Tag: science

Futuristic “biocomputers” Using Human Brain Cells Could Soon Be A Reality

Futuristic “biocomputers” using the power of human brain cells could soon become a reality — revolutionizing digital technology, a new study explains. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University say the half-human-half-machine devices have the potential to push past current technological limits by using brain organoids taken from tiny human skin samples.

The team of scientists has been experimenting with brain tissue the size of a pen dot, containing neurons and other functions with the ability to learn and memorize. Professor Thomas Hartung, who leads the work, says this “biological hardware” could soon assist with valuable research on how the human brain works and provide a way of alleviating energy consumption demands in supercomputers.

The study team also hopes organoid intelligence could additionally revolutionize drug testing research for neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegeneration. Though computers can do calculations with numbers and data far quicker than humans, the brain is much better at making complex logical decisions, such as identifying one animal from another.

“The brain is still unmatched by modern computers,” Hartung says in a media release. “Frontier, the latest supercomputer in Kentucky, is a $600 million, 6,800-square-feet installation. Only in June of last year, it exceeded for the first time the computational capacity of a single human brain — but using a million times more energy.”

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Science needs to stop using terms like male, female, mother and father, researchers say

Alternatives to terms like “male” and “female” and “mother” and “father” should be sought in science because they assume that sex is binary and heterosexuality is the norm, a group of researchers from the US and Canada suggests.

Male and female should instead be referred to as “sperm-producing” and “egg-producing,” the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Language Project said, according to the Times of London.

Meanwhile, father and mother should be labeled “parent,” “egg donor” and “sperm donor” in the scientific field.

The group has called on the scientific field to use words that are more “inclusive and precise,” according to a press release from the University of British Columbia, which has three researchers in the initiative.

“Much of Western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture,” some project members wrote in the Trends in Ecology and Evolution journal.

UBC assistant professor Dr. Kaitlyn Gaynor said the undertaking began from a Twitter conversation among a few people about terminology that is potentially harmful.

“We reached out to different networks in ecology and evolution that were focused on increasing inclusion and equity in the field to rally support for one very specific action —revising terminology that might be harmful to certain people, particularly those from groups historically and currently excluded from science,” she said, according to the press release.

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“Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam”

What is nothing? This is a question that has bothered philosophers as far back as the ancient Greeks, where they debated the nature of the void. They had long discussions trying to determine whether nothing is something.

While the philosophical facets of this question pose some interest, the question is also one that the scientific community has addressed. (Big Think’s Dr. Ethan Siegel has an article describing the four definitions of “nothing.”)

It’s nothing, really

What would happen if scientists took a container and removed all the air out of it, creating an ideal vacuum that was entirely devoid of matter? The removal of matter would mean that energy would remain. Much in the same way that the energy from the Sun can cross to the Earth through empty space, heat from outside the container would radiate into the container. Thus, the container wouldn’t be truly empty.

However, what if scientists also cooled the container to the lowest possible temperature (absolute zero), so it radiated no energy at all? Furthermore, suppose that scientists shielded the container so no outside energy or radiation could penetrate it. Then there would be absolutely nothing inside the container, right?

That’s where things become counterintuitive. It turns out that nothing isn’t nothing.

The nature of “nothing”

The laws of quantum mechanics are confusing, predicting that particles are also waves and that cats are simultaneously alive and dead. However, one of the most confusing of all quantum principles is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is commonly explained as saying that you cannot simultaneously perfectly measure the location and movement of a subatomic particle. While that is a good representation of the principle, it also says that you cannot measure the energy of anything perfectly and that the shorter the time you measure, the worse your measurement is. Taken to the extreme, if you try to make a measurement in near-zero time, your measurement will be infinitely imprecise.

These quantum principles have mind-bending consequences for anyone trying to understand the nature of nothing. For example, if you try to measure the amount of energy at a location — even if that energy is supposed to be nothing — you still cannot measure zero precisely. Sometimes, when you make the measurement, the expected zero turns out to be non-zero. And this isn’t just a measurement problem; it’s a feature of reality. For short periods of time, zero is not always zero.

When you combine this bizarre fact (that zero expected energy can be non-zero, if you examine a short enough time period) with Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2, there is an even more bizarre consequence. Einstein’s equation says that energy is matter and vice versa. Combined with quantum theory, this means that in a location that is supposedly entirely empty and devoid of energy, space can briefly fluctuate to non-zero energy — and that temporary energy can make matter (and antimatter) particles.

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Scientists Looking to Scatter Moon Dust Around Earth to Combat ‘Climate Change’

A group of scientists has proposed creating a shield made of moon dust positioned between the Earth and the sun as a way to lower the planet’s temperature in a bid to combat “climate change,” a plan that could have devastating consequences.

In a Feb. 8 study published in the journal PLOS, three researchers from the University of Utah proposed their moon dust shield idea while calling climate change an “existential threat.” Large quantities of moon dust between the Earth and the sun can “reduce the amount of sunlight received on our planet,” they claimed while estimating that billions of kilograms of moon dust will be needed annually to maintain the shield. “Because dust grains between Earth and the Sun tend to drift out of alignment, they must be replenished,” the study said.

The “most promising” scenario for creating the shield involves mining lunar dust and ballistically blasting it from the moon on a trajectory toward the Earth-sun L1 Lagrange point, a gravitationally stable point located 900,000 miles from Earth.

The plan is estimated to potentially lower sunlight by 1.8 percent or around six days of sunlight per year, thereby lowering the Earth’s temperature.

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Scientists to engineer woolly mammoth’s return by 2027

The long-extinct woolly mammoth is slated for a return to the world stage by 2027, Popular Mechanics reported Monday of biotechnology startup Colossal’s ambitious project.

“It will walk like a woolly mammoth, look like one, sound like one, but most importantly, it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the mammoth’s extinction,” the Texas-based, billion-dollar company said of its landmark de-extinction project.

“The woolly mammoth is a vital defender of the earth,” the site also says.

Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences began making headlines again after recent press releases highlighting their work on similar projects to “de-extinct” other ancient creatures like the dodo bird.

“In addition to bringing back ancient extinct species like the woolly mammoth, we will be able to leverage our technologies to help preserve critically endangered species that are on the verge of extinction and restore animals where humankind had a hand in their demise,” said CEO and Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm on the organization’s website.

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Scientist who edited babies’ genes says he acted ‘too quickly’

The scientist at the heart of the scandal involving the world’s first gene-edited babies has said he moved “too quickly” by pressing ahead with the procedure.

He Jiankui sent shock waves across the world of science when he announced in 2018 that he had edited the genes of twin girls, Lulu and Nana, before birth. He was subsequently sacked by his university in Shenzhen, received a three-year prison sentence, and was broadly condemned for having gone ahead with the risky, ethically contentious and medically unjustified procedure with inadequate consent from the families involved.

Speaking to the Guardian in one of his first interviews since his public re-emergence last year, He said: “I’ve been thinking about what I’ve done in the past for a long time. To summarise it up in one sentence: I did it too quickly.”

However, he stopped short of expressing regret or apologising, saying “I need more time to think about that” and “that’s a complicated question”.

He declined to elaborate on what he believed ought to have been in place before proceeding with gene editing, but said he would give further details at an invited talk he is scheduled to give at the University of Oxford next month.

He studied physics in China before moving to the US to study for a PhD at Rice University and a post-doctorate in genome sequencing at Stanford University. He returned to China in 2012 to pursue Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing research, launching a variety of biotechnology business ventures.

Gene-edited cells were already beginning to be used in clinical treatments for adults. But genetically modifying embryos was – and is – far more ethically contentious, because changes are made to every cell in the body and are passed down to subsequent generations. Some question whether such a step could ever be medically justified.

Against this backdrop, He dropped the bombshell at an international conference in Hong Kong four years ago that he had modified two embryos before they were placed in their mother’s womb. It later emerged that a third gene-edited baby had been born.

The edit, of a gene called CCR5, targeted a pathway used by the HIV virus to enter cells, and was claimed to give the babies immunity to HIV.

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Geneticists Intend To Bring The Dodo Bird Back From Extinction

Scientists believe they have found a way to bring back the animal most synonymous with the extinction, the dodo bird. Should their endeavor prove successful, this could open the door for the resurrection of several other animals that were thought to be long gone.

A “de-extinction company” known as Colossal Biosciences has decided to play God and right a “wrong” done by humans by using edited DNA to create a so-called proxy version of the dodo since an exact clone is not possible. Should the recreation prove successful, the next step would be to re-introduce the dodo to its original habitat in Mauritius.

The founders of the company believes reintroducing the dodo will benefit conservation and the wildlife ecosystem. They do not elaborate on why, however.

Colossal Biosciences is also working bringing other endangered species back from the dead, such as the Tasmanian tiger and wooly mammoth.

Here is the story from Vice fully explaining the process for “de-extincting” the dodo and the many challenges Colossal Biosciences faces:

Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Ben Lamb and Harvard geneticist George Church, announced on Tuesday that it plans to resurrect and rewild the dodo, the iconic flightless bird that has become a powerful symbol of extinction after it was rapidly wiped out as a result of human interference on its native island of Mauritius.

Colossal is already working on efforts to de-extinct the wooly mammoth and thylacine (aka the Tasmanian tiger), and reintroduce them to wild habitats. In the process, the company hopes to pioneer new technologies with applications in conservation biology and human healthcare, to name a few.

Now, the company has added the dodo to its de-extinction wishlist and tapped Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Santa Cruz, to back the project. The team envisions the return of a “proxy” version of this idiosyncratic bird, meaning a species with edited DNA as opposed to an exact clone, to its original habitat in Mauritius.

“I think this is an opportunity where, given the man-made nature of the extinction of the dodo, man could not only bring the dodo back, but also fix what was done to parts of the ecosystem to reintroduce them,” noted Lamm in the same call. “There’s a lot of benefits from a conservation perspective, in terms of what we can learn from rewilding.”

The flightless bird was such a one-off that its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, a colorful flying bird that looks completely different from its famous extinct cousin. The bizarre appearance distinguished the dodo as a cultural curiosity practically from the moment European explorers came across it during the 17th century.

Now, Shapiro and her colleagues are tackling the challenge of stitching together a dodo-like animal using genomes that have been sequenced from real dodo specimens, as well as genomes from their close relatives, such as the Nicobar pigeon and the Rodrigues solitaire, another extinct flightless bird that lived on the nearly island of Rodrigues. Indeed, de-extincting the dodo will have to start with reverse-engineering it.

“Once a species is extinct, it’s really not possible to bring back an identical copy,” Shapiro said. “The hope is that we can use, first, comparative genomics so we can get at least one, and hopefully more, dodo genomes that we can use to look and see how dodos are similar to each other, and different from things like the solitaire.”

From there, the team will “compare those to the Nicobar pigeon, and other pigeons, and identify mutations in that genome that we believe may have some phenotypic impact that made the dodo look like a dodo instead of like a Nicobar pigeon,” she continued.

Getting the right genetic ingredients for a dodo proxy is only the first hurdle in what may be a long scientific quest. The researchers will also have to figure out how to get a dodo embryo into an egg so that a new generation of birds can successfully hatch.

As with many emerging fields, the science of de-extinction contains many ethical nuances in addition to its technical challenges. Tom Gilbert, who serves as director of the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics, told Motherboard that proxies for extinct species may well be technically feasible, but that is only the beginning of the conversation.

“The question really is, how close will the proxy be to the extinct form?” said Gilbert, who recently joined Colossal’s advisory board, in an email. “That’s a much harder question, and not straightforward to answer, given it raises the question…what are you measuring? Genomic similarity? Physical similarity? Similarity in the niche it fills/what it does, even if it doesn’t look the same (e.g. if you can make an elephant able to live in the cold where it acts like a mammoth…is that enough??

“For reasons I’ve argued before in various articles I think that the best we can hope for is something that is an equivalent with regard to the niche it fills,” he continued. “This raises the question of is it worth it? Here it’s also not black and white. Sometimes maybe, but in other cases maybe the environment is so changed already that the hope of free living populations is far from what can be done. One has to bear in mind e.g. how much, relatively, human untouched environment is left.”

There are other dilemmas to consider if the dodo were to be resurrected. The first dilemma is how to protect the bird from another extinction.

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Medical Journal Floats Concept of Using Braindead Women As Surrogates Through “Whole Body Gestational Donation”

An entry from the Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics is prompting outrage from women on social media after theorizing that the bodies of vegetative or braindead female patients could be utilized as “whole body gestational” surrogates.

The article, originally published in November of 2022, is titled Whole Body Gestational Donation, and floats the concept of utilizing vegetative women’s entire bodies as surrogates for “prospective parents who wish to have children but cannot, or prefer not to, gestate.”

Written by Anna Smajdor, a Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway, the article proposes that it may be viable to utilize the donated bodies of women for gestational purposes in the same manner as donated organs are used.

“I suggest if we are happy to accept organ donation in general, the issues raised by whole-body gestational donation are differences of degree rather than substantive new concerns,” Smajdor writes in her abstract.

“As with many surrogacy arrangements, commissioning parents may prefer to create an embryo for implantation using their own gametes or those of donors. Thus, impregnation could be a surgical affair, preceded and followed by appropriate hormonal therapy to ensure maximal chance of success.”

Referencing previous theories by Israeli medical professor Rosalie Ber, Smajdor considers that the bodies of female patients in persistent vegetative states (PVS), or those who have experienced brain death, could be used as “whole body” incubators for surrogate children.

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Scientists Have Successfully Reversed Signs of Aging in Mice for the First Time

Two research groups in the US were able to stop mice from getting old by fixing their DNA.

In a recent study published in Cell on Jan. 12, Harvard scientists showed that they could manipulate and reverse the aging process in mice by generating DNA repairs.

The results of a 13-year, international study show for the first time that breakdown in epigenetic information accelerates aging in mice and that repairing the epigenome can reverse those signs of aging.

“For about the past 50 years, popular theory has held that the process of aging is caused in large part by an accumulation of mutation. There’s growing evidence, however, that aging has a significant epigenetic component. That is, the process by which stretches of DNA or the genes are turned on and off,” said the paper’s senior author, David Sinclair, professor of genetics at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research.

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Why Has Google Scholar Removed the “Since 2020” Filter for Searching Peer-Reviewed Studies?

Google Scholar is every student’s mainstream means of getting sources to cite in their research papers. Teachers and professors across the nation have barred Wikipedia from ever being used as a source, so where do they turn to instead? Google Scholar.

Though you may detest everything Google, you can’t deny that they have some products and services that work absolutely fantastically. And, of course, Google Scholar is no exception. You’ll be hard pressed to find a source of peer-reviewed research that’s as easy and organized to sift through as this site. Those who are well-familiar with the search engine know that it’s a very easy-to-use means of finding some of the best, cutting-edge research that’s being done across the globe.

Whether you’re interested in epigenetics, what is happening in the world of artificial intelligence philosophy (yes, it’s a thing), or need to brush up on your Mayan archaeology news, Google Scholar has it. But it’s not just that the information is out there.

Nope, as we’ve pointed out above, all of this information has to be easily sifted through. And one of the reasons that students across the globe are thankful for this is because of one particular quirk of syllabi across the nation: teachers are picky with who they’ll regard as trustworthy.

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