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lucieperloff

Don't Waste Your Emotions on Plants, They Have No Feelings | Live Science - 0 views

www.livescience.com/plants-dont-think-or-feel.html

Consciousness research science

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Trees — and all plants, for that matter — feel nothing at all, because consciousness, emotions and cognition are hallmarks of animals alone, scientists recently reported in an opinion article.
  • Though plants lack brains, the firing of electrical signals in their stems and leaves nonetheless triggered responses that hinted at consciousness, researchers previously reported.
  • Beginning in 2006, some scientists have argued that plants possess neuron-like cells that interact with hormones and neurotransmitters, forming "a plant nervous system, analogous to that in animals
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      so what changed?
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  • "If the lower animals — which have nervous systems — lack consciousness, the chances that plants without nervous systems have consciousness are effectively nil," Taiz said.
  • "Being unconscious is in all likelihood an advantage to plants and contributes to their evolutionary fitness," he added.
lucieperloff

Meet a Bee With a Very Big Brain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bees-brains.html

science research brain science brains

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The large shaggy bee also has a very large brain.
  • The large shaggy bee also has a very large brain.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Relative to other bees? Or to similar sized insects?
  • That means when it comes to insects, the rules that have guided brain evolution in other animals may not apply.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Makes sense because insects and mammals have had very differnt evolutionary obstacles to overcome and survive
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  • “Bees manage surprisingly complex behavior with tiny brains,” making the evolution of bee brains an especially interesting subject.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Maybe the size of the bee's brains doesn't actually relate to their intelligence
  • Bees that only go through one generation each year have larger brains, relative to their body size, than bees with multiple generations a year.
  • A bee with a broad diet can fly into a field and drink the first nectar it finds. But a bee with a specialized diet may have to spot its preferred bloom, with its specific color and fragrance, among a whole field of similar flowers — a task that might require more brain.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is where it could be more important for bees to have larger brains
  • Larger brains have also been linked to social behavior in primates and other mammals. But scientists found no connection between brain size and whether a bee lived in hives like honeybees or was a loner like our big-brained aster-eater.
  • “Highly social species have smaller brains because each individual is more like a cell in the body of the hive,”
  • Dr. Tibbetts said that even for vertebrates, whether bigger-brained animals are smarter is a topic of wide debate.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      You can't really compare the intelligence of a bee and another vertebrate
anonymous

How Engaging With Art Affects the Human Brain | American Association for the Advancemen... - 0 views

www.aaas.org/...gaging-art-affects-human-brain

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Today, the neurological mechanisms underlying these responses are the subject of fascination to artists, curators and scientists alike.
  • "Once you circle these little things and come to the end of this little project, you'll be invited to compare where you came out against what the results of this experiment were and are," Vikan said. "What you'll find in this show is that there is an amazing convergence. The people that came to the museum liked and disliked the same categories of shapes as the people in the lab as the people in the fMRIs."
  • "Art accesses some of the most advanced processes of human intuitive analysis and expressivity and a key form of aesthetic appreciation is through embodied cognition, the ability to project oneself as an agent in the depicted scene,
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  • Embodied cognition is "the sense of drawing you in and making you really feel the quality of the paintings,"
  • The Birth of Venus" because it makes them feel as though they are floating in with Venus on the seashell. Similarly, viewers can feel the flinging of the paint on the canvas when appreciating a drip painting by Jackson Pollock.
  • Mirror neurons, cells in the brain that respond similarly when observing and performing an action, are responsible for embodied cognition
  • Most research on the effects of music education has been done on populations that are privileged enough to afford private music instruction so Kraus is studying music instruction in group settings
  • "But observing the action requires the information to flow inward from the image you're seeing into the control centers. So that bidirectional flow is what's captured in this concept of mirror neurons and it gives the extra vividness to this aesthetics of art appreciation
  • Performing an action requires the information to flow out from the control centers to the limbs,
  • While congenitally blind people usually don't have activation in the visual area of the brain, in brain scans done after the subjects were taught to draw from memory,
  • Hearing speech in noise is one area in which musicians are uniquely skilled. In standardized tests, musicians across the lifespan were much better than the general public at listening to sentences and repeating them back as the level of background noise increased, Kraus said.
  • Artists are known to be better observers and exhibit better memory than non-artists. In an effort to see what happens in the brain when an individual is drawing and whether drawing can increase the brain's plasticity
  • Musicians are also known for their ability to keep rhythm, a skill that is correlated with reading ability and how precisely the brain responds to sound. After one year, students who participated in the group music instruction were faster and more accurate at keeping a beat than students in the control group, Kraus said.
  • "To sum things up, we are what we do and our past shapes our present," Kraus said. "Auditory biology is not frozen in time. It's a moving target. And music education really does seem to enhance communication by strengthening language skills."
  • "When you're doing art, your brain is running full speed,"
  • "It's hitting on all eight cylinders. So if you can figure out what's happening to the brain on art,
kaylynfreeman

Why Lack of Human Touch Can Be Difficult Amid Coronavirus | Time - 1 views

time.com/...coronavirus-human-touch

psychology brain science

shared by kaylynfreeman on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • With people around the world practicing social distancing and self-isolation to curb the further spread of coronavirus, some are starting to feel the effects of a lack of human touch.
  • “Touch is the fundamental language of connection,” says Keltner. “When you think about a parent-child bond or two friends or romantic partners, a lot of the ways in which we connect and trust and collaborate are founded in touch.”
  • It’s not just about how we feel emotionally. Keltner adds that “touch deprivation” can impact people on a psychological and even physical level
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  • “Big parts of our brains are devoted to making sense of touch and our skin has billions of cells that process information about it,”
  • “The right type of friendly touch—like hugging your partner or linking arms with a dear friend—calms your stress response down. [Positive] touch activates a big bundle of nerves in your body that improves your immune system, regulates digestion and helps you sleep well. It also activates parts of your brain that help you empathize.”
  • Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University cited hugging specifically as a form of touch that can strengthen the immune system in a 2014 study investigating whether receiving hugs—and more broadly, social support that gives the perception that one is cared for—could make people less susceptible to one of the viruses that causes the common cold.
  • Broadly speaking, the participants who had reported having more social support were less likely to get sick—and those who got more hugs were far more likely to report feeling socially supported.
  • Everybody should be open to people being a little more socially distant and not touching as much. Some of it will return and some of it won’t.”
  • Although there’s no exact substitute for human touch, if you’re struggling with this aspect of self-isolating in particular, there are a few alternatives that can offer similar health benefits for people who are social distancing
  • “When we’re touched [in a positive way], a cascade of events happens in the brain and one of the important ones is the release of a neurochemical called oxytocin,”
  • Keltner adds that dancing, singing or doing yoga with others via an online platform can also be highly effective substitutes for physical contact
  • “Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease; it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country,”
  • Zak says U.S. customs like shaking hands and hugging may be changed forever and suggests that non-tactile greetings like a nod, bow or wave may come to replace them. However, he says it will still be important to find ways to reintroduce the humanity of positive touch into in-person interactions without putting anyone’s physical or mental health in jeopardy.
  • “In-person interactions have a big effect on the brain releasing oxytocin, but interacting via video is actually not that [different],” he explains. “It’s maybe 80% as effective. Video conferencing is a great way to see and be seen.”
  • But for those who are quarantining alone or with people with whom they don’t have physical contact, loneliness and social isolation are growing health concerns.
  • this process reduces stress and improves immunity. “That’s super valuable in a time of pandemic.”
  • If you’re using a video chat service for work or school, Zak recommends that you take five minutes at the beginning of the call to focus on interpersonal connection.
  • to illustrate how dance parties like Daybreaker can be beneficial for people’s physical and mental health. “When you create a dance experience driven by music, community and participation, that’s how you’re able to release all four happy brain chemicals,” Agrawal says.
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    Touch has a great impact on our brains and our reactions amid coronavirus separation. There are a few substitutes for human touch, like yoga and facetime, that we can all try.
knudsenlu

Why Do We Need to Sleep? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549473

sleep science psychology research

shared by knudsenlu on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In a way, it’s startling how universal sleep is: In the midst of the hurried scramble for survival, across eons of bloodshed and death and flight, uncountable millions of living things have laid themselves down for a nice, long bout of unconsciousness. This hardly seems conducive to living to fight another day.
  • such a risky habit is so common, and so persistent, suggests that whatever is happening is of the utmost importance. Whatever sleep gives to the sleeper is worth tempting death over and over again, for a lifetime.
  • “What is so important that you risk being eaten, not eating yourself, procreation ... for this?”
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  • Biologists call this need “sleep pressure”: Stay up too late, build up sleep pressure. Feeling drowsy in the evenings? Of course you are—by being awake all day, you’ve been generating sleep pressure! But like “dark matter,” this is a name for something whose nature we do not yet understand.
  • The search for the hypnotoxin was not unsuccessful. There are a handful of substances clearly demonstrated to cause sleep—including a molecule called adenosine, which appears to build up in certain parts of the brains of waking rats, then drain away during slumber. Adenosine is particularly interesting because it is adenosine receptors that caffeine seems to work on.
  • For instance, if adenosine puts us under at the moment of transition from wakefulness to sleep, where does it come from? “Nobody knows,” remarks Michael Lazarus, a researcher at the institute who studies adenosine. Some people say it’s coming from neurons, some say it’s another class of brain cells. But there isn’t a consensus. At any rate, “this isn’t about storage,” says Yanagisawa. In other words, these substances themselves don’t seem to store information about sleep pressure. They are just a response to it.
  • A few years ago, the group discovered a mouse that just could not seem to get rid of its sleep pressure. Its EEGs suggested it lived a life of snoozy exhaustion, and mice that had been engineered to carry its mutation showed the same symptoms. “This mutant has more high-amplitude sleep waves than normal. It’s always sleep-deprived,” says Yanagisawa. The mutation was in a gene called SIK3. The longer the mutants stay awake, the more chemical tags the SIK3 protein accumulates. The researchers published their discovery of the SIK3 mutants, as well as another sleep mutant, in Nature in 2016.
knudsenlu

The Theory That Explains the Structure of the Internet - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...553562

structure internet theory science research knowledge technology

shared by knudsenlu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • A paper posted online last month has reignited a debate about one of the oldest, most startling claims in the modern era of network science: the proposition that most complex networks in the real world—from the World Wide Web to interacting proteins in a cell—are “scale-free.” Roughly speaking, that means that a few of their nodes should have many more connections than others, following a mathematical formula called a power law, so that there’s no one scale that characterizes the network.
  • Purely random networks do not obey power laws, so when the early proponents of the scale-free paradigm started seeing power laws in real-world networks in the late 1990s, they viewed them as evidence of a universal organizing principle underlying the formation of these diverse networks. The architecture of scale-freeness, researchers argued, could provide insight into fundamental questions such as how likely a virus is to cause an epidemic, or how easily hackers can disable a network.
  • Amazingly simple and far-reaching natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us,” wrote Barabási (who is now at Northeastern University in Boston) in Linked. He later added: “Uncovering and explaining these laws has been a fascinating roller-coaster ride during which we have learned more about our complex, interconnected world than was known in the last hundred years.”
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  • “These results undermine the universality of scale-free networks and reveal that real-world networks exhibit a rich structural diversity that will likely require new ideas and mechanisms to explain,” wrote the study’s authors, Anna Broido and Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
  • Network scientists agree, by and large, that the paper’s analysis is statistically sound. But when it comes to interpreting its findings, the paper seems to be functioning like a Rorschach test, in which both proponents and critics of the scale-free paradigm see what they already believed to be true. Much of the discussion has played out in vigorous Twitter debates.
  • The scale-free paradigm in networks emerged at a historical moment when power laws had taken on an outsize role in statistical physics. In the 1960s and 1970s, they had played a key part in universal laws that underlie phase transitions in a wide range of physical systems, a finding that earned Kenneth Wilson the 1982 Nobel Prize in physics. Soon after, power laws formed the core of two other paradigms that swept across the statistical-physics world: fractals, and a theory about organization in nature called self-organized criticality.
  • From the beginning, though, the scale-free paradigm also attracted pushback. Critics pointed out that preferential attachment is far from the only mechanism that can give rise to power laws, and that networks with the same power law can have very different topologies. Some network scientists and domain experts cast doubt on the scale-freeness of specific networks such as power grids, metabolic networks, and the physical internet.
  • If you were to observe 1,000 falling objects instead of just a rock and a feather, Clauset says, a clear picture would emerge of how both gravity and air resistance work. But his and Broido’s analysis of nearly 1,000 networks has yielded no similar clarity. “It is reasonable to believe a fundamental phenomenon would require less customized detective work” than Barabási is calling for, Clauset wrote on Twitter.
tongoscar

California prisoner confesses in letter to newspaper that he killed 2 child molesters b... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ss-child-molesters-behind-bars

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A California prison inmate confessed in a letter that he beat two child molesters to death with a cane while behind bars just hours after his urgent warning to a counselor that he might become violent was ignored, a newspaper chain reported Thursday.
  • “We can't comment on an active investigation," Dana Simas, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, wrote in an email.
  • Days before the attack, he said his security classification was changed and he was transferred from a single-person cell to a lower-security dormitory pod at the Central Valley facility. Watson called the switch a “careless" mistake and said he had protested the decision.
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  • Watson wrote that six days after he arrived at the prison, a child molester moved into the pod.
  • Two hours before the attacks the next day, Watson told a prison counselor that he urgently needed to be transferred back to higher-level security “before I really (expletive) one of these dudes up,” but the counselor “scoffed and dismissed" him.
  • “I was mulling it all over when along came Molester #1 and he put his TV right on PBS Kids again,”
johnsonel7

Inherited Learning? It Happens, but How Is Uncertain | Quanta Magazine - 0 views

www.quantamagazine.org/-but-how-is-uncertain-20191016

brain science research

shared by johnsonel7 on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Most recently, some researchers have found evidence that even some learned behaviors and physiological responses can be epigenetically inherited.
  • But in the 1950s, the botanist Royal Alexander Brink discovered that, under different environmental conditions, maize plants with identical genomes expressed different-colored kernels, and these colors were heritable. It was some of the first evidence for epigenetic inheritance. Since then, more examples of inheritance without a clear genetic basis have come to light, as have a variety of possible mechanisms for epigenetic inheritance.
  • C. elegans worms infected with viruses would defend themselves by generating small RNAs that targeted and neutralized the viruses. Moreover, the subsequent offspring of the roundworms also made these small protective RNAs, even though they had never been exposed to the viruses.
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  • He hypothesizes that the process involves one or more molecules released by the nervous system — perhaps small RNAs, perhaps something secreted like a hormone. But somehow those germ cells then influence the behavior of the next generation and seem to circumvent the normal need for rde-4 in the production of the small RNAs for chemotaxis in the progeny.
  • “I believe that today, there is not a single solid paper showing that only small RNAs are involved in epigenetic inheritance,” said Isabelle Mansuy, a neuroepigenetics researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the University of Zurich who studies the inheritance of trauma in humans and mice. In the mouse model she works with, she knows that small RNAs are not sufficient because if she injects small RNAs alone into fertilized mouse eggs, the resulting animals do not show the RNA-associated trait.
  • “If we can ingest a chemical from our environment that changes the epigenomes of the egg or sperm, why couldn’t our brain make a similar molecule that does the same thing?”
manhefnawi

How the Brain Deletes Old Memories | Science | AAAS - 0 views

www.sciencemag.org/...how-brain-deletes-old-memories

Memory Science Brain

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Although the precise role of neurogenesis in memory is still controversial, more than a decade of research has demonstrated that boosting neurogenesis with exercise and antidepressants such as Prozac can increase rodents' ability to learn new information about places and events. A few years ago, however, neuroscientist Paul Frankland of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, noticed that some of the animals in his experiment actually did worse on certain memory tasks when their neuron birth rates had been ramped up. In particular, they performed poorly on tests that required them to retain details about past events.
  • It is difficult to completely eliminate the birth of new neurons in infant mice, but by genetically engineering dividing neural stem cells to self-destruct the team was able to achieve about a 50% reduction of neurogenesis in the animals, Frankland says. With less neurogenesis, the young rodents acted more like adult mice in the experiment. They froze when first placed in the box for roughly a week, rather than just 1 day, after receiving the foot shocks.
manhefnawi

A Deep Dive Into the Brain, Hand-Drawn by the Father of Neuroscience - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...amon-y-cajal-grey-gallery.html

Neuroscience Brain Research

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • This process of synaptic messaging between unconnected cells came to be called the Neuron Doctrine
manhefnawi

Alzheimer's may be caused by haywire immune system eating brain connections | Science |... - 0 views

www.sciencemag.org/...ystem-eating-brain-connections

Research Brain Memory

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • research in mice points to a potential new target: a developmental process gone awry, which causes some immune cells to feast on the connections between neurons.
johnsonel7

Do Babies Cry in Different Languages? - NYT Parenting - 0 views

parenting.nytimes.com/...prespeech-development-wurzburg

research language nature vs nurture

shared by johnsonel7 on 18 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • This was the moment Dr. Wermke, a biologist and medical anthropologist who studies babies’ first sounds, had been waiting for. She made a recording for later analysis in her lab, Würzburg University Clinic’s Center for Pre-Speech Development and Developmental Disorders. But even without the aid of computerized tools, Dr. Wermke could make out a distinctive pattern in Joris’s wail.“He really cried in German just now, right?” she said, smiling as she packed up her equipment.
  • In 2009, Dr. Wermke’s and her colleagues made headlines with a study showing that French and German newborns produce distinctly different “cry melodies,” reflecting the languages they heard in utero: German newborns produce more cries that fall from a higher to a lower pitch, mimicking the falling intonation of the German language, while French infants tend to cry with the rising intonation of French. At this age, babies experiment with a wide variety of sounds, and can learn any language. But they are already influenced by their mother tongue.
  • After they are born, young babies mimic many different sounds. But they are especially shaped by the prosody they heard in the womb, which becomes a handy guide to the strange sounds coming from the people around them. Through stress, pauses and other cues, prosody cuts up the stream of sound into words and phrases – that is, into speech.
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  • The 2-month-old with hearing problems also makes a leap. Nine days after receiving a hearing aid, his irregular, choked cries have given way to confident experiments with vowel sounds.
  • All parents, Dr. Wermke said, have an innate ability to understand and respond to their babies. Indeed, it was mothers who supported her research from the beginning, even as other scientists were skeptical. In the 1980s, when Dr. Wermke first began recording babies’ sounds, many researchers viewed crying as a mere biological alarm signal, worth investigating only in the context of problems such as colic. But mothers never doubted that their tiny babies were worth studying. As Judith Fricke, little Joris’s mother, said, “I think you’d recognize the sound of your own child among a hundred others. You develop an ear for that.”
sanderk

4 Everyday Items Einstein Helped Create - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...ty-lasers-solar-genius-science

einstein Knowledge Technology research

shared by sanderk on 13 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Albert Einstein is justly famous for devising his theory of relativity, which revolutionized our understanding of space, time, gravity, and the universe. Relativity also showed us that matter and energy are just two different forms of the same thing—a fact that Einstein expressed as E=mc2, the most widely recognized equation in history.
  • Credit for inventing paper towels goes to the Scott Paper Company of Pennsylvania, which introduced the disposable product in 1907 as a more hygienic alternative to cloth towels. But in the very first physics article that Einstein ever published, he did analyze wicking: the phenomenon that allows paper towels to soak up liquids even when gravity wants to drag the fluid downward.
  • Again, Einstein didn’t invent solar cells; the first crude versions of them date back to 1839. But he did sketch out their basic principle of operation in 1905. His starting point was a simple analogy: If matter is lumpy—that is, if every substance in the universe consists of atoms and molecules—then surely light must be lumpy as well.
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  • Einstein turned this insight into an equation that described the jittering mathematically. His Brownian motion paper is widely recognized as the first incontrovertible proof that atoms and molecules really exist—and it still serves as the basis for some stock market forecasts.
  • He was trying to explain an odd fact that was first noticed by English botanist Robert Brown in 1827. Brown looked through his microscope and saw that the dust grains in a droplet of water were jittering around aimlessly. This Brownian motion, as it was first dubbed, had nothing to do with the grains being alive, so what kept them moving?
  • If you’ve been to a conference or played with a cat, chances are you’ve seen a laser pointer in action. In the nearly six decades since physicists demonstrated the first laboratory prototype of a laser in 1960, the devices have come to occupy almost every niche imaginable, from barcode readers to systems for hair removal.
  • So Einstein made an inspired guess: Maybe photons like to march in step, so that the presence of a bunch of them going in the same direction will increase the probability of a high-energy atom emitting another photon in that direction. He called this process stimulated emission, and when he included it in his equations, his calculations fit the observations perfectly
  • A laser is just a gadget for harnessing this phenomenon
katherineharron

'Life or death still possible': 31 days at my dad's virtual bedside - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • The attending physician at the intensive care unit had called that morning and asked whether they should include a Do Not Resuscitate order in my dad's chart. They had asked before. I had been indecisive. A successful resuscitation would extend his life. But it might also lead to brain damage.
  • "If it continues in this direction," he told me, "we're talking about a single-digit chance of survival."
  • I suspected that my father had a will and a health care directive inside the house. I put on my mask but couldn't find a clean pair of latex gloves in my duffel bag. It was cold in the backyard. I had a pair of leather gloves. I put those on and entered my childhood home for the first time in weeks. My mother barely registered my presence. She was crying on the couch.
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  • I was relieved -- we wouldn't have to make what felt like an impossible decision -- but then I kept reading. My father had noted that he did not want to be supported by a ventilator or hooked up to a feeding tube for any length of time. He had been connected to both for nearly two weeks.
  • There was grief on her face, but also curiosity. What had finally gotten to her younger son, the one who so rarely showed emotion during his father's hospitalization?
  • I called the hospital and approved the DNR. They told me his status was still dire. I called my dad's closest friends and started preparing them for the worst.
  • My father's lungs showed no signs of progress. The double pneumonia they diagnosed days before was worsening. His kidneys were failing. Dialysis was required but would put a strain on his blood pressure, which was already dangerously low. There was a special form of dialysis designed for delicate situations like this -- continuous veno-venous hemofiltration -- but it wasn't available at Lawrence
  • The morning after I searched for my father's health directive and drafted his obituary, I woke up and tried to turn on my laptop. It wouldn't start. When it eventually booted up, it asked if I wanted to restore an unsaved document. No, I thought, let's see what happens today.
  • It was the same doctor as yesterday, the one who asked about the DNR. "Look, your dad is on a ventilator. That's a form of life support. He's experiencing kidney failure and requires dialysis. His situation is still very acute. He was in good health before the Covid, but his kidney, heart, and lungs are 69 years old. It's tough for them to recover. But the numbers from today are undeniably better than yesterday. There's been an improvement at almost every level. Your dad is a tough guy."
  • One of my close friends, a nurse practitioner, would help me understand all the terminology and its implications. He was treating Covid patients at an ICU upstate. At the end of our calls I'd ask him how he was doing. "We ran out of gowns," he told me one day. "My ICU is out of ventilators -- we're diverting people to Albany," he said another time.
  • "There's a difference between good intentions and good outcomes," I explained to her. She would wave me away and pick up. Inevitably the call would bring her tears. I stewed on the porch. My brother, uncle and I would spend hours trying to ease her mind and pacify her anxiety. Any inquiry or outreach was like sticking a finger in the open wound of her anguish.
  • I called my friend, the nurse practitioner, and gave him the latest update. He seemed upset. "You OK, dude?" "A nurse from my hospital died," he explained.
  • The nurses and doctors who took care of my father -- first for four days at NewYork-Presbyterian Lawrence Hospital, then for nearly a month at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia -- were always empathetic, straightforward and willing to trust me with complicated details.
  • About a week after writing -- then refusing to recover -- my father's obituary, his condition was continuing to improve.
  • "He's only improving," I told her, "because of the life-saving care you guys have given him. The whole city is in awe of you. They should have a parade for you down the Canyon of Heroes."
  • Covid-19 was new and largely unstudied. Maybe one of these seemingly odd treatments would work.
  • "Yesterday was a stumble, but we're getting back on course," I emailed the group. "We always knew this recovery wasn't going to be a straight line. It's important to remain resilient and optimistic even when there are temporary setbacks."
  • "Oh Lou, I've been waiting for your call. I have such good news. They are planning to extubate him tomorrow. They are going to take your father off the ventilator!" She was practically screaming with excitement. I was speechless.
  • I had been withholding certain information from my family and friends during this whole ordeal. My dad had developed a blood clot two weeks into his hospitalization. Clots are extremely dangerous, of course, but it was small and in a relatively manageable location.
  • I called my brother and told him about the plan to get my father off the ventilator. Since there were a number of contingencies, we debated telling my mother. She was living and dying with every update.
  • My father's breathing was labored on the morning they were planning to extubate. They delayed the procedure a day. That next morning, April 16, a doctor called. I was in the shower and rushed out to answer my cell. He said they were doing the extubation within the hour. What do we want to do if the extubation fails?
  • "It went as well as we could have hoped for," the doctor said. "His vitals are stable and he's breathing well. He's resting now." She explained that my father was disoriented and it probably wasn't a great idea to speak with him that day. Whatever, I thought, I'll speak with him when he gets home. He had been on a ventilator for 28 days.
  • I called the doctor later in the day. She told me my dad seemed distressed. He was trying to speak, but his vocal cords were too swollen. "It's so frustrating," she told me. "I don't know what he wants to tell me."
  • "Each facility has their own Covid rules," she explained. "I'll send you over a list." On the list was the nursing home where my grandfather had died several years before. My father had visited him every day.
  • I called the step-down unit where he had been the past three days. They transferred me to his nurse. "He's doing better, love. We took him off the pressor and his blood pressure is in a good range. His heart rate is good. He's breathing fine. The doctors decided he didn't need to go back to the ICU. He's ok."
  • "I've repeatedly said that recovery isn't a straight line. ... Yesterday we managed the roller coaster ride as a family. My brother, uncle and I were with my mother the entire day. We never lost hope or confidence in my dad's medical care and ultimate recovery. If there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it's a blinking one. Right now, it shines again."
  • I drove back to my mom's house. I scanned the block for my brother's car. He had not arrived. I parked. I have to wait for him and then tell my mother, brother and uncle all at once, right? Should I call my wife first? Should I call my dad's best friend?
  • I called my wife. I called my dad's best friend. I called the guys he grew up with. I called his former colleagues. I began every conversation the same way, "This is that call." I listened to each of them yell and cry and ask if I was serious. Then I said I had to make another call.
  • I wrote about my father's career. How he got his law degree at night school and became a prosecutor at the city, state, and federal level. How he convicted mobsters, drug dealers, and those who abused power.
  • I wrote about my dad's volunteer work -- at the Special Olympics, at an organization he founded that helps police families with special needs, and at just about any Italian-American group that needed a lawyer. He was so proud of his Italian-American heritage. He loathed the mafioso caricatures and stereotypes found on TV -- he wrote countless op-eds attacking those -- but he revered the old-school virtues he associated with his Italian-American upbringing: loyalty, humility, hard work, dedication to family.
  • He was a Covid patient for 31 days. It was a painful experience, but ultimately unimportant. It doesn't matter how a man dies. It matters how he lives.
sanderk

Is Pain a Construct of the Mind? - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...is-pain-construct-of-mind

pain mind science brain science emotions research

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Clear Lake found that Rogers could recruit an abnormally high number of muscle fibers. But was this ability because of a freak genetic mutation? Another possibility, which Rogers thinks is more likely, is the way he processes pain when he strains those muscles.
  • What if, instead of superpowered muscles, Rogers has a normal—though extremely well exercised—body, and his abilities arise because he can withstand more pain than most mere mortals?
  • Rogers reasons that, unlike in the dentist's office—where he has no control over the pain that is inflicted on him—he has direct executive control over pain that he inflicts on himself. “I know it's coming, I have an idea of what to expect and I can decide to ignore it,” he says. Confronted with severe pain, most people fear that they will damage their body permanently if they persist, so they stop well before they are in real danger, Rogers explains.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Maybe Rogers's muscle cells are normal, and he experiences pain as most of us do but chooses to disregard it when he feels in command.
  • An illusion is a perception that does not match the physical reality. Is pain, then, as with illusions, a mind construct that some people can decide to turn off? As you will see in the studies that follow, pain varies as a function of mood, attentiveness and circumstances, lending support to the theory that pain is an emotion.
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    During practice, my coaches always say that I need to overcome pain but I never knew how. I found this article interesting because it says that pain is an emotion. I have never thought that pain could even be close to an emotion. It is interesting how the world's strongest man can just ignore the pain and keep doing these incredible feats. Controlling one's pain must either be a skill or just a natural-born gift. Like in TOK, we must practice skills such as controlling our emotions. If pain is an emotion, then theoretically, I could control it. I am going to test this out in my life and see if I can control my own pain during exercise.
manhefnawi

Brain waves may focus attention and keep information flowing | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...n-and-keep-information-flowing

Brain Waves Coordination Focus Information

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • We can’t see it, but brains hum with electrical activity. Brain waves created by the coordinated firing of huge collections of nerve cells pinball around the brain. The waves can ricochet from the front of the brain to the back, or from deep structures all the way to the scalp and then back again.
manhefnawi

Infants Can See Image Differences That Adults Cannot, Study Finds | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...nces-adults-cannot-study-finds

Perception

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Babies may be able to see image details that are invisible or imperceptible to adults. According to a recent study [PDF] from Japanese scientists Jiale Yang, So Kanazawa, Masami K. Yamaguchi, and Isamu Motoyoshi, three- and four-month-old infants may view certain images differently because they lack perceptual constancy. That means they can see small image differences that are invisible to adults because of changes in lighting conditions.
Javier E

New cancer treatment destroys tumours in terminally ill, finds trial | Cancer | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-in-terminally-ill-finds-trial

cancer treatment research

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • In a landmark trial, a cocktail of immunotherapy medications harnessed patients’ immune systems to kill their own cancer cells and prompted “a positive trend in survival”, according to researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, and the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust.
  • Scientists found the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab medications led to a reduction in the size of tumours in terminally-ill head and neck patients. In some, their cancer vanished altogether, with doctors stunned to find no detectable sign of disease.
  • the immunotherapy treatment also triggered far fewer side-effects compared with the often gruelling nature of “extreme” chemotherapy,
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The results from the phase 3 trial, involving almost 1,000 dying head and neck cancer patients, were early and not statistically significant but were still “clinically meaningful”, the ICR said, with some patients living months or years longer and suffering fewer side effects.
  • When the research nurses called to tell me that, after two months, the tumour in my throat had completely disappeared, it was an amazing moment,” said Ambrose. “While there was still disease in my lungs at that point, the effect was staggering.”
Javier E

Climate Change: The Technologies That Could Make All the Difference - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-make-a-difference-11650656071

climate change technology research development

shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • The modularity of DAC systems implies that costs for CO2 removal might drop 90% to 95% over a couple of decades, just like the recent cost declines for other modular solutions such as wind turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.
  • Unlike other pollutants, what matters with carbon dioxide isn’t the location of its release but the total atmospheric accumulation. Releasing greenhouse gases in industrial corridors and then removing them from the atmosphere in remote locations has essentially the same net effect as if the carbon wasn’t emitted in the first place. That means we can deploy DAC systems wherever the energy for their operation is cheapest, ecosystem impacts are lowest, and the economic activity would be welcome.
  • A solar microgrid, which generates, stores and distributes clean energy to homes and facilities in a local network, provides a strong answer to these needs and wants. It can integrate with the main electric grid or disconnect and operate autonomously if the main grid is stressed or goes down. The physical pieces—solar panels, batteries and inverters—have been improving for a while. What’s new and coming, though, is the ability to orchestrate these different pieces into agile electric grids.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • With digital tools and data science, demand for energy can now be sculpted locally to match available resources, reducing the number of power plants that utilities need to keep in reserve.
  • The key is giving consumers the ability to separate flexible energy uses—say, operating a Jacuzzi—from essential needs, which can now be done with phone apps for smart appliances and service panels.
  • Meanwhile, connections between groups of customers can be opened and closed as needed with modern, communicating circuit switchgear.
  • The good news is that record amounts of batteries are being installed in U.S. homes and on the electric grid, despite supply-chain bottlenecks.
  • The bad news is that current battery technology only offers a few hours of storage. What’s needed are more-powerful battery systems that can extend the length or scale of storing, which could be even more enabling to sun and wind power.
  • Two such solutions are on the horizon. Stationary metal-air batteries, such as iron-air batteries, don’t hold as much energy per kilogram as lithium-ion batteries so it takes a larger, heavier battery to do the job. But they are cheaper, iron is a plentiful metal, and the batteries, whose chemistry works via interaction of the metal with air, can be sized and installed to store and discharge a large level of electricity over days or weeks.
  • improved large iron-air batteries are poised to become a great new backup for renewable energy within the next couple of years to address those times of year when drops in renewable energy production can last for days and not hours.
  • For households, a battery configuration called a virtual power plant also holds huge potential to extend the use of renewables. These systems allow a local utility or electricity distributor to collect excess energy stored in multiple households’ battery systems and feed it back to the grid when there is a surge in demand or generation shortfall.
  • Electrification is a good choice for smaller vessels on short voyages, like the world’s largest all-electric ferry launched in Norway in 2021. It isn’t yet a viable option for ships on transoceanic voyages because batteries are still too large and heavy, though innovative approaches for battery swapping are being explored.
  • Greener Shipping
  • For longer voyages, e-ammonia, a hydrogen-derived fuel made with renewable energy, has been identified as a prime candidate, although work is needed to ensure safety. Ammonia has a higher energy density than some other options, making it a more economical option for powering large ships across oceans.
  • Among ammonia projects in the works, MAN Energy Solutions is developing engines that can run on conventional fossil fuel or ammonia, a coalition of Nordic partners is designing the world’s first ammonia-powered vessel, and Singapore is evaluating how to bunker the fuel.
  • Some EV makers such as Tesla are now embracing an older, less-expensive battery technology known as lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP, used originally in scooters and small EVs in China
  • . It draws entirely on cheap and abundant minerals and is less flammable. The power density of LFP is less than NMC, but that disadvantage can be overcome by advances in vehicle design.
  • One approach being tested eliminates the outer packaging of the batteries altogether and directly installs cells, packed in layers, into a cavity in the EV’s body chassis.
  • Eventually, solid-state batteries—with a solid electrolyte made from common minerals like glass or ceramics—could become a key EV battery technology.
  • The solid electrolyte is more chemically stable, lighter, recharges faster and has many more lifetime recharging cycles than lithium-ion batteries, which depend on heavy liquid electrolytes.
  • these innovations are good news for those hoping to speed up EV adoption. They also suggest that batteries, far from becoming a standardized commodity, are going to be customized as auto makers create their own vehicle designs and battery makers develop proprietary platforms.
Javier E

What Is 'Food Noise'? How Ozempic Quiets Obsessive Thinking About Food - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ozempic-food-noise.html

noise food cravings psychology

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • There is no clinical definition for food noise, but the experts and patients interviewed for this article generally agreed it was shorthand for constant rumination about food. Some researchers associate the concept with “hedonic hunger,” an intense preoccupation with eating food for the purpose of pleasure, and noted that it could also be a component of binge eating disorder, which is common but often misunderstood.
  • “It just seems to be that some people are a little more wired this way,” he said. Obsessive rumination about food is most likely a result of genetic factors as well as environmental exposure and learned habits
  • The active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy is semaglutide, a compound that affects the areas in the brain that regulate appetite, Dr. Gabbay said; it also prompts the stomach to empty more slowly, making people taking the medication feel fuller faster and for longer. That satiation itself could blunt food noise
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Why some people can shake off the impulse to eat, and other people stay mired in thoughts about food, is “the million-dollar question,”
  • There’s another theoretical framework for why Ozempic might quash food noise: Semaglutide activates receptors for a hormone called GLP-1. Studies in animals have shown those receptors are found in cells in regions of the brain that are particularly important for motivation and reward, pointing to one potential way semaglutide could influence cravings and desires.
  • Ms. Klemmer said she worried about the potential long-term side effects of a medication she might be on for the rest of her life. But she thinks the trade-off — the end of food noise — is worth it. “It’s worth every bad side effect that I’d have to go through to have what I feel now,” she said: “not caring about food.”
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