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Category: biological – Page 159

When baboons experience trauma in early life, they have higher levels of stress hormones in adulthood—a potential marker of poor health—than their peers who don’t experience trauma, even if they have strong social relationships as adults, according to a study led by a University of Michigan researcher.

The study examined the links between childhood adversity, adult social relationships and glucocorticoid concentrations. The goal was to determine whether one of the reasons that baboons who experience early trauma live shorter, less healthy lives was because they fail to develop strong social relationships in adulthood, which could be beneficial to health.

U-M biological anthropologist Stacy Rosenbaum and her co-authors found that while early life adversity didn’t strongly affect baboons’ ability to have social relationships, any positive effect of those relationships was much smaller than the large negative effects of early life trauma.

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Imagine tiny crystals that “blink” like fireflies and can convert carbon dioxide, a key cause of climate change, into fuels.

A Rutgers-led team has created ultra-small dioxide crystals that exhibit unusual “blinking” behavior and may help to produce methane and other fuels, according to a study in the journal Angewandte Chemie. The crystals, also known as nanoparticles, stay charged for a long time and could benefit efforts to develop quantum computers.

“Our findings are quite important and intriguing in a number of ways, and more research is needed to understand how these exotic crystals work and to fulfill their potential,” said senior author Tewodros (Teddy) Asefa, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He’s also a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering in the School of Engineering.

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MetaRomantism and “Evil”

MetaRomanticism can be thought of as an attempt to reform Romanticism, which seems necessary since it seems to be a constant companion to Modernism and it is especially dangerous when it has access to Modernist tools that is uses while refusing to be rational. Perhaps this explains the horrors of Nazism in the 20th century. Nazis were irrationalist Romantics that stole the Modernist tools of Weimar Germany and nearly destroyed human civilization and they attached themselves to Dharma traditions that sometime support versions of annihilationism.

How can MetaRomanticism help?

Perhaps Romantics need to understand why evil exists and MeteRomanticsim should attempt to provide explications that encourage all parties to attempt to be just and a blessing to all families, even if perceived as evil. A version of activities that I think might attract evil are traditions that attempt to extinguish all life because they think it is just and blessing to all sentient beings.

If this is part of a sincere tradition, I would suggest that they cultivating all sentient life so that it can evolve to the point where it can legitimately consent to extinguishing its own sensations — where many faiths do not believe that biological death is the death of sensation. Perhaps like interpretations of Buddhism, they could attempt to convince each other to extinguish all at once voluntarily, but only whenever all sentient beings are able to do so with legitimate consent. However, they should keep in mind that even if all sentient life no longer experienced sensations voluntarily, it would be a highly homogenous result and the mind of Elyon, which can be thought of as Nature or a mind we all share, does not seem to like homogeny, as seen in the form of entropy. What if all the sentient beings tried to voluntary stop experiencing sensation and then life finds a way to start evolving again and sentient life has to wait a long time — with lots of different types of suffering occurring — before sentient beings appear that are wise enough to control their own suffering and the suffering of other sentient beings?

Also, the real evil is probably when sadistic people attach to beautiful sincere traditions such as Buddhism, or uglier less likely to be sincere traditions such as Satanism, for selfish sadistic reasons. Perhaps annihilationists should learn to watch for that so we don’t all get hurt, and they should be willing to accept a just of the punishments and a no more than a just portion of the rewards if they should become a custodian of other sentient beings at some point during their attempts to extinguish all sensation.

Evil might also sometimes exist because people wish to charge forward or hold the current culture in place using unjust reasons. Participants in conservative or progressive cultures should also watch for people pressing forward or holding the ground in sadistic, irresponsible, or unjust ways.

Continue reading “Skrillex — Kill Everybody (Bare Noize Remix)” | >

Summary: Repetitive transcranial memory stimulation applied to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex modifies the negative effects of fear memories. The findings could have implications for the treatment of PTSD.

Source: University of Bologna

A research group from the University of Bologna has succeeded in modifying the negative effect of a returning memory that triggers fear, and developed a new non-invasive experimental protocol. The result of this study, published in the journal Current Biology, is an innovative protocol that combines fear conditioning—a stimulus associated with something unpleasant that induces a negative memory—and the neurostimulation of a specific site of the prefrontal cortex.

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A team of researchers led by Cunjiang Yu, Bill D. Cook Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, has developed a new form of electronics known as “drawn-on-skin electronics,” allowing multifunctional sensors and circuits to be drawn on the skin with an ink pen.

The advance, the researchers report in Nature Communications, allows for the collection of more precise, motion artifact-free health data, solving the long-standing problem of collecting precise biological data through a when the subject is in motion.

The imprecision may not be important when your FitBit registers 4,000 steps instead of 4,200, but sensors designed to check heart function, temperature and other physical signals must be accurate if they are to be used for diagnostics and treatment.

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The squid typically have dark eyes and an array of black and reddish brown spots across their bodies while the genetically altered hatchlings have light pink or red eyes and almost no dark spots.

The milestone, which was first reported in Current Biology Thursday, could pave the way for researchers to study the biology of cephalopods like squid, octopus and cuttlefish the same way they study more common lab animals like study mice and fruit flies.

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Crop yields for apples, cherries and blueberries across the United States are being reduced by a lack of pollinators, according to Rutgers-led research, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

Most of the world’s crops depend on honeybees and for , so declines in both managed and wild bee populations raise concerns about , notes the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“We found that many crops are pollination-limited, meaning would be higher if crop flowers received more pollination. We also found that honey bees and wild bees provided similar amounts of pollination overall,” said senior author Rachael Winfree, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Managing habitat for and/or stocking more honey bees would boost pollination levels and could increase crop production.”

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For decades, scientists have gathered ancient sediment samples from below the seafloor to better understand past climates, plate tectonics and the deep marine ecosystem. In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers reveal that given the right food in the right laboratory conditions, microbes collected from sediment as old as 100 million years can revive and multiply, even after laying dormant since large dinosaurs prowled the planet.

The research team behind the new study, from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, the Kochi University and Marine Works Japan, gathered the ancient samples ten years ago during an expedition to the South Pacific Gyre, the part of the ocean with the lowest productivity and fewest nutrients available to fuel the marine food web.

“Our main question was whether life could exist in such a nutrient-limited environment or if this was a lifeless zone,” said the paper’s lead author Yuki Morono, senior scientist at JAMSTEC. “And we wanted to know how long the could sustain their life in a near-absence of food.”

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