Phosphorus, present in our DNA and cell membranes, is one of the six main elements that make up the human body and an essential element for life as we know it. Unlike hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and calcium, phosphorus is rare. It is even more scarce in the rest of the Solar System. The source of its arrival on early Earth has long been up to debate.
Are we entering a new evolutionary epoch? “A book is made of wood. But it is not a tree. The dead cells have been repurposed to serve another need,” say researchers at the University of Vermont who have repurposed living cells—scraped from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These millimeter-wide “xenobots”, a 21st-century echo of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient)—and heal themselves after being cut.
“Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species –including “The Year UFO’s Became Legit” to “Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of the Decade” to “Antarctica’s Ghostly Invader.”
“The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of the universe that ignores consciousness,” says Stanford University’s Russian-American theoretical physicist, Andrei Linde in his paper, Life Universe Consciousness, about the central mystery of our time, concluding that consciousness may exist by itself, even in the absence of matter, just like gravitational waves, –excitations of spacetime– that may exist in the absence of protons and electrons.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“What we’ve made lets us dig ten times deeper than what we’ve been able to do before, helping us to see hundreds of millions of years into the past,” says Evan Floden, a researcher at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona who led on developing a new tool that simultaneously compares 1.4 million genetic sequences. “Our technology is essentially a time machine that tells us how ancient constraints influenced genes in a way that resulted in life as we know today, much like how the Hubble Space Telescope observes things that happened millions of years ago to help us understand the Universe we live in today.”