Curiosity June 2023

E44

From Latin June= iuniores, young people

Month of Roses. Florigraphy: Language of flowers

Brain implant let a paralysed man walk just by thinking about walking.

This month’s Discoveries

1. A man paralyzed from the hips down since 2011 can now walk again thanks to implants that provided a “digital bridge” between the man’s brain and his spinal cord. This digital bridge bypassed injured sections of the spinal cord, according to the Swiss study published in Nature. | Elon Musk’s Neuralink implantable chip gets FDA approval for clinical trial | Study highlights the importance of napping for memory consolidation in early childhood | Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds. Artificial intelligence system can translate a person’s brain activity into a continuous stream of text.
2. Study finds ChatGPT outperforms physicians in providing high-quality, empathetic responses to written patient questions in r/AskDocs. A panel of licensed healthcare professionals preferred the ChatGPT response 79% of the time, rating them both higher in quality and empathy than physician responses.| UCSD
3. Study has found that teens who use cannabis recreationally are two to four times as likely to develop psychiatric disorders, such as depression and suicidality, than teens who don’t use cannabis at all |Columbia| LSD helps to learn things faster by increasing neuronal plasticity
4. Surge of gamma wave activity in brains of dying patients suggest that near-death experience is the product of the dying brain
5. Regular walks strengthen connections in and between brain networks, according to new research, adding to growing evidence linking exercise with slowing the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
6. Cancer patients do not need to avoid exercise, quite the contrary. Short bouts of light or moderate exercise can increase the number of cancer-destroying immune cells in the bloodstream of cancer patients according to two new Finnish studies.
7. Chemotherapy drug reaches brain in humans for first time. Novel ultrasound uses microbubbles to open blood-brain barrier to treat glioblastoma in humans.
8. Air pollution from oil and gas production responsible for $77 billion in annual US health damages, contributes to thousands of early deaths, childhood asthma cases nationwide| Note: this is only from production. The burning of it does about 10x as much damage (IMF says $649 billion annually).
9. Coal power creates many times more radioactivity than nuclear power
10. Making the first mission to mars all female makes practical sense. A new study shows the average female astronaut requires 26% fewer calories, 29% less oxygen, and 18% less water than the average male. Thus, a 1,080-day space mission crewed by four women would need 1,695 fewer kilograms of food.
11. Fake news is mainly shared accidentally and comes from people on the political right, new study finds| Nature
12. Ancient humans may have stopped in Arabia for 30,000 years on their way out of Africa
13. New research found for almost a half of all people who receive a knock to the head (Concussion), there are changes in how regions of the brain communicate with each other, potentially causing long term symptoms such as fatigue and cognitive impairment.| Cambridge
14. Scientists find link between photosynthesis and ‘fifth state of matter’| U Chicago| Bose-Einstein Condensate is a state of matter created when particles, called bosons, are cooled to near absolute zero| So it’s like a highway filled with cars to a traffic jam. The front car disappears and everyone can move one spot over, but this takes time and is observed as ‘friction’. But in this case all the cars start driving at the exact same time, effectively eliminating the effect of a traffic jam while still moving
15. Body Type May Give Athletes Upper Hand in Certain Climates: Taller, leaner runners with long limbs tended to excel in Ironman events held in warm climates, while marathoners with stockier builds and shorter limbs fared better in colder climates

Please subscribe to our facebook group for more exciting science stories

Observances

• 3 Cycle Day, Mercury
• 4 Strawberry Moon
• 5 Environment Day
• 7 Food Safety Day
• 8 Oceans Day
• 10 Moon-Saturn Conjunction
• 14 Blood Donor Day, Moon-Jupiter Conjunction
• 21 June Solstice
• 22 Moon-Venus Conjunction
• 29 Tropics

Opportunities

• Marie Curie PostDoc fellowship, 30 Sep 2023
• Australia-India student exchange program, 13th Oct 2023
• MentX Mentor call is open now. Successfully supervising four or more interns (mentees) and submitting comprehensive report by them is what is expected. After successful mentoring, mentors will be inducted in YAI as lifetime fellows.
• Programme Manager, Royal Irish Academy. Salary: €39,979 — €52,112. Deadline: 8 June
• Summer school “The Right to Higher Education in the Global South: Horizons, Debates and Challenges”. Deadline to apply: 16 June
• GYA Sasha Kagansky Interdisciplinary Grant to facilitate the development of curiosity-driven, blue-sky, exploratory research pilots or prototypes that unite researchers in low/middle-income and high-income countries and cross disciplinary boundaries. Value: 10,000 EUR. Deadline: 28 June
• Indo-Russian Bilateral Program, 15th June
• EMBO Global Investigator Network, 30th June
• Several JRF/Project position calls shared in facebook group

My latest book “Life Skills” is now on sale, Rs. 435 only. Order here. YAI Fb page lists more exciting curiosity-driven research news every day, do subscribe.

To share this story, use this link