Grandma's Experiences Leave Epigenetic Mark on Your Genes | DiscoverMagazine.com
Your ancestors’ lousy childhoods or excellent adventures might change your personality, bequeathing anxiety or resilience by altering the epigenetic expressions of genes in the brain.I’d say this brings a whole other dimension to the concept of “generational” trauma, innit?
I was just thinking about this yesterday, when a while ago I found out that my grandma and I both had really vivid dreams when we were little of an old woman grabbing our feet and pulling us out of bed…
File this under: things poc have known since 5ever but weren’t ‘logical’ before guayts proved them with science
(via fuckyeahcracker)
Harvard professor looks for 'adventurous woman' who agrees to give birth to cloned Neanderthal
white people no.
(via youngbadmangone)
kcjo:
Aerogel, also know as frozen smoke, is the world’s lowest density solid, clocking in at 96% air. If you hold a small piece in your hand, it’s practically impossible to either see or feel, but if you poke it, it’s like styrofoam. It supports up to 4,000 times its own weight and can withstand a direct blast from two pounds of dynamite. It’s also the best insulator in existence.
Chemistry at its finest
can i eat that
Why don’t we use this for everything?!?
This shit is about the coolest thing ever.
It’s such a great insulator that a thin layer of it will protect anything from the heat of a bunsen burner.
Even though it’s incredibly light and has an extremely low density, its lattice-like molecular structure makes it able to hold objects much greater in mass.
What if you got loads of it, and made a bed, you could pretend you were a pegasus
Possibly one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
Again, because science boner.
Ho W
"I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries."
Marco Rubio, you guys. (via motherjones)
What I don’t understand is how people like this think parents AREN’T teaching their kids about faith and how their faith defines the creation of the universe. Like, is EVERY child a Christian? No. So, then, why should we be teaching something in school that is based on faith when there are so many different religions? Isn’t it just easier to teach the thing that is based in science and is an observable fact and leave the faith guidance up to parents?
Since when did a person’s religious education become something EVERYONE was responsible for teaching? Like, just be a parent and talk to your kid about your religious believes and stop whining about how it’s not taught in school. There’s a reason it’s not and it’s not because little Suzy is an oppressed Christian, it’s because there are other kids in her class who aren’t and ALL of them are entitled to receive a scientific education that doesn’t force them to learn about the book of genesis.
Goddamn.
(via rabblevolunteer)
Spray-on clothes unveiled on chemistry lab catwalk
As the fashion pack leave London for Milan, one designer and a professor of particle technology unveiled their own unique collection made in one afternoon with spray-on fabric. The pair, Manel Torres and Paul Luckham, are perfecting a fabric that can be sprayed onto skin and other surfaces to make clothes, medical bandages and even upholstery.Torres, a visiting academic at Imperial College London, approached Luckham, an Imperial College professor of particle technology, to help him realize his dream of a spray-on garment that can be taken off, washed and worn again.“Couture these days is almost dying,” Torres said. “I think here we have a good way of creating instant clothing — that is not very expensive.”Torres demonstrated the process in a lab at Imperial College, spraying a T-shirt onto a model in a matter of minutes. An experience the model described as “nice, actually.”“It’s like second skin,” she said.The system uses short fibers, such as wool, linen or acrylic, mixed with polymers to bind them together. A solvent which evaporates on contact with a surface allows the fibers to be sprayed out of can as a liquid. The spray can be applied using an aerosol can or high pressure spray gun and the texture can be varied by changing the fibers and the numbers of layers of spray. The whole process also allows the material to be recycled.“The beauty about this material is that…I will tear it into parts and I will dissolve it again with the same solvent and I will spray some of it in Rome in two days time,” Torres said.Fashion is just one use of the technology and the pair have set up a company to explore other applications, such as medical patches and bandages, hygiene wipes, air fresheners and upholstery for furniture and cars. Luckham says the technology could see a change to the way we think about using fabric — for example a sterile duster could be sprayed onto a surface which needs to be cleaned.“The advantage of having it in an aerosol can is that once the material is inside nothing can get in and so no germs can get inside,” he said.The material can be hand-washed and Torres says more work is needed to ensure it can withstand a washing machine.
(via queensoucouyant)
Yamanaka invented cell time machine
Dr. Shinya Yamanaka invented a time machine.
In the simplest of terms, that’s how he and his colleagues sometimes describe their work. They take full-grown cells from humans and they regress them - they send them back in time, to their earliest, embryonic state - and then they coax them into the future, into totally new types of cells.
Last week, Yamanaka was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his work creating induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells - cells that are genetically engineered into blank slates, allowing them to be transformed into any type of cell in the body.
His technique could allow scientists to explore human diseases like they never have before, or help doctors regenerate tissue lost to injury or illness. Using his technology, scientists can now take a skin cell and transform it into a heart cell that will actually beat in a lab dish.
“I was here, at Gladstone, the moment I learned we got human IPS cells,” said Yamanaka last month, in an interview from his part-time office at San Francisco’s Gladstone Institutes. Yamanaka did most of the IPS cell work at his main lab in Japan.
“My colleague sent me the image, and it was, wow,” Yamanaka said, offering a brief, modest smile. “We had beating human heart cells, made from IPS cells.”
(via hardhatpartycat)
A new class of electronics can dissolve and disappear on a pre-set schedule, within a few minutes or a few years, depending on when you want them to go away.
They could live in the body and deliver drugs, they could stick on the exterior of buildings or tanks, and they can become compost instead of metal scrap—in other words, they turn the common conception of electronics completely upside down.
Transient electronics, as they’ve been dubbed, are a combination of silk and silicon designed to work seamlessly in our bodies and in our environments.
In a new study, researchers built a thermal device designed to monitor infection in a rodent and a 64-pixel digital camera—all from dissolvable material.
Fascinating! What if your old cellphone just disappeared? “Dissolvable material” seems kinda freaky, but … maybe a good thing if it’s real??
More: Awesome New Electronics Can Dissolve and Disappear When They’re No Longer Needed | Popular Science
(via ausetkmt)
(Source: mcavoyster, via jackhawksmoor)
"And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
All those motherfuckers lying and getting me pissed"
Pro-lifers Insane Clown Posse, “Miracles”
I’m beginning to wonder if this horrible song is just a parody of pro-lifers now. what if~
(via propaganda-for-life)
The ICP outed themselves as a Christian Rap band years ago… No way they’re smart enough to actually parody anything.
Scientists Demonstrate Innovative Learning Method - Learn “Matrix-Style”
New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It’s the kind of thing seen in Hollywood’s “Matrix” franchise.
Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person’s visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.
Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.
“Adult early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning,” said lead author and BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe of the part of the brain analyzed in the study.
Neuroscientists have found that pictures gradually build up inside a person’s brain, appearing first as lines, edges, shapes, colors and motion in early visual areas. The brain then fills in greater detail to make a red ball appear as a red ball, for example.
Researchers studied the early visual areas for their ability to cause improvements in visual performance and learning.
“Some previous research confirmed a correlation between improving visual performance and changes in early visual areas, while other researchers found correlations in higher visual and decision areas,” said Watanabe, director of BU’s Visual Science Laboratory. “However, none of these studies directly addressed the question of whether early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning.” Until now.
Boston University post-doctoral fellow Kazuhisa Shibata designed and implemented a method using decoded fMRI neurofeedback to induce a particular activation pattern in targeted early visual areas that corresponded to a pattern evoked by a specific visual feature in a brain region of interest. The researchers then tested whether repetitions of the activation pattern caused visual performance improvement on that visual feature.
The result, say researchers, is a novel learning approach sufficient to cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that require visual performance.
What’s more, the approached worked even when test subjects were not aware of what they were learning.
“The most surprising thing in this study is that mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specific visual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature, without presenting the feature or subjects’ awareness of what was to be learned,” said Watanabe, who developed the idea for the research project along with Mitsuo Kawato, director of ATR lab and Yuka Sasaki, an assistant in neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“We found that subjects were not aware of what was to be learned while behavioral data obtained before and after the neurofeedback training showed that subjects’ visual performance improved specifically for the target orientation, which was used in the neurofeedback training,” he said.
The finding brings up an inevitable question. Is hypnosis or a type of automated learning a potential outcome of the research?
“In theory, hypnosis or a type of automated learning is a potential outcome,” said Kawato. “However, in this study we confirmed the validity of our method only in visual perceptual learning. So we have to test if the method works in other types of learning in the future. At the same time, we have to be careful so that this method is not used in an unethical way.”
At present, the decoded neurofeedback method might be used for various types of learning, including memory, motor and rehabilitation.
The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan supported the research.
-NSF-
(Source: nsf.gov)