“It is widely recognized that Leibniz’s philosophical thought is deeply influenced by the mathematics, physics and philosophical theology of his era. Justin E. H. Smith’s Divine Machines argues that many of Leibniz’s most central philosophical doctrines are similarly bound up with the life sciences of his time, where the “life sciences” are understood very broadly to include fields as diverse as alchemy, medicine, taxonomy, and paleontology. Smith’s groundbreaking exploration represents an important contribution to our understanding of both Leibniz’s philosophy and the study of life in the early modern era. It is to be recommended to historians, philosophers, and historians of philosophy alike. Below I highlight four central topics in Smith’s book, raising some reservations along the way.”
A review of Justin E. H. Smith’s Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life by Jeffrey K. McDonough. Read it HERE
Over the last couple of years, Cosma Shalizi and I have been working together on various things, including, inter alia, the relationship between complex systems, democracy and the Internet. These are big unwieldy topics, and trying to think about them systematically is hard. Even so, we’ve gotten to the point where we at least feel ready to start throwing stuff at a wider audience, to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a paper we’re working on, which argues that we should (for some purposes at least), think of markets, hierarchy and democracy in terms of their capacity to solve complex collective problems, makes the case that democracy will on average do the job a lot better than the other two ways, and then looks at different forms of collective information processing on the Internet as experiments that democracies can learn from. A html version is under the fold; the PDF version is here. Your feedback would very much be appreciated – we would like to build other structures on top of this foundation, and hence, really, really want criticisms and argument from diverse points of view (especially because such argument is exactly what we see as the strength of democratic arrangements).
Excerpt of a text by Henry Farrell (George Washington University) and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi (Carnegie-Mellon/The Santa Fe Institute). Continue HERE
Image via
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.
With the world’s economy picking up again we’re being confronted with some pre-crisis trouble areas. High oil prices and rising food prices. With developing countries developing into First World nations their quest for a more varied diet is hiking up prices across the globe. World demand is outstripping world supply. Seeing as a new supply of food sources takes time it might be an idea to start looking for other produce to fill our bellies. And insects might be a good place to start. They’re plentiful and full of nutrients and if presented right you won’t even know you ate them. Mealworm quiche, grasshopper springrolls and cuisine made from other creepy crawlies is the answer to the global food crisis, shrinking land and water resources and climate-changing carbon emissions, Dutch scientist Arnold van Huis says. To attract more insect-eaters, Van Huis and his team of scientists at Wageningen have worked with Rijn IJssel (a local cooking school) to produce a cookbook and suitable recipes.
Text and Images via Totally Cool Pix (REUTERS/Jerry Lampen). Look the full photo essay HERE
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
Climate science has a long view. The measuring of rainfall, temperature and pressure with instruments made from glass, mercury and copper wire. Scientists have been collecting data for centuries, first in hand-written notebooks, later in vast computer databases. Edmund Halley mapped the trade winds in 1686 and Benjamin Franklin traced the Gulf Stream in the eighteenth century, the first hints of truly global systems. Helmut Landsberg added statistical analysis in the twentieth century, which revealed fluctuation in what until then had felt eternally recurring to the individual. Eventually, models of Earthʼs climate emerged from the data, an attempt to grasp the forces that drive the reality of our immediate environment, our world.
But science itself is careful. Its method progresses cautiously through hypotheses and experiments, always inviting their falsification. Yet, there are moments when it gets propelled to the forefront of human affairs, such as it happened to theoretical physics when it enabled the construction of nuclear devices. Over the last fifty years, climate science has been making visible that human activity has had a significant and increasing influence on the Earthʼs atmosphere. Now it has been given the place in the spotlight, and it feels quite uncomfortable there.
Excerpt of a text written by Sascha Pohflepp. Read it HERE
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
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.
Bruno Latour gives a lecture titled ‘Reenacting Science’ at Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Prof Bruno Latour visited Dublin City University on Friday, February 17th for a special seminar on interdisciplinarity, the arts and the sciences, entitled ‘From Critique to Composition’. Prof Latour is a leading figure in contemporary anthropology and science studies, but the reach of his influence is truly interdisciplinary.
Talk by Prof. Bruno Latour
Azim Premji University Public Lecture Series
March 23, 2012
About the Talk
Ecological crises in contemporary times have created problems for political representation. Existing political assemblies cannot handle these crises due to their scale, the esoteric character of the scientific knowledge necessary to apprehend them, and the intensity of conflicts of values that they generate. Digital resources suggest new possibilities for mapping the heterogeneous networks which link scientists, decision makers, media, citizens and other participants in public debates over ecological issues. They can create political assemblies where contending world views and modes of reasoning engage each other.
The equivalent of two Earths will be required to support the world’s population by 2030. That is the stark warning made by the WWF’s Living Planet Report 2012, which was put together in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network. It warns that the size of the planet’s population and the resulting consumption of environmental resources, such as food and fuel, is unsustainable at current rates. “If we keep on taking more renewable resources than can be replenished, then eventually they will become depleted,” the report stated. “This has already happened locally in some places, for example the collapse of cod stocks in Newfoundland in the 1980s.
Excerpt of an article written by Nicholas Edmondson, IBT. Continue HERE
Communication with dolphins is getting better all the time — they’ve been using iPads, for one thing, and humans have been working on a type of Rosetta Stone-like two-way translation device. A new gadget could improve matters even further, by allowing humans to produce the full range of dolphin sounds. The acoustics researchers who developed it call it the Dolphin Speaker.
Plenty of work is being done with dolphin sounds, but they have mostly focused on dolphin vocalizations and their hearing anatomy. Dolphins can not only hear and produce clicks, whistles and burst pulses well outside of the range of human hearing, but they can vocalize at several different frequency ranges at once. This ocean broadband is key for communication and navigation.
To better understand how these sounds are produced, how they travel and even what they mean, researchers need to be able to play them back, watching how dolphins react. This speaker can do it, producing sounds from 6 kHz to 170 kHz. While others have worked in the low-frequency ranges, this is the first type that can cover the whole spectrum.
Researchers led by Yuka Mishima, a graduate student at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, built a new transducer sandwiched between pieces of acrylic to keep it safe from water. A quadruple piezoelectric panel can broadcast high-frequency sounds, and a single silver circle broadcasts low-frequency sounds, Mishima explains in a presentation about the research. They took it to the ocean and played some dolphin sounds, comparing the sound spectrograms with natural recorded spectrograms obtained from dolphins. The charts looked mighty similar, the researchers say.
The next step is to play back a whole sequence of dolphin noises to dolphins and watch what happens. The paper is being presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting this week.
Dolphin Speaker: The Dolphin Speaker is the first underwater setup that can project the full range of sounds made by dolphins, potentially opening a new avenue for communication with the animals. Mishima et al/Acoustical Society of America.
Geologists at the University of Maryland have published research that could help prove or disprove Gaia theory — the notion that the Earth is one single self-regulating system.
The concept dates from the 70s and was initially formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. It proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings comprise a single system that maintains the conditions for life on Earth. It was initially met with skepticism from the scientific community, and remains somewhat controversial, but is now an important area of research in Earth systems science and biogeochemistry.
If the Gaia hypothesis is correct, then a number of signals should be observable in the Earth’s natural cycles and systems. One of those is that a sulfur compound made by organisms in the ocean should be stable enough in water to allow its transfer into the air, so it can then be returned to land. A team of geologists, geochemists and marine biologists led by Harry Oduro has developed a method of tracking the movement of sulfur through ocean organisms, the atmosphere and the land, potentially yielding evidence as to how strong this cycle is.
Excerpt of an article written by Duncan Geere, Wired UK. Continue HERE
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
Carson C. Chow deploys mathematics to solve the everyday problems of real life. As an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, he tries to figure out why 1 in 3 Americans are obese.
We spoke at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where Dr. Chow, 49, gave a presentation on “Illuminating the Obesity Epidemic With Mathematics,” and then later by telephone; a condensed and edited version of the interviews follows.
You are an M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist. How did you come to work on obesity?
In 2004, while on the faculty of the math department at the University of Pittsburgh, I married. My wife is a Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist, and she would not move. So I began looking for work in the Beltway area. Through the grapevine, I heard that the N.I.D.D.K., a branch of the National Institutes of Health, was building up its mathematics laboratory to study obesity. At the time, I knew almost nothing of obesity.
I didn’t even know what a calorie was. I quickly read every scientific paper I could get my hands on.
I could see the facts on the epidemic were quite astounding. Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds. Since the 1970s, the national obesity rate had jumped from around 20 percent to over 30 percent.
The interesting question posed to me when I was hired was, “Why is this happening?”
Excerpt from an interview/article written by CLAUDIA DREIFUS, NYT. Continue HERE
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
Here’s an idea many philosophers and logicians have about the function of logic in our cognitive life, our inquiries and debates. It isn’t a player. Rather, it’s an umpire, a neutral arbitrator between opposing theories, imposing some basic rules on all sides in a dispute. The picture is that logic has no substantive content, for otherwise the correctness of that content could itself be debated, which would impugn the neutrality of logic. One way to develop this idea is by saying that logic supplies no information of its own, because the point of information is to rule out possibilities, whereas logic only rules out inconsistencies, which are not genuine possibilities. On this view, logic in itself is totally uninformative, although it may help us extract and handle non-logical information from other sources.
The idea that logic is uninformative strikes me as deeply mistaken, and I’m going to explain why. But it may not seem crazy when one looks at elementary examples of the cognitive value of logic, such as when we extend our knowledge by deducing logical consequences of what we already know. If you know that either Mary or Mark did the murder (only they had access to the crime scene at the right time), and then Mary produces a rock-solid alibi, so you know she didn’t do it, you can deduce that Mark did it. Logic also helps us recognize our mistakes, when our beliefs turn out to contain inconsistencies. If I believe that no politicians are honest, and that John is a politician, and that he is honest, at least one of those three beliefs must be false, although logic doesn’t tell me which one.
Excerpt of an article written by TIMOTHY WILLIAMSON at NYT . Continue HERE
What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain. Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and perception. It is uncertain, however, why activation of the 5-HT2A receptor by hallucinogens produces psychedelic effects, but many scientists believe that the effects are linked to increases in brain activity. Although it is not known why this activation would lead to profound alterations of consciousness, one speculation is that an increase in the spontaneous firing of certain types of brain cells leads to altered sensory and perceptual processing, uncontrolled memory retrieval, and the projection of mental “noise” into the mind’s eye.
The English author Aldous Huxley believed that the brain acts as a “reducing valve” that constrains conscious awareness, with mescaline and other hallucinogens inducing psychedelic effects by inhibiting this filtering mechanism. Huxley based this explanation entirely on his personal experiences with mescaline, which was given to him by Humphrey Osmond, the psychiatrist who coined the term psychedelic. Even though Huxley proposed this idea in 1954, decades before the advent of modern brain science, it turns out that he may have been correct. Although the prevailing view has been that hallucinogens work by activating the brain, rather than by inhibiting it as Huxley proposed, the results of a recent imaging study are challenging these conventional explanations.
Excerpt of an article written by Adam Halberstadt and Mark Geyer at Scientific American . Continue HERE
Image above: “Prayer” by Alex Grey
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?
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.
Why do otherwise rational people think it’s a good idea to profile people at airports? Recently, neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris related a story of an elderly couple being given the twice-over by the TSA (Transportation Security Administration), pointed out how these two were obviously not a threat, and recommended that the TSA focus on the actual threat: “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.”
This is a bad idea. It doesn’t make us any safer—and it actually puts us all at risk.
The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, then we should implement it. If it didn’t, we’d be foolish to do so. Sometimes profiling works. Consider a sheep in a meadow, happily munching on grass. When he spies a wolf, he’s going to judge that individual wolf based on a bunch of assumptions related to the past behavior of its species. In short, that sheep is going to profile…and then run away. This makes perfect sense, and is why evolution produced sheep—and other animals—that react this way. But this sort of profiling doesn’t work with humans at airports, for several reasons.
Excerpt of an article written by Bruce Schneier at Sam Harris’ blog. Continue HERE
A film produced by the NPL Film Unit in the 1950s explaining the principles behind the first accurate atomic clock, designed by Louis Essen and built at the National Physical Laboratory in 1955.
We are very grateful to Ray Essen, Louis Essen’s son-in-law, for unearthing this piece of NPL’s history.
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
By comparing the testosterone levels of five-month old pairs of twins, both identical and non-identical, University of Montreal researchers were able to establish that testosterone levels in infancy are not inherited genetically but rather determined by environmental factors.
“Testosterone is a key hormone for the development of male reproductive organs, and it is also associated with behavioral traits, such as sexual behavior and aggression,” said lead author Dr. Richard E. Tremblay of the university’s Research Unit on Children’s Psychosocial Maladjustment. “Our study is the largest to be undertaken with newborns, and our results contrast with the findings gained by scientists working with adolescents and adults, indicating that testosterone levels are inherited.”
The findings were presented in an article published in Psychoneuroendocrinology on May 7, 2012.
The researchers took saliva samples from 314 pairs of twins and measured the levels of testosterone. They then compared the similarity in testosterone levels between identical and fraternal twins to determine the contribution of genetic and environmental factors. Results indicated that differences in levels of testosterone were due mainly to environmental factors. “The study was not designed to specifically identify these environmental factors which could include a variety of environmental conditions, such as maternal diet, maternal smoking, breastfeeding and parent-child interactions.”
“Because our study suggests that testosterone levels in infants are determined by the circumstances in which the child develops before and after birth, further studies will be needed to find out exactly what these influencing factors are and to what extent they change from birth to puberty,” Tremblay said.
“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
Researchers in Spain have found that at least some of the individuals claiming to see the so-called aura of people actually have the neuropsychological phenomenon known as “synesthesia” (specifically, “emotional synesthesia”). This might be a scientific explanation of their alleged ability.
In synesthetes, the brain regions responsible for the processing of each type of sensory stimuli are intensely interconnected. Synesthetes can see or taste a sound, feel a taste, or associate people or letters with a particular color.
The study was conducted by the University of Granada Department of Experimental Psychology Óscar Iborra, Luis Pastor and Emilio Gómez Milán, and has been published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. This is the first time that a scientific explanation has been provided for the esoteric phenomenon of the aura, a supposed energy field of luminous radiation surrounding a person as a halo, which is imperceptible to most human beings.
Excerpt of an article via Science Daily. Continue HERE
We will soon find ourselves plagued by new forms of distress. No, it’s not the economy. It’s not that we are all becoming socially isolated because of Facebook (though it’s possible we are). Rather, doctors are about to redefine what it means to be mentally ill.
A select clique of psychiatrists has been at work for years on the latest version of the official manual of mental illness, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In 2000, they came out with a revised fourth edition of this compendium of psychiatric problems, the DSM-IV. Now, they are toiling away on DSM-5 (dispensing, for one, with those pesky Roman numerals). In the May/June issue of Scientific American Mind, Scientific American’s Ferris Jabr documents some of the biggest proposed changes in this edition-in-progress, slated for publication in 2013. Already, the DSM’s framers have backtracked on some of their original proposals, but most of the elements behind this significant reworking of the DSM remain in effect.
Excerpt of an article written by Ingrid Wickelgren, at Scientific American. Continue HERE
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
A series of three new studies indicates that less religious people, agnostics and atheists are more likely to be generous to those in need while driven by compassion than highly religious individuals. The works call into question widespread assumptions about the link between religion and compassion.
Researchers from the University of California in Berkeley (UCB) found that people in the latter category are less likely to be driven by compassion when they are generous. Social scientists at the university say that compassion is unrelated to generosity in this group.
On the other hand, people in the first category are very likely to give to the poor, or help others out simply because they are compassionate. In other words, their actions come from a genuine interest for helping others out, not because their religion calls for this behavior.
Details of the three studies appear in the latest online issue of the esteemed journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. The researchers say that acts of generosity and charity may not be driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, as some studies had suggested.
“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,” UCB social psychologist Robb Willer says. He was a coauthor of the new paper.
“The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns,” the expert goes on to say.
For the purpose of this investigation, compassion was defined as the emotion that individuals feel when they see others suffering, an emotion based on which they act to help the latter, regardless of personal cost or risk, and without expecting rewards. Religious people expect a reward in the afterlife.
This is one of the main critiques associated with the stance organized religion takes on helping others. Believers are encouraged to be generous with those in need by being told that this will help them after death.
Atheists, agnostics and less-religious people help others due to a genuine sense of compassion, without expecting the get into the good graces of God for their effort. They are also not guided by a moral obligation instilled in them by religious leaders, churches and doctrines, but rather by their impulses.
The study results can be interpreted as providing additional evidence that morality, good conduct, compassion and generosity, among other behaviors, do not stem from religion, as many religious and spiritual leaders would have people believe. Rather, they stem from our human nature.
So 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.
Dolphin Speaker: The Dolphin Speaker is the first underwater setup that can project the full range of sounds made by dolphins, potentially opening a new avenue for communication with the animals. Mishima et al/Acoustical Society of America.
Polymer scaffolds guide stem cells growth into customized sizes and shapes.
The external device that allows chip pairs to process images.
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