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Philip Ball on Muck Rack

Philip Ball

Verified
London
As seen in: Apple Podcasts, MSN Australia, MSN Ireland, MSN UK, The New York Times, BBC, British Journal of Cancer, Financial Times, HuffPost, Nature and
Author, writer & broadcaster, mostly about science & its interactions with society. Books include Bright Earth, Critical Mass, The Modern Myths, How Life Works.
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Articles

Is Life Just Different?

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By Philip Ball Verified
| Quanta Magazine Verified
In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft, which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter. So great is the transformative power of life that its presence can be detected just from the light and radio waves our planet emits or reflects into space.
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Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI

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By Philip Ball Verified
| Quanta Magazine Verified
Samuel Velasco and Hannah Waters/Quanta Magazine Introduction Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells of living organisms, known as their genomes, and claimed that this genetic database must be some kind of blueprint, code script, or computer.
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Would mirror life really threaten our own?

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By Philip Ball Verified
| Chemistry World Verified
New modelling suggests that even if we could create cells based on mirror-image biomolecules, their natural counterparts would outcompete them in the wild Source: © Thom Leach/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Bacteria created with mirror-image biomolecules would face different survivial pressures to their natural counterparts At the end of 2024, a new technological doomsday scenario arrived to haunt us.
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