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DNA is Blueprint, Contractor and Construction Worker for New Structures

In the Northwestern study, gold nanoparticles take the place of atoms. The novel part of the work is that the researchers use DNA to drive the assembly of the crystal. Changing the DNA strand's sequence of As, Ts, Gs and Cs changes the blueprint, and thus the shape, of the crystalline structure. The two crystals reported in Nature, both made of gold, have different properties because the particles are arranged differently.

"We are now closer to the dream of learning, as nanoscientists, how to break everything down into fundamental building blocks, which for us are nanoparticles, and reassembling them into whatever structure we want that gives us the properties needed for certain applications," said Chad A. Mirkin, one of the paper's senior authors…

The bunny is hopping over to the Land of Edge once again. There are some thought provoking exchanges there which include comments of Stuart Hameroff arguing a concept mentioned at Telic Thoughts before. It's unusual to cite the last paragraph of a long page in an introduction but here is that paragraph from the Land Of Edge link.

There are interesting historical aspects to both sides of this physics/biology metaphor. Darwin provided a causal mechanism for seemingly teleological results. Similarly, quantum mechanics provides a causal mechanism for why the principle of least action works, a principle that smells teleological, the way it is formulated classically.- Piet

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The Irrationality of Science is a Viewpoint article which comments on the recent op ed piece by Paul Davies. A quote from the Davies article is followed by the author's response. My comments follow that.

Davies:

Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith….In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

Viewpoint author:

The last sentence is an irritatingly common misrepresentation of faith. Faith is not believing despite the lack of evidence, faith is believing despite the fact that the evidence falls short of proof. Anyway, Davies is going to argue that science, like religion, is ultimately based on faith:

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Bradford posted about Paul Davies' op-ed in the New York Times on the thread Science and Faith. Which quickly went downhill as our live-in critics decended like vultures to put a quick stop to any real discussion.

The SciBlog community wasn't hampered by such tactics, so came out hot and heavy in defense of their ideology against Davies' observations. Anti-theist PZ Myers insisted that Faith is not a prerequisite for science, but only managed to demonstrate laughable ignorance of the relevant science. My favorite excerpts…

When someone says that life would not exist if the laws of physics were just a little bit different, I have to wonder"¦ how do they know? Just as there are many different combinations of amino acids that can make any particular enzyme, why can't there be many different combinations of physical laws that can yield life?

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Paul Davies authored Taking Science on Faith an opinion piece in the New York Times. He asks some questions about laws of physics at the end of this paragraph:

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion "” all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

Davies next notes an attitude shift and the dependence of life on a limited range of mathematical values. We live in a universe that accomodates life; a most convenient condition.

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Writing in Nature, professor of biology Chris D. Thomas bemoans the environmental damages caused by human activity. But not to worry, he says. In a few million years, humans will be extinct.

The geological perspective of Terra is bizarrely reassuring. Humans will presumably be gone within a few million years, perhaps sooner. If the past that Novacek describes is a guide to the future, global ecosystem processes will be restored some tens of thousands to a million years after our demise, and new forms of life over the ensuing millions of years will exploit the denuded planet we leave behind. Thirty million years on, things will be back to normal, albeit a very different 'normal' from before. It is good to be optimistic. The problem is living here in the meantime.

Robin Hanson wonders: "Yet if a plague, for example, were to produce this outcome within the next ten years, I'm pretty sure most everyone would see this as a catastrophe of the highest possible order. So how does this become a good thing if it happens in the next million years?"

More on scientists cheering for the death of humans here.

A PLOS Computational Biology paper entitled Are There Rearrangement Hotspots in the Human Genome? is authored by Max A. Alekseyev and Pavel A. Pevzner. It addresses an issue important to our understanding of genomic dynamics and how we view causes of change. Recent controversy about rearrangement hotspots and different models are discusssed. The random breakage model (RBM) is contrasted with the fragile breakage model (FBM). The former argues that no rearrangement hotspots exist in the human genome while the latter argues that the human genome is a mosaic with regions having low propensity for rearrangements existing along with fragile regions or rearrangement hotspots. The summary of the paper follows:

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There were a couple of very interesting research news reports this week coming in from the fields. Turns out that biological scientists are beginning to understand why their simplistic model of evolution [a.k.a. Neodarwinian Synthesis] can't account for the empirically obvious differences between human beings and our closest relatives. They've been looking at things the wrong way, guided by that simplistic model.

First up is the report that Ancient Retroviruses Spurred Evolution of Gene Regulatory Networks. About the estimated 8% of the human genome that consists of primate-specific retroviral DNA insertions.

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Joy posted the blog entry Stop the Presses! It's all Over! citing questionable news coverage of a paper published by researchers at the University of Manchester. The university's press release titled St Bernard study casts doubt on creationism contains two paragraphs which I'll quote and comment on. The first:

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The leaders in the New Atheist Movement like to equate religious belief with mental illness. While we can expect such rhetoric from activists, what is troubling is that the same people typically posture as advocates for science. This is troubling because science continues to show that religious belief is actually good for mental health. For example, consider this study that was announced just yesterday:

Research shows that religion and spirituality are linked to positive physical and mental health; however, most studies have focused on people with life threatening diseases. A new study from the University of Missouri-Columbia shows that religion helps many individuals with disabilities adjust to their impairments and gives new meaning to their lives.

According to the study, persons facing impending death may use religion to help them accept their condition, come to terms with unresolved life issues, and prepare for death. However, the study suggests that religion may be an equally, if not more important, coping mechanism for persons with chronic disabilities such as traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, stroke and arthritis.