Don’t know if this song is better than sex. I’m still a virgin.
The discovery [of the Higgs boson], if confirmed, will mark the culmination of a hunt that has taken years and cost billions of dollars, and will shape the field for years to come. (…) What fundamental discoveries in biology might inspire the same thrill? We put the question to experts in various fields. (…)
Is there life elsewhere? (…)
Is there foreign life on earth? (…) Some have postulated the existence of a ’shadow biosphere’ on Earth, teeming with life that has gone undiscovered because scientists simply don’t know where to look. It could contain life that relies on a fundamentally different biochemistry, using different forms of amino acids or even entirely novel ways of storing, replicating and executing inherited information that do not rely on DNA or proteins. (…)
How did life start…? (…) Joyce says that there will come a point at which researchers learn how to synthesize an evolving, replicating system from scratch. (…) Several labs have already made headway. (…) In 2009, a paper from Joyce’s lab reported the development of a system of RNA molecules that undergo self-sustaining Darwinian evolution5. But enzymes and a human hand were needed to create the RNA sequences to start off the reaction, Joyce says, and so far his lab has not found conditions that would allow the system to form spontaneously. “We’re still a bit challenged,” he says. “But the system is running more and more efficiently all the time.” (…)
… and can we delay its end? (…) Cynthia Kenyon and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, reported that mutations in a single gene allowed the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to live more than twice as long as usual. Three years later, a group led by Andrzej Bartke, who studies ageing at Southern Illinois University in Springfield, reported that mice bearing a single mutation that causes hormonal deficiencies live up to 68% longer than mice without the mutation. Both papers, and a slew of work since, have suggested that it might be possible to significantly slow human ageing and its associated diseases.
image { Trevor Brown }
