James M. Tour is an American synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology. Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas, United States. Dr. Tour is one of the world’s top synthetic organic chemists in…
Viruses Required for Complex Life: The knee-jerk reaction when hearing the word “virus” is an almost universal negative reaction for most people. After all, viruses are associated with a host of benign as well as severe sicknesses and diseases from the common cold to HIV and its associated autoimmune deficiency syndrome or AIDS. Yet, upon…
Charles Darwin originally proposed that all living things in the world today originated from a single common ancestor from which we all share a history of common descent. This process of common descent formed the “Tree of Life”, where the process of gradual evolutionary changes over hundreds of millions of years of time produced a…
This presentation is about how an extreme level of significance or importance can be hiding within something that is apparently extremely insignificant. Concepts presented include the history of the Voyager 1 space mission and Carl Sagan’s request to have it take a picture of Earth from 4 billion miles away… as well as various anthropic…
The Darwinian mechanism is dependent upon random genetic mutations in order to produce variability in gene pools upon which natural selection can then work to preferentially select out the best mutations to be passed on to future generations. One of the serious problems here (and there are more) is that beneficial mutations are very rare…