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Category: evolution

Understanding Jupiter’s early evolution helps illuminate the broader story of how our solar system developed its distinct structure. Jupiter’s gravity, often called the “architect” of our solar system, played a critical role in shaping the orbital paths of other planets and sculpting the disk of gas and dust from which they formed.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Konstantin Batygin, professor of planetary science at Caltech; and Fred C. Adams, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Michigan; provide a detailed look into Jupiter’s primordial state.

Their calculations reveal that roughly 3.8 million years after the solar system’s first solids formed—a key moment when the disk of material around the sun, known as the protoplanetary nebula, was dissipating—Jupiter was significantly larger and had an even more powerful magnetic field.

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Nitrous oxide, a commonly used analgesic gas, temporarily improved the opening of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) to allow gene therapy delivery in mouse models using focused ultrasound (FUS), UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report in a new study. Their findings, published in Gene Therapy, could eventually lead to new ways to treat a variety of brain diseases and disorders.

“The approach we explored in this study has the potential to advance care for diseases of the brain that can be treated by targeted therapeutic delivery,” said study leader Bhavya R. Shah, M.D., Associate Professor of Radiology, Neurological Surgery, and in the Advanced Imaging Research Center at UT Southwestern. He’s also an Investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and a member of the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases. Deepshikha Bhardwaj, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate at UTSW, was the study’s first author.

The BBB is a highly selective border of semipermeable cells that line tiny blood vessels supplying blood to the brain. It is thought to have developed during evolution to protect the brain from toxins and infections in the blood. However, the BBB also impedes the delivery of drugs that could be used to treat neurologic or neuropsychiatric conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or brain tumors. Consequently, researchers have worked for decades to develop solutions that can temporarily open the BBB to allow treatments to enter.

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Is your mind more than just your brain? Does the soul actually exist? These questions have been pondered for millennia. What does the latest scientific research suggest? On this episode of the ID The Future podcast, renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor begins a conversation with host @Andrew_McDiarmid about his new book The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. Egnor makes a powerful case that our capacity for thought, reason, and free will points to something beyond mere brain function.

After defining terms, Egnor begins exploring the compelling evidence he has gathered across four decades of practice in neurosurgery. He recounts the remarkable results of split-brain surgery, where patients whose brain hemispheres are functionally disconnected still feel like one person and can process information presented separately to each hemisphere. This implies a part of their mind is not solely located in their brain. You’ll also hear about conjoined twins who share brain parts but maintain distinct intellects and free will, highlighting which aspects of the soul are not brain-based and cannot be shared.

Along the way, Dr. Egnor also boldly challenges the Darwinian view of the mind’s evolution, arguing that abstract thought and free will are immaterial and could not have arisen through natural selection. Learn why Dr. Egnor believes nature is not a closed system and that science alone cannot fully interpret its own findings. Drawing on ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, he presents arguments for a cause outside of nature.

This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. In Part 2, we’ll explore Dr. Egnor’s personal journey from atheism to theism and more evidence for the immortality of the mind and the existence of the soul.

Enjoy more ID The Future here:

#neuroscience #intelligentdesign #mind #brain.

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He told Newsweek that the unexpected result “upsets the usual interpretation of the nature of the CMB. It essentially means that we do not have solid evidence for a hot big bang. Taking the observed CMB and subtracting this foreground leaves too little for the hot big bang to be real.”

(The “hot big bang” refers to how the universe started in a hot, dense, state and has been cooling and expanding ever since.)

Kroupa added: “This shocking result means that we now need to revisit the very foundations of everything we know about cosmology, gravitation and the evolution of the Universe and how galaxies came to be.”

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For a while now, there has been a problematic mystery at the heart of the standard cosmological model. Although all observations support the expanding Universe model, observations of the early period of the cosmos give a lower rate of acceleration than more local observations. We call it the Hubble tension problem, and we have no idea how to solve it. Naturally, there have been several proposed ideas: what if general relativity is wrong; what if dark matter doesn’t exist; what if the rate of time isn’t uniform; heck, what if the entire Universe rotates. So, let’s add a new idea to the pile: what if dark matter evolves?

While there have been several models proposing an evolving dark energy, the idea of evolving dark matter hasn’t been widely considered. The reason for this is twofold. First, the observations we have of dark matter are excellent. They point to the presence of some kind of material that doesn’t interact strongly with light. The only major weak point is that we haven’t observed dark matter particles directly. Second, the vast majority of folk opposed to dark matter focus on eliminating it altogether through things like modified gravity. They figure dark matter is fundamentally wrong, not something to be tweaked. That makes this new idea rather interesting.

In this work, the authors look at both evolving dark energy and evolving dark matter and argue that the latter is a much better fit to observational data. The first thing they note is that the two models are somewhat related. Since the evolution of the cosmos depends in part on the ratio of energy density to matter density, a model with constant dark matter and evolving dark energy will always appear similar to a model with evolving dark matter and constant dark energy.

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How did life originate? Ancient proteins may hold important clues. Every organism on Earth is made up of proteins. Although all organisms—even single-celled ones—have complex protein structures now, this wasn’t always the case.

For years, evolutionary biochemists assumed that most emerged from a simple signature, called a motif. However, new research suggests that this motif, without the surrounding protein, isn’t as consequential as it seemed. The study is published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

The international team of researchers was led by Lynn Kamerlin, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Georgia Research Alliance Vasser Woolley Chair in Molecular Design, and Liam Longo, a specially appointed associate professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Institute of Science Tokyo, in Japan.

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Everyone’s seen Rudolph Zallinger’s “The March of Progress” illustration showcasing the evolution of humans: from early primate ape ancestor, Dryopithecus, and progressing toward modern man, Homo sapiens. Evolution is a fascinating phenomenon, but it doesn’t necessarily always follow a straight path as portrayed by Zallinger.

The idea that evolution marches from simple to complex forms, building irreversibly on each prior form has been around for a long time. Paleontologist Louis Dollo’s law states that once an organism progresses with a specialized structure, it does not revert to the previous state.

But now, a new study published in the journal Evolution is challenging the prevailing belief that life progresses unidirectionally. The findings suggest some plants can evolve backward, i.e., specialized species can revert to their more primitive forms.

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By popular request we’ve begun adding playlists of the show as Podcasts on Youtube Music, I’ll try to add a new one every 2–3 days till we have most of our inventory up there, but given today’s Episode is *Cities of the Future*, a collection of all of those seemed a good idea https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LuyCbYUhy-79RQKkOXonmx4 These are the (tentatively named) upcoming playlists/podcasts list I’ll be adding, in no particular order: Megastructures & Extreme Engineering The Fermi Paradox & Alien Civilizations Space Colonization & Habitats Post-Scarcity & Future Civilizations Transhumanism & Human Evolution Propulsion & Interstellar Travel Terraforming & Planetary Engineering Mind, Machines & Alien Intelligence Future Warfare & Defense Strange Worlds & Alien Life.

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