“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.”
The discovery of the language of life, an ancient, long molecule called DNA with eight nucleotide letters suitable for storing and transmitting information, was a breakthrough in our knowledge of the range of possibilities necessary for life on Earth and beyond. Now, new studies suggest that alternatives to DNA-based life, as we know it on Earth, may be possible on other worlds.
Francis Crick, responsible for discovering, along with James Watson, the double-helix structure of DNA, once described the origin of life as ‘almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going’. Now, by creating protocells in hot, alkaline seawater, an undaunted University College London-led research team has added to evidence that the origin of life could have been in deep-sea hydrothermal vents rather than shallow pools. Some of the world’s oldest fossils discovered originated in such underwater vents.
