Science news of the day thread.

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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Wed Mar 24, 2021 6:39 pm

Scientists discover why the human brain is so big

Molecular switch makes human organ three times larger than great apes’, study finds

It is one of the defining attributes of being human: when compared with our closest primate relatives, we have incredibly large brains.
Now scientists have shed light on the reasons for the difference, by collecting cells from humans, chimps and gorillas and turning them into lumps of brain in the laboratory.

Tests on the tiny “brain organoids” reveal a hitherto unknown molecular switch that controls brain growth and makes the human organ three times larger than brains in the great apes.

Tinker with the switch and the human brain loses its growth advantage, while the great ape brain can be made to grow more like a human’s.
“What we see is a difference in cellular behaviour very, very early on that allows the human brain to grow larger,” said Dr Madeleine Lancaster, a developmental biologist at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. “We are able to account for almost all of the size difference.”

The healthy human brain typically reaches about 1,500cm3 in adulthood, roughly three times the size of the 500cm3 gorilla brain or the 400cm3 chimp brain. But working out why has been fraught with difficulty, not least because developing human and great ape brains cannot easily be studied.
In an effort to understand the process, Lancaster and her colleagues collected cells, often left over from medical tests or operations, from humans, gorillas and chimps, and reprogrammed them into stem cells. They then grew these cells in such a way that encouraged them to turn into brain organoids – little lumps of brain tissue a few millimetres wide.

After several weeks, the human brain organoids were by far the largest of the lot, and close examination revealed why. In human brain tissue, so-called neural progenitor cells – which go on to make all of the cells in the brain – divided more than those in great ape brain tissue.

Lancaster, whose study is published in Cell, added: “You have an increase in the number of those cells, so once they switch to making the different brain cells, including neurons, you have more to start with, so you get an increase in the whole population of brain cells across the entire cortex.”
Mathematical modelling of the process showed that the difference in cell proliferation happens so early in brain development, that it ultimately leads to a near doubling in the number of neurons in the adult human cerebral cortex compared with that in the great apes.

The researchers went on to identify a gene that is crucial to the process. Known as Zeb2, it switches on later in human tissue, allowing the cells to divide more before they mature. Tests showed that delaying the effects of Zeb2 made gorilla brain tissue grow larger, while turning it on sooner in human brain organoids made them grow more like the ape ones.
John Mason, professor of molecular neural development at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the research, said it highlighted the power of organoids for the study of brain development.

“It’s important to understand how the brain develops normally, partly because it helps us understand what makes humans unique and partly because it can give us important insights into how neurodevelopmental disorders can arise,” he said.

“Brain size can be affected in some neurodevelopment disorders, for example macrocephaly is a feature of some autism spectrum disorders, so understanding these very fundamental processes of embryonic brain development could lead to better understanding of such disorders,” he added...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... -is-so-big
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Mon Mar 29, 2021 12:51 am

I for one look forward to nubile girls dressed in this fabric. .. :biggrin:

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interesting read..
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2021 ... ow-to-make
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Sun May 02, 2021 2:46 pm

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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Mon May 03, 2021 1:00 am

I should probably re-title this thread "Science link of the day". :tea:
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Mon May 03, 2021 5:03 pm

How to Rewrite the Laws of Physics in the Language of Impossibility

Chiara Marletto is trying to build a master theory — a set of ideas so fundamental that all other theories would spring from it. Her first step: Invoke the impossible.

Constructor theory grew out of work in quantum information theory. It aims to be broad enough to cover areas that can’t be described in the traditional ways of thinking, such as the physics of life and the physics of information.


°°°

They say that in art, constraints lead to creativity. The same seems to be true of the universe. By placing limits on nature, the laws of physics squeeze out reality’s most fantastical creations. Limit light’s speed, and suddenly space can shrink, time can slow. Limit the ability to divide energy into infinitely small units, and the full weirdness of quantum mechanics blossoms. “Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible,” writes the physicist Chiara Marletto. “Bizarre as it may seem, it is commonplace in quantum physics.”

Marletto grew up in Turin, in northern Italy, and studied physical engineering and theoretical physics before completing her doctorate at the University of Oxford, where she became interested in quantum information and theoretical biology. But her life changed when she attended a talk by David Deutsch, another Oxford physicist and a pioneer in the field of quantum computation. It was about what he claimed was a radical new theory of explanations. It was called constructor theory, and according to Deutsch it would serve as a kind of meta-theory more fundamental than even our most foundational physics — deeper than general relativity, subtler than quantum mechanics. To call it ambitious would be a massive understatement...
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Seabass » Mon May 03, 2021 9:16 pm

Brian Peacock wrote:
Mon May 03, 2021 5:03 pm
How to Rewrite the Laws of Physics in the Language of Impossibility

Chiara Marletto is trying to build a master theory — a set of ideas so fundamental that all other theories would spring from it. Her first step: Invoke the impossible.

Constructor theory grew out of work in quantum information theory. It aims to be broad enough to cover areas that can’t be described in the traditional ways of thinking, such as the physics of life and the physics of information.


°°°

They say that in art, constraints lead to creativity. The same seems to be true of the universe. By placing limits on nature, the laws of physics squeeze out reality’s most fantastical creations. Limit light’s speed, and suddenly space can shrink, time can slow. Limit the ability to divide energy into infinitely small units, and the full weirdness of quantum mechanics blossoms. “Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible,” writes the physicist Chiara Marletto. “Bizarre as it may seem, it is commonplace in quantum physics.”

Marletto grew up in Turin, in northern Italy, and studied physical engineering and theoretical physics before completing her doctorate at the University of Oxford, where she became interested in quantum information and theoretical biology. But her life changed when she attended a talk by David Deutsch, another Oxford physicist and a pioneer in the field of quantum computation. It was about what he claimed was a radical new theory of explanations. It was called constructor theory, and according to Deutsch it would serve as a kind of meta-theory more fundamental than even our most foundational physics — deeper than general relativity, subtler than quantum mechanics. To call it ambitious would be a massive understatement...
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Mon May 03, 2021 11:11 pm

Try it now.
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Seabass » Mon May 03, 2021 11:16 pm

It works. You may as well delete my post. This one too.
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by pErvinalia » Mon May 03, 2021 11:39 pm

You should definitely delete those posts. And this one too.
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Mon May 03, 2021 11:57 pm

I might delete those posts, and this one too.
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by JimC » Tue May 04, 2021 12:06 am

A shocking example of cancel culture... :nono:
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Sat May 29, 2021 9:39 pm

Nasa publishes new picture of 'downtown' milky way...

chandra_2021-05-27.png

Threads of superheated gas and magnetic fields are weaving a tapestry of energy at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. A new image of this new cosmic masterpiece was made using a giant mosaic of data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

The new panorama of the Galactic Center builds on previous surveys from Chandra and other telescopes. This latest version expands Chandra's high-energy view farther above and below the plane of the Galaxy — that is, the disk where most of the Galaxy's stars reside — than previous imaging campaigns. In the image featured in our main graphic, X-rays from Chandra are orange, green, blue and purple, showing different X-ray energies, and the radio data from MeerKAT are shown in lilac and gray. The main features in the image are shown in a labeled version.

One thread is particularly intriguing because it has X-ray and radio emission intertwined. It points perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy and is about 20 light years long but only one-hundredth that size in width.

A new study of the X-ray and radio properties of this thread by Q. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst suggests these features are bound together by thin strips of magnetic fields. This is similar to what was observed in a previously studied thread. (Both threads are labeled with red rectangles in the image. The newly studied one in the lower left, G0.17-0.41, is much farther away from the plane of the Galaxy.) Such strips may have formed when magnetic fields aligned in different directions, collided, and became twisted around each other in a process called magnetic reconnection. This is similar to the phenomenon that drives energetic particles away from the Sun and is responsible for the space weather that sometimes affects Earth.

A detailed study of these threads teaches us more about the Galactic space weather astronomers have witnessed throughout the region. This weather is driven by volatile phenomena such as supernova explosions, close-quartered stars blowing off hot gas, and outbursts of matter from regions near Sagittarius A*, our Galaxy's supermassive black hole.

Also labeled in the main image are X-rays reflected from dust around bright X-ray sources (green circles), Sagittarius A*, and, in purple circles and ellipses, the Arches and Quintuplet Clusters, DB00-58 and DB00-6, 1E 1743.1-28.43, the Cold Gas Cloud and Sagittarius C...

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chan ... estry.html
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Seabass » Sat May 29, 2021 11:01 pm

Looks like my phone wallpaper... :ask:
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Sun May 30, 2021 11:14 am

:hehe:
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by rainbow » Sun May 30, 2021 12:26 pm

JimC wrote:
Tue May 04, 2021 12:06 am
A shocking example of cancel culture... :nono:
Now if we were to cancel cancel culture, the universe would disappear up its rectum.
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