photodynamic therapy
Wow. Proteins and enzymes at work. It looks mechanical:
Plasmatic grapes!
Looks like the animations from inner life of a cell.
I wish cameras could be made that small.
That would really make my job a lot easier. All I do now is inference inference inference! I’d prefer to just look and SEE what is going on.
This is cool.
Researchers watched in real time as a single-celled algae evolved into a multicellular organism. The transition took place over the course of 50 weeks and was caused simply by the introduction of a predator to the environment.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39558-8
Edit: An author on the paper was posting on the topic at reddit. Here’s his ELI5 answer to a question on what this finding means:
Life is pretty good as a single celled organism. You can feed yourself fairly easily and you can reproduce really fast. Some people wonder why unicells would evolve to be multicelled in the first place. Why isnt the world just full of single celled organisms? This study shows that predatory pressure is a sufficient reason to become multicellular, because by being bigger, you can avoid being eaten. A similar situation may or may not have played out in nature millions of years ago
Makes me wonder if schools of fish can be considered a multi-individual organism. I guess in order for this to be the case, different individuals would need to play different biological roles. (Portuguese man o’ war is a better example come to think of it. Never mind.)
There’s a followup article on this subject up today:
Plenty of good in there, recommend reading the whole thing. But this is the bit that stood out to me, answering “what are the leading arguments against this”:
Fascinating read.
Look, sometimes your side hustle has to become your full time thing.
Article is from 2015 … so if he’s right, we get dinosaurs on Times Square at New Years!
Arrow of Time and its Reversal on IBM Quantum Computer
Uncovering the origin of the arrow of time remains a fundamental scientific challenge. Within the framework of statistical physics, this problem was inextricably associated with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which declares that entropy growth proceeds from the system’s entanglement with the environment … Our findings break ground for investigations of the time reversal and the backward time flow in real quantum systems.
Quantum mechanics is just mind bending. Here’s a related piece on that experiment.
The team set out to calculate the probability to observe an electron “smeared out” over a fraction of a second spontaneously localizing into its recent past. It turned out that even if one spent the entire lifetime of the universe – 13.7 billion years – observing 10 billion freshly localized electrons every second, the reverse evolution of the particle’s state would only happen once. And even then, the electron would travel no more than a mere one ten-billionth of a second into the past.
Unrelated but freaky:
Scientists have grown a miniature brain in a dish with a spinal cord and muscles attached. The lentil-sized grey blob of human brain cells were seen to spontaneously send out tendril-like connections to link up with the spinal cord and muscle tissue. The muscles were then seen to visibly contract.
My favorite one recently is this:
Inject some nano-gubbins into your eyes, see in near-infrared.