Lifeboat Foundation

A long-term study since 1929 has revealed significant insights into barley’s evolution, showing its adaptation to different environments and the substantial impact of natural selection. This research underscores the limitations of evolutionary breeding and highlights the need for further exploration to enhance crop yields.

Utilizing one of the world’s oldest biological experiments, which commenced in 1929, researchers have revealed how barley, a major crop, has been influenced by agricultural pressures and its evolving natural environment. These findings highlight the significance of long-term studies in comprehending the dynamics of adaptive evolution.

The survival of cultivated plants after their dispersal across different environments is a classic example of rapid adaptive evolution. For example, barley, an important neolithic crop, spread widely after domestication over 10,000 years ago to become a staple source of nutrition for humans and livestock throughout Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa over just a few thousand generations. Such rapid expansion and cultivation have subjected the plant to strong selective pressures, including artificial selection for desired traits and natural selection by being forced to adapt to diverse new environments.

“Mind uploading speculation and debate often concludes that a procedure described as gradual in-place replacement preserves personal identity while a procedure described as destructive scan-and-copy produces some other identity in the target substrate such that personal identity is lost along with the biological brain. This paper demonstrates a chain of reasoning that establishes metaphysical equivalence between these two methods in terms of preserving personal identity.” — Keith Wiley https://keithwiley.com https://www.brainpreservation.org/tea… thanks for tuning in! Please support SciFuture by subscribing and sharing! Have any ideas about people to interview? Want to be notified about future events? Any comments about the STF series? Please fill out this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mr9P… Kind regards, Adam Ford — Science, Technology & the Future — #SciFuture — http://scifuture.org

Major impacts, significant challenges.

The breakthrough blends biological and mechanical elements, sparking ethical debates.

Advanced Biology is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary biology journal publishing innovative research at the intersection of the life sciences.

Spider spidroin revives the silken splendor.

In their quest to make silk powerful again, not by status but rather by thread strength, scientists turned to an arachnoid. Dragline silk, the thread by which the spider hangs itself from the web, is one of the strongest fibers; its tensile strength—a measure of how much a polymer deforms when strained—is almost thrice that of silkworm silk.²

Beyond durable fashion garments, tough silk fibers are coveted in parachutes, military protective gear, and automobile safety belts, among other applications, so scientists are keen to pull on these threads. While traditional silk production relies on sericulture, arachnophobes can relax: spider farms are not a thing.

Advances in artificial intelligence are making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between uniquely human behaviors and those that can be replicated by machines. Should artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrive in full force—artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence—the boundary between human and computer capabilities will diminish entirely.

In recent months, a significant swath of journalistic bandwidth has been devoted to this potentially dystopian topic. If AGI machines develop the ability to consciously experience life, the moral and legal considerations we’ll need to give them will rapidly become unwieldy. They will have feelings to consider, thoughts to share, intrinsic desires, and perhaps fundamental rights as newly minted beings. On the other hand, if AI does not develop consciousness—and instead simply the capacity to out-think us in every conceivable situation—we might find ourselves subservient to a vastly superior yet sociopathic entity.

Neither potential future feels all that cozy, and both require an answer to exceptionally mind-bending questions: What exactly is consciousness? And will it remain a biological trait, or could it ultimately be shared by the AGI devices we’ve created?

“My work shows that we need to look more carefully at how ocean biology can affect the climate,” said Dr. Jonathan Lauderdale.

How will climate change influence the ocean’s circulation in the future? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as a researcher from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) investigated how could hinder the ocean’s mechanisms of transferring carbon between the ocean floor and the planet’s atmosphere. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand the long-term impacts of climate change and what steps that can be taken to mitigate them.

For the study, Dr. Jonathan Lauderdale, who is a Research Scientist in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate (PAOC) at MIT used models to challenge previous studies pertaining to the transfer of nutrients, specifically carbon, between the ocean floor and the Earth’s atmosphere, with an emphasis on a specific class of molecules called “ligands”. These previous studies dating back 40 years have hypothesized that weaker ocean circulation results in reduced levels of carbon dioxide being transferred to the atmosphere.

Continue reading “Predicted Weakening of Ocean’s Overturning Circulation” »

“We want to build tools that can make biology programmable,” says Alex Rives, the company’s chief scientist, who was part of Meta’s efforts to apply AI to biological data.

EvolutionaryScale’s AI tool, called ESM3, is what’s known as a protein language model. It was trained on more than 2.7 billion protein sequences and structures, as well as information about these proteins’ functions. The model can be used to create proteins to specifications provided by users, akin to the text spit out by chatbots such as ChatGPT.

“It’s going to be one of the AI models in biology that everybody’s paying attention to,” says Anthony Gitter, a computational biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.