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Is it real or is it…?
source: Life On a continuing theme of (Roughly) Daily (c.f., e.g., here and here): the “grand old man” of pictorial journalism, Life, offers a series of arresting photos and asks “Real or Fake?“ As we...
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That’s life…
Virus (source: Flickr/Razza Mathadsa) Writing in The Scientist, Professor Edward N. Trifonov tackles the most fundamental of questions: The definition of life is as enormous a problem as the...
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Survivors…
Conan O’Brien mourns the death of Newsweek in print: “It’s sad, it’s a little mind-boggling. And what’s even stranger and sadder is when you see some of the magazines that actually outlasted Newsweek....
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“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated…”*
Capt. Kirk facing a Horta, a silicon-based life-form (in “Devil in the Dark” from “Star Trek: The Original Series” source Silicon-based (and other alternate) forms of life are a staple of speculative...
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“I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of...
Data From: Reader, John. (1986). The Rise of life. London: Roxby Prehistory Press. – Lutgens, Frederick K. (2006). Essentials of geology. Pearson Education. Inc. click here, and again on the image,...
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“Such is the essential mystery”*…
For about a billion years, life on earth was a relatively simple proposition: it was composed entirely of single-celled organisms (prokaryotes) in either the bacteria or archaea families. Then,...
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“I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent...
source If the range of habitable radii is sufficiently broad, most inhabited planets are likely to be closer in size to Mars than the Earth. Furthermore, since population density is widely observed...
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“Nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our...
From illustrator John Hendrix, a series of graphics (based on an essay by Gregory Laughlin)– see them all (and in larger sizes) at “How Big Can Life Get?” * Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty...
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“The missing link in cosmology is the nature of dark matter and dark energy”*…
Familiar visible matter can be thought of as the privileged percent—actually more like 15 percent—of matter. In business and politics, the interacting 1 percent dominates decision making and policy,...
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“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life”*…
Jeremy England is concerned about words—about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like “consciousness” and “information”; too loaded, he says. Too treacherous. When he’s...
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“Humans as we know them are just one morphological waypoint on the long road...
Imagine a world where the human race is no longer the dominant species. Extinct through war or spectacular accident. By devastating pandemic, super-natural disaster, or cosmic cataclysm. Passed...
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“It would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an...
Detail of the nerves of the trunk from Cerebri Anatome 1664 by Thomas Willis The model of nature as a complex, clockwork mechanism has been central to modern science ever since the 17th century. It...
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“It is a good day to study lichens”*…
Wolf lichen Science is sometimes caricatured as a wholly objective pursuit that allows us to understand the world through the lens of neutral empiricism. But the conclusions that scientists draw from...
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“That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim”*…
What does it mean to be alive? Science, shockingly, still doesn’t have a consensus. For example, is it fair to say that the novel coronavirus now sweeping the world is alive? The short answer is...
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“I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too...
The Fermi paradox, named for physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability...
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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to...
There is just something obviously reasonable about the following notion: If all life is built from atoms that obey precise equations we know—which seems to be true—then the existence of life might...
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“Man tends to define in terms of the familiar. But the fundamental truths may...
Most of us probably do not need to think too hard to distinguish living things from the “non-living”. A human is alive; a rock is not. Easy!Scientists and philosophers do not see things quite this...
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“Man tends to define in terms of the familiar. But the fundamental truths may...
Most of us probably do not need to think too hard to distinguish living things from the “non-living”. A human is alive; a rock is not. Easy!Scientists and philosophers do not see things quite this...
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“Life’s a little weird”…
Needs must… You may have ridden out the pandemic in compact living quarters without, say, much natural light or air conditioning. Perhaps you lived with roommates or family in an atmosphere that, as...
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“Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up”*…
Travis Boyer: Crush Blue, 2020 The living– and conscious?– infrastructure of the biosphere… Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable...
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