Another week of amazing news from our Pale Blue Dot, with stories ranging from strange things are happening at the outer edges of our solar system to plants feel pain and might even see to a wrinkle in nature could lead to alien life.
Is information at the core of life in the Universe? Are we humans an anomaly? Join narrator, Nicole Butscher on this week’s journey of discovery from the emergence of the human “dataome” –a world of bits built of and for information, which was like a sudden invasion by extraterrestrials, or an asteroid impact that precipitates a mass extinction–to the discovery of what astronomers think is the first planet beyond the Milky Way (or is it something more interesting), and more.
In Reinventing the Sacred, Stuart Kaufman, theoretical biologist and emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the origin of life on Earth, observes: “There is a world beyond physics. Given continuous spacetime, there are a second-order infinity of possible histories of the biosphere. We are agents who alter the unfolding of the universe.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
News from our Pale Blue Dot for the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend: from the “telescope that ate astronomy” to what “Impossible” meant to the legendary physicist, Richard Feynman to black-hole bubbles that could swallow to Universe to poaching triggers the evolution of tuskless elephants to tech companies ‘don’t get’ science-fiction.
“NASA’s ENIGMA (Evolution of Nanomachines In Geospheres and Microbial Ancestors) research team,” evolutionary biologist Paul Falkowski told The Daily Galaxy, “is focused on answering a single, compelling question in astrobiology: How did proteins evolve to become the predominant catalysts of life on Earth?
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
Another amazing week of news from the Cosmos: from the New York Times’ Carl Zimmer on the origins of life and how it may have evolved on other worlds to the the creeping suspicion, that there is something substantial missing from our standard model of the Universe to Albert Einstein’s demon-haunted quantum world.