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POLITICAL RESISTANCE. “There is a strong perception within the technosignature search community that NASA has an institutional hostility, or at least staunch resistance, to including searches for technosignatures in its research portfolio. This perception comes from, among other things, private discussions with NASA officials, public comments by NASA officials, and explicit (and often contradictory) language in NASA funding calls excluding searches for technosignatures.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend and ends this weekend on a history of the search for extraterrestrial life and recommendations going forward supported by 126 prominent experts. Of note, this covers only the search for technosignatures of intelligent life, not any efforts to see if biosignatures of other life forms might exist, such as bacteria or viruses, or life as we do not know it. Logically, they are inextricably connected, but our search for biosignatures is an even sadder story of institutional lack of support. View in LinkedIn

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ELECTROCHEMICAL CLOCK REGULATION. "There is growing awareness that circadian clocks are closely related to the intracellular redox state across a range of species. As the redox state is determined by the exchange of the redox species, electrochemically controlled extracellular electron transfer (EC-EET), a process in which intracellular electrons are exchanged with extracellular electrodes, is a promising approach for the external regulation of circadian clocks.” https://lnkd.in/d-EW9zi View in LinkedIn

EXPANDING BEYOND HOBBYISTS. “The resulting workshop report stated: “...getting good answers to the questions posed by the workshop is not a matter of asking the appropriate experts to synthesize information that already exists, it will require training and supporting scientists to do the work necessary to generate that information in the first place. ​—Technosignatures Workshop Participants (2018).” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

CLOCK ENTRAINMENT. “Circadian clocks, which underlie the daily rhythms in virtually all organisms, are entrained by diurnal changes in light, temperature, nutrients, and even sound.” https://lnkd.in/dYTpyue View in LinkedIn

DIRTY LITTLE SECRET. “The small size of the trained workforce in the field is a major problem for NASA and its search for life in the universe.​ For instance, at the NASA Technosignatures Workshop, participants were charged with answering questions about the state of the art of the field, advances coming in the near- and medium-future to advance the field, and what role NASA could play in the field.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

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CONSERVED CLOCKS. “It is not surprising such clocks have been documented frequently in organisms ranging from photosensitive cyanobacteria to humans. The key genes involved in animal circadian clocks are highly conserved. For example, there is high homology among core insect and human circadian clock genes, and recent work on circadian clocks in the cnidarian, Nematostella vectensis, reveals a high similarity of the cnidarian clock to both insect and mammalian clocks, thus implying an early evolution of clocks within animals.” http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/content/53/1/131.full View in LinkedIn