Watch “Health Matters 2023: How 21st Century Science Is Improving How We Age”
15 Friday Sep 2023
Posted Health and wellness, Over 65
in≈ Comments Off on Watch “Health Matters 2023: How 21st Century Science Is Improving How We Age”
15 Friday Sep 2023
Posted Health and wellness, Over 65
in≈ Comments Off on Watch “Health Matters 2023: How 21st Century Science Is Improving How We Age”
25 Sunday Apr 2021
Plants, scientists say, transmit information about light intensity and quality from leaf to leaf in a very similar way to our own nervous systems.
These “electro-chemical signals” are carried by cells that act as “nerves” of the plants.
And the response, which took the form of light-induced chemical reactions in the leaves, continued in the dark.
This showed, they said, that the plant “remembered” the information encoded in light.
“We shone the light only on the bottom of the plant and we observed changes in the upper part,” explained Professor Stanislaw Karpinski from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in Poland, who led this research.
He presented the findings at the Society for Experimental Biology’s annual meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
“And the changes proceeded when the light was off… This was a complete surprise.”
In previous work, Professor Karpinski found that chemical signals could be passed throughout whole plants – allowing them to respond to and survive changes and stresses in their environment.
But in this new study, he and his colleagues discovered that when light stimulated a chemical reaction in one leaf cell, this caused a “cascade” of events and that this was immediately signaled to the rest of the plant via a specific type of cell called a “bundle sheath cell”.
The scientists measured the electrical signals from these cells, which are present in every leaf. They likened the discovery to finding the plants’ “nervous system”.
What was even more peculiar, Professor Karpinski said, was that the plants’ responses changed depending on the colour of the light that was being shone on them. N
.
“There were characteristic [changes] for red, blue and white light,” he explained.
He suspected that the plants might use the information encoded in the light to stimulate protective chemical reactions. He and his colleagues examined this more closely by looking at the effect of different colors of light on the plants’ immunity to disease.
“When we shone the light for on the plant for one hour and then infected it [with a virus or with bacteria] 24 hours after that light exposure, it resisted the infection,” he explained.
“But when we infected the plant before shining the light, it could not build up resistance.
“[So the plant] has a specific memory for the light which builds its immunity against pathogens, and it can adjust to varying light conditions.”
He said that plants used information encrypted in the light to immunize themselves against seasonal pathogens.
“Every day or week of the season has… a characteristic light quality,” Professor Karpinski explained.
“So the plants perform a sort of biological light computation, using information contained in the light to immunize themselves against diseases that are prevalent during that season.”
Professor Christine Foyer, a plant scientist from the University of Leeds, said the study “took our thinking one step forward”.
“Plants have to survive stresses, such as drought or cold, and live through it and keep growing,” she told BBC News.
“This requires an appraisal of the situation and an appropriate response – that’s a form of intelligence.
“What this study has done is link two signaling pathways together… and the electrical signaling pathway is incredibly rapid, so the whole plant could respond immediately to high [levels of] light.
31 Wednesday Mar 2021
Posted mental health, Therapy, Wellness, youtube
in≈ Comments Off on UCTV-The Science and Art of Psychotherapy: Insider’s Guide
Tags
07 Tuesday Jul 2020
Posted art, Art Therapy, Therapy, Wellness
in≈ Comments Off on Art and brain science
Here is an interesting article from the NYT about the brain and art from a professor of brain science at Columbia University.:
…… The portraiture that flourished in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century is a good place to start. Not only does this modernist school hold a prominent place in the history of art, it consists of just three major artists — Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele — which makes it easier to study in depth.
As a group, these artists sought to depict the unconscious, instinctual strivings of the people in their portraits, but each painter developed a distinctive way of using facial expressions and hand and body gestures to communicate those mental processes.
Their efforts to get at the truth beneath the appearance of an individual both paralleled and were influenced by similar efforts at the time in the fields of biology and psychoanalysis. Thus the portraits of the modernists in the period known as “Vienna 1900” offer a great example of how artistic, psychological and scientific insights can enrich one another.
The idea that truth lies beneath the surface derives from Carl von Rokitansky, a gifted pathologist who was dean of the Vienna School of Medicine in the middle of the 19th century. Baron von Rokitansky compared what his clinician colleague Josef Skoda heard and saw at the bedsides of his patients with autopsy findings after their deaths. This systematic correlation of clinical and pathological findings taught them that only by going deep below the skin could they understand the nature of illness.
I’ve read many a book and chatted with art therapists about the psychological process involved in art and art making and this article comes from a different perspective; brain science.
19 Sunday Apr 2020
Posted Happiness, Uncategorized
in≈ Comments Off on Commonwealth Club: The Science of Happiness During COVID-19
“The COVID-19 pandemic has affected almost every facet of human life. Negative emotions like fear, stress, anxiety and depression are inevitable and can overwhelm even the most optimistic of people. What can we do to nurture our happiness during these unprecedented times?”
05 Tuesday Nov 2019
Plants, scientists say, transmit information about light intensity and quality from leaf to leaf in a very similar way to our own nervous systems.
These “electro-chemical signals” are carried by cells that act as “nerves” of the plants.
And the response, which took the form of light-induced chemical reactions in the leaves, continued in the dark.
This showed, they said, that the plant “remembered” the information encoded in light.
“We shone the light only on the bottom of the plant and we observed changes in the upper part,” explained Professor Stanislaw Karpinski from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in Poland, who led this research.
He presented the findings at the Society for Experimental Biology’s annual meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
“And the changes proceeded when the light was off… This was a complete surprise.”
In previous work, Professor Karpinski found that chemical signals could be passed throughout whole plants – allowing them to respond to and survive changes and stresses in their environment.
But in this new study, he and his colleagues discovered that when light stimulated a chemical reaction in one leaf cell, this caused a “cascade” of events and that this was immediately signalled to the rest of the plant via a specific type of cell called a “bundle sheath cell”.
The scientists measured the electrical signals from these cells, which are present in every leaf. They likened the discovery to finding the plants’ “nervous system”.
What was even more peculiar, Professor Karpinski said, was that the plants’ responses changed depending on the colour of the light that was being shone on them.
Plants perform a sort of biological light computation, using information contained in the light to immunise themselves against diseases
“There were characteristic [changes] for red, blue and white light,” he explained.
He suspected that the plants might use the information encoded in the light to stimulate protective chemical reactions. He and his colleagues examined this more closely by looking at the effect of different colours of light on the plants’ immunity to disease.
“When we shone the light for on the plant for one hour and then infected it [with a virus or with bacteria] 24 hours after that light exposure, it resisted the infection,” he explained.
“But when we infected the plant before shining the light, it could not build up resistance.
“[So the plant] has a specific memory for the light which builds its immunity against pathogens, and it can adjust to varying light conditions.”
He said that plants used information encrypted in the light to immunise themselves against seasonal pathogens.
“Every day or week of the season has… a characteristic light quality,” Professor Karpinski explained.
“So the plants perform a sort of biological light computation, using information contained in the light to immunise themselves against diseases that are prevalent during that season.”
Professor Christine Foyer, a plant scientist from the University of Leeds, said the study “took our thinking one step forward”.
“Plants have to survive stresses, such as drought or cold, and live through it and keep growing,” she told BBC News.
“This requires an appraisal of the situation and an appropriate response – that’s a form of intelligence.
“What this study has done is link two signalling pathways together… and the electrical signalling pathway is incredibly rapid, so the whole plant could respond immediately to high [levels of] light.
26 Friday Jul 2019
Posted Social Science
in≈ Comments Off on The Science of Making Things Go #Viral
16 Saturday Mar 2019
I read this article a few years ago and it keeps popping up. From the SMU News, Southern Methodist University in Dallas Texas, USA.
DALLAS (SMUNews) — Researchers from Southern Methodist University have described two seismic events that they believe may offer the first evidence of a previously undetected form of matter passing through the earth.
This form of matter — known as “strange quark matter” — is so dense that a ton-sized nugget would be about the size of a red blood cell. Physicists have suspected since 1984 that this very heavy form of matter might exist, but no one has yet found evidence of it.
In 1984, Harvard physicist and Nobel Laureate Sheldon L. Glashow suggested that one way such matter might be found would be if a physicist teamed up with a seismologist to search for traces of the matter that might have passed through the earth at supersonic speed. In 1993, SMU physicist Vidgor Teplitz asked Eugene Herrin, a seismologist in the Department of Geological Sciences in SMU’s Dedman College, to collaborate with him on the project. The two were assisted by David Anderson, a senior systems analyst in the Department of Geological Sciences, and Ileana Tibuleac, then a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geological Sciences.
In a paper submitted to the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America and published online at http://xxx.lanl.gov/ (subject area: astrophysics), the SMU researchers describe how they found evidence of strange quark matter by searching through more than a million records of seismic events collected by the U.S. Geological Survey from 1990 to 1993 that were not associated with traditional seismic events such as earthquakes. These records of so-called “unassociated events” were collected from seismic stations set up around the world to monitor earthquakes and nuclear testing.
In a paper previously published in 1995 (available online at http://cornell.mirror.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v53/i12/p6762_1), Herrin and Teplitz had determined that it would be feasible to search for seismic events that might indicate passage of strange quark matter (also known as nuclearites) through the earth because such events would have a distinct seismic signal — a straight line. This would be caused by the large ratio of speed to the speed of sound in the earth. Herrin estimates that strange quark matter might pass through the earth at 250 miles per second, 40 times the speed of seismic waves. The team also determined that the minimum requirement for detection of a nuclearite would be detection of its signal by seven monitoring stations.
In their new paper, the SMU researchers describe two seismic events with the linear pattern they were looking for. One event occurred on Oct. 22, 1993, when something entered the Earth off Antarctica and left it south of India .73 of a second later. The other occurred on Nov. 24, 1993, when an object entered south of Australia and exited the Earth near Antarctica .15 of a second later. The first event was recorded at seven monitoring stations in India, Australia, Bolivia and Turkey, and the second event was recorded at nine monitoring stations in Australia and Bolivia.
“We can’t prove that this was strange quark matter, but that is the only explanation that has been offered so far,” Herrin said.
The SMU team is now trying to determine where the heavy quark matter may have come from. In April 2002, two different teams of scientists reported that they had identified collapsed stars that might be composed of ultradense strange quark matter. Scientists believe that chunks of strange quark matter might be created when stars made of strange quark matter collide.
Unfortunately, Herrin notes, seismologists may not be able to find any more events that suggest the passage of strange quark matter through the Earth. In 1993 the U.S. Geological Survey stopped collecting data from “unassociated events” such as those that the SMU team used in its research.
Related materials:
08 Friday Mar 2019
Interesting article about pets and how humans react/respond to them. From the abstract:
Neural substrates underlying the human-pet relationship are largely unknown. We examined fMRI brain activation patterns as mothers viewed images of their own child and dog and an unfamiliar child and dog. There was a common network of brain regions involved in emotion, reward, affiliation, visual processing and social cognition when mothers viewed images of both their child and dog. Viewing images of their child resulted in brain
activity in the midbrain (ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra involved in reward/affiliation), while a more posterior cortical brain activation pattern involving fusiform gyrus (visual processing of faces and social cognition) characterized a mother’s response to her dog. Mothers also rated images of their child and dog as eliciting similar levels of excitement (arousal) and pleasantness (valence), although the difference in the own vs. unfamiliar child comparison was larger than the own vs. unfamiliar dog comparison for arousal. Valence ratings of their dog were also positively correlated with ratings of the attachment to their dog. Although there are similarities in the perceived emotional experience and brain function associated with the mother-child and mother-dog bond, there are also key differences that may reflect variance in the evolutionary course and function of these relationships.
Stoeckel LE, Palley LS, Gollub RL, Niemi SM, Evins AE (2014) Patterns of Brain Activation when Mothers View Their Own Child and Dog: An fMRI Study. PLoS ONE 9(10): e107205. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107205
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%253Adoi%252F10.1371%252Fjournal.pone.0107205
31 Friday Aug 2018
Posted Uncategorized
in≈ Comments Off on Scientist Seeks Neural And Biological Basis For Creativity, Beauty And Love
One of the world’s leading neuroscientists is to search for the neural and biological basis for creativity, beauty and love after receiving over £1 million from the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest medical research charity. The research will bring together science, the arts and philosophy to answer fundamental questions about what it means to be human.
Professor Semir Zeki from University College London (UCL) has received a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award to establish a programme of research in the new field of “neuroaesthetics”. The research will build on his previous work into the neural mechanisms behind beauty and love.
Together with Professor Ray Dolan, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, Professor Zeki will look at questions that have been debated for millennia by writers, artists and philosophers and yet have been little studied by neurobiologists: Can we measure beauty objectively” How are beauty and love related” What does it mean to be happy”
“All human societies place a high premium on art and the pursuit of beauty,” says Professor Zeki. “We all value and reward creativity. We all want to pursue happiness. But what do these entities mean in concrete, neurobiological terms” We hope to address these issues experimentally. The results will not only increase our knowledge about the workings of the human brain but will also give deep insights into human nature and how we view ourselves.”
Neuroesthetics aims to illuminate the brain’s workings through its cultural products in a similar way to how neuroscientists study the brain through malfunctions caused by disease. However, Professor Zeki believes its impact may be much wider.
“The new field of neuroaesthetics will teach biologists to use the products of the brain in art, music, literature and mathematics to better understand how the brain functions,” he says. “Success will encourage an interdisciplinary approach to other fields, such as the study of economics or jurisprudence in terms of brain activity. This will have a deep impact on social issues.”
Using Wellcome Trust funding, Professor Zeki hopes to attract students and researchers from the sciences, arts and humanities in truly interdisciplinary research. Their work will be overseen by an Advisory Board that will include author AS Byatt, physician, opera producer and broadcaster Sir Jonathan Miller and Dr. Deborah Swallow, Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
“Professor Zeki is a Renaissance Man for the twenty-first century,” says Professor Richard Morris, Head of Neurosciences and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust. “His research sees no boundaries between science and the arts and humanities and will provide an exciting insight in issues that strike at the heart of what it is to be human.”