Naucni radovi zanimljivi za siru javnost

[Indy]

To je tema koja odbija da umre. :D

 

 

 

 

 

(Izvor: Coursera video)

 

 

[Skyhighatrist]

Ujedinjeni topik za ground breaking vesti iz nauke, poput ove (ako već imamo odgovarajući topik, molim prebac gde treba):
 

Researchers at Japanese research company RIKEN, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, and German research centre Forschungszentrum Jülich have used Japan's K computer — one of the world's most powerful supercomputers — to run the longest and most successful brain simulation to date.
 
Equipped with 705,024 processor cores and running at speeds of over 10 petaflops, it is ranked the world's fourth-most powerful computer. Using the Neural Simulation Technology (NEST) software and 92,944 of its processors, the computer managed to replicate one second of brain activity as it would play out across 1.73 billion nerve cells and 10.4 trillion synapses — only one per cent of the brain's neuronal network.
 
This took the K computer 40 minutes.

Edited May 2, 2014 by Skyhighatrist

[Skyhighatrist]

Ili recimo ovo:

 

[DarkAttraktor]

Scientists may have pinpointed what’s killing the bees: Yep, it’s the pesticides

Lindsay Abrams, Wednesday, May 21, 2014 11:40 PM CEST

 

 

In his heartbreaking discussion with Salon about the sad, doomed plight of the world’s bees, bumblebee expert David Goulson laid out the three main suspected causes of recent die-offs: habitat loss, disease and a specific class of pesticides known as neonicotinoid. That third one’s  the most controversial and, to the increasing frustration of many, one that the U.S. has yet to address. It’s also, according to a recent study from Harvard, the key factor causing colony collapse disorder, or CCD. That’s right: researchers are pretty sure they’ve found the smoking gun. Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott explains why:

____

 

The experiment couldn’t have been simpler. Working with nearby beekeepers, Harvard researcher Chensheng Lu and his team treated 12 colonies with tiny levels of neonics and kept six control hives free of the popular chemicals. All 18 hives made it through summer without any apparent trouble. Come winter, though, the bees in six of the treated hives vanished, leaving behind empty colonies—the classic behavior of colony collapse disorder. None of the six control hives experienced a CCD-style disappearing act, although one did succumb to a common-to-bees gut pathogen called nosema.

 

Other studies have shown negative “sublethal” impacts of neonics on bees—that is, that the chemicals harm bees in subtle ways at doses too low to kill them outright. For example, this 2012 Science paper found that tiny amounts of the chemicals significantly affects bees’ ability to find their way back to their hives—”at levels that could put a colony at risk of collapse.” Another 2012 study, also published in Science, found that bumblebees exposed to “field-realistic levels” of a neonicotinoid called imidacloprid exhibited a severely diminished capacity to produce new queens. What makes the new Harvard study remarkable is that it actually simulated colony collapse disorder—neonic-treated bees suddenly abandoned hives that had been healthy all summer, while untreated bees hung around and repopulated their hives.

 

In the paper, the authors call the spectacle of abandoned hives “striking and perplexing” because “honeybees normally do not abandon their hives during the winter.” More research is needed to identify the mechanism by which neonic pesticides trigger the evacuations, they write, but the results point to “impairment of honeybee neurological functions, specifically memory, cognition, or behavior, as the results from the chronic sublethal neonicotinoid exposure.”

____

 

Mystery solved, according to Lu. But Philpott also spoke with USDA researcher Jeff Pettis who, while supportive of the study, said it was too small to hold forth as the answer to everything. Pettis did acknowledge, however, that it’s the latest addition to a long list of studies showing that even if pesticides aren’t the thing killing the bees, they’re almost definitely a thing killing the bees. That, unfortunately, is good news for the pesticide industry, which would rather CCD remain enigmatic, lest the U.S. make like Europe and ban the chemicals altogether.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEamiM7iFHg

[DarkAttraktor]

bbbrate minli, atraktor izneverovao:

 

Suicide in Hungary-an introduction

 

Suicide rates are high in large parts of Northern and Eastern Europe, and some of the highest figures have been reported in Hungary [1,10]. In

addition to psycho-social factors, several lines of evidence indicate genetic and biological contributions to unexpectedly high Hungarian suicide rate [12]. Within Europe, the countries with the highest suicide rate constitute a contiguous J-shaped belt from Finland through the Baltic countries, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to central Europe (Hungary, Slovenia, Austria) [12]. Genetic similarities observed between populations of these countries led to the Finno-Ugrian suicide hypothesis which states that high suicide rates of these countries are the consequence of a shared genetic susceptibility [12]. Genetic background of this phenomenon is very probable because other (e.g., cultural/socio-political/economic) features of these countries are quite different. Consonant with the theory about the genetic background of the high suicide rate of Hungary, Hungarian immigrants in the USA have the highest suicide rates of all immigrant groups [11]. In addition, the existence of an unfortunate genetic/cultural susceptibility of Hungarians to suicidal behavior is further bolstered by the fact that suicide rates of those Romanian counties where the proportions of Hungarian people are high (e.g., Harghita, Covasna, Mures) were much higher than of those counties where the population percentages of Hungarians are low [13].

 

Between 1960 and 2000 in the vast majority of years, the suicide rate of Hungary was the highest in the world. The reason of this very high suicide mortality of Hungary is not fully understood. It is one possibility is that the medical examiners in Hungary certify those deaths as suicide which would otherwise be labeled as undetermined death or as death related to other causes. However, the highest suicide rate of Hungarian immigrants in the USA [11] and the similarly high suicide rate of ethnic Hungarians living in Romania [13] contradict this possibility. Political or economic causes are also very unlikely, as between 1960 and 1990 the suicide rates of Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and former Yugoslavia (countries with similar political and economic systems) were around one third of the Hungarian figure, and during the mentioned period, in the majority of the years, the suicide mortality of Denmark, Finland, Austria, and Sweden (with much more advantageous political and economic situations) have been among the top ten in the world. As mentioned above, the most established risk factor(s) of suicide are different forms of (untreated) major affective disorders. Although direct comparison of national epidemiological data on prevalences of affective disorders is not fortunate due to some methodological issues (e.g., different studies have frequently used different diagnostic instruments), it can be said that lifetime prevalence of ‘any’ bipolar disorder, which carries the highest risk of suicide [14-16], is unusually high in Hungary (5.1%) [17,18]. Albeit, lifetime prevalence of major depressive disorder according to the DSM-IV criteria in the Hungarian population (15.1%) is similar to the corresponding data from other European countries and the USA, a recent study, assessing depressive symptoms using CES-D in the general population of 23 European countries, reported the highest mean scores in Hungary among all investigated countries [19,20]. In summary, these results raise the possibility that high prevalence of affective (especially bipolar) disorders (and possibly also subthreshold manifestations of bipolarity and bipolar spectrum disorders) in the Hungarian population may be one of the most important contributors to the markedly high suicide rate of Hungary.

 

evo ga ceo clanak ovde: http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/12/1/21#B11

 

edit: a njihova severno-azijska bratija Mari i Udmurti, navodno imaju triput veci suicide rate od Madjara:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugrian_suicide_hypothesis

Edited June 29, 2014 by DarkAttraktor

[logoped]

Da pitam

Ima li digod štogod o primeni kreativne drame u Srbalja, širi pojam estetsko vaspitanje

a da nije teorijski rad, no onaj nastao na osnovu istraživanja prakse, dakle konkkretnih primera sa sve godinama, i slično

[Indy]

Otkrivena topla voda, rupa na saksiji i Amerika (sve odjednom)

[rajka]

uhm

Edited July 18, 2014 by rajka

[fonTelefon]

fakin lajers I van maj moni bek nema ni evolucije ni zagrevanja

 

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/stephen-hawkings-blunder-on-black-holes-shows-danger-of-listening-to-scientists-says-bachmann

[BraveMargot]

clanak je zajebancija, realno, ali ima tu i istine... ja licno poznajem nekoliko naucnih kardasijana i jako su naporni.

 

http://genomebiology.com/2014/15/7/424

[betty]

"If you would like to discuss this further please follow me on Twitter"  

[BraveMargot]

objavio covek u genome biology, pa ti vidi.

[Indy]

Birth Month Affects Lifetime Disease Risk

[Ajant23]

Birth Month Affects Lifetime Disease Risk

 

Pomerili su fazu horoskopa za trećinu, lukavo...

Edited June 20, 2015 by Ajant23

[Prospero]

This Research Suggests Why Historians Have to Begin Acknowledging that Biology Is a Key Factor in a Person’s Politics

tags: science relevant to history

by John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford

 

John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith are professors of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. John R. Alford is a professor of political science at Rice. They are the authors of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences.

 

 

Related Link Science Relevant to History

At one level, the course of history seems driven by idiosyncratic events and personalities. Yet at another, amidst all the apparent unpredictability, recognizable patterns of conflict consistently reappear. The most important of these recurring cleavages separates the political left from the political right. The terms left and right may or may not have originated earlier than revolutionary France but it is certain that, as Emerson notes, “the party of conservatism and that of innovation have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.” Emerson goes on to suggest that these primal differences likely have “a depth of seat in the human condition.” We could not agree more. In fact, the central purpose of our research, which we summarize in a recent book, has been to document the deeper bases of this fundamental ideological distinction.

 

Why is it that, no matter the era or the geographic region, some people seem drawn to tradition and security while others are more open to new lifestyles and novel experiences? We believe it is because, no matter the era or the region, some people are more physiologically sensitive than others to life’s threats, dangers, and negative outcomes. (In our studies, we often use visual stimuli such as images of dangerous animals, vomit, physical violence, wounds, and spoiled food.)

Those with greater biological sensitivities naturally are more likely to favor political and social structures that are thought to offer protection. They gravitate toward the traditional and the certain and away from the unproven and novel. On the other hand, those who are biologically less affected by negative stimuli and situations are more likely to be supportive of social and political arrangements that welcome new and untried approaches. Of course, there are also those who fall in the middle of this physiological responsiveness spectrum just as there are plenty of people who are either politically indifferent or middle-of-the-road. No matter whether the physiological test employed is electrodermal activity (skin conductance), eyetracking (to identify people’s patterns of directed attention), subthreshold muscle movements, or brain activation patters (as measured by magnetic resonance imaging), multiple labs in multiple countries consistently find a relationship between political beliefs and physiological response to disgusting, threatening, or simply disquieting aspects of life.

Conclusions such as these are easy to misconstrue. For example, they do not mean that, as Rogers and Hammerstein suggested, “every boy and every gal that is born into the world alive is either a little liberal or a little conservative.” Recent evidence does indicate that political tendencies are in part genetic but that same evidence also indicates an important role for environmental events. Just because individuals display relatively consistent biological tendencies does not mean those tendencies are entirely genetic. Environmental forces can also lead to biological instantiation, especially if they are searing or oft-repeated. Moreover, these conclusions do not mean that every political issue-of-the-day springs from biological differences. To take one example positions on economic issues such as taxation and government spending do not seem to be tied as tightly to physiological patterns as social issues are (such as immigration and gay marriage).

Finally, none of this is to say that historical events and the way elites and the media frame issues are irrelevant. Quite the contrary. Those who are physiologically sensitive to negative situations may favor isolationism or they may favor interventionism depending upon the particular context (pre- or post-Pearl Harbor) and depending upon the arguments of leaders such as Charles Lindbergh, Robert Taft, or Barry Goldwater; however, relative to those who fail to give evidence of strong physiological responses in the face of negativity, they are consistently more concerned with security in the face of outside threats. In other words, those who are sensitivity to negativity can be channeled in different specific policy directions but they will always be more persuaded by arguments that the direction in question will lead to greater security and less susceptibility to the powers of groups other than their own.

Those with stronger physiological responses to unpalatable situations are more likely to favor defense spending, less likely to favor open immigration politics, and more likely to view with suspicion external entities, such as the United Nations and the European Union. Issues may come and go, inter-racial marriage may be replaced by gay marriage and soon gay marriage may be replaced by something else, but the type of person who is consistently more bothered by departures from the traditional way of doing things will continue to possess a particular physiological signature compared to those who embrace the nontraditional.

We know from personal experience that people are eager to use these findings as evidence that one group of people is more flawed than another—that, for example, conservatives or liberals have now been shown to be biologically deficient. Politics being what they are, this is not surprising; nonetheless, perhaps it is time to recognize that political differences are not simply the result of one side of the spectrum being uninformed, mentally inferior, or morally bankrupt. Rather, they are the result of deep-seated biological and psychological differences that extend well beyond politics. Those who practice violence or intolerance should never be excused but it could be that political understanding will be furthered by recognizing that those who merely harbor different political preferences than we do may do so because of deep-running biological differences that are not easily changeable. People generally believe that if others were of good heart and sound mind and were exposed to full information, then they would agree with us. This is simply not the case. People are different; they experience the world differently; they do not see, feel, and sense identical stimuli in the same way. Perhaps furthering an appreciation for these basic differences and recognizing that there is nothing inherently wrong with being either more or less physiologically sensitive to danger would soften the edges of political disputes that are so detrimental.

It takes nothing away from the fascinating twists and turns of history to note that they overlay a more general pattern. In fact, doing so provides a baseline from which to try to understand that which would otherwise be deeply confusing. The battles between innovation and tradition, between stability and progress, will be enduring because people will continue to differ in the biological traits that fuel these conflicting desires.

 

See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159929#sthash.8iEncAP0.dpuf