Under culture conditions, the embryos survived until the formation of hind limbs and important organs.
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Un estallido similar al de una supernova extremadamente luminosa, apodado «el Camello», parece deberse a un agujero negro recién nacido que devora la estrella desde dentro.
At times we have had to be subjected to various types of home quarantines to cause of an epidemic. The psychological and sociological consequences of this have been, naturally, negative, but also positive, as we see below.
During the Plague, for example, home confinement and social distancing surely favored geniuses like Shakespeare either Newton so that, surrounded by time, tranquility, silence and other elements inappropriate to the hectic social life, lwill carry out some of their masterpieces.
Newton's Quarantine
In Japan there is a unique phenomenon in the world in which teenagers generally decide to cloister themselves in their room and not come out for weeks or months, the Hikikomori. Also in the West we are accustomed to cases of monks or others who decide to become anchorites, isolating themselves for a while or forever from the world. But it is the first time in recent history that many of us are going to be forced to stay for a long time within four walls (although we now have a fifth in the form of a screen that allows us to see much further).
Perhaps we can draw some motivation from other quarantine stories whose results were more than remarkable. It is the case of Isaac Newton, who during the plague quarantine of 1665, made some of his greatest contributions to Physics.
Newton was in his early 20s when the Great Plague of London devastated the city.. He was just another undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. And it would be another 200 years before scientists discovered the bacteria that caused the plague. But even without knowing exactly why, people practiced some of the same things we do to avoid illness.
To ensure social distancing, Cambridge sent students home to continue their studies. For Newton, that meant going to Woolsthorpe Manor, the family farm a few miles northwest of Cambridge. He then acquired some prisms and experimented with them in his room, even making a hole in his blinds so that only a small ray could pass through. From this arose his theories on optics. It was one of the advantages of having time to meditate and experiment in comfort and without structured classes.
In London, a quarter of the population would die from the Plague between 1665 and 1666. It was one of the last major outbreaks in the 400 years that the Black Death devastated Europe. Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667, theories in hand. Two years later, Newton became a professor.
For its part, during a plague quarantine of 1605, William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth and E.l King Lear. "The plague was the most powerful force that shaped his life and that of his contemporaries," he wrote. Jonathan Bate, one of his many biographers. The plague closed London's theaters. Shakespeare felt that writing was the best use of his time. "This meant that his days were free, for the first time since the early 1590s, to collaborate with other playwrights," he writes. James S. Shapiro in his book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.
We may be condemned to be within four walls (or five), but our minds never will be.
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The news
Living in quarantine was a stimulus for Newton to change the history of Physics
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
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What is consciousness? How do we know it's us? How much consciousness is there in someone who remains in a coma? If we make an exact copy of the arrangement of our neurons and synaptic connections, Will we keep our conscience?
They are philosophically thorny questions, and perhaps the questions are not even well formulated because they are based on a priori concepts, concepts that are difficult to define, and a good dose of subjectivism. However, technologists who try to achieve immortality approach the question in a more practical and mechanistic way, as if it were Newton's law.
Water and consciousness
For many, the phenomenon of consciousness, then, would only be product of the particular organization of the particles that make up the brain, as the phenomenon "humidity" is a product of the special organization of water molecules in a pattern that we call "liquid" and that differs from the "gas" or "solid" pattern, which are not humid (vapor cloud and crystal of ice, respectively).
As the Swedish cosmologist explains Max Tegmark in his book Life 3.0:
As with solids, liquids and gases, I think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, with properties that go beyond those of its particles. For example, falling into a deep sleep extinguishes consciousness, simply through a reorganization of the particles. Likewise, my consciousness would disappear if I were to freeze to death, which would rearrange my particles in a more unfortunate way.
Alcor, in Arizona, is governed by this pragmatism, the largest of the four cryopreservation facilities that exist in the world, three of which are in the United States, while the fourth is in Russia. How he explains it Mark O'Connell in his book How to be a machine:
Hundreds of people have arranged for their bodies to be transferred here as soon as possible once their clinical death has been determined, so that a series of procedures can be performed on them (including, in half of the cases, the separation of the head from the body) that allow their cryonic suspension until science finds a way to bring them back to life.
They all hope that, when they die, their bodies will be preserved in liquid nitrogen, waiting for the day when some future technology could allow them to be thawed and reanimated, or when the kilo and a half of neural networks that housed their skulls can be extracted, scanned to recover all the information they stored, converted into code and transferred to some new type of mechanical body not subject to decrepitude or death or other human defects.
However, Will his consciousness be preserved? Perhaps we should not ask such questions and act with the mechanistic pragmatism of some technologists. Perhaps we are facing another example of the Theseus paradox, according to a Greek legend collected by Plutarch:
The ship in which Theseus and the young men of Athens returned (from Crete) had thirty oars, and the Athenians kept it until the time of Demetrius of Phalerus, since they removed the damaged boards and replaced them with new and more resistant ones, of So this ship had become an example among philosophers about the identity of things that grow; One group argued that the ship remained the same, while the other claimed that it was not.
Which may also lead us to ask if we follow when teleporting:
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The news
And if consciousness were only a phenomenon of the organization of matter, like the humidity of water molecules
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
A small proportion of patients regain some consciousness during medical procedures, but a new study of brain activity could prevent that potential trauma. It could also help both people in comas and scientists trying to define which parts of the brain are key to the conscious mind.
Thanks to machine learning, now It is suggested that consciousness depends on the integration between the parietal cortex, the striatum and the thalamus.
Most important brain regions
Measures of integration, not just complexity, better detect changes in consciousness. Parietal/subcortical areas contribute more than frontal areas to decoding consciousness. And the integration of parietal and subcortical areas is a hallmark of conscious states.
All of this was what UW-Madison researchers found when they recorded electrical activity in approximately 1,000 neurons surrounding each of the 100 sites in the brain of a pair of monkeys at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center during various states of consciousness: under drug-induced anesthesia, light sleep, resting wakefulness, and awakening from anesthesia to a waking state through electrical stimulation of a deep point in the brain.
To select features that best indicate whether the monkeys were conscious or unconscious, the researchers they used machine learning, an artificial intelligence technique, supplying its large data set to a computer.
They then told him which state of consciousness had produced each pattern of brain activity and asked which brain areas and patterns of electrical activity corresponded most strongly to consciousness. The results pointed in the opposite direction to the frontal cortex, the part of the brain that is usually monitored to safely maintain general anesthesia in human patients and the part most likely to exhibit the slow waves of activity considered typical of unconsciousness.
As explained Michelle Redinbaugh, a graduate student in Saalman's lab and co-senior author from the study, published in the magazine Cell Systems:
With data on multiple brain regions and different states of consciousness, we could bring together all of these signs traditionally associated with consciousness, including how fast or slow brain rhythms are in different areas of the brain, with more computational metrics that describe how complex the brain is. are the signals and how the signals interact in different areas.
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The news
A new technique is developed thanks to artificial intelligence to better measure whether a patient is conscious or not
was originally published in
Xataka Science
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Sergio Parra
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Disrupt methane generation with fermenters that transform carbon energy from food waste and other organic “wet waste” into volatile fatty acids (AGV) we can get jet fuel.
Using a catalyst to add more carbon to VFA molecules, a new study suggests how to build long chains of energy-rich paraffin hydrocarbons that are essentially chemically identical to those in conventional jet fuel, except with a fraction of the carbon footprint.
New biorefining process
The new technology presented in a published study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the University of Dayton, Yale University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
According to the NREL researcher Derek Vardon, author of the study:
If our refining pipeline expands, it could take just a year or two for airlines like Southwest to obtain the fuel regulatory approvals they need to begin using sustainable wet-waste aviation fuel on commercial flights so that means net flights with Zero carbon emissions are on the horizon sooner than some might have thought.
This new biorefining process harnesses food and other waste to produce sustainable aviation fuel compatible with jet engines and capable of supporting zero carbon flights, meaning that greenhouse gas emissions created by the combustion of jet fuel are reduced to zero by emissions eliminated or diverted from the atmosphere when producing the fuel.
Additionally, eliminating food waste as a source of methane can be a very effective way to reduce landfill emissions.
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The news
New solution for sustainable aviation fuel with zero carbon emissions from waste
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
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Estar cansado dificulta reprimir los recuerdos desapacibles. Ello puede afectar, sobre todo, a las personas con depresión o trastorno por estrés postraumático.
Aún no hay evidencias de que el ayuno intermitente sirva para prevenir enfermedades cardiovasculares
Por ahora, los ensayos clínicos sobre este tipo de dieta no permiten establecer conclusiones.
Un famoso ciclo natural que gobernaba ciclones e influía en el clima de Europa no existe. Esto es lo que sostiene quien le dio nombre. La responsabilidad de sus aparentes efectos recaería en los volcanes.
Placing a conformable electrode (a piece of conductive material) on the surface of a Venus flytrap plant, the NTU Singapore team has developed a device communication with plants.
In this way they want to capture electrical signals to monitor how the plant responds to its environment and transmit electrical signals to the plant to make it close its leaves.
Weak signals
The device has a diameter of 3 mm and is harmless to the plant. It does not affect the plant's ability to perform photosynthesis while successfully detecting the plant's electrical signals. The NTU team was inspired by the electrocardiogram (ECG), which is used to detect heart abnormalities by measuring the electrical activity generated by the organ.
Their findings were published in the magazine Nature Electronics. Developing the ability to measure electrical signals from plants could create opportunities for a variety of useful applications, such as plant-based robots that can help pick up fragile objects or help improve food security by detecting diseases in early crops.
According to the lead author of the study, Chen Xiaodong, President Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NTU Singapore:
Climate change is threatening food security around the world. By monitoring the plants' electrical signals, we can detect possible distress signals and abnormalities. When used for agricultural purposes, farmers can discover when a disease is in progress, even before full symptoms appear on crops, such as yellowing leaves. This can give us the opportunity to act quickly to maximize crop yields for the population.
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The news
Using electrical signals, this device can communicate with plants
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.