jimmydasaint

This is one of the huge gaps in my knowledge.

Can someone elucidate how wave of excitation from a heartbeat reach the skin to be detected? I cannot find a reference so an help would be appreciated.

As a Science teacher who "taught" the Biology module in the O.P. I would regard a valid assessment to be both representative and reliable otherwise it is invalid.

In terms of percentage of word content over the whole of the Biology Unit (AQA Biology B1 examination), the heaviest emphasis was on Immunology and on Genetic Engineering. However there were nine topics and any representative and reliable assessment could be expected to choose a question from most, if not all, of the topics. However, this was not the case and the examination had a "sneaky" feel to it as if the examiners wanted to catch pupils out using applied knowledge questions (45% of the examination compared to 25% most years).

The attitude of most students is summarised by a student's you tube post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w7HYNCs-UM

IMHO, it is a basic human right to have a religion or no religion, regardless of the majority beliefs held by any particular country. Nevertheless, a small proportion wish to convert the world to their religion and make it their duty to "bother" others with their views. As a religious person, I don't wish to impose my views on anyone who is an atheist - I just want to get on with my life and not enter into religious arguments with friends or colleagues. If people do bother atheists, a polite reply of "No thank you" normally suffices with an accompanying smile by you as you ignore a leaflet thrust at your face.

As a religious person, I want restaurant owners and clubs of any sort to stop bothering ME if I walk down the streets of London. I actually don't mind drunks or homeless people - they are usually interesting and devoid of the soulless stare of a person forced to hand out leaflets and cards to passers-by,

This needs a reference buddy. A paper, blog, anything that others can comment on. Take care.

I scanned your article but I would assume that this is a multifactorial issue as with so many causes of disease. For example wine might have protective effects against heart attacks.

Red wine, in moderation, has long been thought of as heart healthy. The alcohol and certain substances in red wine called antioxidants may help prevent heart disease by increasing levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (the "good" cholesterol) and protecting against artery damage.

 

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/red-wine/art-20048281

So long as a you sit down and hit the bottle, you could be OK. (Joke, Lino)

This is something I have been thinking of for a while and I wonder if there is a simple way to measure the efficiency of bipedal and quadrupedal gait (of animals) in order to compare the relative efficiency of both.

Anatomically, I assume it is from the power applied to a moving object or from absolute contraction of muscle to a known standard force.

Biochemically, I was thinking on the lines of measuring intramuscular ATP following heavy, standard exercise.

However, I am struggling to find material, references, etc... on this topic.

Are there any clues out there?

Yep. One of my favourite films. The original poster has disappeared. Buckwheats and boat drinks MigL

Fair enough mate. Can you list some of the mechanisms to reverse ageing with some heavy citations so we can have an intelligent discussion. Also, I wonder, can you also reverse seventy years of accumulated stochastic genomic mutations as well. I would assume that regulatory non-expressed genomic regions would be affected by accumulated mutations. I don't know....teach me.

A clue may be to work out how many carbons enter the Krebs cycle per glucose molecule and then calculate the number of ATP s generated in total from the Krebs cycle and the election transport chain. Then, using these figures, work out number of ATP s for myristic acid which has more carbon atoms than glucose. Come back to us for more clues...

This is one scenario/hypothesis for the short-lived survival period which adds to the answers above. In short, there is a component of self-attack by white blood cells cells which appears to exacerbate symptoms of inflammation (irritation and swelling of tissues) which surface after a relatively long "incubation" period:

A scenario which is under experimental exploration exposes an attractive model for initiation of inflammation, comprising oxidative DNA damage of LEBCs and host immune response. According to that, noxious particles induce oxidative DNA damage of the lung epithelial barrier cells (LEBCs), and the acquired mutations are expressed at the microsatellite DNA level of LEBCs. The altered LEBCs are recognized by dendritic cells (DCs) as "nonself" DCs travel with the new information to the lymph nodes, presenting it to the naive T lymphocytes, and after that a predominant CD8+ cytotoxic T-lymphocyte proliferation occurs. The CD8+ T lymphocytes release perforin and granzymes and attract the altered LEBCs, activating cell death cascades [7].

 

From

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/pm/2012/542769/

I attended a seminar many moons ago which discussed something similar and exposing novel enzyme activities. However, you could cross-reference the following paper:

Abstract

The use of enzymes in nearly anhydrous organic solvents generally results in low initial rates/percentage conversions. The current review focuses on some biocatalyst designs like immobilization on nanomaterials, enzyme precipitated and rinsed with organic solvents (EPROS), crosslinked enzyme crystals (CLEC), crosslinked enzyme aggregates (CLEA), protein coated microcrystals (PCMC) and crosslinked protein coated microcrystals (CLPCMC) which show much better catalytic efficiency in such media as compared to other kinds of biocatalyst preparations. The basic methodology and principle behind these efficient designs are described. The relatively recent results on catalytic promiscuity as seen in low water media have also been covered. It is hoped that this will further encourage wider applications of enzymes in neat organic solvents in organic synthesis.

Keywords: Transesterification reactions, aldol condensation, kinetic resolution, enantioselective reactions, regioselectivity, nanobiocatalysts, enzyme catalysis in low water media, enzyme promiscuity

 

 

http://www.hoajonline.com/orgchem/2053-7670/1/1

Please read the follwoing and, if it does not make sense, come back and aask some further questions so we can help you to find out the answers:

http://oregonstate.edu/dept/biochem/hhmi/hhmiclasses/biochem/lectnoteskga/2kjan14lecturenotes.html

You should start with easy sites then build up to more difficult material. This site may help you. If you need more information, please post again:

http://www.s-cool.co.uk/a-level/biology/biological-molecules-and-enzymes/revise-it/carbohydrates

I could be highly thrilled at the breaking of new frontiers by these scientists but this bit worries the hell out of me and I wonder if we will end up with Big Brother in our homes:

The future applications for this discovery are important, not just for the mobile technology we use every day, but will also aid in the development and implementation of the Internet of Things: ubiquitous computing where almost everything in our homes and offices, from toasters to thermostats, is connected to the internet. For these applications, billions of devices are required, and the ability to fit an ultra-small aerial on an electronic chip would be a massive leap forward. - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/new-understanding-of-electromagnetism-could-enable-antennas-on-a-chip#sthash.P9FfiFGG.dpuf

 

A heartfelt thank you mate. My friends have never had a loss such as I have had recently so it is out of their scope entirely to give any advice but they do listen. I am dreading Christmas when I will have time to reflect on things because it will not be a pleasant experience and involve some soul searching. We had good times but I wish we could have had more.

I lost my mother at the relatively tender age of 67 a few years ago. I lost my 24 year old son 3 months ago unexpectedly. I am struggling to cope with the grief and my moods are rollercoasting like a teenager. At least my mother had a reasonably good run but aged 24? How have others coped with grief? Can things get any worse?

I am confused that there is a lack of clear papers from my preliminary search that deal with the calculation of the efficiency of working human or animal muscle. This is important not only from the viewpoint of the effectiveness of exercise regimes but also the efficiency of quadripedal gait compared to bipedal gait.

Any references to papers or thoughts welcomed

Hi,

I hope you got the answer eventually. I am not allowed to explain the answers. However, I can point you to a website and ask you to read their answer:

http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/A-Trihybrid-Cross-Example-Using-Mendel%E2%80%99s-Sweet-Peas.pdf

Also, there may be some confusion about incomplete dominance (partial expression from both alleles rather than complete expression from both) from your question so I have this explanatory link:

http://biology.about.com/od/geneticsglossary/g/incompletedom.htm

Finally, phenylketonuria is autosomal recessive. This means that it is not linked to X chromosomes and is a simple monohybrid cross. The outcomes are probabilities and if the probability of a child inheriting phenylketonuria from 2 heterozygous parents is 0.25, go back to your Maths books and see how to work out the probability of independent events.

http://www.stsci.edu/~tbeck/genetics.html

I am not allowed to help more, but if this is not helpful, ask me for more vague hints...

I have to be honest and state that both Penrose and Hameroff use a bit of semantic obfuscation and semantic acrobatics to keep the concept of "another world" function causing a conscious thought to occur. However, if I remember correctly, the microtubules in the brain are thought to be quasi crystalline due to the strange arrangement of water molecules around them.

Additionally, there are several different hypotheses of what is meant by consciousness and, IMHO, epiphenomenalism or the emergence of consciousness from complex brain chemical reactions in feedback/feedforward loops seems to be the most popular.

Hameroff and Penrose state:

But how do neural firings lead to thoughts and feelings? Conventional ("functionalist") approaches fall short on the mind's enigmatic features. These include: 1) the nature of subjective experience, or qualia, our "inner life" (e.g. Nagel, 1974; Chalmers, 1996) 2) "binding" of spatially distributed brain activities into unitary objects in vision and a coherent sense of "self," 3) transition from pre-conscious processing to consciousness, 4) non-computability (Penrose, 1989; 1994; 1997), and 5) free will.

Functionalist approaches generally assume that conscious experience appears as a novel property at a critical level of computational complexity. On the surface this would seem to deal with issues 1 and 3, however a conscious threshold has neither been identified nor predicted, and there are no apparent differences in electrophysiological activities between non-conscious and conscious activity. Regarding the nature of experience (why we are not unfeeling "zombies") functionalism offers no testable predictions. Problem 2) of 'binding' in vision and self is often attributed by functionalists to temporal correlation (e.g. coherent 40 Hz), but it is unclear why temporal correlationper se should bind experience without an explanation of experience. As functionalism is based on deterministic computation, it is also unable to account for Penrose's proposed non­computability (4), or free will (5). Something may be missing

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/quantumcomputation.html

I don't know. If there is a superior intellect. What makes us think that they are any less liable than us to enter into internecine warfare and conflict. If intellect and emotion go hand in hand with the development of a larger brain and intellect, then they would have nothing to say to us - they have their own problems. If there was ever a time to guide humanity, WW1, WW2 and every war since then would be a good time to intervene.

Can a model be generated, using an Island landmass within a vast ocean, to represent the encompassing of the entire range of human occupation, as it copes with discoveries.

Can the figurative launch from land to sea , be helped by considering the discipline of symmetry breaking, phase transition, complexity, and chaos .

Will the model offer help in dealing with our place in the Universe.

Hi Mike, I started off thinking that you were one sandwich short of a picnic. You have a way of using Physics to explain how human endeavour copes with making new discoveries - in short the human interaction of consciousness and how it interacts with the physical environment. Am I correct?

If not, feel free to enlighten me on this point. I have been reading up about Hameroff and Penrose's theory about quantum consciousness arising from neurons (nerve cells) in the brain. The nerve cells are peculiar to the brain and contain a peculiar form of microtubules (like a celllular skeleton) which is made of building blocks of a protein called tubulin. In between neighbouring neurons there are gaps called synapses. IIRC, the neurons start off vibrations in the microtubules which are orchestrated and then, the tubulin molecules (which number in the trillions easily) start to go into a shape which is similar to computer switches in "on", "off" or both due to quantum vibrations. At some point, something called quantum gravity (which I do not understand) causes a final "setting" of the switches (objective reduction) and gives rise to a conscious thought (e.g. "I need ice cream").

What I don't understand, amongst a whole multitude of things, is why everything around us physically cannot be explained in quantum terms - I thought it was quantum all the way up from subatomic particles to the largest objects in the cosmos.

It seems to me that what you are doing, and I commend you for it, is applying laws of physics to human behaviour as physical beings. IF that is true, you cannot avoid the indeterminate nature of the quantum world. But then, what do I know. I'm only a biologist...

In my opinion, Penrose has pointed out microtubules in the brain as behaving like switches in a quantum computer due to the sheer number of tubulin subunits (the building blocks of microtubules) which are found within neurons (nerve cells) in the brain. I don't understand much about classical computation but I though binary used by computers had switches in a "1" or "0" position but, due to the special conditions in the brain where the conformation (specific protein shape) of the tubulin subunits can vary, they could adopt a position of "1", "0" or in between, generating a lot of information holding capacity.

The work has been criticised by Tegmark et al due to the insistence of the authors of the original theory that the quantum vibration of the tubulin subunits could be maintained for a relatively long period in the warm, wet and noisy environment of the brain. However, since then, it has been shown that bacteriochlorophyll also uses quantum vibrations at room temperature when electrons arising from light excitation go through the most efficient energy harvesting processes and the paper in the O.P. suggests that vibration is a "natural" quality of microtubules in brain neurons.

Additionally, a protein complex that contributed to the process of how long term potentiation (or memory) seemed to fit spatially on to brain neuron microtubule subunits perfectly.

In my view, the hypothesis has stood the test of time and now needs confirmation, affirmation and recognition as a robust theory by the general scientific community.

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/publications.html

My original assumptions about the Turing Test are that there is a pre-requisite for human experience. Not only in terms of syntax and semantics of human linguistic discourse but also in human responses to stimuli. For example, how would a computer answer the following question:

"Rate the following on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being the most pleasant:

a) waking up to a sunny autumn day;

b) smelling toast and eggs in the morning;

c) eating a dried out orange;

d) eating a burned marshmallow"

The elements of human experience would, on average (from a representatively large sample) indicate favour of the first two statements but not with the latter two.

There are limitations, of course, with this part of the test but, there is a vast range of questions which can be asked in order to establish if the comunicator is human or not.

These are my opinions and, IMHO, the Turing has has not been passed according to the over-optimistic OP.

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A brilliant find! Penrose and Hameroff's Orch OR model finally finds substantial evidence to back it. I find this news to be exciting and wonderful.. Really, it deserves a Nobel prize.

OK, a bit of reading makes a little bit more sense. Back to the initial O.P. SNP's are single nucleotide polymorphisms, where different forms of the same gene for eye colour differ by one base.

For example, these can be thought of as SNP's

1. ...CTGAATGA...

2 ...CTGATTGA...

3 ...CTGACTGA...

4 ...CTGAGTGA...

These can be detected in Europeans so that blue, brown or any combination can be detected using two techniques.

This means that, at a crime scene, DNA can be extracted from body tissues and the eye colour can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy.

The first technique uses a short DNA primer which is a short piece of DNA complementary to the DNA sequence containing the SNP. The reaction mixture also contains DNA polymerase which is an enzyme that extends the DNA. It also contains nucleotides called dideoxynucletide phosphates which which stop the DNA polymerase after it adds the base complementary to the DNA sequence containing the SNP. These dideoxynucleotide phosphates contain a fluorescent compound which can be detected by a laser. Each dideoxynucleotide phosphate is attached to a different fluorescent marker.

Next, let's imagine that we use a short DNA primer containing the following sequence:

....GACTT

after binding to SNP No. 1, the DNA extension by the DNA polymerase is stopped and the fluorescent marker is identified by a laser when DNA's are separated by a technique called capillary electrophoresis which I do not understand.

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/pharma/snips/

Any thoughts and corrections to what I have written are welcome.