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Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V.

ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V.

In the festival’s final day, speakers turn to the cosmos and our place within it.

This is the latest Lifeboat Foundation update on our worldwide pandemic.

It is also at https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeboatfoundation/permalink/10158811699298455.

Key summary of this report:

Continue reading “Coronavirus Update III” »

Scientists in Australia think hardy agave plants could be the next big biofuel source. In addition, the bioethanol produced from the plants could help fill unprecedented global demand for hand sanitizer.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tPx1yqvJgf4

Don’t despair: In just 45 seconds, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams demonstrates how to make your own cloth facemask.

It’s lo-tech. You can use a T-shirt, hand towel, or bandana. The only other thing you need is rubber bands.

Continue reading “CDC shows you how to make a face mask in 45 seconds” »

Scientists have found an ancient submarine forest of bald cypress trees entombed in Mobile Bay off the coast of Alabama.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the forest flourished on the banks of a prehistoric river near the Gulf of Mexico nearly 60,000 years ago. When the trees died, their massive trunks became entombed in peat and sediment. Eventually, sea levels rose, the coastline receded, and the remains of these ancient trees were buried by the sea. The forest was preserved, undisturbed for millennia, until recent intensifying storms along the coast began to expose it.

Earlier this week, NOAA shared a video of the incredible site (below), showing it teeming with schools of fish.

The ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic could get a boost if Canadians paid more attention to the relative humidity levels in public and private spaces, according to a growing body of international research.

Doctors, scientists and engineers agree that sufficient indoor air moisture levels can have a powerful but little-understood effect on the transmission of airborne diseases. While the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is currently treated as one that’s transmitted through droplet infection rather than the air, research on exactly how it passes between humans is still underway.

Most buildings, however, fall short of the recommended threshold of 40 to 60 per cent relative humidity, particularly in countries with colder, dryer climates such as Canada.

The implications of split-brain research have been widely debated. Scientists and philosophers have long argued over what is known as the mind-body quandary, the relationship between our mind and the physical brain. Some scientists saw the work of Sperry and others as supporting the notion that the brain operates almost entirely mechanically, and that consciousness, reasoning and free will have almost no effect. But Sperry strongly felt otherwise…

What this meant to Sperry was that free will, and responsibility, were no illusion. “It is possible to see today,” he believed, “an objective, explanatory model of brain function that neither contradicts nor degrades but rather affirms age-old humanist values, ideals, and meaning in human endeavor.”

It’s fair to say that the true significance of the split-brain experiments goes far beyond the significance of the lateralization of the brain; it also points to the immaterial nature of the mind.

The human cerebral cortex is important for cognition, and it is of interest to see how genetic variants affect its structure. Grasby et al. combined genetic data with brain magnetic resonance imaging from more than 50,000 people to generate a genome-wide analysis of how human genetic variation influences human cortical surface area and thickness. From this analysis, they identified variants associated with cortical structure, some of which affect signaling and gene expression. They observed overlap between genetic loci affecting cortical structure, brain development, and neuropsychiatric disease, and the correlation between these phenotypes is of interest for further study.

Science, this issue p. eaay6690.