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For biologists, seeing is believing. But sometimes biologists have a hard time seeing. One particularly vexing challenge is seeing all the molecules in an intact tissue sample, down to the level of single cells, simultaneously. Detecting the location of hundreds or thousands of biomolecules—from lipids to metabolites to proteins—in their native environment allows researchers to better understand their functions and interactions. Unfortunately, scientists don’t have great tools to accomplish this task.

Now a multi-institutional research team has developed a tissue expansion method that enables scientists to use imaging to simultaneously detect hundreds of molecules at the single cell level in their native locations. Their paper is published in the journal Nature Methods.

Imaging methods, including most types of microscopy, provide a view of molecules inside cells. But they can track only a select handful of molecules at one time, and they can’t detect all types of biomolecules, including some lipids. Other methods, like regular mass spectrometry, can detect hundreds of molecules but don’t work on intact samples, so researchers can’t see how the biomolecules are oriented.

UPNA researchers created a 3D mid-air display allowing natural hand interaction with virtual objects using an elastic diffuser and high-speed projections. Dr. Elodie Bouzbib from the Public University of Navarra (UPNA), together with Iosune Sarasate, Unai Fernández, Manuel López-Amo, Iván Fernánd

Researchers at Purdue University have developed an “ultra-white” paint that reflects 98 per cent of sunlight and deflects infrared heat, allowing buildings to cool below the surrounding air temperature.

The paint, which the university describes as the “whitest paint on record”, owes its cooling power to barium sulphate – a pigment derived from the mineral barite – and reflects up to 98.1% of sunlight.

Unlike the titanium dioxide used in traditional white paints, which absorbs UV light, the barium sulphate is also capable of deflecting infrared heat away from the surface to which it is applied.

Pure experiential properties are properties of experiencing subjects that are purely phenomenally constituted: to have such properties is exhausted by the way it is like to have them. A thinker who is acquainted with such properties by having them is in a position to form phenomenal concepts of such properties, concepts in terms of the way it is like to have them.
Certain phenomenal concepts of experiential properties are nature-revealing: the thinker having such concepts has full access to what it is to have the property the concept is used to attribute. This is the thesis of phenomenal essentialism, the starting point of an argument for dualism about experiential properties which will be developed in the talk. According to the dualist thesis at issue to have an experiential property does not consist in the fulfillment of any physical condition.

Full Title: The argument from understanding for property dualism about experiential properties.