jimmydasaint

Livingstone, thanks for the answer. I will read the Stanford entry tonight. However, as for storage of memory, I watched a video about rat neurons cultured in vitro which control the motion of a wheeled machine like a proto-brain. The cultured cells appear to show stronger neurological connections like a stronger memory of something. This research may uncover the true origin of memory and it may finally exclude the thought of a soul driving and influencing matter. Spiritualists may have to look elsewhere for the expression of a soul...

Video of the Rat brain controlling a wheeled machine

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/reuters/13612-early-cyborg-is-a-rat-video.htm

I think this is from the same team:

As the cells are living tissue, they are kept separate from the robot in a temperature-controlled cabinet in a container pitted with electrodes. Signals are passed to and from the robot via Bluetooth short-range radio.

The robot and rat brain cells work together

 

 

The brain cells have been taught how to control the robot's movements so it can steer round obstacles and the next step, say its creators, is to get it to recognise its surroundings.

 

Once the robot can do this the researchers plan to disrupt the memories in a bid to recreate the gradual loss of mental faculties seen in diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

 

Studies of how neural tissue is degraded or copes with the disruption could give insights into these conditions

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7559150.stm

I am fascinated by the possibility of storage of memory in neurons. Where could it be stored? Is it a system of layers of epigenetic switches or is it stored in some other way? Any ideas please?

Penrose focuses on consciousness as behaving algorithmically, then attempts to formulate mathematical proofs where the behavior of a person is given formal mathematical properties.

 

To put it in Kantian terms, when arguing against materialists Penrose is unable to separate the phenomena from the noumena. To Penrose, there's nothing emergent about consciousness at all, and it's inseparable from whatever mathematical activities go on to facilitate it. To frame it in the modern verbage of the philosophy mind, Penrose likens materialism to reductive eliminativism, that is that mind is matter and the two are inseparable.

I would agree with Penrose here. He seems to favour dualist arguments. However, the materialist notion can be analagous to the epiphenomenological model which adds to Husserl's ideas of meaning coming from a person's consciousness acting on perceptions. In other words, the consciousness is like a foam which collects in an extremely active neurophysiological pond firing neurons left, right and centre. You can pick and choose if you like the materialistic notion of consciousness but you would also have to answer the objections raised by Penrose about the limitations of a machine (the Turing halting problem and Godel's incompleteness theorem).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Functionalists would argue that mind is a symbolic (noumenological) system which is independent of its underlying substrate. It doesn't matter if that substrate is a wet lump of fat or a silicon chip with electrons whizzing through it. So long as it pushes symbols around in the right way the system is conscious.

So, in short, you are saying that inputs (or qualia) to the brain are then not immediately turned into outputs but are transformed by an intermediary function into a range of outputs. So this is another form of materialism. The functions can then work in feedback loops to the brain. Would I be right in asserting these opinions? OK, if that is the case, what is the distinction made between conscious and physical states that govern perceptions? For example, when I look at my chidren asleep, I do not think: 'my neonates are in a state of dormant and quiescent slumber' I think: 'aw, they're so cute when they sleep'. The physical and conscious states express a difference.

As a consequence of this dichotomy, there is a problem with expressing machine consciousness as anslagous to human consciousness.

I suppose Penrose would fancy himself a monist, but he's not. He's a dualist is sheep's clothing.

I think Penrose is a dualist in dualists clothing, to be honest. I have read a little bit about the Orch OR model and it seems to leave the source of the Objective Reduction to 'spooky' other world sources.

[sheepish] I tried reading Kant as a primary source and gave up after reading part of his Prolegomena because I could not understand his terminology and reference points like someone in his own time could [/sheepish]

 

Here is some stuff to inspire you

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2552973/Rats-brain-used-to-power-robot.html [this has been exagerated in the blogosphere]

 

[this guy could be considered stupid, but his got a powerful idea people]

I like the sources you gave to me. In my youth I read some references to Whitehead and Bergson and the source of what we could could memory which seemed to have a spooky unknown origin. This animat where movement is controlled by rat neuron tissue seems to demystify the origin of memory and is worthy of another thread.

OK. My mass of brain tissue is nothing special and I know that. So we are saying that it is a problem of complexity similar to the neural networks in a human brain. I was trying to establish if humans can do something that the computers cannot (at present). For example I seem to recall that Penrose could solve a tiling problem where a surface could be tiled with a small number of shapes without the pattern repeating - I think this is called non-periodic tiling. Apparently this tiling problem could not have an algorithm applied to it. Does anyone know of an algorithm which could solve this problem or come close to it at present?

This link is not a primary source:

Penrose is very much the mathematician. Not only does he mathematically model Black Holes, he solves extremely difficult math puzzles in his spare time. In the 1960’s it was mathematically proven that you could tile a surface without having the pattern ever repeat. They called it non-periodic tiling and the race was on to figure out who could find the least number of tile shapes that could be used for non-periodic tiling. The number started out with over 20,000 tile shapes which was quickly reduced to 104. In 1974, Penrose had reduced it to six tile shapes. Shortly after that, he identified non-periodic tiling was possible with just two tile shapes.

 

Penrose maintains that his solution to non-periodic tiling could not have been found via an algorithmic process. Ergo, his brain is not an algorithmic computer. He formalized this by claiming strict algorithmic artificial intelligence (Strong AI) was impossible.

http://dfcord.blogspot.com/

I would highly recommend Roberts, Reiss and Monger. It is for British Sixth Forms (Yrs 12 and 13) but chooses breadth rather than depth and succeeds in entertaining and informing the enquiring mind.

For a preview see:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HHaDGynAz1EC&pg=PR7&lpg=PR7&dq=Roberts,+Reiss+and+Monger&source=web&ots=v5VIfcKVux&sig=_ogvClVOtzQK9VSY47YeJJjpEtg&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPR8,M1

Do you guys honestly mean that a computer can 'feel' an emotion. I can pretend to be happy when my wife has spent my pay cheque on rubbish but it is a pretend emotion - not one that is actually felt. A simulation is not the same as a genuine appreciation involving various areas of the brain.

Just musing about the boundaries of Artificial Intelligence, I wonder if AI programming can ever take a machine to the point that it would be able to appreciate the sounds of a waterfall, or a gently murmuring stream or be able to appreciate the works of Wagner. Or to be happy when the UK win gold medals in the Olympics. In short, can our emotions ever be felt and appreciated by a computer, and could it then make mistakes based upon emotion?

These guys used something called Imiquimod:

Small anti-viral compounds activate immune cells via the TLR7 MyD88−dependent signaling pathway

 

Hiroaki Hemmi1, Tsuneyasu Kaisho1, Osamu Takeuchi1, Shintaro Sato1, Hideki Sanjo1, Katsuaki Hoshino1, Takao Horiuchi1, Hideyuki Tomizawa2, Kiyoshi Takeda1 & Shizuo

Correspondence should be addressed to Shizuo Akira sakira@biken.osaka-u.ac.jp

 

 

The imidazoquinoline compounds imiquimod and R-848 are low-molecular-weight immune response modifiers that can induce the synthesis of interferon- and other cytokines in a variety of cell types. These compounds have potent anti-viral and anti-tumor properties; however, the mechanisms by which they exert their anti-viral activities remain unclear. Here we show that the imidazoquinolines activate immune cells via the Toll-like receptor 7 (TLR7)-MyD88−dependent signaling pathway. In response to the imidazoquinolines, neither MyD88- nor TLR7-deficient mice showed any inflammatory cytokine production by macrophages, proliferation of splenocytes or maturation of dendritic cells. Imidazoquinoline-induced signaling events were also abolished in both MyD88- and TLR7-deficient mice.

http://www.nature.com/ni/journal/v3/n2/full/ni758.html

Now by looking up Imiquimod, I found the following, probably because I lead a sad and meaningless life,

IMIQUIMOD (R837) Safety Data Sheet

 

Date: 09-05-05 Date of printing: 10-05-05 Page 1 of 2

 

 

1. Name of substance/preparation and company

1.1 Commercial product: IMIQUIMOD (1(2-Methyl-propyl)-1H-imidazol [4,5-c] quinolin-4-amine, R-837)

Cat.-No.: tlrl-imq,

1.2 Company: CAYLA SAS- InvivoGen Corp.

5 rue Jean Rodier BP 4437 3950 Sorrento Valley Blvd, suite A

31 405 Toulouse Cedex 04 France San Diego, California 92121, USA

Tel. ++33 (0)5 62 71 69 391 858 457 5874

Information obtainable from: ++33 (0)5 62 71 69 391 858 457 5874

This product is for laboratory use only and is not intended for human or animal diagnostics, therapeutic or clinical uses....

http://www.invivogen.com/MSDS/MSDS_imiquimod.doc

If this was close enough as an analogue for an MSDS for the original compound would you please enlighten us with the background of how and why it is used.

I think this is reasonably well established:

Leukemia cells

 

In people with leukemia, the bone marrow produces abnormal white blood cells. The abnormal cells are leukemia cells. At first, leukemia cells function almost normally. In time, they may crowd out normal white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets. This makes it hard for blood to do its work.

 

You can learn more here: http://www.medicinenet.com/leukemia/article.htm

Another question to accompany the OP. Is there evidence of intolerance to the pill at all and how would you know? I presume that intolerance would manifest in some immunological or biological contra-indications. From doing a (very) cursory search, it seems that there are only a few contra-indications and most doctors do not seem to hesitate to prescribe oral contraceptives (OC). I found some reference to adverse effects of using OC's:

The first suggested that a low amount of women were more likely to be susceptible to venous thromboembolism to certain OC's (possibly due to resistance effects to activated protein C in OC's containing desogestrel). However, these effects were then discounted http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/321/7255/190

Other studies also seem to indicate that OC's are well tolerated in women http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/571231_4

Perhaps it may be wise to say that the jury is still out on this isuue and that evidence of resistance is scant.

Depends on what you mean by a nervous system? Do you mean a human nervous system? Plants appear to have excellent 'sensory' systems to sense gravity (geotropism) and light (phototropism). http://www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/content/abstract/60/5/736

There is also fine control of germination or flowering responses to periods of light and darkness mediated by phytochromes. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=157529

Plants also have immune systems recognising foreign antigens

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14616074

In summary, although I have not given you primary references, plants do well at sensing important factors vital for life already. But it is an interesting thought if they start to think...

The story about Britain being touted for even more surveillance does not make happy reading for me. We are already an information poor, entertainment rich society like the U.S. This makes many of us more likely to accept entertainment instead of real 'reality' We tend to passively accept the Government's suggestions for surveillance in order to aid security in this great nation. If push comes to shove, do we just quietly agree to be surveilled using Terahertz technology (not X-rays) which can see through clothes, invasive audio and visual surveillance technology and finally microchipped for I.D.? I cannot see the Americans being so receptive to being treted in this way.

Tories push for more surveillance

In a sign the Conservative party may be moving away from the civil liberties ideals of former shadow home secretary David Davis, the Tories have announced a push to make it easier for police to launch surveillance operations against non-terrorists.

 

New shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve wants to get rid of the system for authorising surveillance on suspected criminals, claiming one officer spent 13-and-a-half hours completing paper work so he could follow a burglar with previous convictions.

 

"Revising the act's framework so that authorisation - and all the paperwork that goes with it - is not required for basic police work is just one way the party will cut red tape to free more police onto our streets," Mr Grieve continued.

 

That kind of change would open up an array of surveillance options to the police, including video or audio surveillance, thermal and X-ray imaging, the use of CCTV cameras, on-site watching of public locations and uniformed or plain-clothed patrols.

 

The party denies amendments to the act would result in an interference with people's privacy, saying the type of surveillance operation covered by the act could not "reasonably" be seen to constitute an invasion of privacy.

I first thought that the answer was to refer to the simple textbook answer:

Neurons, like all cells, maintain different concentrations of certain ions across their cell membranes. Imagine the case of a boat with a small leak below the water line. In order to keep the boat afloat, the small amount of water entering through the leak has to be pumped out, which maintains a lower water level relative to the open sea. Neurons do the same thing, but they pump out positively charged sodium ions. In addition, they pump in positively charged potassium ions (potash to the gardeners out there!!) Thus there is a high concentration of sodium ions present outside the neuron, and a high concenttration of potassium ions inside. The neuronal membrane also contains specialised proteins called channels, which form pores in the membrane that are selectively permeable to particular ions. Thus sodium channels allow sodium ions through the membrane while potassium channels allow potassium ions through.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/synaptic/public/basics_ch1_2.html

Then I saw the word 'why?'. After a bit of searching and reading, I came up with the following paper and this can provide you with a basis for further research and reading :

Leak K+ currents contribute to the resting membrane potential and are important for modulation of neuronal excitability. Within the past few years, an entire family of genes has been described whose members form leak K+ channels, insofar as they generate potassium-selective currents with little voltage- and time-dependence. They are often referred to as "two-pore-domain" channels because of their predicted topology, which includes two pore-forming regions in each subunit. These channels are modulated by a host of different endogenous and clinical compounds such as neurotransmitters and anesthetics, and by physicochemical factors such as temperature, pH, oxygen tension, and osmolarity. They also are subject to long-term regulation by changes in gene expression. In this review, the authors describe multiple roles that modulation of leak K+ channels play in CNS function and discuss evidence that members of the two-pore-domain family are molecular substrates for these processes.

http://nro.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/9/1/46

The emphasis is my own but, suffice to say, nothing in biology seems to be simple. Good luck with your reading.

 

I don't really know what is meant by the statement "learned to talk to taller people in a way..." - that tells me it's an issue for you. Why do you feel you need to self consciously "direct" yourself around tall people? Any people?

 

Not an issue as such, I think it is the Scottish thing about looking peopple in the eyes. I think that it exaggerates the height difference to try to look a tall person in the eyes to an onlooker, so to 'minimise' the exaggerated size difference I can just talk to a chest as comfortably. Anyone's chest - but with women I don't stare at the chest too often as other men do, with the 'talk to the breasts' syndrome that men have. In that case I tend to look down at the floor. It is just sheer convenience.

SkepticLance thanks for the information about bullies - so life is all about power, sex and money like my Dad told me....

First of all, define your terms and do your own groundwork. For example what is bare lymphocyte syndrome? It looks like BLS is an autosomal recessive disease which involves severe combined immunodeficiency. Now ask yourself how Adenovirus 12 interacts with certain genes of the immune system by doing a quick search of scholarly articles. Then cross-reference and you will find an hypothesis. I see you have posted this terse enquiry on another Forum as well...

Anyway, being a kindly guy, I will give you a lead and you can follow up with a fuller explanation and teach the rest of us in return. Try to think of gene regulation of Major Histocompatability antigens (Class II and I)

http://www.authoratory.com/authors/2002/1087946749/1/pubs.htm

I was actually emphasising the neutral surface because the OP wanted something close to good ole H2O without modifications but thanks for the information. I can imagine that the separating channels require a polymer or sieving matrix as you have mentioned. I have learnt something new again. Thanks Charon Y.

Correct. Silica columns have a cut off of 400-500 bp, if I remember correctly. However, there is another method I have found after a bit of searching:

 

Microchip electrophoresis has become a mature separation technique in recent years. Compared to agarose gel electrophoresis, which is commonly used for DNA separation, microchip electrophoresis has several advantages such as automation, fast analysis speed and minimum sample requirement. For the fabrication of electrophoretic microchips, silica-based and polymer-based materials are two commonly used substrates. Among the polymer-based materials, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) substrate can be wire-imprinted in a common laboratory to form microfluidic channels without expensive fabrication facilities. Moreover, the neutral hydrophilic surface chemistry of PMMA allows direct DNA separation to be performed on bare microchips without the tedious surface modifications that are normally required for silica-based materials. This chapter presents an imprinting method for fabricating PMMA microchips as well as the on-chip assay for performing electrophoretic DNA separation on the fabricated microchip.

http://www.springerprotocols.com/Abstract/doi/10.1007/978-1-59745-426-1_1

Is this what you were looking for asaroj27?

Yes...I did read that Napoleon was of average height for Frenchman of his time, and the information above is very interesting, but did not know about Hitler. I am only 5 foot 3 inches but thought I was taller for years because my Dad told me he was 5 foot 5 inches. (It turned out later that he was 5 foot 1 inch tall ) Talk about small man syndrome!

However I am quite cool and rational and have learned to talk to taller people in a way that does not make me look small. For example I don't look up to make eye contact and sit down whenever I can to reduce the obvious height difference.

In the University study in the OP, tall men and short men under 5 foot 5 inches were told they were being tested for reflexes etc...but short people were asked to deliberately rap the taller people on the knuckles. It was found that the taller subjects were much more likely to retaliate and 'get their revenge'. Therefore I think the syndrome should now be renamed 'Tall Man Syndrome.'

I thought everyone must have heard the Physics Guy rap.

or is this 'old hat' now?

Being a small man, in most senses of the word, I was surprised to hear that the public perceive small men to be more aggressive and power hungry to overcompensate for their lack of height. However, it seems that this story could be a myth from a recent study by the University of Central Lancashire which shows the opposite to be a strong probability - i.e. Tall Man Syndrome.

Short men 'not more aggressive'

 

Dennis Wise's aggressive playing style made up for his lack of inches

The theory that short men end up as more aggressive than taller ones has been dismissed by a scientific study.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6501633.stm

However, Napoleon, Hitler and Sarkozy are small men.

What do you think?

From a quick scan, and this is by no stretch of the imagination complete, it seems that some introns code for snoRNA's as well as the types of RNA's specified by MedGen.

A couple of interesting references, though the second is a Letter and seems rushed for publication:

Intron-mediated RNA interference and microRNA (miRNA).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17981704

and

Fugu lntron Oversize Reveals the Presence of

U1S snoRNA Coding Sequences in Some

lntrons of the Ribosomal Protein S3 Gene

http://genome.cshlp.org/cgi/reprint/6/12/1227

Others can advance the knowledge here. The microRNA seems to interfere with the expression of mRNA with complementary nucleotide sequences. The snoRNA seems to be small nucleolar RNA with the following function:

Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are a class of small RNA molecules that guide chemical modifications (methylation or pseudouridylation) of ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs) and other RNA genes (tRNAs and other small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs))

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SnoRNA

From the OP it seems that the question is more about isolation of DNA so I wanted to suggest a method that involved an 'aqueous' aspect to it. It is not quite clear though.

Gels are probably very convenient but you can also use column chromatography for isolation of DNA:

A Sephadex column procedure for DNA isolation is also useful for detecting dsRNA

Alberto B.Livore, Peter Grubb', Clint W.Magill and Jane M.Magillt

Departments of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, 'Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas Agricultural Experiment

Station, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA

Submitted November 18, 1987

 

Agarose gel electrophoresis of DNA isolated from certain strains of

Exserohilum turcicum (formerly Helminthosporium turcicum) gave 6 extra

ethidium stained bands bel ow the high mol ecul ar weight band of undigested

DNA. As the extra bands were not digested by restriction endonucl eases,

further experiments were undertaken to determine the nature of the bands. The

bands did not appear if extracts were first treated with RNase A which had

been treated to el iminate DNase (1). Further, the bands when stained with

acridine orange (2) fluoresced green on UV exposure, while low

molecular weight material fluoresced red. The material in the

bbaands could also be recovered by binding to cellulose fibers

* (Whatman CF-11) in the presence of 15% ethanol (3). These

resul ts l ead to the concl usion that the bands (arrows in E.t.

lane) are double stranded RNA. The occurrence of dsRNA

mycoviruses or of dsRNA inclusions in fungi where viruses cannot

be detected is quite common (4). In some cases the number and

size of the dsRNA species present can be used to identify

specific fungal strains and may be related to pathogenicity (5).

In other cases, including E. turcicum, the existence of dsRNA

inclusions has been implicated by serological techniques, though

no dsRNA has been isolated (6). We feel that the simplicity and

efficiency .of the procedure will make it extremely useful to

others interested in locating and characterizing dsRNA from

fungi and perhaps from other organisms as well especially when

isolation of DNA is also desirable.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=334703&blobtype=pdf

We aren't breeding new strains of antibiotic bacteria they are all ready there, however it doesn't matter that they are there because that is why we have an immune system, antibiotic resistant bacteria are only a problem when our immune system is weakened and only occur in large numbers when antibiotics are prevalent and therefore it is of great advantage to be resistant to them, hence the problem in hospitals and the search for new antibiotics (which will only be a temporary fix) and other treatment methods.

You have to be careful of making statements with that degree of certitude. I must admit that I had been labouring under the misconception that a large number of bacteria were wiped out with orally administered bacteriocidal antibiotics with a broad spectrum. However, that misconception has been corrected from this thread.

Back to the point, is the general use of antibacterial agents in household items causing resistant strains to increase in number. The short answer is that I don't know. However, now that I have read e-coli's blog, it seems that the dosage is quite low and that the issue of resistance was considered prior to the use of antibacterials. Triclosan for example causes no resistance effects to occur.

Thanks for the reply.