This article makes me feel really stupid because it is making the case that there is some profound new discovery about consciousness when I see nothing profound whatsoever. To me, the most meaningful excerpt is:
“The babies in our study have revealed something really profound: that there is action in the midst of inaction, and inaction in the midst of action. Both provide meaningful information to the infant exploring the world and its place in it,” said Kelso. “The coordination dynamics of movement and stillness jointly constitute the unity of the baby’s conscious awareness – that they can make things happen in the world. Intentionally.”
Yes, and? So a baby learns from that the mobile directly correlates to its own leg moving and not moving? How is this anything profound and how do it explain anything new about consciousness? I don't mean to downplay novel new experiments (which this is), but I'm not seeing anything "groundbreaking," "profound," or the "birth of purpose." I get that understanding how infants learn is important, but I don't see anything new in these results, we've known about cause-and-effect learning for a long time.
If someone can edify me on any profound implications of this, I would be thankful.
I don't like that "resurrect extinct species" thing though. Even after reading about what could be its advantages, I don't see how great it could be for us. If that goal could be removed when making such studies, it would be fine imo.
I don't think there's a lot of value to having the muscle transcriptome of an extinct species, since it's probably similar enough to extant marsupial or even eutherian muscle transcriptomes. And we're not going to be building adult thylacines from scratch using this information.
Very surprising RNA could survive this long, though.
Sounds to me like it's the opposite of how an LED works. Instead of creating a small gap that discharges a photon, the material creates a small gap that collects an ion. The ion is then run downstream to the thing that is being powered, making the gap available for another ion.
In other words, it kinda works the same as clouds do to create lightening, the material just facilitates this in a way that can be reliably consumed and at a much, much lower energy scale.
Well, all went a bit quiet. Partly because the Montreal-based company leading the way, Nexia Biotechnologies, a company spun out of McGill University, swiftly went bust and sold its two GM goats — Sugar and Spice — to the Canada Agriculture Museum in Ottawa, which in 2013 removed its genetically-engineered goats from display amid public pressure.
Quiet momentum continues, however, under Dr Randy Lewis of Utah State University and his team. Though he is unaware of the whereabouts of Sugar and Spice today, his lab looks after over twenty goats capable of producing silky milk.
Grad students are definitely in a precarious position in reference to their advisors and to ‘notable’ profs working in their area. Working abroad at the pre-PhD stage (especially somewhere where you don’t know the language) sounds like it compounds the issues. I think home institutions need to do a better job preparing and then protecting their students in this respect including creating avenues for reporting and legal protection.
Relatedly, where are memories stored? How can we have flashes of memory from decades ago? Why can we not access certain memories until something traumatic or triggering happens and then it comes flooding back? Why do smells trigger memory?
Long term memories are stored in the hypothalamus as you sleep at night.
Smells are tied to more primitive structures in in the brain. I'm a little rusty on why it makes the memories so strong, but there's quite a bit of research out on that one.
Trauma is also encoded differently, but there's a lot of garbage research that muddies the waters on that particular subject.
The researchers suggest that these relocating neurons are only temporary guests in the larval mushroom body, taking on necessary larval functions for a while but then returning to their ancestral tasks in the adult brain. That’s in keeping with the idea that the adult brain is the older, ancestral form within the lineage and the simpler larval brain is a derived form that came much later.
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