Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Monday, April 20, 2020

The future is now: 10 ideas from past SF applied in present



SF writers have often succeeded in imagining the technology we use today.

Over the years, SFs, whether we're talking about books, comics, serials or movies here, have managed to show us what the technology we will use in the future might look like. This genre has given birth to many important names in literature, among them, Jules Verne managing to combine an easy-to-read style of writing with a boundless imagination; he managed to foresee even aselenization in his book "From the Earth to the Moon".

The development of radio and television has given many writers and writers the opportunity to share their ideas with the general public and even give us a clear picture of how the technology we use will look. Space has created a list of 10 ideas from SF that, in the meantime, have become reality.


1. Star Trek Mobile Phone: The Original Series

The first mobile phone was invented by Motorola in 1973 and weighed 1.1 kilograms; Over time, scientists have been able to consistently reduce the weight of these devices and, more importantly, increase their number of functions.

H&I | The Star Trek prop that predicted the flip phone is back



If the first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTAC, only gave you 35 minutes for calls, the preset phones can work even for a few days without being charged, and some of them can even download in a few seconds a lot of information that initially mobile telephony would have seemed astronomical.


2. Universal Translator, Star Trek: The Original Series

The characters in Star Trek used a device to communicate with the various alien species. Currently, the idea of a device has been replaced by an algorithm, such as the one offered by Skype that allows the translation of the voice from one language to another. Obviously, the current technology does not meet SF standards, but it alone represents solid steps in the right direction.

Star Trek's Universal Translator Version 1.0 Shelly Palmer
Fans of Star Trek (The Original Series) will fondly remember the “Universal Translator.” While Gene Roddenberry’s epic saga was both inspirational and aspirational for some, it set goals for others. How much wireless bandwidth would you need on the Starship Enterprise? How would a medical tricorder work? What kind of storage would you need on Memory Alpha? How did the noise-cancelling for communicators work? Every engineer I know can tell you a story about how he or she was inspired by this amazing 1960s television show.


3. Teleportation, Star Trek: The Original Series

Quantum teleportation moves into the third dimension – Physics World Physics World


The idea behind the teleportation in this series is that a person could be "decomposed" into energy and "recomposed" once they reach their destination. Unfortunately, our scientists have not been able to teleport people, but they have been able to teleport photons, the smallest forms of matter, on the boundary between energy and matter.

Physicists in China and Austria have shown for the first time they can teleport multi-dimensional states of photons. Carrying out experiments using photons encoded via three spatial states, they say their scheme can be extended to arbitrarily high numbers of dimensions and is a vital step in teleporting the entire quantum state of a particle. The work could also improve technology used in quantum communications and quantum computing.

Quantum mechanics forbids the quantum state of one particle from being copied precisely to another particle. But teleportation – the instantaneous transfer of a state between particles separated by a long distance – offers an alternative. The process involves no physical transfer of matter and erases the state of the particle to be copied.


4. 3D Holograms, Star Wars

In the Star Wars universe, some of the communication is done with the help of three-dimensional holograms, such a transmission being the one that removes Obi-Wan Kenobi from his isolation on the desert planet Tatooine.


In real life, in 2018, researchers at Brigham Young University, United States of America managed to create such a hologram, their technology uses fast particles.


5. Bionic members, Star Wars

Star Wars fans know over the course of the nine films many people lose their limbs; however, the confrontation between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader of Cloud City gave us the first picture of how an artificial hand could look and function.

Cybernetics Wookieepedia - Fandom

This scenario seems to be closer to reality now than it was in the 1970s when the series was launched; researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, have managed to produce an arm that can be controlled with the help of sensors by people whose arms have been amputated.


6. Digital panels, Blade Runner

In this movie, viewers can see a possible version of a Los Angees from the not too distant future; on some of the buildings of this city are a series of giant billboards that would be digital. In 2013, the company Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) was created which develops a similar technology.










7. Artificial intelligence

Currently, artificial intelligence has a variety of applications, starting from art and even to medicine and pharmacology; we can say that researchers in most people do their best to adapt the algorithms to help them in their work, and this is due to their almost unlimited potential.

In the movie Blade Runner, we are presented with the idea of synthetic people who need artificial intelligence to function; the existence of these algorithms tends to play an important role in the unfolding of the film.


8. Space Stations, 2001: A Space Odyssey

In the 1968 film, we are presented with the idea of ​​a space station, located on the Earth's low orbit, where astronauts experience microgravity. Starting with 1998, this idea began to take shape and in reality, with the construction of the International Space Station, a laboratory dedicated to microgravity studies.


Washington, DC, April 2, 1968.  The Uptown Theater.  Opening night.  The world eagerly awaits the premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s latest epic film.  Four years in the making with noted science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, the film has been delayed and is over budget.  Two days later, 2001: A Space Odyssey opens in New York and Los Angeles, and in other US cities the following week.  Anticipation runs high, given the talent involved and the near total secrecy surrounding the film during production and editing, which Kubrick was still finishing just a few days before opening day.  Even Clarke didn’t see the finished product until the premiere.


9. Tablets, 2001: A Space Odyssey

The tablets we use today appeared in 2010, however in 1964, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the creators introduced the concept of "newspads". These devices were used by the scientists in the movie and, like Samsung, these were the first true tablets and not the iPads.


10. Cars without driver, Total Recall

This 1984 film presents a concept that scientists from a multitude of research institutions and private companies are actively working on: creating an algorithm that allows cars to travel safely, without the need for a driver at steering wheel. NASA seems to be interested in this property, and that would allow it to build more efficient robots that explore space.


The futuristic cars of Total Recall, behind the scenes hemmings.com

























A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away? No, wrong movie), reader Greg Allen caught our post on the Boonie Bug and sent in some screengrabs from the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall guessing that the Johnnycab was based on a Boonie Bug. It wasn’t, but that post did inspire James Belohovek to get in touch with us. James did some work on the Johnny in the Johnnycab and had a chance to take plenty of pictures on set during the filming of the movie.

You may also like : Star Wars Day: May The Force Be With You. "Isolation does not stop fans of the series around the world from celebrating Star Wars Day"





Sunday, March 5, 2017

Alan Mathison Turing, the mathematical genius and father of the computer that deciphered the famous Enigma code. A conviction for 'crime' of being gay brought death to 42 years.


How very sad it is when the prejudices of a society result in the promulgation of harsh laws within a system of justice which results in persons being treated most unjustly. Often the sentence imposed for the “crime” had widespread ramifications of devastating proportions. Just so is the tale of a renowned mathematician, the man often called the father of the modern computer, Alan Mathison Turing.


Turing was born on 23rd June 1912 of parents who, fairly typical of the time, travelled between England and India for most of his early life. He thus lived mostly with foster parents and at various boarding schools so he did not experience an ordinary family life. He was not much of a scholar but interested in science and mathematics, which was an embarrassment to his parents – for gentlemen of the time were required to study the classics and languages. It was only when he went to Kings College that he finally found the comfort of being accepted and experienced a sense of belonging.


Passport photo of Alan Turing at aged 16.
Turing was usually casually dressed and often looked rather scruffy. He chewed his nails and tended to stutter although those who knew him well noted that it seemed he used to think carefully before he spoke. At college, he enjoyed rowing and sailing.

He became a very good marathon runner and won a number of races. At one of the marathons he ran in 1948, he clocked a time just 11 minutes short of the Olympic winning runners – not a result to be sneezed at. He often used to run the 10 or so miles between his two places of work and explained that “I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my head is by running hard”

While having a brilliant mathematical mind, and furthering his studies in various areas of physics, biology, chemistry and even neurology, he was also fascinated by Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. However, by far his most far-reaching works were with regard to computer science. He created the universal Turing machine which was the basis of the first computer.

His exceptional expertise at being able to think “out of the box” and his ability to come up with ideas that had not been considered by more logical thinkers, were utilised during the WWII, at Bletchley Park. This secretive centre worked ceaselessly at breaking enemy codes.


Turing was instrumental in the cracking of, amongst others, one of the Nazi’s most damaging encryption codes, the Enigma. This enabled Britain to decode important, strategic German messages, thereby saving thousands of lives, in Europe and of those who were at sea. It is thought to have shortened the war by at least two years.


A complete and working replica of a bombe at the National Codes Centre at Bletchley Park. Photo Credit.
By 1950, his work, much of which was aimed at how machines can ‘think’, resulted in the development of a test for artificial intelligence which is still used today. Soon afterwards, he broke new ground in the area of morphogenesis which introduced another field of study – one of mathematical biology. He was an unusually brilliant man.

Then came personal disaster. While Turing had not kept his homosexuality a secret from his close friends and workmates, it was strictly against the law and governed by the Criminal Law amendment Act of 1885. He was arrested in 1952 and charged with indecency, for which he was subsequently convicted, having himself admitted to the charges while insisting that it shouldn’t be against the law.


The sentence imposed was one of chemical castration whereby a series of injections were administered which would cause him to become impotent. It was dreadful enough to be submitted to public humiliation but even worse was to come. Turin, now a convicted homosexual was deemed a security risk and so his Security Clearance was revoked, essentially cutting him off from the passion of his life – his work. It would seem that these two blows were just too much for him to deal with and were probably the reason for his suicide on 7th June 1954, at the age of 42.


Turing by Stephen Kettle at Bletchley Park, commissioned by Sidney Frank, built from half a million pieces of Welsh slate. Photo Credit.
Society has changed radically from that time and resultantly a number of very old and unjust laws have been changed. “The fact that it was common practice for decades reflected the intolerance of the times … but it does not make it any less wrong and we should apologize for it,” was what Robert Hannigan ( Head of Britain’s digital espionage agency) said in a speech at the conference organised in support of all gays and of their rights.

He apologised for the tremendous damage caused to homosexuals by such policies. In his speech he paid particular tribute to Turing as — “a problem-solver who was not afraid to think differently and radically.”

Turing’s story, as told in the film about him called ‘The Imitation Game’, shows today’s generation just what a genius he was. His Turing Machine has been described as the “foundation of the modern theory of computation and computability. “

Turing was granted a posthumous pardon by Queen Elizabeth II, under the “Royal Prerogative of Mercy,” after the request was submitted by Justice Secretary Chris Greyling.   One cannot turn back the clock but one should be glad the Turing memory has been so “cleansed”, even though more than 60 years later.


One wonders, however, what Alan Turing would have achieved and what legacy he would have left the world, had the times been more forgiving and had he lived his life to a ripe old age.


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Warhistoryonline . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

159th anniversary Tagore vs Einstein: One of the most important historical discussion about religion and science

Credit: wikipedia




















Updated 11/05/2020

Rabindranath Tagore's 159th anniversary: Why Bengal prays to a poet

For Bengalis, Tagore's birth date in the Western calendar shifts every year, just like it does for holy festivals—the poet is celebrated like a god

Rabindra Jayanti 2020: Know Interesting Facts From Rabindranath 
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On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian philosopher, musician, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history, exploring the age-old friction between science and religion. Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore (public library) recounts the historic encounter, amidst a broader discussion of the intellectual renaissance that swept India in the early twentieth century, germinating a curious osmosis of Indian traditions and secular Western scientific doctrine.

The following excerpt from one of Einstein and Tagore’s conversations dances between previously examined definitions of science, beauty, consciousness, and philosophy in a masterful meditation on the most fundamental questions of human existence.

EINSTEIN: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?


Rabindranath Tagore Biography & Facts Britannica

TAGORE: Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the Truth of the Universe is human Truth.

I have taken a scientific fact to explain this — Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man’s world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.


Rabindranath Tagore: Friendship and love The Economic Times


EINSTEIN: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.
Albert Einstein walking on down the street Pinterest

TAGORE
: When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as Truth, we feel it as beauty.


Tagore Translation Deemed Racy Is Pulled From Stores in China The New York Times

EINSTEIN: This is the purely human conception of the universe.



TAGORE: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world — the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it Truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.

EINSTEIN: This is a realization of the human entity.

TAGORE: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realized the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.


Rabindranath with Einstein in 1930 Credit: wikipedia

EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.

TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through man.

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.consciousness, and philosophy

TAGORE: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is also a Truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.

TAGORE: Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human, otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth – at least the Truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance – that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called maya or illusion.

EINSTEIN: So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual, but of humanity as a whole.

TAGORE: The species also belongs to a unity, to humanity. Therefore the entire human mind realizes Truth; the Indian or the European mind meet in a common realization.

EINSTEIN: The word species is used in German for all human beings, as a matter of fact, even the apes and the frogs would belong to it.

TAGORE: In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our individual minds and thus reach that comprehension of Truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.

EINSTEIN: The problem begins whether Truth is independent of our consciousness.

TAGORE: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.

EINSTEIN: Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.

TAGORE: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.

EINSTEIN: If nobody would be in the house the table would exist all the same — but this is already illegitimate from your point of view — because we cannot explain what it means that the table is there, independently of us.

Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.

TAGORE: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind.

In the apprehension of Truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.

It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.

EINSTEIN: Then I am more religious than you are!

TAGORE: My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being.


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Brainpickings . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Friday, February 3, 2017

Scientists have created new forms of life containing '' Artificial DNA'' This could be the beginning of a whole new life form.

Credit: Kateryna Kon
Scientists have engineered the first ever 'semi-synthetic' organisms, by breeding E. coli bacteria with an expanded, six-letter genetic code.

While every living thing on Earth is formed according to a DNA code made up of four bases (represented by the letters G, T, C and A), these modified E. coli carry an entirely new type of DNA, with two additional DNA bases, X and Y, nestled in their genetic code.

The team, led by Floyd Romesberg from the Scripps Research Institute in California, engineered synthetic nucleotides - molecules that serve as the building blocks of DNA and RNA - to create an additional base pair, and they’ve successfully inserted this into the E. coli’s genetic code.

Credit: samsunkenthaber

Now we have the world’s first semi-synthetic organism, with a genetic code made up of two natural base pairs and an additional 'alien' base pair, and Romesberg and his team suspect that this is just the beginning for this new form of life.

"With the virtually unrestricted ability to maintain increased information, the optimised semi-synthetic organism now provides a suitable platform  to create organisms with wholly unnatural attributes and traits not found elsewhere in nature," the researchers report.

"This semi-synthetic organism constitutes a stable form of semi-synthetic life, and lays the foundation for efforts to impart life with new forms and functions."

Back in 2014, the team announced that they had successfully engineered a synthetic DNA base pair - made from molecules referred to as X and Y - and it could be inserted into a living organism.


Since then, they’ve been working on getting their modified E. coli bacteria to not only take the synthetic base pair into their DNA code, but hold onto it for their entire lifespan.

Initially, the engineered bacteria were weak and sickly, and would die soon after they received their new base pair, because they couldn’t hold onto it as they divided.

Credit: Wonderwhizkids

"Your genome isn't just stable for a day," says Romesberg. "Your genome has to be stable for the scale of your lifetime. If the semisynthetic organism is going to really be an organism, it has to be able to stably maintain that information."

Over the next couple of years, the team devised three methods to engineer a new version of the E. coli bacteria that would hold onto their new base pair indefinitely, allowing them to live normal, healthy lives.

The first step was to build a better version of a tool called a nucleotide transporter, which transports pieces of the synthetic base pair into the bacteria’s DNA, and inserts it into the right place in the genetic code. 

"The transporter was used in the 2014 study, but it made the semisynthetic organism very sick," explains one of the team, Yorke Zhang.

Once they’d altered the transporter to be less toxic, the bacteria no longer had an adverse reaction to it.

Next, they changed the molecule they’d originally used to make the Y base, and found that it could be more easily recognised by enzymes in the bacteria that synthesise DNA molecules during DNA replication.

Finally, the team used the revolutionary gene-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9 to engineer E. coli that don’t register the X and Y molecules as a foreign invader.

The researchers now report that the engineered E. coli are healthy, more autonomous, and able to store the increased information of the new synthetic base pair indefinitely.

"We've made this semisynthetic organism more life-like," said Romesberg.

If all of this is sounding slightly terrifying to you, there's been plenty of concern around the potential impact that this kind of technology could have.


Back in 2014, Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a Canadian organisation that aims to address the socioeconomic and ecological issues surrounding new technologies, told the New York Times:

"The arrival of this unprecedented 'alien' life form could in time have far-reaching ethical, legal, and regulatory implications. While synthetic biologists invent new ways to monkey with the fundamentals of life, governments haven’t even been able to cobble together the basics of oversight, assessment or regulation for this surging field."

And that was when the bacteria were barely even functioning. 

But Romesberg says there's no need for concern just yet, because for one, the synthetic base pair is useless. It can't be read and processed into something of value by the bacteria - it's just a proof-of-concept that we can get a life form to take on 'alien' bases and keep them.

The next step would be to insert a base pair that is actually readable, and then the bacteria could really do something with it.

The other reason we don't need to be freaking out, says Romesberg, is that these molecules have not been designed to work at all in complex organisms, and seeing as they're like nothing found in nature, there's little chance that this could get wildly out of hand.

"[E]volution works by starting with something close, and then changing what it can do in small steps," Romesberg told Ian Sample at The Guardian.

"Our X and Y are unlike natural DNA, so nature has nothing close to start with. We have shown many times that when you do not provide X and Y, the cells die, every time."


Time will tell if he's right, but there's no question that the team is going to continue improving on the technique in the hopes of engineering bacteria that can produce new kinds of proteins that can be used in the medicines and materials of the future.


The research has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Earth is Flat, Vaccines are bad and Global Warming is a myth. What makes people reject scientific research?

Credit: JooJoo41/Pixabay
A lot happened in 2016, but one of the biggest cultural shifts was the rise of fake news - where claims with no evidence behind them (e.g. the world is flat) get shared as fact alongside evidence-based, peer-reviewed findings (e.g. climate change is happening).

Researchers have coined this trend the 'anti-enlightenment movement', and there's been a lot of frustration and finger-pointing over who or what's to blame. But a team of psychologists has identified some of the key factors that can cause people to reject science - and it has nothing to do with how educated or intelligent they are.

In fact, the researchers found that people who reject scientific consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccine safety, and evolution are generally just as interested in science and as well-educated as the rest of us.

City climate change Credit: NASA Climate Change

The issue is that when it comes to facts, people think more like lawyers than scientists, which means they 'cherry pick' the facts and studies that back up what they already believe to be true.

So if someone doesn't think humans are causing climate change, they will ignore the hundreds of studies that support that conclusion, but latch onto the one study they can find that casts doubt on this view. This is also known as cognitive bias. 

"We find that people will take a flight from facts to protect all kinds of belief including their religious belief, their political beliefs, and even simple personal beliefs such as whether they are good at choosing a web browser," said one of the researchers, Troy Campbell from the University of Oregon.

"People treat facts as relevant more when the facts tend to support their opinions. When the facts are against their opinions, they don't necessarily deny the facts, but they say the facts are less relevant."

This conclusion was based on a series of new interviews, as well as a meta-analysis of the research that's been published on the topic, and was presented in a symposium called over the weekend as part of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual convention in San Antonio.

The goal was to figure out what's going wrong with science communication in 2017, and what we can do to fix it. 

The research has yet to be published, so isn't conclusive, but the results suggest that simply focussing on the evidence and data isn't enough to change someone's mind about a particular topic, seeing as they'll most likely have their own 'facts' to fire back at you. 

"Where there is conflict over societal risks - from climate change to nuclear-power safety to impacts of gun control laws, both sides invoke the mantel of science," said one of the team, Dan Kahan from Yale University.

Instead, the researchers recommend looking into the 'roots' of people's unwillingness to accept scientific consensus, and try to find common ground to introduce new ideas.

So where is this denial of science coming from? A big part of the problem, the researchers found, is that people associate scientific conclusions with political or social affiliations.

New research conducted by Kahan showed that people have actually always cherry picked facts when it comes to science - that's nothing new. But it hasn't been such a big problem in the past, because scientific conclusions were usually agreed on by political and cultural leaders, and promoted as being in the public's best interests. 

Now, scientific facts are being wielded like weapons in a struggle for cultural supremacy, Kahan told Melissa Healy over at the LA Times, and the result is a "polluted science communication environment". 

So how can we do better? 

"Rather than taking on people's surface attitudes directly, tailor the message so that it aligns with their motivation," said Hornsey. "So with climate skeptics, for example, you find out what they can agree on and then frame climate messages to align with these."

The researchers are still gathering data for a peer-reviewed publication on their findings, but they presented their work to the scientific community for further dissemination and discussion in the meantime.

Hornsey told the LA Times that the stakes are too high to continue to ignore the 'anti-enlightenment movement'.

"Anti-vaccination movements cost lives," said Hornsey. "Climate change skepticism slows the global response to the greatest social, economic and ecological threat of our time."

"We grew up in an era when it was just presumed that reason and evidence were the ways to understand important issues; not fear, vested interests, tradition or faith," he added.

"But the rise of climate skepticism and the anti-vaccination movement made us realise that these enlightenment values are under attack."

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Saturday, January 28, 2017

DOCTORS SUCCESSFULLY TREAT TWO BABIES WITH LEUKEMIA USING GENE-EDITED IMMUNE CELLS

Scientists are using gene-editing techniques to fight cancer.
IT’S A PROMISING APPROACH, BUT STILL NEEDS A LOT MORE RESEARCH

In a study out this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, a group of British doctors reported that they had successfully “cured” two infants of the blood cancer leukemia using a treatment that involves genetically modified immune cells from a donor.

The study was incredibly small—just two babies—and the infants have only been free of leukemia for 16 and 18 months. Technically, that’s not long enough to say they are cured. Declaring someone who previously had cancer as “cured” usually doesn’t happen until that person has been free of the disease for a few years, at least. But what’s significant about this study is that it combines a promising, novel approach—CAR T cell therapy—with a relatively new gene-editing technique called TALENS, which enables the direct manipulation of genes within a person’s DNA.

In the cancer community, CAR T cell therapy is already touted as a promising immunotherapy treatment (which involves harnessing a person’s immune system to fight cancer on its own), but in preliminary trials, it’s had its limitations. Before it can become a universal cancer treatment, these kinks and logistics need to be worked out. And researchers in the field think that many of them can be solved using gene-editing techniques such as TALENS, the one used in this study, as well as CRISPR, supposedly the easiest such technique to date.


First, what is CAR T-cell treatment?

CAR T, which stands for chimeric antigen receptor T cell, is a new type of cancer treatment which is not yet publicly available, but is in active clinical trials in the United States as well as many other countries such as the United Kingdom and China. The therapy involves removing some T cells (specialized immune cells) from a patient's blood. Then those cells are genetically altered in a lab, giving them special receptors on their surface called CARs. Once the cells are ready, they are infused back into the patient’s blood, where the new (CAR) receptors seek out tumor cells, attach to them, and kill them.
CAR T-cell trials are currently in phase II clinical trials in the United States. A few drug companies, including Novartis, have plans to make the therapy available as early as this year.


How does gene-editing help?

This new treatment has worked really well for blood cancers like leukemia, especially in young children. The problem, as the researchers point out in their study, is that each set of T cells have to be custom made for each patient. That takes a lot of time, and a lot of money. Further, it’s not always feasible, or even possible, to harvest T cells from leukemia patients who simply don’t have enough healthy ones to begin with.
And that’s where gene-editing comes in. The researchers took T cells from donor recipients and made a total of four genetic changes. The two they made with TALENS enabled the T cells to become universal—allowing them to be used in any person without the risk of rejection (a phenomenon called graft-versus-host disease, where the recipient’s immune system creates such an overwhelming response to the foreign cells that the patient can die as a result). The other genetic alterations added that signature receptor to seek out and attack cancer.


What are the limitations of this study?

The two infants in the study—aged 11 and 18 months—both had an aggressive form of leukemia, and had already been subjected to other treatments like chemotherapy and stem cell transplants. And the fact that they have remained cancer free is extremely promising. But again, the study was small. Further, according to a report in MIT Technology Review, many CAR T experts argue that because the children also received other treatments simultaneously (one had a stem cell transplant soon after receiving the CAR T cells) it’s impossible to know for sure whether the CAR T cells were the sole reason the cancer cells stayed away. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told MIT Tech Review. “It would be great if it works, but that just hasn’t been shown yet.


What’s next?

The combination of CAR T cell immunotherapy with gene-editing remains an incredibly promising area of research. Not only to create a “universal donor” CAR T cell, but also to make the treatment more effective. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are currently researching using the the gene-editing technique CRISPR to edit out two genes—called checkpoint inhibitors—that prevent CAR T from working as well as it should. The trial, which could take place this year, would be the first case of a CRISPR-altered cell being used in a human patient in the United States. In November, a Chinese group tested their first CRISPR gene-edited T cells in a patient with lung cancer.
However, it’s important to remember that CAR T cell therapy is in its early stages, and CRISPR/TALEN gene edited CAR T is even newer. There’s still a lot more work to be done, including many, many more studies like this one, with a lot more patients, before it’s available for everyone.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Popsci . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Monday, January 16, 2017

Top 10 scientists who were killed by their experiments

Photo: curiosity

Not always an experiment is successful sometimes the consequences can be fatal, as shown in these 10 cases.

These events are redefining the proverb "no good thing goes unpunished." For these scientists, desire for knowledge has led to their death.

1  
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (1785), French scholar of the eighteenth century has died following an accident with an experimental air balloon when it was deflated at 457 meters. It is known as the first victim of an  "aviation" accident.

Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier – Pilâtre de Rozier


The first untethered balloon flight, by Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes on 21 November 1783. Photo: wikipedia

2
Max Valier (1930) died in a laboratory explosion of jet engine fueled with liquid oxygen.


Max Valier Pioneers of Flight

Valier in a rocket car, circa April 1930. Photo: wikipedia

3
Sieur Freminet (1772) created one of the first diving equipment. He died from a test underwater equipment after a malfunction.


Photo: Wikiwand
4
Tim Samaras (2013) was meteorologist looking for tornadoes to study them and to develop a method by which they can be predicted. He died when a tornado swallowed up his car.



Storm chaser Tim Samaras Photo: wikipedia
5
Harry Daghlian Jr. (1945), during the construction of the first atomic bomb dropped the brick core of a nuclear reactor. His hands began to "burn" instant, then fell into a coma and died 25 days later.

A picture of Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. Photo: wikipedia

Harry Daghlian - Wikiwand



6
Elizabeth Fleischman (1905) introduced radiographs in military hospitals to identify bullets. She used her own body in experiments that led to the illness of cancer.


Elizabeth Fleischman, American X-ray pioneer (1899) Photo: wikipedia

7
Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1786) independently discovered oxygen, chlorine and manganese. Ingesting toxic substances regularly until he died from mercury poisoning.


Carl Wilhelm Scheele from Familj-Journalen1874 Photo: wikipedia

8
Louis Slotin (1946) died after accidental irradiation of uranium and plutonium during atomic weapons research.


Brent Bellamy on Twitter: "One thing I love about Winnipeg is finding treasures like a hidden little park dedicated to Dr. Louis Slotin, near his home. He was a scientist who died


Louis Slotin's Los Alamos badge mugshot, taken sometime while he was working on the Manhattan Project Photo: wikipedia

9
Marie Curie (1934) died of leukemia after exposure for more than 30 years to radioactive materials.


Marie Curie (1867-1934) Polish-born French physicist in 1931 Stock Photo - Alamy


Marie Curie - the most important women in science

10
Alexander Bogdanov (1928) believed that blood transfusions are the key to eternal youth. He died after receiving blood from a patient with malaria and tuberculosis.


Belarussian writer Alexander A Bogdanov Photo: wikipedia


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Curiosity. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.