How consciousness may rely on brain cells acting collectively – new psychedelics research on rats

Psychedelics can help uncover consciousness. agsandrew/Shutterstock Pär Halje, Lund UniversityPsychedelics are known for inducing altered states of consciousness in humans by fundamentally changing our normal pattern of sensory perception, thought and emotion. Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics has increased significantly in the last decade. While this research is important, I have always been more intrigued by the idea that psychedelics can be used as a tool to study the neural basis of human consciousness in laboratory animals. We ultimately share the same basic neural hardware with other mammals, and possibly some basic aspects of consciousness, too. So by examining what happens in the brain when there’s a psychedelically induced change in conscious experience, we can perhaps glean insights into what consciousness is in the first place.We still don’t know a lot about how the networks of cells in the brain enable conscious experience. The dominating view is that consciousness somehow emerges as a collective phenomenon when the dispersed information processing of individual neurons (brain cells) is integrated as the cells interact.But the mechanism by which this is supposed to happen remains unclear. Now our study on rats, published in Communications Biology, suggests that psychedelics radically change the...

Read More........→August 23, 2023

European Space Agency's Euclid telescope launches from Florida, US

An artist's impression of Euclid. Image: ESA.Yesterday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope aboard, launched at 11:12 AM EDT (1512 UTC) from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida, US. Euclid was to study dark matter, dark energy, and the expansion of the universe. Costing €1.4 billion, Euclid was to spend about a month traveling around 1,500,000 kilometers (932,057 mi) to the Lagrange point L2 between the Earth and the Sun, the area of the James Webb Space Telescope. There, it would observe about a third of the sky beyond the Milky Way for six years. NASA designed and built Euclid's Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, with a tentative launch date of May 2027, was to provide more refined data scientists could use to correct Euclid's. IPAC senior research scientist Yun Wang stated Euclid and Roman would "add up to much more than the sum of their parts [...] Combining their observations will give astronomers a better sense of what's actually going on in the universe." Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Euclid was scheduled for launch from French Guiana on a Russian Soyuz rocket in March 2023. Source: https://en.wikinews.org, available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Lice...

Read More........→August 08, 2023

1st baby pangolin in Europe born in Prague zoo, doing well

A baby Chinese pangolin is being weighed at the Prague Zoo, Czech Republic, Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023. A female baby of Chinese pangolin has been born in the Prague zoo on Feb 2, 2023, as the first birth of the critically endangered animal on the European continent, and was doing well, the park said. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)PRAGUE (AP) — A Chinese pangolin has been born in the Prague zoo, the first birth of the critically endangered animal in captivity in Europe, and is doing well after initial troubles, the park said on Thursday.For the first few days after the baby female was born on Feb 2, park keepers were worried because it was losing weight.The reason was found to be that the mother, Run Hou Tang, didn’t have enough milk. Following consultations with experts from Taiwan, a program of artificial feeding with milk from a cat was introduced and the mother was stimulated to produce more of her own.That turned things around with the zoo now expressing cautious optimism about the pup, which still has no name but has been nicknamed “Little Cone” because it resembles a spruce cone.Prague received the rare animals from Taiwan last year, becoming only the second European zoo to keep the species.Guo Bao, the male pangolin, and Run Hou Tang both came from the Taipei zoo, the leading breeder of the mammals that are hunted heavily for...

Read More........→February 24, 2023

World's first 100% hydrogen-powered train now runs in Germany

Alstom, global leader in smart and sustainable mobility, on Wednesday announced the launch of the world’s first hydrogen powered train, the Coradia iLint, setting another historical milestone. The train has started plying on the world’s premiere 100 per cent hydrogen train route in Bremervörde, Lower Saxony, Germany, for passenger service. This regional train only emits steam and condensed water while operating with a low level of noise. Altom has developed 14 vehicles with fuel cell propulsion for Landesnahverkehrsgesellschaft Niedersachsen (LNVG). LNVG had started looking for alternatives to diesel trains in 2012, providing the momentum for the development of the trains in Germany. Other project partners for this world debut are the Elbe-Weser railways and transport company (evb) and the gas and engineering company Linde. “Emission free mobility is one of the most important goals for ensuring a sustainable future and Alstom has a clear ambition to become the world leader in alternative propulsion systems for rail. The world’s first hydrogen train, the Coradia iLint, demonstrates our clear commitment to green mobility combined with state-of-the-art technology. We are very proud to bring this technology into series operation as part of a world premiere, together with our great partners,” said Henri Poupart-Lafarge, CEO and chairman...

Read More........→February 17, 2023

Strong activation of anti-bacterial cells of immune system linked to severe COVID-19: Study

SEP 29, 2020 LONDON: A type of the immune system's T cells known to fight against bacterial infections is strongly activated in people with moderate to severe COVID-19, according to a study which provides a better understanding of how the body responds to the novel coronavirus infection. Researchers, including those from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, noted that this component of the immune system called MAIT cells make up about one to five percent of T cells in the blood of healthy people, and are primarily important for controlling bacteria, but can also be recruited to fight some viral infections. They explained that T cells are a type of white blood cells that are specialised in recognizing infected cells, and are an essential part of the immune system. In the current study, published in the journal Science Immunology, the scientists assessed the role played by MAIT cells in COVID-19 disease. They examined the presence and character of MAIT cells in blood samples from 24 patients admitted to Karolinska University Hospital with moderate to severe COVID-19 disease, and compared these with blood samples from 14 healthy controls and 45 individuals who had recovered from COVID-19. Four of the patients died in the hospital, the study noted. "To find potential treatments against COVID-19, it is important to understand in detail...

Read More........→September 29, 2020