A Conversation between Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Àlex Gómez-Marín.
The conversation will explore “a landscape of consciousness”, toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications.
In 2024, Àlex will curate and host conversations to address The Future Mind, seeking to gain clarity and insight into important contemporary matters that require both urgent action as well as deep reflection.
Recorded January 31, 2024
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle—specifically, a diet rich in fiber but light on red/processed meat, regular exercise, not smoking, and sticking to a normal weight—is linked to a significantly lower risk of diverticulitis, finds a large long-term study, published online in the journal Gut.
What’s more, these five components seem to offset the effects of inherited genes, the findings indicate.
Diverticulitis occurs when “pouches” develop along the gut and become inflamed or infected in the wall of the large intestine (colon), explain the researchers. It’s a common cause of hospital admissions and a major reason for emergency colon surgery, they add.
As brain tumors grow, they must do one of two things: push against the brain or use finger-like extensions to invade and destroy surrounding tissue.
Previous research found that tumors that push—or put mechanical force on the brain—cause more neurological dysfunction than tumors that destroy tissue. But what else can these different tactics of tumor growth tell us?
Now, the same team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame, Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston University has developed a technique for measuring a brain tumor’s mechanical force and a new model to estimate how much brain tissue a patient has lost. Published in Clinical Cancer Research, the study explains how these measurements may help inform patient care and be adopted into surgeons’ daily workflow.
Identifying the formation period of planetary systems, such as our solar system, could be the beginning of the journey to discover the origin of life. The key to this is the unique substructures found in protoplanetary disks—the sites of planet formation.
A protoplanetary disk is composed of low-temperature molecular gas and dust, surrounding a protostar. If a planet exists in the disk, its gravity will gather or eject materials within the disk, forming characteristic substructures such as rings or spirals. In other words, various disk substructures can be interpreted as “messages” from the forming planets. To study these substructures in detail, high-resolution radio observations with ALMA are required.
Numerous ALMA observations of protoplanetary disks (or circumstellar disks) have been conducted so far. In particular, two ALMA large programs, DSHARP and eDisk, have revealed the detailed distribution of dust in protoplanetary disks through high-resolution observations.
As detailed in a new study in Nature Communications, He’s lab brings noninvasive EEG-based BCI one step closer to everyday use by demonstrating real-time brain decoding of individual finger movement intentions and control of a dexterous robotic hand at the finger level.
“Improving hand function is a top priority for both impaired and able-bodied individuals, as even small gains can meaningfully enhance ability and quality of life,” explained Bin He, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “However, real-time decoding of dexterous individual finger movements using noninvasive brain signals has remained an elusive goal, largely due to the limited spatial resolution of EEG.”
Celestial objects known as dark dwarfs may be hiding at the center of our galaxy and could offer key clues to uncover the nature of one of the most mysterious and fundamental phenomena in contemporary cosmology: dark matter.
A paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics by a team of researchers based in the UK and Hawaii describes these objects for the first time and proposes how to verify their existence using current observational tools such as the James Webb Space Telescope. The paper is titled “Dark Dwarfs: Dark Matter-Powered Sub-Stellar Objects Awaiting Discovery at the Galactic Center.”
The Anglo-U.S. team behind the study named them dark dwarfs. Not because they are dark bodies—on the contrary—but because of their special link with dark matter, one of the most central topics in current cosmology and astrophysics research.