Panmere

As reported in the Economist:

As he told “The next 10 years”, a conference organised by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, Dr Harel has been working on a computer model of C. elegans. He hopes this will reveal exactly how pluripotent stem cells—those capable of becoming any sort of mature cell—decide which speciality they will take […]

Recently, I mentioned a newly released National Academy of Sciences report about the search for extraterrestrial life. After reading the report, I have a few comments.
The Executive Summary begins, appropriatetely, with a discussion of life itself and its characteristics:

Reflecting the near inevitability of human missions to Mars and other locales in the solar system where life might […]

There is always room for one more book on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Today, there was an announcement on the FOM discussion list by the author, Peter Smith, of An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems [1]. The author describes the book at his website:

You can get some idea of what is in the book by looking at the […]

The National Academy of Sciences has released a report [1], entitled “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems”. From the Preface:

This report explores a limited set of hypothetical alternative chemistries of life by following a hierarchy of possibilities that have been ranked through experimental, exploratory, and theoretical work done in the past. The study […]

The Declaration of Independence

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station […]

Last week in Nature, appears a peculiar editorial [1], entitled “Meanings of ‘Life’: Synthetic biology provides a welcome antidote to chronic vitalism.” It is a somewhat unsurprising coincidence that it appears almost on the same day as the Venter paper. Of interest are the following two remarkable assertions (bold added):
1)

There is a popular notion that life is something […]