Biologists propose to sequence the DNA of all life on Earth

Can biologists sequence the genomes of all the plants and the animals in the world, including this greater bird of paradise in Indonesia?

When it comes to genome sequencing, visionaries like to throw around big numbers: There’s the UK Biobank, for example, which promises to decipher the genomes of 500,000 individuals, or Iceland’s effort to study the genomes of its entire human population. Yesterday, at a meeting here organized by the Smithsonian Initiative on Biodiversity Genomics and the Shenzhen, China–based sequencing powerhouse BGI, a small group of researchers upped the ante even more, announcing their intent
to, eventually, sequence “all life on Earth.”

Their plan, which does not yet have funding dedicated to it specifically but could cost at least several billions of dollars, has been dubbed the Earth Bio Genome Project (EBP). Harris Lewin, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Davis, who is part of the group that came up with this vision 2 years ago, says the EBP would take a first step toward its audacious goal by focusing on eukaryotes—the group of organisms that includes all plants, animals, and single-celled organisms such as amoebas.



That strategy, and the EBP’s overall concept, found a receptive audience at BioGenomics2017, a gathering this week of conservationists, evolutionary biologists, systematisms, and other biologists interested in applying genomics to their work. “This is a grand idea,” says Oliver Ryder, a conservation biologist at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research in California. “If we really want to understand how life evolved, genome biology is going to be part of that.”

Ryder and others drew parallels between the EBP and the Human Genome Project, which began as an ambitious, controversial, and, at the time, technically impossible proposal more than 30 years ago. That earlier effort eventually led not only to the sequencing of the first human genome, but also to entirely new DNA technologies that are at the center of many medical frontiers and the basis for a $20 billion industry. “People have learned from the human genome experience that [sequencing] is a tremendous advance in biology,” Lewin says.

Many details about the EBP are still being worked out. But as currently proposed, the first step would be to sequence in great detail the DNA of a member of each eukaryotic family (about 9000 in all) to create reference genomes on par or better than the reference human genome. Next would come sequencing to a lesser degree a species from each of the 150,000 to 200,000 genera. Finally, EBP participants would get rough genomes of the 1.5 million remaining known eukaryotic species. These lower resolution genomes could be improved as needed by comparing them with the family references or by doing more sequencing, says EBP co-organizer Gene Robinson, a behavioral genomics researcher and director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana.



The entire eukaryotic effort would likely cost about the same as it did to sequence that first human genome, estimate Lewin, Robinson, and EBP co-organizer John Kress, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History here. It took about $2.7 billion to read and order the 3 billion bases composing the human genome, about $4.8 billion in today’s dollars.

With a comparable amount of support, the EBP’s eukaryotic work might be done in a decade, its organizers suggest. Such optimism arises from ever-decreasing DNA sequencing costs—one meeting presenter from Complete Genomics, based in Mountain View, California, says his company plans to be able to roughly sequence whole eukaryotic genomes for about $100 within a year—and improvements in sequencing technology that make possible higher quality genomes, at reasonable prices. “It became apparent to me that at a certain point, it would be possible to sequence all life on Earth,” Lewin says. Although some may find the multibillion-dollar price tag hard to justify for researchers not studying humans, the fundamentals of matter, or the mysteries of the universe, the EBP has a head start, thanks to the work of several research communities pursuing their own ambitious sequencing projects.

These include the Genome 10K Project, which seeks to sequence 10,000 vertebrate genomes, one from each genus; i5K, an effort to decipher 5000 arthropods; and B10K, which expects to generate genomes for all 10,500 bird species. The EBP would help coordinate, compile, and perhaps fund these efforts. “The [EBP] concept is a community of communities,” Lewin says. There are also sequencing commitments from giants in the genomics field, such as China’s BGI, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom. But at a planning meeting this week, it became clear that significant challenges await the EBP, even beyond funding. Although researchers from Brazil, China, and the United Kingdom said their nations are eager to participate in some way, the 20 people in attendance emphasized the need for the effort to be more international, with developing countries, particularly those with high biodiversity, helping shape the project’s final form.



They proposed that the EBP could help develop sequencing and other technological experts and capabilities in those regions. The Global Genome Biodiversity Network, which is compiling lists and images of specimens at museums and other biorepositories around the world, could supply much of the DNA needed, but even broader participation is important, says Thomas Gilbert, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

The planning group also stressed the need to develop standards to ensure high-quality genome sequences and to preserve associated information for each organism sequenced such as where it was collected and what it looked like. Getting DNA samples from the wild may ultimately be the biggest challenge—and the biggest cost, several people noted. Not all museum specimens yield DNA preserved well enough for high-quality genomes. Even recently collected and frozen plant and animal specimens are not always handled correctly for preserving their DNA, says Guojie Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at BGI and the University of Copenhagen. And the lack of standards could undermine the project’s ultimate utility, notes Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University in New York City: “We could spend money on an effort for all species on the planet, but we could generate a lot of crap.”



But Lewin is optimistic that won’t happen. After he outlined the EBP in the closing talk at BioGenomics2017, he was surrounded by researchers eager to know what they could do to help. “It’s good to try to bring together the tribes,” says Jose Lopez, a biologist from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, whose “tribe” has mounted “GIGA,” a project to sequence 7000 marine invertebrates. “It’s a big endeavor. We need lots of expertise and lots of people who can contribute.”

Source: Elizabeth Pennisi

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The Time Reality: How its Rules Your Body—and Your Social Life

Time is inescapable, even if you try to ignore it, as author Alan Burdick did, by not wearing a watch.

We can’t smell it, we can’t taste it, we can’t hear it or touch it, but time is with us every second of our lives. And for thousands of years, philosophers and psychologists, from St. Augustine to William James, have pondered its meaning and how we perceive it. For his book Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation, Alan Burdick, who refused to wear a watch for much of his life, set off on a journey in search of time, which took him from a research station in the Arctic to the office of Coordinated Universal Time in Paris.

Speaking from his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, Burdick explains how having twins changed his ideas about time, why as far back as the Romans people have complained about being slaves to time, and how new discoveries in neuroscience show that our bodies are filled with clocks.

It’s ironic that, for many years, the author of a book about time refused to wear a watch. Why was that? And how did your perception of time change after you finally relented?

I started this book some time ago, when I was rather a different person. I really was of the mind that if I could take the time off of me physically, that I somehow made it go away. Part of it was that I am prone to think about mortality. Having a watch on me felt like being a grown up! It meant plugging into, and being subject to, all the things that time requires, like being on time, and it made me feel like my day was chopped up into little bits and my watch was going to parse them out to me, like pellets to a rat.



I used to think that this was a modern outlook but I came across a great quote from a Roman poet, complaining about the sundial and how awful it is that it chops our days up into hours.
A lot of other things changed, too. In my case, I had a family—two fraternal twin boys, ten years old—and that forced me to be on time and get more things done than I used to be able to. I had to come to peace with it in that regard. Also, the more I learned about my subject, the more I came to appreciate the extent to which time and timing is embedded in every aspect of our social lives. You and I are going to have a conversation on such-and-such date at such-and-such time and, in order to do that, the time on your watch in the U.K. has to exactly match my time in the U.S. That’s all made possible by this incredible process that goes into making universal coordinated time, which involves atomic clocks and this global coordinated.



One of the most original ideas in your book is that “time is contagious” and even leads us to feel empathy for one another. Unpack that idea for us.

Yes, it’s super weird! We can come at it from a bunch of different ways. One is that research has found that when people are in conversation in person, there are all these things we do without even noticing. If we’re having lunch, you and I will unconsciously pick up our forks more or less at the same time. There’s a great study about two people playing the game Whack-A-Mole. Even though they were competing against each other, their movements fell into synch, even at the expense of losing points. They would unconsciously work toward this synchrony. The more affiliated and friendly you are with that other person, the more you are in synch.



If I watch a video of two people talking, I will be able to tell, unconsciously, how friendly they are, based on the extent to which their movements fall into synch with each other. The difference between a fake and real smile is a matter of milliseconds. It’s incredibly important to know the difference, right? And, in order to tell the difference, you need, as a viewer, to have a really sensitive timing mechanism that can parse one from the other. We have these clocks in us, which are operating all the time. It’s a very open question where exactly in the brain they are and how they work. But it’s clear that they’re there and utterly essential to making our social interactions go smoothly.

The cool thing about hummingbirds is that their timing mechanism is super sophisticated. In one experiment, they flew around outdoors to different flowers, which recharge their nectar at different rates. The hummingbirds want to get to the flower when it has maximum nectar, before its competitor does. So it’s got to do this elaborate optimization and algorithm to figure out how to get there often enough to get what it wants, without getting there too soon and wasting time, or getting there too late and being beaten to it.

Scientists have known about circadian rhythms for a couple of hundred years in plants. But in the last 20 years, the genetic mechanism has become clear in humans. The idea is that each of our cells can essentially tell the time; they have a 24-hour clock, which enables the cell to organize all the things it needs to do, just like you and I. We need to meet at a certain time, or talk at a certain time. Within yourself, your organelles and proteins and genes have stuff to do. It has to happen in a certain order, and that requires a clock. In humans it’s a little over 24 hours long, pretty close to, but not exactly, the length of a day.



All your cells have this clock. Your stomach and liver, all your organs, have a clock. In order to keep those clocks in synch, mammals and we humans have a master clock in our brains that sends out a neuro-chemical signal on a regular basis. Like the conductor of an orchestra, it keeps all of these clocks in time so your body knows that when you eat, 30 minutes later, your liver’s going to jump into action, then your adrenal glands and kidneys are going to do their thing, and your fat cells are going to absorb energy on a certain schedule.

There’s been a lot of research showing that, for night shift workers, truck drivers and other people who work on schedules that don’t match the circadian rhythm, their metabolism is thrown off. Some cancers may even be associated with night shift work or circadian imbalances. Your body is expecting to metabolize food at certain times of the day but if you are living at a different time of day, you’re eating food when your fat cells want to be sleeping.

Michel Siffre is a French cave explorer. In the 1960s, at the height of the space race, scientists were thinking about whether humans could live for a long time in isolation in deep space. Siffre had this idea: What if I go live in this cave for a period of weeks, and monitor my own heart rate and sleep cycle? What does living in isolation away from the sun do to the body? It was clear that humans have circadian cycles and that our body temperatures go up and down on a reliable 24-hour cycle. But Siffre was the first to show that the circadian
cycle in humans is not exactly 24 hours long.

He went on to repeat a similar experiment in a cave in Texas. He was down there for about 6 months, all by himself. He could talk to people up on the surface every once in a while by message. But he had no idea what time it was. He all but went nuts from loneliness and sensory deprivation, because his sleep cycle went totally out of whack. There were times when he would sleep for 40 hours straight then be awake for a couple of days in a row, without knowing it. When he finally came out, he thought that he had been called out a month too soon because his count of the days was so far off.

Two very good but very separate questions! Time speeds up when we’re having fun for reasons that are going to sound circular and even tautological: i.e. when you’re having fun you aren’t looking at the clock or paying attention to the time. By contrast, when you’re bored and have nothing else to do, you’re thinking about the time.

Why does time seem to speed up as we get old? It’s one of the great paradoxes. The funny thing is, in surveys, whether they’re 20, 40, 60 or 80, 85 percent of people in every range say time is speeding up. All indications seem to be that it’s not so much that the time goes by faster, though. My sense of it is that, as you get older, you become more aware of how little time you have, so the time you have feels more precious.



The neatest experience I had was spending two weeks at a biological research station on the north slope of Alaska, just above the Arctic Circle. We were in constant daylight and I’d never experienced anything like that before. It was amazing and unnerving. Like everyone, I am accustomed to thinking of sleep as this demarcation between one day and the next. But when the sun is always up, I might sleep for 8 hours and it would seem like a nap. Two weeks was really one long day. It was deeply disorienting but that’s what I went there to experience.
I had hoped I would meet people who were studying circadian rhythms but none of them were. They were all studying different aspects of ecology and climate change on a much longer time scale than I had gone there to find. It did make me face the profound reality of the kind of long term change that we are now causing on the planet.

The thing that fascinated me most is the idea of time as a social glue, a language, which is
fundamental to all of our social interactions. We can’t interact and have social lives without it. What we do as a social species is share time. That’s almost the definition of being a social species. Once I understood that, it suddenly felt more important to wear a watch.

Even if I’m lying in bed at night with no clock or watch, I have clocks in every cell. All of those clocks together make a master clock. It’s not like I can get away from time. I might delude myself briefly into thinking so, but I can’t. We are filled with clocks.
By Simon Worrall

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You should never ‘Argue’ about Religion

The table talk focuses on everyday issues that we discuss with one another and have philosophical significance, and the daily conversation deals with common sense and minding our own business. Statements such as “that’s common sense” and “it’s none of my business” are frequently used but not always evaluated. Certainly, there are other statements that fall into this category such as, “There is one thing that I never argue about: religion”? Normally this statement is made with strong conviction as if it is not to be compromised but it always puzzles me when someone says this. Despite the fact that it is well within the right of the speaker to adhere to this idea, it still brings up two important questions: Why is this statement made? Is the topic of religion worthy of discussion?

There are several reasons why may say, and genuinely accept, this. One is indifference and this indifference can be expressed in two ways. Some are indifferent because they argue that religious issues are hotly disputed and diverse and conclude that there is no hope in finding any truth in the middle of all these differences and disagreements.

The attempt is futile. Some are indifferent because they simply do not care about religion and argue that we should be more concerned with practical matters, while still others are simply impatient with theological and philosophical issues. “The attempt to discuss these matters is preposterous.” They might claim. Moreover, others do not discuss religion because they find the idea so overwhelming. Here we are attempting to just get by each day and trying to understand the mysteries of religion is quite a daunting task. Lastly, this statement is made because of fear and disillusionment with religion. Some fear the discussion of religious and philosophical matters because they simply do not know how they feel about these topics. They have never really examined it. Or they think that they have examined it and are afraid to find out that they may be wrong. Some are simply disillusioned by religion because of violence committed in its name. They think of conflicts and offenses that have occurred because of religious issues and feel that the teachings of religion have lost their credibility. These reactions to the thought of discussing religion raise another issue which is philosophically significant.



Defining religion is a task unto itself. The meaning of the term ‘religion’ has been hotly debated for centuries by theologians, philosophers, politicians, and even scientists. Because religion is so multifaceted it has difficult to come up with a definition that covers the nature of all religions. Nevertheless, I’m going to make an attempt. According to Wikipedia (believe it or not, it’s probably one of the more concise definitions in cyberspace), religion is “the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or more in general a set of beliefs explaining the existence of and giving meaning to the universe, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.” This definition is adequate particularly in how it treats the idea of the divine. Not all religions—notably Buddhism—require a belief in a divine being. The definition contains concepts such as god or gods, existence, meaning, moral code, and human affairs. It is not a stretch to claim that religion is important to our lives, regardless of whether one admires or despises religion.

Religion’s importance lies in the fact that it deals with ultimate issues; matters that are fundamental to human life such as the existence of God, death, morality, meaning of life and human behavior. These issues are a fundamental concern and understanding them appear to be necessary for flourishing in this life. Dr. Thomas Morris explains in his book, Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life that disputed questions can be divided into two categories: existentially peripheral disputed questions and existentially central disputed questions. According to Dr. Morris, the former are questions that “may be widely or hotly disputed but whose proper resolution is not really crucial for my understanding of my life or for my living of a good life.”



Whereas the latter category are questions that are “widely or hotly disputed among human beings and that matter a great deal to how we understand ourselves and our lives.” For instance, some dispute which operating system is better: Windows or Mac OS X. This debate is worthy of consideration and important for computer usage but the resolution to this question will not affect the ultimate issues of life. However, the existence of God is existentially central because it greatly affects our lives and can lead to important insights into personal meaning, immortality, and ethics.

Religion can be hotly disputed and sometimes this can be discouraging or even repulsive to some but the fact that it is hotly disputed should not excuse us from pursuing an understanding of religion and how it fundamentally affects our lives. There are numerous existentially peripheral questions that are hotly disputed but how many times do you hear those issues being mentioned in the following statement: “There is one thing that I never argue about: …. (fill in the blank).” This is probably not a common statement. It is also important to note that the word “argue” can be misunderstood.
Many times, “argue” is used to mean participation in a heated exchange. In this sense, responsible and rational people would not condone “arguing” about religion. However, the classical meaning of “argue” is to offer reasons for your conclusions. This philosophical sense of the word should be encouraged when it comes to the topic of religion. Offering reasons for our conclusions when it comes to such an important matter as religion is vital to our lives and maybe those who have uttered the statement in question will realize what they are missing.
Source: Rick Pimentel

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There's More to Life than Being Happy

"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness."

Meaning comes from the pursuit of more complex things than happiness

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"

As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."



Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. "In both cases," Frankl writes, "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listed Man's Search for Meaning, as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book's ethos -- its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self -- seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. "To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"

According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high -- as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word "happiness" in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy, without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans, feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."



This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.

How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.



Nearly a quarter of Americans do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful.
Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.

"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers, which include Stanford University's Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, write.

What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists, at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.
The study participants reported, deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others, and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing.



People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.

"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.



Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.

Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering", which brings us back to Frankl's life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that emphasizes the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.

In his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps, Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna and the world. As a 16-year-old boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a two-page paper he had written. Freud, impressed by Frankl's talent, sent the paper to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. "I hope you don't object," Freud wrote the teenager.



While he was in medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. Not only did he establish suicide-prevention centers for teenagers -- a precursor to his work in the camps -- but he was also developing his signature contribution to the field of clinical psychology: logotherapy, which is meant to help people overcome depression and achieve well-being by finding their unique meaning in life. By 1941, his theories had received international attention and he was working as the chief of neurology at Vienna's Rothschild Hospital, where he risked his life and career by making false diagnoses of mentally ill patients so that they would not, per Nazi orders, be euthanized.

That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his field.

As Anna S. Redsand recounts in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to do, so he set out for St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to the organ music, he repeatedly asked himself, "Should I leave my parents behind?... Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?" Where did his responsibility lie? He was looking for a "hint from heaven."

When he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the Ten Commandments -- the one about honoring your father and your mother. With that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the camps.



The wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences there, in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then: "Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself -- be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is."

Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves -- by devoting our lives to "giving" rather than "taking" -- we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.

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Daily Motivation: How to Avoid Mistakes to Move Forward in Life

Those who feel guilty for skipping a trip to the gym or switching on the TV instead of picking up a book after a long day at work can take comfort in the fact that even Dan Ariely, an expert in motivation, can struggle to keep on track.

Even Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University whose TED Talks online have been watched over 7.8million times, had to form a pact with his cousin to force himself to get fit and lose weight.



In his new book The Payoff, Professor Ariely investigates what motivates us and how we can motivate each other.

The Independent spoke to him about the tips and tricks we can use to get motivated, and how to keep up the momentum.

What are some commons ways that people trip up when they try to motivate themselves?
What we often get wrong is our understanding of pleasure. When we think of pleasure we think of short-term pleasure like eating chocolate and we strive towards it and we try to motivate ourselves and other people towards it. But in fact the things that give us pleasure are very different, like writing a book or running a marathon or helping other people.

These things don’t maximise momentary joy but they give us a sense of meaning and accomplishment and achievement, and create anticipation and memories. We focus too much on short-term pleasure not long-term pleasure.



What leads us to behavior that is irrational and goes against motivation, like self-sabotage?
The clearest example of self-sabotage is of a student going out at night late before an exam. What happens is that when we think there's a chance that we might fail, we're afraid of failure as society evaluates us on this failure. What we do is something drastic that will let us point a blaming finger at something else.

Why do some people seem more motivated than others?
Lots of people write to me about injuries because I was injured. [Ariely suffered third degree burns in an accident].
One of the lessons I’ve found is that people who are very badly injured but very successful are the people who changed the focus of success.



Some of the people I spoke tries to drees himself every day, and it takes about 45 minute.
He measures his own success and speed and that's his daily struggle. But he's not worried about the meaning of life and the big purpose he focuses on smaller things. It's key to all of us being more motivated. We just need to look for those small wins on a daily basis.

What are some other proven ways to motivate yourself?
Celebrate success. We often don’t give ourselves time to celebrate success but we finish something and say 'what’s next?' Celebrate when you finish a project, for example, because that's what you have control over.

What is the key to keeping up momentum?
It's connected to the sense of meaning and meaning comes from lots of things: from conquering a mountain or overcoming complex problems or helping other people. Remind yourself what the final goal is to get through the drudgery.

Do you ever struggle to motivate yourself?
A few years ago I decided I needed to start exercising and lose weight so I made a deal with my cousin. We made a contact to stop eating deserts in the week to exercise three times a week. We created strict rules for what exercise and eating meant and a system of accountability, and together those things have helped me dramatically.
Source: The Independent News

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Scientists find evidence for Alternate Theory of How Life Arose

A new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) offers a twist on a popular theory for how life on Earth began about four billion years ago.

The study questions the "RNA world" hypothesis, a theory for how RNA molecules evolved to create proteins and DNA. Instead, the new research offers evidence for a world where RNA and DNA evolved simultaneously.

"Even if you believe in a RNA-only world, you have to believe in something that existed with RNA to help it move forward," said Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, associate professor of chemistry at TSRI and senior author of the new study. "Why not think of RNA and DNA rising together, rather than trying to convert RNA to DNA by means of some fantastic chemistry at a prebiotic stage?"

The study was published recently in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

A Look Back in Time
Researchers have explored the RNA world hypothesis for more than 30 years. The idea behind this theory is that a series of chemical reactions led to the formation of self-replicating RNA molecules. RNA then evolved to create proteins and enzymes that resembled early versions of what makes up life today. Eventually, these enzymes helped RNA produce DNA, which led to complex organisms.

On the surface, RNA and DNA molecules look similar, with DNA forming a ladder-like structure (with nucleobase pairs as the rungs and sugar molecule backbones as the sides) and RNA forming what looks like just one side of a ladder.



If the RNA world theory is accurate, some researchers believe there would have been many cases where RNA nucleotides were mixed with DNA backbones, creating "heterogeneous" strands. If stable, these blended "chimeras" would have been an intermediate step in the transition to DNA.

Problems with Instability
However, the new study shows a significant loss of stability when RNA and DNA share the same backbone. The chimeras do not stay together as well as pure RNA or pure DNA, which would compromise their ability to hold genetic information and replicate.

"We were surprised to see a very deep drop in what we would call the 'thermal stability,'" said Krishnamurthy, who in addition to his position at TSRI has joint appointments with the National Science Foundation (NSF)-National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Center for Chemical Evolution and the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life. This instability appeared to be due to a difference in the DNA sugar molecule structure versus the RNA sugar molecule.

The finding supported previous research from Nobel laureate and Harvard University Chemistry and Chemical Biology Professor Jack Szostak that showed a loss of (nucleotide-binding aptamer) function when RNA mixed with DNA.



Because of this instability, chimeras in the RNA world would have likely died off in favor of more stable RNA molecules. This reflects what scientists see in cells today: If RNA nucleobases mistakenly join a DNA strand, sophisticated enzymes will rush to fix the mistake. Evolution has led to a system that favors more stable, "homogeneous" molecules.

These sophisticated enzymes were probably not around at the time of RNA and DNA's early evolution, so these substitutions may have had a crippling effect on the molecules' ability to replicate and function. "The transition from RNA to DNA would not have been easy without mechanisms to keep them separate," said Krishnamurthy.

Considering a Second Theory
This realization led the scientists to consider an alternate theory: RNA and DNA may have arisen in tandem.

Krishnamurthy emphasized that his lab is not the first to propose this theory, but the findings on chimeric instability give scientists new evidence to consider.
If the two evolved at the same time, DNA could have established its own homogeneous system early on. RNA could have still evolved to produce DNA, but that may have occurred after it first met DNA and got to know its raw materials.

Krishnamurthy added that scientists will never know exactly how life began (barring the invention of a time machine), but by considering circumstances of early evolution, scientists can gain insights into the fundamentals of biology.



In addition to Krishnamurthy, authors of the study "RNA-DNA Chimeras in the Context of an RNA-world Transition to an RNA/DNA-world," were Jesse V. Gavette (first author) and Matthias Stoop of TSRI and the NSF-NASA Center for Chemical Evolution; and Nicholas V. Hud of the Georgia Institute of Technology and the NSF-NASA Center for Chemical Evolution.


This is a computer graphic of an RNA molecule. Credit: Richard Feldmann/Wikipedia

Source:
Jesse V. Gavette ,Provided by: The Scripps Research Institute

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SCIENCE CLOSER TO EXPLAINING THE ORIGINS OF LIFE

Chemists believe that they may have found how reactions on early Earth may have given rise to molecules vital for genetics and energy metabolism.

The molecular dance that led to the origin of life billions of years ago remains one of the deepest mysteries in modern science. Although the exact choreography is forever lost to time, scientists now say that they may have identified one of the key steps. Chemists in Germany today reported a plausible way in which basic chemicals available on early Earth may have given rise to compounds called purines, which are:

"Natural substances found in all cell bodies, and in virtually all foods, purines provide part of the chemical structure of our genes and genes of plants and animals. A relative small number of meals, however, contain concentrated amounts of purines. In most, these foods high in purines foods are also high in protein. Purines are a key ingredient of DNA, RNA and energy metabolism in our cells."

The new work is “very pretty chemistry”, says Gerald Joyce, a chemist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California. Joyce specializes in the chemistry that may have given rise to life.

Joyce along with others have long suggested that one of the key early events in this process was the formation of RNA; a long chainlike molecule that conveys genetic information, and speeds up other chemical reactions. Both of those functions were necessary for life to evolve. However, sorting out how RNA itself may have arisen, and led to an “RNA world” that has certainly been a struggle.

RNA is made up of four different chemical building blocks which are the following; adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and uracil (U). Seven years ago, researchers led by the U.K. chemist John Sutherland showed a plausible series of steps by which chemical reactions on early Earth could have synthesized cytosine and uracil, also known as pyrimidines. However, this route hasn’t been shown to give rise to adenine or guanine which are RNA’s purine building blocks. Others partially succeeded in the purine quest.



In 1972, the U.K. chemist Leslie Orgel along with his colleagues suggested one possible route for purine formation on early Earth. This never seemed all that plausible, says Thomas Carell, a chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. That’s in part due to the process producing only tiny amounts of the purines that are so vital for life.

“People have been looking for synthetic routes to making purines for 40 years,” Carell says.

Carell and his colleagues stumbled upon a new lead several years ago, when they were studying how DNA is damaged. DNA is very similar to RNA except for that uracil is replaced with thymine. The group was studying how a molecule called formamidopyrimidine (FaPy) reacts with DNA, and found that it also readily reacts to form purines. Consequently, they decided to look into whether early Earth conditions could have given rise to FaPys, and thus, purines.

The first step was easy as it only requires hydrogen, cyanide, and water. Hydrogen cyanide, a simple molecule containing only three atoms ( Hydrogen, Nitrogen, and Carbon) is widely believed to have been abundant on early Earth. This molecule readily reacts in water (also thought to be plentiful at the time) to form one class of molecules called aminopyrimidines, which contains several chemical groups called amines. Normally, these amines react indiscriminately to form a wide mix of different compounds. That’s a bad thing in this case, Carell explains, because most of those products wouldn’t be purines.



Carell needed to find a way to stop all but one critical amine from reacting. “Initially I thought this would never work,” Carell says. However, the solution, he says, was far simpler than he expected. When Carell’s team spiked their solution with just a bit of a certain acid, (also widely considered abundant on early Earth) the reaction caused an extra proton from the acid to attach to the aminopyrimidine. That extra proton killed the reactivity of all but one of the amine groups on the molecule. Subsequently, much to Carell’s delight, the lone amine that stayed reactive was precisely the one that reacts to form a purine.

But wait, that’s not all. Further lab results presented today in Science show that the reactive amine on the aminopyrimidine readily bonds with either formic acid or formamide. Last year, the Rosetta space probe detected both of those chemicals on a comet, and now scientists think that they also probably rained down on early Earth. Once the bonds have formed, products of those reactions then eagerly react with sugars to create large quantities of purines. “It’s like a domino cascade,” Carell says.

Mic drop? Not so fast, says Steven Benner, a chemist and origin of life expert at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida. Benner agrees that the newly suggested purine synthesis is a “major step forward” for the field. But even if it is correct, he says, the chemical conditions that gave rise to the purines still don’t match those that Sutherland’s group suggests may have led to the pyrimidines. So just how A’s, G’s, C’s, and U’s would have ended up together has yet to be elucidated. Also, even if all the RNA bases were in the same place at the same time, it’s still not obvious what drove the bases to link up to form full-fledged RNAs, Benner says.



We’re here, so as a result, it must have happened somehow. But, RNA-world researchers still need to line up a few more dominoes before one of the greatest mysteries of life will be truly solved.

Source:
Robert F. Service

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