Life, But Not As We Know It?

This is a cool story I was intending to cover in my good news/bad news segment but I really wanted to talk about it, so sorry that I couldn’t wait, but I assure you I will find something equally cool to talk about on Monday.

Take a look here for the original article if you want to hear a professional journalist covering this, seeing as I will probably leave out something very important completely by accident.

Cutting to the chase, researchers have recently been working on variations on DNA and RNA structure and observing whether or not these variations could undergo the same complex processes that have led to the great diversity of life we see today.

You may remember the story a year or two ago about bacteria that could incorporate arsenic into their DNA to replace the phosphorous in their sugar/phosphate backbone. Well, whether that story deserved the credit it got or not, this goes even deeper into the molecular processes of the key to our genetics.

In fact, by retaining the coding system of nitrogenous bases (adenine, guanine, thymine/uracil, cytosine) and replacing the sugars used in the DNA backbone to create XNA, or xeno-nucleic acid; scientists found that this molecule could indeed undergo its own processes of replication, and on a larger scale, evolution.

Could this mean that life could be more common in the universe than we suspect? Surely, the ability of these molecules to form in other structures than they have on earth increases the possibilities? Perhaps.

What I would like to see personally, is how many other molecules the base pair system could work with.

If there are many more amino acids, or even better, other molecules that could code in similar enough ways to produce the effects we see in life, then, more than ever, it would be arrogant to declare ourselves the chosen people, to assume we are alone in the universe.

Sicko

I won’t drivel on for too long today because I’m feeling rather under the weather.

Now you may not think that feeling ill would prevent me from blathering on but apparently I can’t quite even stop myself from accidentally pressing the caps lock key on my laptop, and if that were to carry on for a good half an hour this would probably look like a very different kind of blog, one that would hopefully not go timecube-esque as I grapple with the urge to retreat to my bedchambers and sleep like Gordon Freeman in between Half-Life 1 and 2.

While going through this I must also grapple with the fact that if I want to do well in my education I should turn up to all lectures, therefore my nap window is slim and slimming the more I get distracted from writing the next sentence to this blog; if I did miss one, with the laboratory sessions anyway, I’d lose 10% of the total module mark, which is crazy, because not everyone’s going to be able to turn up to everything, people get sick, and while I’ve turned up to every lesson thus far there are people in my group who haven’t been able to for medical reasons, and they really need to push hard to not get their mark reduced.

And for what? Because they didn’t turn up to infect the other students? Because they’d rather throw up at home than in class?

Now, I know that might sound a little extreme but its a real example, and one that the system doesn’t really account for, in fact, the way around the situation is so convoluted that in the time you’ve taken to get back the ten percent you lost when you were ill you may have lost enough revision time that you’d lose ten percent in your exams.

In short, being ill sucks, especially for students.

Dear Mr. F.U. Adams

Dear Mike Adams,

I know I rag on you a lot, and I know you probably don’t read this blog or give half a shit of what I or any other sceptic think about your website with its horrendous promotion of anti-vaccination, homeopathy and basically anything that you can stick the word natural onto despite their dissenting explanations and clashing explanations of how basic physics can be defined because of anecdotal evidence and the fact that instead of being a vital part of ‘big pharma’ they are yet another huge business that gets off by pointing its finger at another one that actually produces efficacious medicine that can help people.

Sure all corporate men and women are greedy, but I prefer my megalomaniacs to actually be doing something useful rather than handing out bollocks like they’re hot dogs on sticks, although I suppose since bollocks are ‘natural’ and hot dogs are not you’d much rather eat a bollock, I hear they’re not vegetarian but hey, at least they’re natural eh?

Now where was I? Oh yes.

Mr. Adams have you ever heard of a thing called sustainability? You see not only do you tirelessly promote organic food (no doubt in an effort to sell your plethora of overhyped and overexpensive products) which is not sustainable for the growing population at large, but in one of your recent articles about lab-grown meat you suggest that the world return to traditional animal raising methods rather than this speculative alternative.

You see Mr. Adams, these ‘natural’ derivatives you so pine for are not given any more power of argument from your argument from antiquity. In the years where traditional farming methods were employed above other more efficient schemes and medicine as useless as that which you promote and vaccines were not widespread, a large fraction of a couples’ children would die incredibly early and adult humans were lucky to reach middle age.

Since scientific progress has been increasing, as has human health, quality of life and life expectancy.

What you are promoting is purely based on the fact that you believe it to be natural.

That again is a logical fallacy, as is your career pretty much.

you so easily brush of reducing CO2 emissions by 96% and reducing energy uptake by 45% to be ‘hardly the logical next step in resolving the problem [of environmental impacts of farming]“.

Now here’s where you need to understand what sustainability is. When you do, you might notice that it’s a lot more logical than your proposal.

You see those percentages above? Sustainable levels, much more than what we have at the moment if this estimation is to be believed (which I’m not dead certain about considering how long we probably have left to go until we see the end result).

With lab grown meat, the animal casualties will be absolutely minimal so the ethical issues are tackled rather efficiently, and with just a few animal cells, creating as much meat as they are proposing would be an incredible step to feeding the world and creating a sustainable food source to ensure that our growing population will be equipped to survive the nutritional bottleneck we could potentially create in the future with our breeding rates.

Now I’m not here to talk about organic food but just to give you an idea, GM crops are modified to try and solve this problem, and they are truly, at least in my opinion, the unsung heroes of today’s society, opposed only by those who do not quite understand the basis behind the modifications and what outward effects they create.

Mr. Adams, traditional farming would not be sustainable to feed a growing population, in fact not even one our size could manage with as high a quality of nutrition as we get at the moment by relying on this lifestyle.

In fact I’d like to see you abandon your website and almost criminal business to try your hand at traditional farming.

Write me back with the results and if you feed the world I’ll put away this needle I intended to stealthily vaccinate you with.

Yours Sincerely, Edward Strickson.

P.S. You self righteous prick.