CustoMem in the UK uses synthetic biology to create a granular material that attracts and sticks to micropollutants such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and certain chemicals in wastewater

MicroBio Engineering Inc., a research and engineering consulting firm specializing in developing improved algal strains and cultivation processes for wastewater reclamation, animal feeds, higher value products and, yes, biofuels.

In Japan, scientists are developing synthetically altered soy plants and yeast that produce glycyrrhizen, a compound in licorice root that is 150 to 300 times sweeter than sugar

A stomatal safety-efficiency trade-off constrains responses to leaf dehydration

expatiation

Most of us are unaware of how our actions lead to self-organizing behavior.

The Two Sides of the H-LAM/T System

In my opinion if you can get enrolled into a degree program for systems biology then that would be best. However, if you are just exploring the field on your own I would recommend going through these resources.Video lectures by Uri AlonVideo Lectures by Jeff GorePrinciples of Synthetic Biology (at edx)Coursera specialization on systems biology.If you are looking for mathematical intensive start with first 2 and if you are looking for biologically intensive begin with last 2. Either way go through all 4 of them as they provide diverse perspective on systems biology which is very important. As you will move through these materials all the necessary supplementary information like books, papers and softwares will be informed within these materials itself.Hope this helps!

performance curves beginning to level off – because of our inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware improvements. Wed end up with some very powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further

Butte Biology

Also, the existence of differences between men and women doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t be changed in the future, even some biological ones. How much of what we’ve inherited – biologically, psychologically or socially – is outdated and malleable?  

There are factors other than sexism or discrimination that could in part explain why Google does not have 50 percent female representation. There are differences between men and women on average, based on population level statistics. (He qualifies this by noting a number of these differences are small and there is significant overlap between the genders.) These differences may in part explain the gender gap in tech. Women and men may differ partly because of biological reasons.

This could help explain where so much of our body’s fluid goes. While our cells contain most of the fluid, and the circulatory system carries a whole load more, over a third went unaccounted for and was simply said to be “interstitial”, or just floating around between organs and cells. The researchers claim, in a paper published in Scientific Advances, that the “interstitium” should be defined as an organ in its own right.

Statistical and integrative system-level analysis of DNA methylation data

perfectly fit for a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler"

approaches have proven invaluable for understanding metabo-lism and improving metabolite production (Wiechert 2002;Patilet al. 2004), metabolic engineering ‘design principles’ are yet tobe fully elucidated due to our incomplete knowledge of livingsystems. Subsequently, it can take many iterations of the classi-cal design-build-test cycle to achieve engineering objectives,some of which may even be impossible to meet using availablebiological knowledge.An elegant way to overcome the challenges associated withengineering in biology is to apply a selective pressure to a genet-ically diverse population so that cells with the desired pheno-type can be isolated.

This conclusion is not founded on this single instance, but on this instance compared with a general experience of the regularity of this clement in all its operations.

But should I from the same experiment infer the circulation of the sap in vegetables, this would be called an argument only from analogy.

We compare our assembly to a recently published one for the same species and do not find support for massive horizontal gene transfer. Additional analyses of the genome are ongoing.

studies show changes in gene expression after 8 hours of meditating in the lab

According to set point theory, our attitude and behaviors have a bigger effect on our happiness than our external circumstances – and that’s good news for mindfulness. Mindfulness shapes our brain by increasing gray matter in areas related to attention, learning, self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and compassion.

Mindfulness literally changes our brains, making some areas more responsive, interconnected, and dense. In particular, these are areas related to empathy (the insula); memory, emotion, and emotion regulation; and reward circuitry. In response to distressing stimuli, meditators see more activation in their prefrontal structures (for awareness) and less in their fear-driven amygdala.

They have helped people reduce chronic pain, improve psoriasis, and increase their immune response to the flu shot. One study of mindfulness/compassion meditation out of Emory University showed reductions in stress markers, and even a simple long exhale (ahhhh) increases vagal tone. And – last but not least – a three-month meditation training program boosted telomerase activity, indicating longer telemores and perhaps a longer life expectancy.

In one version of this experiment, if we gave participants synthetic oxytocin (in the nose, that will reach the brain in an hour), they donated to 57 percent more of the featured charities and donated 56 percent more money than participants given a placebo. Those who received oxytocin also reported more emotional transportation into the world depicted in the ad. Most importantly, these people said they were less likely to engage in the dangerous behaviors shown in the ads. So, go see a movie and laugh and cry. It’s good for your brain, and just might motivate you to make positive changes in your life and in others’ lives as well.

When people watch Ben’s story in the lab—and they both maintain attention to the story and release oxytocin—nearly all of these individuals donate a portion of their earnings from the experiment. They do this even though they don’t have to. This is surprising since this payment is to compensate them for an hour of their time and two needle sticks in their arms to obtain blood from which we measure chemical changes that come from their brains. 

when rats are sizing each other up in the moments before a potential fight, which may mean that laughter can help diffuse situations that might otherwise escalate into physical conflict. Similar behavior has been documented among chimpanzees.

As rats age, their chirping generally becomes less frequent. (A similar phenomenon seems to occur in humans: Research done by William Fry, a professor emeritus at Stanford University School of Medicine, has found that kindergarteners laugh 300 times a day, whereas adults laugh just 17 times.) However, rats who were tickled often when young usually retain their tendency to chirp later in life.

It is precisely this more childlike, instinctive form of laughter that scientists believe they have uncovered in rats. Panksepp, the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science at Washington State University, has found that rats emit their high-pitched chirps when tickled, especially in areas, such as the nape of the neck, that are targeted by fellow rats during playful bouts. They make the same sounds when playing or anticipating playtime with one another, as well as when anticipating a reward. Other research has found that this chirping is common when rats enter new environments or encounter new animals; Panksepp likens this to nervous laughter in humans.

scientists have probed the brain circuits involved in human laughter, but this research has faced a number of limitations. For one, though researchers have used sophisticated equipment to observe people’s brain activity while they read cartoons or jokes, this equipment is quite sensitive to movement—a major drawback when you’re trying to induce a hearty belly laugh.

Experiments on humans have found that laughter can increase blood flow and strengthen the heart, much like aerobic exercise does. Laughter also helps decrease one’s threshold for pain, although not all humor is the same in this respect. According to Weems, positive humor—humor that looks for the bright side of troubling situations—is beneficial to our health, while darker, sardonic humor is not.

Take for example an old Groucho Marx joke: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” Our brains will read the first sentence and be taken down a path imagining Grouch Marx on a safari in his pajamas, before we get the new image of the elephant actually inside his pajamas. That process of moving from one possible solution to the next involves a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate, or AC, which becomes more active when there are conflicting interpretations in the brain. The AC helps to quiet down the “louder” parts of the brain (associated with the expected response) to allow other quieter answers to emerge, and it’s particularly active during jokes. It helps us to figure out the novel solution, which, when resolved, gets incorporated into the brain and gives us that spike of dopamine. This is why we feel so good when we get a joke, and why jokes are not funny the second time around.

he grouped humor preferences into three types: “incongruity-resolution,” which involves “violating one’s expectations in novel ways;” “nonsense humor,” “which is funny only because it makes no sense;” and “sexual humor,” which is offensive or taboo. Although not everyone finds the same type of humor funny, the common thread in these joke types is that they all involve dealing with surprise and resolving the ensuing cognitive dissonance. “What elicits laughter isn’t the content of the joke but the way our brain works through the conflict the joke elicits,” writes Weems. Basic Books, 2014, 230 pages

Weems explains what humor is, how things become funny, and why evolution gave us laughter. According to Weems, laughter and humor help us process conflict in our environment through the dopamine that is released in our brains when we find something funny. Dopamine relieves tension—which I discovered with my son—but it’s also implicated in motivation, memory, and attention, affecting processes as varied as learning and pain management.

laughing, probably through its effects on breathingwhich makes you breathe more deeply, actually calms your cardiovascular system. So, it reallyseems to be altering your stress profile as a pathway to physical health.

In answer to why awe would be a potent predictor of reduced pro-inflammatory cytokines, this latest study posits that “awe is associated with curiosity and a desire to explore, suggesting antithetical behavioral responses to those found during inflammation, where individuals typically withdraw from others in their environment,” Stellar said.

In addition to autoimmune diseases, elevated cytokines have been tied to depression. One recent study found that depressed patients had higher levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine known as TNF-alpha than their non-depressed counterparts. It is believed that by signaling the brain to produce inflammatory molecules, cytokines can block key hormones and neurotransmitters—such as serotonin and dopamine—that control moods, appetite, sleep and memory.

There are new psychophysiological findings finding that cytokine levels, cytokinesreally reflect an inflammation in response in your body, which is very tough news onyour health, the only positive emotion that really lowers levels of cytokines is provingto be awe.

E.O. Wilson’s writing about biophilia.And it’s really this very rich hypothesis that we have this evolved love about naturalbeauty. So if you’re out in the woods, you’re in the mountains, you’re watching patternsof light on the ocean, it triggers this feeling in us, this feeling of beautiful delight ifyou will. And E.O. Wilson makes the case that that is an evolved preference because whenwe attach to beautiful things in nature, we’re finding kind of resource-richenvironments that have food and water and shelter as a way to orient towards thelandscape.

busy regions of the brain start stitching new connections with each other. Existing synapses—the connections between neurons that are very busy—get stronger, they get more sensitive, they start building out more receptors. New synapses form as well.

more activation in the left prefrontal cortex is associated with more positive emotions. So as there is greater activation in the left, front portion of your brain relative to the right, there is also greater well-being. That’s probably in large part because the left prefrontal cortex is a major part of the brain for controlling negative emotion. So if you put the breaks on the negative, you get more of the positive. On the other hand, people who routinely experience chronic stress—particularly acute, even traumatic stress—release the hormone cortisol, which literally eats away, almost like an acid bath, at the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain that’s very engaged in visual-spatial memory as well as memory for context and setting. For example, adults who have had that history of stress and have lost up to 25 percent of the volume of this critically important part of the brain are less able to form new memories.

And better understanding them means we can skillfully stimulate the neural substrates of those states—which, in turn, means we can strengthen them. Because as the famous saying by the Canadian scientist Donald Hebb goes, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

Mindfulness interrupts the conditioned responses that prevent us from exploring new avenues of thought, choking our creative potential. Each time we stand up against a habit—whether it’s checking our smartphone during a conversation or reacting defensively to a coworker’s passing remark— we weaken the grip of our conditioning. We lay down new tracks in the brain  and fashion new synaptic connections.

Participants for the gene study came into the lab and meditated for eight hours. Blood samples were taken before and after those hours of practice and then Davidson and crew looked for gene-expression changes over the course of that time in the lab. Results from this meditator group were compared to a control group that was not familiar with meditation and that came into the laboratory for “a day of leisure.” That group watched quiet videos, read, and took gentle walks. The findings? The control-group participants didn’t show the same kind of gene-expression changes, Davidson says. It’s the first study that shows “we can actually see gene-expression changes within a very short period of time.”

“One of the important foci in our research is looking at inflammation, which has been implicated in many chronic illnesses,” Davidson says. “And there’s now increasing evidence to suggest that at a very basic biological level, certain kinds of meditation practices seem to modulate inflammatory systems. They down-regulate particular molecules—we call these proinflammatory cytokines—which are directly implicated in inflammation.”

also did a briefmeditation intervention and in their subjects they were able to show that themeditation program resulted ina greater activation in reward circuitryso more contentment and pleasure and in this caseanticipatory pleasure because they were showing this activationin response to opportunities, to help opportunitiesto be of assistance.

basically what they've been able to showis that certain regions of the brain seem to getmore densely interconnected and more responsiveafter meditation and those ones seem to be areas of the brain that areinvolved inwhat we call interoceptive awareness, which is also the same area that’s implicated in empathy so so we get stronger at responses in our in our insula in response to information from the outside world after having participated in a meditation programathis should make us more empathetic, and thisindeed that’s what we observed.

Neuroplasticity is the idea that our brains change throughoutlifeas a result of day-to-day experiences and activities.

And what they found was that the individuals who participated in the meditation programhad longer telomeres than the individuals who were in the control group after a three-monthexperience. This was first finding in that vein. Elissa Epel and her colleague did anotherresearch project where they looked at a mindfulness-based program for people with eating disorders andshowed that people who did the mindfulness had a 39% increase in telomerase activitywhich corresponds to lengthened telomeres and that this telomerase activity actuallypredicted benefits in other aspects of their treatment program having to do with the people’seating habits. So there’s this interesting effect that is being reiterated that mindfulnessactually seems to make people age more gracefully.

during periods of mind-wandering, regions of the brain’s default mode network were activated. Then when participants became aware of this mind-wandering, brain regions related to the detection of salient or relevant events came online. After that, areas of the executive brain network took over, re-directing and maintaining attention on the chosen object. And all of this occurred within 12 seconds around those button presses.

A particularly generative field is contemplative neuroscience, which involves collaborations between scientists and expert authorities in the traditions that have informed the concept of mindfulness.

For example, when your mind wandered off in that meeting, it might help to know you’re slipping into default mode—and you can deliberately bring yourself back to the moment. That’s an ability that can improve with training.

One brain area stood out in this analysis: the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the default mode network that is particularly related to self-focused thoughts, which make up a good portion of mind-wandering content. It turns out that experienced meditators deactivated this region more quickly after identifying mind-wandering than people who hadn’t meditated as much

more experienced meditators have increased connectivity between default mode and attention brain regions, and less default mode activity while meditating.

a wandering mind isn’t all bad. Not only can we leverage it to build focus using FA meditation, but the capacity to project our mental stream out of the present and imagine scenarios that aren’t actually happening is hugely evolutionarily valuable, which may explain why it’s so prominent in our mental lives. These processes allow for creativity, planning, imagination, memory—capacities that are central not only to our survival, but also to the very essence of being human. The key, I believe, is learning to become aware of these mental tendencies and to use them purposefully, rather than letting them take over. Meditation can help with that.

the Killingsworth and Gilbert study I mentioned earlier found that when people’s minds were wandering, they tended to be less happy, presumably because our thoughts often tend towards negative rumination or stress. That’s why mindfulness meditation has become an increasingly important treatment of mental health difficulties like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even sexual dysfunction.

To some people, these findings about oxytocin might raise another concern: that trust is not subject to rational control—that it’s “all hormones.” This seems to stand in stark contrast to the traditional idea of trust being the outcome of a cognitive, rational process. In my view, trust is both, just like other human social behaviors. We cannot deny that many of our decisions are governed by cognitive processes; in the case of trust, these processes take into account the available information about the trustee’s motivation, the likelihood of a repeated interaction, and so on.

Interestingly, the investors’ expectations about the back-transfer from the trustee did not differ between the oxytocin and placebo recipients. Oxytocin increased the participants’ willingness to trust others, but it did not make them more optimistic about another person’s trustworthiness.

there is a simple hypothesis about what steers the human brain to trust another human: a hormone called oxytocin.

British researchers Peter Woodruff and Tom Farrow are doing some of this important work. Their research suggests that the areas in the brain associated with forgiveness are often deep in the emotional centers, in the region known as the limbic system, rather than in the areas of the cortex usually associated with reasoned judgments. In one study, they asked people to judge the fairness of a transgression and then consider whether to forgive it or empathize with the transgressor. Ten individuals evaluated several social scenarios while the researchers recorded images of their brain activity. Whether people empathized or forgave, similar areas in the emotion centers of the brain lit up. When those same people thought about the fairness of the same transgression, though, the emotion centers stopped being as active. This could be a clue for interventionists. To help people forgive, help them steer clear of dwelling on how fair a transgression was or how just a solution might be. Instead, get people to see things from the other person’s perspective.

Hostility also has been found to be the part of type A behavior that seems to have the most pernicious health effects, such as a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease. Forsaking a grudge may also free a person from hostility and all its unhealthy consequences. It probably isn’t just hostility and stress that link unforgiveness and poor health. According to a review of the literature on forgiveness and health that my colleague Michael Scherer and I published, unforgiveness might compromise the immune system at many levels. For instance, our review suggests that unforgiveness might throw off the production of important hormones and even disrupt the way our cells fight off infections, bacteria, and other physical insults, such as mild periodontal disease.

To ruminate on an old transgression is to practice unforgiveness. Sure enough, in Witvliet’s research, when people recalled a grudge, their physical arousal soared. Their blood pressure and heart rate increased, and they sweated more. Ruminating about their grudges was stressful, and subjects found the rumination unpleasant. It made them feel angry, sad, anxious, and less in control. Witvliet also asked her subjects to try to empathize with their offenders or imagine forgiving them. When they practiced forgiveness, their physical arousal coasted downward. They showed no more of a stress reaction than normal wakefulness produces.

The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the 17th century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility. Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the continental megastate, and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter. We lack the type of physiology or anatomy that in other mammals determine their mating system, and have come up with societies based on monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry. And we have fashioned some religions in which violent acts are the entrée to paradise and other religions in which the same acts consign one to hell. Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, “No, it is beyond our nature,” knows too little about primates, including ourselves.

Is it possible to achieve the cooperative advantages of a small group without having the group reflexively view outsiders as the Other? One often encounters pessimism in response to this question, based on the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active—aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented subliminally, which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it. More recent studies, however, should mitigate this pessimism. Test a person who has a lot of experience with people of different races, and the amygdala does not activate.

Working with captive primates, de Waal and Johanowicz created a mixed-sex social group of juvenile macaques, combining rhesus and stump tails together. Remarkably, instead of the rhesus macaques bullying the stump tails, over the course of a few months the rhesus males adopted the stump tails’ social style, eventually even matching the stump tails’ high rates of reconciliatory behavior. It so happens, moreover, that stump tails and rhesus macaques use different gestures when reconciling. The rhesus macaques in the study did not start using the stump tails’ reconciliatory gestures, but rather increased the incidence of their own species-typical gestures. In other words, they were not merely imitating the stump tails’ behavior; they were incorporating the concept of frequent reconciliation into their own social practices. Finally, when the newly warm-and-fuzzy rhesus macaques were returned to a larger, all-rhesus group, their new behavioral style persisted.

Kummer conducted a simple experiment, trapping an adult female savanna baboon and releasing her into a hamadryas troop and trapping an adult female hamadryas and releasing her into a savanna troop. The females who were dropped in among a different species initially carried out their species-typical behavior, a major faux pas in the new neighborhood. But gradually, they absorbed the new rules. How long did this learning take? About an hour. In other words, millennia of genetic differences separating the two species, a lifetime of experience with a crucial social rule for each female—and a miniscule amount of time to reverse course completely.

it suggests that maybe these prefrontal regionsthat are really important for decision making have to work a little bit harder when we decidenot to cooperate when we decide to compete or defect at the expense of the other person.

we experience pleasurewhen we cooperate knowing that our cooperation is going to lead to benefits to the peoplethat we’re cooperating with.

they found that reward signalling increased with reciprocated cooperation, inother words if I cooperate and I learn that you have alsocooperated then we’re both benefitting from this mutual cooperation there is greater rewardactivation or reward signalling gets boosted. And then also they found that when peoplecooperate but then are met with not cooperation in other words, unreciprocated cooperationdecreases activation in these reward processing areas.