Gori the Grey
The Poster
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- Jan 5, 2009
- Messages
- 13,360
I have actually read the Iliad in Greek, if you can believe it. Odyssey too. One of my life accomplishments of which I'm most proud.
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Newsworthy Science
- Thread starter Birdjaguar
- Start date
Moderator Action: Hah! Your post is perfect and deserves to be shown.
Comrade Ceasefire
Simmer slowly
Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun
European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.
Warm weather is one signal that guides the masting of beech trees, but now it appears that day length does more to determine the precise timing of the fruit release among European beeches.
www.quantamagazine.org
European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.
Warm weather is one signal that guides the masting of beech trees, but now it appears that day length does more to determine the precise timing of the fruit release among European beeches.
Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun | Quanta Magazine
European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.
www.quantamagazine.org
Comrade Ceasefire
Simmer slowly
Yeah, but which Greek do you mean? Homeric, Demotic, Arcadocypriot, Melburnian?
Gori the Grey
The Poster
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2009
- Messages
- 13,360
Yes.
Years ago, there was a commercial for a broadband company. It showed a young person going up to a news kiosk and asking for Homer's Odyssey. The grizzled salesman set the young person aback by asking "Attic, Aeolic or Ionic?" (as though his kiosk/the broadband supplier was so capacious as to be able to offer three separate varieties of the epic). The poems actually are made up of all three dialects. Homeric Greek is a kunstsprache that exists only in and solely for the poems. No one ever spoke it. But there's no version in just one of those dialects.
Anyway, I was still in touch with my Greek professor at the time and in the snobbery of having learned Greek, I told him about the commercial and scoffed at it. He took a more generous-spirited approach, assumed the ad guy had roomed with a classics major in college and half-remembered something that his friend had told him. He was just happy to have Greek feature anywhere in pop culture. Then he asked me "what is broadband?"
Years ago, there was a commercial for a broadband company. It showed a young person going up to a news kiosk and asking for Homer's Odyssey. The grizzled salesman set the young person aback by asking "Attic, Aeolic or Ionic?" (as though his kiosk/the broadband supplier was so capacious as to be able to offer three separate varieties of the epic). The poems actually are made up of all three dialects. Homeric Greek is a kunstsprache that exists only in and solely for the poems. No one ever spoke it. But there's no version in just one of those dialects.
Anyway, I was still in touch with my Greek professor at the time and in the snobbery of having learned Greek, I told him about the commercial and scoffed at it. He took a more generous-spirited approach, assumed the ad guy had roomed with a classics major in college and half-remembered something that his friend had told him. He was just happy to have Greek feature anywhere in pop culture. Then he asked me "what is broadband?"
Bamboo species have similar links that span the entire globe.Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun
European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.
Warm weather is one signal that guides the masting of beech trees, but now it appears that day length does more to determine the precise timing of the fruit release among European beeches.
Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun | Quanta Magazine
European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.
When we lived in NC in 1970 and 80s, I planted a P. Bambusoides cutting in a small clearing in an oak hickory forest where we lived. The 1960s mass flowering of that species reached NC in the late 70s and my two shoots flowered and died. I saved the flowers and may have them in the pages of a book somewhere. They recovered over the next few years and put up a few new shoots from the roots. When I returned to visit our house there in the early 2000s, there were many many stalks 40 60' tall.
EDIT: Upon further reflection. I dug my original root clump of bamboo from a wild stand in Chapel Hill NC.Before digging it, I spoke with the owner of the plot if I could do so. In our conversation he told me that he had planted his original roots many years earlier and had taken them from a church yard in Society Hill SC That church in SC had collected their original stand from returning missionairies in China. So it would appear that the original Chinese rootstock flowering timeline has carried through to a now strong stand in Orange Cty NC.
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Broken_Erika
Play with me.
This DIY brick sauna is helping frogs fight disease
And you can build it for around $60
Wedged into the tiny holes of masonry bricks, which heat their bodies up to near 30 C, you might think Australian green and golden bell frogs would be uncomfortable.
But new research says the amphibians love it, and that these DIY dry saunas — made with spray-painted bricks housed in plastic greenhouses — could give them an edge in fighting a deadly fungus.
"This is really exciting," said Anthony Waddle, a biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and lead author of the new study published in Nature. "If frogs are given the opportunity, they can [help] themselves."
Waddle and his team designed experiments involving easily obtained materials, setting these makeshift saunas up in a semi-wild habitat on Macquarie University campus to see if frogs would use them to fight off a global killer.
The fungus is Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (shortened to Bd, but also referred to as chytrid, pronounced kit-rid), and it is responsible for declines in the population of more than 500 amphibian species — and the extinction of at least 90 others.
"I think it's been one of the most devastating pathogens that Western science has recorded," said Christina Davy, a biologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, who was not involved with the study.
"It infects the skin of the amphibians and it interferes with their ability to move water and gases across their skin," explained Davy.
Waddle compared chytrid's effects to an athlete who drinks too much water, disrupting the body's sodium and potassium levels, eventually leading to cardiac arrest.
Davy adds that chytrid is fast-acting, hardy, can spread without hosts and is found around the world. When it enters a new area, previously uninfected and endangered species can be wiped out.
A brick house
But before you imagine an amphibian version of the spores in The Last of Us, chytrid does have preferences — and really hot temperatures, close to 30 C, are not among them.Waddle and his team worked with green and golden bell frogs, an endangered species that's native to New South Wales. After infecting frogs with chytrid, they created mesocosms — a controlled outdoor environment — of different frog habitats. These included the so-called frog saunas, and the resulting toasty and humid climate was highly preferred by the frogs, Waddle explained.
But he also found that when "frogs had access to these shelters, their body temperatures were higher and over time they had lower infections." On top of that, frogs that cleared their infections using this high heat were more resistant to re-infection.
Ana Longo, an amphibian disease expert and biologist at the University of Florida, called the experiment simple yet elegant, but cautioned that it faces challenges in how it would scale to other species and in the wild.
"Amphibians are so diverse and they have so many different habitat preferences," she said from Gainesville, Fla.
However, Longo says when it comes to a threat as devastating as chytrid, there are few tools available outside of a controlled zoo environment, such as anti-fungal treatments.
"We need bold measures at this point," Longo said. "We know that [a] single measure is not going to be effective across all the species. So I think we just have to try different things."
Waddle says the materials cost him around 70 Australian dollars. Both Davy and Longo appreciated how approachable and affordable this solution could be for anyone to build.
Why save the frogs?
Amphibians are part of numerous food webs, and Waddle says they bring benefits to aquatic environments in their early lives as larvae and tadpoles, as well as to the land once they mature.Both predator and prey, they are critical to healthy snake populations as well as keeping insect populations down. In fact, when chytrid killed off frog populations in Costa Rica and Panama, there was a spike in cases of malaria.
While his team's solution isn't permanent, it would give the frogs a fighting chance during colder seasons where chytrid thrives.
- 'Deadliest disease in all time' wipes out 90 species of frogs and toads
- Frogs, fungus and forests: N.B. Museum researchers documenting diversity
While declines in frog species from chytrid have been observed around the world for decades, Davy at Carleton University says it doesn't always kill. Her own research found it to be widespread in Ontario in frogs and salamanders, and doesn't result in mass death.
But she warns that tolerance may not apply to newer strains.
"There's real concern right now about bringing a new species of chytrid fungus to North America," Davy said. "And there's real concern that if it reached [the continent] … it could also be really devastating."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/frog-shelters-chytrid-bd-fungus-1.7246839
Narz
keeping it real
Biohacking frogs, nice 
Bonyduck Campersang
Staring into the distance
- Joined
- Dec 11, 2022
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- 4,681
'Singing lemurs could demonstrate origin of human music'
The Madagascan singing lemurs calls have a steady beat, similar to human music.
www.bbc.com
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
*Insert obligatory King Julien meme here*
I like to move it move it, I like to move it move it
I like to move it move it, I like to move it move it
Can we use quantum computers to do time travel and make measurements more accurately?
This one is really beyond me, and New Scientist (avoiding paywall) and Sabine Hossenfelder disagree on if anything in this paper is going backwards in time. In a terrible bit or writing, but considering the publication that probably means I would not understand a better explanation, New Scientist gloss over the critical bit with:
From the abstract it sounds to me like they are entangling two particles and doing some Bells Inequality/Quantum Computer like maths breaking. Where the time travel comes in other than where the researchers got the idea from I do not know.
This one is really beyond me, and New Scientist (avoiding paywall) and Sabine Hossenfelder disagree on if anything in this paper is going backwards in time. In a terrible bit or writing, but considering the publication that probably means I would not understand a better explanation, New Scientist gloss over the critical bit with:
Arvidsson-Shukur and his colleagues designed an experiment involving two atoms set up as superconducting qubits and an unknown field that could be electric, magnetic or something else. They wanted to monitor changes in one of the qubits’ spin, to estimate the unknown field’s strength. If they didn’t know the field’s direction, they didn’t know how to prepare the spin. The solution to these kinds of problems is normally to prepare many different qubits with different spins and to use that to work out the field. But this approach involves time-consuming preparation of many electrons that are discarded before the measurement.
A better approach is to send that state back in time using entanglement. In the experiment, one of two entangled qubits was placed under the influence of the field. Then, the researchers prepared a measurement on the entangled partner to send that optimal state back in time to the qubit in the field.
From the abstract it sounds to me like they are entangling two particles and doing some Bells Inequality/Quantum Computer like maths breaking. Where the time travel comes in other than where the researchers got the idea from I do not know.
Spoiler Abstract :
Spoiler Perhaps the bit that explains it? :
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Can we use quantum computers to do time travel and make measurements more accurately?
This one is really beyond me, and New Scientist (avoiding paywall) and Sabine Hossenfelder disagree on if anything in this paper is going backwards in time. In a terrible bit or writing, but considering the publication that probably means I would not understand a better explanation, New Scientist gloss over the critical bit with:
Arvidsson-Shukur and his colleagues designed an experiment involving two atoms set up as superconducting qubits and an unknown field that could be electric, magnetic or something else. They wanted to monitor changes in one of the qubits’ spin, to estimate the unknown field’s strength. If they didn’t know the field’s direction, they didn’t know how to prepare the spin. The solution to these kinds of problems is normally to prepare many different qubits with different spins and to use that to work out the field. But this approach involves time-consuming preparation of many electrons that are discarded before the measurement.A better approach is to send that state back in time using entanglement. In the experiment, one of two entangled qubits was placed under the influence of the field. Then, the researchers prepared a measurement on the entangled partner to send that optimal state back in time to the qubit in the field.
From the abstract it sounds to me like they are entangling two particles and doing some Bells Inequality/Quantum Computer like maths breaking. Where the time travel comes in other than where the researchers got the idea from I do not know.
Spoiler Abstract :
Spoiler Perhaps the bit that explains it? :
If you just look at quantum mechanics, this is actually quite straightforward: You can just describe this by a wave function evolving forwards in time and no going back is necessary. The reason why the phase measurement is better is because you have more degrees of freedom: Instead of two orthogonal states, you have four orthogonal states.
The problem only occurs when you want to interpret the qubits as independent entities (which they are not within the quantum mechanical formalism). As always with entanglement, it is impossible to have an interpretation that is realistic, local, and causal. You have to drop one of them and these retrocausal people want to drop (or at least modify) causality. I am not sure why, but I have not read their arguments (maybe I should?). But I don't see this experiment as an argument for retrocausality: It uses the mysteries of entanglement, but that's it.
They may have found something to add to Narcan to make it better, possibly. I think this could be big as the new synthetic type opioids the state is pushing people towards bind much more strongly to the receptor so Naloxone, the active ingredient in Narcan, is much less effective at blocking their actions.
A µ-opioid receptor modulator that works cooperatively with naloxone
A µ-opioid receptor modulator that works cooperatively with naloxone
Spoiler Abstract :
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Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode words’ meaning
My reading of this is that it brings practical mind reading a lot closer (though still not close).
By eavesdropping on the brains of living people, scientists have created the highest-resolution map yet of the neurons that encode the meanings of various words. The results hint that, across individuals, the brain uses the same standard categories to classify words — helping us to turn sound into sense.
The study is based on words only in English. But it’s a step along the way to working out how the brain stores words in its language library, says neurosurgeon Ziv Williams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. By mapping the overlapping sets of brain cells that respond to various words, he says, “we can try to start building a thesaurus of meaning”.
The work was published today in Nature.
Mapping meaning
The brain area called the auditory cortex processes the sound of a word as it enters the ear. But it is the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a region where higher-order brain activity takes place, that works out a word’s ‘semantic meaning’ — its essence or gist.
Previous research2 has studied this process by analysing images of blood flow in the brain, which is a proxy for brain activity. This method allowed researchers to map word meaning to small regions of the brain.
But Williams and his colleagues found a unique opportunity to look at how individual neurons encode language in real time. His group recruited ten people about to undergo surgery for epilepsy, each of whom had had electrodes implanted in their brains to determine the source of their seizures. The electrodes allowed the researchers to record activity from around 300 neurons in each person’s prefrontal cortex.
As participants listened to multiple short sentences containing a total of around 450 words, the scientists recorded which neurons fired and when. Williams says that around two or three distinct neurons lit up for each word, although he points out that the team recorded only the activity of a tiny fraction of the prefrontal cortex’s billions of neurons. The researchers then looked at the similarity between the words that activated the same neuronal activity.
A neuron for everything
The words that the same set of neurons responded to fell into similar categories, such as actions, or words associated with people. The team also found that words that the brain might associate with one another, such as ‘duck’ and ‘egg’, triggered some of the same neurons. Words with similar meanings, such as ‘mouse’ and ‘rat’, triggered patterns of neuronal activity that were more similar than the patterns triggered by ‘mouse’ and ‘carrot.’ Other groups of neurons responded to words associated with more-abstract concepts: relational words such as ‘above’ and ‘behind’, for instance.
The categories that the brain assigns to words were similar between participants, Williams says, suggesting human brains all group meanings in the same way.
The prefrontal cortex neurons didn’t distinguish words by their sounds, only their meanings. When a person heard the word ‘son’ in a sentence, for instance, words associated with family members lit up. But those neurons didn’t respond to ‘Sun’ in a sentence, despite these words having an identical sound.
Mind reading
To an extent, the researchers were able to determine what people were hearing by watching their neurons fire. Although they couldn’t recreate exact sentences, they could tell, for example, that a sentence contained an animal, an action and a food, in that order.
“To get this level of detail and have a peek at what’s happening at the single-neuron level is pretty cool,” says Vikash Gilja, an engineer at the University of California San Diego and chief scientific officer of the brain–computer interface company Paradromics. He was impressed that the researchers could determine not only the neurons that corresponded to words and their categories, but also the order in which they were spoken.
Recording from neurons is much faster than using imaging; understanding language at its natural speed, he says, will be important for future work developing brain–computer interface devices that restore speech to people who have lost that ability.
My reading of this is that it brings practical mind reading a lot closer (though still not close).
By eavesdropping on the brains of living people, scientists have created the highest-resolution map yet of the neurons that encode the meanings of various words. The results hint that, across individuals, the brain uses the same standard categories to classify words — helping us to turn sound into sense.
The study is based on words only in English. But it’s a step along the way to working out how the brain stores words in its language library, says neurosurgeon Ziv Williams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. By mapping the overlapping sets of brain cells that respond to various words, he says, “we can try to start building a thesaurus of meaning”.
The work was published today in Nature.
Mapping meaning
The brain area called the auditory cortex processes the sound of a word as it enters the ear. But it is the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a region where higher-order brain activity takes place, that works out a word’s ‘semantic meaning’ — its essence or gist.
Previous research2 has studied this process by analysing images of blood flow in the brain, which is a proxy for brain activity. This method allowed researchers to map word meaning to small regions of the brain.
But Williams and his colleagues found a unique opportunity to look at how individual neurons encode language in real time. His group recruited ten people about to undergo surgery for epilepsy, each of whom had had electrodes implanted in their brains to determine the source of their seizures. The electrodes allowed the researchers to record activity from around 300 neurons in each person’s prefrontal cortex.
As participants listened to multiple short sentences containing a total of around 450 words, the scientists recorded which neurons fired and when. Williams says that around two or three distinct neurons lit up for each word, although he points out that the team recorded only the activity of a tiny fraction of the prefrontal cortex’s billions of neurons. The researchers then looked at the similarity between the words that activated the same neuronal activity.
A neuron for everything
The words that the same set of neurons responded to fell into similar categories, such as actions, or words associated with people. The team also found that words that the brain might associate with one another, such as ‘duck’ and ‘egg’, triggered some of the same neurons. Words with similar meanings, such as ‘mouse’ and ‘rat’, triggered patterns of neuronal activity that were more similar than the patterns triggered by ‘mouse’ and ‘carrot.’ Other groups of neurons responded to words associated with more-abstract concepts: relational words such as ‘above’ and ‘behind’, for instance.
The categories that the brain assigns to words were similar between participants, Williams says, suggesting human brains all group meanings in the same way.
The prefrontal cortex neurons didn’t distinguish words by their sounds, only their meanings. When a person heard the word ‘son’ in a sentence, for instance, words associated with family members lit up. But those neurons didn’t respond to ‘Sun’ in a sentence, despite these words having an identical sound.
Mind reading
To an extent, the researchers were able to determine what people were hearing by watching their neurons fire. Although they couldn’t recreate exact sentences, they could tell, for example, that a sentence contained an animal, an action and a food, in that order.
“To get this level of detail and have a peek at what’s happening at the single-neuron level is pretty cool,” says Vikash Gilja, an engineer at the University of California San Diego and chief scientific officer of the brain–computer interface company Paradromics. He was impressed that the researchers could determine not only the neurons that corresponded to words and their categories, but also the order in which they were spoken.
Recording from neurons is much faster than using imaging; understanding language at its natural speed, he says, will be important for future work developing brain–computer interface devices that restore speech to people who have lost that ability.
Spoiler Legend :
Remorseless1
Emperor
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2022
- Messages
- 1,214
Meh. It's all Greek to me
Lab-grown meat set to be sold in UK pet food
The UK has become the first European country to approve putting lab-grown meat in pet food.
Regulators cleared the use of chicken cultivated from animal cells, which lab meat company Meatly is planning to sell to manufacturers.
The big development is a new culture medium that is ~100 fold cheaper
Culture media are essential to the production of cultivated meat, entailing a mix of nutrients to facilitate the growth of animal cells. According to Meatly, this accounts for the majority of the costs involved in the entire process, reducing which is key to reaching price parity with conventional meat.
Typically, culture media cost hundreds of pounds per litre, but Meatly’s protein-free version brings that down to just £1 ($1.25)
The new cell culture medium created by Meatly contains no serum or animal-derived components, steroids, hormones, antibiotics or growth factors – the latter is responsible for the bulk of the costs associated with culture media. The startup’s innovation is food-safe and used in its suspension culture bioreactors without microcarriers, which are typically needed to help cells proliferate and enhance their density.
Even before this the price was dropping fast (though that last point sounds dodgy)
Apparently it is a touchy point in america, with Ron DeSantis banning it. I can see environmental issues with it, as I do not think the process is particularly environmentally friendly, but I suspect that is not Ron's problem with it.
The UK has become the first European country to approve putting lab-grown meat in pet food.
Regulators cleared the use of chicken cultivated from animal cells, which lab meat company Meatly is planning to sell to manufacturers.
The big development is a new culture medium that is ~100 fold cheaper
Culture media are essential to the production of cultivated meat, entailing a mix of nutrients to facilitate the growth of animal cells. According to Meatly, this accounts for the majority of the costs involved in the entire process, reducing which is key to reaching price parity with conventional meat.
Typically, culture media cost hundreds of pounds per litre, but Meatly’s protein-free version brings that down to just £1 ($1.25)
The new cell culture medium created by Meatly contains no serum or animal-derived components, steroids, hormones, antibiotics or growth factors – the latter is responsible for the bulk of the costs associated with culture media. The startup’s innovation is food-safe and used in its suspension culture bioreactors without microcarriers, which are typically needed to help cells proliferate and enhance their density.
Even before this the price was dropping fast (though that last point sounds dodgy)
Apparently it is a touchy point in america, with Ron DeSantis banning it. I can see environmental issues with it, as I do not think the process is particularly environmentally friendly, but I suspect that is not Ron's problem with it.
Narz
keeping it real
Man playing god or something like that...
What is the point of evolving intellect if not to play god?
Right wing Americans =/ Americans
America may be a land of many loony religious folks but it's still the innovation capital of the world (for now).
Are these not Christians? Did not Jesus say we would do even greater things than he? Why do they not want to be like God?
Spoiler John 14:12 :
That would be doing things through the Holy Spirit, i.e. in the full will of God, not through one's own ambition or intelligence. Remember the story of the Fall, of the snake whispering -- ye shall be as Gods. That's a conversation for the religious thread, though.
Personally, my wariness re: lab-grown meat comes from a strong distrust of corporations and processed food in general.
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