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Dec 13, 2021

Fecal Transplant Discovery Could Improve Care for Life-Threatening Infections

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, materials

Findings suggest way to help patients heal from dangerous C. difficile.

New research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine sheds light on why a fecal transplant can benefit patients with dangerous recurrent C. difficile infections – and suggests a way to improve patient outcomes.

C. difficile infection causes life-threatening diarrhea, and it often takes hold in patients in hospitals and nursing homes as a result of long-term antibiotic use. Doctors have known that fecal transplants – literally transplanting fecal material from a healthy person into the sick – can improve C. difficile outcomes, but they haven’t fully understood why. The new UVA research offers important answers.

Dec 13, 2021

New metacognition research provides insight into how the brain looks at itself

Posted by in category: neuroscience

The Neuro-Network.

𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐨𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟

𝙄𝙣 1,884, 𝙬𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙚 𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙢𝙥𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙤 𝙙𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙡𝙞𝙢𝙞𝙩𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙝𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙘𝙚𝙥𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣, 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙡𝙚𝙨 𝙋𝙞𝙚𝙧𝙘… See more.

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Dec 13, 2021

Stiff Competition: Lab-Made Hexagonal Diamonds Stiffer Than Natural Cubic Diamonds

Posted by in categories: materials, physics

Nature’s strongest material now has some stiff competition. For the first time, researchers have hard evidence that human-made hexagonal diamonds are stiffer than the common cubic diamonds found in nature and often used in jewelry.

Named for their six-sided crystal structure, hexagonal diamonds have been found at some meteorite impact sites, and others have been made briefly in labs, but these were either too small or had too short of an existence to be measured.

Now scientists at Washington State University’s Institute for Shock Physics created hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness using sound waves. Their findings are detailed in a recent paper in Physical Review B.

Dec 13, 2021

Dr. Harold White — Advancing Human Exploration Beyond Our Solar System — Limitless Space Institute

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space travel

Advancing Human Exploration Beyond Our Solar System — Dr. Harold “Sonny” White, Limitless Space Institute


Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White, is Director, Advanced Research & Development, at the Limitless Space Institute (LSI — https://www.limitlessspace.org/), in Houston, Texas.

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Dec 13, 2021

A Gene-Tweaked Jellyfish Offers a Glimpse at Other Minds

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

This research can also offer a glimpse at how other forms of thinking might be organized. “It lets us get at this issue of what are the options for a nervous system or behavior,” Weissbourd says. It’s hard to put yourself into the mind of a jellyfish—their life cycle of polyps and spores is utterly alien, their weird array of sensory organs have no analogues to our own. Clytia have specialized balance organs called statocysts; other species of jellyfish have sensors called rhopalia that detect light or chemical changes in the surrounding water.

Researchers have observed some things that could be thought of as akin to our emotional states; for example, Clytia display a unique set of behaviors when spawning, and they perform their feeding action more quickly when they’re hungry. “But they might have a totally different set of nervous system states,” Weissbourd says.

These gene-tweaked jellies are an exciting new platform for research, says Sprecher. Future experiments will improve our understanding of modular nervous systems, not only in jellyfish but in more complex species too. These are ancient creatures, but we know so little about how they see the world, or if it even makes sense to think of them as “seeing” in the way that mammals do. Literally peering inside them could help provide the answers.

Dec 13, 2021

Dr. David Berson: Your Brain’s Logic & Function

Posted by in categories: biological, education, neuroscience

Listen: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

In this episode, Dr. Huberman is joined by Dr. David Berson, Professor and Chairman of Neuroscience at Brown University. Dr. Berson discovered the neurons in your eye that set your biological rhythms for sleep, wakefulness, mood and appetite. He is also a world-renowned teacher of basic and advanced neuroscience, having taught thousands of university lectures on this topic. Many of his students have become world-leading neuroscientists and teachers themselves.

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Dec 13, 2021

Challenging Einstein’s Greatest Theory in 16-Year Experiment — Theory of General Relativity Tested With Extreme Stars

Posted by in categories: physics, space

Researchers at the University of East Anglia and the University of Manchester have helped conduct a 16-year long experiment to challenge Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

The international team looked to the stars — a pair of extreme stars called pulsars to be precise – through seven radio telescopes across the globe.

And they used them to challenge Einstein’s most famous theory with some of the most rigorous tests yet.

Dec 13, 2021

How our views on black holes have changed since Einstein

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

They’ve become an essential ingredient of astrophysics.


Black holes helped to explain new astronomical discoveries, becoming essential ingredients of astrophysics. Science regarded black holes as abstractions until the 1960s. The recent experimental discovery of gravitational waves has changed our understanding of what black holes are.

In 2016, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration detected gravitational waves generated by two merging black holes, opening a new era of astronomy celebrated by the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics.

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Dec 13, 2021

AMA Live Stream #1

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension

Yesterday’s longevity AMA: michael lustgarten, phd.


Questionsabout yesterday’s video, and more…AMA!

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Dec 13, 2021

Hubble Image Captures a Stunning Spiral Galaxy in Aquila

Posted by in category: cosmology

This week’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures the glorious spiral galaxy UGC 11,537, seen at an angle that shows off both its long spiral arms and the bright clump of stars at its center. It is located 230 million light-years away in the constellation of Aquila (Latin for “eagle”).

As well as being pleasing to look at, this image was collected to further scientific knowledge about the enormous black holes at the galaxy’s heart. “This image came from a set of observations designed to help astronomers weigh supermassive black holes in the centers of distant galaxies,” Hubble scientists wrote. “Hubble’s sharp-eyed observations along with data from ground-based telescopes allowed astronomers to make detailed models of the mass and motions of stars in these galaxies, which in turn helps constrain the mass of supermassive black holes.”

Hubble is back up and running this week, with all four of its currently active instruments operational and collecting science data once again. The telescope had been automatically placed into safe mode following a synchronization error in late October, but the error seems to have been a one-off. In the weeks since the error occurred, the Hubble team turned on first one of the older inactive instruments, then each of the currently active instruments one by one.