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Category: Life

The molecular biologist, Jacques Monod, saw chance as one of the ‘secrets of life’

The molecular biologist, Jacques Monod, saw chance as one of the ‘secrets of life’

Sean B. Carroll writes: Jacques Monod arrived in Paris to some dreadful news. On June 5, 1944, four years into the German occupation of France during World War II, he was supposed to meet with fellow leaders in the French Resistance when his assistant, Geneviève Noufflard, told him that several commanders within the greater Paris region had just been caught by the Gestapo. Monod was pretty sure that at least one of those arrested knew about the rendezvous he was…

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The value of uncertainty

The value of uncertainty

Mark Miller et al write: Understanding our own relationship with uncertainty has never been more important, for we live in unusually challenging times. Climate change, COVID-19 and the new order of surveillance capitalism make it feel as if we are entering a new age of global volatility. Where once for many in the West there were just pockets of instability (deep unpredictability) in a sea of reliability – albeit sometimes in disagreeable structures and expectations – it lately seems as…

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Physics and information theory give a glimpse of life’s origins

Physics and information theory give a glimpse of life’s origins

Natalie Elliot writes: How did life originate? Scientists have been studying the question for decades, and they’ve developed ingenious methods to try to find out. They’ve even enlisted biology’s most powerful theory, Darwinian evolution, in the search. But they still don’t have a complete answer. What they have hit is the world’s most theoretically fertile dead end. When scientists look for life’s origins, they usually work in one of two directions. They work backwards in time through the record of…

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For Schopenhauer, happiness is a state of semi-satisfaction

For Schopenhauer, happiness is a state of semi-satisfaction

David Bather Woods writes: On 13 December 1807, in fashionable Weimar, Johanna Schopenhauer picked up her pen and wrote to her 19-year-old son Arthur: ‘It is necessary for my happiness to know that you are happy, but not to be a witness to it.’ Two years earlier, in Hamburg, Johanna’s husband Heinrich Floris had been discovered dead in the canal behind their family compound. It is possible that he slipped and fell, but Arthur suspected that his father jumped out…

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The return of existentialism

The return of existentialism

Carmen Lea Dege writes: Existentialist ideas have seen a remarkable comeback during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Albert Camus’s frequently invoked novel The Plague, Friedrich Nietzsche’s turn to tragedy, and Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of bad faith, to Giorgio Agamben’s Carl Schmitt–inspired musings about the state of emergency and what Michel de Montaigne, Martin Heidegger, and Blaise Pascal can teach us about facing death. The thread running through all these appeals to existentialism is a sensitivity to human…

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Why a Roman philosopher’s views on the fear of death matter as coronavirus spreads

Why a Roman philosopher’s views on the fear of death matter as coronavirus spreads

Lucretius Carus. Internet Archive Book Images/Flickr By Thomas Nail, University of Denver With the global spread of the new coronavirus, fears about illness and death weigh heavily on the minds of many. Such fears can often result in a disregard for the welfare of others. All over the world, for example, essential items such as toilet paper and hand sanitizer have been sold out, with many people stockpiling them. A first-century B.C. Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius was worried that…

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The consciousness of rats has ethical implications for humans

The consciousness of rats has ethical implications for humans

Kristin Andrews and Susana Monsó write: In the late 1990s, Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, discovered that rats laugh. This fact had remained hidden because rats laugh in ultrasonic chirps that we can’t hear. It was only when Brian Knutson, a member of Panksepp’s lab, started to monitor their vocalisations during social play that he realised there was something that appeared unexpectedly similar to human laughter. Panksepp and his team began to systematically study this phenomenon by tickling…

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The demise of bees will lead to ours too unless we change the way we grow food

The demise of bees will lead to ours too unless we change the way we grow food

Alison Benjamin writes: The oldest love affair in history is between the bee and the flower. It began more than 100m years ago, when nature devised a more efficient way than winds for plants to procreate. About 80% of plant species now use animals or insects to carry pollen grains from the male part of the plant to the female part. The plants developed flowers. Their perfumed scent, colourful displays and sweet nectar are all designed to woo pollinators. Over…

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More evidence of ‘insect apocalypse’

More evidence of ‘insect apocalypse’

The Guardian reports: Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites in two decades. The research adds to growing evidence of what some scientists have called an “insect apocalypse”, which is threatening a collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Earth. A third study shows plummeting numbers of aquatic insects in streams. The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark…

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How trees find their form

How trees find their form

By Rachel Ehrenberg, January 31, 2020 There’s a place in West Virginia where trees grow upside-down. Branches sprout from their trunks in the ordinary fashion, but then they do an about-face, curving toward the soil. On a chilly December day, the confused trees’ bare branches bob and weave in the breeze like slender snakes straining to touch the ground. “It’s really kind of mind-boggling,” says plant molecular biologist Chris Dardick, waving toward the bizarro plum trees. “They’re completely messed up.”…

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Simone de Beauvoir’s authentic love is a project of equals

Simone de Beauvoir’s authentic love is a project of equals

Kate Kirkpatrick writes: The desires to love and be loved are, on Simone de Beauvoir’s view, part of the structure of human existence. Often, they go awry. But even so, she claimed, authentic love is not only possible but one of the most powerful tools available to individuals who want to be free. So what, exactly, is this authentic love? In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir argued that culture led men and women to have asymmetrical expectations, with the result…

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A universal law may govern all living beings

A universal law may govern all living beings

Michel Loreau writes: The diversity of life is awe-inspiring. However, while biologists tend to focus on the multitude of species and how they live, what unites them may at times be more interesting than what sets them apart. In the era of “big data” and its deluge of information, this diversity can now begin to be perceived as a whole, discerning universal properties common to all creatures large and small. It was already known that there exist simple mathematical laws…

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In untold numbers, animals are suffering and dying, and we are either partly or wholly responsible

In untold numbers, animals are suffering and dying, and we are either partly or wholly responsible

Jeff Sebo writes: At the time of writing, Australia is on fire. The fires have killed at least 25 humans and more than a billion animals. Animals such as koalas are especially at risk, since their normal response to threats – climbing to the tops of trees – leaves them vulnerable in the case of fire. As a result, an estimated 25,000 koalas have died and many more will die in the coming weeks. In 2018, Hurricane Florence swept through…

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New evidence suggests, the default condition in plants is immortality

New evidence suggests, the default condition in plants is immortality

Erin Malsbury writes: Long-lived humans having nothing on trees. Some, like the Ginkgo biloba, can live more than 3000 years. Now, in the most comprehensive plant aging study to date, researchers have revealed the molecular mechanisms that allow the ginkgo—and perhaps other trees—to survive so long. The new study provides the first real genetic evidence for something scientists have long suspected: “The default condition in plants is immortality,” says Howard Thomas, a plant biologist from Aberystwyth University who was not…

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Could invisible aliens really exist among us? An astrobiologist explains

Could invisible aliens really exist among us? An astrobiologist explains

They probably won’t look anything like this. Martina Badini/Shutterstock By Samantha Rolfe, University of Hertfordshire Life is pretty easy to recognise. It moves, it grows, it eats, it excretes, it reproduces. Simple. In biology, researchers often use the acronym “MRSGREN” to describe it. It stands for movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition. But Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut and a chemist at Imperial College London, recently said that alien lifeforms that are impossible to spot may be living…

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In these bleak times, imagine a world where you can thrive

In these bleak times, imagine a world where you can thrive

Gary Younge writes: As a child my mother used to put on the song Young, Gifted and Black, by Bob and Marcia, put my feet on hers and then dance us both around the living room. “They’re playing our song,” she’d say. It was the early 1970s, she was barely 30 and I was the youngest of three children she was raising alone. Struggling to believe there was a viable future for her children in a country where racism was…

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