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It's time to consider restricting human breeding. Given the number of children that starve each day, dwindling planetary resources and the coming transhumanist era, it might be time to consider restricting human breeding, argues futurist Zoltan Istvan in this guest post A few years ago, I was at a doctor party, the kind where tired residents drop by in their scrubs, everyone drinks red wine, and discussion centres around medical industry gripes. I wandered over to a group of obstetricians and listened in. One tall blonde woman said something that caught my attention: with 10,000 kids dying everyday around the world from starvation, you'd think we'd put birth control in the water. The controversial idea to restrict or control human breeding is not new. In 1980, Hugh LaFollette, Ethics professor at the University of South Florida, wrote a seminal essay on the topic titled Licensing Parents. One of the most comprehensive works about the idea of restricting breeding is Peg Tittle's book Should Parents be Licensed?

Debating the Issues. Scientists investigate radio wave "bursts" from space. Young Blood May Hold Key to Reversing Aging. Two teams of scientists published studies on Sunday showing that blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice, rejuvenating their muscles and brains. As ghoulish as the research may sound, experts said that it could lead to treatments for disorders like and heart disease. “I am extremely excited,” said Rudolph Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the research. “These findings could be a game changer.” The research builds on centuries of speculation that the blood of young people contains substances that might rejuvenate older adults.

In the 1950s, Clive M. McCay of and his colleagues tested the notion by delivering the blood of young rats into old ones. To do so, they joined rats in pairs by stitching together the skin on their flanks. Later, Dr. It later became clear that are essential for keeping tissues vital. In the early 2000s, scientists realized that stem cells were not dying off in aging tissues. Dr. Amy J. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. How to Tell When Someone Is Lying. On January 27, 2008, Penny Boudreau’s twelve-year-old daughter, Karissa, went missing in her hometown of Bridgewater, Canada. That afternoon, mother and daughter had had a fight in a grocery-store parking lot. They’d been having a “heart-to-heart” about “typical teen-age things,” Boudreau said. At 7:30 P.M., Boudreau, worried, called a few friends and teachers—none had heard a thing—and notified the police.

By the following day, Karissa was still unaccounted for and the Bridgewater police began notifying other precincts. They issued a media alert and began a full search effort. On January 29th, the police station held a press conference. Penny, distraught, pleaded for her daughter to return, in a widely televised appeal. On February 9th, two weeks after her disappearance, Karissa was finally found. People lie all the time. We lie in most any context—Feldman’s work has turned up frequent lies in relationships ranging from the most intimate (marriage) to the completely casual.

Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Research. Jeffrey Mogil’s students suspected there was something fishy going on with their experiments. They were injecting an irritant into the feet of mice to test their pain response, but the rodents didn’t seem to feel anything. “We thought there was something wrong with the injection,” says Mogil, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The real culprit was far more surprising: The mice that didn’t feel pain had been handled by male students.

Mogil’s group discovered that this gender distinction alone was enough to throw off their whole experiment—and likely influences the work of other researchers as well. “This is very important work with wide-ranging implications,” says M. Mogil has studied pain for 25 years. So he decided to take a closer look. Thinking back to his Paris Hilton experiment, Mogil wondered whether the rodents were responding to the sight of a woman or man or to something more subtle. Male odor could even influence human clinical trials. Discovery of quantum vibrations in 'microtubules' inside brain neurons supports controversial theory of consciousness -- ScienceDaily.

‘The Sixth Extinction,’ by Elizabeth Kolbert. Photo (This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014. For the rest of the list, click here.) Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”

Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. For example, we continue to use the world’s atmosphere as an open sewer for the daily dumping of more than 90 million tons of gaseous waste. An Unnatural History. Microscopic computing in cells and with self-assembling DNA tiles.

One of the three goals of natural algorithms is to implement computers in non-electronic media. In cases like quantum computing, the goal is to achieve a qualitatively different form of computing, but other times (as with most biological computing) the goal is just to recreate normal computation (or a subset of it) at a different scale or in more natural ways. Of course, these two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive ! Imagine how great it would be if we could grow computers on the level of cells, or smaller. For starters, this approach could revolutionize health-care: you could program some of your own cells to sense and record your internal environment and release drugs only when necessary. It could also alter how we manufacture things; if you throught 3D printers are cool , what if you could program nanoscale assemblies?

To start, it is important to understand what cells can already compute. References Angluin, D., Aspnes, J., & Eisenstat, D. (2008). Barish, R. Doty, D., Lutz, J. The Hordes of Microbes Inside Your Body Are Your Friends - Alexis C. Madrigal. Jonathon Rosen As tools for engineering life’s building blocks have proliferated in recent years, our definition of human life has become more expansive.

For example, we are learning that the vast ecosystems of microbes inside our bodies are as integral to our health as our own tissues, affecting everything from our immune systems to our brain chemistry. Meanwhile, the field of biology itself keeps expanding—see, for example, synthetic biology, the new subfield that uses the combined insights of molecular biology, engineering, and chemistry to construct biological parts and processes.

The synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA, works at the intersection of these developments. Alexis Madrigal: People have big expectations for biology in the 21st century. Christina Agapakis: People want synthetic biology and biotechnology to be the next industrial revolution. AM: Some synthetic biologists have pushed to bring an engineering mind-set to biology. Researchers find a completely new DNA binding protein. The basic premises underlying gene expression—when and where genes are turned on and off—were worked out in bacteria by François Jacob and Jacques Monod in the middle of the twentieth century. The expression of a gene typically relies on one or more proteins binding to a specific DNA sequence near the gene of interest.

These proteins are called transcription factors since they regulate the transcription of genes into RNA, the first step in turning them into proteins. At this point, many different families of related transcription factors have been defined. And, as more and more genomes have been sequenced, it was easy to get the impression that we had a complete catalog. But now, researchers at UCSF have discovered a new type of never-seen-before DNA binding protein in an organism called Candida albicans. C. albicans is a fungus. These yeast can be “white” or “opaque. " There are five transcriptional factors known to regulate white-opaque switching.

SOPA's daddy is now in charge of government science funding, and he hates peer-review. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is the goon who brought SOPA to the nation. Now he's in charge of science funding in the House, and he's got some spectacularly stupid ideas for science as a whole. Stuart sez, "The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress.

For good measure, it would also set in motion a process to determine whether the same criteria should be adopted by every other federal science agency. " Smith's request to NSF didn't sit well with the top Democrat on the science committee, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX). U.S. (Image: Congressman Lamar Smith visits JWST @ SXSW, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from nasawebbtelescope's photostream) Does antimatter fall up? Experiment could provide the answer. How deep does the asymmetry between matter and antimatter go?

Each type of particle (electrons, protons, etc.) have antimatter partners: positrons, antiprotons, and so forth. These antiparticles have an opposite electric charge (unless they're neutral), but otherwise behave much like their matter counterparts. But one interesting question remains unanswered: does antimatter possess antigravity, experiencing a repulsive force when matter experiences attraction?

And, even if antimatter experiences plain old gravity, does it behave in exactly the same way as matter does? Researchers from the ALPHA experiment at CERN realized their antihydrogen trap could help answer that question. That may sound like a weak result, but the experiment was not originally designed to perform this test. Antihydrogen provides a particularly useful means of testing gravitational effects on antimatter, as it's electrically neutral.

Designing de novo: interdisciplinary debates in synthetic biology - Online First. Synthetic biology is often presented as a promissory field that ambitions to produce novelty by design. The ultimate promise is the production of living systems that will perform new and desired functions in predictable ways. Nevertheless, realizing promises of novelty has not proven to be a straightforward endeavour. This paper provides an overview of, and explores the existing debates on, the possibility of designing living systems de novo as they appear in interdisciplinary talks between engineering and biological views within the field of synthetic biology. To broaden such interdisciplinary debates, we include the views from the social sciences and the humanities and we point to some fundamental sources of disagreement within the field. Different views co-exist, sometimes as controversial tensions, but sometimes also pointing to integration in the form of intermediate positions.

As the field is emerging, multiple choices are possible. Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation. Physicists have devised a new experiment to test if the universe is a computer. A philosophical thought experiment has long held that it is more likely than not that we're living inside a machine. The theory basically goes that any civilisation which could evolve to a 'post-human' stage would almost certainly learn to run simulations on the scale of a universe. And that given the size of reality - billions of worlds, around billions of suns - it is fairly likely that if this is possible, it has already happened. And if it has? Well, then the statistical likelihood is that we're located somewhere in that chain of simulations within simulations. The alternative - that we're the first civilisation, in the first universe - is virtually (no pun intended) absurd.

And it's not just theory. READ MORE: Physicists Have Evidence Universe Is Computer Simulation Now another team have devised an actual test to see if this theory holds any hope of being proven. This is where it gets complex. Questions swarm around synthetic biology's impact on Mother Nature. Wildlife Conservation Society The promise and peril of synthetic biology for wildlife conservation and biodiversity will be the subject of an international conference in England this month. By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News Conservationists say it's high time to consider whether synthetic biology will solve some of the huge problems that beset endangered species, or bring new problems. It just might do both. "Synthetic biology brings with it a powerful attraction, causing biology to veer towards engineering with its inherent approach of human problem solving," three experts on biodiversity and conservation say in this week's issue of PLOS Biology.

"It may prove to be a cure for certain wicked problems. But we suggest that now is the time to consider whether synthetic biology may be a wicked solution, creating problems of its own, some of which may be undesirable or even unacceptable in the area of biodiversity conservation. " What is synthetic biology? More about synthetic biology: Synthetic biology and evolution. The first time Jay Keasling remembers hearing the word “artemisinin,” about a decade ago, he had no idea what it meant. “Not a clue,” Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled. Although artemisinin has become the world’s most important malaria medicine, Keasling wasn’t an expert on infectious diseases. But he happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology, which—by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology—seeks to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world.

Scientists have been manipulating genes for decades; inserting, deleting, and changing them in various microbes has become a routine function in thousands of labs. Keasling and a rapidly growing number of colleagues around the world have something more radical in mind. Keasling wasn’t sure what to tell his student. “ ‘Amorphadiene,’ I said. It will not be the last. Our Biotech Future by Freeman Dyson. It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.

These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. A New Biology for a New Century. Project Seeks to Build Map of Human Brain.