The SRK Science Thread 2.0

[hubcapsignstop]

why is it called sex if its purpose is not reproduction? Horizontal gene transfer has been known for a long time and is recognized as an important element in eukaryotic evolution, and I dont think any news mags tried redefining it as sex. Is this further attempts at hypersexualizing our culture and our children?
hahaa

[forte95]

It’s sex because the cells love each other

Stop judging them, just because they can’t reproduce they can’t express their love? Cellulophobe

Spoiler

http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20131126013116/adventuretimewithfinnandjake/images/8/81/Kappa.png

[ThePurpleBunny]

Water vapor detected in clear skies on Neptune-sized exoplanet

[ThePurpleBunny]

Newfound Super-Bright Neutron Star Baffles Scientists And Should Not Exist

[Hecatom]

Comet's close encounter with Mars a boon for science

[Don_Barracuda]

Paralysed man walks again after cell transplant

A paralysed man has been able to walk again after a pioneering therapy that involved transplanting cells from his nasal cavity into his spinal cord.

Darek Fidyka, who was paralysed from the chest down in a knife attack in 2010, can now walk using a frame.
The treatment, a world first, was carried out by surgeons in Poland in collaboration with scientists in London.

Details of the research are published in the journal Cell Transplantation.

BBC One’s Panorama programme had unique access to the project and spent a year charting the patient’s rehabilitation.
Darek Fidyka, 40, was paralysed after being stabbed repeatedly in the back in the 2010 attack.

He said walking again - with the support of a frame - was “an incredible feeling”, adding: "When you can’t feel almost half your body, you are helpless, but when it starts coming back it’s like you were born again."
Prof Geoff Raisman, chair of neural regeneration at University College London’s Institute of Neurology, led the UK research team.

He said what had been achieved was “more impressive than man walking on the moon”.

The treatment used olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) - specialist cells that form part of the sense of smell.

OECs act as pathway cells that enable nerve fibres in the olfactory system to be continually renewed.

In the first of two operations, surgeons removed one of the patient’s olfactory bulbs and grew the cells in culture.

Two weeks later they transplanted the OECs into the spinal cord, which had been cut through in the knife attack apart from a thin strip of scar tissue on the right. They had just a drop of material to work with - about 500,000 cells.

About 100 micro-injections of OECs were made above and below the injury.

Four thin strips of nerve tissue were taken from the patient’s ankle and placed across an 8mm (0.3in) gap on the left side of the cord.

The scientists believe the OECs provided a pathway to enable fibres above and below the injury to reconnect, using the nerve grafts to bridge the gap in the cord.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/78392000/gif/_78392534_spinal_cord_624.gif

Video and more information here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-29645760

http://img.pandawhale.com/post-29085-Jesse-Pinkman-YEAH-SCIENCE-gif-2wAB.gif

[Don_Barracuda]

Scientists create a crystal that can absorb and release oxygen. Potential a diver could carry a few grains of crystals because it could take oxygen from the water.

http://www.sdu.dk/en/om_sdu/fakulteterne/naturvidenskab/nyheder/2014_09_30_iltsluger

[Tekno_Virus]

[Serpent]

Science funding is in such an awful state as of now; I remember I posted something in this thread regarding Obama’s “Brain Initiative” to increase grants for Neuroscience research. It totaled something like 40 grants or some bullshit the last time I checked, which means my PI and lab group had no way of getting this funding. Meanwhile the sequester did more damage than that to NIH as a whole. /rant

Science funding is in an awful state right now. It is so vast that it has created bloated research programs that universities have learned to exploit to great benefit (most people would be surprised exactly what fractions of grants (tax $$$) goes to the universities as opposed to the research). Universities are pumping out grad degrees at such a rate to actually devalue them. In most STEM feilds in the US the market is so saturated recent PhDs are facing record unemployment. Per chance is your Neuroscience field one of the lucky ones? It is no coincidence that the only people parroting the ‘US is STEM deficient’ myth are education institutions, politicians, and savvy CEOs (the CEOs know that the Universities are diluting the value of the degrees to thier benefit). And universities arent really letting poor quality grad students go, they need them to keep teaching labs full of paying undergrads. It is easy as ever to get a PhD. The bubble created by the vast increases in NIH/NSF funding has left out of work PhDs rotting in deadend postdocs working 90h/wk for peanuts or leaving their feild altogether. Another side effect is the sense of entitlement that PIs feel for tax money to carry out research so they can keep the cycle going. Sure alot of the research is good and important, but alot of it is indeed of dubious value. How is the job placement in the Neuroscience field?

A thousand times this! Anyone actually in the STEM fields that has had to deal with real employment has known this, and it’s not new! It’s a decades old problem!

Essentially for Science it’s med school or bust. I have a science background and I’ve mentioned it before.

Tech is slightly better. Math is worse. Engineering is sort of in the middle, but really only electrical and mechanical have any kind of demand, and there are far more graduates than regular jobs for them, so it turns out the military actually employs most of the engineers. If you want to serve that’s fine, but I don’t think most of them had that as a first option.

And forget just going with an undergrad degree the SM fields. There is absolutely zero interest for that, hence why hubcap has to mention PhDs. When you add in H1-b visas actually even TE have some big issues and lowered job security and salary expectations for many.

Neuroscience from the people I know who have gone to that type of work is usually more from the medical field side, that is, practicing doctors will move into that. A lot of doctors hate medical practice, and if you’re going to hire researchers for neuroscience naturally you will take any medical doctor over some non-medical doctor for the field, with very few exceptions.

Anyway to the more recent posts, there is some very old research that mentions magnetic fields and certain psychic energies. Most of the research has long ago been dropped or just isn’t popularly mentioned though. Either because it’s too hard to measure and really follow up on it, or because there isn’t really much faith in it leading to anything. So most of it is usually hoaxes and exaggerations. You can build a psychic box if you’re interested in it, I always wondered if anyone actually did it and tried it out and what their results were. http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_psycho17.htm

For what it’s worth, I certainly believe in magnetic fields on a personal level. And it seems like you have more than the traditional five senses (people generally can feel if they are being watched, even though they can’t see it or have any reason to have that suspicion). While I’m not ready to identify that as telekinetic or psychic power (I certainly do not believe people can see the future) I am also certain our understanding has a very massive gap in terms of human ability to perceive things, and without a better word for it now, we can call it psychic or mental communication and related.

[white_shadow]

…

[white_shadow]

I’m loving these updates about impossibly bright neutron stars and paralysis healing. I theorize that the neutron star might be a slightly more massive, but physically smaller, quark star, whose interactions with matter might be more volatile and explosive.

This is interesting:

Can Our Bodies Predict the Future?

People’s bodies know a big event is coming just before it happens, at least according to a new study.

If true, the research, published Oct. 17 in the journal Frontiers of Perception, suggests something fundamental about the laws of nature has yet to be discovered.

“The claim is that events can be predicted without any cues,” said Julia Mossbridge, a Northwestern University neuroscientist who co-authored the study. “This evidence suggests the effect is real but small. So the question is: How does it work?”

Other scientists are skeptical of this interpretation, however. They suggest some bias in which studies get published could play a role in seeing an effect where there is none.

Real effect?

Many studies have shown that physical responses including heart rate, pupil dilation and brain activity change between one and 10 seconds before people see a scary image (like a slithering snake). In most of these experiments, frightening pictures were randomly interspersed with more-neutral ones, so that in theory participants didn’t have any clues about which photo would pop up next. But because the finding seemed so unnatural, those studies were understandably met with skepticism.

To see whether the effect was real, Mossbridge and her team analyzed over two dozen of these studies. As part of the analysis, they threw out any experiments in which they saw bias or flaws.

They still found a “presentiment” effect, in which measures of physiological excitement changed seconds before an event. The finding suggests that people’s bodies subconsciously sense the future when something important is about to happen, even if the people don’t know it.

For instance, if you were a day-trader betting lots of money on one stock, “10 seconds beforehand you might predict your stock tanking,” Mossbridge told LiveScience.

The paper doesn’t claim that people are psychic or have supernatural or paranormal powers. Instead, the authors believe presentiment is a real, physical effect that obeys natural laws — just ones that nobody understands, Mossbridge said. [Infographic: Belief in the Paranormal]

Researchers skeptical

But others doubt presentiment exists at all.

While the statistical methods used in the study are sound, that doesn’t mean presentiment is real, said Rufin VanRullen, a cognitive scientist at the Center for Research on the Brain and Cognition, in an email.

“All it means is that there is a statistical trend for scientists who search for these so-called presentiment effects to actually find them,” wrote VanRullen, who was not involved in the study.

Instead, it’s more likely that the experiments are biased, perhaps unintentionally, in a way the study authors missed, Kyle Elliott Mathewson, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said via email.
**
It’s also possible that scores of researchers looked for this result, failed to find it and forgot all about it, added Mathewson, who like VanRullen wasn’t involved in the study. Those studies would never be published, he said, so the overall effect in the published studies would be biased.

According to the researchers, in order for such bias to explain their results, at least 87 other unpublished studies would need to show no effect.

“Between psychology labs and parapsychology investigations, I can imagine this many failed experiments that go unreported easily,” Mathewson wrote.**

Can Our Bodies Predict the Future?

I’ve heard of this test before and I found it quite intriguing, but the fact that it has shown repeated and independently tested success really raises an eyebrow. Causality on a quantum level behaves in a similarly eerie way (i.e. as long as the effect shares perfect energy equivalence with the cause, the effect can occur first before the cause without violating physics), considering our brains run on electric impulses and has a weak, but existing electromagnetic field, the phenomena doesn’t sound impossible.

[ThePurpleBunny]

Videos of chemical reactions.

http://beautifulchemistry.net/reactions.html

In Beautiful Chemistry, we used a 4K UltraHD camera and special lenses to capture chemical reactions in astonishing detail without the distraction of beakers and test tubes. At the molecular scale, we used advanced computer graphics and interactive technology to showcase some of the most beautiful chemical structures selected from a large volume of scientific literature.

[pherai]

wow! @“white shadow” thats gotta be the most awe inspiring thing i’ve read in recent memory. trying very hard not to abandon all skepticism there. so cool

[white_shadow]

wow! @“white shadow” thats gotta be the most awe inspiring thing i’ve read in recent memory. trying very hard not to abandon all skepticism there. so cool

That’s the thing. Every era has to have a paradigm shift where the once impossible becomes an well-known axiom. There was a time where Einstein’s theory of relativity was hotly contested by the scientific status quo; famed scientists of their time outright scoffing the theory and even dismissing the results once it was verified. The idea that gravity bent space and curved light was preposterous to them. Now it’s common scientific knowledge.

Conventions change because of the discoveries of the few, not the many- who comfortably rest upon the knowledge of their predecessors.

Scientists once dismissed that organisms could harness fragile quantum events for survival, but now they’ve discovered that birds can use quantum entanglement to literally see the earth’s magnetic field for navigation, and that algae can use quantum coherence to make photosynthesizing of photons nearly 100% efficient. Not only are these quantum events occurring, but these creatures have evolved to use it for survival.

In the same way, this subconscious reaction to an exciting event 10 seconds or less before it occurs not only sounds possible, but has an evolutionary advantage. Even if your conscious mind doesn’t know what’s coming next, your body might prime itself to initiate a flight or fight response once the actual event occurs. This type of theory corresponds with bats, who react to echolocation faster than what is synaptically possible, and can track their prey’s constant movement within microseconds.

This doesn’t have to be treated like some kind of mysticism, but just a phenomena that might have a currently inexplicable, but still scientific explanation, yet to be deciphered. This might also explain the qualia of consciousness and why it feels the way it does. Heck, I used to believe deja vu was just some glitch in the brain when we encounter a familiar scenario similar to a prior experience, but after several strong and very specific experiences of it over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised if some mild precognition might be at work.

[hubcapsignstop]

But is a Kuhnian paradigm shift (the mechanism behind which is, ironically, diametrically opposed to the idea that scientific knowledge is driven by the individual) going to come from a publication in the Journal ‘Frontiers of Perception’?

[MechWarrior]

Mofugga, here’s your “paradigm shift” of this era!

Laser fusion experiment extracts net energy from fuel

Took 70 years, since World War II, but now we here.
And this was BEFORE the Lockheed-Martin reactor announcement, MONTHS before.
The future is now.
Literally.

[MCP]

That says net energy from fuel, not total system input. It’s still a long way off.

That said, I enjoy your enthusiasm about fusion.

edit: I can’t claim this is 100% correct because this story happened about a year ago I think; iirc, the fuel input is less than 1% of the total energy input into the system.

[MechWarrior]

I’m aware of the details, but a milestone is a milestone. lol

[forte95]

In hindsight, quantum effects in biological processes shouldn’t have been surprising lol. The bird thing and algae thing are definitely surprising because it’s a pretty extreme case where the processes almost fully rely on quantum effects, but I could guess most species have evolved some form of control over quantum effects even if it’s just petty stuff.

Like maybe what happens between neurons. Electrical signals jump between the synapses because of conductive neurotransmitters, right? Maybe some neurotransmitters take advantage of quantum tunneling current lol, idk

It’s just that we’ve only come to know about quantum effects recently, but organisms have probably been taking advantage of quantum effects for a long time now.

It’s pretty sublime when you think about it

[Don_Barracuda]

deleted - posted in the engineering thread