Emergence is the development of complex organized systems. Like intelligence in the field of AI, or agents in distributed artificial intelligence, emergence is a central concept in complex systems

Emergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All well and good. Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling insights. But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has always been that at least now we would have a deeper — simpler — understanding of the universe. That the more we could observe, the more we would know. But what about the less we could observe? What happens to new knowledge then? It’s a question cosmologists have been asking themselves lately, and it might well be a question we’ll all be asking ourselves soon, because if they’re right, then the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the night sky, we’re seeing the universe.

Not so. Not even close.

Out There : Most of the Universe is Dark Matter

Mergers are increasing in importance for nonprofit organizations. This flow chart with helpful narrative guides administrators through a 5-phase plan to complete a merger from the critical early discussions through the merger’s execution.

Merger Process Flowchart

Erwin Schr�dinger was born on August 12, 1887, in Vienna, the only child of Rudolf Schr�dinger, who was married to a daughter of Alexander Bauer, his Professor of Chemistry at the Technical College of Vienna.

Erwin's father came from a Bavarian family which generations before had settled in Vienna. He was a highly gifted man with a broad education. After having finished his chemistry studies, he devoted himself for years to Italian painting. After this he took up botany, which resulted in a series of papers on plant phylogeny.

Erwin Schr�dinger - Biography

We start out outside the cell, they zoom into it and we see the cell membrane and protein structures around it that make it move, into the inside of the cell where proteins interact to get work done, structural protein fibers self assembling, and then it takes us into the nucleas, where we see dna translated into RNA, assembled into proteins which are then processed and shipped to the cell membrane for use in fighting crime... errr infection.

I wish they'd had this in biology class. This is amazing.

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A pair of strange new worlds that blur the boundaries between planets and stars have been discovered beyond our Solar System.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Strange 'twin' new worlds found

The genetic code specifies all the proteins that a cell makes. The second code, superimposed on the first, sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped. The spools both protect and control access to the DNA itself.

The discovery, if confirmed, could open new insights into the higher order control of the genes, like the critical but still mysterious process by which each type of human cell is allowed to activate the genes it needs but cannot access the genes used by other types of cell.

...

Knowing the pattern, they were able to predict the placement of about 50 percent of the nucleosomes in other organisms.

The pattern is a combination of sequences that makes it easier for the DNA to bend itself and wrap tightly around a nucleosome. But the pattern requires only some of the sequences to be present in each nucleosome binding site, so it is not obvious. The looseness of its requirements is presumably the reason it does not conflict with the genetic code, which also has a little bit of redundancy or wiggle room built into it.

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In the genetic code, sets of three DNA units specify various kinds of amino acid, the units of proteins. A curious feature of the code is that it is redundant, meaning that a given amino acid can be defined by any of several different triplets. Biologists have long speculated that the redundancy may have been designed so as to coexist with some other kind of code, and this, Dr. Segal said, could be the nucleosome code.

WOOT!

Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA - New York Times

When men spend the night in the same bed with someone else their sleep patterns are disturbed, even if they do not have sex. This leads to poorer performance in intelligence tests the next day, UK’s Daily Mail newspaper said quoting an Austrian scientist’s research.

Women, too, get disturbed sleep if they share a bed, but their mental ability is not affected. Professor Gerhard Kloesch of the University of Vienna and his team used eight young unmarried, childless couples for the study.

Holy fuck. She's making me stupid.

Share a bed makes men dull

String theory, which took off in 1984, posits that elementary particles such as electrons are not points, as standard physics had it. They are, instead, vibrations of one-dimensional strings 1/100 billion billionth the size of an atomic nucleus. Different vibrations supposedly produce all the subatomic particles from quarks to gluons. Oh, and strings exist in a space of 10, or maybe 11, dimensions. No one knows exactly what or where the extra dimensions are, but assuming their existence makes the math work.

String theory, proponents said, could reconcile quantum mechanics (the physics of subatomic particles) and gravity, the longest-distance force in the universe. That impressed particle physicists no end. In the 1980s, most jumped on the string bandwagon and since then, stringsters have written thousands of papers.

But one thing they haven't done is coax a single prediction from their theory. In fact, "theory" is a misnomer, since unlike general relativity theory or quantum theory, string theory is not a concise set of solvable equations describing the behavior of the physical world. It's more of an idea or a framework.

Partly as a result, string theory "makes no new predictions that are testable by current _ or even currently conceivable _ experiments," writes Prof. Smolin. "The few clean predictions it does make have already been made by other" theories.

Hahaha, its so great to hear someone trash an entire field of study, when its not a fundy or a crackpot!

Northwest Florida Daily News: Has string theory tied up better ideas in physics?

In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples -- water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis's home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001 -- contain microbes from outer space.

Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600 degrees Fahrenheit . (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250 degrees Fahrenheit .)

Kerala is where the Indian monsoon begins...

Mysterious red cells might be aliens� - Jun 2, 2006 - CNN.com