"there is a very deeply-rooted assumption that humans have some innate, unique qualities that distinguish us from not only mere matter but other animals as well. … once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins — and you can see why lots of people would oppose this. … I keep returning to this quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus on music: “Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains … The question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what is already musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the same thing ethnologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual systems.” Music is but one of many domains that is typically seen as inherently social and therefore uniquely human, and the anthropocentric perspective tends to reduce everything to how it functions in the human experiential frame. And on a side note, this is why I’m so excited by Ian Bogost’s upcoming book “Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s Like To Be A Thing” … Robots can be said to have their own culture precisely because they don’t need to copy our sociologisms in order to be social, although what they do in their own social realm may not easily map on to things we do in our social realm. This is probably what fascinates me most"

"He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still. … He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man. I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire. Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham. … What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died. … after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us. His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before. This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it. … Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times. Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve’s final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW." via Chris (Twitter)

"Life on earth uses six elements heavily in its chemistry: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, also known as CHNOPS . There are other elements used in small amounts for specialized functions, too: zinc, for instance, is incorporated as a catalyst in certain enzymes. We also use significant quantities of some ions, specifically of sodium, potassium, calcium, and chloride, for osmotic balance and they also play a role in nervous system function and regulation; calcium, obviously, is heavily used in making the matrix of our skeletons. But for the most part, biochemistry is all about CHNOPS. … Arsenic already participates in earthly chemistry, badly. … researchers have found that some earthly bacteria that live in literally poisonous environments are adapted to find the presence of arsenic dramatically less lethal, and that they can even incorporate arsenic into their routine, familiar chemistry." via Bobbie (Twitter)

"How will we classify what is natural or unnatural when life is built from scratch?<br />
Synthetic Biology is turning to the living kingdoms for its materials library. No more petrochemicals: instead, pick a feature from an existing organism, locate its DNA code and insert it into a biological chassis. From DIY hacked bacteria to entirely artificial, corporate life-forms, engineered life will compute, produce energy, clean up pollution, make self-healing materials, kill pathogens and even do the housework. The Tree of Life is always changing, ever since we first created it. Now, we are adding to the living kingdoms for the first time. But these synthetic organisms are no different to other life forms, except that we invented them. We will have to insert an extra branch into the Tree of Life. The Synthetic Kingdom is part of our new nature."

"The fossils would have existed during a period in Earth history that came shortly after the so-called Great Oxidation Event, when free oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere rose rapidly. Another oxygen surge that occurred about half a billion years ago co-incided with the Cambrian Explosion - the huge spurt in evolution that established all the major animal groupings. "The evolution of the Gabon macrofossils, representing an early step toward large-sized multicellularity, may have become possible by the first boost in oxygen," Dr El Albani and colleagues said in a statement, "whereas the Cambrian Explosion could have been fuelled by the second. "Why it took 1.5 billion years for the multicellular organisms to take over is currently one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of the biosphere.""

"A geological mapping project found sedimentary deposits in a region called Hellas Planitia which suggest a large sea once stood there. The 2,000 km-wide, 8km-deep Hellas basin is a giant impact crater - the largest such structure on Mars. The researchers say their data support a lake between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago. Some scientists believe that conditions on Mars were more favourable for the evolution of life at this time than they were on Earth. "This mapping makes geologic interpretations consistent with previous studies, and constrains the timing of these putative lakes to the early-middle Noachian period on Mars," said Dr Leslie Bleamaster, research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson."

Freeman Dyson: "This experiment, putting together a living bacterium from synthetic components, is clumsy, tedious, unoriginal. From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery. It opens the way to the new world of synthetic biology. It proves that sequencing and synthesizing DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life. After this, the tools will be improved and simplified, and synthesis of new creatures will become quicker and cheaper. Nobody can predict the new discoveries and surprises that the new technology will bring. I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet."

"at this moment of complete victory for materialism something odd has happened: the chemical & material world turns out to be entirely shaped by something called "information". "Life is basically the result of an information process – a software process" says Venter, & "Starting with the information in a computer, we put it into a recipient cell, & convert it into a news species". But though this information clearly exists in some sense, it's impossible to say what kind of thing it is, because it isn't a thing at all … it isn't material, & it isn't bound by physical laws. Information turns out to be as elusive & as omnipresent as God once was … neither fits into any kind of common sense category; in orthodox theology, the idea of existence without God is senseless: not meaningless, but self-contradictory. Something similar is true of information in the sense that Venter uses it. … A universe without information could not exist & certainly couldn't contain scientists"

""We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.""

"Some types of bacteria and other single-celled organisms can live without oxygen, but nothing as complex had been found as these three species of Loricifera, a group of marine-sediment dwellers who inhabit one of Earth's most extreme and little-known environments. … The new species, however, don't have the mitochondria found in almost every other animal cell, converting oxygen and nutrients into chemical energy. Even the few parasite species once thought to be mitochondria-free seem to have had them at some point in history, and possess mitochondrial remnants that perform the same essential functions. Instead the new Loricifera species have structures called hydrogenosomes, which are found in some single-celled organisms and require no oxygen to produce chemical energy."

via Kim (Twitter)

News broke today that Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of France’s towering intellectuals, has died. He was 100 years old. The New York Times has a lengthy obit that covers the career of the anthropologist who brought us “structuralism” and helped us look at diverse cultures in new ways. NPR has also aired a short piece (in audio) that highlights Lévi-Strauss’ intellectual accomplishments. You can listen below.

Audible Starter Kit: Get 3 Audiobooks, Plus a Free Phillips Spark 2GB MP3 Player

News broke today that Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of France’s towering intellectuals, has died. He was 100 years old. The New York Times has a lengthy obit that covers the career of the anthropologist who brought us “structuralism” and helped us look at diverse cultures in new ways. NPR has also aired a short piece (in audio) that highlights Lévi-Strauss’ intellectual accomplishments. You can listen below.

Audible Starter Kit: Get 3 Audiobooks, Plus a Free Phillips Spark 2GB MP3 Player

"Life is just one short, inescapable approach. ... Take my friend Tony Errington, a roaring giant of a man who has just died much younger than he should have. I met him 30 years ago when he walked into a shop I co-owned in Cornwall, carrying boxes of sunglasses. We didn't sell sunglasses but he told us we did now. He drove down from Walthamstow at the height of summer in a van loaded with whatever he could lay his hands on, and scorched the village. The word went out – "Big Tony's here!" – and wives would lock up their husbands, fearing the infectiousness of his high spirits. By three in the morning the entire male population of Boscastle lay unconscious in the streets while Tony roamed the lanes like some fertility god looking for someone to drink with. Later he became an artist. He wanted life so badly he had to live it and then remake it on canvas. You love men like this at your peril, because they don't last. But what else is love for?" via Steve (Twitter)

"what would we have if we determined that there were microbes making methane, and other microbes consuming methane? An ecosystem -- the first ecosystem found someplace other than Earth. ... we'd finally have a chance to do comparative ecology. Everything we know about how ecosystems work, how biology works, comes from a single data point: Earth. ... What would Martian microbes have as the equivalent of DNA? Genes? Would there be elements of their biochemistry that would be unusually surprising? Then there's the possibility that said Martian microbes would have a biology essentially identical to that found on Earth. The most plausible explanation for that would be that Earth life actually started on Mars (which cooled faster than Earth, so would have started its biology sooner) and was exported via Martian rocks ejected from massive impacts and hitting Earth as meteorites. We've discovered Mars-origin meteorites on Earth, so we know this is plausible. So many questions."

"Dedicated to finding the best of the LIFE Photo Archive and Flickr Commons."

"It seems in my life that it's been all about being open to new experiences. Work isn't a job, it's a journey full of natural ups and downs - but the best times are the learning times. Pay attention to them when they come along, learning as much as you can along the way - and realize that it's time to change gears if those times are too few and infrequent."

"Earth's most ancient rocks, with an age of 4.28 billion years, have been found on the shore of Hudson Bay, Canada. ... "These ribbons could imply that 4.3 billion years ago, Earth had an ocean, with hydrothermal circulation. ... Now, some people believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria. If that were true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life."

"Orpheus went to hell and back, and lost what he went there for anyway. We strive to fill the gaps of antiquity, scan palimpsests from rubbish-tips, train every fragment of the spectrum upon them. The lacunae, though, are part of the story. What we have is what we have; what we’re given, we should be grateful for."

"A rudimentary form of natural selection likely existed in the primordial soup even before life arose on Earth. If so, the complex "ecosystem" of prebiotic molecules may have made the eventual arrival of life much more probable. Most experts presume that life arose from complex molecules such as nucleic acids and proteins, which were assembled from a mix of simpler units strung together with chemical bonds. To examine how this might occur, Martin Nowak and Hisashi Ohtsuki, mathematical biologists at Harvard University, used simple equations to model the growth of such chains of building-blocks. ... At some point, Nowak's model predicts, the best replicator may get fast and accurate enough to dominate the population, sucking up all the resources and driving all the other prebiotic sequences extinct. This is the threshold of life. "Ultimately, life destroys pre-life," says Nowak. "It eats away the scaffold that has built it.""

"1. Helping other people helps me. 2. Having guts always works out for me. 3. Thinking that life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now. 4. Organising a charity group is surprisingly easy. 5. Being not truthful always works against me. 6. Everything I do always comes back to me. 7. Assuming is stifling. 8. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on. 9. Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted. 10. Money does not make me happy. 11. My dreams have no meaning. 12. Keeping a diary supports personal development. 13. Trying to look good limits my life. 14. Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses. 15. Worrying solves nothing. 16. Complaining is silly. Either act or forget. 17. Everybody thinks they are right. 18. If I want to explore a new direction professionally, it is helpful to try it out for myself first. 19. Low expectations are a good strategy. 20. Everybody who is honest is interesting."

"be wary of following the careers advice your college gives you. ... What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the complete opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution. ... my second piece of career advice echoes the political advice offered by Benjamin Franklin: whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. ... my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. ... You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?"

"1. The Professions ... are a grind, and for many there is no passion or purpose, no vision or meaning, no intuitive individual truth. ... 2. Academics ... most academics ... get into a spiral of irrelevance and isolation from the rest of the world. 3. Politics ... in order to change the world through politics, you must gain power, and the game of gaining power will fuck you up for sure. 4. Critical thinking ... IS useful, but it is not a complete toolbox. (Consider, for example, how useful it is to know how to do creative thinking.) The problem is that most smart people have only one tool, but because they don’t know any better, they operate as if their toolbox is full."

""We consider this the second in our three-step process to create the first synthetic organism," said J. Craig Venter ... "What remains now that we have this complete synthetic chromosome … is to boot this up in a cell.""

"It’s now generally believed that the archaea and bacteria developed separately from a common ancestor nearly 4 billion years ago. Millions of years later, the ancestors of today's eukaryotes split off from the archaea."

"the hypothetical latest living organism from which all currently living organisms descend. As such, it is the most recent common ancestor of the set of all currently living organisms. It is estimated to have lived some 3.9 to 4.1 billion years ago"

"To transform the science of biology & inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species … increase our collective understanding of life on Earth & safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity"