It's all about Science & Technology even cosmos(Universe); Here you will find latest research going on in scientific world & Upcoming future aspect and Technologies like Biotechnology ,Nanotechnology , AI , transhumanism ,Anti-Aging ,cancer Stem cell , Quantum physics.......list goes on I'll hope you will enjoy in the ocean of Science & Technology
Deep within our bodies are all kinds of genes that turn on and off over the years, including the very genes that make you grow a body in the first place. This is where scientists are looking for the magical code that could enable us to regrow organs and regenerate limbs. A Harvard researcher thinks he might've found it.
George Daley of Harvard Medical School stumbled upon it somewhat accidentally, in fact. While employing a (rather cruel) identification technique for his lab mice—clipping their ears or the tips of their toes—he noticed something odd. Unlike other mice, these little guys would grow back their ears and toes in a few days. Why? Well, the mice had been genetically engineered so that a gene that helps them grow in the womb would continue to function after birth. It would, in a sense, never turn itself off. It's called Lin28a, and, by boosting metabolism, it can trick the body into thinking it's younger than it actually is.
This is good news! The only question now is: How good? Daley and company confirmed that the gene could regrow parts of body parts, but his method had some limitations. Scientific Americandescribed the experiment's shortcomings thusly:
The power of Lin28a appeared to only extend so far. When mice were no longer babies—at five weeks—the scientists were not able to regenerate their limbs, even if the gene was stimulated. And mice with Lin28a activation were never able to repair damage to the heart, suggesting that the protein is not equally effective everywhere in the body.
So Lin28a works—but not forever, and not everywhere. Don't give up hope, however, becausethere are plenty of other genes out therethat could be the key. Now that scientists know bodily healing can be controlled by manipulating certain metabolic processess, they can seek out other genes that might be involved. In other words, they now know where to look.
Limb regeneration is likely still a ways off, but we're now one step closer. Even basic research on Lin28a could be tremendously important for making new drugs that enable us to heal faster and better. Call it the Wolverine gene. [Scientific American] Even read the article published at NATURE
Stuart Hameroff is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology at the University of Arizona — but he's a pariah as far as most neuroscientists are concerned. The reason? Consciousness, he dares say, is far more than just a computational process — it's actually quantum.
Along with the esteemed mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, Hameroff is the co-author of the highly controversial Orch OR model of consciousness (Orchestrated Objective Reduction ) — the suggestion that quantum phenomenon, rather than classical mechanics, can explain conscious awareness.
The theory presents a new kind of wave function collapse that occurs in isolation, called objective reduction. This wave function collapse, they argue, is the only possible non-physical thing that can account for a non-computable process, namely consciousness. They speculate that this could happen inside the brain's microtubules.
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Recently, Nikola Danaylov of the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast caught up with Hameroff to learn more. The result is a fascinating one hour interview in which the two discuss a number of topics, including various theories of mind, how anesthesia can inform the debate, the Orch OR model, and why the vast majority of scientists are disdainful of it.
In addition, they get into some weird territory and discuss quantum souls, the afterlife, reincarnation, and Hinduism and Buddhism. They even hit some futurist topics like the Singularity, cryonics, and chemical brain preservation, and also discuss Hameroff's upcoming paper (together with Roger Penrose) where they will review and present new evidence in support of their theory.
Science has made leaps with 3D printing, perhaps one of the most astounding technological advances in recent years. As we’ve seen, scientists have been able to develop functioning organs, bones and tissue using a person’s own stem cells, prosthetic limbs, 3D printed guns that can withstand the force of firing a bullet and cars (among many other things). Hell, 3D printers can even print other 3D printers, which could have some cool implications for using the technology to build the first human base on the moon or Mars. The sky is the limit.
Credit: Yaroslav Urzhumov
In recent news, a team of researchers have combined two awesome technologies into an exceptionally exciting product: an invisibility cloak created by a 3D printer — the very first of its kind. (Harry Potter, anyone?) The team, who hail from Duke University, released the first prototype more than seven years ago, with the newest design unveiled several months ago, which looks rather unimpressive (particularly, it looks like a Frisbee composed of Swiss cheese) on the surface.
So, how does it work? It’s actually kind of simple. Algorithms are used to determine the size, location and shape of the holes in the polymer circular-Frisbee design, which is open in the center, needed to deflect microwave beams (the only thing that can be deflected by this particular proto-type). An opaque object is placed in the center, after which, microwave beams are aimed and ejected at the device from the side of the disk, cloaking the object in the center, making it disappear from sight. Ultimately, “the microwaves are re-radiated back into free space on the shadow side of the cloak.”
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‘The design of the cloak eliminates the ‘shadow’ that would be cast, and suppresses the scattering from the object that would be expected,’ said Urzhumov, one of the leaders from Duke. He is hopefully, that in the-not-so-distant future, that a prototype will be developed that will cloak an object at optical and infrared wavelengths, using transparent polymers or glass. In addition, he believes that the same technique could lead to larger cloaking devices. Perhaps eventually, a cloak similar to the one used in the Harry Potter movies will be functional.
A rare, recently discovered microbe that survives on very little to eat has been found in two places on Earth: spacecraft clean rooms in Florida and South America. Microbiologists often do thorough surveys of bacteria and other microbes in spacecraft clean rooms. Fewer microbes live there than in almost any other environment on Earth, but the surveys are important for knowing what might hitch a ride into space. If extraterrestrial life is ever found, it would be readily checked against the census of a few hundred types of microbes detected in spacecraft clean rooms. The work to keep clean rooms extremely clean knocks total microbe numbers way down. It also can select for microbes that withstand stresses such as drying, chemical cleaning, ultraviolet treatments and lack of nutrients. Perversely, microbes that withstand these stressors often also show elevated resistance to spacecraft sterilization methodologies such as heating and peroxide treatment.
"We want to have a better understanding of these bugs, because the capabilities that adapt them for surviving in clean rooms might also let them survive on a spacecraft," said microbiologist Parag Vaishampayan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., lead author of the 2013 paper about the microbe. "This particular bug survives with almost no nutrients."
This population of berry-shaped bacteria is so different from any other known bacteria, it has been classified as not only a new species, but also a new genus, the next level of classifying the diversity of life. Its discoverers named it Tersicoccus phoenicis. Tersi is from Latin for clean, like the room. Coccus, from Greek for berry, describes the bacterium's shape. The phoenicis part is for NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, the spacecraft being prepared for launch in 2007 when the bacterium was first collected by test-swabbing the floor in the Florida clean room.
Some other microbes have been discovered in a spacecraft clean room and found nowhere else, but none previously had been found in two different clean rooms and nowhere else. Home grounds of the new one are about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) apart, in a NASA facility at Kennedy Space Center and a European Space Agency facility in Kourou, French Guiana. http://phys.org/news/2013-11-rare-microbe-distant-rooms.html#jCp
Black holes -- massive objects in space with gravitational forces so strong that not even light can escape them -- come in a variety of sizes. On the smaller end of the scale are the stellar-mass black holes that are formed during the deaths of stars. At the larger end are supermassive black holes, which contain up to one billion times the mass of our sun. Over billions of years, small black holes can slowly grow into the supermassive variety by taking on mass from their surroundings and also by merging with other black holes. But this slow process can't explain the problem of supermassive black holes existing in the early universe -- such black holes would have formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang.
Now new findings by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) may help to test a model that solves this problem.
Certain models of supermassive black hole growth invoke the presence of "seed" black holes that result from the deaths of very early stars. These seed black holes gain mass and increase in size by picking up the materials around them -- a process called accretion -- or by merging with other black holes. "But in these previous models, there was simply not enough time for any black hole to reach a supermassive scale so soon after the birth of the universe," says Christian Reisswig, NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Astrophysics at Caltech and the lead author of the study. "The growth of black holes to supermassive scales in the young universe seems only possible if the 'seed' mass of the collapsing object was already sufficiently large," he says.
To investigate the origins of young supermassive black holes, Reisswig, in collaboration with Christian Ott, assistant professor of theoretical astrophysics, and their colleagues turned to a model involving supermassive stars. These giant, rather exotic stars are hypothesized to have existed for just a brief time in the early universe. Unlike ordinary stars, supermassive stars are stabilized against gravity mostly by their own photon radiation. In a very massive star, photon radiation -- the outward flux of photons that is generated due to the star's very high interior temperatures -- pushes gas from the star outward in opposition to the gravitational force that pulls the gas back in. When the two forces are equal, this balance is called hydrostatic equilibrium.
During its life, a supermassive star slowly cools due to energy loss through the emission of photon radiation. As the star cools, it becomes more compact, and its central density slowly increases. This process lasts for a couple of million years until the star has reached sufficient compactness for gravitational instability to set in and for the star to start collapsing gravitationally, Reisswig says.
Previous studies predicted that when supermassive stars collapse, they maintain a spherical shape that possibly becomes flattened due to rapid rotation. This shape is called an axisymmetric configuration. Incorporating the fact that very rapidly spinning stars are prone to tiny perturbations, Reisswig and his colleagues predicted that these perturbations could cause the stars to deviate into non-axisymmetric shapes during the collapse. Such initially tiny perturbations would grow rapidly, ultimately causing the gas inside the collapsing star to clump and to form high-density fragments.
These fragments would orbit the center of the star and become increasingly dense as they picked up matter during the collapse; they would also increase in temperature. And then, Reisswig says, "an interesting effect kicks in." At sufficiently high temperatures, there would be enough energy available to match up electrons and their antiparticles, or positrons, into what are known as electron-positron pairs. The creation of electron-positron pairs would cause a loss of pressure, further accelerating the collapse; as a result, the two orbiting fragments would ultimately become so dense that a black hole could form at each clump. The pair of black holes might then spiral around one another before merging to become one large black hole. "This is a new finding," Reisswig says. "Nobody has ever predicted that a single collapsing star could produce a pair of black holes that then merge."
Reisswig and his colleagues used supercomputers to simulate a supermassive star that is on the verge of collapse. The simulation was visualized with a video made by combining millions of points representing numerical data about density, gravitational fields, and other properties of the gases that make up the collapsing stars.
Although the study involved computer simulations and is thus purely theoretical, in practice, the formation and merger of pairs of black holes can give rise to tremendously powerful gravitational radiation -- ripples in the fabric of space and time, traveling at the speed of light -- that is likely to be visible at the edge of our universe, Reisswig says. Ground-based observatories such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), comanaged by Caltech, are searching for signs of this gravitational radiation, which was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity; future space-borne gravitational-wave observatories, Reisswig says, will be necessary to detect the types of gravitational waves that would confirm these recent findings.
Ott says that these findings will have important implications for cosmology. "The emitted gravitational-wave signal and its potential detection will inform researchers about the formation process of the first supermassive black holes in the still very young universe, and may settle some -- and raise new -- important questions on the history of our universe," he says.
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Through the wormhole with Morgan Freeman The riddle of Black Holes....awesome video will fascinate you toward Black hole
These findings were published in Physical Review Letters the week of October 11 in a paper titled "Formation and Coalescence of Cosmological Supermassive-Black-Hole Binaries in Supermassive-Star Collapse." Caltech coauthors authors on the study include Ernazar Abdikamalov, Roland Haas, Philipp Mösta. Another coauthor on the study, Erik Schnetter, is at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Sherman Fairchild Foundation.
RNA is the key functional component of spliceosomes, molecular machines that control how genes are expressed, report scientists from the University of Chicago online, Nov. 6 in Nature. The discovery establishes that RNA, not protein, is responsible for catalyzing this fundamental biological process and enriches the hypothesis that life on earth began in a world based solely on RNA.
"Two of the three major processes in eukaryotic gene expression -- splicing and translation -- are now shown to be catalyzed by RNA," said Jonathan Staley, PhD, associate professor of molecular genetics and cell biology at the University of Chicago and co-corresponding author on the study. "The eukaryotic gene expression pathway is more of an RNA-based pathway than protein-based."
For genes to be expressed, DNA must be translated into proteins, the structural and functional molecules that catalyze chemical reactions necessary for life. To do so, genetic information stored in DNA is first copied into strands of messenger RNA (mRNA), which are subsequently used to create proteins.
An international research team has produced the first-ever ultra-high resolution 3D digital reconstruction of a complete human brain. At the astonishingly low resolution of 20-microns, the new scans are providing an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of the mind.
And remarkably, it could also be seen as a precursor to brain preservation and mind uploading. But more on that in just a bit. First, the breakthrough.
It’s called BigBrain, and it’s a part of the $1.6 billion European Human Brain Projectthat's seeking to simulate the human brain on a supercomputer. Over the course of the next ten years, HBP researchers will work to understand and map the network of over a hundred billion neuronal connections that elicit emotions, volitional thought, and even consciousness itself. And to do so, the researchers will be using a progressively scaled-up multilayered simulation running on a supercomputer.
But to get there, the researchers are going to have to peer deep inside the human brain. Hence the BigBrain project. Here’s how they did it.
Slice 'n Scan
First, the researchers took a 65-year-old female human brain embedded in paraffin wax. Then, using a special large-scale tool called a microtome they cut it into 7,400 individual slices each measuring 20-microns thick.
These histological sections were then mounted on slides, stained to detect cell structures, and then digitized with a high-resolution flatbed scanner.
The entire process took 1,000 hours.
Using this data, the researchers then reconstructed the high-resolution 3D brain model on a computer. Each slice had to be painstakingly aligned and reconstructed.
From the Macroscopic to the Microscopic
Traditional brain scans are great, but they only produce data at the macroscopic level. What’s required is ultra-high resolution in three dimensions. The new anatomical tool does just that, allowing scientists to see parts of the brain at a resolution of 20-microns — a distance smaller than the size of one strand of human hair. This is a spatial resolution that improves upon previous techniques by a factor of 50.
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Here's a video produced by the researchers:
The new scans show the fine details of the brain’s microstructure down to the cellular level. What they’ve created here is a neurological atlas for small cellular circuit data, or single layers or sublayers of the cerebral cortex.
Using this map, scientists hope to gain important insights into the neurobiological basis of cognition, language, emotions, and other processes. It’ll help them study neurodegenerative disorders. They’ll compare this data to fMRI brain scans. And they’ll be able to generate a brain model with a resolution of one micron to capture details of single cell morphology.
The 3D aspect is particularly important. The human cerebral cortex is very heavily folded, making it difficult to determine thickness and other proportions with standard scanning techniques. What’s more, the cerebral cortex’s thickness changes over the course of a lifetime and is also affected by aging processes, including those linked with Alzheimer’s disease. The new technique overcomes these limitations, allowing scientists to understand the structure of different functional areas, including the motor cortex and regions important for learning and memory.
The Map is Not the Territory
There is a risk, however, of overstating the importance of this breakthrough.
As it has often been said, anatomy is not explanation. Just because we have a remarkably fine map of the human brain doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to understand it. No doubt, it will certainly help. But neuroscientists will still need to confer with cognitive scientists and other specialists if we ever hope to gain a full understanding of the human mind.
The researchers are also unduly optimistic when it comes to their timelines. They plan to simulate the entire human brain — from the molecular level to the interaction of entire brain regions — on a supercomputer in ten years. I think that’s highly unlikely. But they are on the right track by developing these sorts of techniques.
The path to uploads?
As noted earlier, the technique could also be seen as a precursor to mind uploading — the process of transferring or copying an existing human brain to a separate substrate. This latest breakthrough is a far cry from where we need to be, but it’s definitely a sign of things to come.
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And in fact, Kenneth Hayworth is working on this exact sort of thing. He’s the president of the Brain Preservation Foundation and senior scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus. He’s the co-inventor of a highly advanced brain slicing machine that can image neural circuits at the nanometer scale. Hayworth has designed and built several automated machines to implement this process.
Eventually, we’ll be able to scan brains at such a high resolution that the information that constitutes a person — a person’s very essence that’s embedded within the brain’s molecules and their precise orientation — could be reconstructed at an alternate location. Assuming we could perform a kind of conversion where we transform biological information to digital form (i.e. algorithmic equivalents), we may be able to rebuild a brain based on information like this.
Needless to say, we’ll need to scan at an insanely high resolution to capture the degree of information needed. Not only that, the amount of data required — including quite possibly the location of individual atoms — will be horrendous. But there’s no reason to believe that computers of the future won’t be up to the task.
In this video, Dr. Claudia Gravekamp, an Associate Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, describes the principles of cancer vaccination and her own lab's cutting-edge research in the field. She begins by presenting the basics of cancer and tumor immunology, then discusses the advantages of cancer vaccines compared to current therapies. Dr. Gravekamp details how these therapies leverage cytotoxic T lymphocytes to kill cancerous cells, then describes the multiple hurdles that cancer vaccines have yet to overcome, including the relative lack of naive T cells in elderly patients. Finally, Dr. Gravekamp launches into a thorough description of her own research to make better cancer vaccines using Listeria, an intracellular bacterium that does not multiply in normal tissues but does infect tumor cell.
Sounds completely counter-intuitive, doesn't it? But it's completely correct, hot water does indeed freeze faster than cold water. Even more interestingly, up until now we've had no idea why! It was a mystery. A paper published this week claims to have solved the problem once and for all. Read their explanation here: http://bit.ly/19XIeC8
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