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When one mentions the topic of “head transplantation” (or a related topic – the “brain transplant”), for most people, it remains a topic purely in the context and sphere of science fiction.

Yet most people are unaware of the following history:

In 1908, Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon who had developed surgical methods to connect blood vessels in the context of organ transplantation, collaborated with the American Charles Claude Guthrie perform the first head grafts between dogs.

In 1954, Vladimir Demikhov, a Soviet surgeon who conducted important work to improve coronary bypass surgery, performed experiments in which he grafted a dog’s head and upper body, onto another dog; the effort was focused on how to provide blood supply to the donor head and upper body.

Continue reading “Dr. Ren Xiaoping — Pushing Surgical Boundaries — Head Transplantation (Cephalosomatic Anastomosis)” | >

The idea that mass extinctions allow many new types of species to evolve is a central concept in evolution, but a new study using artificial intelligence to examine the fossil record finds this is rarely true, and there must be another explanation.

Charles Darwin’s landmark opus, On the Origin of the Species, ends with a beautiful summary of his theory of evolution, “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

In fact, scientists now know that most species that have ever existed are extinct. This extinction of species has on the whole been roughly balanced by the origination of new ones over Earth’s history, with a few major temporary imbalances scientists call mass extinction events. Scientists have long believed that mass extinctions create productive periods of species evolution, or “radiations,” a model called “creative destruction.” A new study led by scientists affiliated with the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology used machine learning to examine the co-occurrence of fossil species and found that radiations and extinctions are rarely connected, and thus mass extinctions likely rarely cause radiations of a comparable scale.

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Hey it’s Han from WrySci HX with Part 2 of a four part series on sleep and brain computer interfaces such as Neuralink. We’ll look at what we know about sleep and how BCIs might be able to help us in the future, 2021 and beyond. This isn’t a topic I’ve seen much about so I decided to see what was up. This second part is on sleep regulation (aka how we fall asleep, and hopefully how we can fall asleep more easily in the future) and sleeping with only certain parts of the brain, while the next ones will cover sleep and dream theories. More below ↓↓↓

Watch Part 1 here! https://youtu.be/EmtlanXdGf4

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Continue reading “How Can We Fall Asleep More Easily? Neuralink 2021 And Beyond [Part 2]” | >

If we’re going to get better at powering the planet with renewable energy, we need to get better at finding ways of efficiently storing that energy until it’s needed – and scientists have identified a particular material that could give us exactly that.

The material is known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), in which carbon-based molecules form structures by linking metal ions. Crucially, MOFs are porous, so they can form composite materials with other small molecules.

That’s what the team did here, adding molecules of the light-absorbing compound azobenzene. The finished composite material was able to store energy from ultraviolet light for at least four months at room temperature before releasing it again – a big improvement over the days or weeks that most light-responsive materials can manage.

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