Category: Life
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Listening to music. Humans. Apes.
In the eternal search for understanding what makes us human, scientists found that our brains are more sensitive to pitch, the harmonic sounds we hear when listening to music, than our evolutionary relative the macaque monkey. The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, highlights the promise of Sound Health, a joint…
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The evolution of… evolution.
New research identifies a previously overlooked global event which changed the course of the evolution of life in the oceans. It coincided with a rise in calcium carbonate-secreting plankton and their subsequent deposition on the ocean floor. The ocean as we understand it today was shaped by a global evolutionary regime shift around 170 million…
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Asteroids. Death. Opportunities.
When the asteroid hit, dinosaurs weren't the only ones that suffered. Clouds of ash blocked the sun and cooled the planet's temperature, devastating plant life. But fungi, which decompose dead stuff, did well. So what happened to the lichens, which are made of a plant and fungus living together as one organism? "We thought that…
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Open-ending algorithms… The end as the beginning…
Evolution allows life to explore almost limitless diversity and complexity. Scientists hope to recreate such open-endedness in the laboratory or in computer simulations, but even sophisticated computational techniques like machine learning and artificial intelligence can't provide the open-ended tinkering associated with evolution. Here, common barriers to open-endedness in computation and biology were compared, to see…
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There is no Death! There is no Life either! (A child, a brain map and a coincidence? - Part II)
Some days ago Harmonia Philosophica posted an article about how a Truth Puzzle filled in by a child was amazingly enough indicating something that could be of importance for philosophy (check the "There is no Death! (A child, a brain map and a coincidence?) article"). Now a new twist was added to the plot. Some…
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