June 2017 Ideas and Innovation
Read the articles selected in June 2017
How Egypt’s love for cats helped our feline friends colonise the planet
by Ian Johnston
Source: The Independent, 20 June
A study published on Nature Ecology & Evolution reconstructs the long adventure of cats from Near East across the world. Appeared in the Near East during the Neolithic, left the Ancient Egypt, which depicted it in domestic contexts, going to the conquest of the Western thanks to its skills in catching mice.
See attached
Le blob, génie unicellulaire
by Nathaniel Herzberg
Source: Le Monde, 21 June
“Physarum polycephalum” is a not well-known organism, a flabby pigmented mass, self-nourishing and -reproducing, with a brain, memory, moving and reaction capacities, which interests not only biologists but also engineers for its electronic potentialities in the development of hybrid systems.
See attached
Santé
Source: L’Obs, 15 June
All our cells are female or male: the way we fall ill, the symptoms, the genetic predisposition change from a gender to another, yet the traditional medicine is based more on the observation of male body. Not everybody knows that infarct is the first cause of death in women, before the breast cancer.
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Europe backs missions to search for Earth-like planets, deep space cataclysms
by Daniel Clery
Source: Science, 20 June
The European Space Agency has approved PLATO and LISA’s missions: PLATO will search habitable planets orbiting around sunlike stars through 26 telescopes, continuously looking around 50% of the sky. LISA aims to detect gravitational waves in space to reconstruct the biggest universe cataclysms.
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En attendant le sang artificiel, les dons restent indispensables
by Damien Mascret
Source: Le Figaro, 14 June
Blood donations in the world can’t satisfy the need of the Planet. A équipe of the University Pierre-et-Marie-Curie has experimented the production of red corpuscles injected into a patient successfully. Researchers now stake on the passage from the laboratory to the factory for an industrial delivery.
Neuroscientist says brain training could heal a broken heart
by Ian Sample
Source: The Guardian, 9 June
Researchers at Cambridge University are experimenting computerized tests to reduce impulsivity in psychiatric patients, but useful also to dull the pain of a broken love. Moreover, paracetamol and aspirin seem work in the same brain circuits that produce emotions.
Computers are starting to reason like humans
by Matthew Hutson
Source: Science, 14 June
Researchers at Google’s Deep Mind have created an algorithm able to reproduce relational reasoning, a complex form of thought difficult to apply to machines. The ability to perform comparison tasks is an important step in the direction of a flexible artificial intelligence.
Read more:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/computers-are-starting-reason-humans
The “time machine” reconstructing ancient Venice’s social networks
by Alison Abbott
Source: Nature, 14 June
After the digitation project funded by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage in 2006, the Venice Time Machine thanks to the current technologies intends to give a pluri-dimensional view of the cultural and commercial reality of this and other European historical centers.
Read more:
https://www.nature.com/news/the-time-machine-reconstructing-ancient-venice-s-social-networks-1.22147
Time may be fuzzy. If so, the idea of causality may be in trouble
Source: The Economist, 8 June
In the Gedankenkenexperimente around the dimension of time and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, quantum mechanics meets relativity theory, to question the location in space and in time and the notion of time linearity.
Oldest Homo Sapiens fossil claim rewrites our species’history
by Ewen Callaway
Source: Nature, 7 June
Remains found at the Moroccan site of Jebel Irhoud show that Homo sapiens appeared more than 100.000 years earlier than our previsions. This more primitive human had a lineage comparable with modern anatomy, and a mix of features originating from all the continent.
Des “métamateriaux” pour des IRM du cerveau plus précises
by Marc Cherki
Source: Le Figaro, 5 June
M-Cube, a project funded by the Horizon 2020 programme, intends to experiment metamaterials for clinical use to empower MRI images, cutting the exposition time and the utilization costs of the machines.
A radical proposal for preventing rare genetic diseases
by Lee Cooper
Source: Wired, 6 June
Thousands of rare genetic diseases make many millions of patients in every country. The only way to prevent these illnesses in our genealogical tree is the preimplantation genetic diagnosis made during in vitro fertilization. It’s time for a more open dialogue about this therapeutic treatment.
Jupiter’s secrets revealed by NASA probe
by Alexandra Witze
Source: Nature, 25 May
The results of NASA’s Juno mission on Jupiter are changing our models of giant planets: the spacecraft has discovered a surge of ammonia rising from the planet’s equator, a magnetic field stronger, patchier and more complex than prefigured, as well a larger core.
Read more:
http://www.nature.com/news/jupiter-s-secrets-revealed-by-nasa-probe-1.22027
A life or death pioneer in cancer treatment’s new frontier
by Laurie Mcginley
Source: The Washington Post, 29 May
Immunotherapy could attack advanced cancers not responding to chemotherapy. New drugs work in cancers due to a genetic defect, called MMR deficiency, and with a high number of mutations. This new perspective encourages patients to try clinical trials.
La guerre contre les bactéries lancée dès l’arrivée à l’hôpital
by Soline Roy
Source: Le Figaro, 30 May
In the USA every year 100.000 people die for infections caught during a hospitalization. A study published in Science Translational Medicine analyzed the bacterial exchanges that happen in a health structure to better understand their propagation.
No lifeguards in the gene pool
Source: The Independent, 30 May
The solution for climate change and population growth can’t be found on another planet. Humanity should first fight against its Selfish Gene and address the no rational aspects of its condition. A new civilization elsewhere in the universe couldn’t move with the same human, disastrous flaws.
Info
- Pubblicato il : 19/12/2017 Modificato il : 04/04/2019
Allegati
- Santé pour femmes pdf
- Le blob pdf
- Egypt's love for cats pdf
- Brain training pdf
- En attendant le sang artificiel pdf
- A Radical Proposal pdf
- Metamateriaux pdf
- Oldest Homo sapiens fossil pdf
- Time may be fuzzy pdf
- No lifeguards in the gene pool pdf
- La guerre contre les bactéries
- A life or death pioneer in cancer treatment pdf