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DARPA Wants to Create Synthetic Organisms to Terraform and Change the Atmosphere of Mars Biotech, Space, Synthetic Biology June 25, 2015 by Giulio Prisco 435SHARES TwitterLinkedinFacebook The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) believes that it's on the way to creating synthetic organisms capable of terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth, Motherboard reports.Speaking at a recent biotech conference hosted by DARPA, Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) said: For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not...

Biologists Invoke the Past in Modern Bacteria By swapping ancient genes into modern E. coli, scientists hope to tease out the rules of evolution. Yaman OzakinBetul Kacar, a research fellow at Harvard University, has revived an ancient protein in E. coli. By: Emily SingerJune 18, 2015 One of the greatest challenges in evolutionary biology is trying to piece together the history of life based on fragmentary evidence and limited knowledge of the forces at play — the rich tapestry of climate, geology and living things that forms the backdrop for evolution. How, for example, did the light-sensitive molecules that enable...

Miners in northwestern Canada have discovered ice age camel bones whose DNA is forcing scientists to redraw the family tree of the now-extinct species. Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the Yukon's Department of Tourism and Culture, said three fossils recovered from a gold mine in the Klondike in 2008 are the first western camel bones found in the territory or Alaska in decades. Scientists had believed western camels that once lived in North America were related to llamas and alpacas common to South America, but they now have genetic proof that the animals are more closely tied to the camels...

Incredible (IMHO) exposition of the co-dependence of "evolutionary" minerology and biology.

For the past several centuries everyone believed that Mars was the most likely body in our solar system to support life beyond Earth. But, after centuries of telescope observation, decades of spacecraft exploration and several robots exploring its surface the promise of discovering life on Mars remains elusive. Now, scientific attention is being focused on Europa, the fourth largest of Jupiter's 67 confirmed moons. It may be an even better candidate for finding life than Mars. For life to be present the three basic requirements are: 1) liquid water; 2) chemical building blocks; and, 3) a source of energy. Europa...

Secular scientists are at a loss over how to get their favorite origins story, Darwinian evolution, a more confident presence in schools.After nearly a century of one-sided control of education on origins, Darwinian scientists shouldn’t be faced with this dilemma. After all, their own theory presupposes that human beings are material entities that can be conditioned like other animals. And yet, despite a near total exposure to Darwinian evolution in textbooks, museums, educational TV – and often in the general culture, such as in many sci-fi movies – a substantial majority of the public doesn’t buy the completely materialistic...

Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, say they’ve discovered a microorganism that hasn’t evolved in more than two billion years — the longest ever absence of evolutionary evidence in a single species. Researchers say the deep sea creature — whose evolutionary stasis is detailed in the journal PNAS doesn’t disprove evolution so much as bolster Darwin’s case. “The rule of biology is not to evolve unless the physical or biological environment changes, which is consistent with Darwin,” lead study author J. William Schopf, a professor of earth, planetary and space sciences at UCLA. SNIP Schopf says it is...

Engineering is the science and practice of designing things, usually systems and sometime systems of systems. Engineers understand that nothing worthwhile happens by accident in this universe, ever. The probabilities are too vastly against it. With 70,000 gene pairs in the average chromosome and 12 different proteins at work, that would mean at least odds of (70,000 X 70,000 X 12 X 12) = 7.0 X 10^11 if you could get all that stuff in the same place at the same time without the added consideration of the right conditions. All the monkeys with their typewriters would have several thousands...

“Now, many experts view it as a sexual orientation as immutable as heterosexuality ... a deep-rooted predisposition ... that becomes clear during puberty and does not change.”The above idea was expressed with respect to homosexuality decades ago and since has become left-wing dogma. The thinking is that if someone was “born that way,” if the behavior is “natural” for him and he didn’t choose his feelings, how could it be wrong?Yet the opening quoted line wasn’t penned decades ago — it’s only two years old. And homosexuality wasn’t the focus.It was about pedophilia.Here is the complete quotation, as published by...

MCNEAL — Once it housed soldiers stationed at Fort Huachuca, then it was moved to McNeal and was filled with the sounds of happy feet dancing and the chattering of ladies at coffee cloches. Now abandoned, there are new inhabitants that really are no fun — killer bees. The irritable, six-legged flying pollinators have been in the building on Frontier Road for a number of years, tending huge honeycombs and creating problems for those who walk their dogs, ride horses or just take a morning stroll. If one puts out nectar for the hummingbirds and orioles in spring within the...

A Columbia High School biology teacher killed and slaughtered a rabbit in front of 16 sophomores to show them how livestock is processed into food, Allison Westfall, the Nampa School District spokeswoman, said Thursday. The matter has been turned over to the district’s human resources department, Westfall said. She would not speculate on what might happen to the teacher because it is a personnel matter. She said she didn’t have the name of the teacher. The teacher expressed remorse for his action in class on Monday, Westfall told the Idaho Statesman. “That is not part of the biology curriculum,” she...

A married same-sex couple cannot use a marital statute to block a man's paternity petition for the child he fathered with one of the spouses during the women's marriage, a Family Court judge has determined. Monroe County Family Court Judge Joan Kohout (See Profile) said that while state Domestic Relations Law prohibits discrimination against same-sex married couples, it does not require the court to "ignore the obvious biological differences between husbands and wives." Neither spouse in a male-male marriage can biologically give birth to a baby, and neither spouse in a female-female marriage can be the biological "father," Kohout wrote...

More than 60 years after its last confirmed sighting, a strange deer with vampire-like fangs still persists in the rugged forested slopes of northeast Afghanistan according to a research team led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which confirmed the species presence during recent surveys.

"New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional," writes Nicholas Wade in his recently published book, "A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History." That sounds reasonable, and Wade, a science reporter and editor for many years at Nature and the New York Times, seems an unimpeachable source. But many well-meaning people will regard his words as provocative and even dangerous. For they fatally undermine the idea, widely shared by so-called progressives, that any apparent differences between groups of people are the product of nurture rather than nature, of social conditioning rather...

Friday, 23 May 2014 Stuart Gary ABC New Australian research suggests Martian minerals may have formed from biological rather than geological origins. The findings, reported in the journal Geology, indicate the mineral stevensite, which is found on both Earth and Mars, can be created either in hot, highly alkaline volcanic lakes, or by mineralisation in living microbes. Stevensite is a magnesium-silicate mineral, used a Nubian beauty treatment for several centuries.

Powerhouse of Scientists Refute Evolution, Part One by Brian Thomas, M.S. * In 2011, the “Biological Information: New Perspectives” conference was held in which 29 leading design scientists technically assessed critical aspects of Neo-Darwinian theory. This evolutionary theory holds that new biological information arises when mutations allow nature to select between organisms, and when it first appeared many scientists thought it was a brilliant idea. However, according to those participating in the 2011 conference, the theory has proven to be inadequate and now needs replacement. The participants’ major findings, published technically in 2013, were summarized and grouped into three major...

Watch this rabbit in action!

The mysterious vanishing of honeybees from hives can be directly linked to insectcide use, according to new research from Harvard University. The scientists showed that exposure to two neonicotinoids, the world's most widely used class of insecticide, lead to half the colonies studied dying, while none of the untreated colonies saw their bees disappear. "We demonstrated that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering 'colony collapse disorder' in honeybee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter," said Chensheng Lu, an expert on environmental exposure biology at Harvard School of Public Health and who led the...

Last month a baby in Tennessee made history: Emilia Maria Jesty was the first child born in the state to have a woman listed on the birth certificate as her "father." The marital status of the baby's parents was the subject of a flurry of court filings up to a few days before her birth. Valeria Tanco and Sophy Jesty were wed in New York, a state that recognizes gay marriage, and moved to Tennessee, which does not. They are among scores of same-sex couples who, working with advocacy groups, have filed lawsuits to expand gay-marriage rights following a major...

Genesis Science Is Practical, Not Just Academic by James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D. * “It doesn’t really matter, in the real world, what you believe about creation or evolution,” the college student glibly challenged me. “Whether the evolutionists are right or whether Genesis is right makes no practical difference in how science works or in how people live their lives.” With a grin and a wave of his hand, the sophomore dismissed the real-world relevance of biblical creation as if it were no more practical than evolutionary myths. Was he correct? Is the Genesis record of God’s creation (and...