Our galaxy is rich in Earth-sized planets

“But there is something more profound here, something deeper, and that deeper underlying point is that science is in the process of redefining life as we know it, and that is going to change our worldview in a profound way; not in a dissimilar way as 400 hundred years ago, Copernicus’ act did, by changing the way we view space and time. Now it’s about something else, but it’s equally profound … What if that Copernican insignificance [i.e., the Earth as an insignificant grain of ‘cosmic sand’] was actually all wrong?

“Think about those oldest living things on Earth, but in a cosmic proportion: this is not insignificant; this is very significant. So life might be insignificant in size, but it is not insignificant in time. Life and the universe compare to each other like a child and a parent – parent and offspring. So what does this tell us? This tells us that that insignificance paradigm that we somehow got to learn from the Copernican principle – it’s all wrong. There is an immense, powerful potential in life in this universe, especially now that we know that places like the Earth are common. And that potential, that powerful potential, it is also our potential – of you and me. And if we are to be stewards of our planet Earth and of its biosphere, we’d better understand the cosmic significance – and do something about it.”

The Big Bang was an autotelic cosmic seed

Researchers are developing novel computers by mimicking the way that neurons are built and how they talk to each other.

Dr Arnaud Lucotte said the discovery could assist physicists in the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle".

"From the beginning I've seen the genetic code in two ways: as raw material that could be translated into notes, and also as a thing of wonder and a thing of extraordinary beauty; and it was from both points of view that the piece arose," he told BBC News.

Information And Entropy – Top-down Or Bottom-up Development In Living Systems?

This paper deals with the fundamental and challenging question of the ultimate origin of genetic information from a thermodynamic perspective. The theory of evolution postulates that random mutations and natural selection can increase genetic information over successive generations. It is often argued from an evolutionary perspective that this does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because it is proposed that the entropy of a non-isolated system could reduce due to energy input from an outside source, especially the sun when considering the earth as a biotic system. By this it is proposed that a particular system can become organised at the expense of an increase in entropy elsewhere. However, whilst this argument works for structures such as snowflakes that are formed by natural forces, it does not work for genetic information because the information system is composed of machinery which requires precise and non-spontaneous raised free energy levels – and crystals like snowflakes have zero free energy as the phase transition occurs. The functional machinery of biological systems such as DNA, RNA and proteins requires that precise, non-spontaneous raised free energies be formed in the molecular bonds which are maintained in a far from equilibrium state. Furthermore, biological structures contain coded instructions which, as is shown in this paper, are not defined by the matter and energy of the molecules carrying this information. Thus, the specified complexity cannot be created by natural forces even in conditions far from equilibrium. The genetic information needed to code for complex structures like proteins actually requires information which organises the natural forces surrounding it and not the other way around – the information is crucially not defined by the material on which it sits. The information system locally requires the free energies of the molecular machinery to be raised in order for the information to be stored. Consequently, the fundamental laws of thermodynamics show that entropy reduction which can occur naturally in non-isolated systems is not a sufficient argument to explain the origin of either biological machinery or genetic information that is inextricably intertwined with it. This paper highlights the distinctive and non-material nature of information and its relationship with matter, energy and natural forces. It is proposed in conclusion that it is the non-material information (transcendent to the matter and energy) that is actually itself constraining the local thermodynamics to be in ordered disequilibrium and with specified raised free energy levels necessary for the molecular and cellular machinery to operate.
(More here)

Europe's "Big Bang" probe sends back first image: the Big "Seed"

Microwave signatures point to the birth and death of stars and galaxies, as well as the embers of the "Big Bang" which, according to theory, brought the Universe into existence 13.7 billion years ago.

The information encoded within DNA and RNA, the bio-friendly and finely tuned cosmic laws and forces of nature, and the ensuing emergence of life and sentience and consciousness, support the hypothesis that the Big "Bang" was a seed - the Big "Seed."

Regarding the impetus of the Big Seed, the best explanation that human reason can offer is Aristotle's unmoved mover; the mechanistic, materialistic atheists' multiverse hypothesis is an untestable, question-begging supposition.

God particle signal is simulated as sound

God particle signal is simulated as sound:

"When you are hearing what the sonifications do you really are hearing the data. It's true to the data, and it's telling you something about the data that you couldn't know in any other way," said Archer Endrich, a software engineer working on the project.

"We can hear clear structures in the sound, almost as if they had been composed. They seem to tell a little story all to themselves. They're so dynamic and shifting all the time, it does sound like a lot of the music that you hear in contemporary composition," he explained.

Although the project's aim is to provide particle physicists with a new analysis tool, Archer Endrich believes that it may also enable us to eavesdrop on the harmonious background sound of the Universe.

He said he hoped the particle collisions at Cern would "reveal something new and something important about the nature of the Universe".

And Mr Endrich says that those who have been involved in the project have felt something akin to a religious experience while listening to the sounds.

"You feel closer to the mystery of Nature which I think a lot of scientists do when they get deep into these matters," he said.

"Its so intriguing and there's so much mystery and so much to learn. The deeper you go, the more of a pattern you find and it's fascinating and it's uplifting."

"It is remarkable that the distribution of galaxies on huge scales can tell us about the mass of the tiny neutrinos."

In light of the above, please consider the following:

Manchester historian deciphers hidden 'Plato Code'

Fascinatingly, it's a musical code," he said. "Plato and the Greeks believed music was the key to mathematics and the cosmos.

"What we didn't know was that he used Greek musical scales to give his works a hidden structure and then built layers of hidden meanings beneath that."

The hidden codes reveal that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea - the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

"In ancient times, many of his followers said his writings were written in symbols; in modern times that was denied," he said.

"So I've rediscovered that the Ancients were correct."

The Path of the Upward Spiral

New Form of Gene Regulation Hints at Hidden Dimension of DNA

New Form of Gene Regulation
Hints at Hidden Dimension of DNA

This discovery that pseudogenes may indeed have a function could transform biology, says Pier Paolo Pandolfi, a cancer geneticist and biologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Harvard Medical School who led the study. The finding has already altered the perspectives of people in his lab, he says. “Now we are unable to think the same. It changes the way we do biology on a daily basis.”

"This means that not only have we discovered a new language for mRNA, but we have also translated the previously unknown language of up to 17,000 pseudogenes and at least 10,000 long non-coding (lnc) RNAs. Consequently, we now know the function of an estimated 30,000 new entities, offering a novel dimension by which cellular and tumor biology can be regulated, and effectively doubling the size of the functional genome."

Pseudogenes are considered to be defunct relatives of known genes. But there is some surprising news: pseudogenes are functional and could have a role in the control of cancer. Two experts discuss the significance of these findings for understanding the regulation of gene expression and cancer biology.

An entire class of seemingly useless genetic components may actually regulate gene activity, suggests a study that — though preliminary — has potentially transformative implications for biology. The findings involve apparently redundant copies of genes, called “pseudogenes,” and RNA molecules that would normally carry out genetic instructions, but appear to be disabled. When it comes to altering the activity of PTEN, a cancer tumor-regulating gene, these components are neither redundant nor broken. Instead they help turn PTEN on and off. The same might happen for thousands of other genes. If so, the findings have revealed an entire new class of operators in the programming language of life. “This is a completely new way by which genes can be regulated. It’s something that up to this point has been undiscovered,” said Leonardo Salmena, a Harvard Medical School geneticist and co-author of the study, published June 23 in Nature. The implicit question is whether the process is unique to PTEN and its decoys, or applies to the human genome’s other 19,000 pseudogenes. If so, the junk may actually be vitally important to development and disease. “There’s a huge domain of non-coding RNAs. Until now, we couldn’t make sense of them,” said study co-author Pier Paolo Pandolfi, also a Harvard Medical School geneticist. “Now we have a way to understand them. We’re not in the dark.” Indeed, each human genome has many pseudogenes, or near-perfect copies of functional genes. These pseudogenes produce RNA that doesn’t seem to do anything, but simply floats in cellular space. Scientists have long assumed pseudogenes and their RNA to be so much cruft, the biological equivalent of leftover code that’s yet to be excised from a program. But the researchers in this study, whose specialty is a tumor-suppressing gene called PTEN, noticed that RNA produced by PTEN’s pseudogenes was shaped exactly like the real thing. According to Pandolfi, if the findings truly represent a widespread new class of RNA, they will double the known number of functional genetic elements. “This brings into play thousands of RNAs that we previously had no idea what they did,” said Salmena. “We think we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg with this phenomena.” “To what extent this is going to be a general mechanism, the onus is now on the scientific community to begin looking in other systems,” said Singer. “I presume they will.”

Michelangelo & the Human Brain

Some of Michelangelo's best known works may bear hidden messages suggesting that the human brain is among God's greatest creations, scientists say:

Neurosurgeons Dr. Rafael Tamargo and Ian Suk of Johns Hopkins University looked closely at Michelangelo's painting "Separation of Light From Darkness," which depicts the beginning of the universe. They found that the neck of God in this painting appears to contain the human brainstem.

"He recognized that the brain was an important structure, and I think he included it in the creation of the universe because he recognized that this is one of the most magnificent things that God had created," Tamargo said.

The brainstem is the most primitive part of the brain, through which all signals traveling to and from the brain must pass, Tamargo said.

In the image above, on the left, you can see a comparison between the neck of God in the painting and a real brain stem. On the right, notice the different angles of light on the figure, which was uncommon for Michelangelo.

The pink backdrop behind God is in the shape of a human brain