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Seasonal goodies at their best! View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends on a spectacular Russian paper on finding intact organisms outside the ISS space station, and their five year investigation of the topic, with careful controls. This builds on many reports of experimental organism survival in outer space, including lichens and tardigrades. Humanity has been willfully blind about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and has spent a pitiful amount of money and effort investigating this topic, possibly out of fear of causing public unrest. View in LinkedIn

CORRECT CONTAMINATION CONTROLS. “The composition of DNA of detected biomaterial excludes single accidental contamination of terrestrial origin. Furthermore, sampling and processing procedures that were used reduced the likelihood of contamination to a minimum. The absence of contamination is supported by clean negative controls, which are very important when using molecular techniques.” https://lnkd.in/dNHWs6R View in LinkedIn

TRANSPORT MECHANISM. “The discovery in the present study of the DNA of the marine and terrestrial bacteria on the surface of the ISS requires an explanation of the transport mechanisms allowing living matter to reach a height of more than 400 km.” https://lnkd.in/dNHWs6R View in LinkedIn

SECOND HYPOTHESIS. “In this paper samples of space dust from the exterior surface of the ISS were subjected to PCR analysis followed by sequencing of the PCR products. The results obtained indicate the possibility of a mass transfer of the sea bacterial plankton (or its fragments) to the ISS orbit. Alternatively, the transfer of biological material from space to ISS and thence to the ground may be supposed.” https://lnkd.in/dNHWs6R View in LinkedIn

STRIPE AND TRIANGLE MOTIFS. “Fig. 6 shows the distributions of stripes and triangles in this group and the maximum-likelihood assignment of ancestral states. The presence and absence of stripes, in particular, is scattered throughout the phylogeny, indicating that they are evolutionarily labile, although triangle presence/absence shows some correlation with large clades.” https://lnkd.in/dwfZQzE View in LinkedIn

WOLFRAM INSPIRATION. “Bard Ermentrout, John Campbell, and George Oster, (1986). Inspired by Wolfram and cellular automata, this is a classic. The neural hypothesis of shell patterning: the secretory activity of the epithelial cells that generate shell patterns is regulated by nervous activity. “ https://lnkd.in/dgWQqGF View in LinkedIn

UV LIGHT HISTORIES. “Unlike their modern relatives, the 4.8-6.6 million-year-old fossil cone shells often appear white and without a pattern when viewed in regular visible light. By placing these fossils under ultraviolet (UV) light, the organic matter remaining in the shells fluoresces, revealing the original coloration patterns of the once living animals. However, it remains unclear which compounds in the shell matrix are emitting light when exposed to UV rays.” https://lnkd.in/dUkV8Fr View in LinkedIn

PHYLOGENETIC SIGNAL. “We found phylogenetic signal in the continuous parameters of the primary neural network and in the presence/absence of a hidden network, suggesting that the model reasonably approximates the developmental processes underlying pigmentation patterns in the Conus species we considered. In contrast, various features of the pigmentation patterns, such as the presence of stripes and dots, do not have significant phylogenetic signal.” https://lnkd.in/dwfZQzE View in LinkedIn

NON-HOMOGENEOUS EDDIES. “The sensitivity of the neural network to perturbations means that small, gradual evolutionary shifts in one or a few parameters of the neural network can shift a shell from one pattern regime into an entirely dissimilar one.” https://lnkd.in/dwfZQzE View in LinkedIn