2+ hour, 51+ min ago   (288+ words) While amino acids can be produced in experiments or found on meteorites, they are often consumed by side reactions that create non-living tar. Source By now, you may have heard about some of the problems facing the field of origin-of-life…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago   (251+ words) A design or phenotype that is maximally optimized for one trait, such as we see at point A in Figure 1, which is maximized for Performance 1 (acceleration), is called an "archetype." Here's how Uri Alon describes this reverse engineering: We simply…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago   (288+ words) Consciousness does not emerge from human brains, according to Professor Maria Str'mme, a professor of nanotechnology at Uppsala University. Instead, she claims that it exists as a fundamental field " a "building block" of the universe. If this is correct, "mysterious…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago   (261+ words) We might think that mathematicians are focused on incredibly complex ideas and equations, far above the everyday thoughts of the rest of us. Source No amount of small, blind, and gradual changes to the steam engine could ever have produced…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (591+ words) One risk with trying to put animal intelligence on a continuum with human intelligence is that it can result in apparently pointless controversies. But here's one such controversy that is actually fun. At'Science News,'Elie Dolgin'reports'on a West Coast wolf…...

2+ mon, 2+ week ago   (912+ words) We are all familiar with the duality " structure and function " from both technology and biology. Source In this and three subsequent posts on the science of purpose, I propose to offer a unified theory of emergence and specified irreducible complexity…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago   (288+ words) In 1994, a strange, pixelated machine came to life on a computer screen. It read a string of instructions, copied them, and built a clone of itself " just as the Hungarian-American Polymath John von Neumann had predicted half a century earlier....

3+ mon, 1+ week ago   (417+ words) Philosopher John Searle, well-known for his work on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, has died. John Searle wrote extensively consciousness and the mind, intentionality, and speech act theory. He is especially well known for his Chinese Room Argument…...

3+ mon, 2+ week ago   (291+ words) Do you recognize the number 1/137.035999206? It might seem arbitrary, but if the fine structure constant were any higher or lower, you might not exist! Source Do you recognize the number 1/137.035999206? It might seem arbitrary, but if the fine structure constant…...

4+ mon, 2+ week ago   (743+ words) Always display content from YouTube Alex G'mez-Mar'n[0:30] I think many AI devotees conflate simulation with instantiation: The idea that if something behaves as if it is something else, you can equate both things and that's a conceptual flaw that has…...