According to this article, we can gain design insights from even the small creatures.
"Some of the most ingenious ideas for designing microfluidic systems come from observing plants and animals. A study that quantifies the protein-driven helical flow of liquid in large plant cells, for instance, may well inspire micron-scale liquid mixers and sensors."
In looking at proportional development we see the kind of specificity and complexity that makes arguing for design easy.
"Instead of discounting the variability of the Bicoid gradient among different embryos, we found this noise to be an advantage of the system," said Dr. Ma, also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. "The amount of Bicoid going to small and large embryos all self corrects, so the system is built to be very robust and precise so different cells can be told to become part of the head, or part of something else, in a proportionate manner."
Scientists are using the gecko foot as a design pattern for adhesives.
"The gecko's amazing ability to stick to surfaces and walk up walls has inspired many researchers to manufacture materials that mimic the special surface of a gecko's foot. The secret behind the gecko's ability to stick so well is a forest of pillars at the micro-/nano-scale on the underside of the gecko's foot. Because there are so many pillars so close together, they are held tightly to the surface the gecko is walking on by a molecular force called the Van der Waals force."
The search for new physics (such as string theory) centers around trying to find evidence that relativity fails in particular cases.
These new theories can be exotic and contain many strange elements such as multiple beginnings and multiple universes. To the extent that such constructs exist, the singular beginning of the universe is undermined. However as pointed out in this article, speculators are going to need to wait for another day.
"Physicists working to disprove "Lorentz invariance" -- Einstein's prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they're turned or how fast they go -- won't get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists...
The notion of a Lorentz-violating field has become popular among theoretical physicists. Known physical rules do not do a very good job of explaining the cataclysmically chaotic moments immediately following the Big Bang, so some physicists are developing new theories to sort out the mess."
Life has turned out to be far more complex and sophisticated than we could have ever imagined. Is such complexity a natural outworking of random processes or is it indicative of design? That is the question that many seek to answer.
Here you can read about some of this remarkable complexity in this article about plants.
"Researchers at the University of Delaware have discovered that when the leaf of a plant is under attack by a pathogen, it can send out an S.O.S. to the roots for help, and the roots will respond by secreting an acid that brings beneficial bacteria to the rescue.
The finding quashes the misperception that plants are “sitting ducks”--at the mercy of passing pathogens--and sheds new light on a sophisticated signaling system inside plants that rivals the nervous system in humans and animals."
Cells have sophisticated backup systems in place to handle scenarios when things go wrong. In particular, there are redundant genes in place to handle situations when problems occur. As pointed out in the article, this failsafe operation presents a problem for traditional and simplistic knock out schemes which are used to understand gene function. However, help is on the way in the form of a new screening technique.
"In a typical RNAi screen, researchers begin with a library of short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) targeting specific genes. Each siRNA disrupts the gene's ability to produce a particular protein. Scientists place the siRNAs on thousands of cells, with just one gene being targeted in each well of cells. Then they watch the cells and record changes.But this approach fails to capture some key players because many genes are redundant. Thus, cells can mask their distress when they lose a single gene by turning to fail-safes with the same function. Perrimon's approach overcomes this obstacle.
"If you take one part out of a plane engine, it still works, but if you take out that part plus its fail-safe, then you're in trouble," explains corresponding author Chris Bakal, a postdoctoral research in the Perrimon lab."
This article describes a fabrication technique that will allow for the modeling of structures based on those that exist in biological organisms.
"Living organisms provide inspiration for innovations in many different fields and for entirely different reasons. Energy is stored in a chemical form by plants with almost 100% efficiency. Animal muscle is an efficient mechanical motor capable of an exquisite degree of control. Transmission of information in the nervous system is more complex than in the largest telephone exchanges. And the problem-solving capabilities of a human brain greatly exceed those of the most powerful supercomputers. In this vein, biological species furnish numerous examples of structures exhibiting multifunctional properties."
Followers of biblical archaeology would be interested in this finding."The Bible and other Jewish sources are full of details about the priests and high priests, from the descriptions of their garments as described in the Book of Exodus, to the number of high priests who served in the First and Second Temples. Now archaeology is providing new evidence to show the institution indeed existed: a fragment from the lid of a sarcophagus, bearing the inscription "son of the high priest" in a Second Temple-era script."
This is an interesting bit of news. It shows how little we know about genomic change over time. It further illustrates a lack of knowledge when it comes to understanding the purpose of various genomic constructs.
"Scientists have discovered mystery snippets of mammal DNA that have survived eons of evolution and yet have no apparent purpose. The finding reveals just how much we don't know about the secrets hidden in our genome and that of other animals."
Convergence is a theme that I have mentioned in the past. The important thought concerning convergence is that life is a lot more constrained than anticipated. Some argue that this restricted nature argues against an evolution that is completely random in nature.
"Striedter and Charvet show that parrots and songbirds also resemble primates in a key aspect of forebrain development: all three groups of animals have enlarged telencephalic subventricular zones, which contain specialized forebrain progenitor cells.
Striedter and Charvet further suggest that this enlargement of the forebrain's subventricular zone is due to a mechanical constraint arising from the cellular mechanisms governing forebrain development."
Nature provides many examples of good engineering that can be used to inspire human designs.
"Lauga and his team demonstrate that water snails have to distort the surface in order to move. "If they don't, they won't go anywhere," said Lauga, who explained that these water snails naturally rise up due to their low weight, and therefore do not have to work to remain near the surface.
Lauga and his colleagues said their finding could lead to a new method of propulsion. One of Lauga's colleagues, Anette Hosoi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has already imitated the adhesive/ lubricating propulsive method of land snails to drive a robotic device. Now, as a result of this new water snail finding, the researchers said it may be possible to build similar devices that walk on water.
"The water snails show us that this is possible, and therefore one can design biomimetic systems taking advantage of that movement," Lauga says.
While there's much still to be learned, we are seeing that what was previously thought to have no function, has purpose in the genome.
"For about 15 years, scientists have known that certain "junk" DNA -- repetitive DNA segments previously thought to have no function -- could evolve into exons, which are the building blocks for protein-coding genes in higher organisms like animals and plants. Now, a University of Iowa study has found evidence that a significant number of exons created from junk DNA seem to play a role in gene regulation."
