16 Steps to Generating Advanced Life
By Dr. Hugh Ross                                                         May 15, 2014
Sixteen steps punctuate the history of life on Earth. Each of these steps is critical for making possible the entry of advanced life. The likelihood of all these steps occurring from a naturalistic perspective is essentially zero. This zero probability does not take into account either life’s origin or the origin of the mind and the human spirit.

Why does the history of life appear the way it does? Naturalists, materialists, deists, and most theistic evolutionists would answer that the chemicals on early Earth spontaneously self-assembled into a simple cell that was able to reproduce. From there, the cell's daughters evolved to produce all the life-forms that have ever existed throughout the past 3.8 billion years. Such a history requires that life make at least 16 transitional steps in order to generate advanced life-forms.

1. Cells containing only a few hundred gene products must transition to cells containing several thousand gene products.
2. Respiration systems must transition from anaerobic to aerobic.
3. Cells must develop nuclei.
4. Cells must develop mitochondria.
5. Cells must transition from free-floating to colony life.
6. Single-celled organisms must transition into multicellular organisms.
7. Asexual organisms must transition into sexual organisms.
8. Organisms must develop eyes or eye precursors.
9. Organisms must evolve differentiated organs and appendages.
10. Organisms with ectoskeletons must evolve into organisms with endoskeletons.
11. Very-small-bodied organisms must become large-bodied organisms
12. Non-animal life must transition into animal life
13. Non-vascular plants must transition into vascular plants
14. Non-chordate animals must evolve into chordate animals
15. Animals must develop a mind, free will, and emotions.
16. Advanced animals must develop a spirit, symbolic cognition, and symbolic relational capability—in other words, they must become human.

Salvation Described in Computer Terms       
By: Melody Crombie                                                     May 22, 2014

The 'fruit' that Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden is comparable to an evil computer virus/malware download that infected all of humanity; physically, mentally and spiritually. While some of us seem more infected than others, no one is immune. Everyone has felt the bite of evil in our own hearts and lives; and in the people around us.

Jesus offers a free virus/malware removal tool to anyone who is willing to download and install it in their heart (the CPU of the body). Revelation 3:20 tells us how to install the tool, it is so easy a child can do it. The Bible tells us that Jesus is the only one who is completely effective against Satan's attacks.

P.S. Remember to engage the malicious software removal tool, aka Jesus Christ, by daily following Him, obeying Him and reading your Bible. Jesus will help protect you as He scans, actively seeks out, destroys and overcomes any hidden malicious code.

Boffins to convert PURE LIGHT into MATTER by 2015 New collider could answer questions about gamma-ray bursts, young Universe                 By Brid-Aine Parnell, 19 May 2014

Three theoretical physicists say scientists will be able to make matter out of pure light* within the next year – using today's technology.

The idea of making matter out of light sounds far-fetched, but it’s an important prediction from the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and it's the same process that was in play during the first hundred seconds of the Universe.

In 1934, two US scientists – Gregory Breit and John Wheeler – described a theoretical way of how simply smashing together two photons would create an electron and a positron, although they wrote at the time that they thought it unlikely it would be achieved in a lab.

The pair of physicists reckoned this would be the very simplest method to turn light into matter. The maths worked out, but the technology just didn’t exist to attempt an experimental proof.

Now boffins from Imperial College London, and one from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics who was visiting the UK, claim to have come up with a way to do it in just one day “over several cups of coffee”.

They were working on fusion energy, but realised that their work could be applied to the Breit-Wheeler theory. They propose a new kind of high-energy physics experiment – a photon-photon collider. First, scientists would use an extremely powerful high-intensity laser to speed electrons up to just below the speed of light. Firing these electrons into a slab of gold would create a beam of photons a billion times more energetic than visible light.

Artificial brains learn to adapt
May 16, 2014
For every thought or behavior, the brain erupts in a riot of activity, as thousands of cells communicate via electrical and chemical signals. Each nerve cell influences others within an intricate, interconnected neural network. And connections between brain cells change over time in response to our environment.

Despite supercomputer advances, the human brain remains the most flexible, efficient information processing device in the world. Its exceptional performance inspires researchers to study and imitate it as an ideal of computing power.

Artificial neural networks

Computer models built to replicate how the brain processes, memorizes and/or retrieves information are called artificial neural networks. For decades, engineers and computer scientists have used artificial neural networks as an effective tool in many real-world problems involving tasks such as classification, estimation and control.

However, artificial neural networks do not take into consideration some of the basic characteristics of the human brain such as signal transmission delays between neurons, membrane potentials and synaptic currents.

A new generation of neural network models—called spiking neural networks—are designed to better model the dynamics of the brain, where neurons initiate signals to other neurons in their networks with a rapid spike in cell voltage. In modeling biological neurons, spiking neural networks may have the potential to mimic brain activities in simulations, enabling researchers to investigate neural networks in a biological context.


Universe evolution recreated in lab
By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News                              7 May 2014

An international team of researchers has created the most complete visual simulation of how the Universe evolved. 
The computer model shows how the first galaxies formed around clumps of a mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter.

It is the first time that the Universe has been modelled so extensively and to such great resolution.

The research has been published in the journal Nature.

Continue reading the main story “Start Quote Now we can get to grips with how stars and galaxies form and relate it to dark matter”

Prof Richard Ellis Caltech The simulation will provide a test bed for emerging theories of what the Universe is made of and what makes it tick.

One of the world's leading authorities on galaxy formation, Professor Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, described the simulation as "fabulous".

The computer model draws on the theories of Professor Carlos Frenk of Durham University, UK, who said he was "pleased" that a computer model should come up with such a good result assuming that it began with dark matter.

"You can make stars and galaxies that look like the real thing. But it is the dark matter that is calling the shots".

Bend It, Charge It, Dunk It: Graphene, the Material of Tomorrow
By NICK BILTON             April 13, 2014, 11:00 am

I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

No, fans of “The Graduate,” the word isn’t “plastics.”

It’s “graphene.”

Graphene is the strongest, thinnest material known to exist. A form of carbon, it can conduct electricity and heat better than anything else. And get ready for this: It is not only the hardest material in the world, but also one of the most pliable.

Only a single atom thick, it has been called the wonder material.

Graphene could change the electronics industry, ushering in flexible devices, supercharged quantum computers, electronic clothing and computers that can interface with the cells in your body.

While the material was discovered a decade ago, it started to gain attention in 2010 when two physicists at the University of Manchester were awarded the Nobel Prize for their experiments with it. More recently, researchers have zeroed in on how to commercially produce graphene.

The American Chemical Society said in 2012 that graphene was discovered to be 200 times stronger than steel and so thin that a single ounce of it could cover 28 football fields. Chinese scientists have created a graphene aerogel, an ultralight material derived from a gel, that is one-seventh the weight of air. A cubic inch of the material could balance on one blade of grass.

“Graphene is one of the few materials in the world that is transparent, conductive and flexible — all at the same time,” said Dr. Aravind Vijayaraghavan, a lecturer at the University of Manchester. “All of these properties together are extremely rare to find in one material.”

Scientists develop bacterial ‘FM Radio’ Posted April 10, 2014 - 03:15             by Thomas Anderson

Programming living cells offers the prospect of harnessing sophisticated biological machinery for transformative applications in energy, agriculture, water remediation and medicine. Inspired by engineering, researchers in the emerging field of synthetic biology have designed a tool box of small genetic components that act as intracellular switches, logic gates, counters and oscillators.

But scientists have found it difficult to wire the components together to form larger circuits that can function as “genetic programs.” One of the biggest obstacles? Dealing with a small number of available wires.

A team of biologists and engineers at UC San Diego has taken a large step toward overcoming this obstacle. Their advance, detailed in a paper which appears in this week’s advance online publication of the journal Nature, describes their development of a rapid and tunable post-translational coupling for genetic circuits. This advance builds on their development of “biopixel” sensor arrays reported in Nature by the same group of scientists two years ago.

The problem the researchers solved arises from the noisy cellular environment that tends to lead to highly variable circuit performance. The components of a cell are intermixed, crowded and constantly bumping into each other. This makes it difficult to reuse parts in different parts of a program, limiting the total number of available parts and wires. These difficulties hindered the creation of genetic programs that can read the cellular environment and react with the execution of a sequence of instructions.

The team’s breakthrough involves a form of “frequency multiplexing” inspired by FM radio.

“This circuit lets us encode multiple independent environmental inputs into a single time series,” said Arthur Prindle, a bioengineering graduate student at UC San Diego and the first author of the study. “Multiple pieces of information are transferred using the same part. It works by using distinct frequencies to transmit different signals on a common channel.” 

Universe Measured With Near-Perfect Accuracy: Scientists Say It's Probably Infinite, Flat, And Eternal
By Ben Wolford on January 9, 2014 3:29 PM EST

Scientists have mapped the universe to 1 percent accuracy. (Photo: Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Scientists announced Thursday that they've pretty much figured out the universe, unlocking potential clues to mysterious "dark energy;" bolstering theories that the universe is flat, eternal, and infinite; and mapping 1.3 million galaxies down to about 1 percent accuracy. All of this from an experiment that isn't even done collecting data yet. It's supposed to keep going until June.

"We've done the analysis now because we have 90 percent of [the experiment's] final data, and we're tremendously excited by the results," says Martin White, chair of the survey team and physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. They announced the findings Thursday and have submitted their paper for publication with the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The team has good reason to be excited: no one has ever mapped the universe so accurately. As team leader David Schlegel put it, "I now know the size of the universe better than I know the size of my house."

They did it using a high-powered telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, which, for almost five years, has been hunting deep space for galaxies. Some of them are more than 6 billion light-years away and, therefore, at least as many years old (FYI, a light-year is a distance, equal to about 5.9 trillion miles). They say it may be the largest collection of redshift galaxies (galaxies moving away from us) ever compiled. By comparison, the new Hubble photo of deep space, said to capture the farthest reaches yet, only shows galaxies 3.5 billion light-years from earth.

With that information, the physicists looked for clusters of galaxies called Baryon acoustic oscillations, or baryons, which arrange themselves in circles around a central cluster. They're basically caused by pressure ripples from when the universe was formed about 13.4 billion years ago, which cooled and froze. In this case, they proved useful because the radius of each cluster is always the same. In effect, they are a 500-million-light-years-long measuring tape.

The scientists translated the data into a 3-D map of the universe. What they discovered is that the universe is "flat" — not in the two-dimensional sense, but in the physicist jargon sense. That is, its shape adheres to principles of basic fourth-grade geometry: A triangle's angles add up to 180 degrees, and that kind of thing. Here's the cool part about that: "One of the reasons we care is that a flat universe has implications for whether the universe is infinite," Schlegel says in the news release. "That means — while we can't say with certainty that it will never come to an end — it's likely the universe extends forever in space and will go on forever in time. Our results are consistent with an infinite universe."

That said, there will always be dissenting voices. These physicists in Denmark say the universe could die at any moment, and that this outcome is more likely that previously thought. "Maybe the collapse has already started somewhere in the universe, and right now it is eating its way into the rest of the universe," they said. "Maybe a collapse is starting right now, right here. Or maybe it will start far away from here in a billion years. We do not know."

Brown Dwarfs: Strange Failed Stars of the Universe Explained
(Infographic) by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist   |  January 29, 2014 01:00pm ET

Brown dwarfs started out the same as ordinary stars, collapsing from giant nebulas of dust and gas. Most brown dwarfs are not quite massive enough to sustain a nuclear fusion reaction at their cores. Brown dwarfs, therefore, are transitional objects, standing between stars and giant gas planets. The mass of a brown dwarf can range from 13 to 90 times the mass of the planet Jupiter, or up to about a tenth the mass of the sun.

Brown Dwarf Photos: Failed Stars and Stellar Misfits Revealed

Brown dwarfs are classified according to the spectrum of the light detected from them. M-class stars are the coolest stars that can burn successfully, and are the most common stars in the universe (about 75 percent of the stars in the sun’s neighborhood). Many M-stars are red dwarfs, but some are brown dwarfs.

L-class brown dwarfs are cooler than M stars. Some L stars can support hydrogen fusion, but most do not. T-class brown dwarfs have surface temperatures in the range of 800 to 1,880 degrees Fahrenheit (430 to 1,030 degrees Celsius). T dwarfs are largely composed of methane.


Top 10 Star Mysteries

Y-class brown dwarfs are the coolest of the dwarfs. Their temperature may be as low as that of a household oven, or even the temperature of a human body.

Some brown dwarfs are orbited by planets, or sometimes discs of matter similar to those in developing solar systems (artist’s rendering, inset). Astronomers have found microscopic particles of the mineral olivine orbiting in the dust disc. Olivine crystals are thought to be the initial stage of the process that builds rocky planets such as Earth. 

In 2014, astronomers were able to map features in the atmosphere of T-class brown dwarf Luhman-16B. The “clouds” are believed to be droplets of molten iron and minerals, floating in an atmosphere of hydrogen at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius).

GRAV WAVE TSUNAMI boffinry BONANZA – the aftershock of the universe's Big Bang Landmark discovery backs Einstein and shows inflation is as old as time
By Iain Thomson, 17 Mar 2014

Pics A team of astrophysicists has announced a sighting of gravitational waves – formed in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the universe as we know it blinked into existence.

The breakthrough discovery throws enormous weight behind the famous Big Bang theory. The boffins must be expecting a call from the Nobel Prize panel in Sweden.

Surf the light fantastic ... Gravitational waves from inflation create distinctive patterns in the cosmic microwave background, observed by the team's equipment

"This is something that's not just a home run, but a grand slam," said Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland, US, today. He was speaking at a press conference to announce his team's results: "It's the smoking gun for [the universe's] inflation and it's the first detection of gravitational waves."

The waves, first predicted by Albert Einstein 99 years ago as a key tenet of his theory of General Relativity, are formed in the cosmic microwave background when massive objects like stars and black holes interact.

The biggest gravitational wave, now observed, was formed 13.8 billion years ago as the universe suddenly snapped into being – a smoking gun for the Big Bang, the cosmic birth of reality as we know it.

The team's work also supports the theory that in the instant after that moment, the expansion of space briefly exceeded the speed of light – the aforementioned inflation – and this caused ripples in the first light energy to exist. The inflationary theory of creation helps explain why we have detected temperature differences across the universe.

The signal indicating the presence of gravitational waves is much stronger than expected, too. The boffins' evidence and papers on the discovery can be found here.

“This has been like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we found a crowbar,” said co-leader Clem Pryke, the British-born associate professor at the University of Minnesota.

Mapping out Earth's place in the universe among 'Council of Giants'      Posted March 12, 2014 - 04:00 
We live in a galaxy known as the Milky Way – a vast conglomeration of 300 billion stars, planets whizzing around them, and clouds of gas and dust floating in between.

Though it has long been known that the Milky Way and its orbiting companion Andromeda are the dominant members of a small group of galaxies, the Local Group, which is about 3 million light years across, much less was known about our immediate neighbourhood in the universe.

Now, a new paper by York University Physics & Astronomy Professor Marshall McCall, published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, maps out bright galaxies within 35-million light years of the Earth, offering up an expanded picture of what lies beyond our doorstep.

"All bright galaxies within 20 million light years, including us, are organized in a 'Local Sheet' 34-million light years across and only 1.5-million light years thick," says McCall. "The Milky Way and Andromeda are encircled by twelve large galaxies arranged in a ring about 24-million light years across – this 'Council of Giants' stands in gravitational judgment of the Local Group by restricting its range of influence."

McCall says twelve of the fourteen giants in the Local Sheet, including the Milky Way and Andromeda, are "spiral galaxies" which have highly flattened disks in which stars are forming. The remaining two are more puffy "elliptical galaxies", whose stellar bulks were laid down long ago. Intriguingly, the two ellipticals sit on opposite sides of the Council. Winds expelled in the earliest phases of their development might have shepherded gas towards the Local Group, thereby helping to build the disks of the Milky Way and Andromeda.

What Really Killed Jesus?          By: Melody Crombie

After seeing, "The Passion of the Christ,"  ten years ago, my husband refused to go to another emotionally charged cry-fest with me; so I rounded up a couple of the kids (and several packs of Kleenex) and saw, "Son of God" tonight.

I like watching different versions of the life and times of Jesus as well as viewing various artistic renderings, (see the "Pictures and Quotes" section).  It is helpful for opening up discussions about the accuracy of the film when cross referenced with scripture and historical documents.

If you've spent any time in the church pews you should know exactly why Jesus came and died (if not, then please read the Book of John and Hebrews) but after spending time out in the world you may be confused about the precise way Jesus died, especially when different theories are repeatedly thrown around.

One can only inwardly quake in horror at the brutality of Jesus' death when you see in cinematic detail the punishment we deserve (Isaiah 53:5) being inflicted on him. 

The following list (from "Free Christian Teaching") describes in detail how Jesus ultimately died:

Squeezing light into metals: Engineers control conductivity with inkjet printer    Date:March 7, 2014    Source:University of Utah
 
Using an inexpensive inkjet printer, University of Utah electrical engineers produced microscopic structures that use light in metals to carry information. This new technique, which controls electrical conductivity within such microstructures, could be used to rapidly fabricate superfast components in electronic devices, make wireless technology faster or print magnetic materials.

High-speed Internet and other data-transfer techniques rely on light transported through optical fibers with very high bandwidth, which is a measure of how fast data can be transferred. Shrinking these fibers allows more data to be packed into less space, but there's a catch: optical fibers hit a limit on how much data they can carry as light is squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces.

In contrast, electronic circuits can be fashioned at much smaller sizes on silicon wafers. However, electronic data transfer operates at frequencies with much lower bandwidth, reducing the amount of data that can be carried.

A recently discovered technology called plasmonics marries the best aspects of optical and electronic data transfer. By crowding light into metal structures with dimensions far smaller than its wavelength, data can be transmitted at much higher frequencies such as terahertz frequencies, which lie between microwaves and infrared light on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that also includes everything from X-rays to visible light to gamma rays. Metals such as silver and gold are particularly promising plasmonic materials because they enhance this crowding effect. "Very little well-developed technology exists to create terahertz plasmonic devices, which have the potential to make wireless devices such as Bluetooth -- which operates at 2.4 gigahertz frequency -- 1,000 times faster than they are today," says Ajay Nahata, a University of Utah professor of electrical and computer engineering and senior author of the new study.

Power-packed Bacterial Spores Generate Electricity by Beth Mole 10:11am, March 3, 2014

With mighty bursts of rehydration, bacterial spores offer a new source of renewable energy.

Bacillus spores quickly shrivel in dry times and bloat with a blast of humidity. The transitions, which take about half a second, pack a powerful punch that biophysicist Ozgur Sahin at Columbia University realized could translate to usable energy. By smearing spores onto a flat piece of rubber about the length of a human hand, Sahin and his colleagues developed a spore-powered generator. In arid conditions, parched spores pull the rubber into a curve, while wafts of wet air plump up spores and spring it flat again.

The team linked the rubber to an electromagnetic generator, so that every flex produced an electric current. By weight, spore power rivaled the juice in a car battery, Sahin and colleagues report January 26 in Nature Nanotechnology. Since the spores tote such a high energy potential—more than 1,000 times that of mammalian muscle—Sahin and colleagues say energy-harvesting devices based on the dormant dynamos could be linked into municipal grids to contribute a power boost to homes and cities.

EXPAND AND FLEX Energy can be captured from bacterial spores with an absorbent cortex layer (left) that swells when wet. Researchers spread spores on pieces of latex (above) and harnessed energy from the motion created as spores shriveled and expanded.">

A Powerful New Way to Edit DNA
By ANDREW POLLACK  MARCH 3, 2014

  In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the final paragraph of a paper: “The biological significance of these sequences is not known.”

Now their significance is known, and it has set off a scientific frenzy.

The sequences, it turns out, are part of a sophisticated immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. And that system, whose very existence was unknown until about seven years ago, may provide scientists with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life.

In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants.

This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will,” said Charles Gersbach, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University.

"Bad Design" Debunked in a Fish: It Actually Achieves the Impossible
November 7, 2013 5:30 AM -
An article on the Hub news page for Johns Hopkins University starts with a photo of a colorful glass knifefish, then poses a puzzle:

A quirk of nature has long baffled biologists: Why do animals push in directions that don't point toward their goal, like the side-to-side sashaying of a running lizard or cockroach? An engineer building a robot would likely avoid these movements because they seem wasteful. So why do animals behave this way? (Emphasis added.)

Stop right there. Ask how evolutionists and ID advocates would respond to this mystery. Evolutionists might think this is just leftovers from evolutionary "tinkering" or "cobbling," producing function good enough to permit survival. ID advocates might suspect a shrewder design than first meets the eye.

So what did the Johns Hopkins researchers learn from studying the apparently wasteful motions of the glass knifefish? In fact, they uncovered a superior design -- so good that it produces a functional benefit that has long challenged engineering wisdom:

RNA Shows Design, Too   February 4, 2014 4:58 AM -

RNA differs from DNA in one of the sugars that makes up its backbone and one of the bases that makes up its side branches (uracil instead of thymine); it is also usually found in single strands instead of DNA's double helix. New discoveries, though, are showing RNA does far more than passively transfer DNA's information to other places. It, too, is a masterpiece of intelligent design and function.

A paper in Nature describes how information is stored not only in RNA's base sequence, but in its folds. Because RNA has more degrees of freedom, it can take on a wide variety of forms not possible for DNA. "RNA has a dual role as an informational molecule and a direct effector of biological tasks. The latter function is enabled by RNA's ability to adopt complex secondary and tertiary folds and thus has motivated extensive computational and experimental efforts for determining RNA structures," the authors begin (emphasis added). In their conclusion, they say, "We identify hundreds of specific mRNA regions that are highly structured in vivo, and we show for three examples that these structures affect protein expression."

In other words, the structure, not just the sequence, carries functional information. "Our studies provide an excellent set of candidate regions, among the truly enormous number of structured regions seen in vitro, for exploring the regulatory role of structured mRNAs."

What Happened on the First Day of Creation? A Study of Genesis 1:1-1:2
By:  Douglas Hamp

The First Day of Creation The glory of the Bible is that, unlike the writings of other ancient nations which demonstrated a belief that water was the primal material before the existence of any gods, it claims that God was in the beginning and that He created all that is.  Both the Gap theory and a relatively new theory, which posits that the six-day-creation-clock didn’t really start ticking until God uttered the words “Let there be light” in verse three, suggest that the first day didn’t start in verse one but in either verse two or verse three, respectively.  Let us simply analyze, biblically and linguistically, the full range of the key Hebrew words in Genesis 1:1–2 and see what they mean and if they support the idea that a time gap exists in those verses.  (English words for which the Hebrew equivalent is given are italicized.)

In the beginning God created (ברא bara) the heavens and the earth (את השׁמים ואת הארץ et hashayim ve’et ha’aretz).  The earth was without form, and void (ובהו תהו tohu vavohu); and darkness was on the face of the deep (תהום tehom). And the Spirit of God was hovering (מרחפת merachefet) over the face of the waters (המים על־פני al pnei hamayim).

Bara and Asa The first key word isברא  created (bara) which is used a total of 53 times in the Old Testament.  The basic and majority times used form of the word, which is used in Genesis 1, has the general meaning of create, shape or form.  It has been suggested that the word bara used here in Genesis is a different type of action than the word עשׂה (asa – do, make, fashion or produce) used in Exodus 20:11 where God says that he made the heavens and earth in six days.

 Bara and asa are for the most part synonymous with one important distinction between them: bara is used only of God’s actions and never of man’s.  There are countless examples of where man can asa (do or make); however, only God can bara.  There is by implication creation ex nihilo, but the major thrust of the word bara lies in its use by God only and on the initiation of something new.  The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (TWOT) notes concerning asa and its distinction from bara:

Stanford creates biological transistors, the final step towards computers inside living cells      By Sebastian Anthony on March 29, 2013 at 8:56 am
Bioengineers at Stanford University have created the first biological transistor made from genetic materials: DNA and RNA. Dubbed the “transcriptor,” this biological transistor is the final component required to build biological computers that operate inside living cells. We are now tantalizingly close to biological computers that can detect changes in a cell’s environment, store a record of that change in memory made of DNA, and then trigger some kind of response — say, commanding a cell to stop producing insulin, or to self-destruct if cancer is detected.

Stanford’s transcriptor is essentially the biological analog of the digital transistor. Where transistors control the flow of electricity, transcriptors control the flow of RNA polymerase as it travels along a strand of DNA. The transcriptors do this by using special combinations of enzymes (integrases) that control the RNA’s movement along the strand of DNA. “The choice of enzymes is important,” says Jerome Bonnet, who worked on the project. “We have been careful to select enzymes that function in bacteria, fungi, plants and animals, so that bio-computers can be engineered within a variety of organisms.”

Like a transistor, which enables a small current to turn on a larger one, one of the key functions of transcriptors is signal amplification. A tiny change in the enzyme’s activity (the transcriptor’s gate) can cause a very large change in the two connected genes (the channel). By combining multiple transcriptors, the Stanford researchers have created a full suite of Boolean Integrase Logic (BIL) gates — the biological equivalent of AND, NAND, OR, XOR, NOR, and XNOR logic gates. With these BIL gates (pun possibly intended), a biological computer could perform almost computation inside a living cell.

You need more than just BIL gates to make a computer, though. You also need somewhere to store data (memory, RAM), and some way to connect all of the transcriptors and memory together (a bus). Fortunately, as we’ve covered a few times before, numerous research groups have successfully stored data in DNA — and Stanford has already developed an ingenious method of using the M13 virus to transmit strands of DNA between cells. (See: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram.) In short, all of the building blocks of a biological computer are now in place.

This isn’t to say that highly functional biological computers will arrive in short order, but we should certainly begin to see simple biological sensors that measure and record changes in a cell’s environment. Stanford has contributed the BIL gate design to the public domain, which should allow other research institutes, such as Harvard’s Wyss Institute, to also begin work on the first biological computer. (See: The quest for the $1000 genome.)

Moving forward, though, the potential for real biological computers is immense. We are essentially talking about fully-functional computers that can sense their surroundings, and then manipulate their host cells into doing just about anything. Biological computers might be used as an early-warning system for disease, or simply as a diagnostic tool (has the patient consumed excess amounts of sugar, even after the doctor told them not to?) Biological computers could tell their host cells to stop producing insulin, to pump out more adrenaline, to reproduce some healthy cells to combat disease, or to stop reproducing if cancer is detected. Biological computers will probably obviate the use of many pharmaceutical drugs.

Image Processing in the Eye: Like "Magic" Evolution News & Views January 16, 2014 5:33 The amount of image processing going on in the eyeball is astounding. Did you know that the signal from your retina splits into some 20 channels that analyze the image before it reaches the brain? A pair of German neuroscientists, writing in Current Biology, describe as "magic" how two of those channels work at the neural level. They begin by commenting on how we enjoy the best of both design constraints:   The visual system of primates, including that of humans, famously features both exquisite spatial acuity and a high temporal resolution. This dual focus on both 'sharpness' and 'speed' is made possible through different processing streams set up already in the retina. In a recent study, Puthussery et al. now show that key differences in the processing streams that are thought to underlie these visual abilities are already set up right after the first synapse of the visual system -- in retinal bipolar cells.

The retina breaks the visual world into several parallel representations prior to transmission to the brain. Each representation, or 'channel', is based on a different type of retinal ganglion cell that carries information about specific features of the visual scene -- such as edges, directed motion or 'color'. Of the 20 or so types of ganglion cells that exist in the primate retina, two in particular have attracted considerable attention since they were first described in the 1940s: the parasol and midget cells. (Emphasis added.)

The authors go on to describe how the "parasol ganglion cells" are responsible for "fast, low acuity" while the "midget ganglion cells" provide "slow, high acuity." What makes the difference? At least three factors are involved: (1) the way they are wired in parallel with the bipolar cells (between the photoreceptors and the amacrine cells), (2) the way they are wired in series with the amacrine cells (between the bipolar cells and the ganglion cells), and (3) the waveforms of the electrical output of the bipolar cells.

Astronomers Get First Glimpse of Cosmic Web
by Andrew Fazekas in StarStruck     January 19, 2014
Astronomers have for the first time captured a glimpse of the vast, web-like network of diffuse gas that links all of the galaxies in the cosmos.

Leading cosmological theories suggest that galaxies are cocooned within gigantic, wispy filaments of gas. This “cosmic web” of gas-filled nebulas stretches between large, spacious voids that are tens of millions of light years wide.  Like spiders, galaxies mostly appear to lie within the intersections of the long-sought webs.

In observations spied through one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, the 33-foot (10-meter) Keck I Telescope in Hawaii, astronomers led by Sebastiano Cantalupo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, now report that they have detected a very large, luminous filament of gas extending about 2 million light-years across intergalactic space, exactly as predicted by theory.

Essentially, the filament reported in the January 19 Nature represents one of the strands of the cosmic web that holds together the galaxy-rich universe. Astronomers hope to understand both the structure of the universe and the development of galaxies such as our own Milky Way by unraveling the secrets of the cosmic web.

Building computer brains that can reason like humans
Future Thinking | 19 November 2013
Computing has developed at an amazing pace over the last few decades, but even today’s computers are essentially glorified calculators, says Dr Dharmendra Modha. The founder of IBM’s Cognitive Computing Group wants to change that. He wants our computers to think more like humans.

Modha and his team are designing a cognitive computing chip and software ecosystem inspired by the human brain. It would consume far less power and space than today’s computers and could power everything from search and rescue robots in hazardous environments to intelligent buoys which float on ocean waves, predicting tsunamis or warning of oil pollution.

The idea, part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) project called SyNAPSE, involves a global team of experts working across neuroscience, nanoscience and supercomputing to build this complicated system. Modha spoke to BBC Future at his laboratory in Almaden, California about how this approach could change the way our computers see the world.

Can games create an education fit for the future?
Future Thinking | 7 November 2013
Video games usually get in the way of homework. GlassLab, however, is a collaboration between educators and technologists. Uniting commercial game studios and educational groups the aim is to embrace gaming technology to transform the learning process and make it more relevant to the demands of the 21st Century. 

They could even one day replace traditional exams.

SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge, which has just launched, is an educational version of the video game SimCity. Designed for teenagers, students play the role of a city mayor, managing a city with some pressing pollution problems.   

BBC Future spoke to Jessica Lindl, general manager of GlassLab, at the Silicon Valley-based gaming company, EA (Electronic Arts) about how games could prepare children for jobs