Science Of The Day
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- sted1
- sted1
- sarahfailin1
http://www.popsci.com/3d-bioprin…
A team of researchers from Wake Forest University has created a 3D bioprinting tool that creates large synthetic bone, cartilage, and muscle tissue that is viable for weeks or months at a time when implanted in animals. With a bit more work, the researchers believe these 3D printed tissues could be transplanted into humans, according to a study published today in Nature Biotechology.
- sausages0
Kermit found
- i_monk1
An 'earthflow' in Russia.
- crazyAl_dizzle
- what is causing this?Gnash
- coolmoldero
- Russia. where even nature does whatever the fuck it wants to do._niko
- WTF is wrong with Russia?utopian
- Russia is like an endless Fail of day thread.utopian
- that is the melting of permafrost. maybe linked to climate change. or putin's asslowimpakt
- Glacier comin' thrulambsy
- The sound of those trees breaking makes it super creepy...baseline_shift
- lol @ utopianinteliboy
- slava vamgilgamush
- In Soviet Russia... ah fuck it.ETM
- But seriously... Russia is so bad even the very earth is trying to leave :)ETM
- yuriman1
One more step along the long road towards brain-to-brain interfaces
Imagine being able to communicate with others through only your thoughts. No words, no signs are exchanged: only pure information travelling directly from one brain to another. Of course, that is the stuff of dreams and science-fiction flicks: in the real world, the closest that scientists have come to establishing direct communication between brains involves an extremely convoluted apparatus and would take hours to transmit the amount of information you typically exchange in a 2-minute conversation. Nevertheless, research on these brain-to-brain interfaces, as they are called, is valuable because it might one day allow patients with brain damage who cannot speak to communicate using other means. In a recent PLOS ONE report, Andrea Stocco, Rajesh Rao and colleagues from the University of Washington, USA, expand on previous research to demonstrate that BBIs can actually be used to solve problems, albeit in the narrow sense of the experimental laboratory.“Guess what I’m thinking about”
In the experiment, Rao and colleagues built upon previous research from their lab and others to design the brain-to-brain interface. Two participants played a game of “guess what I’m thinking about”, in which the inquirer (the one doing the guessing) asked “yes-or-no” questions to the respondent (the one doing the thinking about). In scientific experiments, the number of parameters must often be kept as low as possible, and this one was no exception: the responder had to think of one object among 8 in a predetermined category (for instance, “dog” among 7 other animals), and the inquirer, who knew the list of objects but ignored which one was selected by the respondent, could only ask three predetermined “yes-or-no” questions (e.g. “Does it fly?”). It is in the way the responder’s answers were communicated to the inquirer that the brain-to-brain interface kicked in.
From brain to brain via EEG and magnetic pulses
To indicate his or her answer, the respondent directed his or her gaze to either of two LED lights, one flashing at 13 Hz coding for “yes”, the other flashing at 12 Hz for “no”. The respondent’s brain responded to the flashing light at the corresponding frequency, and that cerebral activity could be picked up reliably and decoded in real-time by an EEG system. The “yes-or-no” answer was then transmitted to the inquirer’s brain using a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) machine. TMS allows stimulating the cerebral cortex non-invasively by sending sharp magnetic pulses through the scalp and skull, which in turn briefly change the activity of neurons in a given patch of cerebral cortex. When applied to the visual cortex at the back of the head, TMS pulses trigger the perception of brief flashes of light called phosphenes. Here, Rao and colleagues simply controlled the intensity of the TMS pulses so that a “yes” answer would reliably induce the perception of a phosphene by the inquirer, whereas a “no” answer would not.
Article: http://blogs.plos.org/neuro/2015…
- Those 3 paragraphs sum it up well. Here's the whole paper: http://journals.plos…yuriman
- Yeah this shit blows my mind (pun intended). They've come a long way since working with rats on this.
The idea of sharing brain states is insanetwooh
- utopian1
This gigantic void is the biggest structure we've ever discovered in the universe
- pablo280
- Hindu god Ganesha got his head because of the presence of plastic surgeons in ancient India...uan
- http://www.washingto…uan
- They should really term this a body transplant.monospaced
- antimotion1
- what is information? particles?
the information abounding going particles is returned by a chaotic 'and useless' *** this resolves the information paradox.uan - for all practical purposes the information is lost.
@8:26
what is he telling?uan - http://www.washingto… here's a nice summarysarahfailin
- it's amazing that this guy can still communicate.utopian
- what is information? particles?
- sarahfailin1
Two supermassive blackholes poised to collide within merging galaxies, 3.5 billion light years away. Will explode with the energy of 100 million supernovae, mostly in the form of gravitational waves. The galaxy(ies) could be completely blown apart by the force of the explosion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/2…
- uan1
Mummified monk found inside 1,000-year-old Buddha statue
The CT scan and endoscopy revealed more than just the mummified remains of Liuquan. Samples of a material that has yet to be identified were taken from the thoracic and abdominal cavities, and something else extraordinary was discovered: in the spaces once occupied by organs, the team found scraps of paper scribed with ancient Chinese characters.
- religion thread?sarahfailin
- more on the science side I thought.uan
- Archeology, anthropology. It documents the history of our species. I'm for it.jtb26
- In some way these guys were trying to reach out beyond their life and into some greater beyond. Documenting this does that in a way.jtb26
- i_monk0
Stopping HIV with an artificial protein
http://news.sciencemag.org/biolo…
For 30 years, researchers have struggled to determine which immune responses best foil HIV, information that has guided the design of AIDS vaccines and other prevention approaches. Now, a research team has shown that a lab-made molecule that mimics an antibody from our immune system may have more protective power than anything the body produces.
- renderedred1
15 French volunteers leave cave after 40 days without daylight or clocks
Deep Time project investigated how a lack of external contact would affect sense of time – and two thirds wanted to stay longer
- moldero0
'New material uses the cold darkness of the Universe to cool your house'
Engineers from Stanford University in the US have created a material that keeps your house cool by beaming heat back into the “cold darkness of the Universe”.The material reflects sunlight, just like a regular mirror, but most importantly, it also beams heat from inside a building straight into outer space. This means that it lowers the temperature of anything that’s it’s placed on by up to five degrees, even if it’s sitting in direct sunlight - and all without electricity.
The material works using a phenomenon called radiative cooling, which is a way of passively transferring heat from one place to somewhere cooler. The phenomenon already happens all the time - our body emits heat into the cooler air around us, and if it’s cold outside, our house will lose heat to the atmosphere.
But of course, this doesn’t help you much if you’re trying to keep your house cool on a day when the outside air is hotter than your home - instead we rely on electricity-intensive methods of keeping things cool. Right now in the US, 15 percent of the country’s electricity is used on air conditioning.
Now, however, the Stanford team has found a way to transfer the heat from our homes to a place that’s always cold - the Universe. The material is described in the current issue of Nature.
Outside of Earth’s atmosphere, the Universe has an average temperature of just under thee Kelvin (-270 degrees Celsius), which means that it pretty much absorbs all the heat we can possibly pump into it. To take advantage of this, the engineers made a material that first absorbs heat and then sends it directly into outer space, bypassing our atmosphere altogether.
That required finding a wavelength that wouldn’t be absorbed by our atmosphere and would make its way straight into outer space - it turns out infrared light with a wavelength between 8 and 13 micrometres does just that.
The researchers then made a structure that absorbs heat from its surroundings and is tuned to only radiate it out at these specific wavelengths. In the illustration above, it's shown reflecting regular sunlight (yellow) and also beaming heat out at this specific wavelength (red).
This “cosmic fridge”, as the team calls it, is made up of seven sheets of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver. In total it’s only 1.8 microns thick, and can be produced en masse in existing facilities, according to the researchers.
This means that it’s a technology we could pretty much put into use straight away.
The only remaining issue to overcome at the moment is how to get the heat from inside a building through the exterior walls and into the new material, so that it can beamed into outer space.
If we can work that out, and manage to produce this material cheaply and quickly, it could drastically change the way we cool our homes and result in huge energy demand reductions. It can also help to cool off-grid properties and improve quality of life in developing areas.
- i_monk0
- But I saw this 4 hour youtube video that said it's a scam....hereswhatidid
- ill buy it, not buying those cancer bulbs though.moldero
- little advice, even if it congratulates your world view, get the habit of asking for sources, this image has noneGeorgesIV