Scientists study the immortal jellyfish to learn about its DNA reproduction, life cycle and telomeres. New research reveals its special genes.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1034
Some neuroscientists believe we will never solve the hard problem. Just as a goldfish will never be able to read a newspaper or write a sonnet, Homo sapiens, these scholars argue, are cognitively closed to such knowledge. It is a great but impenetrable mystery. The psychologist Steven Pinker calls the hard problem “the ultimate tease… orever beyond our conceptual grasp.” Echoing the view that consciousness remains outside the limits of human comprehension, one of the best entries in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is the following:
“Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself.”
Others believe that if we just keep solving the easy problems, the hard problem will disappear. By locating and understanding what we call the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) — neural mechanisms that researchers say are responsible for consciousness, typically gleaned using brain scans or neurosurgery to compare conscious and unconscious states — we will march ever closer to solving the mystery, until one day there is nothing left to solve. Defining an NCC starts as a process of elimination: the spinal cord and cerebellum can be ruled out, for instance, because if both are lost to stroke or trauma, nothing happens to the victim’s consciousness. They still perceive and experience their surroundings as they did before. The best candidates for NCC (so far) are a subset of neurons in a posterior hot zone of the brain that comprises the parietal, occipital and temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex. When the posterior hot zone is electrically stimulated, as it sometimes is during surgery for brain tumors, a person will report experiencing a menagerie of thoughts, memories, sensations, visual and auditory hallucinations, and an eerie feeling of surrealism or familiarity. So if the consciousness illusion is located anywhere, it might be in this mysterious region of the posterior cortex.
Managing Complex Transplant (and Xenotransplant) Cases Globally — Dr Robert A Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS, Director, NYU Langone Health
Dr. Robert A. Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS, (https://nyulangone.org/doctors/1467404137/robert-montgomery) is the Director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, and Chair and a Professor in their Department of Surgery, where he oversees a diverse team of medical and surgical specialists who provide a wide variety of surgery and transplantation services including bone marrow, heart, kidney, liver, lung, and facial transplantation.
Dr. Montgomery received his Doctor of Medicine with Honor from the University of Rochester School of Medicine, his Doctor of Philosophy from Balliol College, The University of Oxford, England in Molecular Immunology, and completed his general surgical training, multi-organ transplantation fellowship, and postdoctoral fellowship in Human Molecular Genetics at Johns Hopkins.
Circa 2016 This gives more exacting detail of the Tasmanian devils resistance to cancer.
A recently emerged infectious cancer has caused the near extinction of the Tasmanian devil, but some populations persist. Here, Epstein et al. provide evidence for possible resistance via rapid evolution in two genomic regions that contain cancer-related immune response genes.
Researchers have developed a new chip-based beam steering technology that provides a promising route to small, cost-effective, and high-performance lidar systems. Lidar, or light detection and ranging, uses laser pulses to acquire 3D information about a scene or object. It is used in a wide range of applications such as autonomous driving, 3D holography, biomedical sensing, free-space optical communications, and virtual reality.
“Optical beam steering is a key technology for lidar systems, but conventional mechanical-based beam steering systems are bulky, expensive, sensitive to vibration, and limited in speed,” said research team leader Hao Hu from the Technical University of Denmark. “Although devices known as chip-based optical phased arrays (OPAs) can quickly and precisely steer light in a non-mechanical way, so far, these devices have had poor beam quality and a field of view typically below 100 degrees.”
Too much screen use has been linked to obesity and psychological problems. Now a new study has identified a new problem—a study in fruit flies suggests our basic cellular functions could be impacted by the blue light emitted by these devices. These results are published in Frontiers in Aging.
“Excessive exposure to blue light from everyday devices, such as TVs, laptops, and phones, may have detrimental effects on a wide range of cells in our body, from skin and fat cells, to sensory neurons,” said Dr. Jadwiga Giebultowicz, a professor at the Department of Integrative Biology at Oregon State University and senior author of this study. “We are the first to show that the levels of specific metabolites—chemicals that are essential for cells to function correctly—are altered in fruit flies exposed to blue light.”
“Our study suggests that avoidance of excessive blue light exposure may be a good anti-aging strategy,” advised Giebultowicz.
The thermal radiation emitted by the human body is predominantly in the long-wave infrared region (8–14 μm), which is characterized by low photon energy and low power intensity.
Recently, a research team led by Associate Prof. Lu Xiaowei, Prof. Jiang Peng and Prof. Bao Xinhe from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) designed a highly sensitive long-wave infrared detector that enables low-power non-contact human-machine interaction.
This study was published in Advanced Materials on July 11.
Alloy that exceeds the strength and ductility of other state-of-the-art additively manufactured materials. This breakthrough could lead to higher-performance components for applications in aerospace, medicine, energy, and transportation. The work was done by researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Georgia Institute of Technology. It was led by Wen Chen, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UMass, and Ting Zhu, professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, will be published today (August 3, 2022) in the journal Nature.
High entropy alloys (HEAs) have become increasingly popular as a new paradigm in materials science over the past 15 years. They are comprised of five or more elements in near-equal proportions and offer the ability to create a near-infinite number of unique combinations for alloy design. Traditional alloys, such as brass, stainless steel, carbon steel, and bronze, contain a primary element combined with one or more trace elements.
T. dohrnii is the only species that is biologically immortal, and now scientists have peered into its DNA to find out what lets it live forever.
Scientists say medication also used after undergoing an organ transplant is capable of extending life with only brief use
COLOGNE, Germany — A drug that patients normally take during cancer therapy may have the power to increase the human lifespan, a new study reveals. Researchers in Germany say rapamycin can cause side-effects when patients take it as a lifelong anti-aging treatment. However, their new report finds even brief usage can have a dramatic impact on longevity while cutting down on side-effects.