15 results found.
... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 8: Fall 1979 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Importance Of Nonsense One of the greatest surprises of modern molecular biology has been the discovery of "split genes" in higher forms of life. In the chromosomes of lowly bacteria, genes march along one behind the other, but in more complex organisms the genes are separated by segments of genetic material that apparently have nothing to do with the manufacture of protein. Because there seems no need for these inserted jumbles of genetic information, they are characterized as "nonsense." But evolutionists insist that this nonsense must have some survival value or it wouldn't be there! Present speculation is that the nonsense segments separate mini-genes that contain the blueprints for assembling well-defined parts of proteins that possess specific functions. To illustrate, the main part of the immunoglobulin molecule has four functional parts (one for interacting with cell membranes, another that functions as a hinge, and so on). Lo and behold, the immunoglobulin gene consists of four mini-genes separated by three segments of nonsense. The suspicion is that the evolution of higher life forms has been accelerated by keeping these prefabricated, functionally oriented mini-genes apart and shuffling them as integral units. The shuffling of entire functional elements rather than smaller bits and pieces of genetic information might speed up organic evolution. (Lewin, Roger; "Why Split Genes?" New Scientist, 82:452, 1979.) From Science Frontiers #8 , Fall 1979 . ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 117: May-June 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Unread Biotic Message We have been selling ReMine's book The Biotic Message in which he asserts that life itself is a message of transcendental nature. Every bacterium and human is a cosmic statement. Shifting from the macroscopic to the microscopic (phenotype to genotype), we recall that all macroscopic "statements" are really expressions of DNA -- the genetic code. But when we examine DNA, we find that only about 3% of the DNA in human cells codes for protein manufacture. The remaining 97% is termed "nonsense" or "junk" DNA. But there may actually be sense in nonsense DNA. Statistical analysis of nonsense-DNA "words" (3 -8 bases long) reveals considerable redundancy. Long stretches of nonsense DNA are definitely not random. In fact, the structure of nonsense DNA resembles that of language. The coding or "sense" DNA, on the other hand, lacks this language structure. The implication is that coding and nonsense DNAs carry different kinds of messages. The former consists simply of blueprints; the latter is couched in a language that we have not yet learned to read. (Flan, Faye; "Hints of a Language in Junk DNA," Science, 266:1320, 1994.) Comment. On the microscopic level, we can read only 3% of the biotic message! From Science Frontiers #117, MAY-JUN 1998 . 1998 ...
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... treacherous computer of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was being slowly disconnected, it began singing "A Bicycle Built for Two." In other words, the cutting of the computer's interconnections did not result in gibberish, rather memories that were previously stored flashed through its data processors. Something similar seems to happen with nonfictional computers. When a type of computer program termed an "artificial neural network" is "killed" by cutting links between its units, it in effect approaches a state which "might" be something like biological "death." S.L . Thaler, a physicist at McDonnell Douglas, has been systematically chopping up artificial neural networks. He has found that when between 10% and 60% of the network connections have been severed, the program generates primarily nonsense. But, as the 90% (near-death!) level is approached, the network's outout is composed more and more of previously learned information, like HAL's learned song! Also, when untrained artificial neural networks were slowly killed, they responded only with nonsense. (Yam, Philip; "' Daisy, Daisy'," Scientific American, 268:32, May 1993.) From Science Frontiers #88, JUL-AUG 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 37: Jan-Feb 1985 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The earth is expanding and we don't know why Let us taunt the geologists now with an idea that many of them consider to be nonsense. The Expanding Earth Hypothesis goes back to at least 1933, a time when the Continental Drift Hypothesis was accorded the same sort of ridicule. Now, Continental Drift is enthroned; and ironically many of its strongest proponents are vehemently opposed to the Expanding Earth, ignoring the lessons of history. The data that suggest that the earth has expanded significantly over geological time come from the pleasant pastime of continent fitting. If one takes the pieces of continental and oceanic crust and tries to fit them together at various times over the past several hundred million years, taking into account the production of crust at the midocean ridges, the fit gets worse and worse as one works backward in time. Great gaps (or "gores") appear between the pieces of crust which geologists believed existed at these periods. (Of course, one can play this puzzle-piece game only at passive continent-ocean boundaries where the oceanic crust has not slid under the continental crust. The South Atlantic is a good place to work.) These embarrassing, grotesque gaps can be made to disappear almost as if by magic by assuming that the earth was smaller in the past. This seems, on the surface, to be a crazy idea. Why would an entire planet swell up like a balloon? ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 25: Jan-Feb 1983 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Manifestations of earth energy at megalithic sites?Stories have long circulated that strange phenomena cluster about megalithic sites, such as Stonehenge. Those who claim psychic powers state that earth energies (whatever they are) seem to focus at these ancient constructions. The story goes that the builders of the stone circles could also detect these natural forces and intentionally chose these spots where the energies were most powerful. "Proper" siting and orientation were doubtless important to the builders of the megalithic structures, but can modern, no-nonsense science even begin to explore these mystical, psychic claims? Given today's scientific impatience with all psychic subjects, one would not expect a scientific journal, even a popular one, to touch the subject of "earth energies." Yet, here is an article describing the use of ultrasound detectors and Geiger counters in surveying megalithic monuments for foci of earth energies. Sure enough, curious enhancements of ultrasound intensity were discovered at the Rollright Stones. At another site, the natural radiation background level was anomalously depressed. It is all very mystifying. (Robins, Don; "The Dragon Project and the Talking Stones," New Scientist, 96: 166, 1982.) Comment. This appearance of this article would be comprehensible if it were in the April 1 issue of New Scientist, but it wasn't . In truth, of course, there could be something in the "earth energy" ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 8: Fall 1979 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology Enigmatic Stone Forts of the American Midwest Libyan Signs From Southeastern Kentucky Astronomy Are the Sun's Fires Going Out? An Oasis on Mars -- No Palm Trees But... Due to A Fortunate Coincidence You Can Read About A Fortunate Coincidence Rings of Uranus: Invisible and Impossible? Biology Convergent Evolution Or Chance Look-alikes The Importance of Nonsense Geology Coral Carbon Ratios Confound Chronometry Old Tektites in Young Sediments? Iridium and Mass Extinctions Geophysics Brontides Become Respectable Chicken-plucking by Tornados Psychology Deathbed Experiences Laid to Rest ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 10: Spring 1980 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Dynamic Dna Smugness over our discovery of the genetic code and some simple features of biological synthesis has recently been undermined by the recognition that the so-called nonsense segments in genes may be important after all. Now comes the realization that the DNA molecule may not be a staid, static construction. Travelling kinks and other disturbances seem to play some unknown role in biological recognition. Some biochemists have even suggested that DNA winds and unwinds or "breathes" like a living thing as it helps to manufacture biological substances. (Spencer, Michael; "Bent DNA," Nature, 281:631, 1979.) Comment. The addition of the time dimension to biological synthesis evokes thoughts of oscillating systems, frequency dependence, filters, etc. Perhaps Nature has invented something better than the silicon chip. From Science Frontiers #10, Spring 1980 . 1980-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... of all in this respect. (Schlaug, Gottfried, et al; "In Vivo Evidence of Structural Brain Asymmetry in Musicians," Science, 267: 699, 1995. Nowak, Rachel; "Brain Center Linked to Perfect Pitch," Science, 267:616, 1995) Comment. Perfect pitch is nice to have, but why should it have evolved at all seeing it has little survival value? What good is perfect pitch -- or any kind of musical talent -- in tracking animals or grubbing for tubers? Women vs. men. In another application of magnetic resonance imaging, B. Shaywitz and colleagues at Yale compared the inferior frontal gyrus areas of the brains of men and women engaged in language tests. Specifically, they were being asked whether or not two nonsense words rhymed. Men, they found, use only the left inferior frontal gyrus area, but in women both left and right areas were activated. Conclusion: women, who regularly score better than men in linguistic tests, may acquire this extra capability by harnessing both halves of their brains. (Aldhous, Peter; "Why Women Are Better with Words," New Scientist, p. 10, February 18, 1995) From Science Frontiers #99, MAY-JUN 1995 . 1995-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 11: Summer 1980 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Hierarchies Of Evolution All organisms from man to mouse to amoeba are merely DNA's way of manufacturing still more DNA -- so goes the modern ramification of molecular biology and the Genetic Code. In other words, DNA and genes are selfish, and ultimate parasites, directing the evolution of life only to maximize the production of DNA. This theme is not the subject of this paper by Doolittle and Sapienza. Rather, they wonder about those nonsense DNA sequences that do not code for protein. The presence of these "useless" bits of genetic material is often explained in terms of gene "expression." Emphasis is always on maximizing the "fitness" of the organism (phenotype). Perhaps this seemingly excess genetic material actually maximizes the fitness (survivability) of the DNA itself. Evolution thus occurs at DNA and gene (genome) levels, despite what transpires at the organism (phenotype) level. (Doolittle, W. Ford, and Sapienza, Carmen; "Selfish Genes, the Phenotype Paradigm and Genome Evolution," Nature, 284:601, 1980.) Comment. We know that mitochondria and chloroplasts have their own genetic material; evolution may be occurring at this level, too, independent of pressures for change on the organisms. Waxing speculative, may there not be other hierarchies where systems are trying to maximize their own survivability, even at molecular, atomic, and subatomic levels? Don't laugh! ...
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... Oh, The Complexity of it All!The headlines say that the human genome has been charted and further imply that we now can read life's total blueprint. Closer study of the announcement reveals that there still remain unreadable snippets of the genome here and there. In fact, the total number of human genes is still in doubt: maybe 30,000, some say 120,000. This wide range of uncertainty does not inspire belief in the accurate readability of this biological blueprint at the present time. Usually left unsaid is the fact that the present blueprint covers only 2-3 % of the territory. That's right, 97-98% of the human genome isn't mapped at all. This uncharted territory is assumed to be "junk" or "nonsense" DNA that plays no role in heredity. Want to bet that this assumption is correct? And don't forget that genes jump around. The genome is really a moving target. Genes also work in concert. It is not one gene coding for one protein, which then has a singular role in creating an operational human being. For example, some 5,692 genes are active in breast-cancer cells. Genes may also have multiple roles. Our present blueprint of the human genome does not display all the mobility and complex interrelationships of the genes. We do know that genes are the blue-prints for the manufacture of proteins. Of these, there may be over 1,000,000 different -- more than ten times the number of genes! These ...
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... All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Flies fly into frogmouth's mouth Papuan frogmouth after just catching a fly Behind this deliberately cryptic title lurks a curiosity that verges on the anomalous; namely, a bird (the Papuan frogmouth) that apparently secretes a substance in its cavernous mouth that attracts flies. This bird, according to several observers, does not have to fly with its mouth agape to catch insects like its relatives (whippoorwills, etc.). It often simply sits on a branch with its huge mouth open, and flies enter of their own accord to investigate the source of a promising odor. J. Diamond, who wrote about this "living flytrap" in the February issue of Natural History, wondered about the evolutionary rationale here: "My first thought was, nonsense! If so, frogmouths would have achieved every species' evolutionary dream -- getting food without work or cost. Then I reflected that there was indeed a cost, that of synthesizing the sticky chemical bait. On the other hand, a raven-sized bird would have to attract a lot of flying insects before its strategy of setting itself up as a living flytrap could rate as successful." In the same article, Diamond introduced the reader to two other remarkable birds also found in Papua New Guinea. Both of these birds are meaty, lumbering, and easy to kill. Ideal prey, one would suppose. However, almost as they gasp their last breath, they begin to stink. Predators learn to avoid them. Natives who sometimes hunt them joke that one has to ...
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... RNA World. What besides a chemical soup might have existed before "life-as-we-know-it" arrived upon the scene? A science fiction writer like H.P . Lovecraft could certainly come up with an ominous entity based upon RNA alone. Be that as it may, a book is now on the market bearing the title The RNA World (R .F . Gesteland and J.F . Atkins, eds., Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1993) Nature reviewed the book in its January 20 issue. In addition, the RNA World was discussed recently in Science. We now extract one nugget from each of these two sources. From Nature's review. Humans are more primitive than microorganisms in the sense that we still retain cumbersome introns (nonsense DNA) in our genes, while lowly microorganisms have been able to eliminate them. From Science. No one seems to have a clue about where RNA came from. C. de Duve ventured that: ". .. the emergence of RNA depended on robust chemical reactions -- it is wrong to imagine that some fantastic single accidental event supported the development of the RNA World." In connection with the generally accepted idea that the evolution of RNA must have taken hundreds of millions of years: ". .. de Duve suggested that, on the contrary, for such a complex chemical process to succeed it must have been relatively fast in order to avoid decay and loss of information." (Brenner, Sydney; "The Ancient Molecule," Nature, 367:228 ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 38: Mar-Apr 1985 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Hypnosis And Memory Hypnotic hypernesia is the unusually vivid and complete recall of information from memory while under hypnosis. The present article reviews the extensive literature on the subject and the longstanding controversy as to whether hypnosis can enhance memory at all. One fact does seem clear, hypnosis does not help subjects recall nonsense data or information without meaning, such as random numbers and words. When it comes to meaningful phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc., hypnosis does aid recall to some extent. If the words evoke considerable imagery, as poetry often does, hypnosis seems to help recall even more. Finally, the recall of meaningful visual images and connected series of images is helped most of all by hypnosis. In fact, there is some evidence that eidetic imagery, that vivid, near-total recall of images, which is almost exclusively a talent of childhood, can be recovered by mature subjects under hypnosis. There do not seem to be any theories that explain all these effects of hypnosis on memory. (Relinger, Helmut; "Hypnotic Hypernesia," American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 26:212, 1984.) Comment. Of course, memory shorn of hypnotic effects cannot really be explained either. The results of Relinger's survey make one wonder whether the human brain is specially "wired" or built to efficiently handle visual imagery that is "meaningful" in the context of human experience and theoretical expectations. This ...
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... their own, how do the prions multiply? Recent laboratory work suggests that the prions subvert a gene that normally dwells in the brain. With the help of this gene, an endless stream of prions emerges, and the animal is sick. In hamsters, which are employed in laboratory research on scrapie, a gene demarcated PrP has been implicated in scrapie. PrP is present in both healthy and infected hamster brains, but no one knows what its normal function is, if indeed it has one. (Anonymous; "Prion Gene," Scientific American, 253:60, July 1985.) Comment. One can make an immediate connection between the traitorous PrP genes in the hamster brains and the excess genetic material in humans and all life forms. Biologists commonly call excess genetic material "nonsense DNA" which only means that they haven't devined its purpose. But, as already sugested, these unused blueprints may have had some past purpose or will be called into action in the future. The purpose may be insidious, as in the case of scrapie, or vital to the organism's survival in some unrecognized biological Armageddons. From Science Frontiers #41, SEP-OCT 1985 . 1985-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 17: Fall 1981 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Was there really a big bang?Narlikar says, "Maybe not," and proceeds to tick off observational evidence against it. He begins, however, by pointing out the philosophical impasse encountered as Big Bang proponents look backward to time = 0 and earlier. Where did the matter/energy of the Big Bang come from? Was the venerable Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy violated? Big Bangers loftily dismiss such questions as "nonsense." Narlikar follows with some observational problems of the Big Bang: There seem to be objects in the universe that are older than the Big Bang age of the universe (9 -13 billion years); Quasar redshifts used to support the Big Bang theory may arise from the general expansion of the universe; The microwave background radiation of 3 K, which was gleefully embraced by Big Bangers as an echo of their version of creation, is actually of the same energy density as starlight, cosmic rays, etc., and need not have anything to do with the Big Bang; and The Big Bang Theory and General Relativity assume a constant G (the gravitational constant), but some recent lunar orbit measurements suggest that G is slowly decreasing! (Narlikar, Jayant; "Was There a Big Bang?" New Scientist, 91:19, 1981.) Comment. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the whole Big Bang business is the contempt with which theory supporters dismiss all objections. ...
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