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Category: evolution

This #COVID19 is quite weird it just keeps evolving. In a weird way it is pushing evolution through our immune system. The only thing I know that is similar is like the flu or a bigger organism like cancer. Based on this information the virus just keeps evolving not dying off. Among the weird stuff it doesn’t effect cats or most animals or plants. Basically we either need a universal vaccine which is still being developed or we may need quantum radar to kill off the virus in our bodies when it comes out either that or foglet armor to not breathe it in like Ironman. I find it is just an odd virus as essentially it evolves so fast past even human beings abilities to fend it off even with suits it seems to spread so fast that it cannot be completely contained. From dogs that sniff it out it seems sorta everywhere. I know minor things like high dosages of vitamin c work with zinc and probiotics which was the first way to battle it when it didn’t become this whole pandemic because oddly enough it wasn’t a big deal in previous years because the 19th version of the virus. I know some things that kill it off are ultra violet and lysol as well as bleach. So it makes me think it is more a bioweapon where the universal vaccine would work. But oddly enough I am uncertain if it really dies off especially if it is airborne. If we can destroy the virus by reprogramming it to be sterile or innert or even for it to just kill itself off with crispr like we have done with mosquitoes to stop malaria. We can easily make new vaccines which is good but nearly every year or so there is an entirely new version. This isn’t new but it sorta is like the flu. But there are some theories that I sorta have where it seems to be near heat sources where it grows. Like my uncle who had the virus which we had him turn off electricity and also do vitamin c probiotics and zinc which did work. He ended up getting an antibody naturally this way. I personally got the vaccine and found that it does work but when the new delta version came out it did the same as the last one it sorta just randomly evolves for some reason even smells similar but oddly enough it still remains even after all the lysol. So to me it seems like a bioweapon that is self evolving which is we could use the mechanism to essentially evolve ourselves taking the components of it. If this was a nanobot swarm I would say it spreads from radio waves or something but this virus keeps spreading in odd ways like even from the sky. Which sorta makes me believe that it is sorta being manipulated maybe by a signal perhaps or it has its own program inside it. It reminds me of a Grey goo nanobot swarm that keeps evolving but the biological virus version. I mean it could actually be an exterrestial virus there was a meteorite that came around then and odd things that followed from the meteorite like dogs attacking people and cats attacking people even huge mountain lions. Which makes me think of a sorta an invasion of something. We need to maybe get the viruses input and output to find what it is going to do next. All and all seems odd because even other viruses don’t evolve or like fly or spread that fast. Ideally we should have cyborg nanobots running through Ironman in avengers endgame but so far our best better is treating it like the flu pumping out a new vaccine each year till we know a universal vaccine like using henreitta lacks immortal unlimited cell division cells like they did with polio. But till then we need to keep watching the virus as seems sorta more than it appears based on its original version.

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Denisovan DNA lives on in some humans today because, once our Homo sapien ancestors encountered the Denisovans, they had sex with them and gave birth to babies — something geneticists call admixture. By analyzing current-day genetic data, we can look back into human history.

Geneticists have found that a Philippine ethnic group known as the Ayta Magbukon has the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world.

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At the center of galaxies, like our own Milky Way, lie massive black holes surrounded by spinning gas. Some shine brightly, with a continuous supply of fuel, while others go dormant for millions of years, only to reawaken with a serendipitous influx of gas. It remains largely a mystery how gas flows across the universe to feed these massive black holes.

UConn Assistant Professor of Physics Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, lead author on a paper published today in The Astrophysical Journal, addresses some of the questions surrounding these massive and enigmatic features of the universe by using new, high-powered simulations.

“Supermassive black holes play a key role in and we are trying to understand how they grow at the centers of galaxies,” says Anglés-Alcázar. “This is very important not just because black holes are very interesting objects on their own, as sources of gravitational waves and all sorts of interesting stuff, but also because we need to understand what the central black holes are doing if we want to understand how galaxies evolve.”

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When plants first ventured onto the land, evolving from freshwater-dwelling algae, more than 500 million years ago, they transformed the planet. By drawing carbon dioxide from the air, they cooled Earth, and by eroding rock surfaces they helped build the soil that now covers so much land.

These changes to the planet’s atmosphere and land surface paved the way for the evolution of the biosphere we know. Land plants make up around 80 percent of Earth’s biomass.

The pioneering plants were small and moss-like, and they had to overcome two big challenges to survive on land: avoiding drying out, and surviving the Sun’s harsh ultraviolet light.

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Widespread human SARS-CoV-2 infections combined with human-wildlife interactions create the potential for reverse zoonosis from humans to wildlife. We targeted white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) for serosurveillance based on evidence these deer have ACE2 receptors with high affinity for SARS-CoV-2, are permissive to infection, exhibit sustained viral shedding, can transmit to conspecifics, and can be abundant near urban centers. We evaluated 624 pre-and post-pandemic serum samples from wild deer from four U.S. states for SARS-CoV-2 exposure. Antibodies were detected in 152 samples (40%) from 2,021 using a surrogate virus neutralization test. A subset of samples was tested using a SARS-CoV-2 virus neutralization test with high concordance between tests. These data suggest white-tailed deer in the populations assessed have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

One-Sentence Summary Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 were detected in 40% of wild white-tailed deer sampled from four U.S. states in 2021.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans, can infect multiple domestic and wild animal species (1 – 7). Thus, the possibility exists for the emergence of new animal reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2, each with unique potential to maintain, disseminate, and drive novel evolution of this virus. Of particular concern are wildlife species that are both abundant and live in close association with human populations (5).

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No, it’s not forbidden to innovate, quite the opposite, but it’s always risky to do something different from what people are used to. Risk is the middle name of the bold, the builders of the future. Those who constantly face resistance from skeptics. Those who fail eight times and get up nine.

(Credit: Adobe Stock)

Fernando Pessoa’s “First you find it strange. Then you can’t get enough of it.” contained intolerable toxicity levels for Salazar’s Estado Novo (Portugal). When the level of difference increases, censorship follows. You can’t censor censorship (or can you?) when, deep down, it’s a matter of fear of difference. Yes, it’s fear! Fear of accepting/facing the unknown. Fear of change.

What do I mean by this? Well, I may seem weird or strange with the ideas and actions I take in life, but within my weirdness, there is a kind of “Eye of Agamotto” (sometimes being a curse for me)… What I see is authentic and vivid. Sooner or later, that future I glimpse passes into this reality.

When the difference enters, it becomes normal and accepted by society to make room for more innovation, change, and difference.

Cyberspace 2021.

The term “cyberspace” first appeared in fiction in the 1980s, incorporating the Internet invented earlier (1969). It’s as if time doesn’t matter, and cyberspace always exists. There might not be a name for it yet, but it sure did, like certain Universal Laws that we are discovering and coining, but that has always existed.

It is the ether of digital existence…!

In 1995, I was also called crazy — albeit nicely, by the way — when, from door to door, I announced the presence of something called the Internet. Entrepreneurs who esteemed me until they warmly welcomed me into their companies, perhaps because of my passion for explaining what was unknown to them, only to decline later what I proposed to them: placing companies in the network of networks.

I was affectionately dubbed crazy for a few more years until the part where “I stopped being crazy” to be another entrepreneur exploring something still strange called the Internet. We were about to reach the so-called “dot-com bubble.” The competition had arrived, and I clapped my hands; I no longer felt alone!

(Obviously, I wasn’t the only one to see the future forming in front of our eyes. I saw color on black and white screens.)

The heights of wisdom, the masters of the universe, began to emerge because they heard that the Internet was a business that made much money, and the gold rush became frantic and ridiculous. A few years later — some weren’t for years — there was a mushroom explosion.

After persuasion resulting from the obvious and not the explanations of insane people (me included), this new industry has matured and revolutionized the world. However, history tends to repeat itself, and several revolutions, large and small, have taken place since then. Some are so natural that change happens overt and viral. But more attention needs to be paid to some revolutionary changes that could jeopardize human existence as we know it.

I’m referring to Artificial Intelligence (AI) which is now everywhere, albeit invisible and tenuous. The exponential acceleration of technology is taking us there to the point of no return.

When Moore’s Law itself becomes outdated, it only means that technological acceleration has gone into “warp” speed. At the risk of us human beings becoming outdated, we must change our reluctance and skepticism.

There is no time for skepticism. Adaptation to what is coming, or what is already here among us, like extraterrestrials, is crucial for the evolution and survival of the human species. I believe we are at another great peak of technological development.

I always pursued the future, not to live outside the reality of the present but to help build it. After all these years of dealing with the “Eye of Agamotto,” I feel the duty and obligation to contribute to a better future and not sit idly by watching what I fear will happen.

Angels and demons lurk between the zeros and ones!

So far, with current conventional computers, including supercomputers, the acceleration is already vertiginous. With quantum computers, the thing becomes much more serious, and if we aren’t up to merging our true knowledge, our human essence, with machines, danger lurks.

Quantum computing powers AI, maximizing it. An exponentiated AI quickly arrives at the AGI. That is the Artificial General Intelligence or Superintelligence that equals or surpasses the average human intelligence. That’s the intelligence of a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task of any human being.

When we no longer have the artificiality of “our own” intelligence and Superintelligence has emerged, it’s good that the bond between human and machine has already had a real “handshake” to understand each other, just like two “modems,” understood each other in the BBS (Bulletin Board System) time.

We human beings are still — and I believe we always will be — the central computer, albeit with inferior computational resources (for now), and replaced by mighty machines that accelerate our evolution.

There is no way out. It’s inevitable. It’s evolution. So, a challenge and not a problem. Perhaps the greatest human challenge. So far, it’s been warming up. Henceforth, everything done will have to be free of human toxicity so that New AI is, in fact, our best version, the cream of the very best in human beings; its essence in the form of a whole!

A digital transformation is a transition to a different world. The power of adaptation to this different world defines our existence (survival, like Darwin).

As you’ve already noticed, the title of this article (Innovation is a risk!) has a double meaning. Let me complement it with:

Life is a risk!

A new discovery explains what determines the number and position of genetic exchanges that occur in sex cells, such as pollen and eggs in plants, or sperm and eggs in humans.

When are produced by a special cell division called meiosis, chromosomes exchange large segments of DNA. This ensures that each new cell has a unique genetic makeup and explains why, with the exception of identical twins, no two siblings are ever completely genetically alike. These exchanges of DNA, or crossovers, are essential for generating , the driving force for evolution, and their frequency and position along chromosomes are tightly controlled.

Co-first author of the study Dr. Chris Morgan explains the significance of this phenomenon: “Crossover positioning has important implications for evolution, fertility and selective breeding. By understanding the mechanisms that drive crossover positioning we are more likely to be able to uncover methods to modify crossover positioning to improve current plant and animal breeding technologies.”

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“It’s an extraordinary paper with some extraordinary claims,” says Gray Camp, a developmental biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, whose lab last year reported2 growing brain organoids that contained a gene common to Neanderthals and humans. The latest work takes the research further by looking at gene variants that humans lost in evolution. But Camp remains sceptical about the implications of the results, and says the work opens more questions that will require investigation.

Humans are more closely related to Neanderthals and Denisovans than to any living primate, and some 40% of the Neanderthal genome can still be found spread throughout living humans. But researchers have limited means to study these ancient species’ brains — soft tissue is not well preserved, and most studies rely on inspecting the size and shape of fossilized skulls. Knowing how the species’ genes differ from humans’ is important because it helps researchers to understand what makes humans unique — especially in our brains.

The researchers, led by Alysson Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, used the genome-editing technique CRISPR–Cas9 to introduce the Neanderthal and Denisovan form of a gene called NOVA1 into human pluripotent stem cells, which can develop into any cell type. They cultured these to form organoids, clumps of brain-like tissue, up to 5 millimetres across, alongside normal human brain organoids for comparison.

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In March 2017, Read and his Penn State colleague David Kennedy published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in which they outlined several strategies that vaccine developers could use to ensure that future vaccines don’t get punked by evolutionary forces. One overarching recommendation is that vaccines should induce immune responses against multiple targets. A number of successful, seemingly evolution-proof vaccines already work this way: After people get inoculated with a tetanus shot, for example, their blood contains 100 types of unique antibodies, all of which fight the bacteria in different ways. In such a situation, it becomes much harder for a pathogen to accumulate all the changes needed to survive. It also helps if vaccines target all the known subpopulations of a particular pathogen, not just the most common or dangerous ones. Richard Malley and other researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital are, for instance, trying to develop a universal pneumococcal vaccine that is not serotype-specific.

Vaccines should also bar pathogens from replicating and transmitting inside inoculated hosts. One of the reasons that vaccine resistance is less of a problem than antibiotic resistance, Read and Kennedy posit, is that antibiotics tend to be given after an infection has already taken hold — when the pathogen population inside the host is already large and genetically diverse and might include mutants that can resist the drug’s effects. Most vaccines, on the other hand, are administered before infection and limit replication, which minimizes evolutionary opportunities.

But the most crucial need right now is for vaccine scientists to recognize the relevance of evolutionary biology to their field. Last month, when more than 1000 vaccine scientists gathered in Washington, D.C., at the World Vaccine Congress, the issue of vaccine-induced evolution was not the focus of any scientific sessions. Part of the problem, Read says, is that researchers are afraid: They’re nervous to talk about and call attention to potential evolutionary effects because they fear that doing so might fuel more fear and distrust of vaccines by the public — even though the goal is, of course, to ensure long-term vaccine success. Still, he and Kennedy feel researchers are starting to recognize the need to include evolution in the conversation. “I think the scientific community is becoming increasingly aware that vaccine resistance is a real risk,” Kennedy said.

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The super app, synonymous with popular mobile apps like WeChat, Grab, GoTo and Paytm, has enjoyed noteworthy success in Asian countries, but is relatively absent in other markets. CNBC’s Nessa Anwar, joined by Arjun Kharpal, explains the strategies and evolution behind the world’s biggest super apps.

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