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A Momentary Flow

Rebuilding worldviews one world at a time

neuromorphogenesis:

Consuming Coffee Linked to Lower Risk of Detrimental Liver Disease
Regular consumption of coffee is associated with a reduced risk of primary sclerosing cholangitis(PSC), an autoimmune liver disease, Mayo Clinic research shows. The findings were being presented at the Digestive Disease Week 2013 conference in Orlando, Fla.
PSC is an inflammatory disease of the bile ducts that results in inflammation and subsequent fibrosis that can lead to cirrhosis of the liver, liver failure and biliary cancer.
“While rare, PSC has extremely detrimental effects,” says study author Craig Lammert, M.D., a Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist. “We’re always looking for ways to mitigate risk, and our first-time finding points to a novel environmental factor that also might help us to determine the cause of this and other devastating autoimmune diseases.”
The study examined a large group of U.S. patients with PSC and primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) and a group of healthy patients. Data showed that coffee consumption was associated with reduced risk of PSC, but not PBC. PSC patients were much likelier not to consume coffee than healthy patients were. The PSC patients also spent nearly 20 percent less of their time regularly drinking coffee than the control.
The study suggests PSC and PBC differ more than originally thought, Konstantinos Lazaridis, M.D., a Mayo Clinic hepatologist and senior study author says: “Moving forward, we can look at what this finding might tell us about the causes of these diseases and how to better treat them.”

neuromorphogenesis:

Consuming Coffee Linked to Lower Risk of Detrimental Liver Disease

Regular consumption of coffee is associated with a reduced risk of primary sclerosing cholangitis(PSC), an autoimmune liver disease, Mayo Clinic research shows. The findings were being presented at the Digestive Disease Week 2013 conference in Orlando, Fla.

PSC is an inflammatory disease of the bile ducts that results in inflammation and subsequent fibrosis that can lead to cirrhosis of the liver, liver failure and biliary cancer.

“While rare, PSC has extremely detrimental effects,” says study author Craig Lammert, M.D., a Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist. “We’re always looking for ways to mitigate risk, and our first-time finding points to a novel environmental factor that also might help us to determine the cause of this and other devastating autoimmune diseases.”

The study examined a large group of U.S. patients with PSC and primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) and a group of healthy patients. Data showed that coffee consumption was associated with reduced risk of PSC, but not PBC. PSC patients were much likelier not to consume coffee than healthy patients were. The PSC patients also spent nearly 20 percent less of their time regularly drinking coffee than the control.

The study suggests PSC and PBC differ more than originally thought, Konstantinos Lazaridis, M.D., a Mayo Clinic hepatologist and senior study author says: “Moving forward, we can look at what this finding might tell us about the causes of these diseases and how to better treat them.”

(via paradoxicalparadigms)

Source mayoclinic.org

Reblogged from Neuropsychotic!

Will ‘Digital Ethnic Cleansing’ Be Part of the Internet’s Future?

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, and Steve Clemons discuss the political limitations of the Internet.

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It’s easy to assume that a global Internet, with all its promise of scaled communication and education and democratization, will eventually help to foster democracy. But it’s also not entirely accurate to assume that. In a conversation with The Atlantic’s Steve Clemons yesterday evening, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen — co-Googlers and co-authors of The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business — made a point of emphasizing the limitations of technological innovation. Particularly when it comes to geopolitical change.


See on theatlantic.com

Behavior is the result of a complex ill-understood set of computations performed by nervous systems and it seems essential to decompose the question into two,” he wrote, “one concerned with the question of the genetic specification of nervous systems and the other with the way nervous systems work to produce behaviour.” In other words, how do genes build brains and how do brains direct bodies?

Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity? - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

Source The Atlantic

They had a map of the brain, a model of the body, and a pretty good idea of how to build the environment. Their artificial intelligence might not be embodied, but it would be “situated.” The brain would direct the body and the body would interact with the environment, and all three pieces would be connected by the intricate feedback loops that permeate biology. Their goal became clear: they should build, as they put it on the website, “a fully digital lifeform — a virtual nematode — in a completely open source manner.

Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity? - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

Source The Atlantic

Thinking about it that way makes me go beyond a black and white notion of ‘alive’ to a more functional perspective — living systems are those which self sustain. Our goal is to aggregate more of the biological processes we know that help the worm to self-sustain than have ever been aggregated before, and to measure how close our predictions of behavior match real living behavior, more than it is to shoot for some pre-conceived notion of how much ‘aliveness’ we need.

Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity? - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

Source The Atlantic

More broadly, OpenWorm raises fascinating questions about what we mean when we say something is alive. If and when this project succeeds in modeling the worm successfully, we’ll be faced with a new and fascinating concept to think with: a virtual organism. Imagine downloading the worm and running it in a virtual petri dish on your computer. What, exactly, will you be looking at? Will you consider it to be alive? What would convince you?

Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity? - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

Source The Atlantic

OpenWorm isn’t like these other initiatives; it’s a scrappy, open-source project that began with a tweet and that’s coordinated on Google Hangouts by scientists spread from San Diego to Russia. If it succeeds, it will have created a first in executable biology: a simulated animal using the principles of life to exist on a computer.

Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity? - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity?

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

A far-flung team is trying to build the first digital lifeform to work out the basic principles of the brain.

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For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. 

And yet, these are exciting times for “executable biology,” an emerging field dedicated to creating models of organisms that run on a computer. Last year, Markus Covert’s Stanford lab created the best ever molecular model of a very simple cell. To do so, they had to compile information from 900 scientific publications. An editorial that accompanied the study in the journal Cell was titled, “The Dawn of Virtual Cell Biology.”

In January of this year, the one-billion euro Human Brain Project received a decade’s worth of backing from the European Union to simulate a human brain in a supercomputer. It joins Blue Brain, an eight-year-old collaboration between IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, in this quest. In an optimistic moment in 2009, Blue Brain’s director claimed such a model was possible by 2019. And last month, President Obama unveiled a $100 million BRAIN Initiative to give “scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action.” An entire field, connectomics, has emerged to create wiring diagrams of the connections between neurons (“connectomes”), which is a necessary first step in building a realistic simulation of a nervous system. In short, brains are hot, especially efforts to model them in silico.


See on theatlantic.com

An Unending Quest to “Know thyself”:


At the start of the twenty-first century, we lack the specific spiritual resources and cultural contexts that made feasible the characteristic nineteenth-century quests of Emerson and Nietzsche—never mind the early modern lives of Montaigne and Descartes, or such ancient exemplars as Socrates, Plato, Seneca, and Augustine.

For whether we acknowledge it or not, we still live in the shadow of the Delphic injunction “Know thyself” and the Socratic ambition to examine oneself and others, even if taking these ideals seriously in the wake of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Nietzsche seems now to entail an unending quest, with no firm goal and no certain reward, apart from experiencing, however briefly, a yearning for wisdom and a desire to live a life in harmony with that yearning—come what may.

James Miller, Examined Lives: Socrates to Nietzsche (via johnsparker)

Reblogged from Markings

Printable A3-sized solar cells hit a new milestone in green energy

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Imagine a future where solar panels speed off the presses, like newspaper. Australian scientists have brought us one step closer to that reality.

Researchers from the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC) have developed a printer that can print 10 meters of flexible solar cells a minute. Unlike traditional silicon solar cells, printed solar cells are made using organic semi-conducting polymers, which can be dissolved in a solvent and used like an ink, allowing solar cells to be printed.

Not only can the VICOSC machine print flexible A3 solar cells, the machine can print directly on to steel, opening up the possibility for solar cells to be embedded directly into building materials.

“Eventually we see these being laminated to windows that line skyscrapers,” said David Jones, a researcher at University of Melbourne who is involved with the work. “By printing directly to materials like steel, we’ll also be able to embed cells onto roofing materials.”

Printing 10 meters of solar cells in a minute means good things for solar.

(via Printable A3-sized solar cells hit a new milestone in green energy | Ars Technica)