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Cautionary Tales by Valerie Jeffries
Pandemic Errors NATURE QUOTE OF THE DAY Monday 4th Oct 2021 (Unattributed) from Nature magazine: “Droplets and surfaces are very convenient for people in power — all of the responsibility is on the individual. On the other hand, if you admit it is airborne, institutions, governments and companies have to do something.” Units, droplets, and…
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Part 3: Primitive and Complex (and crème brûlée)
By Dr Valerie Jeffries FLS. Exploration of the Solar System looking for evidence of habitability is about ‘primitive life’, with no expectation of anything beyond tiny bacterial-style cells, possibly with viruses. Single-celled life forms ruled Earth for 1.5 billion years before the evolution of bigger modern cells, and in terms of total biomass they still…
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Part 2: Promising planets, Dry worlds, and Water-bears
By Dr Valerie Jeffries FLS Language of Life The term ‘Earthlife’ acknowledges that all life we know uses the same universal coding system to read its DNA. The way it translates DNA into bodies is amazingly neat, but uses a ‘language’ that’s arisen by chance. When humans first made words with meanings, two tribes on opposite continents would…
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LIFE, BUT NOT WHERE WE KNOW IT? Part 1: Life on Mars
By Dr Valerie Jeffries FLS. Are we alone ? We no longer believe that Planet Earth holds the only possibility of life, just as we know that our whole Solar System is extremely small in the vastness of space. We already recognise Mars, possibly Venus, and at least three moons of the giant planets Jupiter…
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LIFE IN THE TIME OF THE VIRUS by Dr Valerie Jeffries.
Here we are, the world-dominating Hominin, miserably in thrall to the tiniest and simplest form of life, a virus. It’s not even alive in some opinions, depending on your definition of Life. We learn the things that Life must be capable of, all of it contributing to that overarching requirement, reproduction. A virus can do…
