Nicolle Rager Fuller / NSF

An artist's conception shows an RNA molecule, which may have served as an early form of life on Earth.

The debate over the definition of life is getting messier and messier, but one of the pioneers on the biochemical frontier is suggesting a method to tell whether scientists are actually looking at a new form of life: Follow the bits of information that are contained in the chemistry.

"How many heritable 'bits' of information are involved, and where did they come from?" Scripps Research Institute biologist Gerald Joyce asks in an essay published today by the journal PLoS Biology. "A genetic system that contains more bits than the number that were required to initiate its operation might reasonably be considered a new form of life."

By that definition, we're not yet close to identifying alien life, in the lab or in the cosmos, Joyce told me today. "The fact is, there is only one known form of life, and we're part of it. Someday, maybe there'll be something that's off the grid, but everything we know is part of the tree of life."

Joyce says that verdict applies to microbes with artificially constructed DNA, such as the bacteria that were built in a lab two years ago, as well as to the arsenic-tolerant bacteria that were at one time touted as a form of alien life. He worries that all these claims about creating or finding alien life could backfire.

"We've had enough of these false alarms that I'm getting a little nervous that the public is going to perceive it as 'crying wolf,'" he said. "There have been enough examples that we need to just cool it a little."

Joyce applies the same rule of thumb to his own research, which focuses on RNA enzymes that can be combined to create a synthetic genome. In the essay, he notes that the RNA enzymes can "evolve" into new forms, but contain only 24 bits of their own heritable information in the form of chemical base pairs. The molecules need another 60 bits of information that are provided at the outset and are not subject to mutation and selection.

"Thus, of the 84 total bits required for the system to replicate and evolve, only about one-fourth can be counted as part of the system's molecular memory," he writes. "The synthetic genetic system is not a new life form because it operates mostly on borrowed bits."

Creating or remaking life in the lab
Is it even possible to come up with a life form from scratch? That's one of the key reasons for having a working definition, so that scientists know alien life when they see it ... or make it. The synthetic bacteria created by J. Craig Venter and his colleagues wouldn't qualify because those microbes are merely using a computerized genetic code that was tweaked from nature. "Craig Venter knows that he didn't make a new life form. He remade Mycoplasma," Joyce said.

But if RNA enzymes — or another class of synthetic molecules known as xenonucleic acid polymers or XNA — could be developed into stand-alone genetic systems, with more than half of the information passed along through an alternate chemistry, that just might lead to a truly new form of life.

"That's definitely knocking on the door ... What you'd need is an XNA molecule that has the function of copying XNA parent molecules to produce XNA progeny with pretty good fidelity," Joyce said. Right now, the XNA bits have to be swapped into DNA for amplification, he noted.

Life on other worlds
Joyce said alien life could be created in the lab, or its fingerprints could be detected far from our solar system. "About a decade from now, we're going to start seeing the atmospheric composition of extrasolar planets," he said. If future telescopes pick up the signs of unusual chemistry — say, an unexpected excess of ozone — that could point to potential life processes. But to clinch the case, scientists would need to learn enough about the mechanism behind the chemistry, and how that chemistry preserves "molecular memory" from one generation to the next.

"To me, in a slogan, biology is chemistry plus history," Joyce said. "There's a special class of chemistry that has memory, that has history built in. It's a kind of chemistry that learns from experience."

Confirming the existence of biological-style chemistry on Mars, or in some other environment in our own solar system, presents a special case. "Now we're really in the game," Joyce said. "We're talking about 'spit-carrying molecules.' Maybe we can get little snippets of information and start stitching that together, and have enough to say, 'OK, is it on the tree of life or not?' If the sequence is just off the tree, was it a deep branch, or did it become its own thing?"

Joyce said the alien-life debate could well be reignited by developments right here on Earth, such as the analysis of samples brought up from Lake Vostok, a freshwater lake hidden beneath a miles-thick layer of Antarctic ice. "I won't be surprised, when the samples come up from James Cameron's deep dive to the Mariana Trench, that someone starts thinking that there's something weird down there," he said in a PLoS Biology podcast. "Maybe it's an alternative life form."  

One thing's for sure: Until another truly alien form of life is created or discovered, it's impossible to make a meaningful estimate of how common life might be in the universe, or arrive at the answer to one of life's ultimate questions: Are we alone?

"I think humans are lonely, and long for another form of life in the universe, preferably one that is intelligent and benevolent," Joyce said in a PLoS news release. "But wishing upon a star does not make it so. We must either discover alternative life or construct it in the laboratory. Someday it may be discovered by a Columbus who travels to a distant world or, more likely in my opinion, invented by a Geppetto who toils at the workbench."

More about life, the universe and everything:

• Can scientists define 'life' ... using just three words?
• What should society do about synthetic life?
• Gallery: Six signs that aliens might actually exist
• What exactly is life?

In the PLoS Biology podcast, Joyce discusses the search for new life forms and synthetic biology. Joyce's work was supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

J. Craig Venter Institute

A genetically transformed strain of bacteria takes on a bluish cast as a signal that synthetic coding was incorporated into the cell's genetic machinery.

Someday, microbiomes just might give us a world where crude oil is grown like a crop, where vaccines for new flu strains can be produced in days instead of months, and where physicians can tweak the bacteria in your gut to cure what ails you. At least that's the promise held out by genomics pioneer Craig Venter and others at a symposium conducted this week at Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology.

A decade ago, Venter was among a cadre of researchers who first decoded the human genome — in Venter's case, his own. Today, as the head of the J. Craig Venter Institute, he's among a cadre of researchers who are not only working out the implications of that genetic code for our daily lives, but also studying how to tweak the genetic codes of the myriad microbes that surround us — and in some cases, live within us. The makeup of those microbial communities is what scientists refer to a "microbiome."

A decade ago, the main challenge facing geneticists was to translate the "analog" information of cellular chemistry into a digital database, Venter told attendees. Today, the main challenge is to reverse course and make the "digital to analog" conversion, so that innovations in genetic code can be applied to the real world.

How's that done? Venter and his colleagues made a start on that task just a few years ago, by pioneering a process to synthesize DNA and insert it into a strain of bacteria. The daughter cells reflected the artificially altered programming instead of their forebears' natural genetic code.

Now Venter and others are putting synthetic biology to work. Here are just a few of the examples cited at the Seattle symposium, titled "Systems Biology and the Microbiome":

• Novartis, a major pharmaceutical company, is working with Venter on techniques to crack the genetic code of an influenza virus strain and pass it along to the vaccine-makers within five days. A quick turnaround is the key to containing the spread of deadly flu strains like the one that killed tens of millions in 1918. "We think we're actually pandemic-ready," Venter said.
• Several commercial ventures, including Sapphire Energy, are tweaking algae to produce oil-like compounds at a price that's cheaper than the cost of crude oil. Sapphire CEO Jason Pyle pointed out that based purely on commodity costs, corn is a cheaper energy source than oil (though not as cheap as natural gas). If genetically modified algae could be grown in mass quantities as cheaply as corn, it could become a renewable energy source that's much closer to carbon-neutral than fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide could come to be seen as "the raw material of the future," Venter said.

• Algae strains could also be reprogrammed to produce foodstuffs, Venter said. Such genetic twists could outpace today's chemical-heavy agricultural methods, which are increasingly being seen as too wasteful for the planet's rising population. "Ultimately, the elimination of agriculture as we know it should be a goal of modern science," Venter said. However, harnessing synthetic algae cells is "not a short-term project," he cautioned.
• Unraveling the human microbiome, particularly in our digestive system,. ranks among the top priorities for microbiologists. Physicians are already experimenting with "fecal transplants" — a gross-sounding procedure that involves injecting material from a donor's intestines into the gut of a patient who needs a healthier bacterial community. Having your digestive bacteria analyzed, and tweaked if necessary, may someday become part of a routine physical. (However, MIT's Eric Alm noted that it wouldn't have to be done annually, because your gut's microbiome doesn't usually change that quickly.)
• The bacteria in our bowels may even play a role in space exploration: If we ever get to the point of sending astronauts to Mars, Venter said one of the first items on the agenda should be to replace the astronauts' Earth-centric gut bacteria with a selection more suited to the Mars trip. Venter has said other bacteria cold be engineered to create fuel and food from raw materials on Mars, including the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.

This all sounds like a science-fiction utopia, but some believe there's the potential for a sci-fi nightmare instead. Last month, an international environmental consortium called for a moratorium on the commercial use of synthetic organisms, and an outright ban on the application of synthetic biology to the human genome or the human microbiome.

"It is our obligation to safeguard the future, to be wise in our development and use of technologies which could threaten humans and the Earth," said Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. The results of an online survey on synthetic biology are due to be released next month.

What do you think about the idea using genetically altered microbes to produce fuel, food and medicine? Is it a panacea, a Pandora's Box, or something in between? Feel free to register your opinion in the online poll above, or in the comment space below.

More about the microbiome and synthetic biology:

• Scientists map the world's microbes
• What's living on your smartphone?
• Bacteria prefer prime real estate
• Renewable rubber highlights new economy
• One-third of Americans back ban on synthetic biology

JCVI via Science/AAAS

Scientists took a type of bacteria known as Mycoplasma capricolum and transplanted a custom-written version of the genome from a different type of bacteria, Mycoplasma mycoides. The synthetic genome included coding for the production of a blue compound, which served here as a signal that the bacteria were "synthetic cells."

More than 100 environmental and social-action groups say synthetic organisms shouldn't be sent out into the world until governments create a new framework to regulate them. Their recommendations for such a framework are outlined in a statement of principles issued today.

Synthetic biology aims to create new genetic strains of microbes, such as algae that are tailor-made to produce biofuels, or bacteria that are engineered to fight medical maladies ranging from infections to cancer. Researchers estimate that the global market for synthetic biology was $1.1 billion in 2010, and is on track to increase to $10.8 billion in 2016.

Critics, however, say that the technology could lead to environmental hazards of Frankensteinian proportions, including new strains of unstoppable invasive species and unpredictable hazards to human health. The 111 groups behind today's statement, including Friends of the Earth, the International Center for Technology Assessment and the ETC Group, are on the critical side of the spectrum.

"We are calling for a global moratorium on the release and commercial use of synthetic organisms until we have established a public interest research agenda, examined alternatives, developed the proper regulations and put into place rigorous biosafety measures," Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, said in a news release. "It is our obligation to safeguard the future, to be wise in our development and use of technologies which could threaten humans and the Earth."

The groups call for an outright ban on the use of synthetic biology on the human genome, or on the human microbiome — that is, the wide assortment of microbes that are found inside us or on our skin. They say the current systems in place to regulate genetic engineering are inadequate for the task ahead. 

"Self-regulation of the synthetic biology industry simply won't work. Current laws and regulations around biotechnology are outdated and inadequate to deal with the novel risks posed by synthetic biology technologies and their products," said Andy Kimbrell, executive director of the International Center for Technology Assessment.

The debate over synthetic biology has intensified since geneticist J. Craig Venter and his colleagues announced the development of the "first synthetic cell" in 2010. In the wake of that announcement, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues said there was no need to halt research into synthetic biology or establish an entirely new regulatory framework. Instead, the commission called for a combination of industry self-regulation, closer coordination by existing regulatory agencies and further research into the potential for risk.

When that report was released, the ETC Group's Jim Thomas said it was "disappointingly empty and timid." Thomas' group is one of the principal backers of the proposed principles issued today.

A spokesman for the Biotechnology Industry Organization told ScienceInsider's Elizabeth Pennisi that the principles issued today were not helpful to policymakers or the public, due to "the shrillness of its tone and its lack of objectivity." He said "there are a lot of safeguards in place" today, while acknowledging that the existing regulations may eventually need to be upgraded.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has established its own project to study the policy implications of synthetic biology. One of the leaders of that project, senior research associate Todd Kuiken, told me that the principles issued today were "not that much different" from the presidential commission's recommendations, although he said the tone was a bit more strident. "The word 'moratorium' is a little strong," he said.

"There are potential risks there, and we need to look at these issues before we start putting these things out there," Kuiken said. "I don't think anything they said is that surprising to folks, nor is the response from industry that surprising."

The center's Synthetic Biology Project has voiced concern about the implications of genetic technology for the past 18 months. In a recent Nature commentary, Kuiken and four colleagues urged scientists and officials to take additional steps to avoid "a synthetic-biology disaster."

"Public agencies must link basic and environmental risk research by co-funding projects and requiring grant recipients to work with environmental agencies from the start," they wrote. "Given the complexity of the research questions, the economic and social value of successful synthetic-biology applications and the potential impact of errors, we think that a minimal investment of $20 million to $30 million over 10 years is appropriate."

Today, the Synthetic Biology Project is kicking off an online survey to gauge public opinion on the ethical, legal and social implications synthetic biology. The center said results from the survey would be compiled into a report to be released in May. To take the survey, click here. But first, register your opinion in our own unscientific poll at right.

More about synthetic biology:

• First synthetic life form holds promise and peril
• One-third of Americans back ban on synthetic biology
• Synthetic life could help humans colonize Mars
• DNA chip is 'printing press' for synthetic biology
• Yeast adds vitamins to bread

Henry Bortman / 2010

Other scientists are analyzing the controversial strain of bacteria that biologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues found in California's Mono Lake.

It's been one year since researchers shook up the scientific world by claiming they bred bacteria that used arsenic in place of phosphorus, and the controversy is still simmering: The lead researcher and her critics say they're taking a closer look at the microbe at the center of the "weird life" claims.

After hitting the highs and the lows of academic acclaim, Felisa Wolfe-Simon has left her original research group and joined up with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California to continue her research into the bacterium known as GFAJ-1, which gets its name from the acronym for "Give Felisa a Job." (No joke!)

"There is so much work to do we're focusing on that and look forward to communicating our efforts in the coming months," Wolfe-Simon told me in an email this week.

Meanwhile, Wolfe-Simon's highest-profile critic, University of British Columbia microbiologist Rosie Redfield, took on the task of replicating the GFAJ-1 experiment. "I'm doing this even though I agree with all the other researchers who said this result is almost certainly wrong," Redfield told me. "Scientifically, it's really kind of a waste of time to try to replicate this yourself. But there's always the possibility that you could be wrong. And more than that, there was just a general sense that, you know, somebody should try."

Redfield has sent purified DNA samples to collaborators at Princeton University for mass spectrometry analysis — to see whether any arsenic was really taken up into the molecular structure. "We just got the DNA from Rosie Redfield," one of those collaborators, Leonid Kruglyak, told me this week. A graduate student in Kruglyak's lab, Marshall Louis Reaves, is currently working out the protocols for analyzing the DNA.

"We want to be able to fragment the DNA and run the fragments on the mass spectrometer," Krugylak said. "Those fragments should look quite different in the mass spectrometer if there is arsenate."

Just today, another team of researchers, led by Simon Silver of the University of Illinois at Chicago, announced that they have sequenced GFAJ-1's genome and will be analyzing it for new clues in the case.

Argonne National Laboratory's Jack Gilbert, a member of the team, characterized himself as a "100 percent skeptic" about the findings announced a year ago, but said that the gene sequence was still worth having. He and his colleagues have already found some interesting genetic twists, even if there's no evidence of arsenic in the DNA. "It's interesting to have this information to determine what the mechanism might be if other evidence shows this to be true," he explained.

Gilbert said it was mere coincidence that the genome sequence was published online exactly one year after Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues kicked off the controversy. "I hadn't even considered that today was the anniversary," he told me.

Why all the fuss?
The case of GFAJ-1 is significant on more than one level.

If the central claim of the original paper holds true, that means the machinery of life can be tinkered with to replace one seemingly essential chemical — phosphorus — with a different chemical that's seemingly inimical to life. One of Wolfe-Simon's original collaborators, Arizona State University astrobiologist Paul Davies, has long maintained that "weird life," built on a different biochemical platform, could exist right under our noses and we wouldn't know it.

The prospect of weird life on Earth would also argue in favor of widening the search for weird life on other worlds, perhaps as close as Mars or the Saturnian moon Titan. That's what led NASA to tout the research a year ago as having extraterrestrial implications. "The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, an associate administrator at the space agency. The news reports went even farther. Here's a typical headline: "NASA Discovers Alien Life in California."

Actually, what Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues did was to take an existing strain of salt-loving bacterla from California's Mono Lake, and try to breed it in the presence of high concentrations of arsenic. GFAJ-1 emerged as the best prospect: The research team said it seemed to take hold in the high-arsenic environment, and they said their molecular analysis suggested that arsenic-based compounds known as arsenates were incorporated in the place of phosphates.

The bacteria in the arsenic-rich culture weren't aliens at all. But for many chemists and microbiologists, the research team's claims, published online by the journal Science on Dec. 2, 2010, were as hard to believe as reports of a UFO landing.

One chemist, Steven Benner of the Florida-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, said he bet Wolfe-Simon $100 that the arsenic wasn't taken up in the DNA. Benner said in an email this week that the proposition was "still in limbo ... so the bet is not yet collected." (Wolfe-Simon told me she doesn't remember the bet.)

The skepticism over the reported results erupted almost immediately in a wave of blog postings and Twitter updates from commentators and scientists, including Redfield. As a result, the #arseniclife case quickly became a case study for instant peer review, mediated by the Internet. It also turned into a case study for open science, in which researchers share their results as they become available rather than holding them back until they're published in a journal.

Redfield emerged as a strong voice, for the skeptics as well as for the open-science movement. Her technical criticisms focused on the way that the bacteria samples were handled. "The way they isolated their DNA was almost 'I can't believe they did this' badly done," she told me this week. Such criticism led Science's editors to hold back the on-paper publication of the research for months, until eight sets of technical comments could be collected from Redfield and other observers and vetted through peer review. Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues were also given space to respond to the technical comments.

"That was pretty unprecedented," said Ginger Pinholster, director of the Office of Public Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science.

The next steps
Since then, the focus has shifted from the headlines to the labs. A Popular Science profile of Wolfe-Simon created a bit of a stir a couple of months ago: She was quoted as saying that she was "basically evicted" from her research group and worried that "it's quite possible that my career is over."

But during this week's email exchange, Wolfe-Simon told me that the "Popular Science article quotes were not what I said," and that "what matters now is what these organisms are telling us about biology, and that is my focus." Here are some reflections on the one-year anniversary from one of her emails to me:

"What a busy year it has been!

"With the generous support of NASA, we are able now to dive deep and explore this scientific discovery. After such a discovery comes the time-intensive process of rigorous testing. We aim to unravel the mechanisms behind how this microbe accomplishes the ability to flourish and grow despite uptake and utilization of arsenic. This systematic rigorous testing is critical and needed to build upon an initial discovery of this type.

"To this end, I have joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with Dr. John Tainer and his group there. LBNL provides the diverse intellectual and material resources of a major national laboratory, affording us the opportunity to pursue our efforts to test multiple aspects and implications of the work efficiently and stringently. LBNL synergistically complements the generous financial support from NASA.

"Currently, we have made significant headway in optimizing the growth conditions of GFAJ-1 and preparing samples for a wide range of analyses, including biomolecule crystallization and metabolite characterization. There is so much work to do we're focusing on that and look forward to communicating our efforts in the coming months. ...

"I maintain my serious commitment to science and the process of data-driven research. I look forward to speaking with you some time in the not too distant future after we make additional scientific progress."

Other researchers are delving into the mysteries of GFAJ-1 as well, even though they don't think the claims about arseno-DNA and other "weird life" wonders will hold up. "I don't have any money for this," Redfield told me. "This is just a side project in what would be my spare time, if professors have any spare time."

Redfield says the projects she gets paid for are more likely to be scientifically productive, but they're not as interesting to the general public. "This struck me as an opportunity to do science openly in a circumstance where people would be actually interested in what I'm doing, and what the results were," she said.

Now the fruits of her GFAJ-1 labors are in the hands of Kruglyak and his colleagues. If the arsenic in the samples has really been incorporated in the DNA, rather than merely representing sample contamination, traditional genetic sequencing techniques would not work. "They could give all sorts of unpredictable results," Kruglyak said. That's why mass spectrometry has to come into play.

Kruglyak can't predict how long it will take to get the answers. "It always takes longer than whatever I would say," he told me. "I would hope it's weeks, not months."

Meanwhile, Gilbert and his colleagues will continue studying GFAJ-1's genetic makeup. He told me "there's nothing spectacularly amazing" about the bacteria, which was not subjected to the high-arsenic treatment applied by Wolfe-Simon's team and by Redfield. But Gilbert said the raw bacteria's genome has some intriguing twists nevertheless.

"What is quite interesting is that this has very few arsenic resistance genes, i.e., it does not have the typical suite of genes that would make the cell resistant to arsenic in the environment," he told me in an email. Further study of the genome may at last point to an explanation for GFAJ-1's affinity for arsenic — but as of today, one year after the bacteria came onto the world scene, Gilbert can't predict what that explanation might be.

"We will prod and poke at this thing for another year, and see if there's anything more interesting," he said.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scientists have figured out how male hummingbirds serenade the ladies. And it doesn't necessarily involve humming a tune.

In this week's issue of the journal Science, Yale University biologist Chris Clark and his colleagues reveal that the birds can make their tails flutter at set frequencies as the dive toward the females for an aerial display. Different species of hummers make their own signature sounds, which are dependent on how the tail feathers interact with each other. Other factors, such as the size, shape, weight and stiffness of the feathers, contribute to the variations in tone.

"The sounds that hummingbird feathers can make are more varied than I expected," Clark said in a National Science Foundation feature article on the research.

The high-speed courtship dives give the males a chance to show off their shimmery feathers and their aerobatic prowess. But what's the purpose behind the tail-flapping? Clark suggests that the loudness of the buzz may serve as a proxy for a male's fitness, and therefore his suitability as a mate.

Some hummingbirds flutter their tail features to make a sound almost identical to its vocal courtship song. In fact, Clark theorizes that the vocal sound may have evolved from the tail sound.

Clark measured the flutter of the feathers using a scanning laser doppler vibrometer, and analyzed high-speed videos of the tail feathers of hummingbirds in a wind tunnel.

"This work is an excellent example of the use of physical approaches to understand the function of biological structures, and it reveals aerodynamic — rather than vocalized — signaling during courtship," said the NSF's William Zamer. "It is significant that the diversity of feather structures in these hummingbirds may result from sexual selection."

But is there any practical application to this work? Well, maybe so. Clark notes that airplane wings can also flutter as air flows over them, and if they're not engineered just right, they could even break due to all that fluttering. In contrast, hummingbird feathers are built to bend rather than break. Engineers just might be able to learn a thing or two from dive-bombing birds.

If you want to learn more, check out the NSF online feature, this posting on the Dot Earth blog, this one from Not Exactly Rocket Science, this ScienceNOW report ... and, of course, the tuneful video above.

More songs of the animal kingdom:

• Gibbons sing with different accents
• Ultrasonic love songs drive female mice wild
• In a noisy world, birds are changing their tune
• Tiny insect makes loud noise ... with its genitals

In addition to Clark, authors of the Science paper, "Aeroelastic Flutter Produces Hummingbird Feather Songs," include Damian Elias and Richard Prum.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

Daniel Maurer / AP

This 35,000-year-old bird-bone flute, held by the University of Tübingen's Nicholas Conard, is considered one of the world's oldest handcrafted musical instruments. But researchers say human musicmaking has much more ancient roots.

If you think about, there's no escape, really. Music holds humanity in a vise grip. Every culture you can think of has it, hears it and taps their feet to it. So how did music first take hold? A new analysis proposes that music hijacked our ancestors' ability to hear and interpret the movements of fellow human beings.

That claim is at the heart of “Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man,” a new book by neurobiologist Mark Changizi. Changizi analyzed the rises and falls in the rhythm and intonation of more than 10,000 samples of folk music from Finland and found that they bear a stamp — an auditory fossil of sorts — that can be traced back to the rises and falls and rhythms associated with the movement of people. 

It’s the latest in a series of theories that have drawn upon evolutionary biology, developmental biology, psychology and neuroscience to explain how human beings came to cultivate music as a complex, expressive craft. Music has persisted in society, but it doesn't seem to come with any obvious survival benefit. If it wasn't essential to survival, why did it stick around? 

BenBella Books

"Harnessed," a new book by neurobiologist Mark Changizi, focuses on the origins of music - and how music helped shape humanity.

“Music really is the story about a person moving or doing something around you,” Changizi told me. “It’s just like listening to a story. We’re having an auditory story about people moving our midst.” 

The appreciation for music grew and developed from this primal urge, monopolizing a natural faculty meant for human survival. Music essentially “harnessed” this urge, Changizi says, which also explains the title of the book.

“A lot of thinking is remote from the physical act of making music,” William Benson, a jazz musician and author of the book "Beethoven’s Anvil," told me. “And [Changizi] gets right to the physical aspect of making music.”

For one thing, it explains music's emotional appeal. In his book, Changizi described a study that looked at the foot patterns of people in different emotional states. When they were happy, sad or angry, their gaits betrayed their feelings.

“Music may not be marching orders from our commander, but it can sometimes cue our emotional system so precisely that we feel almost compelled to march in lockstep with music’s fictional mover,” Changizi writes. “And this is true whether we are adults or toddlers. When music is effective at getting us to mimic the movement it mimics, we call it dance music, be it a Strauss waltz or a Grateful Dead flail.”

The relationship between movement and music may come as a surprise for some, but not so much for others. In some African cultures, the word for "music" and "dance" are one and the same. In contrast, concert pianists or cellists sit still when they perform. 

Why this difference? Blame the Gregorian chant, says Benson. Monasteries were the intellectual centers of Europe in the Middle Ages. Monks chanted tonal, arrhythmic verses daily, developed the Western musical notation, and set the pattern for the understanding and performance of Western music during the centuries that followed. “And if you think of that as the basis for music, then you’re not going to get the kind of music you get in Africa and India,” Benson told me.

Essentially, the Gregorian chant decoupled the ideas of movement and rhythm from music in the Western world. But Changizi's theory brings the ideas together once again, backed by a statistical approach that looks more deeply into the correlation between dance and movement and music. 

Take a deeper look into the brain, and you may have an even more convincing case for music being an intrinsic characteristic of the human experience, says Edward Large, who studies how the brain processes sound and rhythm. While Changizi's musical analysis sounds reasonable, there may be an even deeper universality. "The paydirt is where you find the same patters in the brain that you find in the music," he told me.

So, the human brain was harnessed. A faculty that came into being for survival — recognizing the behavioral patterns in the movements of others — was tweaked, and music hitched a ride into the lives of modern humans.

We see such behavior all the time, Changizi explains. Just look at cats: “Although tuna is not what cat ancestors ate, tuna is sufficiently meat-ish in odor and taste that it fits right into a cat’s finicky diet disposition.” And music, it seems, is tuna for our finicky brains.

More about the science of music: 

• Making music from weather data
• Music of spheres and the stars
• The geometry of music
• Music made for monkeys
• Music for cavemen
• The sounds of science

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology for everyone. Find her on Twitter and Google+ and join our conversation on Facebook. 

Lydia Mathger

Scientists are studying how squid and other cephalopods change color and pattern of their skin to blend in with their environment in hopes of creating next-generation camouflage for the military. Shown here are chromatophores (large brown, red and yellow structures) and iridophores (pink iridescent splotches) in th esquid Loligo pealeii.

The ability of octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish to instantaneously change the color and pattern of their skin to blend in with their surroundings has caught the eye of the U.S. military. Its goal is a new generation of high-tech camouflage.

The Office of Naval Research has awarded $6 million to a team of U.S. scientists to conduct the basic research required to make the squid-like camo. Precisely how the military will use the technology is classified, noted Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. 

One can imagine, though, everything from tanks draped in a skin that constantly updates its look so that it blends in with its surroundings as it rolls through a patchwork of agricultural fields or a uniform that allows soldiers to disappear on crowded urban streets as easily as they do in swampy forests.  

Research approach
Hanlon and colleagues plan to extract the "operating principles" that make the skin of squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish observant, adaptive and responsive to the environment. The information they gather from looking at interactions of pigments and reflectors at the cellular and molecular levels will be used to inform the engineers and scientists building the materials that emulate these properties.

"This is the bio-inspired approach to engineering," Hanlon noted in email to me Monday from Turkey where he is on a research dive. "Let the animals guide some of our work. Animal systems are always more elegant and sophisticated than most folks give them credit for."

Another branch of the research effort builds on a 2008 discovery by Hanlon and colleagues Lydia Mathger and Steven Roberts that the skin of these marine animals contains opsins, the same type of light-sensing proteins that function in eyes.

The team aims to figure out where the opsins are located in the skin, and where and how they send the light information to change body and skin patterns.

"The most exciting possibility is that the opsins may sense light and inform the skin to change (or) refine some aspect of its pattern without sending information back to the brain," said Hanlon, who is also a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University.

Building new materials
It will be up to the team's engineers to try and emulate the skin of the cephalopods, as this class of marine animals is known, using new so-called metamaterials, materials that blur the line between material and machine.

Naomi Halas, an expert on nano-optics at Rice University in Texas and principal investigator on the grant, said the group plans to use patterns of organized nanostructures to create sheets of materials that can change colors quickly — like the pixels of a high-definition television screen — but also see light in the same way that squids do, according to a press release.

A key component of the material will be unique clusters of nanomaterials discovered by Rice chemist Stephan Link, a co-investigator on the grant. Halas said Link's materials are very sensitive to changes in their environment and can more easily change colors than other nanomaterials.

Beyond military
According to Hanlon, this work isn't just for secretive military applications. Industry and society may also benefit from the effort, which will reveal knowledge about combining pigments and reflectors.

"Some (of the applications) are as simple as heating and cooling things by absorbing or reflecting radiation," he said. "Detroit can make cars that change color; fashion designers can make dresses that change pattern — highlight of the cocktail party!"

How would you use this technology? Weigh in with a comment below.

More stories on cephalopods and disguise

• Hawaiian squid carries a built in light
• Astonishing octopus is master of disguise
• Get set for invisible war machines
• Octopuses walk on 2 arms to get by predators
• Some sharks can become invisible, study says
• The 'why' of a leopard's spots
• Lizards' camouflage reveals evolution in action
  

Biologists are using the kind of animation technology you might see in a multimillion-dollar "Toy Story" movie to show the general public how molecules inside a cell work.

The resulting high-tech visual aids have found their way into thousands of high-school classrooms, and they've been watched millions of times on video-sharing websites such as YouTube. That's the kind of success Robert Lue, director of life sciences education at Harvard University and the creator of the BioVisions project, has been hoping to achieve.

"It is very much about how do you put science in context, how do you take advantage of the fact that we are visual animals, that we in fact understand the world through our eyes to a significant degree, and apply that reality of who we are as animals to the way in which we perceive science," he told me.

Behind the scenes
The team's latest animation, "Powering the Cell: Mitochondria" shows how molecules inside the cell convert food into energy. You can watch it by clicking on the arrow above. Here's an earlier video, "The Inner Life of the Cell," which shows white blood cells attacking infections in the body:

To make the animations, Lue and scientific collaborators take mountains of data about the workings of the molecules inside a cell, synthesize all that information, and create visual models in their minds of what it would look like. They then communicate these visions to animators.

"We are scientists that translate data into visual models, but we also, to a significant degree, are film directors," he told me. "In the same way that a film director has to establish point of view, has to establish in a particular scene what you see, how would particular characters behave, what would be the most compelling or dramatic perspective ... we also have to create that as well."

The animators turn that vision into a digital reality, using their expertise in what kinds of motions can be created, how to render the surfaces of molecules, and what colors to use.

Impact on science education
In addition to striving for scientific accuracy, the collaboration is after an end product that is useful as a science communication tool. That means making editorial decisions about what to leave on the cutting-room floor.

"If we showed everything in real time that would be a simulation, not a representation, and a simulation of reality would be so complex that it would fail as a communication tool," Lue said.

For example, the density of proteins inside a cell is so great that if the animations included them all, nothing would be visible. "You need to thin things by more than a hundredfold, so that you can focus on the players that are the primary characters for a particular sequence," he noted.

Lue is particularly proud of a survey showing that the molecular animations are used in 78 percent of high schools, a finding that he says shows the animations enable students to think about biology in a new light and "understand the relevance of the unseen world."

And they’ve achieved this with a budget that’s in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions available to animators in Hollywood.

More stories on the science of movies and animations:

• Scientists visualize a virus on the attack
• Animation in a micro-Wonderland
• Virtual actor takes over in 'Tron'
• The physics behind the movie magic
• 'Avatar' technology raises Oscar question
• Moving closer to a 'Matrix'-style virtual world

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Linda Parysek via The Cell

This photomicrograph showing mitochondria in a mouse cell is part of an online image database launched today.

For many of us, the wonders of cell biology came alive when we peered through a microscope at an amoeba in science class. Today, a new online image library of cells brings that same sense of wonder and magic to anyone with an Internet connection.

The library contains more than 1,000 images, videos, and animations of cells from a variety of organisms — from the Chinese hamster (Cricetulus griseus) to humans (Homo sapiens).

The database aims to advance research on cellular activity with the ultimate goal of improving human health, according to the American Society for Cell Biology, which has created the database in partnership with Glencoe Software and the Open Microscopy Environment.

"In our research of disease, one of the key features is to understand the mechanism of disease — and that is going to happen, in many cases, at the cellular level," David Orloff, manager of The Cell image library, told me.

For example, the library will make it possible for scientists to compare different cell types online and understand the nature of specific cells and cellular processes, both normal and abnormal. This may lead to new discoveries about diseases, as well as new targets for drug development.

T. Anderson, D. Benson via The Cell

This image of a rat neuron highlights concentrations of a protein called N-cadherin (shown in red) as well as key chemical receptors (shown in green and blue).

"By looking at our database of cells, a scientist could get information that can confirm or refute a hypothesis or even develop a new hypothesis," project principal investigator Caroline Kane, a professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, told the journal Clinical and Translational Science.

On another level, Orloff told me that the database could serve as a tool to teach the basics of disease: "If someone puts an image of cancer cells dividing [in the library] and you can watch a cancer cell and its division and growth into a tumor versus a normal cell's growth, there's going to be an awareness for the researcher."

The database serves as a publicly accessible educational resource for anyone interested in the wonders of cell biology. Think of it as science class without the stress of a pending exam — alhough students may want to study up anyway. "I've talked with a number of teachers who are very excited to have something like this to present in their classrooms," Orloff said.

Development of The Cell was funded by a $2.5 million grant made available under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In other words, this is stimulus money at work "to serve the public in an effort to cure disease ultimately — and advance scientific research," Orloff noted.

More stories on cell biology:

• The moving parts inside your cells
• Amoebas turn to family during tough times
• Beauty of science revealed in embryo images
• Slideshow: Nikon Small World wonders
• It's alive! Artificial DNA controls life

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).