Today’s stories range from Earth Has Been Many Planets to This Ancient Molecule Is The Root Cause Of All Life On Earth, And Mars to AI beats a Thousand of World’s Best Crossword Solvers, and much more.
“Spooky” quantum biology might cause your DNA to mutate–Theoretical research suggests that quantum effects could drive mutations in human DNA. This is the latest development in an emerging field called quantum biology. The mechanism involves proton transfer through quantum tunneling, a process that occurs in one-quadrillionth of a second. Cells have built-in proofreading systems that help prevent these mutations., reports Big Think.
“Is Anybody Out There?” (What if the Answer is Yes?), reports Tom Porter for Bowdoin College. “These scientists are generally very keen to find out if there is any extraterrestrial life, but they often haven’t really focused beyond that step. They asked us to consider ‘okay, if this does happen, what happens next? How do we behave? What are we missing?’ And there are several ethical concerns that we presented.”
Humans Are More Likely To Attack An Extraterrestrial Civilization Than The Other Way Around Says Scientist, reports Forbes.com.
Earth Has Been Many Planets, reports Maxwell Moe for The Daily Galaxy. ““There have been many planet Earths” says astrophysicist Adam Frank who talks about climate change from an astrobiological lens. Frank’s observation mirrors author Peter Brannen’s lens in that if 100 million years of Earth’s geological history, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history, can easily wear the Himalayas flat, what chance will San Francisco or New York have of surviving a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene.
Scientists Mull the Astrobiological Implications of an Airless Alien Planet –A rocky world devoid of atmosphere arouses debate over the habitability of the Milky Way’s most common star systems, reports Adam Mann for Scientific American.
Scientist says interstellar travel might be possible without spaceships –Forget about spaceships: Aliens could be “cosmic hitchhikers” traveling on free-floating planets, reports Salon.com. “a new research article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, in which author Irina Romanovskaya, says that interstellar travel would likely create technosignatures — such as radio waves, industrial pollution, light pollution, or anything that would suggest advanced technology is being used — when aliens engage in such travel.
AI beats a thousand of the world’s best human crossword solvers–A crossword-solving AI has beaten more than a thousand of the best human solvers at the prestigious American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, reports New Scientist
This Ancient Molecule Is The Root Cause Of All Life On Earth, And Mars. Could life on Earth and Mars have originated from similar components? Scientists have found some evidence of the same in a giant breakthrough for questions about life’s origin on Earth. According to scientists at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, ribonucleic acid (RNA), a DNA-like regulator of genetic material in humans, may have been the first genetic material for life. And now they’re assessing how this worked out favorably for life on Earth and where it originated.
Dazzling close-up images of the natural world, from flowers to flies –These are some of the winning and shortlisted entries for the Olympus Image of the Year Global Life Science Light Microscopy Award, a global photography competition showcasing the art of scientific imaging
James Webb Space Telescope Set to Study Two Strange Super-Earths –Space agency officials promise to deliver geology results from worlds dozens of light-years away, reports Scientific American. “The telescope’s scientific consortium has an ambitious agenda to study geology on these small planets from “50 light-years away”, they said in a statement Thursday (May 26). The work will be a big stretch for the new observatory, which should exit commissioning in a few weeks.”
Geology from 50 Light-Years: Webb Gets Ready to Study Rocky World–“Imagine if Earth were much, much closer to the Sun. So close that an entire year lasts only a few hours. So close that gravity has locked one hemisphere in permanent searing daylight and the other in endless darkness. So close that the oceans boil away, rocks begin to melt, and the clouds rain lava.”
How Einstein changed time forever, “Time,” says Al-Khalili. “ticks by at different rates for different people depending on your frame of reference, and it’s malleable and it’s stretchable,” reports this Big Think podcast.
From the Ancient Ashes of Vesuvius, Human DNA Genetic material recovered from a 1st-century Pompeii man reveals a spinal disorder and ancestral links to Anatolia reports New York Times.
Scientists Have Figured Out Why Childbirth Became So Complex and Dangerous, reports Science Daily. A study finds that complex human childbirth and cognitive abilities are a result of walking upright.
Convergent Evolution Has Been Fooling Us: Most of Our Evolutionary Trees Could Be Wrong, reports Science Daily.
Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff
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James Webb Space Telescope’s Super-Secret Targets to Is Geometry a Language Only Humans Know?
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Age of Dinosaurs Found in Human Genome to Is Earth’s Core a Weird State of Matter?
Why are NASA Spaceships Exploring Earth’s Deepest Oceans to Is Reality a Wavefunction?
The Terrifying Message Lurking in Earth’s Ancient Record to Robots Evolving Autonomously
The Quantum Century to Events That Could Have Ended Humanity
The ‘Douglas Adams Epoch’ to Earth’s Earliest Life May Owe Existence to Viruses
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