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News at Tipitaka Network - 0 views

www.tipitaka.net/...news.php dogmatism falsification religion ignorance bias faith dual-causation logic Quantum-Physics measurement Reality Heisenberg uncertainty 5-senses perception
shared by Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13
     
    Finding some interesting and very much TOK articles while I'm working on my religious investigation about the science behind Buddhist beliefs. I found this one particularly intriguing as it discusses why the theory of reincarnation is scientifically sound and why scientists are often narrow-minded and overly trusted. "I was once told by a Buddhist G.P. that, on his first day at a medical school in Sydney, the famous Professor, head of the Medical School, began his welcoming address by stating "Half of what we are going to teach you in the next few years is wrong. Our problem is that we do not know which half it is!" Those were the words of a real scientist." "Logic is only as reliable as the assumptions on which it is based." "Objective experience is that which is free from all bias. In Buddhism, the three types of bias are desire, ill-will and skeptical doubt. Desire makes one see only what one wants to see, it bends the truth to fit one's preferences." "Reality, according to pure science, does not consist of well ordered matter with precise massed, energies and positions in space, all just waiting to be measured. Reality is the broadest of smudges of all possibilities, only some being more probable than others." "At a recent seminar on Science and Religion, at which I was a speaker, a Catholic in the audience bravely announced that whenever she looks through a telescope at the stars, she feels uncomfortable because her religion is threatened. I commented that whenever a scientist looks the other way round through a telescope, to observe the one who is watching, then they feel uncomfortable because their science is threatened by what is doing the seeing! "
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Conflicts between science and religion - 0 views

www.iep.utm.edu/s-rel science knowledge
shared by Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Nov 12
     
    I found another article that highlighted the clear conflict between science and religion as the author reflects on the work of all the scientists we studied, including Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, three of the most famous scientists in history. The author highlights the struggle between church and the findings of these scientists. For example, in the Steven Hawkings movie, the narrator talked about how Newton's discovery of gravity and his laws of motion went against what the church believed. In the article, the author highlights this conflict when he says, "Interestingly, this led to two diametrically opposed inferences. On the one hand, many people saw the success of Newton (and many people see the continued success of physics to the present day) as an argument for atheism. If God is not needed to explain the behavior of the world, and if the cosmos, like a giant clock, operates on mechanical principles alone, then one has no reason to suppose that God even exists. There are no explanatory gaps left for God to fill. Newton himself would have rejected this. He considered God to have a vital role in setting up the initial conditions for the universe."
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Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html climate change science research motivated reasoning bias
shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.
  • One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming.
  • He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.
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  • Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.
  • “The whole doubt-mongering strategy relies on creating the impression of scientific debate,” said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a book about such campaigns. “Willie Soon is playing a role in a certain kind of political theater.”
  • Environmentalists have long questioned Dr. Soon’s work, and his acceptance of funding from the fossil-fuel industry was previously known. But the full extent of the links was not; the documents show that corporate contributions were tied to specific papers and were not disclosed, as required by modern standards of publishing.
  • “What it shows is the continuation of a long-term campaign by specific fossil-fuel companies and interests to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change.
  • Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change.
  • Though often described on conservative news programs as a “Harvard astrophysicist,” Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard. He is a part-time employee of the Smithsonian Institution with a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering. He has received little federal research money over the past decade and is thus responsible for bringing in his own funds, including his salary.
  • Though he has little formal training in climatology, Dr. Soon has for years published papers trying to show that variations in the sun’s energy can explain most recent global warming. His thesis is that human activity has played a relatively small role in causing climate change.
  • As the oil-industry contributions fell, Dr. Soon started receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars through DonorsTrust, an organization based in Alexandria, Va., that accepts money from donors who wish to remain anonymous, then funnels it to various conservative causes.
  • Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a NASA division that studies climate change, said that the sun had probably accounted for no more than 10 percent of recent global warming and that greenhouse gases produced by human activity explained most of it.“The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” Dr. Schmidt said.
  • Dr. Soon has found a warm welcome among politicians in Washington and state capitals who try to block climate action. United States Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who claims that climate change is a global scientific hoax, has repeatedly cited Dr. Soon’s work over the years.
  • Dr. Oreskes, the Harvard science historian, said that academic institutions and scientific journals had been too lax in recent decades in ferreting out dubious research created to serve a corporate agenda.
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News Report on Global Temperatures Is Wrong, Scientists Say - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ming-daily-mail-breitbart.html
shared by maxwellokolo on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 06 Dec 16
     
    Scientists on Friday debunked a widely circulated news media report suggesting that recent record-high global temperatures were unrelated to climate change. The report, which first appeared in the British tabloid The Daily Mail and was summarized in Breitbart News, the right-wing opinion and news site, cited incomplete data and drew incorrect conclusions, the scientists said.
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Mammoth fragments from Siberia raise cloning hopes - Yahoo! News - 1 views

news.yahoo.com/e-cloning-hopes-165221958.html mammoth cloning DNA science
shared by Emily Horwitz on 12 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Scientists have discovered well-preserved frozen woolly mammoth fragments deep in Siberia that may contain living cells, edging a tad closer to the "Jurassic Park" possibility of cloning a prehistoric animal, the mission's organizer said Tuesday.
  • Expedition chief Semyon Grigoryev said Korean scientists with the team had set a goal of finding living cells in the hope of cloning a mammoth. Scientists have previously found bones and fragments but not living cells.
  • Some believe it's possible to recreate the prehistoric animal if they find living cells in the permafrost.
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Psychiatry's New Guide Falls Short, Experts Say - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-falls-short-experts-say.html psychiatry guide science mental paradigm diagnosis causes brain science psychology knowledge
shared by Javier E on 07 May 13 - No Cached
  • his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.
  • While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., is the best tool now available for clinicians treating patients and should not be tossed out, he said, it does not reflect the complexity of many disorders, and its way of categorizing mental illnesses should not guide research.
  • senior figures in psychiatry who have challenged not only decisions about specific diagnoses but the scientific basis of the entire enterprise. Basic research into the biology of mental disorders and treatment has stalled, they say, confounded by the labyrinth of the brain.
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  • The creators of the D.S.M. in the 1960s and ’70s “were real heroes at the time,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Broad Institute and a former director at the National Institute of Mental Health. “They chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with ‘normal.’ But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn’t have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don’t have five diseases — they have one underlying condition.”
  • Dr. Insel is one of a growing number of scientists who think that the field needs an entirely new paradigm for understanding mental disorders, though neither he nor anyone else knows exactly what it will look like.
  • Decades of spending on neuroscience have taught scientists mostly what they do not know, undermining some of their most elemental assumptions. Genetic glitches that appear to increase the risk of schizophrenia in one person may predispose others to autism-like symptoms, or bipolar disorder. The mechanisms of the field’s most commonly used drugs — antidepressants like Prozac, and antipsychosis medications like Zyprexa — have revealed nothing about the causes of those disorders. And major drugmakers have scaled back psychiatric drug development, having virtually no new biological “targets” to shoot for.
  • Dr. Hyman, Dr. Insel and other experts said they hoped that the science of psychiatry would follow the direction of cancer research, which is moving from classifying tumors by where they occur in the body to characterizing them by their genetic and molecular signatures.
  • Dr. Insel said in the interview that his motivation was not to disparage the D.S.M. as a clinical tool, but to encourage researchers and especially outside reviewers who screen proposals for financing from his agency to disregard its categories and investigate the biological underpinnings of disorders instead.
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Free will debate: What does free will mean and how did it evolve? - 0 views

www.slate.com/..._how_did_it_evolve.single.html free will human sciences natural scions
shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will
  • Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom, and so bashing free will is appealing. But their statements against free will can be misleading
  • Free will means freedom from causation.” Other scientists who argue against free will say that it means that a soul or other supernatural entity causes behavior, and not surprisingly they consider such explanations unscientific.
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  • There is a genuine psychological reality behind the idea of free will. The debate is merely about whether this reality deserves to be called free will.
  • Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization.
  • Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them
  • Self-control furnishes the possibility of acting from rational principles rather than acting on impulse.
  • If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting
  • That, in a nutshell, is the inner deciding process that humans have evolved. That is the reality behind the idea of free will: these processes of rational choice and self-control
  • Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it
  • Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there—it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.
  • Understanding free will in this way allows us to reconcile the popular understanding of free will as making choices with our scientific understanding of the world.
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Chinese Scientist Blasts Trump's Climate-Change Talk - China Real Time Report - WSJ - 1 views

blogs.wsj.com/...0127cpollute
shared by dicindioha on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • A global-warming skeptic, Mr. Trump has vowed to cancel the accord, which the Obama administration helped broker, in his first 100 days as president.
  • “I think he is cute, saying whatever comes to his mind. I think the U.S. is a cute country too, because a person like him became the president,” said Prof. Ding.
  • The president said in a 2012 tweet that the Chinese created “the concept of global warming.”
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  • His argument: that a per capita count of emissions would be more equitable and treat all people the same.
  • One cannot both enjoy the benefits of industrialization and completely avoid the damages of it, he said.
  • “Steel made in China is sold to the U.S. The emission is done in China but the consumption happens in the U.S. It’s unfair to attribute that emission to China,” he said.
  • Unlike in the U.S., climate-change skeptics in China are an extremely rare breed—something that Mr. Ding posited was the result of better science education.
  • urged other nations to stick to the Paris agreement, calling it a “responsibility we must assume for future generations.”
  • dicindioha on 09 Feb 17
     
    I previously bookmarked an article about Australia's role in the Paris accords, and then I did not realize the world is in jeopardy of losing the U.S.'s involvement in it. We are one of the leading producers of gas emissions in the world, so that is scary to think about. It is interesting to see that people in such power as the leader of a forefront country do not trust the science that supports global warming, and it is kind of scary. I think it was also interesting that Prof. Ding said steel made in China is sold to the US, where people use it, so it's unfair to attribute the emission to China. That is an interesting argument considering they are making it in order to sell it, but yes we are using it, so it seems both are at fault here, possibly not just to the US. This climate change argument is all over and after our discussions about trusting science it is amazing to see the different sides up for debate that should be difficult to debate unless people debating are expert scientists in global warming/climate change.
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Believe It Or Not, Most Published Research Findings Are Probably False | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ch-findings-are-probably-false science research bias
shared by sissij on 01 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • but this has come with the side effect of a toxic combination of confirmation bias and Google, enabling us to easily find a study to support whatever it is that we already believe, without bothering to so much as look at research that might challenge our position
  • Indeed, this is a statement oft-used by fans of pseudoscience who take the claim at face value, without applying the principles behind it to their own evidence.
  • at present, most published findings are likely to be incorrect.
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  • If you use p=0.05 to suggest that you have made a discovery, you will be wrong at least 30 percent of the time.
  • The problem is being tackled head on in the field of psychology which was shaken by the Stapel affair in which one Dutch researcher fabricated data in over 50 fraudulent papers before being detected.
  • a problem know as publication bias or the file drawer problem.
  • The smaller the effect size, the less likely the findings are to be true.
  • The greater the number and the lesser the selection of tested relationships, the less likely the findings are to be true.
  • For scientists, the discussion over how to resolve the problem is rapidly heating up with calls for big changes to how researchers register, conduct, and publish research and a growing chorus from hundreds of global scientific organizations demanding that all clinical trials are published.
  • sissij on 01 Mar 17
     
    As we learned in TOK, science is full of uncertainties. And in this article, the author suggests that even the publication of science paper is full of flaws. But the general population often cited science source that's in support of them. However, science findings are full of faults and the possibility is very high for the scientists to make a false claim. Sometimes, not the errors in experiments, but the fabrication of data lead to false scientific papers. And also, there are a lot of patterns behind the publication of false scientific papers.
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The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...p-memory-brain-forgetting.html new york times science social media
shared by sissij on 04 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators.
  • It turns out, for example, that neurons can prune their synapses — at least in a dish.
  • Dr. Diering and his colleagues then searched for the molecular trigger for this change. They found that hundreds of proteins increase or decrease inside of synapses during the night. But one protein in particular, called Homer1A, stood out.
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  • “Once you know a little bit of what happens at the ground-truth level, you can get a better idea of what to do for therapy,” Dr. Tononi said.
  • sissij on 04 Feb 17
     
    I find this article very interesting. Everyday, there are all sorts of articles alleges that scientist says this and that. Sometimes, they even contradicts each other. I feel like the science today on the newspaper is hardly reliable. Since science is a social project that's only accessible for a community of specialists. The general population usually plays a role of acceptors. Then many mass media uses the name of science to put up claims that mislead the people. It's really hard for us, the general population, to make sure what we read about on newspaper science section is really science, not another piece of fake news. --Sissi (2/4/2017)
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Climate Science Skeptic Testifies for 40 Minutes Before State Senate Environment Commit... - 0 views

www.seattleweekly.com/...n-senate-environment-committee bias science social media
shared by oliviaodon on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Climate Science Skeptic Testifies for 40 Minutes Before State Senate Environment Committee He was invited by Sen. Doug Ericksen, who is now part of President Trump’s EPA transition team.
  • A prominent skeptic of mainstream climate science today provided an unusually lengthy testimony before a Washington Senate committee at the invitation of Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale. In his statements, Tony Heller, an independent scientist who also blogs under the name Steve Goddard and tweets as @SteveSGoddard, claimed that several employees of two federal agencies doctored data, misleading climate scientists. The veracity of the statement remains in question. Committee time is precious in Olympia. Normally, people get two to three minutes to testify before they are cut off. A panel of a few experts can get 30 minutes on some occasions. Heller was allotted 40 minutes.
  • Heller is not a part of any organization, but he sometimes participates in work groups held by Myron Ebell, who leads efforts at the Liberatian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute to deny the findings of climate scientists. Ebell also led Trump’s transition team at the EPA for a couple of months.
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  • In the days prior to his appearance, Heller—an active Twitter user, who also believes Barack Obama was not born in the United States and that the New York Times is “fake news”—tweeted photos of the Puget Sound area’s recent snow as arguments against global warming. Also on Monday and Tuesday, he tweeted:
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NASA's Big Announcement? A New Solar System That Could Sustain Life | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...lanets-that-could-sustain-life nasa science technology
shared by sissij on 27 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Our solar system is spread out by comparison. This cramped little system finds each planet’s orbit closer to their star, TRAPPIST-1, than Mercury is to ours. Of all the planets discovered, TRAPPIST-1f is the most likely to sustain life, NASA scientists say. Those closer planets may be too hot to contain liquid water, while those beyond may be too cold.
  • Another interesting consideration, this star, since it burns so slowly, will likely outlive ours by a trillion years. So if the Earth is vanquished and the situation is right, we may find a new Eden on TRAPPIST-1f.
  • sissij on 27 Feb 17
     
    I think this is a very striking discovery because it gives us possibilities that there might be alien lives. We have been searching potential planet that can sustain life for a long time and now scientists claim that they have found one at 40 light year away from us. It may lead us to discovery of new living creatures. --Sissi (2/27/2017)
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Scientists Build New Computer Made of DNA - 0 views

www.popularmechanics.com/...new-computer-made-of-dna technology science
shared by kortanekev on 04 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Scientists at the University of Manchester have developed a new type of self-replicating computer that uses DNA to make calculations, a breakthrough that could make computing far more efficient.
  • kortanekev on 04 Mar 17
     
    what are the ethical implications of a computer that functions much like we do... but better? Could a "DNA computer" program its own mutations? When computers do everything for us...what will be the pursuit of knowledge?  Evie K 3/4/17
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Milky Way being pushed through space by cosmic dead zone, say scientists | Science | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...osmic-dead-zone-say-scientists space scientists science
shared by johnsonle1 on 04 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • johnsonle1 on 04 Mar 17
     
    The movement of the Milky Way is dominated by the gravitational attraction of the galaxies around it. If galaxies were scattered randomly through space, the pull would be the same in every direction. But galaxies are not evenly spread out in the universe. As a result, patches of space that are dense in galaxies draw others towards them, while regions that are emptier than normal literally fail to pull their weight: they effectively push objects away from them.
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Magic Viking Sunstone? Crystal's Secret Revealed by Scientist Read more: http://www.fo... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...-secret-revealed-by-scientists science technology knowledge discovery
shared by courtneylang3 on 03 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • courtneylang3 on 03 Nov 11
     
    "The Vikings could have discovered this, simply by choosing a transparent crystal and looking through it through a small hole in a screen," study researcher Guy Ropars wrote in an email to LiveScience. "The understanding of the complete mechanism and the knowledge of the polarization of light is not necessary." Is knowledge of mechanism and process essential in understanding a scientific discovery? This also shows how be develop from believing in magical explination to scientific
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New Truths That Only One Can See - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ths-that-only-one-can-see.html research knowledge
shared by Sophia C on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • eproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true
  • With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.
  • any hypotheses already start with a high chance of being wrong
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  • the human tendency to see what we want to see, unconscious bias is inevitable. Without any ill intent, a scientist may be nudged toward interpreting the data so it supports the hypothesis, even if just barely.
  • He found that a large proportion of the conclusions were undermined or contradicted by later studies.
  • He and his colleagues could not replicate 47 of 53 landmark papers about cancer
  • esearchers deeply believed that their findings were true. But that is the problem. The more passionate scientists are about their work, the more susceptible they are to bias
  • “The slightest shift in their microenvironment can alter the results — something a newcomer might not spot. It is common for even a seasoned scientist to struggle with cell lines and culture conditions, and unknowingly introduce changes that will make it seem that a study cannot be reproduced.
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Give the Data to the People - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ve-the-data-to-the-people.html science data transparency repeatability evidence reproduction
shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has hired my group, Yale University Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review.
  • Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all.
  • As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence.
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  • Even when studies are published, the actual data are usually not made available. End users of research — patients, doctors and policy makers — are implicitly told by a single group of researchers to “take our word for it.” They are often forced to accept the report without the prospect of other independent scientists’ reproducing the findings — a violation of a central tenet of the scientific method.
  • Companies worry that their competitors will benefit, that lawyers will take advantage, that incompetent scientists will misconstrue the data and come to mistaken conclusions.
  • We require those who want the data to submit a proposal and identify their research team, funding and any conflicts of interest. They have to complete a short course on responsible conduct and sign an agreement that restricts them to their proposed research question. Most important, they must agree to share whatever they find. And we exclude applicants who seek data for commercial or legal purposes. Our intent is not to be tough gatekeepers, but to ensure that the data are used in a transparent way and contribute to overall scientific knowledge.
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Gut Bacteria Might Guide The Workings Of Our Minds : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...transcript.php bacteria emotion brain science
shared by Emily Freilich on 23 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Turns out you really can have a gut feeling about something, because evidence has been mounting that those microbes in the body may be important for our emotional health as well as our physical health.
  • PRIA TEWARI: Growing up in India we believe that what you eat influences your thoughts.
  • MAYER: We found that the type of community you have, of microbes you have in your gut, is reflected in some ways in some basic architectural aspects of the brain.
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  • STEIN: The brain connections of people whose microbes are dominated by one species of bacteria look different than those of people whose microbes are dominated by another species. That suggests that the specific mix of microbes in our guts helps determine what kinds of brains we have, how our brain circuits develop, how they're wired.
  • STEIN: It worked the other way around too. The bold mice became timid when they got the microbes of anxious ones. Aggressive mice also calmed down when the scientists altered their microbes by changing their diet, feeding them probiotics, or dosing them with antibiotics.
  • This could help explain why some people are born with brains that don't work the way they're supposed to, causing problems like autism, anxiety, depression.
  • COLLINS: And this resulted in a change in behavior. The mice became a little bit less anxious, a little bit more gregarious.
  • They did things like replace the gut bacteria of anxious mice with bacteria from fearless mice.
  • STEIN: Finally, these scientists figured out how the microbes in the guts of the mice were communicating with their brains - by sending signals up a big nerve known as the vagus nerve.
  • All this is raising the possibility that scientists could create drugs that mimic these signals. Or just give people the good bacteria - probiotics - to prevent or treat problems involving the brain.
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Baffling 400,000-Year-Old Clue to Human Origins - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ound-raises-new-mysteries.html evolution science origins change knowledge
shared by Sophia C on 05 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • e mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years. It is possible, for example, that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA. Scientists hope that further studies of extremely ancient human DNA will clarify the mystery.
  • o was not involved in the research. “That’s an amazing, game-changing thing,” he said.
  • cross. “It’s extremely hard to make sense of,” Dr. Meyer said. “We still are a bit lost here.”
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Drug Widens Immunity to Flu | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37940/title/Drug-Widens-Immunity-to-Flu/ immunity flu science research
shared by grayton downing on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • drug rapamycin paradoxically helped to protect mice against a diverse range of influenza viruses after the animals were vaccinated against just one flu strain.
  • many subtypes and strains of influenza, which evolve at great speed and often hybridize into entirely new strains. Current flu vaccines cannot protect against all of these strains, which forces scientists to try and predict those most likely to cause problems in the coming year.
  • In treated mice, the B cells produced a more diverse repertoire of antibodies, which targeted different parts of the incoming viruses, including regions that are conserved across many strains. This provided protection against flu viruses regardless of strain. 
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  • cross-reactive antibodies bind relatively weakly to their targets and, under normal circumstances, would probably get outcompeted by antibodies with a narrower focus but higher affinity. “For whatever reason, antibodies to the conserved regions are very rare,”
  • possible to skew the response towards more broadly cross-reactive antibodies, in mice, in a particular situation,”
  • not advocating that we use rapamycin [in humans],” said McGargill. However, her group’s discovery could point to other ways of achieving the same effect, perhaps by manipulating the immune system into producing more cross-reactive antibodies. “Maybe instead of trying to enhance the immune response, we need to dampen it a little bit, and allow it to be more diverse,
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