Ferienne is the third installment of an ongoing experimental study on fluid dynamics, magnetism and cymatics. These invisible forces of nature are then made visible through various liquids and mixtures, and they form patterns that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye.
Archive for the ‘Bio’ Category
Center for PostNatural History – Outreach Program
May 23, 2012
The Center for PostNatural History is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to the complex interplay between culture, nature and biotechnology. The PostNatural refers to living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or genetic engineering. The mission of the Center for PostNatural History is to acquire, interpret and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.
The Center for PostNatural History addresses this goal through three primary initiatives:
The maintenance of a unique catalog of living, preserved and documented specimens of postnatural origin.
The production of traveling exhibitions that address the PostNatural through thematic and regional perspectives.
The establishment of a permanent exhibition and research facility for PostNatural studies.
Text via The Center for PostNatural History
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Explore the Human Microbiome
May 22, 2012
The body contains 10 times more bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms than human cells. Most of these species are harmless—although they can still cause illness if they wind up in the wrong place. In addition, researchers are beginning to learn exactly how some microbial species in the body help digestion and contribute to regulation of appetite and the immune system.
Learn about the bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms that maintain human health HERE
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Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains
May 22, 2012
Parasitic worms leave millions of victims paralyzed, epileptic, or worse. So why isn’t anyone mobilizing to eradicate them?
Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms. Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.
Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.
Excerpt from an article written by Carl Zimmer, DISCOVER. Continue HERE
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Berkeley Lab Scientists Generate Electricity From Viruses
May 19, 2012
Imagine charging your phone as you walk, thanks to a paper-thin generator embedded in the sole of your shoe. This futuristic scenario is now a little closer to reality. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.
The scientists tested their approach by creating a generator that produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.
Their generator is the first to produce electricity by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of a biological material. Piezoelectricity is the accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to mechanical stress.
The milestone could lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs.
It also points to a simpler way to make microelectronic devices. That’s because the viruses arrange themselves into an orderly film that enables the generator to work. Self-assembly is a much sought after goal in the finicky world of nanotechnology.
Excerpt of a press release written by Dan Krotz, Berkeley Lab. Continue HERE
Jeannette Ginslov: Capturing Affect With a Handful of Techne
May 19, 2012On May 14, Jeannette Ginslov gave a Medea Talk about the developmental stages of the AffeXity project, the interdependence of the collaborators, the relational and dynamic formation of technical and human intervention, the encounters of the carnal and the digital, the dialogic and temporal scaffolding of encounters of techne and the hands that attempt to capture affect.
JEANNETTE GINSLOV is Medea’s artist-in-residence this spring. Her roots are as performer, choreographer and artistic director in South Africa, but for the last five years she has focused more on interdisciplinary platforms investigating the crossover between the media/dance/cinema/video and the internet.
Her work centers around affect, haptic and digital materiality on several platforms: stage, screens, online and new media applications. Ginslov is currently working with Prof Susan Kozel at Medea on the project AffeXity that draws together screendance, visual imagery and mobile networked devices.
Text Via MEDEA
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The limits of science: Martin Rees
May 19, 2012
Einstein averred that “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”. He was right to be astonished. It seems surprising that our minds, which evolved to cope with life on the African savannah and haven’t changed much in 10,000 years, can make sense of phenomena far from our everyday intuitions: the microworld of atoms and the vastness of the cosmos. But our comprehension could one day “hit the buffers”. A monkey is unaware that atoms exist. Likewise, our brainpower may not stretch to the deepest aspects of reality. The bedrock nature of space and time, and the structure of our entire universe, may remain “open frontiers” beyond human grasp. Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.
Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, or tropical forests – is made up of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. That, at least, is what most scientists believe, and there is no reason to doubt it. Yet there are inherent limits to science’s predictive power. Some things, like the orbits of the planets, can be calculated far into the future. But that’s atypical. In most contexts, there is a limit. Even the most fine-grained computation can only forecast British weather a few days ahead. There are limits to what can ever be learned about the future, however powerful computers become. And even if we could build a computer with hugely superhuman processing power, which could offer an accurate simulation, that doesn’t mean that we will have the insight to understand it. Some of the “aha” insights that scientists strive for may have to await the emergence of post-human intellects.
Article written by Martin Rees, Via Newstatesman
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Smell the Artist: Peter De Cupere
May 17, 2012
By exploiting the subjective, associative impact of smells, in combination with visual images, Peter De Cupere generates a kind of meta-sensory experience that goes beyond purely seeing or smelling. Plastic artist De Cupere paints with scents, produces olfactory objects, soap paintings and sculptures, creates video and live performances, makes three-dimensional drawings and builds poetic smell installations.
Everyone who has ever smelt Peter De Cupere‘s work cannot fail to recognise that his works prompt quite a reaction. You either love it or you feel attacked via your nasal senses. If the latter is true it is often because the spectator adopts a reserved attitude at first as a result of being wary of the unknown. That is exactly why smells in art have been and are still positively avoided. People like to compare and want a return or recognition. This is difficult with smells because they act directly on the limbic system and don‘t give you the necessary time and chance to translate things like you do with „sight“. Smells act on your memory subconsciously and so you associate your own subjective feelings with a specific smell. Your attitude to the object is determined by the smell memory of a certain moment. Add then the combination with the visual aspect of the artwork and you get a mix that does not appear to be completely predictable. Alongside the pleasance of some smells there are also smells that warn us of danger though we do not always need these indications because of habituation. If you cross the street there are many damaging smells present because of pollution: exhaust fumes, rotting processes from discarded foodstuffs, toxic fumes from asphalt and other building materials that are freed by heat from the sun, polluted rain, sewers, etc. But the normal city person has become used to all the exhaust fumes and other air-polluting substances.
Smoke Room, 750.000 used cigarette butts.
Olfactiano: A piano-like instrument that emits different smells when played called ‘Scent Concerts.’
Smell Me Project.
Text via Peter De Cupere
First image above VIA
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Magnetic bacteria create a biological hard drive
May 16, 2012
In the future, ultra-high-density non-volatile storage — such as hard drives — could be grown using magnetic bacteria.
This breakthrough, shepherded by researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, relies on certain strains of bacteria that ingest iron, which is then converted into magnetite (iron II, III oxide), the most magnetic naturally occurring mineral on Earth. These microbes, by following the Earth’s magnetic field, use this built-in magnet to navigate.
To turn this behavior into something that can actually act as magnetic storage, the researchers identified and extracted the protein responsible for converting iron into magnetite — Mms6. A gold substrate is then covered in a checkerboard fashion with chemicals that bind to Mms6, and the substrate is dunked in the protein. The whole caboodle is then washed with an iron solution, turning each of the Mms6 sites into a magnetic bit (pictured above)
Excerpt of an article written by Sebastian Anthony, Extreme Tech. Continue HERE
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Could a single pill save your marriage?
May 15, 2012
Your relationship is on the rocks. Begrudgingly, you and your significant other visit a marriage counselor in the hopes that there’s still something left to salvage in your relationship. You both spill your guts and admit that the love is gone. The counselor listens attentively, nodding her head every now and then in complete understanding. At the end of the session she offers the two of you some practical words of advice and sees you on your way. Oh, but before you leave she fills out a prescription for the two of you. Your marriage, it would seem, has been placed on meds.
Now, as messed up as this scenario might seem, this could very well be the future of marriage counseling. At least that’s what Oxford neuroethicists Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg believe. In their paper, “Neuroenhancement of Love and Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us,” they argue that such a possibility awaits us in the not-too-distant future, and that a kind of ‘love potion’ could eventually be developed to strengthen pair bonding. In fact, most of the compounds required to make such a concoction are already within our grasp. It’s just a matter of doing it.
Excerpt of an article written by George Dvorsky at io9 . Continue HERE
For +++ George Dvorsky, read our interview George Dvorsky: On video-gaming pets, the future of nonhuman animals, and cultural uplift.
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The Age of Insight: Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel Explains How Our Brain Perceives Art
May 12, 2012
Many strands of Eric Kandel’s life come together in his latest work, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present. The 82-year-old University Professor and co-director of the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative was born in Vienna, where, as a boy of 8, he witnessed the Nazis march into the Austrian capital. Decades later, he recalls how much his own intellectual interests were shaped not only by the Holocaust that followed, but by the cosmopolitan city that in the early 1900 served as an extraordinary incubator for creativity and thought that shaped the world we live in today.
Q. What made you decide to turn your attention to the neurobiology of how we perceive art?
There are many motivating factors. One was my longterm interest in Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele, the three Austrian Modernists, my fascination with Vienna 1900 and with Freud. I wanted to become a psychoanalyst and I’m Viennese so I sense a shared intellectual history, particularly with turn-of-the-century Vienna. But the immediate stimulus actually came from [Columbia President] Lee Bollinger. The idea behind the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative is to try to understand the human mind in biological terms and to use these insights to bridge the biology of the brain with other areas of the humanities. Lee expressed the belief that the new science of the mind could have a major impact on the academic curriculum, that in a sense everyone at the University works on the human mind. I felt I was doing this for personal reasons, but isn’t it wonderful that it is also in line with one of the missions of the University?
Excerpts from an Interview at Columbia University in the City of New York
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The Original Colonists: ‘The Social Conquest of Earth,’ by Edward O. Wilson
May 12, 2012
This is not a humble book. Edward O. Wilson wants to answer the questions Paul Gauguin used as the title of one of his most famous paintings: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” At the start, Wilson notes that religion is no help at all — “mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity” — and contemporary philosophy is also irrelevant, having “long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence.” The proper approach to answering these deep questions is the application of the methods of science, including archaeology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Also, we should study insects.
Insects? Wilson, now 82 and an emeritus professor in the department of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard, has long been a leading scholar on ants, having won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes for the 1990 book on the topic that he wrote with Bert Hölldobler. But he is better known for his work on humans. His “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,” a landmark attempt to use evolutionary theory to explain human behavior, was published in 1975. Those were strange times, and Wilson was smeared as a racist and fascist, attacked by some of his Harvard colleagues and doused with water at the podium of a major scientific conference. But Wilson’s days as a pariah are long over. An evolutionary approach to psychology is now mainstream, and Wilson is broadly respected for his scientific accomplishments, his environmental activism, and the scope and productivity of his work, which includes an autobiography and a best-selling novel, “Anthill.”
In “The Social Conquest of Earth,” he explores the strange kinship between humans and some insects. Wilson calculates that one can stack up log-style all humans alive today into a cube that’s about a mile on each side, easily hidden in the Grand Canyon. And all the ants on earth would fit into a cube of similar size. More important, humans and certain insects are the planet’s “eusocial” species — the only species that form communities that contain multiple generations and where, as part of a division of labor, community members sometimes perform altruistic acts for the benefit of others.
Excerpt from an article written by PAUL BLOOM, NYT. Continue HERE
Image above: Edward O. Wilson holds a jar of ant specimens from a dig in Puerto Rico.
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Fish from the Sky with Vegetables. Globe / Hedron a Rooftop Farm.
May 11, 2012
GLOBE / HEDRON is a bamboo greenhouse designed to organically grow fish and vegetables on top of generic flat roofs. The design is optimized for aquaponic farming techniques: the fish’s water nourishes the plants and plants clean the water for the fish.
Using this farming technique, GLOBE / HEDRON is optimized to feed four families of four all year round.
GLOBE / HEDRON is designed to be manufactured and retailed at a low cost. Easy-to-set-up units can be combined to scale up food production capacity.
Using a geodesic dome, the load of the fish tank rests on the frame of the greenhouse and is redistributed to a larger surface. Because of this design, the aquaponic farm can be housed on more roofs without any structural building adaptation. The dome structure is designed to be built with bamboo, so that it is biodegradable and organically farmed.
GLOBE / HEDRON is designed by Antonio Scarponi / Conceptual Devices in collaboration with UrbanFarmers. They are fundraising the first prototype with indiegogo: help them build it.
Text and Images via Conceptual Devices
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Facebook, Twitter Activate Brain’s Reward Regions
May 11, 2012
Many people constantly update about their lives on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter mainly because of the “kicks” that self-disclosure offers, according to a new Harvard study.
The study found that sharing personal information is as good as eating food or even having sex. The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), regions that are associated with reward, were active when people talked about themselves.
Continue article at Medical Daily
Cloning teeth for implantation using stem cells
May 11, 2012
Polymer scaffolds guide stem cells growth into customized sizes and shapes.
LOS ANGELES (KABC): Dentures are the past, dental implants are the present — could the future be teeth grown from stem cells?
“People really care about their teeth and they really care once those teeth are gone,” said Dr. Peter Murray, endodontics professor at Nova Southeastern University. Danka Premovic agrees. When previous dental work failed, she began wearing a mask. “I’m a perky person. I’m a people person and for me to cover up my mouth and wear a mask, it’s just not me,” said Premovic.
Premovic now has eight implants. It’s patients like her that dental regeneration researcher Dr. Murray wants to help. “It would be nice to give people back their own teeth and make their whole body whole again,” said Murray.
To grow teeth, researchers isolate stem cells from the mouth or bone marrow. The cells are multiplied in the lab, then grown on 3-dimensional scaffolds. Stem cells are then attached to an actual tooth. “All the animal studies that have been done so far are very encouraging, so it looks like the clinical trials will be successful,” said Murray.
The teeth can be grown in the lab and implanted in the patient or they could actually grow inside the patient’s mouth, filling in empty spaces with new teeth in just a few months.
Extract of an article via ABC Local. Continue HERE
Researchers Using Stem Cells to Grow New Teeth at Singularity Hub
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This house wants to defeat ageing entirely: A debate about ageing (Aubrey de Grey vs. Colin Blakemore)
May 9, 2012
“This house wants to defeat aging entirely” (Part 1 – Main debate)
Dr. Aubrey de Grey (proposing) and Professor Colin Blakemore (opposing)
A public debate organized by Oxford University Science Society, held in the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford on April 25th, 2012.
(Part 2 – Audience Q&A)
Dr. Aubrey de Grey: De Grey’s research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can thwart the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (SENS), a tissue-repair strategy intended to rejuvenate the human body and allow an indefinite lifespan. To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage. Text via Wiki
Professor Colin Blakemore: Professor Colin Blakemore, Ph.D., FRS, FMedSci, HonFSB, HonFRCP, is a British neurobiologist who is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and University of Warwick specialising in vision and the development of the brain. He was formerly Chief Executive of the British Medical Research Council (MRC). He is best known to the public as a communicator of science but also as the target of a long-running animal-rights campaign. According to The Observer, he has been both “one of the most powerful scientists in the [UK]” and “a hate figure for the animal rights movement”. Text via Wiki
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Paralyzed woman uses bionic suit to complete London Marathon
May 9, 2012
“A paralyzed British woman made history on Tuesday, when she became the first person to ever complete a marathon while wearing a bionic suit. Claire Lomas, 32, finished the 26.2-mile race 16 days after it began, with the help of the ReWalk exoskeleton developed by Amit Goffer.”
Read article written by Amar Toor at The Verge
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Ventricular assist system keeps failing hearts beating
May 9, 2012A ventricular assist system, or VAD, is a implantable device that is used to help a failing heart pump blood through the body, often while the patient is awaiting a heart transplant. It consists of a control system and an energy supply worn outside the body and a pump implanted by the heart or in the abdominal pouch. VADs are generally used to take blood from the left ventricle or deliver it to the aorta. They may also be used to take blood from the right ventricle and deliver it to the pulmonary artery. The latest VADs use continuous-flow pumps that use electric currents to spin a rotor that accelerates blood through the pump. The rotor uses electromagnetic or hydrodynamic suspension instead of ball-bearing suspension, reducing wear-and-tear on the rotor. Source: American Heart Association, FDA
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Your Breasts Are Trying To Kill You
May 8, 2012
Lindy West: I don’t have any children yet, so my breasts are still more aesthetic than functional. I mostly use them as a food shelf, a cellphone case, and an in-flight pillow. When I was young and single and had less self-esteem, I used to joke that my breasts were “all I had” (good one, unhappy baby self!), but now that I’m older, I don’t have to rely on them to feel beautiful—for the time being, they’re just parts of me that fill my clothes and make my back hurt and, sure, make me feel pretty sometimes. I just don’t think about them that much anymore. Thanks to Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, a surprisingly emotional book by Florence Williams, though, that’s all changing. All of a sudden I can’t stop thinking about my breasts. Because it turns out they are total jerks.
In Breasts, Williams, a contributing editor for Outside magazine, attempts to offer a comprehensive social, cultural, medical, and scientific history of the human breast, a la single-word-titled best-sellers like Cod or Salt or Stiff—though not, alas, Balls. (In an act of one-word-wonder solidarity, Stiff author Mary Roach blurbed Breasts, citing Williams’ “double-D talents.”) Though that genre of sweeping, single-topic histories can wind up feeling hasty and reductive (it’s hard to write the history of one thing without touching on the history of all other things), Williams’ writing is scientifically detailed yet warm and accessible. She also stays firmly away from the juvenile (BOOOOOOOOO!!!) and isn’t afraid to delve into her personal life, making Breasts a smart and relatable, if occasionally dry, read.
Excerpt of an article written by Lindy West, at Slate. Continue HERE
Dreaming in color after 20 years: Eye implant restores vision to blind patient
May 5, 2012
It was the ‘magic moment’ that released Chris James from ten years of blindness.
Doctors switched on a microchip that had been inserted into the back of his eye three weeks earlier.
After a decade of darkness, there was a sudden explosion of bright light – like a flash bulb going off, he says.
Now he is able to make out shapes and light. He hopes his sight – and the way his brain interprets what the microchip is showing it – will carry on improving.
Mr James, 54, is one of two British men who have had their vision partly restored by a pioneering retina implant.
The other, Robin Millar, one of Britain’s most successful music producers, says he has dreamed in color for the first time.
Both had lost their vision because of a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, where the photoreceptor cells at the back of the eye gradually cease to work.
Their stories bring hope to the 20,000 Britons with RP – and to those with other eye conditions such as advanced macular degeneration which affects up to half a million.
Mr James had a ten-hour operation to insert the wafer-thin microchip in the back of his left eye at the Oxford University Eye Hospital six weeks ago. Three weeks later, it was turned on.
Mr James, who lives in Wroughton, Wiltshire, with his wife Janet, said of his ‘magic moment’: ‘I did not know what to expect but I got a flash in the eye, it was like someone taking a photo with a flashbulb and I knew my optic nerve was still working.’
The external device that allows chip pairs to process images.
Written by y Jenny Hope (Hopeful article by the way) at the Daily Mail. Continue article HERE
Images via Daily Mail, and The Telegraph
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The Immortal, life-support machines keeping each other alive
May 4, 2012
A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.
The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering.
The interpretation of anatomy with a mechanical vocabulary reflects strongly on the Western perception of the body.
Defining the body as a machine – where dysfunctional parts can be replaced by mechanics – speaks of how we understand life.
These objects encompass social debates about the ethics of euthanasia, the quantification of both the value and quality of life, making physical a poetic desire to conquer our own mortality.
The medical machine – whether in use or not – is an object which transcends its materiality. Designed and created to perform a single, most meaningful function, we never subject these devices to a critical investigation as industrial products within the context of material culture.
This work aims to explore the nature of these devices as objects of our times, liberated from their restrained purpose while still charged with its resonance.
Revital Cohen is a designer who develops critical objects and provocative scenarios exploring the juxtaposition of the natural with the artificial. Her work spans across various mediums and includes collaborations with scientists, bioethicists and animal breeders.
Text and Images via Revital Cohen
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HAIR reGENERATION
May 3, 2012So far all the images I have seen about this nude mice are displaying a languid mohawk hairstyle I am not too fond of. In order for me to feel the relieve that there is an actual cure for hair-loss I have to see the nude mice becoming a fur-ball rolling and rotating rather than walking. Obviously, this cruel statement comes with the question: Why not trying on us “humans” already?
Could we (all of us loosing hair) be the New Transplanting Bioengineered Stem Cells Hair Generation?
This video above accompanies a press release, distributed by ResearchSEA, on behalf of Tokyo University of Science entitled: “Fully functional hair follicle regeneration through the rearrangement of stem cells and their niches”.
Previously HERE as Regenerative medicine repairs mice from top to toe.
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Moths and Bees that drink Animal Tears. Yes, Including Yours
May 3, 2012
If you ever were told by someone not to cry or that crying is useless, that person was far away from the truth. Besides being perfectly natural, therapeutic, and necessary, crying produces nutritious food for moths, bees, and probably many other herbivores. This is definitely one of my favorites examples of mutualism out there. However, these “lachryphages” are picky when choosing their ocular bars and sweet pools.
If this awakens your hidden entomologist or simply your hidden fetishes, here I have a group of articles deepening on this curious fact:
Bees That Drink Sweat From People’s Skin and Tears From People’s Eyes
Urban Buzz: A New Bee That Sips Sweat. Native Insects Getting Closer Look; Humans as ‘Salt Lick’
Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds
Moths with a taste for tears: Insects that live off the tears of mammals
The image above is a fabricated image fount at The Nonist’s wonderful text: Romancing the Lachryphage
Post by Wanderlustmind
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Garlic compound is 100 times more effective than antibiotics for fighting a type of bacteria that causes food poisoning
May 3, 2012
A compound in garlic is 100 times more powerful than two common types of antibiotics in fighting a type of bacteria that causes food poisoning, according to scientists.
The garlic ingredient called diallyl sulphide works for targeting a specific metabolic enzyme and is especially effective in penetrating the slimy ‘biofilm’ that protects colonies of Campylobacter bacterium that makes the food bug 1,000 times more resistant to antibiotics than bacteria without the film.
The new study, recently published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, found that not only was diallyl sulfide 100 times more effective than antibiotics erythromycin and ciprofloxacin, the garlic compound was also able to destroy Campylobacter in just a fraction of the time taken by the drugs.
Researchers said that the latest discovery may lead to future treatments for raw and processed meats, and food preparation surfaces, that most bacterial infections stem from.
“This is the first step in developing or thinking about new intervention strategies,” researcher Dr. Michael Konkel, from Washington State University, who has been studying Campylobacter jejuni for 25 years, said in a statement.
Excerpt of an article written by Christine Hsu, at Medical Daily. Continue HERE
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Signals: A Visualization of Cancer Protein Networking by Casey REAS
May 1, 2012Casey Reas: This is a 2x time-lapse sequence from software that constructs images from protein relationships within a cell. The image was translated into a mural for building 76 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Cell behavior is controlled by interconnected proteins operating in a network to actively transmit instructions. These networks become dysfunctional in cancerous cells. In this image, each graphical cluster represents signals between networked proteins in a cancer cell as they change over time. Individual arcs are signals from one protein to another; the size of an arc corresponds to the magnitude of the signal. Signaling data provided by the laboratory of Professor Michael Yaffe.
Casey Reas is an artist and educator. His software, prints, and installations have has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He is a professor in the department of Design Media Arts at UCLA and the co-founder of Processing with Ben Fry.
Text via Casey Reas’ Vimeo
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Culture, Not Biology, Shapes Language
April 29, 2012
There’s no language gene.
There’s no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language.
There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other. Across the languages of the world (estimated to number 6,000-8,000), nouns, verbs, and objects are arranged in sentences in different ways as people express their thoughts. The powerful force behind this variability is culture.
So goes the argument in Language: The Cultural Tool, the new book I’m reading by Daniel Everett. Next week, I’ll have more to say about the book itself; this week, I want to explore how Everett’s years of living among the Pirahã Indians of Amazonian Brazil helped shape his conclusions — and why those conclusions matter.
The Pirahã are hunter-gatherers who live along the Maici River in Brazil’s Amazon region. They fish, gather manioc and hunt in the forest. As is true with any human society, Pirahã communities are socially complex.
Excerpt of an article written by Barbara J King, NPR. Continue HERE
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The Eye Limits the Brain’s Learning Potential
April 26, 2012
The concept of a critical period for visual development early in life during which sensory experience is essential to normal neural development is now well established. However recent evidence suggests that a limited degree of plasticity remains after this period and well into adulthood. Here, we ask the question, “what limits the degree of plasticity in adulthood?” Although this limit has been assumed to be due to neural factors, we show that the optical quality of the retinal image ultimately limits the brain potential for change. We correct the high-order aberrations (HOAs) normally present in the eye’s optics using adaptive optics, and reveal a greater degree of neuronal plasticity than previously appreciated.
Read this scientific report at Nature
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The Germs That Live on Your Smartphone. PhoneSoap: Simultaneously Charge and Sanitize Your Phone
April 23, 2012
Have you ever wondered how dirty your phone is? It is worse than you think. A little over a year ago my cousin, Wes, and I were watching TV when we saw a report stating that our phones have 18 times more harmful bacteria than the handle on a male public toilet. We were shocked! We started to research online to debunk this report, and we only found more proof (some of which was shown in our video above). We saw reports saying that besides the flu, researchers have found staph, E. Coli, and MRSA living on our cell phones! In fact, people are using their phones even before they leave the stall, which led researchers to find that 1 in 6 phones have fecal matter on them. This rang especially true with me – lets just say I had to change some habits. We found out the reason that our cell phones are so susceptible to bacteria is because of the warmth they radiate (especially our smart phones).
We did some tests of our own to find out how our phones compared to things we thought would be filthy. Our results were surprising:
PhoneSoap Overview:
PhoneSoap is a small box that simultaneously charges and sanitizes your cell phone using UV-C light. UV-C light is electromagnetic radiation that’s used in hospitals and clean rooms around the world. This short wavelength of light penetrates the cell wall of the bacteria and disrupts its DNA, effectively killing it. It is 99.9% effective in killing bacteria and virus’. Best of all it is completely safe.The UV-C light is only on for 3-5 minutes at a time and there is no heat or liquid involved so there is no risk of damaging your phone. There is a UV-C light on the top and on the bottom of the box so that the UV rays surround your phone for complete sanitation.
Text and Images via PhoneSoap. See more at KICKSTARTER
Terrifying Germs That Live on Your Smartphone
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Attention tunes the mind’s ear. Brain activity shows how one voice pattern stands out from the crowd
April 23, 2012The brain’s power to focus can make a single voice seem like the only sound in a room full of chatter, a new study shows. The results help explain how people can pick out a speaker from a jumbled stream of incoming sounds.
A deeper understanding of this feat could help scientists better treat people who can’t sort out sound signals effectively, an ability that can decline with age.
“I think this is a truly outstanding study, which has deep implications for the way we think about the auditory brain,” says auditory neuroscientist Christophe Micheyl of the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the new research.
Excerpt from an article written by Laura Sanders, Science News. Continue HERE
For the project, engineer Nima Mesgarani and neurosurgeon Edward Chang, both of the University of California, San Francisco, studied what happens in the brains of people who are trying to follow one of two talkers, a scenario known to scientists as the cocktail party problem.
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Jurema Action Plant
April 21, 2012
Jurema Action Plant is an interactive bio-machine. It consists in a customized machine which interfaces a sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica).
Jurema Action Plant aims to empower plants by enabling them to use similar technologies as humans use. It is also explores new ways of communication and co-relation between humans, living organism and a machine. Much like humans, animals and machines, the plants have an electrical signal traveling inside them, but they do not have nerves like humans and animals; nor wires and cables like machines. This electrical signal travels inside the cells of the plant. Inspired by this phenomenon, I collaborated with professor Bert van Duijn from the Biology University and the Hortus Botanicus, both from Leiden, on a research into the Action Potential of this plant. At V2_ , we settled upon a solution in which a signal amplifier reads the differences in the electromagnetic field around the plant to determine when it is being touched. These electromagnetic variations trigger movement of the robotic structure, on which the plant is situated, by means of a custom-made circuit board. The thresholds for response are set in such a way that only touching the plant makes it move away from the person touching it.
“Their movement however generally remains invisible to us, because their muscle and nerve-like systems operate at a very slow timescale and their rooting in soil confines their motion to the movement of branches and leaves. These restrictions give plants an enormous disadvantage compared to their main aggressors: animals and humans, in many instances resulting in a loss of biodiversity and even extinction.” (Michel van Dartel, curator V2)
To measure the Action Potential from the plant some electrodes are placed in its branches. When the leaves and branches of the plant are touched this signal changes. This electrical signal travels in the plant and the Action Potential can be measured in any part of the plant, not necessarily where the electrodes are placed. If the plants can fell the touch and this signal travels inside the plant and be can be measured in any part, does it means that plants have memory, consciousness?
Text and Images via Ivan Henriques’ Jurema Action Plant
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