El detector de terremotos del año 132 (de hace casi 1900 años)

microsiervos

Sismómetro — Este dispositivo podía detectar terremotos tan distantes que nadie cercano los sentía siquiera. Era un dispositivo en forma de jarrón con varias cabezas en bronce de dragones, cada una con una bola de bronce en su boca; alrededor del pie tenía varios sapos de bronce con las bocas abiertas. Si la máquina detectaba un temblor de tierra las bolas de bronce se soltaban y caían en la boca de los sapos, provocando un ruido a modo de alarma. La dirección de la cual procedía el temblor quedaba indicada según la bola que había caído.

El dispositivo construido por Zhang Heng en el año 132 era capaz de detectar temblores que había tenido lugar a más de 600 km de distancia. El sismoscopio de Zhang detectaba los terremotos y en qué dirección ocurrían, pero no los medía como hacen los sismógrafos — que no fueron desarrollados hasta que la sismología fue ‘reinventada’ en occidente casi 1700 años más tarde.

Vía IBM Think.
Fotografía (cc) Kowloonese
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First person to live to 1,000 already alive today?

Jurassic Marijuana Plant Brought Back To Life After 200 Million Years

City World News

A French team of scientists from the University of Paris fell upon an unlikely find when they gathered remnants of plant material buried deep into the permafrost of Antarctica in 2013. To their surprise, the recovered plant material contained intact seeds, but it is only months later that a team of paleobotanists took up the challenge of reviving the 200 million-year old plant and, to their own disbelief, succeeded.

It is not the first time an extinct plant has been brought back to life since a specimen of Silene stenophylla, a plant that has been extinct for over 30,000 years, was just brought back into existence in 2012 by Russian scientists, but it is definitely an incredible find as is thought to be of the Jurassic period, possibly estimated to be 200 million-years old.

It is also a mystery that tropical plants could have managed to grow on the Antarctica continent 200 million-years ago and the experiment could bring to light vital information about atmospheric conditions on Earth at the time, such as levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide (CO2).

The obvious question on most minds: how potent is this strain of Cannabis? One researcher did sample the plant and measurements said one hit is the equivalent of smoking four ounces of a normal strain of cannabis.

While it’s an important discovery, many are worried the ancient strain could get out of the lab and into the hands of marijuana growers.

The lab said while the drug will leave the user catatonic for two to five days, there is absolutely no risk of overdoes and the researches promise they will do everything within their power to keep the plants secure.

Un test de atención

microsiervos

Observa este vídeo con mucha atención para descubrir lo que está sucediendo; se trata de comprobar tu capacidad de atención – más o menos. Son solo 60 segundos.

(No tiene susto ni nada de eso.)

Al cabo de un rato notarás que algo extraño está pasando. Al llegar al final se puede escucharse la explicación completa – con el ruido de tu caída de mandíbula incluida.

Si te gustó este hackeo mental seguramente te gustarán El experimento de las camisetas blancas, la carta que cambia de color y alguno otro similar que hemos publicado por aquí. Son todo un ejemplo estupendo de divulgación científica sobre cómo funcionan la visión, nuestro cerebro y los procesos de percepción.

ŠKODA UK

 

The Meaning of Siberia’s Mystery Craters

The New Yorker

By Elizabeth Kolbert

They have been attributed to meteorite impacts, missile strikes, and gas-field explosions. The likeliest explanation, however, seems to be climate change. Credit Photograph by AP.

Ever since last July, when a Russian YouTube user uploaded “Giant Hole in the Ground,” a thirty-four-second video of, well, a giant hole in the ground—about two hundred and fifty feet across and more than a hundred and fifty feet deep—the world has been fascinated by a group of mysterious craters in the tundra of the Russian Arctic. On Thursday, Vasily Bogoyavlensky, the deputy director of the Oil and Gas Research Institute, at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Agence France-Presse that he and his colleagues have now identified seven of these “holes at the end of the world,” including one that is more than half a mile across. “But, in fact, there are plenty more,” Bogoyavlensky said.

Theories about the mystery craters have variously attributed them to meteorite impacts, missile strikes, explosions from nearby gas fields, and the melting of soil-covered ice mounds, known as pingos. The most likely explanation for the phenomenon, however, seems to be climate change. Underground temperatures in parts of Siberia have risen by nearly four degrees in the past fifteen years. As the ground there—mostly permafrost—warms, it releases methane. The methane builds up until there’s an explosion, which leaves behind a hole. “The phenomenon is similar to the eruption of a volcano,” Bogoyavlensky said.

Whether or not they end in explosions, these methane releases are a serious concern. Methane is a greenhouse gas, and on a molecule-by-molecule basis it is a far more potent warming agent than carbon dioxide (although it doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere). If the permafrost is leaking methane because of rising temperatures, a positive-feedback loop could be taking effect: more methane leads to further warming, which leads to further thawing, and so on.

But the holes in Siberia also point to another, stranger phenomenon. Global warming and geology turn out to be connected in unexpected ways. Consider, for example, earthquakes. Generally, earthquakes occur because of the movements of Earth’s tectonic plates; they tend to take place along plate boundaries. But recently Greenland has been experiencing an unusually large number of quakes. One widely discussed theory attributes this to the shrinking of the Greenland ice sheet. As the ice sheet melts, its weight declines, allowing the land underneath it to rise. The process, which is known as isostatic rebound, may well be responsible for the increase in seismic activity.

Iceland, too, is rising, and for similar reasons. As the country’s glaciers melt, the land is rebounding. A recent study showed that some parts of the country are gaining elevation at the astonishing rate of 1.4 inches a year. “What we’re observing is a climatically induced change in the earth’s surface,” Richard Bennett, one of the authors of the study and a geoscientist at the University of Arizona, told the Web site Live Science last month. In the case of Iceland, that change may lead to an increase in volcanic activity. As the land rises, the pressure on the rock beneath it changes. Lower pressure translates into a lower melting temperature, which could, in turn, translate into more (or at least more destructive) volcanic eruptions. The past five years have been packed with “interesting volcanic activity,” Sigrún Hreinsdóttir, Bennett’s fellow-researcher and a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, told the Washington Post. “You can’t make any statistics from those few data points, of course, but you do notice there might be a connection with the uplift,” And there’s a precedent: during the deglaciation that occurred at the end of the last ice age, some twelve thousand years ago, volcanic activity in Iceland is estimated to have increased by as much as a factor of thirty.

In Siberia, the enormous craters are rapidly filling with water. Soon, they’ll probably be lakes. Of course, by then, new craters may well have opened up, and with them new mysteries to investigate in a warming world.

El Dr. Canavero asegura tener listo el primer trasplante de cabeza

Quo
Juan Scaliter

Donante

Se realizan incisiones profundas en los cuellos de ambos pacientes, separando cuidadosamente todas las estructuras anatómicas.

Quedan al descubierto las venas carótidas y yugulares, y la columna.

El cuerpo del donante respira y transmite sangre a los tejidos por medio de diferentes equipos

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¿Sabes de quienes he recibido más cartas y llamadas solicitando información?”, me pregunta desde Italia, Sergio Canavero. “De transexuales.” Y suena lógico. Este neurocientífico, director del Grupo de Neuromodulación Avanzado de Turín, ha asegurado en un trabajo publicado en Surgical Neurological International que ya contamos con la tecnología para realizar un trasplante de cabeza completo. Y propone hacer el primero en menos de tres años.

La investigación en trasplantes de cabeza, que en realidad debería llamarse donación de cuerpo, ya que es la cabeza la que “recibe” un cuerpo nuevo, comenzó en la década de 1940. En aquellos tiempos, el científico ruso Vladimir Demikhov experimentaba con perros construyendo falsas quimeras, como sus canes de dos cabezas. En total, Demikhov realizó más de 20 intervenciones de este tipo, con las que creó un terrorífico ejército de animales bicéfalos. Hoy, estos experimentos se consideran una aberración; pero gracias a ellos se comenzó a investigar en las técnicas de trasplantes. Este científico ruso, muerto en 1988, fue quien logró llevar a cabo el primer trasplante de corazón en un perro, en 1946, el pionero en trasplantar un pulmón en cualquier mamífero, un año más tarde, y en 1953 realizó el primer bypass coronario.

El mono con dos cabezas

Todo ello permitió que en 1967 el cirujano sudafricano Christiaan Barnard realizara por primera vez un trasplante de corazón en un ser humano. El propio Barnard reconocía que “si existe un padre de los trasplantes de corazón y pulmón, ese título lo ostenta, sin duda, Demikhov”. Y no fue el único que le consideró un pionero. En los años 70 el doctor Robert White, inspirado por los experimentos de Demikhov, realizó el primer intercambio de cabezas en primates, trasplantando con éxito la cabeza de un mono Rhesus al cuerpo de otro. El pequeño simio sobrevivió durante varios días, pero al no poder conectar la médula espinal a la cabeza, falleció. El doctor Jerry Silver, de la Universidad Case Western Reserve, estuvo presente y sus memorias no son agradables. “Recuerdo que la cabeza se despertó”, asegura Silver, “y su expresión facial era de un dolor terrible. No me olvido tampoco de la ansiedad y la confusión que se podía ver en su rostro. Cuando los médicos intentaron alimentar al animal, la comida cayó al suelo. Fue terrible. La cabeza siguió viva, pero por poco tiempo”.

“Los científicos estamos preparados para un debate como este. Es la sociedad la que no lo está todavía”, asegura el neurocientífico José Aguilera

El dolor que experimentó el mono es algo en lo que Cavanero ya ha investigado. “Se produce cuando se secciona la médula espinal”, explica, “y se llama dolor central. Es algo que no deberías desearle ni a tu peor enemigo”.

Por eso, este obstáculo, la reconexión de la médula, es la piedra angular en la que se basa el trabajo de Canavero: “Cuando leí los papeles de White, me pregunté si lograría hacer un trasplante. Y comencé a interesarme en la regeneración neuronal. En 1986, George Bittner, del Departamento de Zoología de la Universidad de Texas, demostró que se podía restablecer la conexión entre las partes seccionadas de la médula utilizando polietilenglicol (PEG), un polímero que actúa como adhesivo. Me resultó interesante, pero durante treinta años nadie escribió sobre eso”. Lo extraño es que en 2013 el antes mencionado doctor Silver reconectó la médula de una rata gracias a este pegamento. Así que, ¿obstáculo salvado? En absoluto. Para el propio Silver: “Aún estamos a años luz de poder realizar una intervención similar en humanos. Falta mucho para que consigamos unir todas las piezas de modo que el sujeto recupere finalmente la movilidad completa”.

Canavero no está de acuerdo: “Desde hace 50 años sabemos que no es necesario reconectar todo el circuito nervioso para tener motricidad completa; basta solamente entre un 10 y un 30%. Nosotros creo que podemos reconectar hasta un 60%”.

Otros avances parecían imposibles y...

Las afirmaciones de Canavero han generado, obviamente, mucho revuelo. Algunos, como el propio Silver, aseguran que es imposible. Otros, como Anthony Warrens, de la Sociedad Británica de Trasplantes, señalan que “conectar una cabeza a un cuerpo es un sinsentido hoy en día. Toda la idea es muy extraña”. Mientras tanto, aquí, en España, las opiniones están muy divididas. Manuel Martín Loeches, profesor de Neurociencia Cognitiva de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, asegura: “No lo veo nada descabellado, y en realidad el único dilema sería el de quién es el “titular” de lo que salga: ¿el dueño original de la cabeza o el del cuerpo? Voto por el de la cabeza, es lo único que vale de verdad para que haya un ‘yo’. Tengo mis dudas respecto a cómo enlazar el sistema nervioso central (cerebro y médula espinal) con todos los nervios periféricos, pero tampoco lo creo imposible, hoy día, pues se ha hecho con los de las manos. Resumiendo: lo creo factible, me caben pocas dudas”.

Por su parte, José Aguilera, director del Instituto de Neurociencias de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, es ambiguo. Al principio, asegura: “Difícilmente se podría llevar a cabo una intervención así. La médula espinal es muy compleja y el resultado podría no ser bueno”. Después lo piensa más despacio: “Pero la verdad es que no lo podemos considerar inverosímil. Habría que ver el tema del rechazo de tejidos y cómo afectaría hormonalmente al comportamiento del nuevo cuerpo el cerebro”.

Son muchos los científicos que ponen en tela de juicio que de verdad contemos con la tecnología para realizar este tipo de operación, que claman que es algo imposible y que estamos jugando a Prometeo y Frankenstein. “Hace poco más de un siglo”, señala Canavero para explicarlo, “a los hermanos Wright les decían que una nave que fuera más pesada que el aire no podía levantar vuelo. La historia de la ciencia está plagada de ejemplos de imposibles que se convirtieron en realidad”.

Pero también de otros, como los coches voladores, los autobuses submarinos y los viajes en el tiempo, que apenas llegaron al cine.

Aguilera intenta aclarar esta cuestión: “Muchas veces estas ideas se lanzan para obtener notoriedad o para avanzar hacia el futuro. Es como cuando Barnard hizo el primer trasplante de corazón; quizá él avanzó demasiado deprisa. Aunque muchos científicos ya sabíamos que se podía hacer”.

La intervención completa (véase el paso a paso en la página anterior) requiere del trabajo de 100 profesionales médicos durante unas 36 horas y costaría unos 10 millones de euros. Aunque pueda sorprender, el tiempo necesario para reconectar cuerpo y cabeza es de apenas una hora. “Esto viene de conocimientos adquiridos por el doctor White en sus intervenciones”, señala Canavero. “Y pese a parecer increíble, es más que suficiente. Igual que los 20 minutos que nos llevará reunir ambas secciones de la médula. Claro, que es la parte más crítica de toda la intervención”. Según el neurocientífico italiano, tanto los costes como el tiempo se irán reduciendo a medida que progresemos en nuestro conocimiento. “Inicialmente, un trasplante de hígado”, confirma Canavero, “duraba unas 14 horas; ahora apenas 2”. Pero no es lo mismo un solo órgano que un cuerpo entero...

La pregunta es: ¿Deberíamos hacerlo?

Pese a que el objetivo de este trasplante es restablecer las funciones motoras en pacientes con condiciones médicas muy graves, como distrofia muscular progresiva, cáncer o tetrapléjicos con fallos orgánicos múltiples, Canavero señala que podría abrir las puertas a profundos dilemas éticos. “Hay mucha gente que sufre de enfermedades ahora incurables... Pero muchos pueden utilizarlo como una forma de esquivar la muerte por medio de un cuerpo más joven. El problema será regular un procedimiento que tiene el poder de dividir a la sociedad”.

Desde el Comité Español de Bioética, el Dr. Manuel de los Reyes, uno de sus miembros más reconocidos, se niega a opinar porque, asegura, no tiene suficiente información al respecto.

Por suerte, José Aguilera da en el clavo: “Los científicos estamos preparados para este tipo de debates. La sociedad no lo está. En el mundo hay miles de científicos experimentando con sustancias peligrosas y no ocurre nada. Yo he trabajado con un neurotóxico que podría haber matado a toda la población de Barcelona. Eso no significa que lo usemos. Pero la sociedad necesita participar de este tipo de dilemas”. Y a la luz de la velocidad a la que se puede acercar este logro, no queda duda de esa necesidad.

Cavanero reconoce que aún no ha progresado más debido a la falta de fondos. Pero esto se podría resolver muy pronto, confiesa, ya que el Proyecto 2045 ha contactado con él. Esta iniciativa del millonario ruso Dmitry Itskov pretende crear tecnologías que nos permitan transferir nuestra personalidad a entidades no biológicas y volvernos eternos. “Me han invitado a Moscú a exponer mis ideas”, señala Canavero, “para hablar de la posibilidad de darme fondos y poder continuar la investigación”. La primera etapa del proyecto 2045 concluye el año que viene. Quizá entonces ya sepamos si los trasplantes de cabeza son una realidad o un recurso más para la ciencia ficción.

Fractals - Hunting The Hidden Dimension

OrionDocs A

Order and Chaos [Full Documentary]

topdocumentaryfilms
New Atlantis Full Documentaries

For thousands of years the human species is wondering about the world around him. What has changed dramatically in this search is how to find the answers. The great novelty of Science is the discovery of how to discover. In “Sorting the Universe” we will know how the application of the scientific method has led to elaborate theories like relativity, discover the DNA or know the structure of the atom.

'Ghost Boy': The Story of a Young Man Trapped in His Body

By Alexa Keyes, Kate Snow and Wonbo Woo

It was 1988, and Martin Pistorius was a healthy 12-year-old boy growing up in South Africa when his life took an unexpected turn. Pistorius went home from school with a sore throat, and he never returned.

His body gradually weakened. He lost the ability to walk, to eat on his own and eventually, the ability to communicate. Doctors suspected some kind of neurodegenerative disease, but his case was a medical mystery. Martin's parents say doctors told them their son now had the intelligence of a three-month-old, and that they should take him home to die.

The last words he ever spoke: "When home?" 

But Pistorius didn't die. He spent more than a decade at home and in day-care centers. His parents were told he was unaware of the world around him, but about four years after he fell ill, Pistorius says he began to "wake up."

"For so many years, I was like a ghost. I could hear and see everything, but it was like I wasn't there. I was invisible," Pistorius told NBC News' Kate Snow with the help of a device that speaks the words he types into a computer.

"What really got to me was the complete and utter powerlessness," Pistorius said. "Every single aspect of your life is controlled and determined by someone else. They decide where you are, what you eat, whether you sit or lie down, in what position you lie in, everything."

Day after day, year after year, Pistorius was trapped in a body that wouldn't move, left with nothing but his own thoughts.

"I would literally live in my imagination," he said. "Sometimes to such an extent that I became almost oblivious to my surroundings." 

His family struggled to come to terms with his illness. One night, after his parents argued, his mother turned to her son and said, "I hope you die." She didn't think her son was there to hear it, but he was.

"It broke my heart, in a way," Pistorius said. "But at the same time, particularly as I worked through all the emotions. I felt only love and compassion for my mother."

But in 2001, there was new hope. A therapist at Pistorius' care center, Virna Van Der Walt, began to pick up on tiny signals that made her realize he was more aware than people thought.

"He had a sparkle in his eye, I could see he was understanding me," Van Der Walt wrote to NBC News' Kate Snow.

She urged his parents to take him for cognitive testing, and for the first time, Pistorius was able to show people that he understood.

"She was the catalyst who changed everything," Pistorius said. "Had it not been for her, I would probably either be dead or forgotten in a care home somewhere."

As his mind grew stronger, so did his body. Pistorius was given special equipment he could use to communicate, which, he says, changed everything.

"I don't think I will ever forget that feeling when my mom asked me what I'd like for supper and I said, 'Spaghetti Bolognese,' and then she actually made that," he said. "I know that must seem insignificant, but for me, that was amazing."

Pistorius had to relearn everything - from reading and socializing to making decisions for himself. He went to college, learned to drive, and even feel in love.

He married Joanna, who he met through his sister, in 2009, and they are hoping to start a family.

"It took a massive amount of work, blood, sweat and tears," he said. "But I am a different person today that I was 13 years ago."

Today, Pistorius works as a web designer. His story captured in an autobiography, "Ghost Boy," is on The New York Times best-seller list.

He's grateful for the little things, like being able to have a conversation or experiencing something for the first time. 

His message - don't overlook what's possible.

"Never underestimate the power of the mind, the importance of love and faith, and never stop dreaming," Pistorius said, adding one more piece of advice:

"Treat everyone with kindness, dignity, compassion and respect, irrespective of whether you think they understand or not."

               

             

             

Yitang Zhang: Solving an Unsolvable Math Problem

     
    

The New Yorker

By Alec Wilkinson

Unable to get an academic position, Zhang kept the books for a Subway franchise. Credit Photograph by Peter Bohler

I don’t see what difference it can make now to reveal that I passed high-school math only because I cheated. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide, but I entered the wilderness when words became equations and x’s and y’s. On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain—smart boys whose handwriting I could read—and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes. Having skipped me, the talent for math concentrated extravagantly in one of my nieces, Amie Wilkinson, a professor at the University of Chicago. From Amie I first heard about Yitang Zhang, a solitary, part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who received several prizes, including a MacArthur award in September, for solving a problem that had been open for more than a hundred and fifty years.

The problem that Zhang chose, in 2010, is from number theory, a branch of pure mathematics. Pure mathematics, as opposed to applied mathematics, is done with no practical purposes in mind. It is as close to art and philosophy as it is to engineering. “My result is useless for industry,” Zhang said. The British mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote in 1940 that mathematics is, of “all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote.” Bertrand Russell called it a refuge from “the dreary exile of the actual world.” Hardy believed emphatically in the precise aesthetics of math. A mathematical proof, such as Zhang produced, “should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation,” he wrote, “not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.” Edward Frenkel, a math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says Zhang’s proof has “a renaissance beauty,” meaning that though it is deeply complex, its outlines are easily apprehended. The pursuit of beauty in pure mathematics is a tenet. Last year, neuroscientists in Great Britain discovered that the same part of the brain that is activated by art and music was activated in the brains of mathematicians when they looked at math they regarded as beautiful.

Zhang’s problem is often called “bound gaps.” It concerns prime numbers—those which can be divided cleanly only by one and by themselves: two, three, five, seven, and so on—and the question of whether there is a boundary within which, on an infinite number of occasions, two consecutive prime numbers can be found, especially out in the region where the numbers are so large that it would take a book to print a single one of them. Daniel Goldston, a professor at San Jose State University; János Pintz, a fellow at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, in Budapest; and Cem Yıldırım, of Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul, working together in 2005, had come closer than anyone else to establishing whether there might be a boundary, and what it might be. Goldston didn’t think he’d see the answer in his lifetime. “I thought it was impossible,” he told me.

Zhang, who also calls himself Tom, had published only one paper, to quiet acclaim, in 2001. In 2010, he was fifty-five. “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game,” Hardy wrote. He also wrote, “I do not know of an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty.” Zhang had received a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry from Purdue in 1991. His adviser, T. T. Moh, with whom he parted unhappily, recently wrote a description on his Web site of Zhang as a graduate student: “When I looked into his eyes, I found a disturbing soul, a burning bush, an explorer who wanted to reach the North Pole.” Zhang left Purdue without Moh’s support, and, having published no papers, was unable to find an academic job. He lived, sometimes with friends, in Lexington, Kentucky, where he had occasional work, and in New York City, where he also had friends and occasional work. In Kentucky, he became involved with a group interested in Chinese democracy. Its slogan was “Freedom, Democracy, Rule of Law, and Pluralism.” A member of the group, a chemist in a lab, opened a Subway franchise as a means of raising money. “Since Tom was a genius at numbers,” another member of the group told me, “he was invited to help him.” Zhang kept the books. “Sometimes, if it was busy at the store, I helped with the cash register,” Zhang told me recently. “Even I knew how to make the sandwiches, but I didn’t do it so much.” When Zhang wasn’t working, he would go to the library at the University of Kentucky and read journals in algebraic geometry and number theory. “For years, I didn’t really keep up my dream in mathematics,” he said.

“You must have been unhappy.”

He shrugged. “My life is not always easy,” he said.

With a friend’s help, Zhang eventually got his position in New Hampshire, in 1999. Having chosen bound gaps in 2010, he was uncertain of how to find a way into the problem. “I am thinking, Where is the door?” Zhang said. “In the history of this problem, many mathematicians believed that there should be a door, but they couldn’t find it. I tried several doors. Then I start to worry a little that there is no door.”

“Were you ever frustrated?”

“I was tired,” he said. “But many times I just feel peaceful. I like to walk and think. This is my way. My wife would see me and say, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m working, I’m thinking.’ She didn’t understand. She said, ‘What do you mean?’ ” The problem was so complicated, he said, that “I had no way to tell her.”

According to Deane Yang, a professor of mathematics at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, a mathematician at the beginning of a difficult problem is “trying to maneuver his way into a maze. When you try to prove a theorem, you can almost be totally lost to knowing exactly where you want to go. Often, when you find your way, it happens in a moment, then you live to do it again.”

Keep reading  here >>

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Una calcomanía que mide la glucosa en sangre de forma indolora

microsiervos

En Mashable, The Atlantic, Engineers create a temporary tattoo that tests blood sugar,

Medir los niveles de glucosa varias veces al día es vital para los pacientes con diabetes, para saber cuál es su estado y la dosis de insulina necesaria, si acaso hace falta inyectarla. Pero a quienes no les gustan las agujas tienden a evitar hacer esa prueba, lo que les pone en riesgo de desarrollar complicaciones médicas relacionadas con la enfermedad. El dispositivo es indoloro —consiste en electrodos impresos en papel tipo calcomanía que los pacientes pueden quitarse una vez tomada la medida, o dejárselo puesto durante todo el día. El coste de cada adhesivo es realmente bajo, de unos pocos céntimos, por lo que su uso no resulta muy caro para los pacientes.

Publicado por Nacho

La historia de todo el pasado del universo [y de todo su futuro]

Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell

microsiervos

Esta infografía animada es fruto de una colaboración especial de la gente de Kurzgesagt y de Wait but Why. Es una especie de repaso a nuestra historia al completo y a la de la vida en la tierra en general, un poco al estilo calendario cósmico aunque más bien lo hace utilizando incrementos temporales cada vez más grandes, de forma casi exponencial.

El resultado es perfecto porque a nivel gráfico es simple e icónico, con una elegancia sin igual. Además, las explicaciones son breves y precisas – e incluso quienes no dominen el inglés podrán usar la versión subtitulada al castellano. Además, las explicaciones que da son perfectamente fáciles de entender y con un genial toque de humor, como cuando dice que el ser humano más longevo (nacido a finales del XIX) está más cerca del imperio napoleónico que de la era actual, o que el Tiranosaurio Rex está más cerca en el tiempo del último concierto de Miley Cyrus que de su ancestro el Estegosaurio.

Si la gran parte del vídeo está dedicada a los 13.700 millones de años transcurridos desde el Big Bang, la parte final se dedica brevemente al fin de la Tierra, el Sistema Solar, las estrellas, los agujeros negros y con ello todo, la muerte térmica hasta el Fin de los Tiempos. Para siempre.

Estupendo material para pasar un rato embobado con las «distancias temporales» entre todo lo que conocemos, hacer un ejercicio de humildad acerca de nuestra nimia existencia en el Universo y estupendo material para compartir y charlar sobre él en clase, me atrevería a decir.

'Noah's Ark': Russia to Build World's First DNA Databank of All Living Things!

Dahboo777

Restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba: What it means for American [& Cuba] medicine

but just don't forget that the cuban health system is a weapon of castro and the doctors are slaves of the govermment.

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Fox News

By Melinda Carstensen

An embargo imposed nearly 50 years ago has prevented Cuba and the United States from exchanging medical and technological advances, but scientists say that may be about to change now that the countries have restored diplomatic relations— something many experts believe was a long time coming. 

“I testified before the [U.S.] Senate Foreign relations Committee in 2001, and I was asked by Sen. Dodd (D-CT, 1981-2011) about my opinions on the embargo, and I said, ‘As a scientist, I could never imagine doing an experiment for 40 years and it not working.’ And now it’s been over 50,” Mark Rasenick, professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Illinois, told FoxNews.com.

“It doesn’t matter what your politics are: If you let the embargo go another year, it will have an effect that flies in the face of logic. I think that working together we will make a lot of progress,” said Rasenick, who has traveled to Cuba for numerous international research conferences. The embargo has allowed international meetings but prohibited one-on-one conferences between Cuba and the U.S.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has dubbed Cuba’s health care system as “a model for the world” and praised the country for its strides in medical research. The island has an infant mortality rate of 5 per thousand births and an average life expectancy of about 79 years, according to the World Bank. Those values in the U.S. are 6 and 79 years, respectively. The leading cause of death in Cuba is heart disease— a problem primarily seen in developed nations.

Despite limited medical research funding from the government, Cuban researchers have developed experimental cancer treatments, as well as numerous vaccines— including one for meningitis B that is the most widely used version worldwide.

Researchers in Cuba developed the first meningitis B vaccine in the 1980s during an outbreak on the island, and the vaccine was then distributed in other countries facing outbreaks. Until Novartis developed another meningitis B vaccine, Bexsero— which was used to treat U.S. students this year during emergency outbreaks at Princeton University and the University of California, Santa Barbara— Cuba’s was the only vaccine for this strain available worldwide. In the wake of those outbreaks, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration expedited the approval process for a different vaccine, Trumenba, in October—the first meningitis B vaccine to be licensed in the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

While Cuba’s cancer treatments have gained international attention due to their sometimes unusual nature— one uses a shark fin— calling any of them a “miracle cure” would be premature, Rasenick said. Effects may be limited to a small number of people, and, though promising, the efficacy of these treatments is unclear thus far.

But other medical discoveries in Cuba have proven successful. An epidermal growth factor receptor system to treat wounds, the use of the compound Heberprot-P to treat pressure ulcers common in diabetics, as well as a host of veterinary vaccines, are among other treatments developed in Cuba that have the potential to hit ground in the U.S., Rasenick noted.  

The vaccine and cancer research in Cuba have come out of the Carlos J. Finlay Vaccine and Serum Institute and the Center of Molecular Immunology, respectively. Much of the medical research in the country is concentrated in the west side of Havana, Rasenick said.

According to Mavis Anderson, senior associate at the Latin American Working Group (LAWG), the country has been forced to develop a pharmaceutical industry of its own because of a U.S. rule for strict end-use monitoring of any antibiotic patented in the U.S. That policy has deterred pharmaceutical companies from selling their drugs in Cuba, she said.

“There’s been a lot of development in the medical arena in Cuba in the last 50 years, largely out of need,” Anderson told FoxNews.com. LAWG is a nonprofit that consists of 65 nongovernmental organizations, and advocates for changes in U.S. policy toward Latin American countries.

Cuba’s medical advances are largely attributable to its government, which has prioritized health care, “even as it has limited freedoms and economic prospects of its people,” Peter A. Muennig, an associate professor of health policy and management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, wrote in an email to FoxNews.com.

He said that while the health care systems in the U.S. and Cuba are not comparable, both countries’ medical research stands to advance from open relations.

“[Cuba] will be able to modernize their research equipment and begin to generate revenue based upon the technologies that they have and will develop,” Muennig said. “Over the long-term, I see a good deal of benefit to both nations, as information and technologies are shared, and human capital flows from Cuba to the U.S. There is a surplus of medical personnel in Cuba and a shortage in the U.S. This will therefore be hugely beneficial to both countries.”

Rasenick said Cuba has been hailed worldwide for its development of brain mapping technology. As researchers haven’t had access to magnetic resource imaging (MRI) equipment, they have invented an Electroencephalography (EEG) mechanism, outfitted with a bathing cap and electrodes, to measure electrical patterns on the surface of the brain. The device is manufactured in Spain, and Cuba sells it under the brand Neuronic for about $10,000 USD.

“In rural America, where you don’t have access to functional MRI (fMRI) imaging, if you had someone with a stroke or a brain injury of some kind, and you wanted to find out what was going on with it, with this inexpensive equipment, you could generate the image and send the info to a more sophisticated center where they could analyze it,” Rasenick said.

Edward W. Campion, senior deputy editor and online editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, lauded Cuba’s contributions to global medicine in a January 2013 paper published in the journal.

Campion told FoxNews.com that Cuba frequently sends medics to developing nations. The country has provided aid to its neighboring island Haiti— whose residents live 30 fewer years, on average, than people in Cuba— and it has sent more medics to West Africa to help in the fight against Ebola than any other country, the Associated Press has reported.

“That’s got nothing to do with politics,” Campion said.

Campion added that Cuba has recently focused on genetic technology and studying the genetics of infectious organisms like tuberculosis, an area that “requires communication and interaction with the leaders in the world of science.”

“Medical research and medical teaching depend on communication and learning,” he said. “Isolation is not good for medical care and any kind of scientific research.”

Una cámara a 100 mil millones de fotogramas por segundo permite “ver” la luz desplazándose

Microsiervos

El vídeo muestra una haz de luz rebotando en un espejo. Está grabada con una cámara que capta, sin necesidad de flash ni luces estroboscópicas, 100.000 millones de fotogramas por segundo. En Motherboard, The Fastest Camera Ever Created Will Be Used to Study Invisibility Cloaks, «puedes ver la luz moviéndose y cómo pasa a través y alrededor de los objetos».

La cámara utiliza tecnología de las cámaras de barrido cuyo sensor se desplaza lateralmente a gran velocidad. En esta variante denominada CUP (Compressed Ultrafast Photography) la lente capta los fotones y los envía a través de un tubo hasta una superficie del tamaño de una moneda recubierta con un millón de microespejos. El proceso descompone los fotones que forman la luz en electrones que son recogidos según llegan a un sensor CCD: World's fastest 2D camera can capture 100 billion frames per second.

Esta tecnología tiene numerosas aplicaciones en ciencia, incluyendo medicina, y tecnología, incluyendo el desarrollo de capas de invisibilidad o de «ocultación óptica, en los que la luz se curva o se deforma en torno a los objetos en lugar de pasar a través de ellos.»

jasontpkoebler 

Researchers unearth new clues about ancient ‘computer’

Fox News

 (Giovanni Dall Orto)

Researchers have unearthed new clues to an ancient Greek astronomical puzzle that has fascinated archaeologists for over a century.
The Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient machine dubbed “the world’s first computer,” was recovered from a treasure-laden shipwreck off the coast of Greece in 1901. However, the latest research by James Evans, professor of physics at the University of Puget Sound, and Christián Carman, history of science professor at the University of Quilmes, Argentina, sheds new light on the clocklike astronomical mechanism.
The study, published in the Archive for History of Exact Science, pinpoints the date when the mechanism was timed to begin as 205 B.C., making it 50 to 100 years older than previously thought.
According a statement released by the University of Puget Sound, the research “fills a gap in ancient scientific history by indicating that the Greeks were able to predict eclipses and engineer a highly complex machine” much earlier than was previously thought.
Evans and Carman’s work also supports the idea that the eclipse prediction scheme was not based on Greek trigonometry (which was nonexistent in 205 B.C.) but on Babylonian arithmetical methods, the University said.
The researchers arrived at the 205 B.C. date via a method of elimination they devised. Evans and Carman examined the hundreds of ways that the device’s eclipse patterns could match Babylonian records reconstructed by John Steele, professor of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University.
“The calculations take into account lunar and solar anomalies (which result in faster or slower velocity), missing solar eclipses, lunar and solar eclipse­s cycles, and other astronomical phenomena,” explained the University of Puget Sound, in its statement. “The work was particularly difficult because only about a third of the Antikythera’s eclipse predictor is preserved.”
The latest research may also place the Antikythera Mechanism close to the lifetime of Archimedes, who died in 212 B.C., although experts have questioned possible links to the celebrated mathematician.
The Mechanism’s heavily encrusted fragments are kept in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

Drool: Ivan Pavlov’s real quest

newyorker

By Michael Specter

Pavlov (operating on a dog in 1902) ran his lab like a factory; dogs were his machines. Credit Courtesy Wellcome Library, London

As a college student, B. F. Skinner gave little thought to psychology. He had hoped to become a novelist, and majored in English. Then, in 1927, when he was twenty-three, he read an essay by H. G. Wells about the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. The piece, which appeared in the Times Magazine, was ostensibly a review of the English translation of Pavlov’s “Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex.” But, as Wells pointed out, it was “not an easy book to read,” and he didn’t spend much time on it. Instead, Wells described Pavlov, whose systematic approach to physiology had revolutionized the study of medicine, as “a star which lights the world, shining down a vista hitherto unexplored.”

That unexplored world was the mechanics of the human brain. Pavlov had noticed, in his research on the digestive system of dogs, that they drooled as soon as they saw the white lab coats of the people who fed them. They didn’t need to see, let alone taste, the food in order to react physically. Dogs naturally drooled when fed: that was, in Pavlov’s terms, an “unconditional” reflex. When they drooled in response to a sight or sound that was associated with food by mere happenstance, a “conditional reflex” (to a “conditional stimulus”) had been created. Pavlov had formulated a basic psychological principle—one that also applied to human beings—and discovered an objective way to measure how it worked.

Skinner was enthralled. Two years after reading the Times Magazine piece, he attended a lecture that Pavlov delivered at Harvard and obtained a signed picture, which adorned his office wall for the rest of his life. Skinner and other behaviorists often spoke of their debt to Pavlov, particularly to his view that free will was an illusion, and that the study of human behavior could be reduced to the analysis of observable, quantifiable events and actions.

But Pavlov never held such views, according to “Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science” (Oxford), an exhaustive new biography by Daniel P. Todes, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In fact, much of what we thought we knew about Pavlov has been based on bad translations and basic misconceptions. That begins with the popular image of a dog slavering at the ringing of a bell. Pavlov “never trained a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell,” Todes writes. “Indeed, the iconic bell would have proven totally useless to his real goal, which required precise control over the quality and duration of stimuli (he most frequently employed a metronome, a harmonium, a buzzer, and electric shock).”

Pavlov is perhaps best known for introducing the idea of the conditioned reflex, although Todes notes that he never used that term. It was a bad translation of the Russian uslovnyi, or “conditional,” reflex. For Pavlov, the emphasis fell on the contingent, provisional nature of the association—which enlisted other reflexes he believed to be natural and unvarying. Drawing upon the brain science of the day, Pavlov understood conditional reflexes to involve a connection between a point in the brain’s subcortex, which supported instincts, and a point in its cortex, where associations were built. Such conjectures about brain circuitry were anathema to the behaviorists, who were inclined to view the mind as a black box. Nothing mattered, in their view, that could not be observed and measured. Pavlov never subscribed to that theory, or shared their disregard for subjective experience. He considered human psychology to be “one of the last secrets of life,” and hoped that rigorous scientific inquiry could illuminate “the mechanism and vital meaning of that which most occupied Man—our consciousness and its torments.” Of course, the inquiry had to start somewhere. Pavlov believed that it started with data, and he found that data in the saliva of dogs.

Pavlov’s research originally had little to do with psychology; it focussed on the ways in which eating excited salivary, gastric, and pancreatic secretions. To do that, he developed a system of “sham” feeding. Pavlov would remove a dog’s esophagus and create an opening, a fistula, in the animal’s throat, so that, no matter how much the dog ate, the food would fall out and never make it to the stomach. By creating additional fistulas along the digestive system and collecting the various secretions, he could measure their quantity and chemical properties in great detail. That research won him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But a dog’s drool turned out to be even more meaningful than he had first imagined: it pointed to a new way to study the mind, learning, and human behavior.

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Supervivencia estadística en el ajedrez

microsiervos

Oliver Brennan hizo todo un análisis a partir de una pregunta en Quora: ¿Cuáles son las probabilidades de supervivencia de cada pieza de ajedrez en los juegos históricos en general? Así que preparó los 2,2 millones de partidas de la base de datos Million Base 2.2 (que abarca hasta julio de 2013) y puso una máquina a hacer crujir números.

Si eres el peón de e2, date por jodido.

El resumen es que para las blancas el peón de e2 es el que más veces es eliminado de la partida; curiosamente para las negras es el caballo de g8… Las siguientes piezas son el resto de caballos y los peones centrales. Hay una curiosa simetría en el resultado, lo que es interesante dado que el tablero no es simétrico y los conceptos de ataque y defensa están muy marcados desde el principio.

Los dos reyes tienen –obviamente– una probabilidad de supervivencia del cien por cien hasta el momento en que termina la partida. Las siguientes piezas más resistentes son los peones laterales: h2, h7, g2, a2… Del resto de piezas curiosamente las torres suelen sobrevivir más que las damas (aunque por poco); de hecho los expertos saben que más o menos el 60 por ciento de las partidas acaban en los llamados «finales de torres».

Aquí hay una curiosa visualización animada movimiento a movimiento de cómo cambian los valores a lo largo del conjunto de partidas.

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