Diagram of Neuron and Microtubules Reference video:
I would like to dedicate this video on Hodgkin and Huxley model of Neurons. That basically explains Neurons as electric circuits with the organization and movement of positive and negative charge. The positive and negative is in the form of ion atoms. The neuron membrane acts as a boundary separating charge with ionic gates embedded in the cell membrane forming the potential for the build-up and movement of ion charge. This process can form signals along the neurons with the potential difference across the cell membrane forming what is called an action potential. The big question is how can this process of electrical activity form consciousness? To answer this question we have to look deeper into the process. When we do this, we find that the movement or action of charged particles like ions emit photon ∆E=hf energy.
Therefore, this whole process can be based on an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
Our everyday electronic devices, such as living room lights, washing machines, and televisions, operate thanks to electrical currents. Similarly, the functioning of computers is based on the manipulation of information by small charge carriers known as electrons. Spintronics, on the other hand, introduces a unique approach to this process.
Instead of the charge of electrons, the spintronic approach is to exploit their magnetic moment, in other words, their spin, to store and process information – aiming to make the computers of the future more compact, fast, and sustainable. One way of processing information based on this approach is to use the magnetic vortices called skyrmions or, alternatively, their still little understood and rarer cousins called ‘merons’. Both are collective topological structures formed of numerous individual spins. Merons have to date only been observed in natural antiferromagnets, where they are difficult to both analyze and manipulate.
Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein calculated the entropy of a black hole in the 1970s, but it took physicists until now to figure out the quantum effects that make the formula work.
Abstract: By harnessing the power of composite polymer particles adorned with gold nanoparticles, a group of researchers have delivered a more accurate means of testing for infectious diseases.
Details of their research was published in the journal Langmuir.
The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the need for fast and reliable infectious disease testing in large numbers. Most testing done today involves antigen-antibody reactions. Fluorescence, absorptions, or color particle probes are attached to antibodies. When the antibodies stick to the virus, these probes visualize the virus’s presence. In particular, the use of color nanoparticles is renowned for its excellent visuality, along with its simplicity to implement, with little scientific equipment needed to perform lateral flow tests.
In 2022, the Physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the universe works.
Many look at those experiments and conclude that they challenge “locality”—the intuition that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact. And indeed, a mysterious connection between distant particles would be one way to explain these experimental results.
Others instead think the experiments challenge “realism”—the intuition that there’s an objective state of affairs underlying our experience. After all, the experiments are only difficult to explain if our measurements are thought to correspond to something real. Either way, many physicists agree about what’s been called “the death by experiment” of local realism.
Summary: Researchers made a groundbreaking discovery about the maturation process of adult-born neurons in the brain, highlighting the critical role of mitochondrial fusion in these cells. Their study shows that as neurons develop, their mitochondria undergo dynamic changes that are crucial for the neurons’ ability to form and refine connections, supporting synaptic plasticity in the adult hippocampus.
This insight, which correlates altered neurogenesis with neurological disorders, opens new avenues for understanding and potentially treating conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s by targeting mitochondrial dynamics to enhance brain repair and cognitive functions.
But when it comes to the origin of the Universe, we don’t know what forces are at play. We actually can’t know, since to know such force (or better, such fields and their interactions) would necessitate knowledge of the initial state of the Universe. And how could we possibly glean information from such a state in some uncontroversial way? In more prosaic terms, it would mean that we could know what the Universe was like as it came into existence. This would require a god’s eye view of the initial state of the Universe, a kind of objective separation between us and the proto-Universe that is about to become the Universe we live in. It would mean we had a complete knowledge of all the physical forces in the Universe, a final theory of everything. But how could we ever know if what we call the theory of everything is a complete description of all that exists? We couldn’t, as this would assume we know all of physical reality, which is an impossibility. There could always be another force of nature, lurking in the shadows of our ignorance.
At the origin of the Universe, the very notion of cause and objectivity get entangled into a single unknowable, since we can’t possibly know the initial state of the Universe. We can, of course, construct models and test them against what we can measure of the Universe. But concordance is not a criterion for certainty. Different models may lead to the same concordance — the Universe we see — but we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between them since they come from an unknowable initial state. The first cause — the cause that must be uncaused and that unleashed all other causes — lies beyond the reach of scientific methodology as we know it. This doesn’t mean that we must invoke supernatural causes to fill the gap of our ignorance. A supernatural cause doesn’t explain in the way that scientific theories do; supernatural divine intervention is based on faith and not on data. It’s a personal choice, not a scientific one. It only helps those who believe.
Still, through a sequence of spectacular scientific discoveries, we have pieced together a cosmic history of exquisite detail and complexity. There are still many open gaps in our knowledge, and we shouldn’t expect otherwise. The next decades will see us making great progress in understanding many of the open cosmological questions of our time, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and whether gravitational waves can tell us more about primordial inflation. But the problem of the first cause will remain open, as it doesn’t fit with the way we do science. This fact must, as Einstein wisely remarked, “fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.” Not all questions need to be answered to be meaningful.
Worrying can lead to high anxiety, which can trigger physical illness. Learn more from WebMD about how excessive worrying can affect your health — and how to manage it.
