Estebonrober
Deity
- Joined
- Jan 9, 2017
- Messages
- 6,062
./shrug I'll have to work on my Trumpian wordiness.
Newsworthy Science
- Thread starter Birdjaguar
- Start date
./shrug I'll have to work on my Trumpian wordiness.
We have learned manatee
Scientific American | 5 min listen (or 3 min read) Paper
Researchers listened to seven years of manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) chat to learn how the gentle, solitary grazers communicate. Almost all of the creatures’ vocalizations fall into three categories: a high squeak used between mother and calf, a lower squeak that indicated stress and a squeal recorded during “cavorting” and “frisky behaviour”.
Scientific American | 5 min listen (or 3 min read) Paper
Spoiler Spectrograph of manatee :
Berzerker
Deity
The earliest documented case was March 1918 in Kansas, United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it the second deadliest pandemic in human history.
The pandemic broke out near the end of World War I, when wartime censors suppressed bad news in the belligerent countries to maintain morale, but newspapers freely reported the outbreak in neutral Spain, creating a false impression of Spain as the epicenter and leading to the "Spanish flu" misnomer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#:~:text=The earliest documented case was,infected in four successive waves.
They think an infected cook was serving food at Ft Riley, but how did he get sick? Maybe he got it from handling food.
The pandemic broke out near the end of World War I, when wartime censors suppressed bad news in the belligerent countries to maintain morale, but newspapers freely reported the outbreak in neutral Spain, creating a false impression of Spain as the epicenter and leading to the "Spanish flu" misnomer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#:~:text=The earliest documented case was,infected in four successive waves.
They think an infected cook was serving food at Ft Riley, but how did he get sick? Maybe he got it from handling food.
Ferocitus
Deity
If I didn't know any better, I'd swear it was a Domino's delivery guy with a pineapple pizza.
Berzerker
Deity
I luv pineapple on pizza... I do.
But I dont even like tomato paste, I like garlic sauce
But I dont even like tomato paste, I like garlic sauce
Ferocitus
Deity
Mitochondria Double as Tiny Lenses in the Eye
A study published last month in Science Advances found that inside mammalian eyes, mitochondria,
the organelles that power cells, may serve a second role as microscopic lenses, helping to focus
light on the photoreceptor pigments that convert the light into neural signals for the brain to
interpret.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mitochondria-double-as-tiny-lenses-in-the-eye-20220405/
A study published last month in Science Advances found that inside mammalian eyes, mitochondria,
the organelles that power cells, may serve a second role as microscopic lenses, helping to focus
light on the photoreceptor pigments that convert the light into neural signals for the brain to
interpret.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mitochondria-double-as-tiny-lenses-in-the-eye-20220405/
How our brains change in size over age (link to writeup, original paper link broken)
Working with colleagues, Seidlitz has amassed more than 120,000 brain scans — the largest collection of its kind — to create the first comprehensive growth charts for brain development. The charts show visually how human brains expand quickly early in life and then shrink slowly with age. The sheer magnitude of the study, published in Nature on 6 April, has stunned neuroscientists, who have long had to contend with reproducibility issues in their research, in part because of small sample sizes. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is expensive, meaning that scientists are often limited in the number of participants they can enrol in experiments.
The study comes on the heels of a bombshell paper published in Nature on 16 March2 showing that most brain-imaging experiments contain too few scans to reliably detect links between brain function and behaviour, meaning that their conclusions might be incorrect. Given this finding, Laird expects the field to move towards adopting a framework similar to the one used by Seidlitz and Bethlehem, to increase statistical power.
Despite the size of the data set, Seidlitz, Bethlehem and their colleagues acknowledge that their study suffers from a problem endemic to neuroimaging studies — a remarkable lack of diversity. The brain scans they collected come mainly from North America and Europe, and disproportionately reflect populations that are white, university-aged, urban and affluent. This limits the generalizability of the findings, says Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. The study includes only three data sets from South America and one from Africa — accounting for around 1% of all the brain scans used in the study.
Billions of people worldwide lack access to MRI machines, making diverse brain-imaging data difficult to come by, Laird says. But the authors haven’t stopped trying. They have launched a website where they intend to update their growth charts in real time as they receive more brain scans.
The study comes on the heels of a bombshell paper published in Nature on 16 March2 showing that most brain-imaging experiments contain too few scans to reliably detect links between brain function and behaviour, meaning that their conclusions might be incorrect. Given this finding, Laird expects the field to move towards adopting a framework similar to the one used by Seidlitz and Bethlehem, to increase statistical power.
Despite the size of the data set, Seidlitz, Bethlehem and their colleagues acknowledge that their study suffers from a problem endemic to neuroimaging studies — a remarkable lack of diversity. The brain scans they collected come mainly from North America and Europe, and disproportionately reflect populations that are white, university-aged, urban and affluent. This limits the generalizability of the findings, says Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. The study includes only three data sets from South America and one from Africa — accounting for around 1% of all the brain scans used in the study.
Billions of people worldwide lack access to MRI machines, making diverse brain-imaging data difficult to come by, Laird says. But the authors haven’t stopped trying. They have launched a website where they intend to update their growth charts in real time as they receive more brain scans.
The W boson is 0.09% heavier than it should be, and physicists are panicking
The Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois
Writeup Paper
From its resting place outside Chicago, Illinois, a long-defunct experiment is threatening to throw the field of elementary particles off balance. Physicists have toiled for ten years to squeeze a crucial new measurement out of the experiment’s old data, and the results are now in. The team has found that the W boson — a fundamental particle that carries the weak nuclear force — is significantly heavier than theory predicts.
Although the difference between the theoretical prediction and experimental value is only 0.09%, it is significantly larger than the result’s error margins, which are less than 0.01%. The finding also disagrees with some other measurements of the mass. The collaboration that ran the latest experiment, called CDF at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), reported the findings in Science on 7 April.
The measurement “is extremely exciting and a truly monumental result in our field”, says Florencia Canelli, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. If it is confirmed by other experiments, it could be the first major breach in the standard model of particle physics, a theory that has been spectacularly successful since it was introduced in the 1970s. The standard model is known to be incomplete, however, and any hint of its failing could point the way to its replacement, and to the existence of new elementary particles. “We believe there is a strong clue in this particular measurement about what nature might have in store for us,” says Ashutosh Kotwal, an experimental particle physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the CDF study.
Some physicists strike a note of caution. Generating a W boson mass measurement from experimental data is famously complex. Although the work is impressive, “I would be cautious to interpret the significant difference to the standard model as a sign of new physics,” says Matthias Schott, a physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, who works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. Physicists should prioritize working out why the value differs from the other recent results, he says.
Although the difference between the theoretical prediction and experimental value is only 0.09%, it is significantly larger than the result’s error margins, which are less than 0.01%. The finding also disagrees with some other measurements of the mass. The collaboration that ran the latest experiment, called CDF at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), reported the findings in Science on 7 April.
The measurement “is extremely exciting and a truly monumental result in our field”, says Florencia Canelli, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. If it is confirmed by other experiments, it could be the first major breach in the standard model of particle physics, a theory that has been spectacularly successful since it was introduced in the 1970s. The standard model is known to be incomplete, however, and any hint of its failing could point the way to its replacement, and to the existence of new elementary particles. “We believe there is a strong clue in this particular measurement about what nature might have in store for us,” says Ashutosh Kotwal, an experimental particle physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the CDF study.
Some physicists strike a note of caution. Generating a W boson mass measurement from experimental data is famously complex. Although the work is impressive, “I would be cautious to interpret the significant difference to the standard model as a sign of new physics,” says Matthias Schott, a physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, who works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. Physicists should prioritize working out why the value differs from the other recent results, he says.
The Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois
Spoiler Legend :
Writeup Paper
Last edited:
You really can have younger skin
This is not a consumer product, or anywhere near. However it looks really promising to me, turning the cellular clock back in multiple ways including the transcriptome age and epigenetic age that I get the impression appear to be the real drivers of aging.
This is not a consumer product, or anywhere near. However it looks really promising to me, turning the cellular clock back in multiple ways including the transcriptome age and epigenetic age that I get the impression appear to be the real drivers of aging.
Ageing is the gradual decline in organismal fitness that occurs over time leading to tissue dysfunction and disease. At the cellular level, ageing is associated with reduced function, altered gene expression and a perturbed epigenome.
Somatic cell reprogramming, the process of converting somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), can reverse these age-associated changes. However, during iPSC reprogramming, somatic cell identity is lost, and can be difficult to reacquire as re-differentiated iPSCs often resemble foetal rather than mature adult cells. Recent work has demonstrated that the epigenome is already rejuvenated by the maturation phase of reprogramming, which suggests full iPSC reprogramming is not required to reverse ageing of somatic cells.
Here we have developed the first 'maturation phase transient reprogramming' (MPTR) method, where reprogramming factors are expressed until this rejuvenation point followed by withdrawal of their induction. Using dermal fibroblasts from middle age donors, we found that cells temporarily lose and then reacquire their fibroblast identity during MPTR, possibly as a result of epigenetic memory at enhancers and/or persistent expression of some fibroblast genes.
Excitingly, our method substantially rejuvenated multiple cellular attributes including the transcriptome, which was rejuvenated by around 30 years as measured by a novel transcriptome clock.
The epigenome, including H3K9me3 histone methylation levels and the DNA methylation ageing clock, was rejuvenated to a similar extent. The magnitude of rejuvenation instigated by MTPR appears substantially greater than that achieved in previous transient reprogramming protocols. In addition, MPTR fibroblasts produced youthful levels of collagen proteins, and showed partial functional rejuvenation of their migration speed.
Finally, our work suggests that more extensive reprogramming does not necessarily result in greater rejuvenation but instead that optimal time windows exist for rejuvenating the transcriptome and the epigenome. Overall, we demonstrate that it is possible to separate rejuvenation from complete pluripotency reprogramming, which should facilitate the discovery of novel anti-ageing genes and therapies.
Somatic cell reprogramming, the process of converting somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), can reverse these age-associated changes. However, during iPSC reprogramming, somatic cell identity is lost, and can be difficult to reacquire as re-differentiated iPSCs often resemble foetal rather than mature adult cells. Recent work has demonstrated that the epigenome is already rejuvenated by the maturation phase of reprogramming, which suggests full iPSC reprogramming is not required to reverse ageing of somatic cells.
Here we have developed the first 'maturation phase transient reprogramming' (MPTR) method, where reprogramming factors are expressed until this rejuvenation point followed by withdrawal of their induction. Using dermal fibroblasts from middle age donors, we found that cells temporarily lose and then reacquire their fibroblast identity during MPTR, possibly as a result of epigenetic memory at enhancers and/or persistent expression of some fibroblast genes.
Excitingly, our method substantially rejuvenated multiple cellular attributes including the transcriptome, which was rejuvenated by around 30 years as measured by a novel transcriptome clock.
The epigenome, including H3K9me3 histone methylation levels and the DNA methylation ageing clock, was rejuvenated to a similar extent. The magnitude of rejuvenation instigated by MTPR appears substantially greater than that achieved in previous transient reprogramming protocols. In addition, MPTR fibroblasts produced youthful levels of collagen proteins, and showed partial functional rejuvenation of their migration speed.
Finally, our work suggests that more extensive reprogramming does not necessarily result in greater rejuvenation but instead that optimal time windows exist for rejuvenating the transcriptome and the epigenome. Overall, we demonstrate that it is possible to separate rejuvenation from complete pluripotency reprogramming, which should facilitate the discovery of novel anti-ageing genes and therapies.
.
Narz
keeping it real
Someone's gonna make trillions of dollars if they can bring that into a consumer product
Literally trillions if it works on all tissues. I think the reason they did it from skin is because it is an easy source of fibroblasts, rather than it will work on the skin particularly.
Every woman over 40 will want three!
EgonSpengler
Deity
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2014
- Messages
- 12,260
Berzerker
Deity
https://phys.org/news/2016-11-lab-moon-formation.html
Showing that water was present during formation of the moon adds credence to arguments by other space scientists who have put forth theories suggesting that the Earth had water in its mix of ingredients during its formation as well—because most agree that the moon was formed during nearly the same time frame as the Earth. And if that is the case, then theories about water being brought to Earth by comets are wrong.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ... Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep
Showing that water was present during formation of the moon adds credence to arguments by other space scientists who have put forth theories suggesting that the Earth had water in its mix of ingredients during its formation as well—because most agree that the moon was formed during nearly the same time frame as the Earth. And if that is the case, then theories about water being brought to Earth by comets are wrong.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ... Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep
MIND & MATTER
ALISON GOPNIK
A New Way To Measure Creativity
CREATIVITY IS crucial— at the heart of human endeavors ranging from art to entrepreneurship. It’s also notoriously hard to study. Usually in psychological tests we see whether people produce a particular predetermined response to a particular question. The essence of creativity, however, is to spontaneously make something new, something no one could predict beforehand. The few measures of creativity we have are more than 50 years old, and they are hard to score and often unreliable.
In 2017, a group of computational biologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, led by Yuval Hart, invented a new technique to measure creativity: the “creative foraging game.” Subjects see a grid of squares on a computer screen and are asked to move them around to make shapes they consider “interesting and beautiful.” When they find something they like, they save it to a gallery. There are more than 35,000 possible shapes, too many for a human researcher to track, but a computer can automatically record the moves and shapes that people make and can analyze them objectively.
The biologists were inspired by the sophisticated way that animals forage for food in the wild. Birds, for example, have to decide when to eat the cherries on one particular tree and when to fly off to explore another tree that might have more and better fruit. There are mathematical formulas that show how efficient the birds are in getting the largest amount of the best fruit. The researchers wondered, what if you were searching for interesting new shapes instead of cherries?
Some remarkably systematic patterns emerged. There were two phases in the creative process—exploring and exploiting. People would begin by exploring, doodling with the squares and slowly wobbling around from one shape to another. When they hit on a particular shape they liked, they quickly and efficiently made a bunch of similar shapes—the exploit phase. After a bit, they would drain those possibilities and switch back to explore mode, like the birds flitting off to check out a new tree. They would go back to slowly doodling until a new category of shapes emerged. Some people went through the phases more quickly, rapidly switching back and forth between exploring and exploiting, but everyone showed the same pattern.
The results helped the researchers describe a common intuition about the creative process more precisely. Successful creativity alternates between wildly generating lots of crazy possibilities and narrowing in on just the useful ones, as in the old saying that you should “write drunk and edit sober.” The math of foraging lets you describe just how this works.
The Weizmann group used the shape game to explore other aspects of creativity. In one study, they demonstrated a placebo effect. People sniffed a cinnamon-y scent, and the researchers told
half of them before playing the game that the scent would make them more creative. The computer program kept track of how frequently similar shapes were made by multiple participants. The group who believed they would be more creative made significantly more original shapes that were repeated less frequently. (This may help explain why microdosing psychedelics has become so popular in Silicon Valley. The doses may be too small to have much real effect, but they are a great creativity placebo).
My own lab collaborated with Dr. Hart on a study looking at how children play the game. They spent more time than adults exploring and produced more original shapes, but were less efficient exploiters. So children were better at the crazy part of creativity, even if they weren’t as good at refining the possibilities. Like the foraging birds, creators need to do both.
ALISON GOPNIK
A New Way To Measure Creativity
CREATIVITY IS crucial— at the heart of human endeavors ranging from art to entrepreneurship. It’s also notoriously hard to study. Usually in psychological tests we see whether people produce a particular predetermined response to a particular question. The essence of creativity, however, is to spontaneously make something new, something no one could predict beforehand. The few measures of creativity we have are more than 50 years old, and they are hard to score and often unreliable.
In 2017, a group of computational biologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, led by Yuval Hart, invented a new technique to measure creativity: the “creative foraging game.” Subjects see a grid of squares on a computer screen and are asked to move them around to make shapes they consider “interesting and beautiful.” When they find something they like, they save it to a gallery. There are more than 35,000 possible shapes, too many for a human researcher to track, but a computer can automatically record the moves and shapes that people make and can analyze them objectively.
The biologists were inspired by the sophisticated way that animals forage for food in the wild. Birds, for example, have to decide when to eat the cherries on one particular tree and when to fly off to explore another tree that might have more and better fruit. There are mathematical formulas that show how efficient the birds are in getting the largest amount of the best fruit. The researchers wondered, what if you were searching for interesting new shapes instead of cherries?
Some remarkably systematic patterns emerged. There were two phases in the creative process—exploring and exploiting. People would begin by exploring, doodling with the squares and slowly wobbling around from one shape to another. When they hit on a particular shape they liked, they quickly and efficiently made a bunch of similar shapes—the exploit phase. After a bit, they would drain those possibilities and switch back to explore mode, like the birds flitting off to check out a new tree. They would go back to slowly doodling until a new category of shapes emerged. Some people went through the phases more quickly, rapidly switching back and forth between exploring and exploiting, but everyone showed the same pattern.
The results helped the researchers describe a common intuition about the creative process more precisely. Successful creativity alternates between wildly generating lots of crazy possibilities and narrowing in on just the useful ones, as in the old saying that you should “write drunk and edit sober.” The math of foraging lets you describe just how this works.
The Weizmann group used the shape game to explore other aspects of creativity. In one study, they demonstrated a placebo effect. People sniffed a cinnamon-y scent, and the researchers told
half of them before playing the game that the scent would make them more creative. The computer program kept track of how frequently similar shapes were made by multiple participants. The group who believed they would be more creative made significantly more original shapes that were repeated less frequently. (This may help explain why microdosing psychedelics has become so popular in Silicon Valley. The doses may be too small to have much real effect, but they are a great creativity placebo).
My own lab collaborated with Dr. Hart on a study looking at how children play the game. They spent more time than adults exploring and produced more original shapes, but were less efficient exploiters. So children were better at the crazy part of creativity, even if they weren’t as good at refining the possibilities. Like the foraging birds, creators need to do both.
Ferocitus
Deity
Bollocks! They're not panicking - they're happy as pigs in the proverbial.
The only panic is to keep checking the experimental data for possible errors.
Otherwise, it's just the crack in the Standard Model they've been waiting and hoping for.
One month of CNN "fixes" Fox News delusion syndrome
Partisan media impacts voting behavior, yet what changes in viewers’ beliefs or attitudes may underlie these impacts is poorly understood. We recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers using data on actual TV viewership from a media company, and incentivized them to watch CNN instead for a month using real-time viewership quizzes. Despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues’ importance, and overall political views. We show that these effects stem in part from a bias we call partisan coverage filtering, wherein partisan outlets selectively report information, leading viewers to learn a biased set of facts. Consistent with this, treated participants concluded that Fox concealed negative information about President Trump. Partisan media does not only present its side an electoral advantage—it may present a challenge for democratic accountability.
Ferocitus
Deity
But if it rejuvenates old cells (that typically have accumulated genetic damage) and they are
then able to reproduce, isn't that a step on the way to a malignant tumour?
