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BLADE RUNNER 2049 predicted that a society which kept every record electronically could easily be wiped clean by cosmic accident such as sun flares or by malicious intent; bank records, IDs, property deeds, the lot. View in LinkedIn

ADAPTATION TO DRY LAND. “Angiosperm fossil records dating back to the Lower Cretaceous (130–140 million years ago) show, in addition to the generation of seeds, the second major functional innovation of the spermatophytes: the evolution of pollen grains which harbor, and thus protect, sperm cells (the male gametes) from drying out.” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674205214608996 View in LinkedIn

ULTIMATE VULNERABILITY. “Someday the Net will be the summation of the world's total computing resources. All computers will link up into a chaotic digital soup in which everything is connected – indirectly or directly – to everything else. This coming Net of distributed resources will be tremendously powerful, and tremendously hard to harness because of its decentralized nature. It will be an ecology of computing machines, and managing it will require an ecological approach.” http://www.wired.com/1995/02/viruses/ View in LinkedIn

PLANT SWIMMING SPERM "requires an aqueous environment and thus limits their dispersal. Spermatophytes evolved mechanisms to protect their gametes from desiccation and so spread to almost all terrestrial areas. Flowering plants (angiosperms), which develop seeds from ovules that are enclosed in an ovary, represent the most successful phylum, comprising an extraordinary diversity of species dominating today’s terrestrial life.” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674205214608996 View in LinkedIn

WARNING. “Spawn of the devil, computer viruses may help us realize the full potential of the Net.” http://www.wired.com/1995/02/viruses/ View in LinkedIn

DEEPLY SENTIENT PLANTS. “During fertilization, cell–cell communication events take place to achieve and maximize reproductive success. Additional layers of crosstalk exist, including self-recognition and specialized processes to prevent self-fertilization and consequent inbreeding.” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674205214608996 View in LinkedIn

CENTRAL CORE. “One important difference between these polymorphic viruses, as these adaptive variants are known, is that computer viruses only changes form. "Only the package is changed;" the code is not rewritten.” http://www.pcworld.com/article/252103/computer_viruses_could_cross_frontier_into_biological_realm_researchers_say.html View in LinkedIn

THE POLLEN TUBE. “Sperm cells of flowering plants are non-motile and thus require transportation to the egg apparatus via the pollen tube to execute double fertilization. During its journey, the pollen tube interacts with various sporophytic cell types that support its growth and guide it towards the surface of the ovule. The final steps of tube guidance and sperm delivery are controlled by the cells of the female gametophyte.” https://lnkd.in/d9zxv6K View in LinkedIn

PROVOCATIVE QUESTION. “We came to wonder if there can be some kind of convergence between human viruses and computer viruses...It may sound like a scenario for a bad Hollywood movie, but it is not such a stupid question." https://lnkd.in/ddTvp9R View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first weekend on double fertilization in flowering plants. After millennia of random experimentation and brutal winnowing, the reproductive pieces that survived in this group look more like a functional train crash rather than an elegant and streamlined process of passing on genes and generating diversity by outbreeding. This is a poster child of evolution as a blind band-aid process where incompatible systems are bolted together after lineage fusions in a make-do manner. And still, they somehow work against all odds. View in LinkedIn