The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Jundo]

Doctors at Duke University Medical Center this month "reanimated" a heart for a first-of-its-kind transplant performed on an adult in the United States.

Heart transplants typically come from donations after brain death, in which the still-beating heart of a person who has been declared brain dead is transplanted into a recipient. The approach used at Duke is known as a donation after circulatory death (DCD), and it relies on hearts that have stopped beating and are essentially reanimated and begin beating again.
The TransMedics Organ Care System, a warm perfusion pump, allows doctors to resuscitate and preserve hearts for transplantation. The system was used for the adult donation after circulatory death transplant at Duke University Medical Center, one of five centers in the United States approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for clinical trials of the TransMedics system.

https://us.cnn.com/2019/12/03/health...rnd/index.html

I will recite a Reanimated Heart Sutra today.

No eyes ears nose tongue ... so please donate!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Hoag's Object Is a Galaxy Within a Galaxy Within a Galaxy (and Nobody Knows Why)

Look closely at the serpent constellation slithering through the northern sky, and you might see a galaxy within a galaxy within a galaxy.

This cosmic turducken is known as Hoag's object, and it has befuddled stargazers since astronomer Arthur Hoag discovered it in 1950.

The object in question is a rare, ring-shaped galaxy measuring some 100,000 light-years across (slightly larger than the Milky Way) and located 600 million light-years from Earth. In a recent image of the oddball object taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and processed by geophysicist Benoit Blanco, a bright ring of billions of blue stars forms a perfect circle around a much smaller and denser sphere of reddish stars. In the dark gap between the two stellar circles, another ring galaxy — much, much farther away from us — peeks out to say hello.

https://www.livescience.com/hoags-ob...g-mystery.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1IyzAjnOVI

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

This Brainless, Single-Celled Blob Can Make Complex 'Decisions'

Tiny, brainless blobs might be able to make decisions: A single-celled organism can "change its mind" to avoid going near an irritating substance, according to new findings.

Over a century ago, American zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings conducted an experiment on a relatively large, trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism called Stentor roeselii. When Jennings released an irritating carmine powder around the organisms, he observed that they responded in a predictable pattern, he wrote in his findings, which he published in a text called "Behavior of the Lower Organisms" in 1906.

To avoid the powder, the organism first would try to bend its body around the powder. If that didn't work, the blob would reverse the movement of its cilia — hairlike projections that help it move and feed — to push away the surrounding particles. If that still didn't work, the organism would contract around its point of attachment on a surface to feed. And finally, if all else failed, it would detach from the surface and swim away. ...

The findings can help inform cancer research and even change the way we think about our own cells. Rather than being solely "programmed" to do something by our genes, "cells exist in a very complex ecosystem, and they are, in a way, talking and negotiating with each other, responding to signals and making decisions," Gunawardena said. Single-celled organisms, whose ancestors once ruled the ancient world, might be "much more sophisticated than we generally give them credit for," he said.

https://www.livescience.com/single-c...decisions.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Our Large, Adult Galaxy Is As Massive As 890 Billion Suns

Our home galaxy has a new, super-precise mass measurement: about 890 billion times the mass of our sun. That's 3.9 tredecillion lbs. (1.8 tredecillion kilograms), a tredecillion being a 1 with 42 zeros after it, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000. That amounts to about 6 billion billion billion elephants, 296 quadrillion Earth masses or 135 times the mass of the supermassive black hole in the image released back in April.

... But while anyone with a reasonably good telescope can spot the full Andromeda galaxy, most of the body of the Milky Way is hidden from us. Nearby stars and dust clouds block faraway stars from our view, so researchers have to use more-sophisticated technological and statistical methods to infer what how our galaxy is moving and what it looks like from the outside. ...

Of course, the Milky Way consists of more than just stars and gas and other visible things. Like with nearly all known galaxies, most of our galaxy's mass is locked up in an unseen halo of dark matter, exerting gravitational influence without forming any astrophysical objects that we can directly observe.

In this case, the researchers found that the dark matter's mass is equal to about 830 billion times the mass of our sun, or about 93% of the galaxy's total mass.

https://www.livescience.com/our-gala...good-lord.html

And, of course, that is only one galaxy in the universe ... known universe, in fact.

According to the best estimates of astronomers there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. They’ve counted the galaxies in a particular region, and multiplied this up to estimate the number for the whole universe.
http://www.physics.org/facts/sand-galaxies.asp

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

No, it's not a follow-up song to Lou Bega's one-hit wonder "Mambo No. 5." The light from the galaxy known as MAMBO-9 traveled for 13 billion years to reach us, making it the most distant star-forming galaxy ever observed with a telescope.

This monster galaxy is considered a giant stellar nursery and is full of dust, a required ingredient to form stars. The rate of star formation in a galaxy like this can reach a few thousand times the mass of our sun each year -- compared to our own galaxy, which forms three solar masses in a year.
The surprising thing about this galaxy, imaged using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, is its age. It formed 970 million years after the Big Bang, which means it began during the infancy of the universe.

Astronomers didn't expect to find gigantic stellar nursery galaxies dating this far back, but the discovery of MAMBO-9 and other galaxies from the dawn of the universe are changing their understanding.

... The telescope array in Chile, known as ALMA, is sensitive enough to detect these distant, dusty galaxies. But the biggest impediment to finding such faraway galaxies are actually other galaxies, as those closer to us block out the more distant ones with their light. Sometimes they can offer an assist through gravitational lensing, which bends light from the more distant galaxies around them, making them easier to spot. However, this can distort the distant galaxies as well, making it harder to learn more about them. But the researchers spotted MAMBO-9 without gravitational lensing, making it the most distant galaxy to be seen without this distorting effect.

"The total mass of gas and dust in the galaxy is enormous: 10 times more than all the stars in the Milky Way. This means that it has yet to build most of its stars," Casey said.

https://us.cnn.com/2019/12/12/world/mambo-9-distant-galaxy-scn/index.html

Artist's rendering of what MAMBO-9 would look like in visible light ...


ALMA radio image ...


Gassho, J

STLah

[Amelia]

This is one of my favorite threads. Thank you for keeping it up, Jundo.

Gassho
Sat today, lah

[Jundo]

Year of the Pig or Year of the Monkey? Is it a Mig or a Ponkey?

First Pig-Monkey Chimeras Were Just Created in China

Two piglets recently born in China look like average swine on the outside, but on the inside, they are (a very small) part monkey.

A team of researchers generated the pig-primate creatures by injecting monkey stem cells into fertilized pig embryos and then implanting them into surrogate sows, according to a piece by New Scientist. Two of the resulting piglets developed into interspecies animals known as chimeras, meaning that they contained DNA from two distinct individuals — in this case, a pig and a monkey.

"This is the first report of full-term pig-monkey chimeras," co-author Tang Hai, a researcher at the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing, told New Scientist. Eventually, Hai and his colleagues aim to grow human organs in animals for use in transplant procedures. For now, the team plans to stick with monkey cells, as developing human-animal chimeras presents a slew of "ethical issues," the authors noted in a report published Nov. 28 in the journal Protein & Cell.

... By scanning for spots of fluorescent green, the team found monkey cells scattered throughout multiple organs, including the heart, liver, spleen, lungs and skin.

In each organ, between one in 1,000 and one in 10,000 cells turned out to be a monkey cells — in other words, the interspecies chimeras were more than 99% pig.

Although low, the ratio of monkey to pig cells still outnumbered the maximum amount of human cells ever grown in a human-animal chimera. In 2017, scientists created human-pig chimeras that grew only one human cell for every 100,000 pig cells. The interspecies embryos were only allowed to develop for a month for ethical reasons, including the concern that humans cells might grow in the chimera's brain and grant the animal human-like consciousness, according to New Scientist.

... Stem-cell biologist Paul Knoepfler of the University of California, Davis, told New Scientist that the low ratio of monkey to pig cells seems "fairly discouraging." Additionally, the two chimeras and all eight other piglets died shortly after being born, he noted.

The exact reason for the piglets' death remains "unclear," Hai told New Scientist, but he said that he suspects the deaths are linked to the in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure rather than the injection of monkey DNA. Other scientists have also found that IVF doesn't consistently work in pigs, according to a 2019 report in the journal Theriogenology.

In the immediate future, Hai and his colleagues aim to increase the proportion of monkey cells to pig cells in future chimeras, and eventually, grow entire monkey organs in their pigs, Hai told New Scientist. In their paper, the authors noted that their work in pigs could help "pave the way" toward the "ultimate goal of human organ reconstruction in a large animal."

https://www.livescience.com/first-mo...-in-china.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Thanks cousin, for making way for us Homo Sapiens ... may we not go the same way soon ...

Between 108,000 and 117,000 years ago, the first humans to walk upright took their last stand.

Researchers have discovered the youngest fossils of Homo erectus in Central Java, Indonesia, an ancient human species that went extinct before modern humans evolved. The researchers say that their findings confirm when the species went extinct. The study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

... "Homo erectus was an incredibly long-lived species with a massive geographic distribution which makes it one of the most successful hominins that ever lived," Ciochon said.
They were the oldest early humans to have body proportions similar to modern humans, including an expanded brain case. But the Ngandong fossils take it a step further.

"The Ngandong Homo erectus fossils have the largest cranial capacity of any Homo erectus fossils," Ciochon said. "But without additional evidence for behavior, we are unable to say that they were smarter than other Homo erectus groups. Due to the large brain size, Ngandong Homo erectus is referred to as the most derived, advanced, Homo erectus."

But the site tells another story of how even the most successful species can end.

"Our research indicates that Homo erectus likely went extinct due to climate change," Ciochon said. "Homo erectus was found with a collection of animal fossils that lived in an open woodland environment similar to the environment in Africa where it evolved. The environment at Ngandong changed, and the open woodland was replaced by a rainforest. No Homo erectus fossils are found after the environment changed, so Homo erectus likely was unable to adapt to this new rainforest environment."

...
Modern humans are the only hominins that have been found in a rainforest environment, the researchers said, and that's likely due to the fact that we can adapt to live there. "They might not have been able to find food sources they normally ate, or they might have been more vulnerable to the predators in the rainforest," Ciochon said.

https://us.cnn.com/2019/12/18/world/...scn/index.html

... and thank you sun in the sky, for shining as you do ...

New type of explosion spotted on sun's surface

Astronomers spotted a magnetic explosion on the surface of the sun unlike anything they've ever seen before. Although it was initially theorized about 15 years ago, this was their first direct observation of it thanks to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Findings about the explosion published this week in the Astrophysical Journal.
They witnessed the result of an eruption on the surface of the sun, flinging up a loop of material in the sun's corona, or upper atmosphere. This erupted material is known as a prominence. The prominence then fell back toward the sun, but collided with lines of magnetic field. This created the unprecedented magnetic explosion.

... The magnetic field lines on the sun are invisible, but they're also impacted by the super-heated charged particles of plasma nearby. For this observation, the Solar Dynamics Observatory was able to zero in on plasma reached between 1.8 and 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit.
For years, scientists have attempted to understand why the sun's corona is actually millions of degrees hotter than the sun itself. NASA's Parker Solar Probe is investigating that right now as it closely orbits the sun.

https://us.cnn.com/2019/12/18/world/...rnd/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Some brain science stories of the past year that I don't believe have been mentioned before ...

Angry dreams

People can experience many emotions while sleeping, even anger. Researchers discovered that by analyzing brain activity, they could tell whether or not a person had angry dreams.

===========

Missing bulbs

a group of researchers discovered a small subset of people who can smell, even though they're missing a critical brain region needed to be able to smell. The olfactory bulbs sit at the front of the brain and process information about smells from the nose. Researchers discovered this by chance when they examined the brain scans of a 29-year-old woman who could smell normally and saw that she was missing her olfactory bulbs. They later found a couple of other women who were also missing their olfactory bulbs but claimed to be able to smell. They performed brain scans and smell tests on these women, and indeed, their story checked out. The researchers don't know exactly what led to this magical ability to smell, but they think that another part of the brain could have taken on the role of the olfactory bulbs, demonstrating the brain's great ability to remold itself.

===========

Brain half missing

The brain has a remarkable ability to change and adapt, as demonstrated in a small group of people who had half their brains removed as children to reduce epileptic seizures. Despite missing an entire half of their brains, they functioned just fine because the remaining half strengthened, according to a new study. The team analyzed the brains of six adults in their 20s and 30s who had half their brains removed when they were between 3 months old and 11 years old and compared them with others whose brains were intact. Brain scans showed that among patients with only one brain hemisphere, brain regions involved in the same network (such as vision) worked together just as well as they did in those whose brains were intact. They also found that the connectivity between parts of different brain networks was stronger in patients who had a hemisphere removed, which suggests that the brain is able to compensate for the loss of a big part of itself.

===========

Reviving dead brains

Scientists restored brain circulation and cellular activity in pigs' brains hours after they died. This radical experiment challenged the prominent idea that after death, the brain undergoes sudden and irreversible damage. But a group of researchers showed that cell death occurs over a longer period of time, and in some cases, can even be postponed or reversed. The researchers developed a system for studying postmortem brains called "BrainEx," in which they pumped a synthetic blood substitute into the brain's arteries. They pumped this solution into 32 pig brains 4 hours after the animals died and let the solution stay in the brain for 6 hours. They found that the system preserved brain cell structure, reduced cell death and restored some cellular activity. Although the researchers emphasized that they didn't observe any kind of activity that indicated that the brain was aware or conscious, the findings have some scientists questioning what it means to be alive.

https://www.livescience.com/brain-findings-2019.html

... and more at that link.

Gassho, J
stlah

[Jundo]

Secrets of an astonishingly well-preserved 2,600-year-old human brain

In 2008, York Archaeological Trust researchers were excavating the Heslington Iron Age site at the University of York when they uncovered the man's skull face down in a clay-rich pit. The jaw and two vertebrae were still attached. But while cleaning the skull, they realized there was more than just dirt inside."I peered though the hole at the base of the skull to investigate and to my surprise saw a quantity of bright yellow spongy material. It was unlike anything I had seen before," said Rachel Cubitt, from the trust's Finds Department. They confirmed that it was incredibly well-preserved brain material and removed the top of the skull for further study. It was dated to between 482 and 673 BC, the start of the Iron Age. Even details like folds in the brain were still intact in the yellowish-brown mass.

...

The researchers could find no evidence for any artificial preservation techniques or tannins, naturally occurring chemicals that help preserve organic material. They believe some type of acidic fluid might have breached the brain and prevented enzymes from breaking it down. ... Findings about this brain's preservation and its proteins have benefits for current protein biomarker research, medicine and the biomedical field, in addition to archeology, according to the researchers. ... This has implications for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia, which involve harmful protein folding, according to the researchers.
https://us.cnn.com/2020/01/08/health...rnd/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

And ...

Unique Brain Signal Just Discovered. And It Might Make Us 'Human'

A new study suggests that human neurons may have more computing power than once thought.

Cells nestled in the outermost layers of the human brain generate a special kind of electrical signal that might grant them an extra boost of computing power, new research suggests. What's more, this signal may be unique to humans — and may explain our unique intelligence, according to the study authors.

Brain cells, or neurons, link up through long, branching wires and shuttle messages along these cables to communicate with each other. Each neuron has both an outgoing wire, called an axon, and a wire that receives incoming messages, known as a dendrite. The dendrite passes on information to the rest of the neuron through bursts of electrical activity. Depending on how the brain is wired up, each dendrite may receive hundreds of thousands of signals from other neurons along its length. While scientists believe these electrical spikes help wire the brain and may underlie abilities like learning and memory, the exact role of dendrites in human cognition remains a mystery.

Now, researchers have uncovered a new flavor of electrical spike in human dendrites — one they think might allow the cells to perform computations once thought too complex for a single neuron to tackle on its own. The study, published Jan. 3 in the journal Science, notes that the newfound electrical property has never been observed in any animal tissue other than human, raising the question of whether the signal uniquely contributes to human intelligence, or to that of primates, our evolutionary cousins.

... But what does this mean in terms of actual brain function? It means that dendrites may be processing information at each and every point along their lengths, working as a unified network to decide which information to send along, which to discard and which to handle alone, Larkum said.

"It doesn't look that the cell is just adding things up — it's also throwing things away," Mehta told Live Science. (In this case, the "throw away" signals would be excitatory signals that are not properly tuned to the dendritic region's "sweet spot.") This computational superpower could enable dendrites to take on functions once thought to be the work of whole neural networks; for instance, Mehta theorizes that individual dendrites could even encode memories. ...

https://www.livescience.com/newfound-brain-signal-discovered-in-human-neurons.html

Mysterious 'Wave' of Star-Forming Gas May Be the Largest Structure in the Galaxy

Orion's belt may be more than just a waist of space.

According to new research published today (Jan. 7) in the journal Nature, the girdled constellation may also be a small piece of the single largest structure ever detected in the Milky Way galaxy — a swooping stream of gas and baby stars that astronomers have dubbed "the Radcliffe Wave."

Spanning about 9,000 light-years (or about 9% of the galaxy's diameter), the unbroken wave of stars begins near Orion in a trough about 500 light-years below the Milky Way's disk. The wave swoops upward through the constellations of Taurus and Perseus, then finally crests near the constellation Cepheus, 500 light-years above the galaxy's middle. The entire undulating structure also stretches about 400 light-years deep, includes some 800 million stars and is dense with active star-forming gas (known in more delightful terms as "stellar nurseries").

... "We don't know what causes this shape but it could be like a ripple in a pond, as if something extraordinarily massive landed in our galaxy," Alves said.

Prior studies of the Gould Belt have suggested the same. Perhaps a gigantic blob of dark matter crashed into the young gas cloud millions of years ago, warping the galaxy's gravity and scattering the nearest stars into the pattern seen today, one 2009 study in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society posited.

"What we do know is that our sun interacts with this structure," Alves said.

According to the researchers, stellar velocity data suggests that our solar system passed through the Radcliffe Wave some 13 million years ago — and, in about another 13 million years, will cross into it again.

"Sort of like we are 'surfing the wave,'" Alves added.
https://www.livescience.com/radcliff...structure.html

Mysterious seismic hums detected around the world were likely caused by an unusual geologic event — the rumblings of a magma-filled reservoir deep under the Indian Ocean, a new study finds.

These odd hums were an unconventional geologic birth announcement. A few months after the sounds rippled around the Earth, a new underwater volcano was born off the coast of the island of Mayotte, located between Madagascar and Mozambique in the Indian Ocean.

The new findings provide a detailed, one-year timeline of the newborn volcano's birth, which would make any mother (in this case, Mother Earth) proud. The study details how magma from a reservoir about 20 miles (35 kilometers) under the ocean floor migrated upward, traveling through Earth's crust until it reached the seafloor and created the new volcano.

https://www.livescience.com/underwater-volcano-hum.html

Creator of 1st CRISPR Babies Gets Prison Sentence, Reignites Ethical Debate

... news that Chinese researcher He Jiankui had created the world's first genome-edited twins.

Now, commentaries are focused on the news that He has been sentenced to three years in prison and fined 3 million yuan ($560,000) for practicing medicine without a license, violating Chinese regulations on human-assisted reproductive technology and fabricating ethical review documents. ...

Some scientists believe that He's sentence should have been harsher. Others believe the penalties are sufficient and will be an effective deterrent.
Still other scientists bemoan the fact that scientists are being sent to jail. At the same time, they acknowledge that these are unusual circumstances. For example, Jennifer Doudna, one of the pioneers of CRISPR technology, told the Associated Press: "As a scientist, one does not like to see scientists going to jail, but this was an unusual case … [He's work was] clearly wrong in many ways."

... In December 2015, the organizing committee of the First International Summit on Gene Editing — of which I was a member — issued a statement stipulating that "it would be irresponsible to proceed with heritable human genome editing unless and until (i) the relevant safety and efficacy issues have been resolved … and (ii) there is broad societal consensus."

This statement was widely, and in my view appropriately, described by the media as a call for a moratorium on heritable human genome editing. Almost immediately thereafter, however, prominent scientists insisted that a moratorium was uncalled for.

This perspective was crystalized in the February 2017 report Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics and Governance by the U.S. National Academy of Science and National Academy of Medicine. This report concluded that "clinical trials using heritable germline genome editing should be permitted," provided there was a compelling reason and there was strict oversight limiting use of the technology to specific criteria.

... https://www.livescience.com/creator-...-sentence.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Amelia]

I have been wondering about that hum sound since it was first reported!

Gassho
Sat today, lah

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

[Jundo]

Another line has been officially transcended ... or soon ...

The Samsung-backed company STAR Labs just unveiled its much-hyped AI technology called Neon, which the company describes as a digital human being. ... Mistry admits the technology still needs work ("It's just a baby right now"), but his vision is for "the digital species" to one day be everywhere — in your favorite chat applications, home or stores. Instead of ordering from kiosk buttons in a fast food restaurant, you could have a natural conversation with a realistic-looking AI human.
If properly executed, the creations, which are addressed by names like Frank and Hanna (rather than something like "Hey Google"), could present an intriguing yet uncomfortable glimpse into what human-like AI lifeforms could mean for our future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWTwV8AUFtg

More here ...

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/10/tech/samsung-neon/index.html

NEON Zen teacher soon?

Gassho, J

STLah

[Kotei]

Thank you, I missed that one...
Using this AI-'human' as a computer-human interface is one of the use cases, they mentioned...
Imho it has a serious bandwidth issue (amount and speed of data transmission to/from our brain is limited).
The next line regarding this seems to be crossed quite soon, too.

Neuralink, a BMI (Brain Machine Interface) company Mr. Musk is invested in, is planning on implanting 'Neuralink' into some human brains by the end of this year.
Telepathy? Direct wireless link between the AI-clouds and our brains? Maybe possible in the long-run.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jOjh6lwp9w

Gassho,
Kotei sat/lah today.

[Tai Shi]

Jerry Garcia, May 20, 1990 “Make it to the promised Land. Gotta Love One Another when we make it to the Promised Land” My daughter 1 year old, and in December I am an MFA, a trained poet! December 15, 1990!
Tai Shi
Calm Poetry
Jan. 12, 2020
Sat/ lah
30 years later—
Gassho.


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