04:09 Is the human genome a blueprint or a musical score?
7:58 Crick's central dogma of biology
12:03 What scientists got wrong about genes and proteins
18:50 Why evolution chose disordered proteins
22:27 The process of gene regulation
27:03 Why life doesn't work like clockwork
30:29 The growth of intestinal villi
32:18 Why do we have five fingers?
34:55 Causal emergence
38:09 Do all parts of us have their own agency?
42:46 How does this affect genetic approaches to medicine?
48:09 Why do organisms exist at all?
Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. There is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles.
In this talk, discover why some researchers believe that, thanks to incredible scientific advancements, we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.
Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including 'H2O: A Biography of Water', 'Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour', 'The Music Instinct', and 'Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything'.
Philip's book 'Critical Mass' won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. He is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is the author of 'The Modern Myths' and lives in London.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission impacted Dimorphos, the satellite of binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos, on 2022 September 26 UTC. We estimate the changes in the orbital and physical properties of the system due to the impact using ground-based photometric and radar observations, as well as DART camera observations. Under the assumption that Didymos is an oblate spheroid, we estimate that its equatorial and polar radii are 394 ± 11 m and 290 ± 16 m, respectively. We estimate that the DART impact instantaneously changed the along-track velocity of Dimorphos by −2.63 ± 0.06 mm s−1. Initially, after the impact, Dimorphos's orbital period had changed by −32.7 minutes ± 16 s to 11.377 ± 0.004 hr. We find that over the subsequent several weeks the orbital period changed by an additional 34 ± 15 s, eventually stabilizing at 11.3674 ± 0.0004 hr. The total change in the orbital period was −33.25 minutes ±1.5 s. The postimpact orbit exhibits an apsidal precession rate of 6.7 ± 0fdg2 day−1. Under our model, this rate is driven by the oblateness parameter of Didymos, J2, as well as the spherical harmonics coefficients, C20 and C22, of Dimorphos's gravity. Under the assumption that Dimorphos is a triaxial ellipsoid with a uniform density, its C20 and C22 estimates imply axial ratios, a/b and a/c, of about 1.3 and 1.6, respectively. Preimpact images from DART indicate Dimorphos's shape was close to that of an oblate spheroid, and thus our results indicate that the DART impact significantly altered the shape of Dimorphos.
I would also love to see more transparency around AI behavior guardrails, but I don't expect that will happen anytime soon. Transparency would make it much easier to circumvent guardrails.