CWL

laboratoryequipment:

Oldest Evidence of Split Between Old World Monkeys, Apes

Two fossil discoveries from the East African Rift reveal new information about the evolution of primates, according to a study published online in Nature led by Ohio Univ. scientists.

The team’s findings document the oldest fossils of two major groups of primates: the group that today includes apes and humans (hominoids), and the group that includes Old World monkeys such as baboons and macaques (cercopithecoids). Geological analyses of the study site indicate that the finds are 25 million years old, significantly older than fossils previously documented for either of the two groups.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/oldest-evidence-split-between-old-world-monkeys-apes

New Theory of How Giant Stars Grow Unveiled

Baby stars can grow to an incredibly large size — 10 times more massive than the sun, at the least — if they are cocooned in a group of older stars feeding gas to the youngsters, a new study suggests.

This theory could explain how young stars get so big, rather than pushing away gas as they grow and starving themselves once they get about eight times as massive as the sun.

Researchers spotted evidence of this type of “convergent constructive feedback” with the Herschel Space Observatory. It took pictures of a large dust and gas cloud called Westerhout 3, located about 6,500 light-years from Earth, in wavelengths ranging from infrared to part of the microwave spectrum.

[Full Article]

Scientists Offer New Way To Look At The Origins Of Life

People have been trying to understand the origins of life on Earth through scientific means since the concept of science began and a pair of Arizona State University researchers suggests in a new report that we’ve been approaching the question incorrectly, almost from the beginning.

In a paper titled, “The algorithmic origins of life,” Paul Davies and Sara Walker proposed that understanding the correct chemical makeup for the origin of life only tells part of the story and scientists should also be focused on how chemical information is organized into life-creating processes.

They equate the shift in perspective to understanding how a computer works. To function, a computer not only needs hardware, akin to life’s chemical makeup, it also needs software, or chemical information.

“When we describe biological processes we typically use informational narratives – cells send out signals, developmental programs are run, coded instructions are read, genomic data are transmitted between generations and so forth,” Walker said. “So identifying life’s origin in the way information is processed and managed can open up new avenues for research.”

“We propose that the transition from non-life to life is unique and definable,” added Davies. “We suggest that life may be characterized by its distinctive and active use of information, thus providing a roadmap to identify rigorous criteria for the emergence of life. This is in sharp contrast to a century of thought in which the transition to life has been cast as a problem of chemistry, with the goal of identifying a plausible reaction pathway from chemical mixtures to a living entity.”

Walker and Davies argue that their approach skirts many issues that have confounded previous efforts to define the origin of life.

Symbiogenesis

Symbiogenesis is the merging of two separate organisms to form a single new organism. The idea originated with Konstantin Mereschkowsky in his 1926 book Symbiogenesis and the Origin of Species, which proposed that chloroplasts originate from cyanobacteria captured by a protozoan.

Ivan Wallin also supported this concept in his book “Symbionticism and the Origins of Species”. He suggested that bacteria might be the cause of the origin of species, and that species creation may occur through endosymbiosis. Today both chloroplasts and mitochondria are believed, by those who ascribe to the endosymbiotic theory, to have such an origin.

“Animals are gentle, and kind.”

In Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, biologist Lynn Margulis argued later that symbiogenesis is a primary force in evolution. According to her theory, acquisition and accumulation of random mutations are not sufficient to explain how inherited variations occur; rather, new organelles, bodies, organs, and species arise from symbiogenesis. Whereas the classical interpretation of evolution (the modern evolutionary synthesis) emphasizes competition as the main force behind evolution, Margulis emphasizes cooperation. She argues that bacteria along with other microorganisms helped create the conditions that we require for life, such as oxygen.

Margulis believes that these microorganisms make up a major component in Earth’s biomass and that they are the reason current conditions on earth are maintained. She also believes that the DNA in the cytoplasm of animal, plant, fungal and protist cells, rather than resulting from mutations, resulted from genes from bacteria that became organelles. She claimed that bacteria are able to exchange genes more quickly and more easily, and because of this, they are more versatile, which is why life was able to evolve so quickly.

blogthoven:

142 years after Darwin predicted it—footage of the moth that pollinates Angraecum sesquipedale.

geneseelibby:

November 24, 1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin, c. 1854

kidsneedscience:

On 24 November 1859 Charles Darwin published his monumental work On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, changing the face of biology.  Although he only used the words once at the very end of the book, the words evolve and evolution is synonymous with Darwin.  The word evolution had been used in a scientific sense specifically in biology for over a hundred years before Darwin wrote Origin of Species-which is one reason why he avoided it.  By the mid 1850s, the word had connotations of perfectability-something Darwin wanted to avoid.  It was the last sentence of his book:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The word evolution arrived in English in 1620 and comes from the Middle Latin word evolutionem  (nomnitive form evolutio) meaning the unrolling of a book or revealing that which was rolled up.  The Latin evolvere meaning to unroll could also pertain to other ‘hidden’ things (see also for example the etymology of vulva), but mostly meant books, when a ‘volume’ was a rolled up manuscript made from vellum. 

Image of the first edition cover in the public domain.  

I think if we’re to engage in anything that we can use as a tool, we should be enforcing the need for that tool to be understood from what good it can do in the right hands, what having the ‘right hands’ entitles. But also what bad can it bring in the wrong hands, and what having the ‘wrong hands’ means. For all of this to even be realized, we’d have to understand humanity/ ourselves, also as a tool. A tool made possible from the anomaly we call life. The chances of us being here are so low that we can consider ourselves the lucky ones from a few.

Yeah, the universe is huge, which is an understatement, but it is also violent, indifferent, and certainly did not manifest itself with the intent of life given how low our chances of being here are. Yet, we’re one of those stories that was able to continue among all the unfinished ones that never reached our lengths due to these extreme conditions. What do we do with that? keep ourselves stuck on a piece of land, consuming it dry, behaving as though this land was made for us rather than the land shaping us. Life was given the possibility to grow however possible with the conditions available. By looking at the lengths our species has gone, what we can actually do, and where we can go we can see how true that is. The big bang, we’re a continuous process that continue today and just like our brains can change their idea of right/wrong, useful/useless, so can our ideas of what ‘home’ is. We owe the rest of life that, to leave here, because of what we’ve done to them and their lands. If we truly are that anomaly I think we are and that our nature is similar to that of a virus.. that we will want to continue growing.

Why not do it in a way that does not trample the rest of the lifeforms that don’t have our biological luxuries, characteristics and abilities. If we know our Sun is going to explode billions of years from now then why doesn’t our species act on this now? At least have the decency to give the rest of life here a chance to grow like we did. I am admittedly wrong to think of life as a virus, because we’re different, a virus is primitive, we’ve grown to change ourselves in ways a virus never could. We could be the virus that changed itself into a useful tool. Like a programmed virus that was given a new set of possible directives that were never available to it before, it uses these new abilities and tools of its own to change itself from a negative system hogging entity, to an information and understanding promoting entity across the system we call the Multiverse.