Lifeboat Foundation

Forget about evolution, climate change or vaccines – what makes people really lose their mind, apparently, is cats.

“We’ve had posts that have affected people’s lives in a very substantial way, including posts that went beyond the virtual world. People really got threats or disrespectful comments,” says Yomiran Nissan.

Continue reading “The Israelis bringing us big science in little soundbites” »

Discovery could help plug gaps in understanding of evolution after Cambrian explosion more than 500m years ago.

The research uses the genomes of 241 species.

A species is a group of living organisms that share a set of common characteristics and are able to breed and produce fertile offspring. The concept of a species is important in biology as it is used to classify and organize the diversity of life. There are different ways to define a species, but the most widely accepted one is the biological species concept, which defines a species as a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce viable offspring in nature. This definition is widely used in evolutionary biology and ecology to identify and classify living organisms.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake believes that memory is inherent to nature, and has spent the last forty years of his career investigating slippery, esoteric phenomena at the very edges of empiricism. Some of the results are intriguing — dogs that know when their owners have started the long journey home, crosswords that become easier to solve a few days after they’ve been published in the papers, IQ scores increase generation after generation. His work is ongoing, the territory marginal, and the implications immense.

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Continue reading “Memory Across Time & Space — Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, Biologist” »

Using Zoonomia’s data, researchers have also constructed a phylogenetic tree that estimates when each mammalian species diverged from its ancestors⁵. This analysis lends support to the hypothesis that mammals had already started evolutionarily diverging before Earth was struck by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago — but that they diverged much more rapidly afterwards.

Only the beginning

The Zoonomia Project is just one of dozens of efforts to sequence animal genomes. Another large effort is the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), which aims to generate genomes for roughly all 71,000 living vertebrate species, which include mammals, reptiles, fish, birds and amphibians. Although the two projects are independent of one another, many researchers are a part of both, says Haussler, who is a trustee of the VGP.

Over the past 100 million years, mammals have adapted to nearly every environment on Earth. Scientists with the Zoonomia Project have been cataloging the diversity in mammalian genomes by comparing DNA sequences from 240 species that exist today, from the aardvark and the African savanna elephant to the yellow-spotted rock hyrax and the zebu.

This week, in several papers in a special issue of Science, the Zoonomia team has demonstrated how comparative genomics can not only shed light on how certain species achieve extraordinary feats, but also help scientists better understand the parts of our genome that are functional and how they might influence health and disease.

In the new studies, the researchers identified regions of the genomes, sometimes just single letters of DNA, that are most conserved, or unchanged, across mammalian species and millions of years of evolution—regions that are likely biologically important. They also found part of the genetic basis for uncommon mammalian traits such as the ability to hibernate or sniff out faint scents from miles away. And they pinpointed species that may be particularly susceptible to extinction, as well as genetic variants that are more likely to play causal roles in rare and common human diseases.

Morphological study of open clusters can provide observational evidence for tracing the formation mechanism of star clusters and help to explore the evolution of star clusters.

The morphology of open clusters on the two-dimensional (2D) projection planes mostly conforms to the core-shell structure. However, whether this layered structure actually exists in three-dimensional (3D) space is not known.

Recently, researchers from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory (XAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a rose diagram overlaying method based on Gaia data to study the 3D layered structure of open cluster samples within 500 parsec (pc) near the sun.

Scientists have successfully grown a monkey brain to be larger than its regular size by using a human brain gene, replicating that historical moment when humans and primates were set apart.

Most exoplanets lying in the habitable zones around stars are in fact inhospitable to plant life as we know it. That is according to a new study from microbiologists and astronomers at the University of Georgia who say that taking into account the light a planet receives as well as its ability to hold liquid water is a better definition of whether life could exist on other planets.

The Habitable Zone (HZ) is traditionally defined to be the range of distances around a star where an exoplanet can support liquid water on its surface. Too far, and the planet remains frozen like Mars. Too close and the oceans evaporate, as happened to Venus. The zone in the middle is neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right – the so-called “Goldilocks zone”.

Nothing certain is known about the properties and requirements of alien life. However, there are generally two schools of thought in astrobiology. One is that evolution on other planets can figure out ways to sidestep seemingly insurmountable barriers to life as we know it, while others claim that life is everywhere bounded by the same universal physical principles, and can thus only operate a certain way, similar to as on Earth.