But there it is a happy ending: when you stop looking for knowledge while loving. And you refuse looking for your thoughts, but share.

Unpleasant but unavoidable: more you start knowing somebody and understanding him/her more,more you want to run away. Far away. And it is so sad when you know precisely that you do not have any other choice but running.

Healthy life

"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything"

Mark Twain

Look

I am the kind of person who could really hurt you with a look. Probably you realize it better than anybody else and it is why you always prefer the cold, non-involved 2.0 ways of conversation.

But while you was struggling with your limited emotional intelligence and existential cowardise, somebody else successfully played its chances. And now, I am the one who wholeheartedly avoids you. For the rest of my life.

Getting used

We are getting used very fast with good or bad, with what we previously feared, or distrusted. All we need is to tell ourselves that what it is going on with us is part of "our" normality, eventually the normality agreed as well by the others. We focus all our efforts and energies to find out people like "us" with whom to share our common experiences. And, to get more psychological support for what we achieved or for what we don't. The most important is to have a certain mental comfort. It is the same with age, with illnesses, with various status upgrades or downgrades. The social choices we have at our disposal are offering an vaste range of possibilities to stop improving, to stop being angry against our pitiful human situation. With or without a religion, our reactions are following similar patterns and whatever braves our minds and hearts we expected to be, at the end of the road, we are still facing the poor shortages of our desperate efforts to survive. At any kind.

Bad luck with sports

I've read lately various blogs and posts of men about the grotesque and unpleasant experiences encountered with women on JDate. For the sake of objectivity, I can confess I went through similar (bad, and mostly bad taste) episodes.

I started this on-line dating adventure with no prior thoughts. A nickname and vague references about yourself are offering a minimum safety of getting in trouble in the real world and I hoped that, it was a chance to identify from a huge database of opportunities my very small and special target-group. But, all I got after one year of serious approach and daily exercise was the conclusion that the high IQ single men must hide somewhere else. I don't know yet where.

One of the first contacts with this unusual universe was a guy, whose profile indicated he's high educated, socially active and with an impressive career. He started to send me an IM asking me directly "Do you like sports?" I was a bit surprised, because I am this old-type kind of person used to start a conversation, with known and unknown people with at least the classical "hi". but, anyway, maybe the guy was at gym and was planning some special sports gathering. Still, I was challenged by this plain question. To tell him or not the truth? The only sports I'm practicing are jogging, city biking and sometimes some gym, but rather at the very practical level, not something I really liked. And, because for me keeping the record of lies is quite neurons-consuming, I answered candidly: "No". For him to reply back, instantly: "No?"

How challenging! In two minutes we are just trying to get further a conversation started dead. And, I was about to fail this - it seems - important, very important test. So, I wrote back on a self-ironic tone how my relationship with sports was never a good one and blablabla. After another minute or two, he answered on a very professional and distant tone: "I'm very sorry for you (what I'm gonna do now, I missed the chance of my life), but I'm interested ONLY in women who like sports". And closed the window, as to run as far away as possible of such a looser. And I logged out. It was enough for one day.

To be continued.

My problems

I have a couple of small (new) problems these days:

- It is impossible to avoid the big fillers with Viagra pills advertising. Everywhere, including on websites for children.

- The pathetic features about the economic crisis. The last on the list is a Washington Times report about a lady who had the "misfortune" of being freed from prison in the "worse times ever".

- The story of the 14 children single unemployed mother (33), all conceived through in vitro fertilization.

But, in a way I am quite lucky, because I don't watch TV and I am out of JDate, so I could enjoy much more my private silence.

Worse than the worse

I found today this quote from Oscar Wilde: "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about".

Postcards

These days, we do not send too many postcards. We have the e-mails or the phone multimedia options. Our messages could reach the destination instantly. Our pictures might have a more personal touch, because made by ourselves, sharing with the others our personal view of the world. But we are rarely making any such efforts, because we don't have an educated eye to look around us. Plus, we have thousand of (ideas less) ready-made hallmarks or postcards with stereotypical texts. We send it (instantly) sharing in fact our absence.

As for the old times postcards, they are displayed now in museums as this Walker Evans' exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. What about an exhibition of electronic postcards in a virtual museum ?

How Did Life Begin? RNA That Replicates Itself Indefinitely Developed For First Time

ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2009) — One of the most enduring questions is how life could have begun on Earth. Molecules that can make copies of themselves are thought to be crucial to understanding this process as they provide the basis for heritability, a critical characteristic of living systems. New findings could inform biochemical questions about how life began.

Now, a pair of Scripps Research Institute scientists has taken a significant step toward answering that question. The scientists have synthesized for the first time RNA enzymes that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components, and the process proceeds indefinitely.

The work was recently published in the journal Science.

In the modern world, DNA carries the genetic sequence for advanced organisms, while RNA is dependent on DNA for performing its roles such as building proteins. But one prominent theory about the origins of life, called the RNA World model, postulates that because RNA can function as both a gene and an enzyme, RNA might have come before DNA and protein and acted as the ancestral molecule of life. However, the process of copying a genetic molecule, which is considered a basic qualification for life, appears to be exceedingly complex, involving many proteins and other cellular components.

For years, researchers have wondered whether there might be some simpler way to copy RNA, brought about by the RNA itself. Some tentative steps along this road had previously been taken by the Joyce lab and others, but no one could demonstrate that RNA replication could be self-propagating, that is, result in new copies of RNA that also could copy themselves.

In Vitro Evolution

A few years after Tracey Lincoln arrived at Scripps Research from Jamaica to pursue her Ph.D., she began exploring the RNA-only replication concept along with her advisor, Professor Gerald Joyce, M.D., Ph.D., who is also Dean of the Faculty at Scripps Research. Their work began with a method of forced adaptation known as in vitro evolution. The goal was to take one of the RNA enzymes already developed in the lab that could perform the basic chemistry of replication, and improve it to the point that it could drive efficient, perpetual self-replication.

Lincoln synthesized in the laboratory a large population of variants of the RNA enzyme that would be challenged to do the job, and carried out a test-tube evolution procedure to obtain those variants that were most adept at joining together pieces of RNA.

Ultimately, this process enabled the team to isolate an evolved version of the original enzyme that is a very efficient replicator, something that many research groups, including Joyce's, had struggled for years to obtain. The improved enzyme fulfilled the primary goal of being able to undergo perpetual replication. "It kind of blew me away," says Lincoln.

Immortalizing Molecular Information

The replicating system actually involves two enzymes, each composed of two subunits and each functioning as a catalyst that assembles the other. The replication process is cyclic, in that the first enzyme binds the two subunits that comprise the second enzyme and joins them to make a new copy of the second enzyme; while the second enzyme similarly binds and joins the two subunits that comprise the first enzyme. In this way the two enzymes assemble each other — what is termed cross-replication. To make the process proceed indefinitely requires only a small starting amount of the two enzymes and a steady supply of the subunits.

"This is the only case outside biology where molecular information has been immortalized," says Joyce.

Not content to stop there, the researchers generated a variety of enzyme pairs with similar capabilities. They mixed 12 different cross-replicating pairs, together with all of their constituent subunits, and allowed them to compete in a molecular test of survival of the fittest. Most of the time the replicating enzymes would breed true, but on occasion an enzyme would make a mistake by binding one of the subunits from one of the other replicating enzymes. When such "mutations" occurred, the resulting recombinant enzymes also were capable of sustained replication, with the most fit replicators growing in number to dominate the mixture. "To me that's actually the biggest result," says Joyce.

The research shows that the system can sustain molecular information, a form of heritability, and give rise to variations of itself in a way akin to Darwinian evolution. So, says Lincoln, "What we have is non-living, but we've been able to show that it has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting."

Knocking on the Door of Life

The group is pursuing potential applications of their discovery in the field of molecular diagnostics, but that work is tied to a research paper currently in review, so the researchers can't yet discuss it.

But the main value of the work, according to Joyce, is at the basic research level. "What we've found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts." He is quick to point out that, while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not themselves a form of life.

The historical origin of life can never be recreated precisely, so without a reliable time machine, one must instead address the related question of whether life could ever be created in a laboratory. This could, of course, shed light on what the beginning of life might have looked like, at least in outline. "We're not trying to play back the tape," says Lincoln of their work, "but it might tell us how you go about starting the process of understanding the emergence of life in the lab."

Joyce says that only when a system is developed in the lab that has the capability of evolving novel functions on its own can it be properly called life. "We're knocking on that door," he says, "But of course we haven't achieved that."

The subunits in the enzymes the team constructed each contain many nucleotides, so they are relatively complex and not something that would have been found floating in the primordial ooze. But, while the building blocks likely would have been simpler, the work does finally show that a simpler form of RNA-based life is at least possible, which should drive further research to explore the RNA World theory of life's origins.

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Journal reference:

1. Lincoln et al. Self-Sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme. Science, Jan 8, 2009; DOI: 10.1126/science.1167856