Free Republic

Brain inserts and carbon-absorbing bacteria aren’t just the fantasies of Silicon Valley’s richest executives, they’re also a part of a larger hope to advance artificial intelligence and computing efforts. “Biology will undoubtedly fuel computing” in coming years, former Google CEO and current technical advisor Eric Schmidt said at a conference called SynBioBeta in San Francisco Monday. “Taking biology, which I’d always viewed as squishy and analog, and turning it into something that can be digitally manipulated, is an enormous accelerator.” Schmidt’s comments come as Silicon Valley’s seeming obsession with biology attempts to move beyond fascinating projects and into more serious...

For the past several years, many of us have seen headlines referencing the development of birth control drugs for men. It does seem like for too long women alone have borne the burden of pregnancy prevention, despite how baby-making requires two parties to take place. Further, since men are fertile 100% of the time, while women are only fertile about a quarter of the time in their menstrual cycles, it seems a little heavy-handed to put the responsibility solely on women, for couples hoping to postpone kids. As it turns out, the history of birth control includes attempts to find...

Recorded on June 6, 2019 in Italy. Based on new evidence and knowledge that functioning proteins are extremely rare, should Darwin’s theory of evolution be dismissed, dissected, developed or replaced with a theory of intelligent design? Has Darwinism really failed? Peter Robinson discusses it with David Berlinski, David Gelernter, and Stephen Meyer, who have raised doubts about Darwin’s theory in their two books and essay, respectively The Deniable Darwin, Darwin’s Doubt, and “Giving Up Darwin” (published in the Claremont Review of Books).

Refining the Origin of Life ArgumentBy Philip Cottraux One of the most popular arguments for the existence of God involves the complexities of life itself, implying something so intricate could never be the product of natural causes. A supernatural intelligence would be required to form together even the basic living cell, with its membrane, cytoplasm, nucleus, and billions of lines of coding. Requiring over ten thousand chemical reactions each second just to stay alive, the cell is truly a remarkable feat of engineering. And to be fair, to date scientists really don’t know how it originated, though there are plenty...

Vishnivetskaya ... has coaxed million-year-old bacteria back to life on a petri dish. They look “very similar to bacteria you can find in cold environments [today],” she said. But last year, Vishnivetskaya’s team announced an “accidental finding” — one with a brain and nervous system — that shattered scientists’ understanding of extreme endurance. They placed the frozen material on petri dishes in their room-temperature lab and noticed something strange. Hulking among the puny bacteria and amoebae were long, segmented worms complete with a head at one end and anus at the other — nematodes. Clocking in at a half-millimeter long,...

"We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains," To test this, the researchers played a series of harmonic sounds, or tones, to healthy volunteers and monkeys. Meanwhile, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor brain activity in response to the sounds. The researchers also monitored brain activity in response to sounds of toneless noises that were designed to match the frequency levels of each tone played. "We found that human and monkey brains had very similar responses to sounds in any given frequency range. It's...

Male reproductive health has been in decline since the 1960’s. Once considered a global problem by the 1992 study “Evidence for decreasing quality of semen during past 50 years,”[i] it has been shown that the decline in semen quality is largely limited to Western countries.[ii] Specific studies, largely carried out in the 90′s, showed falling sperm counts: - in Belgium— where the “percentage of candidate donors with sperm characteristics below the 5th percentile cut-off value of a normal fertile population increased from 13 to 54% during the [19 year] observation period.”[iii] - in Canada — where overall sperm quality showed...

Scientists have unearthed fossilized fungi in the remote Northwest Territories of the Canadian Arctic dating back to one billion years, in a discovery that could reshape our understanding of how life first arrived on land from the oceans. Fungi, the “Hidden Kingdom,” are not plants. Living things are organized for study into large, basic groups called kingdoms. Fungi were listed in the Plant Kingdom for many years. Then scientists learned that fungi show a closer relation to animals, but are unique and separate life forms. Most fungi build their cell walls out of chitin. This is the same material as...

May 10, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — When I spotted the headline in the Charlotte Observer earlier this week, I had to do a double-take: “The man in the maternity ward,” it read. The tenderly written story, framed as a beautiful human interest piece, begins like this: Liam Johns steps inside the ultrasound clinic and looks around. He’s relieved the waiting room is empty. Maybe no one will notice me, he thinks. Liam is 5-foot-6, with a beard and a baby bump. You can probably see where this is going. Johns, it turns out, is part of a growing trend —...

Boy and girl, now four, are only the second case of ‘sesquizygotic’ twins recorded A pair of twins have stunned researchers after it emerged that they are neither identical nor fraternal – but something in between. The team say the boy and girl, now four years old, are the second case of semi-identical twins ever recorded, and the first to be spotted while the mother was pregnant. The situation was a surprise to the researchers. An ultrasound of the 28-year old mother at six weeks suggested the twins were identical – with signs including a shared placenta. But it soon...

Students in any California public or private school, grades one through 12, could soon be prohibited from performing dissections. Assembly member Kalra introduced the bill last week that would ban dissection in all schools, altering the California education code.

Suppose I declare that I am a king. Should you be required to address me as “Your Majesty”? You say, “Williams, that’s lunacy! You can’t prove such nonsense.” You’re wrong. It’s proved by my declaration. It’s no different from a person born with XY chromosomes declaring that he is a woman. The XY sex determination system is the sex determination system found in humans and most other mammals. Females typically have two of the same kind of sex chromosome (XX) and are called the homogametic sex. Males typically have two different kinds of sex chromosomes (XY) and are called the...

At last, we’ve reached the conclusion of this scintillating drama: the National Zoo’s naked mole-rat colony has chosen its queen. In case you’ve been living under a rock, let us catch you up: the Small Mammal House at the Smithsonian National Zoo is home to a colony of naked mole-rats, and for the last several months they’ve been engaged in a quiet—but brutal—battle for political supremacy. Naked mole-rats are one of just two eusocial mammalian species, which means they live much like colonies of bees or ants: one queen reigns supreme over everybody else, and challengers must fight and kill...

PORTLAND, OREGON—Venus flytraps have a well-known way of dispatching their victims: They snare inquisitive insects that brush up against trigger hairs in their fly-trapping pods (above). But now, physicists have discovered that the triggering process may involve the release of a cascade of exotic chemicals similar to the whiff of ozone that tingles your nose after a lightning bolt. To study this process, scientists used an electrical generator to ionize air into a “cold plasma,” which they then gently blew toward a flytrap in their lab. Normally, the flytrap’s closure is caused by an electrical signal created when two or...

This story came out earlier this week but it was shocking enough that it bears a look. The transgender activist community was all abuzz on Thursday over a letter that had actually been featured in the New York Times a week earlier. Buzzfeed picked it up and ran with it, adding to the celebratory mood. The document in question was an open letter published by a gaggle of 1,600 scientists who are rejecting the anticipated HHS memo defining sex and gender in traditional, scientifically accepted terms for purposes of Title IX questions. What’s truly amazing is the fact that these...

A high school biology teacher is on administrative leave after she allegedly mocked a student for supporting President Trump and calling others “a bunch of Trumpies” in Round Rock, Texas. The incident occurred on the fifth day back from summer vacation, Aug. 22, at McNeil High School outside of Austin, according to district officials. The bullied student's mother claims the public school teacher said: “By the way, I hate Donald Trump with a burning passion and he is a complete douchebag."

Humans and mice share approximately 98% of genes, and have similar physiology and anatomy. This is because we share a relatively recent common ancestor, around 80 million-years-ago. In contrast, the ancestor of all animals lived over 500 million-years-ago. As genomic data becomes available for more animal species a detailed family tree can be created, allowing novel insight into the genomes of long extinct species. In the guest post below Jordi Paps summarises recent research that attempts to reconstruct the genome of the ‘first animal’ by using the genomic data available on living animals. The first animals emerged on Earth at...

The Mississippi Supreme Court heard arguments last week about whether a boy born to a lesbian couple should be legally considered the biological son of his mother's female partner. Because of the nature of the child’s conception and the relationship of the adults in his life, the story is complicated. The two women who were “married” chose to have a child that would be conceived in one of them via anonymous sperm donation. The boy is now six years old. His mother’s “ex-spouse,” who helped raise the child from birth, sought to be recognized as a biological parent when the...

New database could shed light on how people’s brains tick The human brain is teeming with diversity. By plucking out delicate, live tissue during neurosurgery and then studying the resident cells, researchers have revealed a partial cast of neural characters that give rise to our thoughts, dreams and memories. So far, researchers with the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle have described the intricate shapes and electrical properties of about 100 nerve cells, or neurons, taken from the brains of 36 patients as they underwent surgery for conditions such as brain tumors or epilepsy. To reach the right spot,...

While problems with cell line misidentification have been known for decades, an unknown number of published papers remains in circulation reporting on the wrong cells without warning or correction. Here we attempt to make a conservative estimate of this ‘contaminated’ literature. We found 32,755 articles reporting on research with misidentified cells, in turn cited by an estimated half a million other papers.