way in to work.

I know what it means.

Twitter | Threadreader

The story of your life, the story you tell yourself

kliuless — Sat, 21 Dec 2019 01:49:55 -0800

In This Is All - "There is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory."

Does Who You Are at 7 Determine Who You Are at 63?

Mrs Potato — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 11:29:05 -0800

In 1964, with "Seven Up!" Michael Apted stumbled into making what has become the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema. Fifty-five years later, the project is reaching its conclusion.

Shell-less hatching of a chick embryo

Sokka shot first — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 08:20:02 -0800

In 2014, Yutaka Tahara and Katsuya Obara published a paper on a new method they had developed for hatching a chicken embryo without an egg. This is what it looks like. [via]

Dear Europe

mumimor — Sat, 26 Oct 2019 10:49:31 -0800

You'll never walk alone Oh, it won't come to that, surely?" This is a phrase I've heard many times in the last three years. It's uttered by friendly, cultured, open-minded people in my town – the sort of people who woke up on the morning of 24 June 2016 blinking in disbelief at finding their values outvoted. Since that day, they've reassured themselves that the fracture in our society can be reversed, as if a pane of glass can be talked out of the crack in it, as if a burst balloon can be made to see that staying intact is the best thing all round. (SLGuardian) From Paris to Berlin, fado to football, boat trains to pen friends ... public figures reflect on their lifelong relationship with Europe

Time, Space and Causality

kliuless — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 06:32:20 -0800

The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI - "Karl Friston's free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself." (via)

Friston first became a heroic figure in academia for devising many of the most important tools that have made human brains legible to science. In 1990 he invented statistical parametric mapping, a computational technique that helps—as one neuroscientist put it—"squash and squish" brain images into a consistent shape so that researchers can do apples-to-apples comparisons of activity within different crania. Out of statistical parametric mapping came a corollary called voxel-based morphometry, an imaging technique that was used in one famous study to show that the rear side of the hippocampus of London taxi drivers grew as they learned "the knowledge." A study published in Science in 2011 used yet a third brain-imaging-analysis software invented by Friston—dynamic causal modeling—to determine if people with severe brain damage were minimally conscious or simply vegetative. When Friston was inducted into the Royal Society of Fellows in 2006, the academy described his impact on studies of the brain as "revolutionary" and said that more than 90 percent of papers published in brain imaging used his methods. Two years ago, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research outfit led by AI pioneer Oren Etzioni, calculated that Friston is the world's most frequently cited neuroscientist. He has an h-index—a metric used to measure the impact of a researcher's publications—nearly twice the size of Albert Einstein's. Last year Clarivate Analytics, which over more than two decades has successfully predicted 46 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, ranked Friston among the three most likely winners in the physiology or medicine category... For the past decade or so, Friston has devoted much of his time and effort to developing an idea he calls the free energy principle. (Friston refers to his neuroimaging research as a day job, the way a jazz musician might refer to his shift at the local public library.) With this idea, Friston believes he has identified nothing less than the organizing principle of all life, and all intelligence as well. "If you are alive," he sets out to answer, "what sorts of behaviors must you show?" [...] First the bad news: The free energy principle is maddeningly difficult to understand. So difficult, in fact, that entire rooms of very, very smart people have tried and failed to grasp it. A Twitter account with 3,000 followers exists simply to mock its opacity, and nearly every person I spoke with about it, including researchers whose work depends on it, told me they didn't fully comprehend it. But often those same people hastened to add that the free energy principle, at its heart, tells a simple story and solves a basic puzzle. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe tends toward entropy, toward dissolution; but living things fiercely resist it. We wake up every morning nearly the same person we were the day before, with clear separations between our cells and organs, and between us and the world without. How? Friston's free energy principle says that all life, at every scale of organization—from single cells to the human brain, with its billions of neurons—is driven by the same universal imperative, which can be reduced to a mathematical function. To be alive, he says, is to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to minimize free energy.[1]

also btw...

Facebook's Latest Purchase Gets Inside Users' Heads—Literally - "The social media company acquires CTRL-Labs, a 'brain-machine-interface' startup that lets users control devices by tapping signals off a wristband."[2,3]
Inside DeepMind's epic mission to solve science's trickiest problem - "DeepMind's AI has beaten chess grandmasters and Go champions. But founder and CEO Demis Hassabis now has his sights set on bigger, real-world problems that could change lives. First up: protein folding."
How to Build Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust - "Computer systems need to understand time, space and causality. Right now they don't."
A critique of pure learning and what artificial neural networks can learn from animal brains - "Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have undergone a revolution, catalyzed by better supervised learning algorithms. However, in stark contrast to young animals (including humans), training such networks requires enormous numbers of labeled examples, leading to the belief that animals must rely instead mainly on unsupervised learning. Here we argue that most animal behavior is not the result of clever learning algorithms—supervised or unsupervised—but is encoded in the genome. Specifically, animals are born with highly structured brain connectivity, which enables them to learn very rapidly. Because the wiring diagram is far too complex to be specified explicitly in the genome, it must be compressed through a 'genomic bottleneck'. The genomic bottleneck suggests a path toward ANNs capable of rapid learning."
AI That Evolves in the Wild - "Alison Gopnik said how nobody reads past the one sentence in Turing's 1950 paper. They never read past his 1936 paper to his 1939 'Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals', which is much more interesting. It's about non-deterministic computers, not the universal Turing machine but the second machine he wrote his thesis on in Princeton, which was the oracle machine—a non-deterministic machine. Already he realized by then that the deterministic machines were not that interesting. It was the non-deterministic machines that were interesting. Similarly, we talk about the von Neumann architecture, but von Neumann only has one patent, and that patent is for non-von Neumann architecture. It's for a neuromorphic computer that can do anything, and he explains that, because to get a patent you have to show what it can do. And nobody reads that patent."

In mathematics there's this deep, old problem called the continuum hypothesis. We have an infinite number of different infinities, but they divide into only two kinds: countable infinities and uncountable infinities. My analogy for that is how at the end of a conference when you look for a t-shirt, there are only extra small t-shirts and extra large. There are no medium t-shirts. The continuum hypothesis—and there is a difference between being true and being provable—has not been proved. It says you will never find a medium-sized infinity. All the infinities belong to one side or the other.[4,5,6]

Two very interesting things are happening. What this means is that for any uncountable infinity, say, a line, there's an infinite number of points between any two points, and then if you cut a piece of that line, it still has an infinite number of points. That, I believe, is analogous to organisms. All organisms do their computing with continuous function. In nature we use discrete functions for error correction in genetics, but all control systems in nature are analog. The smallest analog system has the full power of the continuum.

On the other side, you have the constructible infinities. What's interesting there is that we're trying to prove this by doing it. We're doing our best to create a medium-sized infinity. So, you can say, "Well, it exists. We've made it." The current digital universe is growing by 30 trillion transistors per second, and that's just on the hardware side, so we have this medium-sized infinity, but it still legally belongs to the countable infinities.[7]

The Explosive Evolution of Consciousness - "Some philosophers identify consciousness with the complex, reflective, self-conscious experiences that we have when, say, we are sitting in an armchair and thinking about consciousness. As a result, they argue that even babies and animals aren't really conscious. At the other end of the spectrum, some philosophers have argued for 'pan-psychism', the idea that consciousness is everywhere, even in atoms. Recently, however, a number of biologists and philosophers have argued that consciousness was born from a specific event in our evolutionary history: the Cambrian explosion. A new book, 'The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul' by the Israeli biologists Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, makes an extended case for this idea."

For around 100 million years, from about 635 to 542 million years ago, the first large multicellular organisms emerged on Earth. Biologists call this period the Ediacaran Garden—a time when, around the globe, a rich variety of strange creatures spent their lives attached to the ocean floor, where they fed, reproduced and died without doing very much in between. There were a few tiny slugs and worms toward the end of this period, but most of the creatures, such as the flat, frond-like, quilted Dickinsonia, were unlike any plants or animals living today.

Then, quite suddenly by geological standards, most of these creatures disappeared. Between 530 and 520 million years ago, they were replaced by a remarkable proliferation of animals who lived quite differently. These animals started to move, to have brains and eyes, to seek out prey and avoid predators. Some of the creatures in the fossil record seem fantastic—like Anomolocaris, a three-foot-long insectlike predator, and Opabinia, with its five eyes and trunk-like proboscis ending in a grasping claw. But they included the ancestors of all current species of animals, from insects, crustaceans and mollusks to the earliest vertebrates, the creatures who eventually turned into us... [8,9,10,11]

Season 3, Episode 10

tocts — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 06:20:25 -0800

Some candy hearts comics [Tommy Siegel] drew, a [twitter] thread

"And it's here. Almost."

Stark — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 03:29:33 -0800

The 101 people, ideas and things changing how we work today (via Kottke)

HOLY SHIT WHAT A TRILOGY

Johnny Wallflower — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 15:22:41 -0800

ONE

My dad died. Classic start to a funny story. He was buried in a small village in Sussex. I was really close to my dad so I visited his grave a lot. I still do. [DON'T WORRY, IT GETS FUNNIER.] (Twitter | Threadreader)

TWO

We had two children and last year they said they wanted to go to Disneyland. We saved up and booked it but rather than say sure you want to go to Disneyland let's go to Disneyland, we decided to make them earn it. I told them they needed to raise £3,000. (Twitter | Threadreader)

THREE

I lived next door to a couple called Lucy and Tim. They were both lovely but very different to one another. He was a gregarious GET IN HERE AND DRINK CHAMPAGNE WITH ME type, she was far more reserved. (Twitter | Threadreader)

Economic Possibilities

kliuless — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:21:20 -0800

A Four Day Workweek Could Be Coming to the U.K. (a podcast for work! or leisure ;) - "If you live in the U.K., your workweek could soon be a day shorter if the political winds tilt more heavily toward the left. Jess Shankleman reports on how the proposal is gaining momentum and how it might affect Britain, then Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Smith joins host Stephanie Flanders for a deeper look at the economic questions raised by the four-day week."[1,2] also btw...

How Stockholm became the city of work-life balance - "With flexible hours the norm, and almost two years' parental leave for every child, Sweden's capital boasts a happy and efficient workforce. What can other cities learn?"
'It's a miracle': Helsinki's radical solution to homelessness - "Finland is the only EU country where homelessness is falling. Its secret? Giving people homes as soon as they need them – unconditionally."[3]

Her Dad Died a Decade Ago. She's 3.

GoblinHoney — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 11:49:46 -0800

Is preserving a Jewish bloodline worth creating a child who will never know her father? Over the past two decades, posthumous reproduction has occurred throughout the world in modest but growing numbers. In this version of assisted reproduction, men donate their genetic material in life, or have it extracted after death, so that they may continue their genetic lineage. Experts predict that the number of these procedures is likely to increase as reproductive technology gains prevalence and as "alternative families," composed of combinations beyond the traditional heterosexual, two-parent setup gradually gain acceptance. Israel, an exceptionally pro-natalist country with the highest usage of IVF per capita, is a thriving laboratory for this novel way of family-making.

India man to sue parents for giving birth to him

GoblinHoney — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 11:54:42 -0800

A 27-year-old Indian man plans to sue his parents for giving birth to him without his consent. Taking "I wish I had never been born" and turning it into action. "I must admire my son's temerity to want to take his parents to court knowing both of us are lawyers. And if Raphael could come up with a rational explanation as to how we could have sought his consent to be born, I will accept my fault," she said. Mr Samuel's belief is rooted in what's called anti-natalism - a philosophy that argues that life is so full of misery that people should stop procreating immediately.

"Nothing matters. Nothing matters. Nothing matters. It became my mantra.

Yellow — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 06:10:13 -0800

Holding hands with a chimp Jesse Bering brings perspective from his reflection brought on while caring for a chimpanzee named Noelle.

Including "Ten Books to Help You Become a Librarian"

Wobbuffet — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 22:06:03 -0800

In "A Nella Larsen Reading List" (Lapham's Quarterly, Nov. 12, 2018), Jaime Fuller takes note of what the author of Passing and Quicksand herself seemed to enjoy reading: "The Harlem Renaissance novelist has faded in and out of focus ... although recent years have seen several biographies and an overdue obituary in the New York Times. Here is a list of books that flitted through her life." The third article in a series, its predecessors are "An Emily Dickinson Reading List" and "A Flannery O'Connor Reading List."

The story of a heart valve

homunculus — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 05:58:33 -0800

Looking Inside My Heart. "Jen Hyde discovered that her heart valve was made by women working in a factory near her childhood home. Getting to know them brought her closer to her own mother." [Via]

Because I've never seen my own bioprosthetic heart valve, I couldn't imagine its global origins or the human hands that had put it together until I peered into this room. I watch each woman move like the blood in my body, pulsing through with desire, shame, regret, and longing. Every inch of their bodies are covered in medical garments. Sarah instructs me to put on a pair of latex gloves, then places a sample of my own valve in my hand. I hold it to my eye to study the stitches, but I have trouble seeing a single one. I can't feel the textures of the valve with my gloved hands; it looks machine made. Even as I hold it now and observe the women at work on the other side of the glass, it seems like a work of fiction that the valve inside my body had been assembled by them. And yet, as I hold the valve for the first time, despite my disbelief in the very existence of this room, I feel a deep gratitude for these women and their labor. That the object now inside me had been made here, had brought me here to Irvine made me wonder what else I couldn't see about my own life.

Before It Had a Theme - A Meta-Pod About This American Life

jayz — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 06:25:53 -0800

A new podcast from the Creator of Anxious Machine - Exploring individual epsiodes of This American Life Stoked to stumble into this in my feed this morning. As a lover of both TAL and Anxious Machine - Give a listen to this new podcast that delves into the making and backstory of old episodes of This American Life.

What Do 90-Somethings Regret Most?

ellieBOA — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 04:16:22 -0800

I interviewed the oldest people I know. Their responses contradict popular research about aging and happiness [slMedium]

The Tapestry of the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence

cortex — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 13:20:51 -0800

The Tapestry of the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence : MetaFilter's own moonmilk took a copy of a copy of the audio data on Voyager's Golden Record, and turned it into a 40-meter-long tapestry of human images-as-sound. Watch it all scroll by. [via mefi projects]