New research: Life processes began before oxygen was on Earth

 

Electron transfer is an absolute necessity for basic life processes like the construction of DNA by RNA, photosynthesis, and respiration. No free elemental oxygen (O2) existed on Earth as far back in time as three billion years ago. All the iron on earth became oxidized when oxygen began to be produced by plant photosynthesis. Iron ore is oxidized iron. Oxidized iron cannot be used as a reactant in electron transfer by RNA. This research proves that RNA could have used iron to catalyze single electron transfer to produce DNA in an oxygen free world three billion years ago. The concept has been proposed but never proven experimentally until this new research accomplished the effect. The research shows that the basic building blocks of life and life processes could have developed very early on Earth and independent of the present day processes that produce DNA from RNA.

 

All history is the history of the evolutionary transubstantiation of matter to Spirit via biological-life processes of Blood and Reason.

Reality is the sprouting of Beauty

Microscopic crystal 'flowers' build themselves in a Harvard lab

Researchers formed hierarchically complex structures by controlling the growth of crystals in a solution. Here, a coral shape was nucleated on top of a spiral. (The scanning electron microscope view is false-colored, but represents the actual color of the structure.)

Imagine peering into a microscope and finding yourself in a garden. That's the case at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where researchers have found a way to shape microscopic crystals into complex and often beautiful structures. Inspired by coral reefs, seashells and other naturally occurring complex mineral structures, postdoctoral fellow Wim L. Noorduin and Harvard colleagues have been researching ways to create similar designs. These "flowers" were created by mixing barium chloride and sodium silicate, also known as waterglass, in a beaker of water. The resulting reaction combines with carbon dioxide in the air to create crystals made of barium carbonate in the water. "When you look through the electron microscope, it really feels a bit like you’re diving in the ocean, seeing huge fields of coral and sponges … Sometimes I forget to take images because it's so nice to explore," Noorduin said in Harvard's press release. Noorduin's findings follow a similar discovery from Harvard biologist Howard Berg, who found that certain bacterial colonies take intricate geometric shapes in response to concentrations of chemicals around them.

 

Here

Most Earthlike Planets Found Yet: A "Breakthrough"




 

Newfound exoplanet Kepler-62f is imagined in an illustration. The shining star to the right is Kepler-62e. Illustration courtesy T. Pyle, Caltech/NASA

Planet hunters are significantly closer to their goal of finding an "Earth twin" with the discovery of two planets similar in size to our own, astronomers with NASA's Kepler mission announced today. The planets, described at a NASA press conference, orbit a sun that's cooler than ours but is at the right distance to allow water to remain liquid, which is considered essential for a planet to support life. (Read about a related discovery in 2011: "NASA's Kepler Finds Two Earth-Size Planets Around Sunlike Star.") And because of their sizes and orbits, the newfound planets are likely either rocky—like Earth—or watery, NASA scientists said. The two planets are located 1,200 light-years away in a five-planet system orbiting a star dubbed Kepler-62... "I would call this a breakthrough discovery." The press conference also introduced another study released today in the Astrophysical Journal, which involves a related discovery of a sun very much like our own named Kepler-69. The newly found extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, are part of a vast menagerie of celestial bodies discovered in recent years. Our Milky Way galaxy alone is now known to have hundreds of billions of planets circling its stars. Scientists also described another recent discovery: Kepler-69. It's "the sun most like our own that we've found that has a planet orbiting in the habitable zone," said study leader Thomas Barclay, a Kepler scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Sonoma, California. Marcy, a co-author of the Kepler-62 study, called the new exoplanet discoveries "profound." That's in part because it dovetails with another recent finding that most of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way have an Earth-size planet orbiting them. He said he didn't think the importance of the Milky Way discovery has really sunk in with the public. "It's not just that most stars have Earth-sized planets, but some of them—many of them actually—are at a distance from their suns that allow for lukewarm temperatures," Marcy said. "That means they just might support life." He added, "It's a very moving moment in humanity's efforts to understand our home planet and the possibility of other habitable planets in the universe."

 

 

‘Shadow Biosphere’ theory gaining scientific support

Scientists: Earth’s core is as hot as the Sun’s surface - evolutionary transubstantiation and harmonic bio-immanence

Earth’s core seems to be pretty hot, according to scientists

All history is the history of the evolutionary transubstantiation of matter to Spirit via biological-life processes of Blood and Reason

New findings regarding the temperature of the Earth’s core are helping align agreement as to why the planet’s magnetic field functions. The temperature—originally thought to be around 5,000C—is now estimated to be a thousand degrees hotter at 6,000C... The new research is beneficial to all fields which study aspects of the planet’s interior. It is also the necessary data to understand Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth’s inner core is pressurized to a point of solidity, but the outer core is liquid (and the mantle above is a flowing solid). A 1,500C difference between the inner core and the mantle is needed to successfully create conditions, along with Earth’s spin, that power the magnetic field. The new number facilitates this difference. BBC News interviewed Dr. Agnes Dewaele, who co-authored the research piece in Science. “Other people made other measurements and calculations with computers and nothing was in agreement. It was not good for our field that we didn’t agree with each other,” she told them. “Now everything agrees.”

 

evolutionary transubstantiation * harmonic bio-immanence

Radical Theory Explains the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life, Challenges Conventional Wisdom

Earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects -- for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA -- are animate, that is, alive. With its broad explanatory power, applicable to all areas of science and medicine, this novel paradigm aims to catalyze a veritable renaissance.

Beauty Sprouting

The Sprouting of Beauty

Looking more like a painting than an astronomy photograph, the Omega nebula glows with vivid colors in this new image from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. This is one of the sharpest and most detailed images of this object ever taken from a ground-based telescope.The nebula — located around 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius — is thought to be a hotbed of recent star formation. The cloud of gas and dust spans approximately 15 light-years and is estimated to contain enough material to produce 800 sun-like stars.

Bioelectrical harmonic bio-immanence

For the first time, Tufts University biologists have reported that bioelectrical signals are necessary for normal head and facial formation in an organism and have captured that process in a time-lapse video that reveals never-before-seen patterns of visible bioelectrical signals outlining where eyes, nose, mouth, and other features will appear in an embryonic tadpole.

"Great Lakes" Discovered on Jupiter Moon?

Hidden inside the thick, icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa may be a giant saltwater body equal to the Great Lakes (map) combined, NASA announced today. Lying about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) from the surface, the ice-trapped lake may represent the newest potentially habitable environment in the solar system—and one of the best prospects for the search for life beyond Earth.

"For decades scientists have thought Jupiter's moon Europa was a likely place for life, but now we have specific, exciting regions on the icy moon to focus our future studies," Don Blankenship, senior research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics, told National Geographic News.

Discovery: Cosmic Dust Contains Organic Matter From Stars

A new look at the interstellar dust permeating the universe has revealed hints of organic matter that could be created naturally by stars, scientists say. Researchers at the University of Hong Kong observed stars at different evolutionary phases and found that they are able to produce complex organic compounds and eject them into space, filling the regions between stars. The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble the makeup of coal and petroleum, the study's lead author Sun Kwok, of the University of Hong Kong, said. Such chemical complexity was thought to arise only from living organisms, but the results of the new study show that these organic compounds can be created in space even when no life forms are present. In fact, such complex organics could be produced naturally by stars, and at an extremely rapid pace.

The new universe is born

Scientists: Bolshoi universe simulation most accurate to date

The "Big Bang" was an autotelic cosmic seed, and the universe is an organism for cultivating Consciousness

According to scientists' current best theories, tentacle-like "filaments" of dark matter formed the scaffolding upon which normal matter coalesced to form the stars and galaxies that we see today.

NASA: DNA Found on Meteorites Indicates Life May Have Originated in Space

The cosmos is a living organism...

There is a sense in which Darwinism (ateleogical reality) represents the mechanization of life. But is the cosmos really best characterized as a watch or a machine? Is it possible the cosmos is more akin to a living organism (or perhaps a living "multiverse" super-organism)? What is the multiverse - if it exists - but self-replication on the grandest scale? The multiverse hypothesis, as explicated by ateleological reality adherents, is the mechanization of the cosmos, and as such it protects Darwinism's exposed flanks. Darwinism (ateleological reality) does not permit teleology, and the multiverse hypothesis purportedly does not require an intelligent Creator. Ateleological reality (mechanism) is a paradigmatic-hegemonic, de jure ideology, imposed by the reigning paradigm's Power-Structure, purposefully designed to render teleological reality (vitalism) unthinkable. Mechanism rules out teleology a priori, and anything and everything is interpreted through mechanism's unsubstantiated assertions and self-proclaimed parameters.

Revolutionary Paradigm Shift: Happy Fourth of July!

My view is that eventually the blueprint model will collapse - and with it the mechanistic model of biology; life will go back, be part of nature, and be endowed with vital powers. ... This is why I don't share this pessimism - because we're on, I think biology's on the edge of a great revolution. Now the revolution that's involved in this, is absolutely world-shattering and transformative; forget quantum mechanics or anything else, because it puts mankind and the forms of life on earth back in to nature and it endows them with vital powers like human agency, freedom of the will ...

The mind is the universe: the universe is the mind.

Big Seed { space-time * matter-energy ~ evolution } Spirit

TRANSUDATIONISM

There is a sense in which Darwinism (ateleogical reality) represents the mechanization of life. But is the cosmos really best characterized as a watch or a machine? Is it possible the cosmos is more akin to a living organism (or perhaps a living "multiverse" super-organism)? What is the multiverse - if it exists - but self-replication on the grandest scale? The multiverse hypothesis, as explicated by ateleological reality adherents, is the mechanization of the cosmos, and as such it protects Darwinism's exposed flanks. Darwinism (ateleological reality) does not permit teleology, and the multiverse hypothesis purportedly does not require an intelligent Creator. Ateleological reality (mechanism) is a paradigmatic-hegemonic, de jure ideology, imposed by the reigning paradigm's Power-Structure, designed to render teleological reality (≈ vitalism) unthinkable. Mechanism rules out teleology a priori, and anything and everything is interpreted through mechanism's unsubstantiated assertions and self-proclaimed parameters.

Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, but he didn't copyright reality. Darwin recognized that change occurs over time, and he saw nature's incrementalism from the perspective of methodological naturalism. But is methodological naturalism the only perspective from which to view nature's incrementalism? The emergence of life, sentience, and consciousness, the bio-friendly laws and forces of nature, as well as the progression of the cosmos from a seed-like singularity to today's visible universe, suggest that perhaps nature's incrementalism actually is goal-based teleology. Why should the Darwinian patina of metaphysical nihilism be the final word concerning nature's incrementalism? Why is the statement: "Ultimately, everything is an accident" any more or less scientific than the statement: "Ultimately, everything is goal-oriented"? Why must the brain be viewed exclusively as a piece of electrified meat? Perhaps the brain is an organ, a portal to higher dimensions, to disembodied Consciousness, but mankind, still with primordial mud on their boots, are unable to perceive this supra-dimensional bioelectrical teleology of the matter-body-brain-mind-consciousness-spirit continuum. As Aristotle's teleology demonstrates, thinking is godlike: abstract contemplation is the highest end. Plato's Republic and Timaeus, St. Augustine's notion of evil as distance from God, Aristotle's view on biological reproduction as somehow participating in the divine: none of these thinkers or their ideas would seem to dispute evolution understood as change over time, or perhaps even as common ancestry – but to deny teleology?