Via the gut.
Bianca Palushaj & Robin M Voigt puts forward a strategy for altering the trajectory of this modern epidemic.
1Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, USA.
2Rush Center for Integrated Microbiome and Chronobiology Research.
3Department of Internal Medicine, and.
4Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Your brain begins as a single cell. When all is said and done, it will house an incredibly complex and powerful network of some 170 billion cells. How does it organize itself along the way? Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientists have come up with a surprisingly simple answer that could have far-reaching implications for biology and artificial intelligence.
Stan Kerstjens, a postdoc in Professor Anthony Zador’s lab, frames the question in terms of positional information. “The only thing a cell ‘sees’ is itself and its neighbors,” he explains. “But its fate depends on where it sits. A cell in the wrong place becomes the wrong thing, and the brain doesn’t develop right. So, every cell must solve two questions: Where am I? And who do I need to become?”
In a study published in Neuron, Kerstjens, Zador, and colleagues at Harvard University and ETH Zürich put forward a new theory for how the brain organizes itself during development.
Biomolecular condensates are non-membrane-encapsulated compartments that control various biological processes. Recent studies have revealed that condensates change in response to stimuli and over time. This Review discusses the heterogeneity and composition changes of nuclear and cytoplasmic condensates, their regulation and how the changes affect cellular biochemical reactions.
Read “” by James P. Kowall on Medium.
Watch this very interesting video in which Roger Penrose argues that Consciousness is fundamental and came first before it created the universe through a process of observation that turns potentiality into actuality:
For 400 years, we’ve believed that mindless matter eventually evolved into conscious minds. But what if we have the causation completely backwards? What if consciousness is the precondition for the universe?
In this video, we dive deep into the quantum paradox, wave function collapse, and the radical scientific theory that consciousness isn’t an accident of evolution — it’s the fundamental building block of reality itself. From the Copenhagen interpretation to the mysteries of the biological brain, we explore how quantum mechanics suggests the physical world is simply what appears when consciousness observes itself.
If humankind is to explore deep space, one small passenger should not be left behind: microbes. In fact, it would be impossible to leave them behind, since they live on and in our bodies, surfaces and food. Learning how they react to space conditions is critical, but they could also be invaluable fellows in our endeavor to explore space.
Microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi can harvest crucial minerals from rocks and could provide a sustainable alternative to transporting much-needed resources from Earth.
Researchers from Cornell and the University of Edinburgh collaborated to study how those microbes extract platinum group elements from a meteorite in microgravity, with an experiment conducted aboard the International Space Station. They found that “biomining” fungi are particularly adept at extracting the valuable metal palladium, while removing the fungus resulted in a negative effect on nonbiological leaching in microgravity.
“Glass” has a unique and distinct meaning in physics—one that refers not just to the transparent material we associate with window glass. Instead, it refers to any system that looks solid but is not in true equilibrium and continues to change extremely slowly over time. Examples include window glass, plastics, metallic glasses, spin glasses (i.e., magnetic systems), and even some biological and computational systems.
When a liquid is cooled very quickly—a process called quenching—it doesn’t have time to organize into a crystal but becomes stuck in a disordered state far from equilibrium. Its properties—like stiffness and structure—slowly evolve through a process called “aging.”
Now, a research team from the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed a new theoretical framework for understanding the universal aging behavior of glassy materials. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
Your brain begins as a single cell. When all is said and done, it will house an incredibly complex and powerful network of some 170 billion cells. How does it organize itself along the way? Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientists have come up with a surprisingly simple answer that could have far-reaching implications for biology and artificial intelligence.
Stan Kerstjens, a postdoc in Professor Anthony Zador’s lab, frames the question in terms of positional information. “The only thing a cell ‘sees’ is itself and its neighbors,” he explains. “But its fate depends on where it sits. A cell in the wrong place becomes the wrong thing, and the brain doesn’t develop right. So, every cell must solve two questions: Where am I? And who do I need to become?”
In a study published in Neuron, Kerstjens, Zador, and colleagues at Harvard University and ETH Zürich put forward a new theory for how the brain organizes itself during development.
In this video we look into one of the developing areas of computing: wetware. Most specifically neuromorphic computing, a science which uses actual neurons on chips.
We talk to Cortical labs, the company that developed the pong-playing dish brain, and professor Thomas Hartung to understand what the benefits of this technology are.
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