Natural Science Forum / Biology / Evolution / August 2008

This quote from Science vol 321 July 18 08 'Simple Sleepers' seems to
somewhat support some of my ideas on sleep. To summarize, I suggest that
sleep is a two part process with the first, deep sleep, a time of rebuilding
and dealing with nurturing; and, the second REM sleep period is ...

Did you know that the creator of the Sims is making an evolution game
called spore. you can go to the official site (spore.com), the wiki
(wikia.spore.com), or my fansite (netteyd.webs.com plz excuse the name
of the site)!

Published online 6 August 2008 | Nature 454, 677 (2008) |
doi:10.1038/454677a
'Virophage' suggests viruses are alive
Evidence of illness enhances case for life.

Can anyone tell me if a DNA strand (or helix) formed abiotically has a
length limit before it becomes unstable?

I am trying to find some references to modern research on overlapping
genetic code, where the same stretch of DNA can express two completely
different proteins by shifting the reading frame by one base.  I (vaguely)
remember reading about such a stretch of genome in mitochondria, ...

Evolutionary Patterns in the Sequence and Structure of Transfer RNA: A
Window into Early Translation and the Genetic Code
Feng-Jie Sun, Gustavo Caetano-Anollés
Department of Crop Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

Microbes beneath sea floor genetically distinct
Tiny microbes beneath the sea floor, distinct from life on the Earth's
surface, may account for one-tenth of the Earth's living biomass, according
to an interdisciplinary team of researchers, but many of these minute