Stars, Cells, and God

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A New Organelle? and Atmospheric Oxygenation Jul 10, 2024

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A New Organelle?

A team of life scientists has claimed to discover a new organelle (called a nitroplast) that fixes nitrogen. It looks like this organelle evolved from an endosymbiont that assumed permanent residence in a eukaryotic cell. If so, this discovery provides support for the endosymbiont hypothesis, challenging the notion that a Creator is responsible for life’s origin and design. In this episode, biochemist Fuz Rana describes this work and its significance to life’s history, and offers a critical assessment of the study’s conclusion.

Atmospheric Oxygenation

An international team of 17 scientists has proposed that a dramatic weakening of Earth’s magnetic field caused an oxygen level jump 575 million years ago. They showed that a much weaker magnetic field would cause solar particles to split apart water molecules in Earth’s atmosphere into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen would escape to interplanetary space, leaving the oxygen to accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere. They demonstrated that that the magnetic field decline is sufficient to explain most of the rapid oxygen rise (from 2% to 8%) that occurred at the time of the Avalon explosion, which marked the first appearance of macroscopic animals. In this episode, Hugh Ross explains that the transition of Earth’s core from being 100% liquid to where a solid inner core begins to form would explain the dramatic weakening of Earth’s magnetic field—and the minimum oxygen level needed for complex life—that occurred 0.6 million years ago.

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Human Brain Tissue Controls Robot | News of the Day Jul 08, 2024

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Join Fazale “Fuz” Rana in this breaking News of the Day episode of Stars, Cells, and God. Fuz reports on the work by a research team from Tianjin University in China, who, recently stole headlines when they announced that they developed a chip that used human brain tissue to control a robotics system. This remarkable breakthrough (called organoid intelligence) generates excitement and also raises some profound ethical and theological questions.

In this episode Fuz explains:

How this technology works
Why researchers are pursuing the development of biocomputing and organoid intelligence
Ethical concerns associated with this work
Christian perspective on organoid intelligence

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Do Early Supermassive Black Holes Refute the Big Bang? | News of the Day Jul 03, 2024

Show notes

Join Hugh Ross in this breaking News of the Day episode of Stars, Cells, and God. Hugh describes the discovery of four fully-formed supermassive black holes that existed just 410–760 million years after the cosmic creation event.

Do Early Supermassive Black Holes Refute the Big Bang?

Quasar J1120+0641, seen 760 million years after the cosmic beginning, has a supermassive black hole (SMBH) weighing 1.52 billion solar masses.
Quasar J1342+0928, seen 700 million years after the beginning, has a SMBH weighing 0.78 billion solar masses.
Quasar J0313-1806, seen 690 million years after the beginning, has a SMBH of 1.6 billion solar masses.
The most distantly detected SMBH belongs to GN-z11. Just 410 million after the beginning, its SMBH weighs 0.002 billion solar masses.
There are three ways such SMBHs can form so early in a big bang universe: through 1) very aggressive early gas accretion by the BHs; 2) mergers of the BHs arising from many 500+ solar-mass first generation stars; and 3) mergers of 10,000+ solar-mass gas clouds that collapse into black holes without forming stars.
The discovery of many more cosmic dawn SMBHs will determine which one, of more, of the three ways explains the SMBHs.

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Smart Dams and Malicious AIs Jul 03, 2024

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Smart Dams

More than 58,000 dams that are built higher than 15 meters (50 feet) exist on nearly all the world’s rivers. Consequently, migratory fish stocks have declined by 76% since 1970 and populations of “megafish” have declined by 94%. Two water resource engineers combined fish migratory taxonomy data with migratory fish life cycle and dam impact models to determine the best fish rescue strategies for five flagship fish species residing in the 12 large dams on the Yangtze River in China. They identified six major misjudgments in China’s fish rescue programs and concluded that large, effective fishways are essential for maintaining robust fish stocks.

Malicious AIs

The quest for more powerful and capable AIs inevitably involves making more sophisticated training algorithms and models with a larger number of parameters. While pursuing this quest, AI developers are also investigating how to align AIs with the values and behaviors we want. Recent research demonstrated that those two goals currently stand in opposition to one another. Specifically, making larger, more sophisticated models results in AIs that effectively resist training to eliminate malicious behavior—regardless of whether the malicious behavior was intentionally programmed or an unintended consequence. Such results provide additional evidence that we humans need to build godly character in ourselves so that we can wisely and responsibly develop and use these powerful AI tools.

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