Lifeboat Foundation

Studying the large-scale structure of our galaxy isn’t easy. We don’t have a clear view of the Milky Way’s shape and features like we do of other galaxies, largely because we live within it. But we do have some advantages. From within, we’re able to carry out close-up surveys of the Milky Way’s stellar population and its chemical compositions. That gives researchers the tools they need to compare our own galaxy to the many millions of others in the Universe.

This week, an international team of researchers from the USA, UK, and Chile released a paper that does just that. They dug through a catalogue of ten thousand galaxies produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, searching for galaxies with similar attributes to our own.

They discovered that the Milky Way has twins – many of them – but just as many that are only superficially similar, with fundamental differences buried in the data. What they discovered has implications for the future evolution of our own galaxy.

Human microproteins encoded by small ORFs have been found to be functional. By comparing the corresponding sequences across vertebrate genomes, Vakirlis et al. show that a number of these originated “from scratch” from noncoding sequences, including two very recent cases unique to humans. These cases demonstrate the rapid evolution of genetic novelty.

“This concept that cells ‘fight back’ against modified RNA is of practical importance, as it suggests how one might improve the effectiveness of RNA therapy.”

Researchers from the Smidt Heart Institute have unveiled a novel concept — they harnessed modified messenger RNA (mRNA) technology used in creating the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines, which can be a significant step in the evolution and creation of biological pacemakers.

Luismmolina/iStock.

Continue reading “A breakthrough in mRNA therapies could lead to biological heart pacemakers” »

How ethical would aliens be?

Ethics derived from biological evolution can be harsh — parasitism, invasiveness, and survival at all costs. Ethics derived from human culture is far more benevolent. Would alien ethics be based more on biology or culture? Let’s hope the latter.

Posted on big think, direct weblink at.

Continue reading “What Sort of Ethics Would Aliens Practice?” »

Investigators from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai have identified how biological pacemaker cells—cells that control your heartbeat—can “fight back” against therapies to biologically correct abnormal heartbeat rates. The research also uncovered a new way to boost the effectiveness of RNA therapies by controlling this “fighting back” activity.

This novel concept, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Reports Medicine, is an important step in the evolution and creation of biological pacemakers—which aim to one day replace traditional, electronic pacemakers.

“We are all born with a specialized group of heart cells that set the pace for our heartbeats,” said Eugenio Cingolani, MD, senior author of the study and director of the Cardiogenetics Program in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai. “But in some people, this natural heartbeat is too slow, leading to the need for an electronic pacemaker.”

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The Fermi Paradox ask us how in a Universe so vast and ancient we seem to be the only intelligent civilization around, with no older interstellar alien empires visible in the galaxy. But could extinction play a role in that, or might extinction events instead drive evolution forward?

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Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox: Extinction” »

Summary: Findings support the theory that microRNAs are essential for the development and evolution of intelligent life.

Source: Dartmouth College.

Octopuses have captured the attention of scientists and the public with their remarkable intelligence, including the use of tools, engaging in creative play and problem-solving, and even escaping from aquariums.

If we re-ran Earth’s clock, would life arise again? Would another civilization eventually evolve? Astrobiology is faced with trying to contextualize our place in the Universe using just a single data point. But even a single data point contains information. The key to unlocking it is a careful understanding of the selection biases at play and intricacies of Bayesian statistics. Today, we’re thrilled to present to you our explainer video of a new research paper led by Prof David Kipping that provides a direct quantification of the odds of life and intelligence on Earth-like worlds, based on our own chronology. Presented & Written by Prof. David Kipping.

This video is based on research conducted at the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University, New York. You can now support our research program directly here: https://www.coolworldslab.com/support.

Previous episodes to catch up on:
► “Watching the End of the World”: https://youtu.be/p9e8qNNe3L0
► “Why We Could Be Alone”: https://youtu.be/PqEmYU8Y_rI

Continue reading “The Odds of Life and Intelligence” »

Our default intuition when it comes to consciousness is that humans and some other animals have it, whereas plants and trees don’t. But how sure can we be that plants aren’t conscious? And what if what we take to be behavior indicating consciousness can be replicated with no conscious agent involved? Annaka Harris invites us to consider the real possibility that our intuitions about consciousness might be mere illusions.

Our intuitions have been shaped by natural selection to quickly provide life-saving information, and these evolved intuitions can still serve us in modern life. For example, we have the ability to unconsciously perceive elements in our environment in threatening situations that in turn deliver an almost instantaneous assessment of danger — such as the intuition that we shouldn’t get into an elevator with someone, even though we can’t put our finger on why.

But our guts can deceive us as well, and “false intuitions” can arise in any number of ways, especially in domains of understanding — like science and philosophy — that evolution could never have foreseen. An intuition is simply the powerful sense that something is true without having an awareness or understanding of the reasons behind this feeling — it may or may not represent something true about the world.