MPJ

Cosmologically speaking, humans and all other animal forms of life (here on Earth) don't live very long. We can thank for this fact to the evolutionary design of life based on organic chemistry we are all made of. We came a long way from the point in history when evolution started to boost our development from hunter-gatherers into today's dominant species. But do we live longer today than before? Despite common belief and compared to our ancestors who lived in the past dozen of millenniums, the life span of humans today, enhanced by miracles of modern ways of living which in short list include improved health care and nutrition, better sanitation, access to clean running water and immunization, is not dramatically extended, if at all. Yes, the life expectancy (average life span of entire population) of the ancient times was way shorter than today but this statistical data was misleading for the fact of the vast number of people in distant past who died very young due to high c...

Genetics is, relatively speaking, a very young science. After discovery of DNA only couple of decades ago it stopped being solely statistical and psychological study of heredity and ever since then it was given a very important component in its labs - a microscope. In simple words, we are now able to dive more deeply into the world of genes and their government of human body and behavior. In this short time we learned a great deal of human genetics and how it works. Many genes are already identified in relation to how we act and interact with others and our environment. Let's discuss some of them that already earned cool nicknames in relation of what they are capable of or what we think and suspect they do. The mixture of genes we own are given to us by our parents, which they inherited from their parents who were gifted with the same from their own mothers and fathers and so on. What is finally our DNA composed of, basically defines us and not just our looks and physical propert...

Something was bothering her for days. She didn't actually know what it was. It was not the food. She knew that well and her belly was not itching her. Not a single bit. Mom was giving her delicious portions every day and she was feeling healthier and stronger every morning. It was not the air or water either. The forest and all three plains outside were.. Like the usual.. Beautiful and green with lots of life emerging from the trees and rocks. Even the ocean was calm and perfect the other day when she foolishly followed her older brother and his two peers to the cliff. They mocked her all the way down the stream and even took all her snacks she had and found on the way. No. What she started to experience just the other day after the trip to the cliffs was some sort of discomfort she never experienced before. Nobody could harm her in the forest. It was not that. Not even on the plains. She was always following her mother and brother during all their travels and never got into an...

There is a period of time we are familiar with acronym "BC". It stands, of course, for "Before Christ", the period before the famous tale about origin of Christian religion. But this time goes far behind Jesus. Far beyond origin of all monotheistic religions. It goes even before the eons when our ancestors knew gods in plural and to the ages when modern humans started their everlasting and ongoing endeavors. The time in prehistory occupied with endless wonders of surrounding nature without firm beliefs but surely filled with many invisible divine spirits and mysterious stars. Due to illiteracy of the period there's almost nothing tangible we could use to gain full knowledge of how early society really looked like and even though we know great deal about those times only by analyzing cave walls, fossil record and DNA samples, in order to describe one early settlement we still must use lots of imagination and scientific guesses. Personally and definitely c...

Stories and speculations about human origin are always fascinating. Ever since Darwin. " Origin of Species ", published in the middle of 19th century, was truly one of those real breakthroughs in scientific thought. However, even though it is widely accepted by the mainstream and to date no alternative theory exists, if we disregard religion, that is - theory of evolution is not complete. In it's core, Darwin's natural selection of life is 'only' describing the evolution as a process. How life adapts to changes. Trials and errors of survival of species. The entanglement of life and environment. What happens if one species collides with another. But, the origin is something else entirely. No valued theory is anywhere on the horizon. What happened at the very beginning is still a mystery. We just ... don't know. Hence.. The stories and speculations. This october my reading time has been reserved for two books about human origin. Coincidentally, they arri...

DNA is a fascinating world. That single molecule of life contains all the information about individual living being. Any bacteria, plant, insect, algae, fish, animal or human grows from that one molecule seed. Probably even some alien form still waiting to be discovered on some moon orbiting Jupiter or Saturn. In one way or another, the same could be true with all life in the universe. All of us are grown from that single instructions manual inside the single DNA set of written directions. And there are no two identical DNA in existence, even if we could mix the same two identical human egg and sperm cells several times, similar but different resulted DNA would always be the outcome. We are surely still not mastering the DNA and bio-engineering - it is still young science and even though one giant molecule of life was hinted by various scientists and scholars more than century ago, it was only in early fifties of 20th century when James Watson and Francis Crick created the first double...

Have you ever thought about what you would be or do if you were born in different ages? Well, the future is uncertain but even so I would most likely do some technical and innovative things. For example, if society evolved into living in the void of space I would definitely try to find a place aboard some research ship or orbital station. In plausibility of some, futuristic global society my place would be not so different than today, only my programming skills would probably be diverted from preposterous business projects into something more substantial and useful in science or engineering. But in the spirit of today's post, lets travel to the past and check several old ages. Two centuries ago in the dawn of industrial revolution I would most definitely be involved in machine invention process. Couple of centuries before that, in Leonardo's time, I would probably be hunted by church for my free-thinker ideas that would, most likely, contradict the main belief and dogma. Year...

Did you know that there are certain species on the face of the Earth that are truly and literally immortal? Yep. They never die. Of old age that is. I am not talking about some microscopic bacterial life or stubborn viruses in existence. No. Real animals. Take these two: turtles and lobsters. They literally don't age. When it comes to first one, I can't resist not to quote article in below refs* I read online - to the logical suspicion of endless turtle lifespan and why in aftermath they don't crawl everywhere we look today, they answer: "Of course they die, otherwise we'd be swimming in turtles, but the weird thing is, they never seem to die of old age. It's always a disease, or a falling boulder, or Master Shredder". And this is a real truth actually, including 'Master Shredder' who might be just a metaphor for us killing turtles for food or purses and belts or whatever we do with dead turtles. Joking aside, the very research of big turtles shows...