Science Updates

[AiA in Atlanta]

Psychopaths tend to rise to the top in the corporate world. Sales managers are often psychopaths.

[Super Nova]

Psychopaths tend to rise to the top in the corporate world. Sales managers are often psychopaths.

Yep. No heart, don't care about anyone... they make the best sales people.

Us poor delivery people have to deliver the shit they sell.

However, I cannot do what they do. It takes a special sort of animal to be very good at sales. Satan must have been a salesman.

[Super Nova]

Personally I think this is funded by the vampires that walk amongst us.

When we can do this, the next steps will be to produce blood superior blood and white cells to repair our systems. We will begin the transformation into a new and unique form of life. Resistance is futile.

Artificial blood 'will be manufactured in factories'

Wellcome Trust-funded stem cell research has produced red blood cells fit for transfusion into humans, paving the way for the mass production of blood
It is the stuff of gothic science fiction: men in white coats in factories of blood and bones.



But the production of blood on an industrial scale could become a reality once a trial is conducted in which artificial blood made from human stem cells is tested in patients for the first time.

It is the latest breakthrough in scientists’ efforts to re-engineer the body, which have already resulted in the likes of 3d-printed bones and bionic limbs.

Marc Turner, the principal researcher in the £5 million programme funded by the Wellcome Trust, told The Telegraph that his team had made red blood cells fit for clinical transfusion.

Prof Turner has devised a technique to culture red blood cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – cells that have been taken from humans and ‘rewound’ into stem cells. Biochemical conditions similar to those in the human body are then recreated to induce the iPS cells to mature into red blood cells – of the rare universal blood type O.

“Although similar research has been conducted elsewhere, this is the first time anybody has manufactured blood to the appropriate quality and safety standards for transfusion into a human being,” said Prof Turner.

There are plans in place for the trial to be concluded by late 2016 or early 2017, he said. It will most likely involve the treatment of three patients with Thalassaemia, a blood disorder requiring regular transfusions. The behaviour of the manufactured blood cells will then be monitored.

“The cells will be safe,” he said, adding that there are processes whereby cells can be removed.

The technique highlights the prospect of a limitless supply of manufactured type-O blood, free of disease and compatible with all patients.

“Although blood banks are well-stocked in the UK and transfusion has been largely safe since the Hepatitis B and HIV infections of the 1970s and 1980s, many parts of the world still have problems with transfusing blood,” said Prof Turner.

However, scaling up the process to meet demand will be a challenge, as Prof Turner’s laboratory conditions are not replicable on an industrial scale. “A single unit of blood contains a trillion red blood cells. There are 2 million units of blood transfused in the UK each year,” he said.

Currently, it costs approximately £120 to transfuse a single unit of blood. If Prof Turner’s technique is scaled up efficiently, it could substantially reduce costs.

Dr Ted Bianco, Director of Technology Transfer at the Wellcome Trust, said: “One should not underestimate the challenge of translating the science into routine procedures for the clinic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the challenge Professor Turner and colleagues have set out to address, which is to replace the human blood donor as the source of supply for life-saving transfusions."

For the moment, factories of blood remain the stuff of fiction.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healt ... ories.html

[Super Nova]

We will evolve into this



or this

[Rorschach]

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/techno ... 6890686534

[Super Nova]

This could be me. Can someone beat me over the head please. Any takers?

Love fractals.

From 'goof' to maths genius thanks to a blow to the head

Jason Padgett is one of the world's few 'sudden savants' – able to draw elaborate geometric fractals following a brain injury which changed his life.



A self-proclaimed former "goof" and college dropout has told how he became a maths genius after suffering a traumatic brain injury

Jason Padgett is a "sudden savant" who sees elaborate geometric shapes in every day objects and has the ability to recreate them by hand.

Among his drawings of fractals, the repeating geometric patterns which are the building blocks of everything in the known universe, is a visualisation of Hawking radiation, the substance emitted from a micro black hole, which took him nine months to create.

Experts say there are only about 40 people with acquired ­savant syndrome in the world.

Unlike other savants, the form of autism which involves extraordinary feats of drawing, memory and mathematical ability from birth – such as those displayed by the Dustin Hoffman character in the 1988 film Rain Man – sudden savants develop their skills later in life, typically after suffering a brain injury.

In Mr Padgett's case, he has gone from a heavy-drinking shop worker to a maths genius whose life is full of wonder thanks to the amazing patterns he sees in everything from the leaves on the trees outside his window to the cream swirling in his coffee.

Now 43, Mr Padgett dropped out of community college to work in his father's furniture shop, and was more invested in drinking with his friends, racing cars and going to the gym than mathematics and geometry.

But in 2002, the father-of-one from Tacoma, in Washington state, was involved in a bar brawl in which he was knocked unconscious from a blow to the head.

The next morning, after being released from hospital, he saw the water flowing from his bathroom tap as perfect perpendicular lines.

"At first, I was startled, and worried for myself, but it was so beautiful that I just stood in my slippers and stared,” he told the New York Post.

When the visuals continued over the next few days, he became: “obsessed with every shape in my house, from rectangles of the windows to the curvature of a spoon.”

Enthralled, Mr Padgett began reading everything he could about maths and physics, developing a particular interest in fractals and the mathematical concept of pi. He is now recognised as a leading maths thinker.

Experts say Mr Padgett's condition is proof that everyone is capable of astonishing feats of mental prowess – if only they could untap the right part of their brain.

In his memoir, “Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel," which is published this week, he writes: “I believe I am living proof that these powers lie dormant in all of us.”

Other sudden savants include Orlando Serrell, who could tell the day of the week of any given date after being struck by a baseball at the age of 10, and Anthony Cicoria, who could play the piano to concert standard following a lightening strike.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -head.html

[Super Nova]

What do you recon, are you ready.

It's Time to Eat Insects



Entomologist Arnold van Huis wants to bring the world around to entomophagy

Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, studies the eating of insects, or entomophagy, and is the author of 'Edible insects: future prospects for food and feed security', published in 2013 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Now he is organizing the first international conference to address the question of whether insects can feed the world. Ahead of the conference opening on May 14 in Wageningen, van Huis talked to Nature about researching, and dining on, this neglected food source.

How did you get involved in entomophagy?
I’m a tropical entomologist, very much involved in pest management and biological control in the tropics. Locusts are one of my specialized areas. I had a sabbatical and I spent that studying the cultural aspects of insects in Africa. So I visited about 24 countries, interviewing a lot of Africans about insects as medicine, insects in proverbs, et cetera, but often half of my interviews were about edible insects. In the beginning for me it was kind of a hobby. But when we started to look at it more seriously, we thought, 'Well, this is a very good alternative to what we are currently doing'.

What excites you the most about the upcoming meeting?
It’s the first time that everybody in this field will come together on a world scale. Insects are still more or less considered a poor man’s diet. It still has that reputation. In the tropics they don’t talk about it, because they know that in the Western world people consider it primitive. I also found that a lot of people say, 'When we have more wealth, we will switch to a Western diet' — the hamburger instead of the insects. And I hope we can change this perception of insects as food during this conference.

Is the scientific field of entomophagy growing?
In the Western world it was rather limited ten years ago. I was one of the few who really started to work on it. There are people who have done quite some research on it — mainly in the fields of ethno-biology and ethno-entomology. But it was considered a peculiar habit of people in the tropics. Never was it looked at as something we could do as well.

The last ten years I’ve seen an exponential increase in interest. When we published the book last year, it had 6 million downloads. It just shows the tremendous interest.

What are the biggest questions in the science of insects as food?
For human consumption, the processing is quite important — how to rear the insects, what kind of organic waste to grow them on — because that makes it economically interesting. If you look at the social sciences, of course, consumer attitude is quite important. It’s not just a matter of taste; it’s also a matter of emotions.

Can Western cultures overcome the ‘ick-factor’ about eating insects?
We produced a cookbook [The Insect Cookbook: Food for a Sustainable Planet], and for the English translation I interviewed René Redzepi, [chef and co-owner] of Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that has just been declared again the best in the world [by Restaurant magazine]. He told me that concerning food, people are very, very conservative. But he has insects on his menu. Alex Atala, from a famous restaurant in Brazil [D.O.M. in São Paulo], also works with insects. And everybody is copying the cooks. I hope that at a certain moment — especially when cooks start experimenting with this on the television — it will go quickly.

Of the insects you have eaten, do any stick in your mind — either as surprisingly tasty or exceptionally unpleasant?
There are both. Let me start with the negative ones. There are flies from eastern African lakes that come out in huge clouds at certain Moon phases. People make a kind of cake out of it — kungu cake. I’ve tasted those and I didn’t like it at all. What I like most also depends a lot on the preparation. Crickets or grasshoppers can be made very delicious.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... t-insects/

[Super Nova]

I liked this scientific fact.

[Super Nova]

It's in our nature I tell you......

How fists and fighting helped shape the human face-
last updated Mon 9 Jun 2014


http://www.itv.com/news/2014-06-09/how- ... uman-face/

Five million years of fist fights has left its mark on the human face, scientists believe.

Evidence suggests it evolved to minimise damage from bruising altercations after our ancient ancestors learned how to throw a punch.

Researchers studied the bone structure of australopiths, ape-like bipeds living four to five million years ago that pre-dated the modern human primate family Homo.

They found that australopith faces and jaws were strongest in just those areas most likely to receive a blow from a fist.

It is a legacy that continues to this day, helping to explain why men's faces are more robust than women's, say the scientists.

Just as they are today, men were the less gentle of the sexes at the dawn of human evolution, and more likely to get into the prehistoric equivalent of a bar fight.

US lead researcher Dr David Carrier, from the University of Utah, said: "The australopiths were characterised by a suite of traits that may have improved fighting ability, including hand proportions that allow formation of a fist; effectively turning the delicate musculoskeletal system of the hand into a club effective for striking.

"If indeed the evolution of our hand proportions were associated with selection for fighting behaviour you might expect the primary target, the face, to have undergone evolution to better protect it from injury when punched."

The study, published in the journal Biological Reviews, builds on previous work indicating that violence played a greater role in human evolution than many experts would like to admit.

In recent years, biologist Dr Carrier has investigated the short legs of great apes, the bipedal posture of humans, and the hand proportions of "hominins", or early human species. He argues that these traits evolved, to a large extent, around the need to fight.

"When modern humans fight hand-to-hand, the face is usually the primary target," said Dr Carrier, commenting on the latest research.

"What we found was that the bones that suffer the highest rates of fracture in fights are the same parts of the skull that exhibited the greatest increase in robusticity during the evolution of basal hominins.


"These bones are also the parts of the skull that show the greatest difference between males and females in both australopiths and humans. In other words, male and female faces are different because the parts of the skull that break in fights are bigger in males."

The debate over the dark side of human nature can be traced back to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that before civilisation humans were "noble savages".

This idea, that civilisation corrupted the human race and made us violent, remains strong in social science, said Dr Carrier. However, the facts did not fit the theory.

Dr Carrier added: "The hypothesis that our early ancestors were aggressive could be falsified if we found that the anatomical characters that distinguish us from other primates did not improve fighting ability.

"What our research has been showing is that many of the anatomical characters of great apes and our ancestors, the early hominins (such as bipedal posture, the proportions of our hands and the shape of our faces) do, in fact, improve fighting performance."

Co-author Dr Michael Morgan, a University of Utah physician, said: "I think our science is sound and fills some long-standing gaps in the existing theories of why the musculoskeletal structures of our faces developed the way they did.

"Our research is about peace. We seek to explore, understand, and confront humankind's violent and aggressive tendencies.

"Peace begins with ourselves and is ultimately achieved through disciplined self-analysis and an understanding of where we've come from as a species. Through our research, we hope to look ourselves in the mirror and begin the difficult work of changing ourselves for the better."

[Rorschach]

Doesn't explain the nose does it?
Or why we don't all have heavy brows to protect the eyes.
Or a great many other things.