Tag: science

DARPA and NIH-Funded ‘Neuroengineers’ Create ‘Wireless Technology to Remotely Activate Specific Brain Circuits’ Using Magnetic Fields and Nanoparticles

A team of scientists led by Rice University “neuroengineers” has created wireless technology to “remotely activate specific brain circuits” on the sub-second timescale. To demonstrate the capability, the neuroengineers used magnetic fields to “activate targeted neurons that controlled the body position of freely moving fruit flies in an enclosure.” The scientists say this research furthers the drive toward the “holy grail of neurotechnologies”: remote control of select neural circuits with magnetic fields.

Incredibly, this use of magnetic fields to control select brain circuits remotely is not new technology. The technique is referred to as “magnetogenetics” and this particular demonstration—outlined in Nature Materials—mainly aims to demonstrate “precise temporal modulation of neural activity” on sub-second timescales as well as “stimulation of different groups of neurons” using varying digital signals.

Previously, the neuroengineers note in their paper, in vivo (in the body) response time of thermal magnetogenetics was on the order of tens of seconds, and was not able to stimulate different groups of neurons.

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The Story of Otis T. Carr: The Man Who Supposedly Invented An ‘Anti-Gravity’ Vehicle In The 1950s

It’s astonishing how the topic of “anti-gravity” technology is still placed in the “conspiracy theory” realm by some. This isn’t the stuff of conspiracy theories or “fringe” science, it’s a field full of reputable scientists, scholars, and real-world examples that have come not only from hard evidence but from extremely credible witness testimony.  History is littered with supposed examples that are surrounded by controversy. This article explores the story of a man by the name of Otis T. Carr (1904-1982).

In the late 1950s, OTC Enterprises, Inc. of Baltimore, Maryland put out a statement that was published in the April 3rd edition of the Baltimore Enterprise. The statement came in the form of a claim that the company was ready to manufacture a flying saucer that was capable of travelling outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. All that was needed was a massive amount of funding, approximately 20 million dollars. The equivalent to that today is probably several billion.

Now, keep in mind that this is the 1950s. There was a big wave of UFO sightings at this time, especially after the atomic bomb was dropped in Japan. The topic was getting a lot of mainstream media attention. Rumors of “crashed craft, and bodies recovered,” that Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell claimed were real were running rampant at this time. President Harry Truman even said, on national television, that they discuss these “UFOs” at every conference his government has had with the military. According to him at the time, “there’s always stuff like that going on.”

In March 2019, astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, who spent years working as a consultant for the Pentagon UFO program and is now a defense contractor, gave a classified briefing to the Defense Department on what he called “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

Did ‘the powers that be’ or ‘the military-industrial complex’ have flying saucer technology when Carr was alive? It’s not far fetched if you sift through the literature. Take, for example, this document from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Electronic reading room. The agency was keeping tabs on news regarding the topic abroad. There are tens and thousands of files that have been declassified showing this, including ones pertaining to Carr which we will get to later. The document reads as follows:

“A German newspaper recently published an interview with George Klein, famous German engineer and aircraft expert, describing the experimental construction of ‘flying saucers’ carried out by him from 1941 to 1945.”

The document goes on to describe how many people believed ‘flying saucers’ to be a postwar development and what it was capable of.

 “The “flying saucer” reached an altitude of 12,400 meters within 3 minutes and a speed of 2,200 kilometers per hour. Klein emphasized that in accordance with German plans, the speed of these “saucers” would reach 4,000 kilometers per hour. One difficulty, according to Klein, was the problem of obtaining the materials to be used for the construction of the “saucers,” but even this had been solved by German engineers toward the end of 1945, and construction on the objects was scheduled to begin, Klein added.”

Otis T. Carr had similar claims. These claims, although few in number, were global. Apparently, Carr put on numerous demonstrations for the public and amassed millions of dollars from extremely wealthy people to do so. If they did not believe him and if he had not shown some promise, how did he receive all of this funding?

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Humanized Yeast: Scientists Create Yeast With Important Human Genes

Delft University of Technology scientists have created baker’s yeast with human muscle genes.

Human muscle genes were successfully inserted into the DNA of baker’s yeast by biotechnologist Pascale Daran-Lapujade and her team at Delft University of Technology. For the first time, scientists have effectively inserted a crucial human characteristic into a yeast cell. Their research was recently published in the journal Cell Reports.

Daran-Lapujade’s lab introduced a characteristic to yeast cells that is regulated by a collection of 10 genes that humans cannot live without; they carry the blueprint for a process known as a metabolic pathway, which breaks down sugar to gather energy and produce cellular building blocks within muscle cells. Because this mechanism is involved in many disorders, including cancer, the modified yeast could be used in medical studies.

“Now that we understand the full process, medical scientists can use this humanized yeast model as a tool for drug screening and cancer research,” Daran-Lapujade says.

Humans and yeast are similar

According to Daran-Lapujade, there are a lot of similarities between yeast and a human being: “It seems weird since yeast lives as single cells and humans consist of a substantially more complex system, but the cells operate in a very similar way.”

As a result, scientists often transfer human genes into yeast. Because yeast removes all other interactions that may exist in the human body, it creates a clean environment in which researchers can analyze a single process.

“As compared to human cells or tissues, yeast is a fantastic organism for its simplicity to grow and its genetic accessibility: its DNA can be easily modified to address fundamental questions,” Daran-Lapujade explains. “Many pivotal discoveries such as the cell division cycle, were elucidated thanks to yeast.”

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This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting

In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage versions of people in order to harvest tissues for use in transplant treatments.

The company, Renewal Bio, is pursuing recent advances in stem-cell technology and artificial wombs demonstrated by Jacob Hanna, a biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Earlier this week, Hanna showed that starting with mouse stem cells, his lab could form highly realistic-looking mouse embryos and keep them growing in a mechanical womb for several days until they developed beating hearts, flowing blood, and cranial folds. 

It’s the first time such an advanced embryo has been mimicked without sperm, eggs, or even a uterus. Hanna’s report was published in the journal Cell on Monday.

“This experiment has huge implications,” says Bernard Siegel, a patient advocate and founder of the World Stem Cell Summit. “One wonders what mammal could be next in line.”  

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1st synthetic mouse embryos — complete with beating hearts and brains — created with no sperm, eggs or womb

For the first time, scientists have created mouse embryos in the lab without using any eggs or sperm and watched them grow outside the womb. To achieve this feat, the researchers used only stem cells and a spinning device filled with shiny glass vials. 

The experiment is a “game changer,” Alfonso Martinez Arias, a developmental biologist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona who was not involved in the research, told The Washington Post(opens in new tab). 

“This is an important landmark in our understanding of how embryos build themselves,” he said.

The breakthrough experiment, described in a report published Monday (Aug. 1) in the journal Cell(opens in new tab), took place in a specially designed bioreactor that serves as an artificial womb for developing embryos. Within the device, embryos float in small beakers of nutrient-filled solution, and the beakers are all locked into a spinning cylinder that keeps them in constant motion. This movement simulates how blood and nutrients flow to the placenta. The device also replicates the atmospheric pressure of a mouse uterus, according to a statement(opens in new tab) from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where the research was conducted.    

In a previous experiment, described in the journal Nature(opens in new tab) in 2021, the team used this bioreactor to grow natural mouse embryos, which reached day 11 of development in the device. “That really showed that mammalian embryos can grow outside the uterus — it’s not really patterning or sending signals to the embryo so much as providing nutritional support,” Jacob Hanna, an embryonic stem cell biologist at the Weizmann and senior author of both studies, told STAT News

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Researchers ‘revive’ organs in dead pigs, raising questions about life and death

Scientists have rebooted vital organs of dead pigs in an experiment bioethicists say may force a rethink of how the body dies, and that further blurs the boundaries between life and death.

Using a system dubbed “OrganEx” that uses special pumps and a cocktail of chemicals to restore oxygen and prevent cell death throughout the body, the Yale University team restored blood circulation and other cellular functions in multiple porcine organs an hour after the pigs’ deaths from cardiac arrest.

Electrical activity was restored in the heart, for instance. The muscle was contracting.

The study “reveals the underappreciated capacity for cellular recovery after prolonged whole-body warm ischemia (loss of blood circulation, and thus oxygen) in a large mammal,” the team r eports in the journal Nature .

The experiments also bolster findings from another Yale-led project three years ago that involved disembodied pigs’ brains. Using a similar perfusion system called BrainEx, researchers restored some functions in brains taken from pigs four hours after they were killed in a meatpacking plant.

That was an isolated organ. The team wondered, could they apply a similar approach on a whole-body scale?

Together, the research challenges old thinking that the body’s cells and organs begin to be irreversibly destroyed within minutes of the heart stopping. Instead, “cellular demise can be halted, and their state (can) be shifted towards recovery at molecular and cellular levels,” the Yale team writes in Nature.

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Scientists Say Loch Ness Monster Might Actually Be Real After New Fossil Discovery

According to scientists, the hypothesis that a so-called Loch Ness Monster could have existed in the Scottish Highlands may not be as absurd as previously thought.

A plesiosaur—a prehistoric reptile with a long, slender neck—may have previously been in Loch Ness, a Scottish lake, according to new research from the University of Bath published on July 21 in the journal Cretaceous Research. Based on their discoveries, they say that the legend of the Loch Ness monster might not actually be fictional.

The statement follows the discovery of plesiosaur fossils in a 100 million-year-old river system in Morocco’s Sahara Desert, suggesting that the reptiles may have lived in freshwater as well as seawater, contrary to earlier theories.

Similar to concerns about Big Foot, scientists have typically always condemned the idea that the Loch Ness monster might genuinely exist. The debunkers have frequently argued that plesiosaurs, which resemble the supposed creature’s popular depiction, could not exist in the freshwater lake because scientists thought they needed a saltwater environment to survive.

However, these new fossils indicate plesiosaurs could’ve actually existed where the legend of the Loch Ness Monster lives because they were found in a freshwater river. The paper suggests that plesiosaurs adapted to tolerate freshwater and that many may have spent the majority of their lives in it. 

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The Earth Just Started Spinning Faster Than Ever Before And Scientists Don’t Know Why

The Earth recently completed a rotation faster than ever before at 1.59 millisecond under 24 hours, and the consequences for how we keep time have experts around the world alarmed.

It could be the first time in world history that global clocks will have to be sped up.

“This would be required to keep civil time—which is based on the super-steady beat of atomic clocks—in step with solar time, which is based on the movement of the Sun across the sky,” Time and Date reported.

Scientists don’t know what is causing our planet to spin faster than ever before, but some experts fear it could be “devastating,” while others speculate the shorter days could be related to climate change, of course.

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Science leaders demand crackdown on medical research fraudsters after allegations that pivotal Alzheimer’s study contained manipulated data – giving false hope to families and slowing the development of effective treatments

Science leaders are demanding a crackdown on medical research fraudsters, warning that the worst offenders pose a threat to public health and should be handed prison sentences.

And they have also called for academic journals that publish dodgy data to be slapped with hefty fines if they fail to act swiftly when fakes are exposed.

The demands come after bombshell allegations that a pivotal study on the cause of Alzheimer’s disease contained manipulated results, potentially leading other scientists down a blind alley, hindering the development of effective treatments and giving false hope to patients and their families. 

It is just the latest in a string of revelations in recent months that have rocked the field of dementia research, and may see top neuroscientists face US government investigations, probes by financial authorities for misuse of public funds and deceiving shareholders, and criminal charges.

In one of the most egregious examples, allegedly falsified data led to patients on a trial risking the side effects of experimental drugs with no chance of seeing any benefit.

Some neuroscientists insist that, while deeply concerning, these problems are outweighed by the large amount of well-conducted research in the field. But others believe corruption will have significantly set back the search for an effective dementia treatment.

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‘Racist Trope’: Woke U.S. Scientist Changes Name Of ‘Asian Giant Hornet’ To Be Less Offensive To China

A woke American scientist got the name of the Asian giant hornet, commonly referred to as a “murder hornet,” changed this week in an apparent attempt to be less offensive to China.

The giant insects can decimate entire populations of honeybees, literally ripping their heads off, and their painful stings can be potentially be fatal to humans if they are allergic.

Asian giant hornets have recently been spotted in small numbers in the Pacific Northwest, where officials have rushed to exterminate them before they become a permanent fixture of local habitats in the U.S.

The Entomological Society of America (ESA) now demands that the insect be called the “Northern giant hornet” to avoid stigmas amid anti-Asian sentiment due to the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China.

Chris Looney, an entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture, admitted in his proposal to rename the Asian giant hornet that the invasive species is “native to parts of Asia” and that the name is “accurate.”

While Looney cited three different reasons for wanting to rename the insect, his top listed reason was stigma associated the name.

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