November 25, 2009 – 3:39 am
A groundbreaking paper “Generation of long RNA chains in water” from Costanzo, Pino, Ciciriello and Di Mauro on Journal of Biological Chemistry proposes conditions for the obtainment of complex RNA chains from cyclic nucleotides. The proposed conditions are typical for the pre-biotic Earth: hot springs and puddles with water at moderate temperature (40 to 90 [...]
You are welcome to take a look at Part 1 and Part2 of this series.
In this third part of the “silicon-based” bacterial evolution, we move to the real action. I developed a program (you can download it from here), which perform evolutive selection based on mathematical criteria. The program has a set of rules to [...]
This is the second part of a post relative to evolution. You can find the first part of the post here.
The last argument in the first post was relative to the requirements for evolution to happen. To recall, you need
An imperfect replicator, an entity able to produce a copy of itself, for example the DNA [...]
This post is in different parts. The fact is that it requires quite a lot of time investment, something I really don’t have in this period.
A long time ago I wanted to play with the concept of genetic code, and how it represents nothing but a language to code for molecular machines. As the Jacquard [...]
I found a very interesting commentary by Nick Bostrom, about the existence of extraterrestrial life and the so-called Fermi Paradox.
The point Nick Bostrom presents is sensible: the current evidence is that life is apparently not very frequent in the Universe. Despite all efforts we did toward finding life, intelligent or not, we failed. Moreover, the [...]
October 20, 2007 – 7:59 pm
Today I was taking a look at this page, and in particular to the geological clock image
Of course there’s uncertainty on the correctness of the actual moments in time, but assuming these values are more or less correct it is quite interesting to note that it took only 500 million years to go from a [...]
