In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms.

In this image, artist Adam Questell has imagined an alien cell that carries its genetic material in twin nuclei.

See also, Darwin's Surprise in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

Are Aliens Among Us? | Scientific American

Discover reports (briefly) on a Nature article from this past summer.

Natural selection, we’re told, is the process by which nature promotes our best qualities. But a look around strains that notion. If nature selects health, beauty, and intelligence, why are most of us far from flawless?

It may be because genes involved in reproduction work against themselves in opposite sexes across generations, says biologist Katharina Foerster at the University of Edinburgh. In her study of eight generations of red deer in Scotland, she noticed a curious pattern: The most prolific male deer sired daughters that tended to have fewer offspring, while the worst male breeders (the deer equivalent of ugly) fathered females that had more offspring. This is evidence, Foerster says, of sexually antagonistic genes. The same gene that makes a buck sexually successful can leave his daughter behind.

Foerster suspects that sexual antagonism is a way to maintain genetic diversity. But with so many reproductive choices available, it would be nearly impossible to detect this pattern in humans.

That's the water cooler version.

Details are also available, including the latest paper (although a subscription is required for full text). A more recent paper cites Foerster's work.

Why Aren’t You Beautiful?

In a bid to progress beyond the shotgun approach to fighting cancer—blasting malignant cells with toxic chemicals or radiation, which kills surrounding healthy cells in the process—researchers at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) are using nanotechnology to develop seek-and-destroy models to zero in on and dismantle tumors without damaging nearby normal tissue.

Nanoparticles Enable Surgical Strikes against Cancer

We have developed a mathematical approach to the study of dynamical biological networks, based on combining large-scale numerical simulation with nonlinear ‘‘dimensionality reduction’’ methods. Our work was motivated by an interest in the complex organization of the signaling cascade centered on the neuronal phosphoprotein DARPP-32 (dopamine- and cAMP-regulated phosphoprotein of molecular weight 32,000). Our approach has allowed us to detect robust features of the system in the presence of noise. In particular, the global network topology serves to stabilize the net state of DARPP-32 phosphorylation in response to variation of the input levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate, despite significant perturbation to the concentrations and levels of activity of a number of intermediate chemical species. Further, our results suggest that the entire topology of the network is needed to impart this stability to one portion of the network at the expense of the rest. This could have significant implications for systems biology, in that large, complex pathways may have properties that are not easily replicated with simple modules.

This is an open access article.

A mathematical tool for exploring the dynamics of biological networks

Here is Paul Davies:

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.

There are a bunch of responses at Edge. Related archive items:

Religious scholars mull Flying Spaghetti Monster

How To Defend Society Against Science

Taking Science on Faith

How do we understand the world? While some look to the heavens for intelligent design, others argue that it is determined by information encoded in DNA. Science serves as an important activity for uncovering the processes and operations of nature, but it is also immersed in a social context where ideology influences the questions we ask and how we approach the material world. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society breaks from the confirms of determinism, offering a dialectical analysis for comprehending a dynamic social and natural world.

In Biology Under the Influence, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins provide a devastating critique of genetic determinism and reductionism within science while exploring a broad range of issues including the nature of science, biology, evolution, the environment, pubic health, and dialectics, They dismantle the ideology that attempts to naturalize social inequalities, unveil the alienation of science and nature, and illustrate how a dialectical position serves as a basis for grappling with historical developments and a world characterized by change. Biology Under the Influence brings together the illuminating essays of two prominent scientists who work to demystify and empower the public's understanding of science and nature.

For many years, Lewontin has written for the New York Review of Books. In 1990, he responded to a review of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind", in which he asks, ARE WE ROBOTS?

Maynard Smith again juxtaposes a "fact" about people with an assumption of motivation. "The people who are going to like this book best, however, will probably be those who don't understand it. As an evolutionary biologist, I have learned over the years that most people do not want to see themselves as lumbering robots programmed to ensure the survival of their genes."

Unless he has been carrying out a stratified sampling poll of Great Britain, John surely means "most literate and educated people, professors, students and people who write letters to the editors", since those are the people that he, and I, mostly know and hear from. But if what he says about them is true, then they are extraordinary masochists as well. They have made a best-seller out of The Selfish Gene in which the robot metaphor first appeared, and a popular intellectual figure and modest academic success out of its previously undistinguished author, Richard Dawkins.

With enemies like these, people have no need of friends. Of all the vulgar errors about biology presently circulating, the notion that we are "lumbering robots blindly programmed" by our genes which "control us body and mind" (Dawkins' original dictum) is surely the most popular by a long shot.

Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health

Last month, RPI President Shirley Ann Jackson spoke at a tribute to MIT's new Green Center for Physics.

Jackson draws inspiration from MIT alumnus Vannevar Bush, who helped mobilize the best US R&D talent during World War 2.

Bush overcame scientists’ “skepticism and even antagonism toward the concept of federal funding,” says Jackson, promoting collaboration with the government. MIT Radiation Laboratory scientists helped develop electronic countermeasures for the deadly buzz bombs that terrorized Londoners during the war. In peacetime, Bush recommended to President Truman the continued marriage of government, industry and science -- weaving in the humanities and social sciences, too.

Bush believed the results of research could be “adapted readily to shifting national needs ... and could assist not only in national security but in general economic growth and quality of life,” says Jackson. Bush’s blueprint helped justify a massive infusion of federal money into R&D for many decades.

But today, this investment has shrunken to historic lows, says Jackson. “50 years after Sputnik,” she says, “we need to focus on another great global challenge: energy security and sustainability.” This is a “race against time,” requiring multi-sector collaboration, rooted in fundamental research, with no product in mind.

Jackson calls for a rejuvenation “on a massive scale” in basic research and education, comparable to the university-government-industry mobilization that began during World War 2.

Science, The Endless Frontier: The Continuing Relevance of Vannevar Bush

Women want to talk about it, but men are more likely to retreat into stoney silence. Our correspondent investigates the science behind how we argue

The short answer is that there is no science behind this.

Why men and women argue differently

What science can, and can't, tell us about the insanity defense

'You Can't See Why on an fMRI'

Sacha van Loo, 36, is not your typical cop. He wields a white cane instead of a gun. And from the purr of an engine on a wiretap, he can discern whether a suspect is driving a Peugeot, a Honda or a Mercedes.

Van Loo is one of Europe's newest weapons in the global fight against terrorism and organized crime: a blind Sherlock Holmes, whose disability allows him to spot clues sighted detectives don't see.

"Being blind has forced me to develop my other senses, and my power as a detective rests in my ears," he said from his office at the Belgian Federal Police, where a bullet-riddled piece of paper from a recent target-shooting session was proudly displayed on the wall. "Being blind also requires recognizing your limitations," he added with a smile, noting that a sighted trainer guided his hands during target practice "to make sure no one got wounded."

Something of a thematic follow-up to The boy who sees without eyes ...

A blind Sherlock Holmes: Fighting crime with acute listening