Gary Stix: Ray Kurzweil and other so-called transhumanists have promised that in coming decades we will be able to transfer a digital copy of the trillions of connections among nerve cells in our brains into a computer. We would essentially reincarnate ourselves as non-biological beings that persist for eternity inside a laptop, on the endless links of the Internet or as avatars inside a television set. After achieving the ultimate copy and paste, we would wave goodbye to death as we know it.
For fairly evident reasons, biologists tend to dismiss out of hand the ideas of Kurzweil and the transhumanist lot as the ravings of computer jocks who know nothing about the real workings of the DNA and cells that make up living tissue. Into this debate comes Sebastian Seung, a young and well-regarded computational neuroscientist from MIT, who has taken a serious look at some of the questions put forth by the transhumanists.
In Connectome, due in February, Seung conveys the excitement of studying the complete circuit diagram of the brain for which the book is named. A full connectome might provide telling insight into what goes goes awry, for instance, in an autistic child or an Alzheimer’s patient (definitely worth reading for these bits alone). In the last chapters, though he takes up the claims of the transhumanists who desperately would like to get their hands on a full connectome for the ultimate upload into binary immortality. Continue HERE
Figure 1: Efficient selection of sensory signals representing the target of focal attention can account for improved behavioral performance. A) When subject is trying to focus attention on one target (yellow highlighted stimulus in right panel) and ignore distractors (blue highlighted stimuli), neural responses were increased in occipital visual areas of the brain. B) When subjects distributed attention across four stimuli, signals from distracters (blue arrows) had the same magnitude as signals from the target (yellow arrow), causing both relevant and irrelevant information to be routed to perceptual areas of the brain and resulting in less discriminable neural response (more overlap between blue and yellow distributions). Credit: RIKEN
Medical Xpress: In a new study to appear in Neuron, scientists at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) have uncovered mechanisms that help our brain to focus by efficiently routing only relevant information to perceptual brain regions. The results provide valuable insights on how our brains achieve such focus and on how this focus can be disrupted, suggesting new ways of presenting information that augment the brain’s natural focal capabilities. Continue HERE
CARL ZIMMER: There are 100 trillion microbes that live in your body. Do you own them? Do they deserve the same protections as your own genes and cells? If someone genetically alters a microbe and claims that if you swallow it, it will let you lose weight, should that living germ be regulated as a drug?
These are a few of the questions I mull in a piece that appears in the Sunday Review section of today’s New York Times. I’ve been writing a lot about the microbial world for a few years now, but only recently did I encounter a group of bioethicists who are now pondering what sort of ground rules we should set up to govern science and medicine as we gain understanding and power over the microbiome. HERE
Welcome to the future of medical understanding. The BioDigital Human is an HTML5 bases platform for medicine and healthcare. Using 3-D, Web-GL visualization the BioDigital Human serves as an interactive tool for medical students to access complex human anatomy in a simple web browser. The surgical and disease-state animations embedded into the interface provide an interactive visual-aid for medical device and pharmaceutical sales reps to explain medical concepts to healthcare practitioners. As anatomical landmarks are paired with embedded education, instructive and training information, the BioDigital Human is the most intuitive way for data groups to organize and navigate medical information.
This video is an introduction to the BioDigital Human platform. Visit http://biodigitalhuman.com to try it for yourself. Or call 212.226.0326 to speak with a member of our team about licensing the BioDigital Human for integration into your application.
Bionic contact lenses have been in development for several years! Engineers at the University of Washington have been working on contact lenses with circuits in them with the goal of being able to display words or images in your line of sight, like in Terminator movies. A prototype which can display a tiny LED light has successfully been tested in the eyes of rabbits… proving that it should be safe for humans!
The goal is for the lenses to be used for reading short emails, text messages and news.
In the future possibilities are pretty amazing. It could act as your GPS while you’re driving, help you look up information, and even augment reality. These lenses contain electronic circuits are made from metal that is one-thousandth the thickness of a human hair. The LED light is one-third of a millimeter in diameter. The circular antenna connects to a power source, which right now is a nearby wireless battery.
The engineers are saying the lenses could also be helpful in monitoring blood sugar levels in the body and sending out a signal in case of an emergency. Let’s imagine what the future could look like: the battery could be in an earpiece, where you could control the lens display by using voice recognition, like Siri. Your computer/phone and additional controls could be in your watch.
You could have night vision. Maybe you could zoom into things. And what about entertainment and gaming? This would take virtual reality to a new level, in many ways. It’s only a matter of time now before we can have bionic eyes.
Riccardo Giraldi: After the success of the first experiment, here is an update bringing multiplayer and new functionalities!
The idea is simple: what if you could control slot cars with the power of your mind?
Mind Scalextric is an R&D project we developed at B-Reel that combines the latest technologies and lets people race together using their minds.
The higher your level of attention, the quicker your car goes!
If you are a pro you can also use the boost – all you have to do is to blink your eyes!
The project has been showcased at the Ultimate Show and Tell at Fallon as well as at the B-Reel London Party together with another experiment called EELS ! Text from HERE
Jaymi Heimbuch: The folks at Philips have come up with some unusual and futuristic designs for their Microbial Home concept. From steampunk-ish kitchens to cocoon-like urban beehives, the designs are truly unique — and that goes for the lighting too.
Here, Philips has shown off a concept for a light that runs on not grid electricity, not solar power, not even wind power. Nope, it runs on bacteria.
According to Philips, “The concept explores the use of bioluminescent bacteria, which are fed with methane and composted material (drawn from the methane digester in the Microbial Home system). Alternatively the cellular light array can be filled with fluorescent proteins that emit different frequencies of light.”
It doesn’t provide enough light to fill a room or read by, but it does provide the subtle glow just right for mood lighting. It also is a piece of furniture or art itself, with individual cells of hand-blown glass in a steel frame. But that means you need a home where something as bulky as this has room to be hung on a wall. Though, Philips notes this could be used beyond indoors, for things like night-time road markings, warning strips on stairs or curbs, exit signs, lights for sensors, and so on.
So, is it practical for the average home? Not really. But it is definitely interesting and we may just find a practical place for the technology yet.
“This represents a new genre of ‘living’ biological products. We have involved the microbial community in the home to provide the soft mood lighting typical of luminescence by using energy stored in our waste streams. Potentially biological products could be self-energizing, adaptive, responsive, self-repairing, act as biological sensors to environmental conditions, and change the way we communicate information.”
Amateur photographer Haris S. Antonopoulos found these eggs on top of a mountain near Athens, Greece. He took a series of images of the 1.2-millimeter-diameter eggs and combined them with photo-editing software. The white halos outline the lids through which nymphs emerge.
Rotifer: Two lobes of the corona of the rotifer Floscularia ringens, spanning 300 microns, emerge from a protective tube. The cilia at the edge of the corona move in a fast, steady, wavelike motion called a metachronal wave, creating water currents that move food to the rotifer’s mouth. The tube consists of reddish-brown circular pellets that the rotifer forms in a cilia-lined socket. A new pellet forms at the center of this first-prize photograph taken by Charles Krebs of Issaquah, Wash. Once the pellet reaches the appropriate size, the rotifer retreats into its tube and, on the way down, quickly but carefully “plants” the new pellet along the top edge of the tube.
Microscopy remains one of the few areas of science in which enthusiastic amateurs can make others take notice. Nonprofessionals routinely produce stunning images of creatures and objects too tiny for the eye to resolve. This crowdsourcing of microscopic imagery arrived long before the invention of the smartphone and networked communications: the amateur has long made a mark with the microscope—in the early years, by hand drawing images that appeared underneath the lens, and, in more recent times, with the added realism brought by the photograph. See it HERE
Namit Arora considers the complexity of consciousness and its implications for artificial intelligence.
Namit Arora: As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent – meaning, possessing the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots’. Neural network research was hot, and one of my professors was a star in the field. A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise. I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of life: how much we subconsciously acquire and call upon to get through life; how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living; and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined these things are with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the Turing test, so that we couldn’t distinguish its responses from those of a human? How could a machine that did not care about its own existence ever behave as humans do? In hindsight, it seems fitting that I was then also drawn to Dostoevsky, Camus and Kierkegaard.
My interlocutors countered that although extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter amenable to the laws of physics. They posited a reductionist and computational approach to the brain that many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, continue to champion today. (Recently Dennett declared, “We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.” – see ‘Daniel Dennett Explains How People Are Like Robots’, Bigthink.com, 9 Mar 2009.) Our intelligence, and everything else that informs our being in the world, had to be somehow coded into our brain’s circuitry – including the great many symbols, rules, and associations we rely on to get through a typical day. Was there any reason why we couldn’t decode this, and reproduce intelligence in a machine some day? Couldn’t a future supercomputer mimic our entire neural circuitry and be as smart as us? Continue HERE
Jesse Emspak: Computers are great at performing functions in the same way over and over again. They’re not so great at adapting to situations they haven’t seen before. Now a group of researchers from MIT is using the human brain as a model for the circuits in a machine -– and opening the way to a computer that can really learn.
The key is plasticity. Plasticity is the quality of human brains that makes them able to change in response to stimuli. It’s one reason many neuroscientists think we remember and learn. It also underlies the ability of the brain to recover from injuries.
The MIT researchers designed a computer chip that can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse. The synapse is the connection between two neurons, through which information flows. But it isn’t like a wire. Synapses are gaps and chemical signals, in the form of neurotransmitters, jump across them and bind to receptors. Those receptors activate ion channels. When an ion channel is opened and closed it changes the cell’s electrical potential and if the change is large enough, an electrical impulse is fired — called an action potential. Continue HERE
The seventh black rhino population established by the WWF Black Rhino Range Expansion Project, was recently released after an epic 1500 kilometre trip across the country. 19 of the critically endangered animals were moved from the Eastern Cape to a new location in Limpopo province.
“This was possible because of the far-sightedness of the Eastern Cape Provincial government who were prepared to become partners in the project for the sake of black rhino conservation in South Africa,” said WWF’s project leader Dr Jacques Flamand. “The operation was difficult due to the number of animals and the long distances involved. But wildlife veterinarians, conservation managers and capture teams from WWF, Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency, SANParks and Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife worked cooperatively to ensure the success of the translocation. We all learned from one another and were united in a common cause.”
“We are a young organisation and this is a great opportunity to be giving something back to the national conservation effort,” said Dave Balfour, conservation director of the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency. “We are excited about getting ourselves integrated into national conservation. A critical element of future conservation success will be the ability of agencies with a common interest to work together. This was a great example of that.”
A relatively new capture technique was used to airlift some of the rhinos out of difficult or inaccessible areas by helicopter. This entails suspending the sleeping rhino by the ankles for a short trip through the air to awaiting vehicles. “Previously rhinos were either transported by lorry over very difficult tracks, or airlifted in a net. This new procedure is gentler on the darted rhino because it shortens the time it has to be kept asleep with drugs, the respiration is not as compromised as it can be in a net and it avoids the need for travel in a crate over terrible tracks,” explains Dr Flamand. “Another advantage is that rhinos can be more easily removed from dangerous situations, for example if they have fallen asleep in a donga or other difficult terrain after being darted. The helicopter translocations usually take less than ten minutes, and the animals suffer no ill effect. All of the veterinarians working on the translocation agreed that this was now the method of choice for the well-being of the animals.”
Security of rhinos is a major concern given the current poaching onslaught. Project partners receiving rhinos on their land are only chosen if their security systems are of a high standard. “Translocating rhinos always involves risk, but we cannot keep all our eggs in one basket. It is essential to manage black rhino populations for maximum growth as it is still a critically endangered species and this is what the project does by creating large new populations which we hope will breed quickly,” concludes Dr Flamand.
The WWF Black Rhino Range Expansion Project aims to increase the range and numbers of black rhino in South Africa and has created seven significant black rhino populations in eight years. Close to 120 black rhino have been translocated to date.
From the The Midnight Archive: EPISODE 05 : SPECIAL FILM – A. HEAD B. BODY — This week we have a very special film presentation. Directed by my good friend Jim Fields (End of the Century, Time Online) – The film is about the late Dr. White, a neurosurgeon… who did a head transplant. Yes. Took the head of an ape, cut it off, and stitched it onto the body of another ape. Successfully. And its all here… All the gory details. The film was actually produced a few years back. But due to the extreme nature of some of the visuals (though i am not sure what the big deal is) it didn’t get much exposure at first. But the brave have certainly made it something of a docu-cult classic. We are honored to be able to have it as a special entry in the Midnight Archive. Jim can be found twiddling his thumbs at the Time Magazine offices weekly and drinking heavily after hours. For more on his work visit jimfields.tv – oh and I did some of the music in the piece… so little talent… so much time… wait a minute – scratch that… reverse!
ROBOTS that mimic the Venus flytrap could run on live insects and spiders, snatching and digesting them for fuel. Now two prototypes have been developed that employ smart materials to rapidly ensnare their prey.
Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) catch insects using two specially adapted leaves. When a bug lands it brushes tiny hairs on the surface, triggering the trapping mechanism. The leaves snap shut in a mere 100 milliseconds, and the plant kills and digests its quarry.
Recreating this method means finding materials that can not only detect the presence of an insect but also close on it quickly. At Seoul National University in South Korea, Seung-Won Kim and colleagues have done this using shape memory materials. These switch between two stable shapes when subjected to force, heat or an electric current. Continue HERE
nded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and published by Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org), Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.
By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. Taken together, they constitute an engaging interdisciplinary resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities, a resource that is capable of enhancing the intellectual and pedagogic experience of working with open access materials.
All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.
Elizabeth Haswell, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, in a growth chamber with her “lab rats,” Arabidopsis plants she uses to understand how plants respond to touch, gravity and other mechanical forces. If wild-type Arabidopsis plants are touched frequently. their growth is stunted. Credit: David Kilper/WUSTL
(PhysOrg.com) — At the bottom of plants’ ability to sense touch, gravity or a nearby trellis are mechanosensitive channels, pores through the cells’ plasma membrane that are opened and closed by the deformation of the membrane. Elisabeth Haswell, Ph.D., a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, is studying the roles these channels play in Arabdopsis plants by growing mutant plants that lack one or more of the 10 possible channel proteins in this species.
“Picture yourself hiking through the woods or walking across a lawn,” says Elizabeth Haswell, PhD, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “Now ask yourself: Do the bushes know that someone is brushing past them? Does the grass know that it is being crushed underfoot? Of course, plants don’t think thoughts, but they do respond to being touched in a number of ways.”
“It’s clear,” Haswell says, “that plants can respond to physical stimuli, such as gravity or touch. Roots grow down, a ‘sensitive plant’ folds its leaves, and a vine twines around a trellis. But we’re just beginning to find out how they do it,” she says.
In the 1980s, work with bacterial cells showed that they have mechanosensitive channels, tiny pores in the cells membrane that open when the cell bloats with water and the membrane is stretched, letting charged atoms and other molecules to rush out of the cell. Water follows the ions, the cell contracts, the membrane relaxes, and the pores close. HERE
Photo: HIV-1, coloured green, budding from a cultured lymphocyte. (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention)
Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or World of Warcraft: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.
The exploit was detailed on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where – exceptionally in scientific publishing – both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors.
Their target was a monomeric protease enzyme, a cutting agent in the complex molecular tailoring of retroviruses, a family that includes HIV.
Figuring out the structure of proteins is vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them.
But a microscope gives only a flat image of what to the outsider looks like a plate of one-dimensional scrunched-up spaghetti. Pharmacologists need a 3-D picture that “unfolds” the molecule and rotates it in order to reveal potential targets for drugs.
This set of paired images provided by Shinji Nishimoto of the University of California, Berkeley on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011 shows original video images, upper row, and those images reconstructed by computer from brain scans. While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed. Scientists reported that result Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011 and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday. In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper. (University of California, Berkeley, Shinji Nishimoto)
Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach. Read article HERE
A piezoelectric beam attached to a Green June Beetle reveals the optimum location to scavenge energy and shows that up to 115 µW total power can be generated from the insect’s body movements. Image credit: Aktakka, et al.
(PhysOrg.com) — For many years, researchers have been working on designing and fabricating micro-air-vehicles (MAVs), flying robots the size of small insects. But after realizing how difficult it is to create a tiny, lightweight flying vehicle capable of carrying a payload and being powered by a long-life onboard power source, some researchers have recently stopped trying to copy real-life insects and started using the insects themselves, with a few small tweaks. For instance, using tiny stimulators near their antennae, electrodes implanted in their central nervous systems, or neuromuscular interfaces, researchers have found that it’s easier to control insect’s brains – and therefore, flight – than to build robotic insects from scratch. +++ Here
Gallus gallus
The Chicken embryo is a staple educational tool in developmental biology.Their availability and similarities with mammalian embryo, help shape our present understanding of embryology. After 21 days of incubation, the chick attempts to break out of its shell, pushing its beak through the air cell. Since the specimens were received out of the egg and without its yoke, I lacked the ability to document the chicken’s interaction in its element. The specimens document a range from 5, 6, 9, 12, to 18 days of development. HERE
ECOSYSTEMS Dr. David A. Relman of Stanford studies the microbes that live peacefully in or on the human body. Annie Tritt for The New York Times.
GINA KOLATA: It was Tuesday evening, June 7. A frightening outbreak of food-borne bacteria was killing dozens of people in Germany and sickening hundreds. And the five doctors having dinner at Da Marco Cucina e Vino, a restaurant in Houston, could not stop talking about it.
What would they do if something like that happened in Houston? Suppose a patient came in, dying of a rapidly progressing infection of unknown origin? How could they figure out the cause and prevent an epidemic? They talked for hours, finally agreeing on a strategy.
That night one of the doctors, James M. Musser, chairman of pathology and genomic medicine at the Methodist Hospital System, heard from a worried resident. A patient had just died from what looked like inhalation anthrax. What should she do?
“I said, ‘I know precisely what to do,’ ” Dr. Musser said. “ ‘We just spent three hours talking about it.’ ” Continue HERE
Photo by Eliza Grinnell/SEAS. SEAS Professor Hanspeter Pfister, an expert in high-performance computing and visualization, is working on a project that aims to create a wiring diagram of all the neurons in the brain.
Sarah Zhang: The brain of a mouse measures only 1 cubic centimeter in volume. But when neuroscientists at Harvard’s Center for Brain Science slice it thinly and take high-resolution micrographs of each slice, that tiny brain turns into an exabyte of image data. That’s 1018 bytes, equivalent to more than a billion CDs.
What can you do with such a gigantic, unwieldy data set? That’s the latest challenge for Hanspeter Pfister, the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
Pfister, an expert in high-performance computing and visualization, is part of an interdisciplinary team collaborating on the Connectome Project at the Center for Brain Science. The project aims to create a wiring diagram of all the neurons in the brain. Neuroscientists have developed innovative techniques for automatically imaging slices of mouse brain, yielding terabytes of data so far. Continue HERE
Hanspeter Pfister and his colleagues have developed an algorithm that automatically detects the boundaries of cells in a sheet of tissue, allowing cells to be matched up across brain slices. Image courtesy of Amelio Vazquez-Reina.
To celebrate the launch of critically acclaimed video game DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION, Square Enix has commissioned filmmaker Rob Spence aka Eyeborg (a self proclaimed cyborg who lost an eye replaced it with a wireless video camera) to investigate prosthetics, cybernetics and human augmentation.
DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is the most powerful and fast-acting of the tryptamine class of hallucinogens. After smoking DMT users regularly report fantastic trips to other dimensions and conversations with intelligent alien life forms. Meyer outlines DMT usage, pharmacology, mythology and occult application, including shamanic uses. He also presents fascinating anecdotal material regarding DMT “alien contact.” Materials from DMT researchers Terence McKenna, Gracie and Zarkov, and dozens of other correspondences are included, providing clues to deciphering the DMT “hyperspace” state.
…and in search for answers people have feared to place
themselves on the line and to actually wrestle with life and
death out there in those strange, bardo-like dimensions, not
realizing that there is no other way to win true knowledge…
– - Terence McKenna – - (Psilocybin and the Sands of Time)
The artificial protein contains a dye that glows cherry red under UV light.
Researchers say they have created the first ever animal with artificial information in its genetic code. The technique, they say, could give biologists “atom-by-atom control” over the molecules in living organisms. One expert the BBC spoke to agrees, saying the technique would be seized upon by “the entire biology community”. The work by a Cambridge team, which used nematode worms, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The worms – from the species Caenorhabditis elegans – are 1mm long, with just a thousand cells in their transparent bodies. What makes the newly created animals different is that their genetic code has been extended to create biological molecules not known in the natural world.
Genes are the DNA blueprints that enable living organisms to construct their biological machinery, protein molecules, out of strings of simpler building blocks called amino acids. Just 20 amino acids are used in natural living organisms, assembled in different combinations to make the tens of thousands of different proteins needed to sustain life. Continue HERE
Wired Magazine: When scientists violate moral taboos, we expect horrific consequences. It’s a trope in our storytelling that goes back at least to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: However well-intentioned our fictional scientists may be, their disregard for ethical boundaries will produce not a peer-reviewed paper in Science but rather a new race of subhuman killers, a sucking wormhole in space-time, or a profusion of malevolent goo. Read HERE
Elucidating feedback is an attempt to convey the creativity inherent in the act of being attentive. The idea is that the details of our experience are created through our observation. The more we observe our environment, the more detail and texture we create within the realm of our experience.
The project is an interactive installation that demonstrates this concept through the use of neurofeedback (suppled through interaction between the user and a brain-computer interface device.)
The BCI device detects the amount of attention the user is paying to the installation through EEG (Electroencephalography) and the user is supplied a realtime environment that reflects their current state of attentiveness. This is intended to form a feedback loop between the user’s attention and the subject of their attention (the projected patterns).
The audio-visual aspect of the installation reflects pattern, order and detail in direct proportion to the attention that the user is currently paying. If the user is in a state where the mind is freely wandering and not focused on any one thing, the patterns decay into static bringing the installation back to a state of stasis. As the user starts to focus once more, the static slowly congeals back into a pattern.
Amateur photographer Haris S. Antonopoulos found these eggs on top of a mountain near Athens, Greece. He took a series of images of the 1.2-millimeter-diameter eggs and combined them with photo-editing software. The white halos outline the lids through which nymphs emerge.
Rotifer: Two lobes of the corona of the rotifer Floscularia ringens, spanning 300 microns, emerge from a protective tube. The cilia at the edge of the corona move in a fast, steady, wavelike motion called a metachronal wave, creating water currents that move food to the rotifer’s mouth. The tube consists of reddish-brown circular pellets that the rotifer forms in a cilia-lined socket. A new pellet forms at the center of this first-prize photograph taken by Charles Krebs of Issaquah, Wash. Once the pellet reaches the appropriate size, the rotifer retreats into its tube and, on the way down, quickly but carefully “plants” the new pellet along the top edge of the tube. 
Elizabeth Haswell, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, in a growth chamber with her “lab rats,” Arabidopsis plants she uses to understand how plants respond to touch, gravity and other mechanical forces. If wild-type Arabidopsis plants are touched frequently. their growth is stunted. Credit: David Kilper/WUSTL
Photo: HIV-1, coloured green, budding from a cultured lymphocyte. (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) 
This set of paired images provided by Shinji Nishimoto of the University of California, Berkeley on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011 shows original video images, upper row, and those images reconstructed by computer from brain scans. While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed. Scientists reported that result Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011 and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday. In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper. (University of California, Berkeley, Shinji Nishimoto)
ECOSYSTEMS Dr. David A. Relman of Stanford studies the microbes that live peacefully in or on the human body. Annie Tritt for The New York Times.
Photo by Eliza Grinnell/SEAS. SEAS Professor Hanspeter Pfister, an expert in high-performance computing and visualization, is working on a project that aims to create a wiring diagram of all the neurons in the brain.
Hanspeter Pfister and his colleagues have developed an algorithm that automatically detects the boundaries of cells in a sheet of tissue, allowing cells to be matched up across brain slices. Image courtesy of Amelio Vazquez-Reina.
The artificial protein contains a dye that glows cherry red under UV light.
Photo: Bartholomew Cooke
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