Radical theory explains the origin, evolution, and nature of life, challenges conventional wisdom

The earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects—for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA—are animate, that is, alive. With its broad explanatory power, applicable to all areas of science and medicine, this novel paradigm aims to catalyze a veritable renaissance.

Erik Andrulis, PhD, assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology, advanced his controversial framework in his manuscript "Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life," published in the peer-reviewed journal, Life. His theory explains not only the evolutionary emergence of life on earth and in the universe but also the structure and function of existing cells and biospheres.

In addition to resolving long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, Dr. Andrulis' theory unifies quantum and celestial mechanics. His unorthodox solution to this quintessential problem in physics differs from mainstream approaches, like string theory, as it is simple, non-mathematical, and experimentally and experientially verifiable. As such, the new portrait of quantum gravity is radical.

The basic idea of Dr. Andrulis' framework is that all physical reality can be modeled by a single geometric entity with life-like characteristics: the gyre. The so-called "gyromodel" depicts objects—particles, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and cells—as quantized packets of energy and matter that cycle between excited and ground states around a singularity, the gyromodel's center. A singularity is itself modeled as a gyre, wholly compatible with the thermodynamic and fractal nature of life. An example of this nested, self-similar organization is the Russian Matryoshka doll.

By fitting the gyromodel to facts accumulated over scientific history, Dr. Andrulis confirms the proposed existence of eight laws of nature. One of these, the natural law of unity, decrees that the living cell and any part of the visible universe are irreducible. This law formally establishes that there is one physical reality.

Another natural law dictates that the atomic and cosmic realms abide by identical organizational constraints. Simply put, atoms in the human body and solar systems in the universe move and behave in the exact same manner.

"Modern science lacks a unifying, interdisciplinary theory of life. In other words, current theories are unable to explain why life is the way it is and not any other way," Dr. Andrulis says. "This general paradigm furnishes a fresh perspective on the character and meaning of life, offers solutions to protracted problems, and strives to end divisive debates."

One debate swirls around the scientific merit of James Lovelock's popular Gaia hypothesis. By showing that the earth is theoretically synonymous with life, Dr. Andrulis' paradigm substantiates the Gaian premise that all organisms and their surroundings on earth are closely integrated to form a single self-regulating complex system.

Another legendary quarrel is that between biblical creationists and neo-Darwinian evolutionists. In demonstrating that the origin and evolution of life is a consequence of natural laws and physical forces, this theory synthesizes arguments and dispels assumptions from both sides of the creation-evolution debate.

To test his paradigm, Dr. Andrulis designed bidirectional flow diagrams that both depict and predict the dynamics of energy and matter. While such diagrams may be foreign to some scientists, they are standard reaction notation to chemists, biochemists, and biologists.

Dr. Andrulis has used his theory to successfully predict and identify a hidden signature of RNA biogenesis in his laboratory at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He is now applying the gyromodel to unify and explain the evolution and development of human beings.

More information: "Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life," Life, Vol. 2:1-105 (2012). http://www.mdpi.co … -1729/2/1/1/

 

Provided by Case Western Reserve University

"Radical theory explains the origin, evolution, and nature of life, challenges conventional wisdom." January 26th, 2012.http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-radical-theory-evolution-nature-life.html

 

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Robert Karl Stonjek

New Quantum Dot Tech Could Boost Current Optical Fiber Band Tenfold

By Clay Dillow

Opening Up New Optical Communications Wavelengths via NICT

Current optical communications schemes rely on a narrow 1.55 micron wavelength band of about 10 terahertz, a band in which optical signals can be well controlled and loss of signal/data is fairly low. But to open up optical networks to the high data load of the future, we need to open up the span of available wavelength. And using a novel quantum dot technology, researchers at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan have done exactly that, to the tune of a roughly tenfold increase.

They did so by creating a whole new process of quantum dot formation involving what’s called a “sandwiched sub-nano separator structure.” Conventionally, crystalline quantum dot structures are grown directly on a silicon surface, which leads to a somewhat uneven, disordered layer of dots. But by inserting an ultra-fine, sub-nanometer-thick separator structure in between the silicon and the quantum dots, the dots grow in a far more dense and ordered structure, leading to a layer of very high-quality, more uniform quantum dots.

The result is a quantum dot light source that is highly stable with a communications-worthy optical frequency band that covers about ten times the width of the current communications band. That opens up optical fiber networks to a lot more usable light, which in turn could speed optical communications and boost capacity. Moreover, the new wavelength band includes light that permeates skin, so there’s an interesting medical imaging aspect to this technology to explore as well. A more thorough visual explanation resides in the video below.

[NICT via DigInfo News]

Making the Blackest of Black Materials

"We made carbon nanotubes that are blacker than anything else."

By NASA Goddard Staff, as told to Flora Lichtman

Little Light Traps

Our material absorbs more than 99 percent of visible and ultraviolet light and 98 percent of infrared light. It’s at least 10 times as good at capturing light as black paint, so we can use it in telescopes, where stray light can contaminate measurements. The nanotubes are sparse enough that light passes between them, like sunlight through trees in a forest. When photons hit the sides of the carbon tubes, they transfer their energy to the carbon’s electrons, which start to move. The light is converted to motion—heat— which dissipates in the tube. —John Hagopian,optical physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

To grow carbon nanotubes, we use a substrate, an adhesion layer and a catalyst: iron. The catalyst condenses on the substrate, a lot like if you boiled water and leaned over the pot with your glasses on. Then we put the whole thing in a quartz tube furnace at 1,382°F. We introduce ethylene gas, which is where the carbon comes from. The catalyst reacts with the gas, and the carbon molecules dissociate and form a tubular hexagonal lattice—a nanotube—on the surface of the iron. The nanotubes can grow in less than a minute. —Stephanie Getty, technologist, NASA Goddard

We put the nanotubes in an integrating sphere—a globe with a highly reflective coating inside. We shine light at the sample and, using a detector, measure the amount of light that bounces off the material. We put a shader near the detector to make sure it’s not getting direct radiation and skewing the results. One thing that’s kind of amazing is that the nanotubes, which are just 100 microns tall, can absorb infrared rays, which have wavelengths the same size as the nanotubes.—Manuel Quijada, engineer, NASA Goddard

How Men Can Decode Women's Menstrual Cycles

The clues are in her voice

By Jen Abbasi

Photo Quiz! Can you tell which one of these women is ovulating and which one is menstruating?Wikimedia Commons

“Are you on your period?” It’s a question most women have been asked at one point or another by their boyfriend or spouse during a disagreement. It turns out that some men actually can tell when it’s a woman’s time of the month—and it’s not because of bratty behavior.

In a study published online last month in the journal Ethology, psychologists Nathan Pipitone at Adams State College and Gordon Gallup at SUNY Albany asked three groups of men to listen to voice recordings of 10 women counting from one to five. Each woman was recorded four times over the course of one full menstrual cycle. (For those who aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of the female reproductive cycle, women are most fertile during ovulation, when their ovaries release an egg, and least fertile during menstruation, when they shed the unfertilized egg and the lining of the uterus.)

After the first group of men listened to all four recordings from each woman, played in random order, they were asked to guess which recordings were made during the women’s periods. The men had a one in four chance of guessing correctly, but they actually did so 35 percent of the time, a significant difference, the researchers say.

In 2008, Pipitone and Gallup showed that men find the voices of ovulating women more attractive than voices recorded during other points in the cycle, so for the second group in the new study, the researchers replaced the recording made closest to ovulation with one from a less fertile day. Even after the potentially telltale contrast was eliminated, the men pinpointed the voice recorded during menstruation 34 percent of the time.

Perhaps the most telling element of the study was the third experiment, in which a new group of men were not told that the research had anything to do with menstrual cycles. Instead they were asked to choose the most “unattractive” voice recording for each woman. They chose the menstrual recording significantly more often than was predicted by chance—again, 34 percent of the time.

In fact, according to the researchers’ calculations, all three groups singled out the voices recorded during menstruation more often than any of the other voices.

So what was it about the women’s voices that gave away their reproductive status? The men in group one who correctly identified the menstrual recordings said they could tell by the mood (bad versus good), quality (harsh versus smooth), pitch (low versus high) and speed (slow versus fast) of the women’s voices. When the second two groups were asked to score the voices based on these characteristics, they reported that menstrual voices sounded lower in mood, quality and pitch. “The men seemed to determine menstrual voices by picking the most unattractive voice,” Pipitone explains.

There’s already evidence that men subconsciously judge where a woman is in her cycle—lap dancers make 80 percent more money in tips when they’re ovulating compared to when they’re menstruating, according to a 2007 paper—but the new study is the first to demonstrate one way men make that determination.

A subconscious (and often conscious) aversion to menstruation makes sense in evolutionary terms, since males wanting to pass on their genes are better off seeking out females closer to ovulation. Over time, the ability to parse a woman’s menstrual cycle could have proliferated, as more perceptive men reproduced more successfully.

Pipitone says the adaptation is an example of the reproductive arms race known as sexually antagonistic coevolution, a phenomenon seen across living species, from humans to brine shrimp. Males show more interest in females when they’re fertile, so it makes sense that human females—who need a lot of help to raise their particularly helpless infants—hide their fertility status. (Female chimps, by contrast, broadcast their fertility with engorged genitalia.) Theoretically, human males retaliated by developing the ability to detect more subtle fertility cues such as those “leaked” by the female voice.

Hormones induce the vocal changes that give women away. “Vocal production is closely tied to our biology,” Pipitone says of men and women. For example, “Cells from the larynx and vagina are very similar and show similar hormone receptors.” The result is that, “The sound of a person’s voice contains a surprising amount of reproductively relevant information,” Gallup says. The obvious example: By speaking on the phone, we can determine a person’s gender and age. But researchers have also shown that voices alone can be used to directly and indirectly predict characteristics like facial appearance, body type, physical strength and even sexual behavior.

I think one of the most interesting results of the study is that across the board, men chose the menstrual voice around a third of the time. It would seem some men are more perceptive to women’s cycles than others. Pipitone and Gallup plan to investigate this question next.

Jennifer Abbasi is a science and health writer and editor living in Brooklyn. Follow Jen on Twitter (she's @jenabbasi) and email her at popsci.thesexfiles@gmail.com.

Researchers Produce the First High-Quality 3-D Images of an Individual Protein

 

Hacking the electron microscope

By Clay Dillow

The First High-Quality 3-D Images of an Individual Protein The various images of a protein particle (A), the 3-D rendering (B), and the complex analysis of the three individual proteins that make up the particle. via Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Proteins are like the workhorses of genetic biology, but they can be notoriously difficult to study. Their structure has everything to do with their function--and sometimes dysfunction--which has far-reaching implications in health and medicine. That’s why it’s such a big deal that a couple of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have more or less hacked their cryo-electron microscope to see at far greater resolutions than its manufacturer intended and produced the first 3-D images of an individual protein with enough clarity to determine its structure.

Cataloging the shapes and structures of proteins is fairly routine science at this point. Pharmaceutical companies dealing in biologic drugs do so all the time as they search for protein therapies that might relieve one condition or another. But it’s not easy, and these conventional protein models are averages of the analyses of many thousands of molecules because it’s simply too difficult to get the resolutions necessary to image the features of an individual protein.

Until now. Gang Ren and Lei Zhang are reporting in the journal PLoS One the creation of their own brand of electron microscopy that they are calling “individual-particle electron tomography,” or IPET. Their images are still a bit fuzzy, but they are good enough for researchers to define a protein’s structure. Moreover, by creating a novel method of keeping their samples extremely cold (flash-frozen-in-liquid-nitrogen-to-negative-292-degrees cold) and tilting them up to 140 degrees while under the lens, they can generate more than a hundred images in a matter of a couple of hours.

Once stitched together those images inform each other, creating not only 3-D depth but helping to focus in on the subject protein and remove noise from the imagery. The result is the best structural imagery of an individual protein that we’ve ever heard about, one with the potential to go far in pharmaceutical research and in informing our fundamental understanding of protein dynamics. LBNL has a more in-depth explanation of the technology via the link below.

[LBNL]

How Disposable, Networked Satellites Will Democratize Space

By Jacob Ward

A New Standard Satoshi

In 1999, professors Robert Twiggs of Stanford University and Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University began to standardize the satellite business. They designed a small orbital unit-–a four-inch cube with little metal feet–-that was wide enough for solar cells, basing their design on a plastic display box for Beanie Babies. Their "CubeSat" had enough room for a computer motherboard and a few other parts necessary to do limited experiments in space, such as monitoring weather or photographing Earth. The design would significantly lower the cost for students to conduct experiments in space. CubeSats could be launched at the same time and piggyback on larger, more expensive missions, mitigating the expense of getting satellites into orbit.

With the design complete, Puig-Suari began to work with the three U.S. agencies that regularly launch satellites—the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program and NASA—to convince them to build CubeSat-ready berths into as many launches as possible. Meanwhile, the aerospace engineering department at CalPoly has become a sort of standards clearinghouse for NASA, testing each academic satellite to make sure the box won’t shake itself apart and cast shrapnel through the rocket during launch. CalPoly and Stanford maintain a forum and post all standards on CubeSat.org.

With so many scheduled launches, an undergraduate engineering student [...] can design one during her freshman year and see it reach space before graduation.Twiggs and Puig-Suari’s efforts are paying off. Since 2001, about 50 CubeSats have entered space. The pair sent up their first in 2003, spending $100,000 in grant money to stow it on a Russian Dnepr launch. When the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched in December 2009, six CubSats were aboard, packed three units at a time inside a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box container called a Poly-Picosatellite Orbital Deployer (P-POD), that was developed at CalPoly. After the payload deployed, the door of the P-POD popped open and the spring pushed all three satellites into orbit, where they unfurled solar panels and began transmitting information to their creators below. This year at least three rockets will launch with room for CubeSats, including the NROL-36, which can fit 11.

With so many scheduled launches, an undergraduate engineering student at one of the nearly 100 schools making CubeSats can design one during her freshman year and see it reach space before graduation. When Roland Coelho, a CalPoly graduate student, was filling out a preflight survey for his CubeSat last year, the range safety officer at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California approached him in confusion. “It asks whether you’ll need a military convoy to escort you,” the officer said. “You don’t?”

“Oh, that’s right,” Coelho replied. “It fits in the trunk of my car.”

Many academic CubeSats currently in orbit report their position, battery life and findings to ham-radio operators on Earth, who forward the information to the originating school. But projects are becoming more ambitious. The Air Force plans to use two networked CubeSats to monitor the Earth’s atmosphere and provide the world’s first real-time look at space weather. Carl Brandon of Vermont Technical College is developing an ion-drive CubeSat system that he says will be able to propel itself to the moon.

Puig-Suari and Charles Scott MacGillivray, who ran a small team of satellite developers at Boeing until last year, have now spun off their own company, called Tyvak, which produces CubeSats on a contract basis for private clients and the U.S. government. A marketplace of standardized components has also emerged, led by Stanford engineering professor Andrew Kalman’s Pumpkin, Inc., which has sold CubeSat kits to more than 100 universities, governments and nonprofit organizations. Kalman says that once people begin to think of CubeSats as disposable, building them out of off-the-shelf components and sending them up 100 at a time, the devices will truly have come of age. “If we launch a group of satellites built out of Android phones, you’ll have app developers able to dream up what to put in space,” he says.

A CubeSat today can cost as little as $100,000 to build, and buying a berth on something like a Falcon 9 runs around $250,000. In the aerospace industry, that’s spare change. The low cost also makes losing a CubeSat tolerable. Last March, a rocket carrying NASA’s Glory satellite and three CubeSats crashed into the ocean. “We were bummed,” says Coelho, who watched the failed launch. “But the NASA guys had lost a $400 million satellite.” One of the lost CubeSats was, in fact, a duplicate. In October, its twin made it into space.

CubeSat:  Austin Williams/Polysat, California Polytechnic University

HOW TO READY A CUBESAT FOR SPACE

The pre-launch guidelines for CubeSats stipulate that the object must be 10 by 10 by 11 centimeters (the extra centimeter is for the little metal feet) and no heavier than 1.3 kilograms. A satellite must remain fully deactivated—no power of any kind—until it exits its spring-loaded launch container; errant signals could scramble the electronics of the primary payload or the rocket’s guidance system. And teams must submit a detailed plan for de-orbiting—tipping the satellite such that it disintegrates in the atmosphere—within five years of leaving Earth, or risk having their satellite killed before it ever takes off.