Sapere Aude
Tag: science
Researchers has come up with a way to reduce immune-system rejection of implantable devices used for drug delivery, tissue engineering, or sensing. Previous research found that smooth surfaces, especially spheres, are better — but counterintuitively, larger spheres actually work better at reducing scar tissue. “We realized that regardless of what the composition of the material is, this effect still persists, and that made it a lot more exciting because it’s a lot more generalizable”.
The pulses stimulated angiogenesis — the process by which new blood vessels form — increasing blood flow to the damaged area and resulting in wounds healing significantly faster.
PSR B1620-26 b is an extrasolar planet located 12k light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius. it is one of the oldest planets in the universe, at 12.7 ga
Can life survive for billions of years longer than the expected timeline on Earth? As scientists discover older and older solar systems, it’s likely that before long we’ll find an ancient planet in a habitable zone. Knowing if life is possible on this exoplanet would have immense implications for habitability and the development of ancient life
We used to think that once a cell reaches full maturation, its DNA is totally stable, including the molecular tags attached to it to control its genes and maintain the cell’s identity. Some cells actually alter their DNA all the time, just to perform everyday functions
2021-08-30: DNA breaks for memory consolidation
When the team mapped genes undergoing double-strand breaks in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus of mice that had been shocked, they found breaks occurring near 100s of genes, many of which were involved in synaptic processes related to memory. DNA breakage might be a regulatory mechanism in many other cell types. But even if breaking DNA is a particularly fast way to induce crucial gene expression, whether for memory consolidation or for other cellular functions, it’s also risky. If the double-strand breaks occur at the same locations over and over again and aren’t properly repaired, genetic information could be lost. Moreover, “this type of gene regulation could render neurons vulnerable to genomic lesions, especially during aging and under neurotoxic conditions. It is interesting that it’s used so intensively in the brain, and that the cells can get away with it without incurring damage that’s devastating.”
Is Our Universe a One-Off Fluke, or an Endless Cycle?
If we throw out inflation theory, what other explanations do we have?
It’s possible that what we think of as the “bang” that started everything was really just another bounce—a transition from a preexisting phase of contraction into one of rapid expansion. With that idea, there’s a whole new domain of time, before the bounce, before the bang, with which you can introduce processes that would naturally smooth and flatten the universe. The contraction would be very gentle and slow compared to the very rapid inflationary expansion, but it would still go at a non-uniform rate. This would translate into fluctuations of temperature and density after the bounce consistent with the fluctuations we see in the cosmic microwave background. This leads to a picture of a cyclical universe. Could there have been a series of bounces in the past? It’s a natural possibility. With each bounce, there’s always going to be this smoothing, flattening process that ends up erasing information, or spreading out information so thinly from what preceded it, that there is almost no trace of it in the universe that you can directly find. The way you get around the problem of beginning is that there is no beginning. It was always there doing this, forever in the past and forever in the future.
A pure quantum musical state would then be made up of a linear combination of the 7 notes with a specific probability associated with each. And a quantum melody would be the evolution of such a state over time.
An audience listening to such a melody would have a bizarre experience. In the classical world, every member of the audience hears the same sequence of notes. But when a quantum musical state is observed, it can collapse into any one of the notes that make it up. The note that is formed is entirely random but the probability that it occurs depends on the precise linear makeup of the state.
this sounds like a greg egan novel.
Could we? most likely not, but if so:
For a society to stand any chance of industrialising, it would have to focus its efforts in certain, very favorable natural environments: not the coal-island of 18th-century Britain, but perhaps areas of Scandinavia or Canada that combine fast-flowing streams for hydroelectric power and large areas of forest that can be harvested sustainably for thermal energy
2015-08-31:
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? While Feynman’s sentence is all good and true, it isn’t particularly useful in an immediate pragmatic sense. I wrote a book recently which was intended as a guidebook for rebooting civilization after an apocalypse, looking at the key technologies and central scientific principles that underpin our lives – the behind-the-scenes fundamentals that we all just take for granted today – and what enabled society to progress through the centuries of history. I argue how the greatest invention of history is the scientific method itself – the knowledge-generation machinery that we have been using for over 350 years now to come to understand how the world works. So if you could preserve only one single sentence, I would push for: ‘The natural world is not governed by whimsical gods, but is essentially mechanical and can therefore be understood and then predicted by people, using careful observation, experimentation, and measurement, and importantly by testing your explanations to try to refute them.’ It’s this reiterative process of refinement that sets science apart from any other system for explaining how the world works.
Our trick was to develop a system that breaks the wood polymers apart in the same proportion as classical aging. Then force the esterification
this is the synthetic diamonds of spirits
In 807 the caliph in Baghdad sent Charlemagne a gift the like of which had never been seen in the Christian empire: a brass water clock. It chimed the hours by dropping small metal balls into a bowl. Instead of a numbered dial, the clock displayed the time with 12 mechanical horsemen that popped out of small windows, rather like an Advent calendar
Instead of focusing on how to kill specific pathogens, THoR seeks to catalyze the development of breakthrough interventions that would increase the ability of patients’ own bodies to tolerate a broad range of pathogens. The program will explore the fundamental biology of host tolerance in animal populations with the goal of expanding treatment options for humans in the future.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 