tag > Biology
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Central Pattern Generator are biological neural circuits that produce rhythmic outputs in the absence of rhythmic input. They are the source of the tightly-coupled patterns of neural activity that drive rhythmic and stereotyped motor behaviors like walking, swimming, breathing, or chewing.
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Redesigning Longevity - Talk by Craig Venter at WGS 2018
Related: Craig Venter was an associate of Jeffrey Epstein - As is most of Craig's social network
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Scientists recreated classic origin-of-life experiment and made a new discovery - 1952 Miller-Urey experiment showed organic molecules forming from inorganic precursors.
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Proprioception is the sense of self-movement and body position. The "sixth sense".
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Coexistence: "The state or fact of living or existing at the same time or in the same place."
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Bacteria, fungi interact far more often than previously thought
In a novel, broad assessment of bacterial-fungal interactions, researchers using unique bioinformatics found that fungi host a remarkable diversity of bacteria, making bacterial-fungal interactions far more common and diverse than previously known. [...] Of the 702 total fungal isolates examined by the research team, bacterial associates were found in 88 percent—an unexpected detection rate relative to previous, more limited studies.
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One of the prominent writers in the field of "Biopunk" is Paul Di Filippo, though he called his collection of such stories ribofunk, a blend of "ribosome" and "funk". In RIBOFUNK: The Manifesto, Di Filippo wrote:
Why Ribo? Cybernetics was a dead science when cyberpunk SF was born, a cul-de-sac without living practitioners. Furthermore, the "cyber" prefix has been irreparably debased by overuse, in vehicles ranging from comic books to bad movies. The tag now stands for nothing in the public mind but computer hacking and fanciful cyborgs such as Robocop. And Weiner's actual texts do not provide enough fruitful metaphors for constructing a systematic worldview.
Why Funk? Punk was a dead music when cyberpunk SF was born, a cul-de-sac albeit with living practitioners who just hadn't gotten the message yet. The music's nihilistic, chiliastic worldview had already culminated in its only possible end: self-extinction.
What is Ribofunk then? Ribofunk is speculative fiction which acknowledges, is informed by and illustrates the tenet that the next revolution—the only one that really matters—will be in the field of biology. To paraphrase Pope, ribofunk holds that: "The proper study of mankind is life." Forget physics and chemistry; they are only tools to probe living matter. Computers? Merely simulators and modelers for life. The cell is King![5]
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Escher Circuits: Using Vision to Perform Computation
In 2008, Mark Changizi, a Sloan-Swartz Fellow in Theoretical Neuroscience at Caltech, noted that the eye can make sense of complex relationships that often mystify the brain: "Our everyday visual perceptions rely upon unfathomably complex computations carried out by tens of billions of neurons across over half our cortex. In spite of this, it does not “feel” like work to see. Our cognitive powers are, in stark contrast, “slow and painful,” and we have great trouble with embarrassingly simple logic tasks."
Might it be possible to harness our visual computational powers for other tasks, perhaps for tasks cognition finds difficult? In other words, could we trick the eye into performing computation? Changizi proposed the Escher Circuit, "a special kind of image that amounts to 'visual software' our 'visual hardware' computes" merely through perception.
