life inspired

"If you want to find life forms that truly seem otherworldly, your local forest is a much better place than your local cineplex. It is home to creatures that are immensely old, fundamentally bizarre and capable of startlingly sophisticated behavior. They are the slime molds." Full article @ NY Times.

Labels: evolution, life, slime mold

"How life began is one of the most compelling questions humanity has ever asked. Atoms and molecules, driven by nothing more than unthinking chemical processes, somehow became the complex reproductive organisms that we see roaming the Earth today -- somehow, they became us." Full artcle @ Wired UK

Labels: chemistry, dna, life, mathematical modeling, origin

"In 1953, Watson and Crick not only described the double-helix structure of DNA, but also embraced the idea that genes contained a code that expresses information and thereby changed our view of life. This article traces how these ideas entered biological thinking and highlights the connections between different branches of science at the time, exploring the power of metaphor in science." Full article @ Cell

Labels: cybernetics, dna, information, life

"Ever since Charles Darwin, biologists have been building trees to show how organisms are related to one another. Now, computational biologist James Rosindell of Imperial College London and his colleagues have come up with a tree that outdoes all trees. Called OneZoom, the approach works like Google Maps: A user can drill down the tree's trunks, branches, and tips to view ever-finer details, and the structure can incorporate an infinite amount of information." Full news analysis @ Science

Labels: evolution, life, visualization

Special Presentation -Jose Lugo Martinezi: Chris Adami's Digital genetics: unraveling the genetic basis for evolution and discussion of Tom Ray's Evolution, ecology and optimization of digital organisms

Special Presentation - Karthik Ramaswamy Padmanabhan: Gibson et al's Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome and discussion of "Life after the synthetic cell"

Labels: artificial ecologies, evolution, life, synthetic bioology

"a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life. Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe." Full article @
Wired Science

Labels: life, proto-life

Could alien life exist in the form of dancing specks of dust? According to a new simulation, electrically charged dust can organise itself into DNA-like double helixes that behave in many ways like living organisms, reproducing and passing on information to one another. Full article @ The New Scientist Space

Labels: information, life

I really prefer the institutional video awards...

Labels: Darwin, genetics, life

Advances in optical microscopy reveal biological processes as they unfold. Full article @ Harvard Magazine. Check out the videos too. Thanks to Erik Wennstrom for the link!

Labels: life, technology

"Starving "social amoebae" called Dictyostelium discoideum seek the support of "kin" when they form multi-cellular organisms made up of dead stalks and living spores". Full story @ Science Daily

Labels: colony behavior, life