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Category: biological – Page 185

Unusual nanoparticles could benefit the quest to build a quantum computer

Imagine tiny crystals that “blink” like fireflies and can convert carbon dioxide, a key cause of climate change, into fuels.

A Rutgers-led team has created ultra-small dioxide crystals that exhibit unusual “blinking” behavior and may help to produce methane and other fuels, according to a study in the journal Angewandte Chemie. The crystals, also known as nanoparticles, stay charged for a long time and could benefit efforts to develop quantum computers.

“Our findings are quite important and intriguing in a number of ways, and more research is needed to understand how these exotic crystals work and to fulfill their potential,” said senior author Tewodros (Teddy) Asefa, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He’s also a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering in the School of Engineering.

Skrillex — Kill Everybody (Bare Noize Remix)

MetaRomantism and “Evil”

MetaRomanticism can be thought of as an attempt to reform Romanticism, which seems necessary since it seems to be a constant companion to Modernism and it is especially dangerous when it has access to Modernist tools that is uses while refusing to be rational. Perhaps this explains the horrors of Nazism in the 20th century. Nazis were irrationalist Romantics that stole the Modernist tools of Weimar Germany and nearly destroyed human civilization and they attached themselves to Dharma traditions that sometime support versions of annihilationism.

How can MetaRomanticism help?

Perhaps Romantics need to understand why evil exists and MeteRomanticsim should attempt to provide explications that encourage all parties to attempt to be just and a blessing to all families, even if perceived as evil. A version of activities that I think might attract evil are traditions that attempt to extinguish all life because they think it is just and blessing to all sentient beings.

If this is part of a sincere tradition, I would suggest that they cultivating all sentient life so that it can evolve to the point where it can legitimately consent to extinguishing its own sensations — where many faiths do not believe that biological death is the death of sensation. Perhaps like interpretations of Buddhism, they could attempt to convince each other to extinguish all at once voluntarily, but only whenever all sentient beings are able to do so with legitimate consent. However, they should keep in mind that even if all sentient life no longer experienced sensations voluntarily, it would be a highly homogenous result and the mind of Elyon, which can be thought of as Nature or a mind we all share, does not seem to like homogeny, as seen in the form of entropy. What if all the sentient beings tried to voluntary stop experiencing sensation and then life finds a way to start evolving again and sentient life has to wait a long time — with lots of different types of suffering occurring — before sentient beings appear that are wise enough to control their own suffering and the suffering of other sentient beings?

Also, the real evil is probably when sadistic people attach to beautiful sincere traditions such as Buddhism, or uglier less likely to be sincere traditions such as Satanism, for selfish sadistic reasons. Perhaps annihilationists should learn to watch for that so we don’t all get hurt, and they should be willing to accept a just of the punishments and a no more than a just portion of the rewards if they should become a custodian of other sentient beings at some point during their attempts to extinguish all sensation.

Evil might also sometimes exist because people wish to charge forward or hold the current culture in place using unjust reasons. Participants in conservative or progressive cultures should also watch for people pressing forward or holding the ground in sadistic, irresponsible, or unjust ways.

Continue reading “Skrillex — Kill Everybody (Bare Noize Remix)” | >

Transcranial Stimulation to Prevent Fear Memories From Returning

Summary: Repetitive transcranial memory stimulation applied to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex modifies the negative effects of fear memories. The findings could have implications for the treatment of PTSD.

Source: University of Bologna

A research group from the University of Bologna has succeeded in modifying the negative effect of a returning memory that triggers fear, and developed a new non-invasive experimental protocol. The result of this study, published in the journal Current Biology, is an innovative protocol that combines fear conditioning—a stimulus associated with something unpleasant that induces a negative memory—and the neurostimulation of a specific site of the prefrontal cortex.

‘Drawn-on-skin’ electronics offer breakthrough in wearable monitors

A team of researchers led by Cunjiang Yu, Bill D. Cook Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, has developed a new form of electronics known as “drawn-on-skin electronics,” allowing multifunctional sensors and circuits to be drawn on the skin with an ink pen.

The advance, the researchers report in Nature Communications, allows for the collection of more precise, motion artifact-free health data, solving the long-standing problem of collecting precise biological data through a when the subject is in motion.

The imprecision may not be important when your FitBit registers 4,000 steps instead of 4,200, but sensors designed to check heart function, temperature and other physical signals must be accurate if they are to be used for diagnostics and treatment.

Scientists genetically alter squids for the first time in ‘game-changing’ breakthrough

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The squid typically have dark eyes and an array of black and reddish brown spots across their bodies while the genetically altered hatchlings have light pink or red eyes and almost no dark spots.

The milestone, which was first reported in Current Biology Thursday, could pave the way for researchers to study the biology of cephalopods like squid, octopus and cuttlefish the same way they study more common lab animals like study mice and fruit flies.

Decline of bees, other pollinators threatens US crop yields

Crop yields for apples, cherries and blueberries across the United States are being reduced by a lack of pollinators, according to Rutgers-led research, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

Most of the world’s crops depend on honeybees and for , so declines in both managed and wild bee populations raise concerns about , notes the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“We found that many crops are pollination-limited, meaning would be higher if crop flowers received more pollination. We also found that honey bees and wild bees provided similar amounts of pollination overall,” said senior author Rachael Winfree, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Managing habitat for and/or stocking more honey bees would boost pollination levels and could increase crop production.”

Deep sea microbes dormant for 100 million years are hungry and ready to multiply

For decades, scientists have gathered ancient sediment samples from below the seafloor to better understand past climates, plate tectonics and the deep marine ecosystem. In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers reveal that given the right food in the right laboratory conditions, microbes collected from sediment as old as 100 million years can revive and multiply, even after laying dormant since large dinosaurs prowled the planet.

The research team behind the new study, from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, the Kochi University and Marine Works Japan, gathered the ancient samples ten years ago during an expedition to the South Pacific Gyre, the part of the ocean with the lowest productivity and fewest nutrients available to fuel the marine food web.

“Our main question was whether life could exist in such a nutrient-limited environment or if this was a lifeless zone,” said the paper’s lead author Yuki Morono, senior scientist at JAMSTEC. “And we wanted to know how long the could sustain their life in a near-absence of food.”

New paper squares economic choice with evolutionary survival

If given the chance, a Kenyan herder is likely to keep a mix of goats and camels. It seems like an irrational economic choice because goats reproduce faster and thus offer higher near-term herd growth. But by keeping both goats and camels, the herder lowers the variability in growth from year to year. All of this helps increase the odds of household survival, which is essentially a gamble that depends on a multiplicative process with no room for catastrophic failure. It turns out, the choice to keep camels also makes evolutionary sense: families that keep camels have a much higher probability of long-term persistence. Unlike businesses or governments, organisms can’t go into evolutionary debt—there is no borrowing one’s way back from extinction.

How biological survival relates to economic choice is the crux of a new paper published in Evolutionary Human Sciences, co-authored by Michael Price, an anthropologist and Applied Complexity Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, and James Holland Jones, a biological anthropologist and associate professor at Stanford’s Earth System Science department.

“People have wanted to make this association between evolutionary ideas and economic ideas for a long time,” Price says, and “they’ve gone about it quite a lot of different ways.” One is to equate the economic idea of maximizing utility—the satisfaction received from consuming a good—with the evolutionary idea of maximizing fitness, which is long-term reproductive success. “That utility equals fitness was simply assumed in a lot of previous work,” Price says, but it’s “a bad assumption.” The human brain evolved to solve proximate problems in ways that avoid an outcome of zero. In the Kenyan example, mixed herding diversifies risk. But more importantly, the authors note, the growth of these herds, like any biological growth process, is multiplicative and the rate of increase is stochastic.

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