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Category: biological – Page 88

The fungal pathogen that wipes out much of humanity in HBO’s latest series The Last of Us is real, but can the cordyceps fungus actually turn humans into zombies one day?

“It’s highly unlikely because these are organisms that have become really well adapted to infecting ants,” Rebecca Shapiro, assistant professor at University of Guelph’s department of molecular and cellular biology, told Craig Norris, host of CBC Kitchener-Waterloo’s The Morning Edition.

In the television series, the fungus infects the brain of humans and turns them into zombies. In real life, it can only infect ants and other insects in this manner.

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Scientists of the University of Antwerp and University of Liège (Belgium) have found how the human brain changes and adapts to weightlessness after being in space for six months. Some of the changes turned out to be lasting—even after eight months back on Earth. Raphaël Liégeois, soon to be the third Belgian in space, acknowledges the importance of the research “to prepare the new generation of astronauts for longer missions.”

A child who learns not to drop a glass on the floor, or a predicting the course of an incoming ball to hit it accurately are examples of how the incorporates the physical laws of gravity to optimally function on Earth. Astronauts who go to space reside in a weightless environment, where the brain’s rules about gravity are no longer applicable.

A new study on in cosmonauts has revealed how the brain’s organization is changed after a six-month mission to the International Space Station (ISS), demonstrating the adaptation that is required to live in weightlessness. The findings are published in the journal Communications Biology.

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Materials scientists are often inspired by nature and therefore use biological compounds as cues to design advanced materials. It is possible to mimic the molecular structure and functional motifs in artificial materials to offer a blueprint for a variety of functions. In a new report in Science Advances, Tae Hyun Kim and a research team at the California Institute of Technology and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in the U.S. and South Korea, created a flexible biomimetic thermal sensing polymer, abbreviated BTS, which they designed to mimic ion transport dynamics of pectin; a plant cell wall component.

The researchers used a versatile synthetic procedure and engineered the properties of the to be elastic, flexible and stretchable in nature. The outperformed state-of-the-art temperature sensing materials such as vanadium oxide. Despite mechanical deformations, the thermal sensor-integrated material showed and stable functionality between 15° and 55° Celsius. The properties of the flexible BTS polymer made it well suited to map across space-time and facilitate broadband infrared photodetection relevant for a variety of applications.

Organic electronic materials are competitive alternatives to conventional silicon-based microelectronics due to their cost-effective, multifunctional nature. Materials scientists seek to tailor the properties of such materials at the molecular level for a range of sensing applications for wearable and implantable devices with specific characteristics such as flexibility and elasticity. At present, there is an increasing demand for all-organic electronic devices to form a range of soft and active materials. For instance, organic thermal sensors are suited for remote health care and robotics, albeit with limitations.

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Watch this next video about the Future of Artificial Intelligence (2030 — 10,000 A.D.+): https://youtu.be/cwXnX49Bofk.
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SOURCES:
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Max Tegmark): https://amzn.to/3xrU351
• The Future of Humanity (Michio Kaku): https://amzn.to/3Gz8ffA
• The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Ray Kurzweil): https://amzn.to/3ftOhXI

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This video covers digital immortality, its required technologies, processes of uploading a mind, its potential impact on society, and more. Watch this next video about the world in 2200: https://bit.ly/3htaWEr.
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CHAPTERS
00:00 Required Technologies.
01:42 The Processes of Uploading a Mind.
03:32 Positive Impacts On Society.
05:34 When Will It Become Possible?
05:53 Is Digital Immortality Potentially Dangerous?

SOURCES:
• The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Ray Kurzweil): https://amzn.to/3ftOhXI
• The Future of Humanity (Michio Kaku): https://amzn.to/3Gz8ffA
• https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/
• https://www.anl.gov/article/researchers-image-an-entire-mous…first-time.
• https://interestingengineering.com/cheating-death-and-becomi…-uploading.

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Continue reading “Digital Immortality: When Will We Live Forever?” | >

Could we imagine a world where our minds are fused together and interlinked with machine intelligence to such a degree that every facet of consciousness is infinitely augmented? How could we explore the landscapes of inner space, when human brains and synthetic intelligence blend together to generate new structures of consciousness? Is it possible to interpret the ongoing geopolitical events through the lens of the awakening Gaia perspective?

#SyntellectHypothesis #cybernetics #superintelligence #consciousness #emergence #futurism #AGI #GlobalMind #geopolitics

“When we look through the other end of the telescope, however, we can see a different pattern. We can make out what I call the One Mind — not a subdivision of consciousness, but the overarching, inclusive dimension to which all the mental components of all individual minds, past, present, and future belong. I capitalize the One Mind to distinguish it from the single, one mind that each individual appears to possess.” — Larry Dossey

Is humanity evolving into a hybrid cybernetic species, interconnected through the Global Mind? When might the Web become self-aware? What will it feel like to elevate our consciousness to a global level once our neocortices are fully connected to the Web?

THE SYNTELLECT HYPOTHESIS: A NEW EXTENSION TO THE GAIA THEORY

In their study of the biosphere, Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock found that Earth behaves like a living organism with characteristics such as dynamic equilibrium, stability, and self-regulation, or homeostasis. They named this entity Gaia, after the Greek goddess of the Earth, and hypothesized that all life forms interact with the environment to regulate the planet’s properties. Earth’s temperature, oxygen content, and ocean chemistry have remained conducive to life for millions of years due to the regulatory effects of biological processes. As life evolves, it impacts its surroundings, leading to either stabilizing or destabilizing feedback loops. The Gaia hypothesis suggests that stabilizing states enable further biological evolution to reconfigure interactions between life and the planet.

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What if we’re not alone on Earth? Why We May Not Be Alone on Earth…

The shadow biosphere is a hypothetical microbial biosphere of Earth that would use radically different biochemical and molecular processes from that of currently known life.

00:00:00 Intro.
00:00:26 Bio.
00:00:55 Brilliant.
00:02:33 The Shadow Biosphere.
00:06:32 Multiple Abiogenesis.
00:13:20 Panspermic Shadow Biosphere.
00:16:40 How to find the Shadow Biosphere.
00:23:23 We don’t know the rules of Earth Life.
00:32:56 Mars life, could it be here?

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Continue reading “Why We May Not Be Alone on Earth w/ Janusz Petkowski” | >

Scientific and technological advances have enabled us to zoom into the biological world. We can get down to the biomolecular scale, a domain where quantum phenomena can take place and therefore cannot be neglected.

Watch the Q&A with Alexandra here: https://youtu.be/_rElT2_NukY
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This talk was recorded at the Royal Institution on 28 October 2022.

Upon completing her doctoral studies in 2005 at the University of Oxford, Alexandra Olaya-Castro was subsequently awarded a three-year Junior Research Fellowship by Trinity College (Oxford), where she began her independent research career.

In November 2008 Alexandra Olaya-Castro obtained a five-year EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship that allowed her to start a research group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of University College London. She was then appointed as a Lecturer in September 2011, was promoted to Reader in October 2015 and to full Professor in 2018.

Throughout her career Alexandra has made scientific contributions to the understanding of signatures and implications of quantum coherence in a variety of quantum systems that include exciton condensates in quantum wells, multi-qubit systems embedded in optical cavities and, her current focus, photo-activated biomolecular systems.

Continue reading “A future with quantum biology — with Alexandra Olaya-Castro” | >