The Murmansk Shipping Company will turn the nuclear-powered container carrier “Sevmorput“ into a drilling vessel for the oil industry. The vessel will be ready for drilling operations in the Arctic within 18 months, the company announced this week.
With the transformation, the world will see the first ever nuclear-powered oil and gas service vessel. The place of work for the vessel is likely to be the Arctic, and first of all the Barents Sea.
When Trump supporters opined
that the “Deep State” would never
allow the populist real estate mogul to take office, I was skeptical. This
seemed to me like a made-for-television movie script rather than a real possibility:
after all, what could they actually do, aside from using force to prevent him
from taking the oath of office?
However, as the campaign progressed, and the Clintonites became
progressively more unhinged in their attacks on Trump, the Russian angle became
more prominent: former acting CIA Director Mike Morell’s accusation
that Trump is an “unconscious agent” of the Kremlin, and “not
a patriot,” seemed over the top at the time, but in retrospect looks more
like it was laying the groundwork for the current CIA-driven propaganda campaign.
But why would the CIA, in particular, have a special aversion
to Trump? Marcy Wheeler, whose analytical abilities I respect despite our political
disagreements, has this
to say:
“First, if Trump comes into office
on the current trajectory, the US will let Russia help Bashar al-Assad stay
in power, thwarting a 4-year effort on the part of the Saudis to remove
him from power. It will also restructure the hierarchy of horrible human rights
abusing allies the US has, with the Saudis losing out to other human rights
abusers, potentially up to and including that other petrostate, Russia. It will
also install a ton of people with ties to the US oil industry in the cabinet,
meaning the US will effectively subsidize oil production in this country, which
will have the perhaps inadvertent result of ensuring the US remains oil-independent
even though the market can’t justify fracking right now.
“The CIA is institutionally quite close with the Saudis right now, and has
been in charge of their covert war against Assad.”
The Saudis, having given
millions to the Clinton Foundation, along with their Gulf state allies,
were counting on a Clinton victory. The CIA has a longstanding relationship
with Riyadh, and together they have been working assiduously to not only overthrow
Assad in Syria but to forge a “moderate” Sunni alliance that will effectively
police the region while establishing the Saudis as the regional hegemon. This
was the Clintonian strategy while Hillary was at the helm of Foggy Bottom: Libya,
Syria, the alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are all examples of
this utterly disastrous “Sunni turn.”
Trump represents a threat to this grand design, and therefore has to be stopped
by whatever means necessary. His desire to “get along with Russia,” his opposition
to regime change in Syria, his critique of the Libyan misadventure, his foreign
policy stance in general – all this meant that he would come to power and “drain
the swamp” of the CIA and the State Department.
The irony here is that the accusation leveled
at Trump – that his historic victory represents a successful attempt by a foreign
power to take control of the White House – is a classic case of projection.
What we are witnessing is a joint CIA-Saudi operation to overthrow the duly
elected President of the United States.
WaPo |Michael V. Hayden, a principal at the
Chertoff Group and visiting professor at George Mason University’s Schar
School of Policy and Government, was director of the National Security
Agency from 1999 to 2005 and the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006
to 2009.
A month ago I wrote here
about the importance and challenge of the intelligence community
establishing a relationship with President-elect Donald Trump.
That has just gotten more important and more challenging.
In
my November op-ed, I asked: “What role will facts and fact-bearers play
in the Trump administration? . . . Which of the president-elect’s
existing instincts and judgments are open to revision as more data is
revealed?”
I had in mind the
president-elect’s confidence in his own a priori beliefs and
specifically his rejection of the intelligence community’s judgment that
Russia had stolen American emails and weaponized their content to
corrode faith in our electoral processes.
This creates more than hurt feelings. The
intelligence community makes great sacrifices, and CIA directors send
people into harm’s way to learn things otherwise unavailable. And
directors have seen stars carved on the agency’s memorial wall
because of it. If what is gained is not used or wanted or is labeled as
suspect or corrupt — by what moral authority does a director put his
people at risk?
Then there is the ethic of
the intelligence profession, captured by the gospel of John’s dictum in
the agency’s headquarters lobby — that the truth will set you free.
PCR | Ironic, isn’t it, that it is those who purport to be liberal and
progressive who are responsible for the revival of McCarthyism in
America. Moreover, the liberal progressives are institutionalizing
McCarthyism in the US government. There is clearly a concerted effort
being made to define truth as fake news and to define lies as truth.
Ironic, isn’t it, that it is the war criminal Hillary, responsible
for the destruction of Libya and the near destruction of Syria until the
Russians intervened, that the liberal progressive forces are desperate
to have as president. Not only did the liberal progressive forces
attempt to elect a war criminal president of the US, they are doing
their best to delegitimize the president-elect who opposes the
orchestrated conflict with Russia.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the liberal progressive bloc refuse to give peace a chance.
The faked news report from the imbeciles at PropOrNot, which was
hyped by the fake news sheet, WaPo, claiming that I was a Russian agent
was supposed to do my credibility harm. Instead, the 200 List told
everyone where they could get good information, and my readership went
up. Moreover, I almost got a Russian passport out of it. But before
sending it along, Putin checked with Russian intelligence and was
informed that I am not on their roster.
The rumor is that if the House intelligence bill passes with Title V intact, those of us on the PropOrNot list could be called before
congressional hearings in a replay of McCarthyism. If they waterboard
me, I might breakdown and implicate Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Jim
Baker, David Stockman, and all the rest. The evidence against us is
pretty strong. Trump is suspect because he wants peace with Russia, and
so did Reagan. From the standpoint of the Hillary forces and the
presstitutes, anyone who wants peace with Russia is bound to be a
Russian agent.
The way the presstitutes have framed the issue, there are no legitimate reasons to be for peace.
craigmurray | I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and
grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt
whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the
leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been
the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here,
and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the
American broadcasts also.
A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they
“know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been
absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its
pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to
believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a
foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows
who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited,
or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other
restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The
anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are
beneath contempt.
As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from
the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks,
they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two.
And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not
connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage
Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions
to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the
Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy
influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very
weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.
The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost
Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never
acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.
I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:
The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while
the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks
were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the
Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have
specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were
said to be one step removed from the Russian government.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close
associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They
are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked
them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a
leak, not a hack; the two are different things.
“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to
people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have
arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.
“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not
been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge
whatsoever.”
But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home
page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one
repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming –
incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the
information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory,
that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my
obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they
arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who
those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the
KGB.
NYTimes | The
point is that delivering deep and lasting reductions in inequality may
be impossible absent catastrophic events beyond anything any of us would
wish for.
History
— from Ancient Rome through the Gilded Age; from the Russian Revolution
to the Great Compression of incomes across the West in the middle of
the 20th century — suggests that reversing the trend toward greater
concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world,
might be, in fact, nearly impossible.
That’s the bleak argument of Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, whose new book, “The Great Leveler”
(Princeton University Press), is due out next month. He goes so far as
to state that “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset
the existing distribution of resources.” If history is anything to go
by, he writes, “peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the
growing challenges ahead.”
Professor
Scheidel does not offer a grand unified theory of inequality. But
scouring through the historical record, he detects a pattern: From the
Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to
hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality.
There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s
not pretty: violence.
The
big equalizing moments in history may not have always have the same
cause, he writes, “but they shared one common root: massive and violent
disruptions of the established order.”
opendemocracy | Don Halcomb is
a 63-year-old farmer who grows corn, soybeans, wheat and barley on his
7,000-acre family farm in Adairville, Kentucky. According to a
report in the New York Times he’s expecting his profits to vanish this year
because crop prices are falling and seeds and fertilizer are increasingly
expensive, their costs driven up by Monsanto, Dupont and other agribusiness
giants.
“We’re
producing our crops at a loss now,” he told the Times, “You can’t cut your
costs fast enough…It’s just like any other industry that consolidates. They
tell the regulators they’re cost-cutting, and then they tell their customers
they have to increase pricing after the deal’s done.”
The ‘deal’ cited by Halcomb concerns Monsanto’s
recent announcement that it plans to merge with Bayer, one the world’s largest
producers of agricultural chemicals and biotechnology products, spiking fears
that the new conglomerate will raise the cost of inputs even further. Less
competition equals more room for large corporations to dictate their prices and
raise their profit margins, producing a virtual monopoly on seeds which will
prevent farmers from diversifying and encourage the trend towards
highly-vulnerable agricultural monocultures.
It’s a fearful image that’s been exercising my imagination
in recent weeks, evoking some powerful theological memories in the process.
Yes, I did say ‘theological’, though perhaps ‘spiritual’ is a better word, so what’s
the connection between spirituality and seeds?
springer | Most contemporary evolutionary biologists
consider perception, cognition, and communication just like any other
adaptation to the environmental selection pressures. A biosemiotic
approach adds an unexpected turn to this Neo-Darwinian logic and focuses
not so much on the evolution of semiosis as it does on the semiosis of evolution.
What is meant here, is that evolutionary forces are themselves
semiotically constrained and contextualized. The effect of environmental
conditions is always mediated by the responses of organisms, who select
their developmental pathways and actions based on heritable or
memorized past experience and a variety of external and internal
signals. In particular, recognition and categorization of objects,
learning, and communication (both intraspecific and interspecific) can
change the evolutionary fate of lineages. Semiotic selection, an effect
of choice upon other species (Maran and Kleisner 2010), active habitat preference (Lindholm 2015), making use of and reinterpreting earlier semiotic structures – known as semiotic co-option (Kleisner 2015), and semiotic scaffolding (Hoffmeyer 2015; Kull 2015), are some further means by which semiosis makes evolution happen.
Semiotic
processes are easily recognized in animals that communicate and learn,
but it is difficult to find directly analogous processes in organisms
without nerves and brains. Molecular biologists are used to talk about
information transfer via cell-to-cell communication, DNA replication,
RNA or protein synthesis, and signal transduction cascades within cells.
However, these informational processes are difficult to compare with
perception-related sign processes in animals because information
requires interpretation by some agency, and it is not clear where the
agency in cells is. In bacterial cells, all molecular processes appear
deterministic, with every signal, such as the presence of a nutrient or
toxin, launching a pre-defined cascade of responses targeted at
confronting new conditions. These processes lack an element of learning
during the bacterial life span, and thus cannot be compared directly
with complex animal and human semiosis, where individual learning plays a
decisive role.
The determinism of the
molecular clockwork was summarized in the dogma that genes determine the
phenotype and not the other way around. As a result, the Modern
Synthesis (MS) theory presented evolution as a mechanical process that
starts with blind random variation of the genome, and ends with
automatic selection of the fittest phenotypes. Although this theory may
explain quantitative changes in already existing features, it certainly
cannot describe the emergence of new organs or signaling pathways. The
main deficiency of such explanations is that the exact correspondence
between genotypes and phenotypes is postulated a priori. In other words,
MS was built like Euclidean geometry, where questioning the
foundational axioms will make the whole system fall, like a house of
cards.
The discipline of biosemiotics has generated a new platform for explaining biological evolution. It considers that evolution is semiosis,
a process of continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of
hereditary signs alongside other signs that originate in the environment
or the body.
nature | Scientists in London have been granted permission to edit the genomes of human embryos for research, UK fertility regulatorsannounced. The 1 February approval by the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) represents the world's first endorsement of such research by a national regulatory authority.
"It’s an important first. The HFEA has been a very thoughtful, deliberative body that has provided rational oversight of sensitive research areas, and this establishes a strong precedent for allowing this type of research to go forward," says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts.
The HFEA has approved an application by developmental biologist Kathy Niakan, at the Francis Crick Institute in London, to use the genome-editing technique CRISPR–Cas9 in healthy human embryos. Niakan’s team is interested in early development, and it plans to alter genes that are active in the first few days after fertilization. The researchers will stop the experiments after seven days, after which the embryos will be destroyed.
ibiology | Advances in rRNA sequencing and other techniques have allowed
scientists to characterize novel symbiotic partnerships. In her first
lecture, Dr. Margaret McFall-Ngai provides an overview of the three main
types of symbiosis: mutualism (both partners benefit), commensalism
(only one partner benefits), and parasitism (one partner benefits, but
the other partner is harmed). McFall-Ngai’s research is currently
focused on understanding the establishment and maintenance of symbiotic
relationships, and the molecular effects that these relationships have
on development, health, and disease.
In her second talk, McFall-Ngai tells the story of a symbiosis between the Hawaiian bobtail squid and Vibrio fischeri (V. fischeri),
a type of luminescent bacteria that enables the squid to hunt at night.
McFall-Ngai and collaborators have identified the molecular mechanism
by which nascent Hawaiian bobtail squid select V. fischeri from
the thousands of other bacteria in their habitat. V. fischeri induces
developmental changes in the squid that drive daily rhythms of gene
expression, which are necessary to control bacterial growth, a crucial
cycle in this symbiotic partnership.
genomemag | Imagine if doctors could correct a cataract, for
instance, not by using a scalpel or laser to perform surgery, but rather
by sending off miniature surgical tools to reach right in and fix the
diseased gene that was responsible. It might surprise you to learn that
scientists have already shown that this sort of thing is doable today —
not in humans perhaps, but in much tinier and fuzzier mice in the lab.
The procedure doesn’t work perfectly every time (which partly explains
why no one has tried it in a person just yet), but when it does, the
animals grow healthy and disease-free.
Scientists in China successfully cured 24 mice of their eye
condition, which was produced by a single, mutant copy of one gene. That
demonstration, reported in the scientific literature two years ago, was
billed as the first to show that it’s possible to correct a genetic
disease using a genome editing tool, which scientists call CRISPR-Cas9.
Although in mice, the findings offered the first proof of principle that
scientists and doctors might one day have sufficient skill and
precision to edit single-gene disorders out of human genomes in much the
same way.
Jinsong Li, one of the leaders of the study from the Chinese Academy
of Sciences, said then that he believes it is “absolutely possible to
use CRISPR to cure genetic disease in the near future.” As further
evidence in support of Li’s conclusion, his paper came out alongside
another by researchers in the Netherlands. They had used CRISPR to
correct a gene that causes cystic fibrosis in adult stem cells derived
from patients with the single-gene disorder.
omicsonline | Genome editing technologies may in the future have therapeutic potential
for various incurable diseases: cancer, genetic disorders, HIV/AIDS to
mention the most obvious. Genome editing of somatic cells, which is at
it various clinical stages, is a promising area of therapeutic
development. This year, a group of Chinese researchers led by Junjiu
Huang - a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in
Guangzhou, used complex enzyme-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 as a therapeutic
agent to eradicate the human β-globulin (HBB) gene from the germline of
the human embryo. The mutations in HBB gene cause β-thalassaemia (a
deadly blood disorder). The research was, however, not completely
successful, and had to be abandoned at its preliminary stage. This
research was published in the journal Protein and Cell after it was
rejected by the journal Nature and Science on ethical grounds. Caution
flags have been raised about the use of CRISPR-Cas9 on human germline
editing. This research has generated the debate among the world-renowned
scientists about the ethical concerns and implications of CRISPR-Cas9
human germline editing. While some members of the scientific community
have argued that a moratorium should be called on human germline
editing, others have argued that it is unethical to withhold a
technology that would eliminate devastating genetic diseases. This paper
critically evaluates the challenges, ethical concerns and implications
of CRISPR-Cas9 human germ line editing.
phys.org | As
the floor plan of the living world, DNA guides the composition of
animals ranging from unicellular organisms to humans. DNA not only helps
shepherd every organism from birth through death, it also plays an
essential role in the development of many human diseases.
But it wasn't
always so. Long before DNA emerged as the molecule of life, its closely
related cousin, RNA (ribonucleic acid), held center stage.
The RNA world refers to a time in earth's distant past when primitive
forms used RNA rather than DNA to archive genetic information, pass it
along using RNA-based copying machinery and perform biological
reactions.
With the emergence of DNA, RNA came to play an intermediary role,
copying DNA messages known as genes and translating them into proteins.
This pathway from DNA to RNA to protein has become so engrained in the
field of biology it is often referred to as "the central dogma."
Recently, however, RNA's strict subservience to DNA has been called
into question. New discoveries have prompted an explosion in RNA
research, with vital implications for both the foundations of biology
and the practice of medicine. (Sidney Altman, who won the Nobel Prize
for establishing that RNA can act independently and perform chemical
reactions on its own, providing powerful evidence for the RNA world
hypothesis, has recently joined ASU's School of Life Sciences).
g3journal | Enhancers physically interact with transcriptional promoters, looping
over distances that can span multiple regulatory elements.
Given that enhancer-promoter (EP) interactions
generally occur via common protein complexes, it is unclear whether EP
pairing
is predominantly deterministic or proximity guided.
Here we present cross-organismic evidence suggesting that most EP pairs
are compatible, largely determined by physical
proximity rather than specific interactions. By re-analyzing
transcriptome
datasets, we find that the transcription of gene
neighbors is correlated over distances that scale with genome size. We
experimentally
show that non-specific EP interactions can explain
such correlation, and that EP distance acts as a scaling factor for the
transcriptional influence of an enhancer. We
propose that enhancer sharing is commonplace among eukaryotes, and that
EP distance
is an important layer of information in gene
regulation.
p2pfoundation | I know this has been a rough time for a
lot of you, and I hope you are doing well. In brief: Yes, there has been
a major electoral upheaval, and it seems there are many confused people
out there working under some pretty strange assumptions. But no, this
isn’t as much of a shift as it may seem.
If
anything, this is the legacy of the 20th Century coming back to haunt
us. In an effort to counter the propaganda of our political enemies,
American social scientists (Bateson and Meade, to be exact) proposed a
world of screens they called “the surround.” Their idea was that if
people had the experience of choosing different things – or of looking
at whichever screen they wanted to – they wouldn’t care so much that all
the choices were for essentially the same thing.
In
short, looking at a screen – any screen – was more important than what a
person learned or came to believe, other than that he or she was
experiencing real autonomy and choice. That was supposed to be America:
the land of choices. The supermarket offers us fifty different laundry
detergents to choose from – even though they are almost all the same,
and are distributed by the same two or three corporations. You can
choose whichever one you want, as long as you choose (and pay for) one
of them.
An array of TV channels gave us a similar
experience of choice. But Bateson and Meade probably never imagined a
world with quite as many screens as ours now has. Or as much of a direct
connection between our experience of screen choice and that of
democracy. American Idol and other reality programs made the connection
discrete. And thus Donald Trump’s migration from reality TV to electoral
politics was seamless. Social media and smart phones took screens to
the next level of illusory user-control, while they simply reduced the
array of possibilities to a narrow beam of sensationalist,
algorithmically assembled, self-affirmation.
But the underlying techniques for influencing people through
all those screens? That’s magic. Or at least the approach to magic
practiced by Hitler and his propagandists in WWII, before it was
utilized by the British and American advertising agencies after the war.
It’s the subject of the graphic novel I released last week – Aleister & Adolf –
about the occult war between Aleister Crowley and Adolf Hitler at the
end of WWII. I hadn’t meant it to be quite so prescient, but it’s a
great way of understanding how we got where we are. The social media
landscape is the ideal space for sigils and memetic engineering because
we are utterly untethered from grounded experience. Those who succeed at
these techniques are the ones who successfully tap into existing hidden
agendas in popular culture. They just jump into the unacknowledged
standing wave of society, and it carries them along for the ride. It’s
not the subject or surfer that matters so much as the wave itself, and one’s willingness to surrender to it entirely. That’s
why celebrities or candidates who adopt this strategy end up seeming to
have no coherent goal.
edgarlowen | A computational model is by far the most reasonable and fruitful
approach to reality. The computational model of Universal Reality is
both internally consistent and consistent with science and the
scientific method. This may initially seem counter intuitive but there
all sorts of convincing reasons supporting it.
There is overwhelming evidence that everything in the universe is its
information or data only and that the observable universe is a
computational system:
1. To be comprehensible, which it self-evidently is, reality must be a
logically consistent structure. To be logical and to continually happen
it must be computable. To be computable it must consist of data because
only data is computable. Therefore the content of the observable
universe must consist only of programs computing data.
2. The laws of science which best describe reality are themselves
logico-mathematical information forms. Why would the equations of
science be the best description of reality if reality itself didn’t also
consist of similar information structures? This explains the so-called
“unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in describing the universe
(Wigner, 1960).
3. By recognizing that reality is a logico-mathematical structure the
laws of nature immediately assume their natural place as an intrinsic
part of reality. No longer do they somehow stand outside a physical
world while mysteriously controlling it. A physical model of the
universe is unable to explain where the laws of nature reside or what
their status is (Penrose, 2005).
4. Physical mechanisms to produce effects become unnecessary in a purely
computational world. It’s enough to have a consistent
logico-mathematical program that computes them in accordance with
experimental evidence.
5. When everything that mind adds to our perception of reality is
recognized and subtracted all that remains of reality is a computational
data structure. This is explained in detail below and can actually be
confirmed by carefully analyzed direct experience.
6. We know that our internal simulation of reality exists as
neurochemical data in the circuits of our brain. Yet this world appears
perfectly real to us. If our cognitive model of reality consists only of
data and seems completely real then it’s reasonable to assume that the
actual external world could also consist only of data. How else could it
be so effectively modeled as data in our brains if it weren’t data
itself?
7. This view of reality is tightly consistent with the other insights of
Universal Reality, which are cross-consistent with modern science.
Total consistency across maximum scope is the test of validity, truth
and knowledge (Owen, 2016).
8. This view of reality leads to simple elegant solutions of many of the
perennial problems of science and the nature of reality and leads
directly to many new insights. Specifically it leads to a clear
understanding of the nature of consciousness and also enables a new
understanding of spacetime that conceptually unifies quantum theory and
general relativity and resolves the paradoxical nature of the quantum
world (Owen, 2016).
9. These insights complete the progress of science itself in reducing
everything to data by revealing how both mass-energy and spacetime, the
last remaining bastions of physicality, can be reduced to data as
explained in Universal Reality (Owen, 2016).
10. Viewing the universe as running programs computing its data changes
nothing about the universe which continues exactly as before. It merely
completes the finer and finer analysis of all things including us into
their most elemental units. It’s simply a new way of looking at what
already exists in which even the elementary particles themselves consist
entirely of data while everything around us remains the same. Reality
remained exactly the same when everything was reduced to its elementary
particles, and it continues to remain the same when those particles are
further reduced to their data.
nautilus | A “living worlds” perspective implies that after billions of years,
life will either be absent from a planet or, as on Earth, have
thoroughly taken over and become an integral part of all global
processes. Signs of life will be everywhere. Once life has taken hold of
a planet, once it has become a planetary‐scale entity (a global
organism, if you will), it may be very hard to kill. Certainly life has
seen Earth through many huge changes, some quite traumatic. Life here is
remarkably robust and persistent. It seems to have a kind of
immortality. Call it quasi‐immortality, because the planet won’t be
around forever, and it may not be habitable for its entire lifetime.
Individuals are here for but an instant. Whole species come and go,
usually in timescales barely long enough to get the planet’s attention.
Yet life as a whole persists. This gives us a different way to think
about ourselves. The scientific revolution has revealed us, as
individuals, to be incredibly tiny and ephemeral, and our entire
existence, not just as individuals but even as a species, to be brief
and insubstantial against the larger temporal backdrop of cosmic
evolution. If, however, we choose to identify with the biosphere, then
we, Gaia, have been here for quite some time, for perhaps 3 billion
years in a universe that seems to be about 13 billion years old. We’ve
been alive for a quarter of all time. That’s something.
The origin of life on Earth was not just the beginning of the
evolution of species, the fount of diversity that eventually begat algae
blooms, aspen groves, barrier reefs, walrus huddles, and gorilla
troops. From a planetary evolution perspective, this development was a
major branching point that opened up a gateway to a fundamentally
different future. Then, when life went global, and went deep, planet
Earth headed irreversibly down the path not taken by its siblings.
Now, very recently, out of this biologically altered Earth, another
kind of change has suddenly emerged and is rewriting the rules of
planetary evolution. On the nightside of Earth, the lights are switching
on, indicating that something new is happening and someone new is home.
Has another gateway opened? Could the planet be at a new branching
point?
The view from space sheds light on the multitude of rapid changes
inscribed on our planet by our industrial society. The orbital
technology enabling this observation is itself one of the strange and
striking aspects of the transition now gripping Earth. If up to now the
defining characteristic of Earth has been planetary‐scale life, then
what about these planetary‐scale lights? Might this spreading, luminous
net be part of a new defining characteristic?
phys.org | An
ideological dispute is taking place in biology. And it's about a big
topic that's central to everything: heredity. In his epoch-making book
On the Origin of Species of 1859, Darwin wrote of the reigning ignorance
about how differences between individuals come about. It was only with
'modern evolutionary synthesis' in the 1940s that people became
convinced that heredity functions through genetics – in other words,
that the characteristics of living creatures are passed on to the next
generations through their genetic substance, DNA.
This
perspective was helpful in providing a focus for research in the ensuing
decades, which brought about extraordinary discoveries. As a result,
many aspects of the form and function of living creatures can now be
explained. But already in the 1950s, different observations called into
question the seemingly exclusive control of the genes. For example,
maize kernels can have different colours even if their DNA sequence is
identical.
Plants remember aridity
Further investigations brought to light the fact that when
individuals with identical genetic material have a different outward
appearance, this can be traced back to different degrees of activity on
the part of the genes. Whether a particular section of DNA is active or
not – i.e., whether it is read – depends to a decisive degree on how
densely packed the DNA is.
This packing density is influenced by several so-called epigenetic
mechanisms. They form a complex machinery that can affix or detach tiny
chemical attachments to the DNA. Here, the rule applies that the tighter
packed the DNA, the more difficult it is to read – and this means that a
particular gene will be more inactive.
Living creatures can adjust to a volatile environment by steering
their epigenetic mechanisms. In this manner, for example, the epigenetic
machinery can ensure that plants can deal better with a hot or arid
climate if it at some point they already had to live through a similar
situation. So in this sense, the epigenetic markings in the genetic
material form a kind of 'stress memory' of the plants. This much is
today a matter of consensus among biologists.
Doubts on heredity over generations
Several studies, however, suggest that the descendants of stressed
plants are also better prepared against the dangers already faced by
their ancestors. "However, these studies are a matter of controversial
debate," says Ueli Grossniklaus, the director of the Department of Plant
and Microbial Biology at the University of Zurich. Like many other
epigeneticists who are involved in deciphering these mechanisms, he
believes that, "since the evidence is patchy, we can't yet say to what
degree acquired characteristics can be transmitted in stable form over
several generations." So it still remains to be proven whether
epigenetics actually brings organisms long-lasting advantages and thus
plays a role in evolution. It's an attractive idea, thinks Grossniklaus,
but it's still to be demonstrated.
It's not just in plants that results on the heredity of epigenetic
markings are causing a stir – the same is true in mice. In order to
investigate the possible long-term effects of severe childhood trauma,
for example, the research group led by Isabelle Mansuy, a professor of
neuro-epigenetics at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, has been
taking mouse offspring away from their mothers for three hours each day,
just a few days after being born.
telegraph | An ethical debate over how long
human embryos can be grown in a lab has erupted after Cambridge
University announced it had allowed fertilised eggs to mature for 13
days – just one day short of the legal limit.
In groundbreaking research, scientists invented a thick soup of
nutrients which mimics conditions in the womb, and keeps an embryo alive
for days longer than it could previously survive without being
implanted into a mother.
Currently UK law bans
laboratories for growing embryos for longer than 14 days because after
two weeks, twins can no longer form, and so it is deemed that an
individual has started to develop.
But scientists have now suggested
that the deadline should be extended to allow for more research into
the development of embryos.
Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, who led the research suggested it
would be useful to extend the limit by a few days, while Professor
Robert Lovell-Badge of London’s Francis Crick Institute said an extra week might be useful, but admitted it could ‘open a can of worms.’
“Proposing to extend the 14-day limit might be opening a can of
worms, but would it lead to Pandora’s box, or a treasure chest of
valuable information ?” said Professor Lovell-Badge
“This is not a question to be left to scientists alone.”
nature | They are meeting in China; they are meeting in the United Kingdom; and
they met in the United States last week. Around the world, scientists
are gathering to discuss the promise and perils of editing the genome of
a human embryo. Should it be allowed — and if so, under what
circumstances?
The meetings have been prompted by an explosion of interest in the powerful technology known as CRISPR/Cas9,
which has brought unprecedented ease and precision to genetic
engineering. This tool, and others like it, could be used to manipulate
the DNA of embryos in a dish to learn about the earliest stages of human
development. In theory, genome editing could also be used to 'fix' the
mutations responsible for heritable human diseases. If done in embryos,
this could prevent such diseases from being passed on.
The prospects have prompted widespread concern and discussion
among scientists, ethicists and patients. Fears loom that if genome
editing becomes acceptable in the clinic to stave off disease, it will
inevitably come to be used to introduce, enhance or eliminate traits for
non-medical reasons.
Ethicists are concerned that unequal access to
such technologies could lead to genetic classism. And targeted changes
to a person's genome would be passed on for generations, through the
germ line (sperm and eggs), fuelling fears that embryo editing could
have lasting, unintended consequences.
Adding to these concerns, the regulations in many countries have not kept pace with the science.
Nature
has tried to capture a snapshot of the legal landscape by querying
experts and government agencies in 12 countries with histories of
well-funded biological research. The responses reveal a wide range of
approaches. In some countries, experimenting with human embryos at all
would be a criminal offence, whereas in others, almost anything would be
permissible.
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