Year: 2022

GROUND-BREAKING. "When Wade posted his self-replicating mathematical organism on a Life community website on 18 May, it sparked a wave of excitement. “This is truly ground-breaking work,” wrote a fellow Life enthusiast, Adam Goucher, on the website Game of Life News. “In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.” https://lnkd.in/d-ckTpQ View in LinkedIn

SIMPLICITY GENERATES COMPLEXITY. "A first for the game, the replicator demonstrates how astounding complexity can arise from simple beginnings and processes – an echo of life’s origins, perhaps." https://lnkd.in/d-ckTpQ View in LinkedIn

"SIMPLE COMPLEXITY. Gemini’s implications extend to the real world. “There’s a fascination with the complexity that is coming out of these incredibly simple rules,” says Susan Stepney, a computer scientist at the University of York, UK, who ran Gemini inside Life, at New Scientist‘s behest. “Eventually that leads on to biology, putting simple atoms together to make complex life.” https://lnkd.in/d-ckTpQ View in LinkedIn

LAUDED ACHIEVEMENT. "Because Wade’s replicator copies itself piece by piece, it is analogous to a photocopier rather than a living cell...because it shows there are multiple ways of solving the same problem. It’s a very impressive technical achievement.” https://lnkd.in/d-ckTpQ View in LinkedIn

NEW VISTAS. "Wade’s discovery could help devise ways to build a molecular-scale computer, starting from tiny components like the cells in Life. “This discovery is helping us understand the world of constructing things from dumb components." https://lnkd.in/d-ckTpQ View in LinkedIn

POSSIBILITY OF LIFE TRANSITION. "Upon observing the seemingly unlimited complexity and variety of Life's evolving patterns, it becomes almost impossible to refrain from imagining, along with Conway, that, were the game really to be played on an infinite lattice, there must surely arise true living ‘life-forms’, perhaps themselves evolving into more complex, possibly sentient, ‘organisms’." https://lnkd.in/d3B2FKW View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues for the second of three weekends on the theme of plant clocks, why they exist, and how they work. These mechanisms are ubiquitous across taxa, and are sophisticated in construction. In many (or most) cases, when external stimuli are removed, they keep ticking. Living things, it seems, are obsessed with time, and have put a lot of ingenuity into marking its passage. I shall refrain from quoting TS Eliot. View in LinkedIn

TRANSCRIPTION PRESENCE. "Circadian control of transcription is widespread, and the list of plant genes regulated by the circadian clock is extensive. Microarray analyses suggest that ∼10% of all Arabidopsis genes regulated at the level of mRNA abundance and have identified multiple metabolic pathways under circadian control." https://lnkd.in/d4JRQbh View in LinkedIn

CIRCADIAN CHARACTERISTICS. "These rhythms all share the same fundamental properties: (i) their ability to become entrained, or synchronized, to diurnal changes in environmental conditions; (ii) persistence upon transfer to constant conditions; and (iii) a constant period over the physiological range of temperatures." https://lnkd.in/d_f7kfY View in LinkedIn

"THE TIMING MECHANISM used in photoperiodism seems in most cases to be based on endogenous circadian rhythms in light sensitivity, as first postulated by Bunning (1936). He suggested that the circadian clock consisted of two half cycles, photophil and scotophil. When light was received in the scotophilic phase, the daily cycle was perceived as an long day, but the absence of light during the scotophilic phase produced an short day response. Support for these circadian clock-based models was initially provided by physiological studies." https://lnkd.in/d_f7kfY View in LinkedIn