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  1. Last 7 days
  2. Nov 2023
    1. 19:00 people teach personality at coaching, but it fails; what scales is biology, not personality

      • see idea on how copy/pasting from someone else doesn't work
  3. Oct 2023
      • for: sensory ecology, conservation biology, adjacency, adjacency - sensory ecology - conservation biology, anthropogenic sensory pollutants

      • title: Why conservation biology can benefit from sensory ecology

      • author Davide M. Dominoni et al.
      • date: Mar. 2020
      • abstract
        • Global expansion of human activities is associated with the introduction of novel stimuli, such as
          • anthropogenic noise,
          • artificial lights and
          • chemical agents.
        • Progress in documenting the ecological effects of sensory pollutants is weakened by sparse knowledge of the mechanisms underlying these effects.
        • This severely limits our capacity to devise mitigation measures.
        • Here,we integrate knowledge of animal
          • sensory ecology,
          • physiology and
          • life history
        • to articulate three perceptual mechanisms—
          • masking,
          • distracting and
          • misleading
        • that clearly explain how and why anthropogenic sensory pollutants impact organisms.
        • We then
          • link these three mechanisms to ecological consequences and
          • discuss their implications for conservation.
        • We argue that this framework can reveal the presence of ‘sensory danger zones’, hotspots of conservation concern
          • where sensory pollutants overlap in space and time with an organism’s activity, and
          • foster development of strategic interventions to mitigate the impact of sensory pollutants.
        • Future research that applies this framework will provide critical insight to preserve the natural sensory world.
  4. Sep 2023
    1. Another feature of this vision that aligns well with Buddhist ideas is the lack of a permanent, unique, unitary Self [68]. The picture given by the evolutionary cell-biological perspective is one where a cognitive agent is seen as a self-reinforcing process (the homeostatic loop), not a thing [69,70,71].
      • for: illusory self, non-self, lack of self, organism - as process, human INTERbeCOMing, bio-buddhism, biology - buddhism
      • for: Michael Levine, developmental biology, human superorganism, multi-scale competency architecture, eukaryote multi-cellular superorganism - interlevel communication, interoception

      • definition: multi-scale competency architecture

        • a complex living organism is not simply nested structurally in terms of cells which comprise tissues, comprising organs, and bodies, and then ultimately societies. Each of these layers has certain problem-solving competencies.
      • comment

        • The HUMAN interBEcomING is a multi-level system.
        • It would be insightful to learn if there are ways our human consciousness level can communicate to each level, including the social level
      • future work
        • literature review of research on specific areas related to the level of human consciousness communicating with other levels of the superorganism
          • perhaps called "interlevel communication of multi-level superorganism
          • interoception signals?
  5. Aug 2023
    1. Capra Biosciences harnesses the superpowers of a biofilm-forming organism Marinobacter atlanticus to make fat-soluble products like retinol which is used in anti-aging face creams, and high-end industrial lubricants for electric car engines
    2. Some startups, like MicroByre, have been working to domesticate those reluctant, recalcitrant, and rebellious microbes by adapting them for use in the lab and creating genetic tools to manipulate them
  6. Jul 2023
    1. Biology used to be considered taxonomy and dissection, like listing and looking at. But now biology, modern biology, is a molecular science.

      What is modern biology... a vast and eclectic field composed of many specialized disciplines that study the structure, function, growth, distribution, evolution, or other features of living organisms.

    1. The notion of functional integration as a basis for biological identity was fully developed only in the 19th century, where it was transformed by the rise of both cell and evolutionary theory. Herbert Spencer
      • Herbert Spencer fully developed Digby's concept into the modern concept of functional integration
        • Spencer introduced the term "survival of the fittest"
        • ‘He tried to unite complex new findings about metabolism and organismic development with evolution and the seeming correspondence of organisms to their environments.
          • In The Principles of Biology (1864), Spencer wrote
            • a biological individual is one in which
            • the interdependence of the parts allows it to function and
            • respond to environmental change as a whole.
          • That is: ‘any concrete whole having a structure which enables it,
            • when placed in appropriate conditions,
        • to continuously adjust its internal relations to external relations, - so as to maintain the equilibrium of its functions.’
  7. Jun 2023
    1. Found this webpage for a 3D brain model when someone (maybe frymatic?) mentioned a region of the brain I was having trouble imagining.

  8. May 2023
  9. Apr 2023
  10. Mar 2023
    1. Review coordinated by Life Science Editors.

      Reviewed by: Dr. Helen Pickersgill, Life Science Editors

      Potential Conflicts of Interest: None

      Main point of the paper: By combining multiple stains and antibodies with ultrastructural expansion (light) microscopy in Plasmodium falciparum during the course of mitosis within red blood cells (the asexual blood stage), when it causes the symptoms of malaria, the authors identified new structural features of cell division in this important human parasite.

      Why this is interesting: Imaging the dramatic physical events that occur when cells divide tells us a lot about the biology of the process and is insightful to compare between different eukaryotes, but many organisms are too small to visualise by light microscopy, which is the most versatile imaging technique. So, they used an existing preparation technique to enlarge the parasites, a wide array of dyes and antibodies, and sampled at multiple timepoints so that more intracellular structures could be visualised and their behaviour and potential functions in cell division revealed.

      Background: Expansion microscopy (ExM) has been around since 2015 (doi: 10.1126/science.1260088) and is a fairly simple and affordable technique. It involves physically magnifying a specimen by embedding it in a polyelectrolyte gel that swells up in water enabling super-resolution imaging. It has been previously applied to Plasmodium and other Apicomplexa, but not with so many different labels across different timepoints at this important life-stage.

      Results: • They imaged 13 subcellular structures (including microtubules, microtubule organising centres, apicoplasts, Golgi and the ER) at multiple timepoints covering the entire asexual blood stage. • Among many results were the following: • They found a central role for the nuclear MTOC in coordinating mitosis and likely in establishing apical-basal polarity early during the asexual cycle. o the MTOC is tethered to the parasite plasma membrane (via cytoplasmic extensions) throughout mitosis. o the cytoplasmic extensions of the MTOC were closely associated (in numbers and positions) with several apical structures including the Golgi and the basal complex. o the MTOC is tethered to the mitochondria and apicoplast during fission and may also regulate their copy numbers. • They performed the first detailed characterization of the short-lived interpolar spindles, previously difficult to visualize, which consist of microtubules connecting duplicated MTOCs as they move to opposite sides of the cell. They found a large variation in their size, which may be how they enable the MTOCs to move without detaching from the plasma membrane. • They were able to study the biogenesis of rhoptries, which secrete proteins required for the parasite to invade host red blood cells, and discovered that: o biogenesis begins earlier than thought and that they associate with MTOCs during the remaining rounds of mitosis. o Rhoptry pairs are likely synthesized independently because over 95% are different sizes and densities.

      Remaining thoughts: • Clearly written and easy to read paper with stunning images. • Comprehensive (including descriptions of when things didn’t work), but remains largely descriptive (of course). • Could be shortened/sharpened to make it more manageable to read without losing the main messages, which are somewhat lost in the text. • A top-level, specialised paper that opens the door for more targeted studies of organelle functions during mitosis and comparisons of these functions with other (higher) eukaryotes. • By identifying key players in mitosis during the asexual blood stage it may reveal candidate therapeutic targets for treating malaria.

    1. Recently, redox-responsive biomolecules such as phenazines have been used in several electrochemical strategies to interrogate a range of biological activities30,31 and to control gene expression in living cells32,33, where the redox status of the biomolecules could be measured or manipulated by application of electronic potentials