<< A Hug Before The Battle! These 2 large Malayan Water Monitor Lizards (Varanus Salvator) sizes each other up before the epic struggle for territory began. These lizards can grow up to 3m long >>
2017 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year.
<< Killing off cells that refuse to die on their own has proved a powerful anti-ageing strategy in mice. Now it's about to be tested in humans >>
<< Surprisingly, senescent cells turn out to be slightly different in each tissue. They secrete different cytokines, express different extracellular proteins and use different tactics to avoid death. That incredible variety has made it a challenge for labs to detect and visualize senescent cells >> Judith Campisi.
<< In young mice, no more than 1% of cells in any given organ were senescent. In two-year-old mice, however, up to 20% of cells were senescent in some organs. But there's a silver lining to these elusive twilight cells: they might be hard to find, but they're easy to kill >> Valery Krizhanovsky.
<< I think senolytics are drugs that could come soon and be effective in the elderly now, even in the next few years >> Nir Barzilai.
To stay young, kill zombie cells. Nature 2017; 550: 448 – 50. doi:10.1038/550448a Oct 26, 2017
https://www.nature.com/news/to-stay-young-kill-zombie-cells-1.22872
MozFest. The world's leading festival for the open Internet movement. Oct 27-29, 2017 Ravensbourne College, London
Decentralization. Who controls the Internet?
https://internethealthreport.org/v01/decentralization/
Building a better blockchain. A new generation of software developers are expanding the scope for an Internet powered by users.
https://internethealthreport.org/v01/stories/building-a-better-blockchain/
Giving artists control of their music.
https://internethealthreport.org/v01/stories/giving-artists-control-of-their-music/
<< Interbreeding between Neanderthals and early modern humans has been shown to have contributed about 2% Neanderthal DNA to the genomes of present-day non-Africans >>
AA << found two archaic haplotypes that contribute significantly to differences in sleep patterns >>
Archaic alleles near ASB1 and EXOC6 << are associated with a preference for being an "evening person" and an increased tendency for daytime napping and narcolepsy, respectively >>
Michael Dannemann, Janet Kelso. The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans. The American Journal of Human Genetics. 2017; 101 (4): 578 - 89. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2017.09.010 Oct 5, 2017
http://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(17)30379-8
Darren Curnoe. Neanderthals didn't give us red hair but they certainly changed the way we sleep. Oct 6, 2017.
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-neanderthals-didnt-red-hair.html
DNA cracking machine
<< The spontaneous deamination of cytosine is a major source of C•G to T•A transitions, which account for half of known human pathogenic point mutations. The ability to efficiently convert target A•T base pairs to G•C could therefore advance the study and treatment of genetic diseases >>
AA << report adenine base editors (ABEs) that mediate conversion of A•T to G•C in genomic DNA >>
<< ABEs advance genome editing by enabling the direct, programmable introduction of all four transition mutations without double-stranded DNA cleavage >>
Nicole M. Gaudelli, Alexis C. Komor, et al. Programmable base editing of A•T to G•C in genomic DNA without DNA cleavage. Nature 2017 doi: 10.1038/nature24644 Oct 25, 2017
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaap/ncurrent/full/nature24644.html
<< there are virtually no detectable byproducts such as random insertions, deletions, translocations, or other base-to-base conversions >>
Researchers extend power of gene editing by developing a new class of DNA base editors. Oct 25, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-enzyme-rewrites-genome.html
RNA cracking machine
<< RNA Editing for Programmable A to I Replacement (REPAIR), which has no strict sequence constraints, can be used to edit full-length transcripts containing pathogenic mutations >>
David B. T. Cox, Jonathan S. Gootenberg, et al. RNA editing with CRISPR-Cas13. Science. Oct 25, 2017:eaaq0180 doi: 10.1126/science.aaq0180
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/24/science.aaq0180
Researchers engineer CRISPR to edit single RNA letters in human cells. Oct 25, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-crispr-rna-letters-human-cells.html
Lauran Neergaard. Scientists working toward reversible kind of gene editing. Oct. 25, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-scientists-reversible-kind-gene.html
also:
<< Exploded drawing of an archetypal ethoscope. The machine is composed of ... >>
<< The ethoscope could be customised for a range of different scenarios >>
<< Another possible use of ethoscopes is the adaptation of the platform to detect behavior of other animals >>
Studying insect behavior? Make yourself an ethoscope. Oct 19, 2017.
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-insect-behavior-ethoscope.html
Quentin Geissmann, Luis Garcia Rodriguez, et al. Ethoscopes: An open platform for high-throughput ethomics. PLOS Biol 15 (10): e2003026. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2003026
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003026
<< When you’re really harried, you probably feel like your head is brimful of chaos. You’re pretty close. Neuroscientists say your brain operates in a regime termed the “edge of chaos,” and it’s actually a good thing. It’s a state that allows for fast, efficient analog computation of the kind that can solve problems that grow vastly more difficult as they become bigger in size >>
<< A micrograph shows the construction of a Mott memristor composed of an 8-nanometer-thick layer of niobium dioxide between two layers of titanium nitride >>
Samuel K. Moore. Memristor-Driven Analog Compute Engine Would Use Chaos to Compute Efficiently. Oct 9, 2017
FonT
"When you’re really harried" ... only?
AA << introduce an algorithm based solely on reinforcement learning, without human data, guidance or domain knowledge beyond game rules. AlphaGo becomes its own teacher >>
David Silver, Julian Schrittwieser et al. Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge. Nature. 2017; 550: 354–9 doi: 10.1038/nature24270 Oct 18, 2017
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v550/n7676/full/nature24270.html
also
# s-ai: handling imperfect information (from scratch), by Libratus. Feb 4, 2017.
http://flashontrack.blogspot.it/2017/02/s-ai-handling-imperfect-information.html
AA << shows how different groups of lizards – geckos and anoles – took two completely different evolutionary paths to developing the beneficial trait of sticky toe pads >>
<< anoles seemed to commit to a single type of toe pad, one that generates lots of friction. As a group, they were able to develop sticky toe pads early. Geckos, meanwhile, opted for an evolutionary “drunken stumble,” and seemingly didn’t commit to a single approach, instead evolving toe pads that generate plenty of friction in some species and others that excel at sticking directly to a surface >>
Layne Cameron, Travis Hagey. An evolving sticky situation. Oct 12, 2017
http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2017/an-evolving-sticky-situation/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171012123031.htm
Travis J. Hagey, Josef C. Uyeda, et al. Tempo and mode of performance evolution across multiple independent origins of adhesive toe pads in lizards. Evolution. 2017; 71 (10): 2344–58 doi: 10.1111/evo.13318 Sep 13, 2017
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.13318/abstract
AA << study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an environment that randomly switches between states of abundance and scarcity >>
AA << consider two scenarios—one of pure resource competition, and one in which one strain provides a public good—and investigate how environmental randomness (external noise) coupled to demographic (internal) noise determines the population’s fixation properties and size distribution >>
Karl Wienand, Erwin Frey, Mauro Mobilia. Evolution of a Fluctuating Population in a Randomly Switching Environment. Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 158301 Oct 11, 2017
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.158301
AA << showed that a randomly changing environment can create a level playing field between self-serving bacteria and bacteria that work together >>
<< Cooperating bacterial populations are more likely to survive in changing habitats >>
Fluctuating environments can help cooperating bacteria. Oct 12, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-fluctuating-environments-cooperating-bacteria.html
AA << data fill an important knowledge gap regarding the post-treatment brain effects of psilocybin, and are the first in depressed patients [..] A ‘reset’ therapeutic mechanism is proposed >>
Robin L Carhart-Harris, Leor Roseman, et al. Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression: fMRI-measured brain mechanisms. Sci Rep 2017; 7 (13187) doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-13282-7
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-13282-7
<< Patients taking psilocybin to treat depression show reduced symptoms weeks after treatment following a 'reset' of their brain activity >>
Ryan O'Hare. Magic mushrooms may 'reset' the brains of depressed patients. Oct 13, 2017.
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_12-10-2017-16-22-36
'Magic mushrooms' may 'reset' the brains of depressed patients, study suggests. Oct 13, 2017
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171013091018.htm
to update:
<< The famous three-body problem can be traced back to Isaac Newton in the 1680s >>
In a recent paper AA << numerically obtain 695 families of Newtonian periodic planar collisionless orbits of three-body system >>
Li, X. & Liao, S. More than six hundred new families of Newtonian periodic planar collisionless three-body orbits. Sci. China Phys. Mech. Astron. (2017) 60: 129511. doi: 10.1007/s11433-017-9078-5
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11433-017-9078-5
the movies:
http://numericaltank.sjtu.edu.cn/three-body/three-body-unequal-mass-movies.htm
http://numericaltank.sjtu.edu.cn/three-body/three-body-unequal-mass.htm
http://numericaltank.sjtu.edu.cn/three-body/three-body.htm
Scientists discover more than 600 new periodic orbits of the famous three-body problem. Oct 12, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-scientists-periodic-orbits-famous-three-body.html
<< “There are products which we have our doubts about,” said Hiroya Kawasaki, chief executive of Kobe Steel >>
<< Making his first public appearance since the company admitted falsifying inspection data on aluminium and copper parts at the weekend, Mr Kawasaki acknowledged the reputational damage caused by the scandal >>
Emiko Terazono. Kobe Steel chief says trust in company has ‘fallen to zero’. ft.com Oct 12, 2017
https://www.ft.com/content/ac18403c-af08-11e7-aab9-abaa44b1e130
<< Kobe Steel President Hiroya Kawasaki said on Thursday there may be other cases in which data has been fabricated by Japan’s third-biggest steelmaker, which is reeling from a cheating scandal that has reverberated along global supply chains >>
Kobe Steel president says there may be other cases of data fabrication. reuters.com Oct 12, 2017
AA << have recently discovered that different types of mental training positively affect either our attention abilities or our social competencies such as compassion and perspective-taking. These improvements in attentional-, socio-emotional or cognitive capacities are parallelled by structural changes in dissociable brain networks supporting these skills. In addition, the scientists were able to show that the release of the stress hormone cortisol after exposure to a psychosocial stressor was significantly reduced only after practising mental techniques aiming at improving social competencies but not by mindfulness-based attention-increasing techniques >>
Tania Singer, Verena Muller. Improving social skills through mental training changes brain structure and reduces social stress. Max Planck Institute. Oct 4, 2017
http://www.cbs.mpg.de/press-release/improving-social-skills
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171004142653.htm
Sofie L. Valk, Boris C. Bernhardt, et al. Structural plasticity of the social brain: Differential change after socio-affective and cognitive mental training. Sci Adv 2017; 3(10) e1700489 doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1700489 Oct 4, 2017
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/10/e1700489
<< Testosterone (..) has been shown to affect economic decision making and is taken as a performance enhancer among some financial professionals >>
Amos Nadler, Peiran Jiao, et al. The Bull of Wall Street: Experimental Analysis of Testosterone and Asset Trading. Management Science.
doi: 10.1287/mnsc.2017.2836 Sep 25, 2017.
http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2836
Raging Bull: First study to find link between testosterone and stock market instability. Oct 10, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-raging-bull-link-testosterone-stock.html
<< Biohacking is a relatively new field of amateur and professional scientists conducting “do-it-yourself” biology experiments >>
Now That Anyone Can Hack Biology—Should We Be Afraid? Singularity Hub. October, 2017
https://singularityhub.com/2017/10/02/biohacking-what-is-it-and-should-we-be-afraid/amp/
Tiffany Vora. What Is Biohacking and Should We Be Afraid of It? Tech-x-planations. Singularity Hub
<< “Deep tremor is very sensitive to small stress changes,” Chao [Kevin Chao] said. “So, we decided to use them as stress meters to monitor local variations in stress build-up and release before and after large earthquakes” >>
Amanda Morris. Do Earthquakes Have a ‘Tell’? Data scientists and seismologists use “deep tremor” to forecast strong earthquakes. Oct 5, 2017.
http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2017/10/do-earthquakes-have-a-tell.html
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171005151119.htm
Kevin Chao, Zhigang Peng, et al.
Temporal variation of tectonic tremor activity in southern Taiwan around the 2010 ML6.4 Jiashian earthquake. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. 2017; 122(7): 5417–34 doi: 10.1002/2016JB013925
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016JB013925/abstract
also
<< English, Farsi and Mandarin readers use the same parts of the brain to decode the deeper meaning of what they're reading >>
<< Even given these fundamental differences in language, which can be read in a different direction or contain a completely different alphabet altogether, there is something universal about what occurs in the brain at the point when we are processing narratives >> Morteza Dehghani.
<< In the case of each language, reading each story resulted in unique patterns of activations in the "default mode network" of the brain. This network engages interconnected brain regions such as the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the inferior parietal lobe, the lateral temporal cortex and hippocampal formation >>
<< One of the biggest mysteries of neuroscience is how we create meaning out of the world. Stories are deep-rooted in the core of our nature and help us create this meaning >> Jonas Kaplan.
University of Southern California. Something universal occurs in the brain when it processes stories, regardless of language. ScienceDaily. Oct 5, 2017.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171005141710.htm
Morteza Dehghani, Reihane Boghrati, et al. Decoding the neural representation of story meanings across languages. Human Brain Mapping. 2017 doi: 10.1002/hbm.23814
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002/hbm.23814
<< a whirligig beetle species, Heterogyrus milloti, inhabiting forest streams in southeastern Madagascar is the last survivor of a once dominant and widespread Mesozoic group. With a Late Triassic to Early Jurassic origin (226–187 Ma) it is the hitherto oldest dated endemic lineage of animal or plant on Madagascar >>
Grey T. Gustafson, Alexander A. Prokin, et al. Tip-dated phylogeny of whirligig beetles reveals ancient lineage surviving on Madagascar. Scientific Reports 2017; 7 (8619) doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-08403-1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-08403-1
<< Even today, the ageless striped whirligig beetle keeps its own company, preferring to skitter atop the surface of out-of-the-way forest streams in southeastern Madagascar—not mixing with latecomers of the subfamily Gyrininae who have become the dominant whirligig beetles on Madagascar and abroad >>
Meet Madagascar's oldest animal lineage, a whirligig beetle with 206-million-year-old origins. Oct 4, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-madagascar-oldest-animal-lineage-whirligig.html
<< understanding what makes some individuals more likely to innovate and/or transmit new behaviors is critical for creating realistic models of culture change >>
<< Older, more social monkeys were more likely to invent new forms of social interaction, whereas younger monkeys were more likely to innovate in other behavioral domains (foraging, investigative, and self-directed behaviors). Sex and rank had little effect on innovative tendencies. Relative to apes, capuchins devote more of their innovations repertoire to investigative behaviors and social bonding behaviors and less to foraging and comfort behaviors >>
Susan E. Perry, Brendan J. Barrett, Irene Godoy. Older, sociable capuchins (Cebus capucinus) invent more social behaviors, but younger monkeys innovate more in other contexts. PNAS. 2017; 114 (30): 7806–7813
http://m.pnas.org/content/114/30/7806
Research reveals how new behaviors appear and spread among capuchin monkeys. Aug 24, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-08-reveals-behaviors-capuchin-monkeys.html
<< Social insect colonies are highly successful, self-organized complex systems. Surprisingly however, most social insect colonies contain large numbers of highly inactive workers. Although this may seem inefficient, it may be that inactive workers actually contribute to colony function >>
Daniel Charbonneau, Takao Sasaki, Anna Dornhaus. Who needs ‘lazy’ workers? Inactive workers act as a ‘reserve’ labor force replacing active workers, but inactive workers are not replaced when they are removed. PLOS ONE 12(9): e0184074. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184074 Sep 6, 2017
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0184074
<< Analyzing the video recordings revealed that a colony breaks down into four main demographics [..]: inactive, lazy ants; so-called walkers that spend most of their time just wandering around the nest; foragers that take care of outside tasks such as foraging and building protective walls from tiny rocks; and nurses in charge of rearing the brood >>
Lazy ants make themselves useful in unexpected ways. Sep 8, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-09-lazy-ants-unexpected-ways.html
<< How does conflict spread through a society? One way to think of conflict spreading is to picture an epidemic, with aggressive individuals "infecting" others and causing them to join the fight >>
<< It appears that it is not individuals who control the length of fights, but the relationships between pairs of individuals >>
AA << found evidence for a more complicated structure behind >>
AA << found evidence that conflict duration is strongly affected by the first interaction, which sets the tone for the fight. If the first interaction is brief, then following episodes are likely to be just as brief. A long drawn out initial brawl, however, will be followed by similarly difficult episodes. This, Flack [Jessica Flack] says, "is a signature of collective memory," meaning "the duration of the conflict is not just determined by individuals independently deciding whether to continue fighting or drop out, but through their joint memory for the past and subsequent collective decision-making." >>
How conflicts spread through monkey societies. Sep 7, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-09-conflicts-monkey-societies.html
Edward D. Lee, Bryan C. Daniels, et al. Collective memory in primate conflict implied by temporal scaling collapse. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. doi: 10.1098/rsif.2017.0223 Sep 6 2017.
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/14/134/20170223
<< N. sul dilatare a spiroide dei lembi segugi //
venati a trapunte //
di slento flusso probante che slitta //
(...)
2135 - strappati dal punto stabile. Jun 04, 2007
http://inkpi.blogspot.it/2007/06/2135-strappati-dal-punto-stabile.html
<< What do a pretzel, a lock of hair and a scream have in common? >>
<< Thors Hans Hansson, a member of the Nobel physics committee, uses a cinnamon bun, a pretzel and a bagel to explain the field of topology, a highly specialised mathematics field studying unusual phases or states of matter >>
<< Referring to the two holes in the pretzel, the one hole in the bagel, and the shape of a bun, Hansson demonstrated that topology explains how a material's shape can be completely deformed into a new one without losing its core properties >>
Ilgin Karlidag. Bagels, pretzels, Boo! How to explain science Nobels. Oct 1, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-10-bagels-pretzels-boo-science-nobels.html