Bacteria that can align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field have been found in a new habitat. Previously spotted on land and in shallow waters, these magnetotactic bacteria have now been confirmed to thrive in the depths of a hydrothermal vent. Despite the challenging conditions, the bacteria were able to adapt and survive in an environment that was not ideal for their typical needs.
Magnetotactic bacteria are of interest not only for the role they play in Earth’s ecosystem but also in the search for extraterrestrial life. Evidence of their existence can remain in rocks for billions of years. Their magnetic inclinations can also provide a record of how magnetic poles have shifted over time. This new discovery brings hope to researchers that the magnetic bacteria might be found in yet more unexpected locations, on Earth and perhaps even on Mars.
Mars is the second smallest planet in our solar system and the fourth planet from the sun. It is a dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere. Iron oxide is prevalent in Mars’ surface resulting in its reddish color and its nickname “The Red Planet.” Mars’ name comes from the Roman god of war.
Michael Levin discusses his 2022 paper “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds” and his 2023 paper with Joshua Bongard, “There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-scale Machines.” Links to papers flagged 🚩below.
Michael Levin is a scientist at Tufts University; his lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems. He works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science.
❶ Polycomputing (observer-dependent) 1:59 Outlining the discussion. 3:50 My favorite comment from round 1 interview. 5:00 What is polycomputing? 8:50 An ode to Richard Feynman’s “There’s plenty of room at the bottom“ 11:10 How/when was this discovered? Reductionism, causal power… 14:40 “It’s a view that steps away from prediction.“ 16:20 From abstract: Polycomputing is the ability of the same substrate to simultaneously compute different things *but emphasis on the observer(s)* 17:05 What’s an example of polycomputing? 19:40 They took a different approach and actually did experiments with gene regulatory networks (GRNs) 23:18 Different observers extract different utility from the exact same system. 26:35 Spatial causal emergence graphs (determinism, degeneracy) | Erik Hoel’s micro/macro & effective information. 29:25 Inventiveness of John Conway’s Game of Life.
❷ Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere. 34:20 Tell me 3 things to determine intelligence (ball vs mouse on a hill) 39:50 Jeff Hawkins’ Thousand Brains Theory. 41:05 Agency is not binary, continuum of persuadability. 44:50 Where’s the bottom of agency? Plants & insects far off from 0 46:55 What is the absolute minimum amount of agency? Some degree of goal directed behavior & indeterminacy… 51:05 Life is a system good at scaling. 51:41 “To me, our world doesn’t have 0 agency anywhere.“ 53:50 As an engineer, what can I take advantage of? 55:00 Surely you don’t think the weather has any intelligence to it…
❸ Attractor Landscapes. 58:35 Homeostatic loops, morphological spaces, attractor landscapes. 1:00:35 “Of course we’re living in a simulation!“ 1:06:45 Attractor landscapes, topography, anatomical morphous space (D’Arcy Thompson) 1:12:28 Planaria stochastic, probability of head shape proportional to evolutionary distance between species. 1:15:15 What is the secret of the universe? Attractor landscapes, quantum fields, black holes. 1:19:05 We need a new system of ethics for unconventional minds.
Animals have a living pulse. Do microbes have something like that as well? If so, it could be a universal biosignature for detecting extraterrestrial life and be useful for many other applications. For more see:
When can we call something alive? This question is more difficult than you may think and has far-reaching practical implications.
In their 1982 paper, Fredkin and Toffoli had begun developing their work on reversible computation in a rather different direction. It started with a seemingly frivolous analogy: a billiard table. They showed how mathematical computations could be represented by fully reversible billiard-ball interactions, assuming a frictionless table and balls interacting without friction.
This physical manifestation of the reversible concept grew from Toffoli’s idea that computational concepts could be a better way to encapsulate physics than the differential equations conventionally used to describe motion and change. Fredkin took things even further, concluding that the whole Universe could actually be seen as a kind of computer. In his view, it was a ‘cellular automaton’: a collection of computational bits, or cells, that can flip states according to a defined set of rules determined by the states of the cells around them. Over time, these simple rules can give rise to all the complexities of the cosmos — even life.
He wasn’t the first to play with such ideas. Konrad Zuse — a German civil engineer who, before the Second World War, had developed one of the first programmable computers — suggested in his 1969 book Calculating Space that the Universe could be viewed as a classical digital cellular automaton. Fredkin and his associates developed the concept with intense focus, spending years searching for examples of how simple computational rules could generate all the phenomena associated with subatomic particles and forces3.
Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have made a discovery that could change our understanding of the universe. In their study published in Science Advances, they reveal, for the first time, that there is a range in which fundamental constants can vary, allowing for the viscosity needed for life processes to occur within and between living cells. This is an important piece of the puzzle in determining where these constants come from and how they impact life as we know it.
In 2020, the same team found that the viscosity of liquids is determined by fundamental physical constants, setting a limit on how runny a liquid can be. Now this result is taken into the realm of life sciences.
Fundamental physical constants shape the fabric of the universe we live in. Physical constants are quantities with a value that is generally believed to be both universal in nature and to remain unchanged over time—for example the mass of the electron. They govern nuclear reactions and can lead to the formation of molecular structures essential to life, but their origin is unknown. This research might bring scientists one step closer to determining where these constants come from.
If we’re ever going to have confirmation of Alien-life, today could be the day, scientists have said. It all began when Japanese astronomers Masaki Morimoto and Hisashi Hirabayashi used a Stanford University telescope 40 years ago to put out a radio signal towards a star called Altair, which was 16.7 light years away.
Why didn’t they send pictures instead of a kid’s drawings? I would be embarrassed to send those to anyone to explain the origin of our species.
Narusawa, 58, believes intelligent life lingers somewhere in the universe, and it’s possible a planet in Altair’s solar system could be harboring intelligent extraterrestrial life.
“Altair may have a planet whose environment can sustain life,” he told the outlet.
An exoplanet is any planet outside our solar system orbiting a star — though there are free-floating exoplanets called “rogue planets” that are untethered in space, according to NASA.
These and other missions on the horizon will face the same obstacle that has plagued scientists since they first attempted to search for signs of Martian biology with the Viking landers in the 1970s: There is no definitive signature of life.
That might be about to change. In 2021, a team led by Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow in Scotland and Sara Walker of Arizona State University proposed a very general way to identify molecules made by living systems—even those using unfamiliar chemistries. Their method, they said, simply assumes that alien life forms will produce molecules with a chemical complexity similar to that of life on Earth.
Called assembly theory, the idea underpinning the pair’s strategy has even grander aims. As laid out in a recentseries of publications, it attempts to explain why apparently unlikely things, such as you and me, even exist at all. And it seeks that explanation not, in the usual manner of physics, in timeless physical laws, but in a process that imbues objects with histories and memories of what came before them. It even seeks to answer a question that has perplexed scientists and philosophers for millennia: What is life, anyway?
