Science Megathread

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

This is the place for discussion of news related to science, opinions/debates on global warming/energy, and pretty much anything else relevant to the thread title.  It might be necessary to sticky this if the thread attracts enough attention, but I think it's a better alternative to having a science/environment board, as has been suggested in the past, because that would just slow down our servers.

Personally, I'm no science buff, but I try to keep up on news related to it as much as I can.  For that, I regularly check the I f**king love science and I F**king Love Neuroscience Facebook pages.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Researchers have developed bone tissue from umbilical stem cells.  It has not been applied to an animal model yet, though researchers are optimistic, given its success in the lab.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Scientists say they have, for the first time, generated a false memory in an animal.

Sounds scary at first, but personally I'm a little skeptical.  Obviously, you can't be completely sure that you're distorting a mouse's memories since you can't ask a mouse to talk its memories.  As one of the commenters said, they are simply inferring that the mice have the memories when instead it could be related to instinctual fear.  Still, the reported experiments scientists have done on humans with this are slightly alarming.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Oh, and FYI: here is what your palm would look like without skin.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Video: What Can You Do Without a Brain?

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Researchers debunk myth of right-brain and left-brain personality traits

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Who'da thought it's all bunk?

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Researchers debunk myth of right-brain and left-brain personality traits

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Who'da thought it's all bunk?

Hahahaha....

Oh, Snowguy...

What?

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As most of you are probably aware, the discoverers of the Higgs boson have rightfully been awarded the Nobel prize in physics.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Doctors save hand by attaching it to man's calf

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Human lung made in lab for first time

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Hasn't been independently verified yet, but supposedly the world's oldest living person has been discovered currently living at age 145.

Obviously this has to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Russian man volunteers for first human head transplant

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Scientists find 'oldest human ancestor.'





Horrifying.

oh and get a load of this

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Some things never change.

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New underwater continent discovered: Zealandia

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Computer system transcribes words users “speak silently”
Electrodes on the face and jaw pick up otherwise undetectable neuromuscular signals triggered by internal verbalizations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuUSc53Xpeg

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Southern Ocean officially declared as fifth in the world: National Geographic

Earth is 71% water, and those who are informed about world geography are aware that the mainland is surrounded by four oceans.

Four? There are now five oceans, not four.

National Geographic, one of the world's most prestigious and well-known mapmakers, has declared the presence of a fifth ocean.

This is the body of water that surrounds Antarctica, and is known as the Southern Ocean.

National Geographic, one of the world's most prestigious and well-known mapmakers, has declared the presence of a fifth ocean.

This is the body of water that surrounds Antarctica, and is known as the Southern Ocean.

[...]

Whales, penguins, and seals all have substantial populations in the Southern Ocean.

However, commercial fishing on krill and Patagonian toothfish has been a source of concern for decades, according to National Geographic.

By legally altering the name of the water body, it wanted to raise attention to these challenges, as well as the fast warming of the Southern Ocean as a result of global warming.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Scientists are closing in on an HIV vaccine

Thanks to researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the National Institutes of Health, there is evidence that an experimental mRNA vaccine has been successful in treating against an HIV-virus relative in mice and rhesus macaques. Such animal research is generally the first step towards producing a successful human vaccine.

mRNA vaccines differ from their conventional vaccine counterparts, which typically contain dead or weakened versions of the target pathogen — or, alternatively, contain pieces of the genetic code of a pathogen wrapped up in a different, harmless virus's genetic code. However, mRNA vaccines actually inject a strand of bespoke RNA that instructs one's cells to produce proteins similar to the ones found on pathogens (microscopic organisms that cause disease). One's immune system then recognizes those proteins and produces antibodies for fighting them.

This new experimental vaccine does this against simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV), which is similar to HIV. The SHIV vaccine actually targets two proteins that appear on the SHIV virus, known as Env and Gag, and thus contains the mRNA instructions for one's (human) cells to replicate those proteins.

As lead researcher Paolo Lusso of NIAID's Laboratory of Immunoregulation told Salon, Env is analogous to an "outer coat," while Gag is a "major component of what we call the core of the virus."

The vaccine convinces muscle cells in inoculated animals to produce virus-like particles (VLPs) with copies of Env all over its surface. Lusso added that Gag was also included because it is "a big inducer of T-cell immunity, which to use an imprecise but useful metaphor are cells that will recognize and infect the [pathogen] and kill it, or facilitate destruction."

In the case of the experimental SHIV vaccine, the early results are promising. When the studies included mice, two injections of the mRNA vaccine induced neutralizing antibodies in all of the tested animals. After the scientists moved on to rhesus macaques — which, as primates, are closer to humans than mice — they found that the inoculations (dispensed in a much more complex study) were largely successful. They produced only mild side effects, like loss of appetite. By the 58th week of study, all of the monkeys had measurable levels of neutralizing antibodies against most of the strains in an SHIV test panel.

[...]

While Lusso was excited as he described the vaccine's future, he also cautioned that scientists are in the very early stages of developing it. Vaccine clinical trials require multiple complex phases of human testing so that experts can be as certain as possible that a vaccine is safe before it is distributed to the public. Usually there are three or four phases in a vaccine trial; the COVID-19 vaccine — which was made in under a year and can thus be considered an unusually accelerated case of vaccine development — was sped up by having multiple phases take place simultaneously. In contrast, the SHIV vaccine has yet to officially commence with phase one. Once it does, researchers will have their work cut out for them.

"The major challenge will be to make this vaccine practical," Lusso told Salon, noting that HIV is a difficult target for the immune system, and therefore immunologists need to figure out how to reduce the number of necessary booster shots.

"It's hard to imagine that we could use less than four booster injections, or let's say four injections altogether, one initial vaccine and three boosters," Lusso explained. "And we may still not get the level of protection we want, so that may require even additional boosters, but there are ways probably to just make each of these boosters more efficient."