Tag: biology
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Plants are clever and conscious. Universe is… the same. [Dissipated consciousness]
Plants are intelligent. Plants deserve rights. Plants are like the Internet – or more accurately the Internet is like plants. To most of us these statements may sound, at best, insupportable or, at worst, crazy. But a new book, Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by plant neurobiologist (yes, plant neurobiologist),…
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A new tree of life… No branches or roots required…
The tree of life might seem like a stable design, appropriate for indelible ink. Plenty of people think so. An Internet search for “phylogenetic tattoos” turns up some showy skin art. But the branches are shifting. Since a radial diagram based on 1990s genetics inspired a rush for tree-of-life tattoos, technical diagrams of life’s ancestral…
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Let the chicken be. Live. [An argument against analysis of anything]
Birds evolved from dinosaurs 150 million years ago, a slow but thorough transformation. Their bodies gained aerodynamic feathers, their digits fused into wings, and they acquired a beak used to gather food. We can see some details of this evolutionary marvel in the fossil record. Yet even the most exquisitely preserved fossil can’t tell us…
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Mind over Body. Life over Death.
“I think, therefore I am” is perhaps the most familiar one-liner in western philosophy. Even if the stoners, philosophers and quantum mechanically-inclined skeptics who believe we’re living an illusion are right, few existential quips hit with such profound, approachable simplicity. The only catch is that in Descartes’ opinion, “we” – our thoughts, our personalities, our…
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DNA. On the edge… Breath in…. Breath out!
For a skin cell to do its job, it must turn on a completely different set of genes than a liver cell — and keep genes it doesn’t need switched off. One way of turning off large groups of genes at once is to send them to “time-out” at the edge of the nucleus, where…
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