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POPSPrevailing theory of aging challenged in Stanford worm study To see whether these signal molecules were part of a wear-and-tear aging mechanism, the researchers exposed worms to stresses thought to cause aging, such as heat (a known stressor for nematode worms), free-radical oxidation, radiation and disease. But none of the stressors affected the genes that make the worms get old. So it looked as though worm aging wasn’t a storm of chemical damage. Instead, Kim said, key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake. Kim’s team refers to this slide as “developmental drift.”
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POPSPsychology, Sociology most politically correct fields The first thing that Simmons does in the study with the database — which covers a range of disciplines and institution types — is to identify a politically correct cohort, reflecting largely common views on a set of issues that are seen as defining political correctness. He finds a set of issues that produce this cohort. The views are the belief that gender gaps in math and science fields are largely due to discrimination; support for affirmative action; and belief that discrimination is a key cause of racial inequities in American society. Generally, members of this cohort see race and gender as fundamental — and share that belief much more than beliefs about the curriculum or scholarship, such that the study says that “multiculturalism trumps postmodernism.” Via Tyler Cowen
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POPSDrug for Longer Life The other drug is a small synthetic chemical that is a thousand times as potent as resveratrol in activating sirtuin and can be given at a much smaller dose. Safety tests in people have just started, with no adverse effects so far. The hope is that activating sirtuins in people would, like a calorically restricted diet in mice, avert degenerative diseases of aging like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s. There is no Food and Drug Administration category for longevity drugs, so if the company is to submit a drug for approval, it needs to be for a specific disease. Nonetheless, longevity is what has motivated the researchers and what makes the drugs potentially so appealing.
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POPSArctic Scientists Explore a "Lost" 26-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem “The origin of life discussion comes up because the rocks that are exposed on this very slow spreading ridge are not volcanic, but instead come directly from Earth’s mantle,” says geochemist Susan Humphris. “The chemistry is very much like the volcanism that occurred on the primordial Earth. If you are thinking about origins of life, you’d like to have an area that is the closest analog to what was happening on the early Earth.”
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POPSHow one day we may all be eternally young "We found a normal developmental programme that works in young animals, but becomes unbalanced as the worm gets older. It accounts for the lion's share of molecular differences between young and old worms." If ageing is not a cost of unavoidable chemistry, but is instead driven by changes in regulatory genes, the ageing process may not be inevitable, he added.
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POPSThe Earth's 6th Great Mass Extinction is Occurring as You Read This With the human population expected to reach 9-10 billion by the end of the century and the planet in the middle of its sixth mass extinction — this time due to human activity — the next few years are critical in conserving Earth’s precious biodiversity. The cause of the Sixth Extinction, Homo sapiens, means we can continue on the path to our own extinction, or, preferably, we modify our behavior toward the global ecosystem of which we are still very much a part. At a casual glance, the physically caused extinction events of the past might seem to have little or nothing to tell us about the current Sixth Extinction, which is a human-caused event. For there is little doubt that humans are the direct cause of ecosystem stress and species destruction in the modern world through transformation of the landscape, overexploitation of species, pollution, and the introduction of alien species
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POPSResearchers Discover Remnant of an Ancient 'RNA World'
Breaker's lab solved a decades-old mystery by describing how tiny circular RNA molecules called cyclic di-GMP are able to turn genes on and off. This process determines whether the bacterium swims or stays stationary, and whether it remains solitary or joins with other bacteria to form organic masses called biofilms. Bacterial use of RNA to trigger major changes without the involvement of proteins resolves one of the questions about the origin of life: If proteins are needed to carry out life's functions and DNA is needed to make proteins, how did DNA arise? The answer is what Breaker and other researchers call the RNA World. They believe that billions of years ago, single strands of nucleotides that comprise RNA were the first forms of life and carried out some of the complicated cellular functions now done by proteins. The riboswitches are highly conserved in bacteria, illustrating their importance and ancient ancestry, Breaker said.
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POPSBisexual Species Summary: homosexuality is a natural behavior in the animal kingdom and also occurs in captive situations, suggesting bisexuality is natural for birds, mammals, and other animals...and for humans as well
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POPSSexes need different dinners Crickets eat junk food! Maybe it's a matter of 'learning' to eat well. (good habits?) Often it can be a case of what is available, or easy to get, rather than what is good and nutritious. Sometimes a small change in diet can lead to a marked improvement in an aspect of the health of the consumer. Generally alongside overall improvement. A 'diet' doesn't have to be a revolution. It can be a replacement of a preference that is unhealthy, with one that is healthy. (Of course that's easy to write)
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POPSBiocultural Evolution in the 21st Century: The Evolutionary Role of Religion My outline introduces the concept of biocultural evolution, particularly with reference to the Twentieth Century and the prospects for the Twenty-First Century. I then explore the concept of complex distributed systems to characterize all highly creative processes in both culture and nature. Subsequently, I turn to the problem of complexity horizons and the challenge that these present for traditional moral reflections. Humans are then characterized as a Lamarckian wild card in epic of evolution. I close by discussing the evolutionary role of religion. See source for the full paper: http://metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/8779/Default.aspx
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POPS Scientists: Humans and machines will merge in future The end result would be a new form of "posthuman" life with beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as humans. Bostrom declined to predict an exact time frame when this revolutionary biotechnological metamorphosis might occur. "Maybe it will take eight years or 200 years," he said. "It is very hard to predict."
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POPSNewly described 'dragon' protein could be key to bird flu cure This unexpected relationship between the two subunits could inspire a number of different therapies or vaccines for H5N1 that rely on muzzling the "dragon's" jaws with another molecule or chemical compound that would block the PB1 subunit's access to the PA site, according to Joachimiak. "If we can put a bit in the dragon's mouth, we can slow or even potentially someday stop the spread of avian flu," he said. "Since we are talking about a relatively small protein surface area, finding a way to inhibit RNA replication in H5N1 seems very feasible."
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POPSHow Your Brain Controls Time Warren Meck of Duke University argues that the brain measures long stretches of time by producing pulses. But the brain does not then count the pulses in the way a clock does. Instead, Meck suspects, it does something more elegant. It listens to the pulses as if they were music. At Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany, scientists have been building a model of how memory may store time. When neurons produce a regular cycle of signals, some signals come a little sooner and some come a little later. The researchers propose that as neurons pass these signals along, they can add tiny advances, some bigger than others. With these tiny wobbles, the brain can compress memories of time from several seconds down to hundredths of a second—a small enough package to store for later retrieval. As it stores time in memories, the brain may alter it in another way that is even more radical. It may record time so that our brains recall events in backward order. Scientists at MIT discovered re
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