Daily Archives: July 22, 2017

To understand the significance of the so-called Monkey Trial, one must try to imagine the America of 1925; specifically, the southern state of Tennessee.

Under pressure by a coalition of strict Christians, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to pass a law the Butler Act that deemed it illegal to "teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal."

The act alarmed many in the legal community, including the recently formed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which persuaded John Scopes, a 24-year-old high school science teacher and football coach from Illinois, to test the constitutionality of the law in what became known as The Monkey Trial.

The trial also attracted intense media attention, including live radio broadcasts of the trial for the first time in history, according to an award-winning documentary by PBS's American Experience on the trial.

Attorney Clarence Darrow represented Scopes; William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic conservative, represented both Tennessee and the fundamentalists who were deeply opposed to Charles Darwin's theory.

"I knew, sooner or later, that someone would have to stand up to the stifling of freedom that the anti-evolution act represented," Scopes wrote in his 1967 book Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes.

The trial ended on July 21 with a guilty verdict and $100 fine.

A year later, the ACLU issued its appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which upheld the law, but overturned the conviction of Scopes on a legal technicality.

Decades later in 1967, Tennessee repealed the act and teachers were free to teach the theories of Darwin without breaking the law.

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1925 Scopes Trial Pits Creationism Against Evolution - Voice of America

Edward Parks, who plays Steve Jobs, and the Santa Fe Opera Chorus in The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. Ken Howard/Courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera hide caption

Edward Parks, who plays Steve Jobs, and the Santa Fe Opera Chorus in The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs.

Mark Campbell is one of the most prolific and celebrated librettists in contemporary American opera. But, as he recently told an audience at the Guggenheim Museum, not everyone thought his latest project was a good idea.

"I've had a number of socialist friends of mine saying, 'Why would you write an opera about Steve Jobs? He was the worst capitalist!' " he said.

Campbell's response to those naysayers? " 'Reach in your pocket you probably have an iPhone there.' "

Jobs has been the subject of movies and books, and now the Apple co-founder's life has also become the stuff of opera. A decade after Apple released its first smartphone, The (R)evolution Of Steve Jobs premieres Saturday on the stage of the Santa Fe Opera.

Even Campbell was initially skeptical of the idea, which came from 40-year-old composer Mason Bates. Bates was convinced that in Jobs' "complicated and messy" life, he'd found the right subject for his very first opera.

"He had a daughter he didn't acknowledge for many years; he had cancer you can't control that," Bates says. "He was, while a very charismatic figure, quite a hard-driving boss. And his collisions with the fact that he wanted to make everything sleek and controllable yet life is not controllable is a fascinating topic for an opera."

The (R)evolution Of Steve Jobs shifts back and forth in time over the course of 18 scenes. Its fragmented, non-linear narrative was a deliberate choice by Campbell and Bates, who wanted to reflect Jobs' personality and psyche. "Steve Jobs did have a mind that just jumped from idea to idea to idea it was very quick," Campbell says.

Bates also created a different "sound world" to match each character. Jobs, for instance, played guitar and spent much of his life dealing with electronics, and so he "has this kind of busy, frenetic, quicksilver world of acoustic guitar and electronica," Bates explains. On the other hand, he says, Jobs' wife, Laurene Powell, inhabits a "completely different space, of these kind of oceanic, soulful strings."

Other characters include Steve Wozniak, Jobs' business partner, and the Japanese-born Zen priest Kobun Chino Otogawa, who led Jobs to convert to Buddhism and served as a mentor for much of his life. Otogawa's "almost purely electronic" sound world makes use of prayer bowls and processed Thai gongs.

As often happens when his compositions premiere, Bates will be seated among the orchestra musicians, triggering sounds and playing rhythms from two laptops. And before you ask: Yes, they are Mac computers. (Bates is quick to note he's not sponsored.)

Even the set echoes Jobs' creations. After a prologue in the iconic garage where Jobs' ideas first took shape, the garage walls explode into six moving cubes with screens that look a lot like iPhones. "We're doing something called projection mapping, where all of the scenic units have little sensors, so the video actually moves with them," opera director Kevin Newbury explains. "We wanted to integrate it seamlessly into the design because that's what Steve Jobs and Apple did with the products themselves."

Jobs's design sensibilities were enormously influenced by Japanese calligraphy including the ens, a circle that depicts the mind being free to let the body create. Bates says that also figures in the opera's title: The (R)evolution Of Steve Jobs, with the capital "R" in parentheses.

"Of course, there's the revolution of Steve Jobs in his creations and his devices. There's also the evolution from a countercultural hippie to a mogul of the world's most valuable company," Bates points out. "And there's the revolution in a circle of Steve Jobs as he looks at the ens, this piece of Japanese calligraphy, and finds that when he can kind of come full circle, he reaches the kind of completion that he sought so long in his life."

That's the side of Jobs this new opera explores: the way his life was marked by the struggle to find the balance between life's imperfections and his drive to create the perfect thing.

Originally posted here:

Sing Different: Steve Jobs' Life Becomes An Opera - NPR

July 20, 2017 by Elizabeth Howell , Astrobiology Magazine The researchers examined the biological processes of E.coli, a common bacteria. Credit: NIAID

A common bacteria is furthering evidence that evolution is not entirely a blind process, subject to random changes in the genes, but that environmental stressors can also play a role.

A NASA-funded team is the first group to design a method demonstrating how transposonsDNA sequences that move positions within a genomejump from place to place.

The researchers saw that the jumping rate of these transposons, aptly-named "jumping genes," increases or decreases depending on factors in the environment, such as food supply.

"This is a new window into how environment can affect evolution rates," said Nigel Goldenfeld, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We can measure evolution rates for the first time, and we can see evolution acting at the molecular level."

Thomas Kuhlman, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said bacteria species can also play a role in jumping rates, as well as the environment.

"The activity of these transposal elements is not uniformly random; it's not just a pile of cells," he said.

Kuhlman and Goldenfeld recently published a paper on the research, "Real-time transposable element activity in individual live cells," in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was led by Neil Kim, a physics graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and also included work from fellow students Gloria Lee, Nicholas Sherer and Michael Martini.

True colors

Goldenfeld studies the role of the environment on evolution, while Kuhlman focuses on the biological processes of E. coli, a common bacteria that lives in the digestive tracts of humans and animals and the cause of infections by way of contaminated feces.

The two researchers came up with a novel approach to watching the movement of jumping genes by engineering an E. coli that expresses a fluorescent protein when the transposons "jump" out of a genome. Because the cell lights up when this occurs, the researchers were able to record the cells that jump more than others.

"The cells light up only when a transposon jumps," Goldenfeld said. "So we can see how often they jump, and when they jump, and where they jump from."

Goldenfeld's team also constructed a computer simulation of the jumping activity that was able to rule out random activity as the primary reason for jumping. Once they compared the simulation with the laboratory trials, it was clear that the transposons were not jumping randomly. Goldenfeld said the findings shed more light on the mechanisms of evolution.

A fundamental assumption of evolution has been that mutations and other instabilities in the genomes randomly occur in an organism as a 'blind" evolutionary force, and those that are beneficial to the cell lead to reproductive success. Another possibility, less accepted by biologists, is that the environment prompts the cell or organism to mutate in order for the cell to prosper better. These adaptive mutations, or stress-induced mutations, occur in response to stressors in the environment.

"Our work shows that the environment does affect the rate at which transposons become active, and subsequently jump into the genome and modify it," Goldenfeld said. "Thus the implication is that the environment does change the evolution rate. What our work does not answer at this point is whether the transposon activity suppresses genes that are bad in the particular environment of the cell. It just says that the rate of evolution goes up in response to environmental stress.

"This conclusion," he added, "was already known through other studies, for certain types of mutation, so is not in itself a complete reversal of the current dogma. We hope that future work will try to measure whether or not the genome instabilities that we can measure are adaptive."

Kuhlman said he has hopes of future research on more complex organisms.

"The next step is operating in yeast, as a very simple eukaryotic cell. Then eventually much further down the road, we'll get [the process] working in mammalian or human cells."

The research is not only useful for understanding the origins of life, but also uncovering situations where cells undergo rapid mutations. One possible application could be routing out the pathways of cancer, which happens when cells abnormally grow and cause problems with the rest of the body.

Goldenfeld added that the findings also have clear implications to astrobiology.

"One of the things that astrobiology is concerned with is the interaction between the environment and the rate of evolution," he said. "Our work showed for the first time that there are environmental influences on the rate of transposon activity, because we could literally measure the effect. We did this quantitatively and compared it with theoretical predictions that assumed that transposon activity was random. We could show that the activity is not random at all."

The NASA Astrobiology Institute funded the research.

Explore further: Watching 'jumping genes' in action

More information: Neil H. Kim et al. Real-time transposable element activity in individual live cells, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601833113

This story is republished courtesy of NASA's Astrobiology Magazine. Explore the Earth and beyond at http://www.astrobio.net .

"Jumping genes" are ubiquitous. Every domain of life hosts these sequences of DNA that can "jump" from one position to another along a chromosome; in fact, nearly half the human genome is made up of jumping genes. Depending ...

Nature is full of parasitesorganisms that flourish and proliferate at the expense of another species. Surprisingly, these same competing roles of parasite and host can be found in the microscopic molecular world of the ...

By inserting an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)-linked human gene called TDP-43 into fruit flies, researchers at Stony Brook University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory discovered a potential role for 'transposons' in ...

The vesper bats are the largest and best-known common family of bats, with more than 400 species spread across the globe, ranking second among mammals in species diversity.

The genome is not a fixed code but flexible. It allows changes in the genes. Transposons, however, so-called jumping genes, interpret this flexibility in a much freer way than "normal" genes. They reproduce in the genome ...

The human genome shares several peculiarities with the DNA of just about every other plant and animal. Our genetic blueprint contains numerous entities known as transposons, or "jumping genes," which have the ability to move ...

(Phys.org)A large international team of researchers has conducted a genetic analysis and comparison of the world's biggest cats to learn more about their history. In their paper published on the open source site Science ...

Optimization for self-production may explain key features of ribosomes, the protein production factories of the cell, reported researchers from Harvard Medical School in Nature on July 20.

For mice and men, a strength in one area of Darwinian fitness may mean a deficiency in another. A look at Olympic athletes shows that a wrestler is built much differently than a marathoner. It's long been supposed that strength ...

Grasshopper mice (genus Onychomys), rodents known for their remarkably loud call, produce audible vocalizations in the same way that humans speak and wolves howl, according to new research published in Proceedings of the ...

Three new species of toads have been discovered living in Nevada's Great Basin in an expansive survey of the 190,000 square mile ancient lake bottom. Discoveries of new amphibians are extremely rare in the United States with ...

Cutting through the ocean like a jet through the sky, giant bluefin tuna are built for performance, endurance and speed. Just as the fastest planes have carefully positioned wings and tail flaps to ensure precision maneuverability ...

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A simple bacteria reveals how stress drives evolution - Phys.Org