What's The Basis For The Claim That These ONLY Provide Structure, Support And Movement?

micro-magnet |   Common to all eukaryotic cells, these filaments are primarily structural in function and are an important component of the cytoskeleton, along with microtubules and often the intermediate filaments. Microfilaments range from 5 to 9 nanometers in diameter and are designed to bear large amounts of tension. In association with myosin, microfilaments help to generate the forces used in cellular contraction and basic cell movements. The filaments also enable a dividing cell to pinch off into two cells and are involved in amoeboid movements of certain types of cells.

Microfilaments are solid rods made of a protein known as actin. When it is first produced by the cell, actin appears in a globular form (G-actin; see Figure 1). In microfilaments, however, which are also often referred to as actin filaments, long polymerized chains of the molecules are intertwined in a helix, creating a filamentous form of the protein (F-actin). All of the subunits that compose a microfilament are connected in such a way that they have the same orientation. Due to this fact, each microfilament exhibits polarity, the two ends of the filament being distinctly different. This polarity affects the growth rate of microfilaments, one end (termed the plus end) typically assembling and disassembling faster than the other (the minus end).

Unlike microtubules, which typically extend out from the centrosome of a cell, microfilaments are typically nucleated at the plasma membrane. Therefore, the periphery (edges) of a cell generally contains the highest concentration of microfilaments. A number of external factors and a group of special proteins influence microfilament characteristics, however, and enable them to make rapid changes if needed, even if the filaments must be completely disassembled in one region of the cell and reassembled somewhere else. When found directly beneath the plasma membrane, microfilaments are considered part of the cell cortex, which regulates the shape and movement of the cell's surface. Consequently, microfilaments play a key role in development of various cell surface projections (as illustrated in Figure 2), including filopodia, lamellipodia, and stereocilia.

Illustrated in Figure 2 is a fluorescence digital image of an Indian Muntjac deer skin fibroblast cell stained with fluorescent probes targeting the nucleus (blue) and the actin cytoskeletal network (green). Individually, microfilaments are relatively flexible. In the cells of living organisms, however, the actin filaments are usually organized into larger, much stronger structures by various accessory proteins. The exact structural form that a group of microfilaments assumes depends on their primary function and the particular proteins that bind them together. For instance, in the core of surface protrusions called microspikes, microfilaments are organized into tight parallel bundles by the bundling protein fimbrin. Bundles of the filaments are less tightly packed together, however, when they are bound by alpha-actinin or are associated with fibroblast stress fibers (the parallel green fibers in Figure 2). Notably, the microfilament connections created by some cross-linking proteins result in a web-like network or gel form rather than filament bundles.

Over the course of evolutionary history of the cell, actin has remained relatively unchanged. This, along with the fact that all eukaryotic cells heavily depend upon the integrity of their actin filaments in order to be able to survive the many stresses they are faced with in their environment, makes actin an excellent target for organisms seeking to injure cells. Accordingly, many plants, which are unable to physically avoid predators that might want to eat them or harm

them in some other way, produce toxins that affect cellular actin and microfilaments as a defensive mechanism. The death cap mushroom, for example, produces a substance called phalloidin that binds to and stabilizes actin filaments, which can be fatal to cells.

 

Curiously Satisfying...,

To return to Hebrews, the writer goes on to say: ' ... it is impossible to please God without faith' (xi.6). That is, it is impossible without the basis or foundation of faith, which makes it possible for a man to think beyond the evidence of his senses and realise the existence of invisible scale and understand psychological meaning. To realise scale means to realise that there are different levels of meaning. Literal meaning is one thing, psychological or spiritual meaning is another thing - although the words used are the same. For example, we saw that the word yeast used in the incident quoted indicated two levels of meaning. The disciples took it on the lower level and were told it was because their faith was little. Their thinking was sensual.

They had difficulty in thinking in a new way on another level. And their psychological thinking was so weak just because they were based on sense and not on faith. Thus sense and faith describe two ways of thinking, not opposites, not antagonistic, but on different levels. For without the perception of scale and levels, things are made to be opposite when they are not so, and Man's mind is split into 'either - or', which leads to endless confusions and mental wrangles and miseries. The writer goes on to say: 'Nobody reaches God's presence until he has learned to believe that God exists and that He rewards those that try to find Him' (xi.6). It is apparent that if scale is behind all things, if order is scale, and if to set in order is to set in scale then what is higher and what is lower must exist. To everything there must be an above and a below. A man who cannot perceive scale, visible and invisible, as did that centurion by means of his psychological understanding due to his great faith, will be shut to the intuitions that only faith opens out to every mind that hitherto has been asleep in the senses and the limited world revealed by them.

The chief preliminary voluntary act - and it needs to be lifelong in its voluntaryness - towards the inner spirit, the source and conveyor of meaning, is that of affirmation. Only by this act does all that is outward, external and dead become connected with what is internal and alive. This is the chief of all psychological acts. It is the preliminary and at the same time the continually renewable act whereby psychology, in the deepest sense - (that is, the science of personal evolution) begins. The final goal of it, far ahead, is the unity of oneself. Man becomes gradually united through himself with himself and not merely with what he accidentally has become and believes himself to be. Affirmation is not by argument but by understanding. Negation leads always to an inner deprivation and so to an increasing superficiality, impatience, loss of meaning, and violence. One can always deny. What is easier? One can always follow the path of negation, if one evades all acts of understand-
ing as sentimental or as scientifically and commercially valueless.

For St. Augustine and many more before and after him, the sick, the deaf, and the dead in the Gospels are the sick and deaf,  and the dead within. And in speaking of the two blind men who, sitting by the way side as Jesus was passing, cried out and asked that their eyes might be opened, he asks if we can really suppose that this is merely an account of a miraculous event concerning two physically blind men? Why does it say that the crowd try to restrain them, and that they fight against it and insist on attracting the attention of Jesus? 'They overcame the crowd, who kept them back, by the great perseverance of their cry, that their voice might reach the Lord's ears. . . . The Lord was passing by and they cried out. The Lord stood still and they were healed. For the Lord Jesus stood still and said, What will ye that I shall do unto you? They said unto him, That our eyes may be opened.' (Matthew xx.30-34) The blind here are those who cannot see but wish to see. Augustine says they are those who are blind in their hearts and realise it. Like the deaf, like the sick and the dead, the blind are a certain kind of people. They are, in this case, people in a certain inner state, knowing they are blind, and wishing to see clearly. 'Cry out among the very crowds', he says, 'and do not despair.' Who are these two blind men who know they cannot see but who recognise the spiritual meaning typified in the person of Jesus - what individual functions of the soul are shewn here that struggle with the crowd of commonplace meanings and thoughts and finally, by their own determination, receive their power of vision? 'If two or three are gathered together in my name . . . ' said Christ (Matthew xviii.20). What two sides of ourselves must first take part that our eyes may be opened - that is, our understanding? Why two, to make it effective?  Nicoll The Mark

DISC: Why Black Holes Instead Of Dark Energy Stars?

consciousnessanduniverse |  A recent study has suggested that dark energy stars may be an alternative to black holes. The term “dark energy star” was coined by George Chapline when he proposed that gravitational collapse of objects with masses greater than a few solar masses should lead to the formation of a compact object called dark energy star with a much larger vacuum energy. The study may be viewed in the context of another paper which states that the important question concerns whether dark energy is a completely new physical entity or one which we already know, namely a gravitational energy within the vacuum of a closed gravitating system that has long been known to be a negative energy. It remains to be seen whether scientists currently analyzing the data gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will provide evidence that dark energy stars exist. EHT is a virtual Earth-sized telescope aimed to measure the size of the emission regions of two supermassive black holes, Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way and M87 in the center of the Virgo A galaxy.

 We know that dark energy is embedded in space, counteracting gravity. The way gravity and antigravity are interacting in my mind is somehow related to time. With the understanding that time’s arrow is perspectival,   I  picture the negative-energy particles of the dark sector traveling backwards from the future somehow meeting at the intersection of past and future those positive-energy particles traveling forward in time as if they both were traveling the same distance in their determination to meet. That is how I see a cosmic coincidence unfolding, with matter and dark energy densities being of precisely the same order in the present times. Lastly, I imagine a phantom energy to be something that appears to have no physical reality and still is ultimately real. Raising the concept of a divide begs the question of what lies on the other side and what circumstances enable its crossing. The modified gravity approach as an alternative to dark energy is the focus of research and may be the 

key to unifying both components of the dark sector, a path to solving the coincidence problem.

Consciousness Does Not Compute

nautil |  This past March, when I called Penrose in Oxford, he explained that his interest in consciousness goes back to his discovery of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem while he was a graduate student at Cambridge. Gödel’s theorem, you may recall, shows that certain claims in mathematics are true but cannot be proven. “This, to me, was an absolutely stunning revelation,” he said. “It told me that whatever is going on in our understanding is not computational.”

He was also jolted by a series of lectures on quantum mechanics by the great physicist Paul Dirac. Like many others, Penrose struggled with the weirdness of quantum theory. “As Schrödinger clearly pointed out with his poor cat, which was dead and alive at the same time, he made this point deliberately to show why his own equation can’t be the whole truth. He was more or less saying, ‘That’s nonsense.’ ” To Penrose, the takeaway was that something didn’t add up in quantum theory: “Schrödinger was very upset by this, as were Dirac and Einstein. Some of the major figures in quantum mechanics were probably more upset than I was.”

But what, I asked, does any of this have to do with consciousness? “You see, my argument is very roundabout. I think this is why people don’t tend to follow me. They’ll pick up on it later, or they reject it later, but they don’t follow argument.” Penrose then launched into his critique of why computers, for all their brute calculating power, lack any understanding of what they’re doing. “What I’m saying—and this is my leap of imagination which people boggle at—I’m saying what’s going on in the brain must be taking advantage not just of quantum mechanics, but where it goes wrong,” he said. “It’s where quantum mechanics needs to be superseded.” So we need a new science that doesn’t yet exist? “That’s right. Exactly.”

After we’d talked for 20 minutes, I pointed out that he still hadn’t mentioned biology or the widely held belief that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. “I know, I know,” he chuckled, and then told me why he felt compelled to write his first book on consciousness, The Emperor’s New Mind, published in 1989. It was after he heard a BBC interview with Marvin Minsky, a founding father of artificial intelligence, who had famously pronounced that the human brain is “just a computer made of meat.” Minsky’s claims compelled Penrose to write The Emperor’s New Mind, arguing that human thinking will never be emulated by a machine. The book had the feel of an extended thought experiment on the non-algorithmic nature of consciousness and why it can only be understood in relation to Gödel’s theorem and quantum physics.

Minsky, who died last year, represents a striking contrast to Penrose’s quest to uncover the roots of consciousness. “I can understand exactly how a computer works, although I’m very fuzzy on how the transistors work,” Minsky told me during an interview years ago. Minsky called consciousness a “suitcase word” that lacks the rigor of a scientific concept. “We have to replace it by ‘reflection’ and ‘decisions’ and about a dozen other things,” he said. “So instead of talking about the mystery of consciousness, let’s talk about the 20 or 30 really important mental processes that are involved. And when you’re all done, somebody says, ‘Well, what about consciousness?’ and you say, ‘Oh, that’s what people wasted their time on in the 20th century.’ ”

Is Sir Roger Penrose's Science of Consciousness Spooky?

medium |  Thus could Roger Penrose’s position be entirely motivated by scientific anti-reductionism? Doctor Susan Blackmore certainly thinks that this is an important motivation. Or at least the programme maker in the following quote does. She writes:

“Finally they got to consciousness. With clever computer graphics and Horizonesque hype they explained that brave scientists, going against the reductionist grain, can now explain the power of the mind to transcend death. It all comes down to quantum coherence in the microtubules. And to make sure the viewer knows that this is ‘real science’ the ponderous voice-over declared ‘Their theory is based on a well established field of science; the laws of general relativity, as discovered by Einstein.’…”

Sure, Blackmore’s talking here about “near-death experiences” (NDEs). Yet those who believe in this — or at least some of them — have found succor in “quantum coherence in the microtubules”. Now don’t those things sound very scientific? Of course we’ll now need to know what quantum coherence is. (Or is it really a case of needing to know whether or not the believers in NDEs actually have any idea of what quantum coherence is?)

Of course Penrose and Stuart Hameroff can’t personally be blamed for spook-lovers quoting their work. However, a psychologist or philosopher may tell us that these two fellows — both scientists — are motivated by very similar things. After all, Hameroff himself has talked about NDEs.

Specifically, Hameroff has said that when the brain dies (or stops functioning), the information within that brain’s microtubules remains alive (as it were) or intact. Moreover, the information of the microtubules leaks out into the world (or, well, into the universe). Not only that: this microtubular information remains intact and bound together because of the power of quantum coherence.

Hameroff goes even further. He’s stated that this phenomenon explains why the subject can experience — see? — himself hovering over his own body. That is, Hameroff seems to endorse near-death experiences. Yet even if “information” (P.M.S. Hacker would have a field day with this word — see here) did leak out into the universe, how would that make it the case that the body which hovers above also has a body and sensory experiences? Microtubular information in the air doesn’t a physical person make. And without a physical body, there are no sensory experiences or anything else for that matter. Thus this is like claiming that if you turn the computer off and then smash it up so violently that its material structure shatters into dust, then the “information” inside would still be intact and would simply float in the air above it. In other words, the soul of the computer would still exist. Unless Hameroff is simply telling us about what he thinks people imagine (or hallucinate) when they’re having a NDE. Though if that’s the case, why all this stuff about microtubular information leaking into the air or even into the universe?

This spooky anti-reductionist motivation is further explained by the philosopher and materialist Patricia Churchland and also the philosopher Rick Grush. According to Blackmore,

“they suggest, it is because some people find the idea of explaining consciousness by neuronal activity somehow degrading or scary, whereas ‘explaining’ it by quantum effects retains some of the mystery”.

Churchland is even more dismissive when she says (as quoted by Blackmore):

“Quantum coherence in the microtubules is about as explanatorily powerful as pixie dust in the synapses.”

To put it more philosophically and simply, Penrose and Hameroff’s position appears to be a defence of traditional dualism. Or, at the very least, the belief in NDEs certainly backs up traditional dualism. And, as we’ve just seen, Hameroff has defended NDEs.

Dualism, Intuition and Free Will

Traditional philosophical dualism has just been mentioned. Here again we can tie Hameroff and Penrose to the concerns (or obsessions) of traditional philosophy. That is, Hameroff hints that his and Penrose’s positions may solve the traditional problems of free will, “the unitary sense of self” and the source and nature of intuition/insight. More specifically, all these philosophical conundrums can be explained by quantum coherence in the microtubules. In terms of simply-put examples, free will is down to quantum indeterminacy; non-locality is responsible for “the unity of consciousness”; and non-algorithmic processing is the baby of “quantum superposition”.

In the technical terms of mind-brain interaction, and as a result of accepting mind-body dualism, the brain and mind can be mutually involved in quantum “entanglement” which is “non-local”. Thus, put simply, we can have mind-to-brain causation. Though this would of course depend on seeing the mind as not being the brain or not even being physical (in a strict or even a non-strict sense). This would put both the mind and brain in the same holistic package and that would help all of us explain…. just about everything!

Quantum Consciousness: Orch-OR Is Better Supported Experimentally Than Any Other Theory Of Consciousness

oxford |  The Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orchestrated objective reduction’ (‘Orch OR’) theory suggests consciousness arises from ‘orchestrated’ quantum superpositioned oscillations in microtubules inside brain neurons. These evolve to reach threshold for Penrose ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) by E=h/t (E is the gravitational self-energy of the superposition/separation, h is the Planck-Dirac constant, and at the time at which Orch OR occurs) to give moments of conscious experience. Sequences, interference and resonance of entangled moments govern neurophysiology and provide our ‘stream’ of consciousness. Anesthetic gases selectively block consciousness, sparing non-conscious brain activities, binding by quantum coupling with aromatic amino acid rings inside brain proteins. Genomic, proteomic and optogenetic evidence indicate the microtubule protein tubulin as the site of anesthetic action. We (Craddock et al, Scientific Reports 7,9877, 2017) modelled couplings among all 86 aromatic amino acid rings in tubulin, and found a spectrum of terahertz (‘THz’) quantum oscillations including a common mode peak at 613 THz. Simulated presence of 8 different anesthetics each abolished the peak, and dampened the spectrum proportional to anesthetic potency. Non-anesthetic gases which bind in the same regions, but do not cause anesthesia, did not abolish or dampen the THz activity. Orch OR is better supported experimentally than any other theory of consciousness.

Herpes and Alzheimer's

genomeweb |  Based on network analyses spanning transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic features of brain viromes in aging individuals with or without late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD), a team led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine and Arizona State University has proposed potential ties between human herpesvirus (HHV) infection, amyloid precursor protein (APP) metabolism, and AD.

"This study represents a significant advancement in our understanding of the plausibility of the pathogen hypothesis of Alzheimer's," corresponding author Joel Dudley, a genetics, genomic sciences, and multi-scale biology researcher affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine and the ASU-Banner Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center, said in a statement.

As they reported online today in Neuron, Dudley and his colleagues sequenced RNA in hundreds of postmortem brain samples, representing unaffected controls and preclinical AD cases, meaning symptom-free individuals with AD neuropathology. Their data revealed a dramatic over-representation of HHV-7 and HHV-6A strains in the preclinical AD endophenotype.

The team shored up this apparent association using data for individuals from additional cohorts of clinical AD cases and controls without AD pathology or symptoms. Network analyses based on whole-exome sequencing, liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, and immunohistochemistry data, along with mouse model experiments, suggested that this association may stem from interactions between viral abundance, transcriptional regulators, and other modulators of APP metabolism.

Studies stretching back several decades have raised the possibility that microbial infections and the immune response mounted against them might contribute to the onset or progression of neurodegenerative conditions such as AD, the authors noted. Even so, they wrote, such research has been "suggestive of a viral contribution to AD, though findings offer little insight into potential mechanisms, and a consistent association with specific viral species has not emerged."

Viruses Modulate the Function and Evolution of All Living Things

NYTimes |  High in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, an international team of researchers set out four buckets to gather a shower of viruses falling from the sky.

Scientists have surmised there is a stream of viruses circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel. Very little is known about this realm, and that’s why the number of deposited viruses stunned the team in Spain. Each day, they calculated, some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet.

Most of the globe-trotting viruses are swept into the air by sea spray, and lesser numbers arrive in dust storms.

“Unimpeded by friction with the surface of the Earth, you can travel great distances, and so intercontinental travel is quite easy” for viruses, said Curtis Suttle, a marine virologist at the University of British Columbia. “It wouldn’t be unusual to find things swept up in Africa being deposited in North America.”

The study by Dr. Suttle and his colleagues, published earlier this year in the International Society of Microbial Ecology Journal, was the first to count the number of viruses falling onto the planet. The research, though, is not designed to study influenza or other illnesses, but to get a better sense of the “virosphere,” the world of viruses on the planet.

Generally it’s assumed these viruses originate on the planet and are swept upward, but some researchers theorize that viruses actually may originate in the atmosphere. (There is a small group of researchers who believe viruses may even have come here from outer space, an idea known as panspermia.)

Whatever the case, viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet by far. While Dr. Suttle’s team found hundreds of millions of viruses in a square meter, they counted tens of millions of bacteria in the same space.

Mostly thought of as infectious agents, viruses are much more than that. It’s hard to overstate the central role that viruses play in the world: They’re essential to everything from our immune system to our gut microbiome, to the ecosystems on land and sea, to climate regulation and the evolution of all species. Viruses contain a vast diverse array of unknown genes — and spread them to other species.

Last year, three experts called for a new initiative to better understand viral ecology, especially as the planet changes. “Viruses modulate the function and evolution of all living things,” wrote Matthew B. Sullivan of Ohio State, Joshua Weitz of Georgia Tech, and Steven W. Wilhelm of the University of Tennessee. “But to what extent remains a mystery.”

Concepts in Kron's Later Papers....,

stackexchange |  Gabriel Kron was an important research electrical engineer known for applying differential geometry and algebraic topology to the study of electrical system. Towards the end of his career he published a number of unusual, even by his standards, papers on concepts with names like polyhedral networks, self organizing automata, wave automata, multidimensional space filters and crystal computer, which I think are more or less synonymous. I have obtained a few of these papers and did not understand them at all. If they were not written be Kron, I would be suspicious of them.

I have not been able to find any significant secondary literature on these ideas. The few citations I have tracked down only mention them tangentially, but I have also found no refutations of these papers and no suggestions that Kron had gone off the rails. The papers were published in respectable journals.

I am looking for an understandable exposition or refutation of these ideas, or pointers to such. Also pointers to follow on research by others, possibly using different terminology.

I am not looking for explanations of Kron's other ideas like diakoptics and tensor analysis of networks.

Some of the relevant papers are:

• G. Kron, Multi-dimensional space filters. Matrix and Tensor Quarterly, 9, 40 - 43 (1958).
• G. Kron, Basic concepts of multi-dimensional space filters. AIEE Transactions, 78, 554 - 561 (1959).
• G. Kron, Self-organizing, dynamo-type automata. Matrix and Tensor Quarterly, 11, 42 - 52 (1960).
• G. Kron, Power-system type self-organizing automata. RAAG Memoirs, III, 392 - 417 (1962).
• G. Kron, Multi-dimensional curve-fitting with self-organizing automata. Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, 5, 46 - 49 (1962).

I have mainly looked at the last one and material at the end of

• Diakoptics; the piecewise solution of large-scale systems. MacDonald, London, 1963. 166 pp.

Gabriel Kron: Negative Resistance

cheniere |  At the time of his death, Gabriel Kron was arguably the greatest electrical scientist ever produced by the United States.

It appears that the availability of this Heaviside energy component surrounding any portion of the circuit may be the long sought secret to Gabriel Kron's “open path” that enabled him to produce a true negative resistor in the 1930s, as the chief scientist for General Electric on the U.S. Navy contract for the Network Analyzer at Stanford University.  Kron was never permitted to release how he made his negative resistor, but did state that, when placed in the Network Analyzer, the generator could be disconnected because the negative resistor would power the circuit.  Since a negative resistor converges surrounding energy and diverges it into the circuit, it appears that Kron's negative resistor gathered energy from the Heaviside component of energy flow as an “open path” flow of energy — connecting together the local vicinities of any two separated circuit components — that had been discarded by previous electrodynamicists following Lorentz.  Hence Kron referred to it as the “open path.”  Particularly see Gabriel Kron, “The frustrating search for a geometrical model of electrodynamic networks,” circa 1962.  We quote:

“...the missing concept of "open-paths" (the dual of "closed-paths") was discovered, in which currents could be made to flow in branches that lie between any set of two nodes.  (Previously — following Maxwell — engineers tied all of their open-paths to a single datum point, the 'ground').  That discovery of open-paths established a second rectangular transformation matrix... which created 'lamellar' currents...” 
“A network with the simultaneous presence of both closed and open paths was the answer to the author's years-long search.”

A true negative resistor appears to have been developed by the renowned Gabriel Kron, who was never permitted to reveal its construction or specifically reveal its development.  For an oblique statement of his negative resistor success, see Gabriel Kron, “Numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations by means of equivalent circuits,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 16, Mar. 1945a, p. 173.  Quoting:

“When only positive and negative real numbers exist, it is customary to replace a positive resistance by an inductance and a negative resistance by a capacitor (since none or only a few negative resistances exist on practical network analyzers).” 

Apparently Kron was required to insert the words “none or” in that statement.  See also Gabriel Kron, “Electric circuit models of the Schrödinger equation,” Phys. Rev. 67(1-2), Jan. 1 and 15, 1945, p. 39.  We quote:

“Although negative resistances are available for use with a network analyzer,…”. 

Here the introductory clause states in rather certain terms that negative resistors were available for use on the network analyzer, and Kron slipped this one through the censors.  It may be of interest that Kron was a mentor of Sweet, who was his protégé.  Sweet worked for the same company, but not on the Network Analyzer project.  However, he almost certainly  knew the secret of Kron's “open path” discovery and his negative resistor.

---

Pooh-poohing the Kron negative resistor is just sheer naïveté.  Kron was one of the greatest electrical scientists of all time, and applied full general relativity to rotating machines, electrical circuits and generators, etc. 

Simply go check his papers in the literature.  Even today, there are few electrodynamicists really able to fully comprehend his advanced work.  And his direct quotations from his own published technical papers in the literature leave no doubt he had made a negative resistor.  Further, other scientists have commented on Kron's discovery of the “open path” connecting any two points in a circuit, and usable to provide energy transfer at will.

The mechanism by which he did this is what Kron was never allowed to reveal.

Gabriel Kron: Tensor Analysis of Rotating Electrical Machinery

wikipedia |  Gabriel Kron (1901 – 1968) was a Hungarian American electrical engineer who promoted the use of methods of linear algebra, multilinear algebra, and differential geometry in the field. His method of system decomposition and solution called Diakoptics is still influential today. Though he published widely, his methods were slow to be assimilated. At Union College a symposium was organized by Schaffer Library on "Gabriel Kron, the Man and His Work", held October 14, 1969. H.H. Happ edited the contributed papers, which were published by Union College Press as Gabriel Kron and Systems Theory

quantumchemistryhistory  |  Gabriel Kron, a very fascinating man. What I could do with the history of Gabriel Kron. He was thrown out of the University of Michigan. I'll tell you a little bit about him that's not in my book; I did something else. He was thrown out of the University of Michigan because he was always fighting with the instructors, at something like sixteen. He decided to work his way around the world, and came to Hollywood. He was very brilliant. He had so many problems because his professors were a couple of light years behind him. He got back to Hollywood, signed a contract for $10,000 or so to work on his new experimental movie camera, and the company that gave him the contract paid him the money up front and went bankrupt. So he had a year or two with no work to do. He came to New York City. In the public library he started to read books on mathematics and became the inventor of something called tensor analysis. It became quite important but then he worked for GE. He was unusual and was not easy to work with because he was ahead of his time. You have to mention him in the history of electrical engineering because he was a character....

Book listing (no ad) taken from alibris.com 8/2003.

Yet another reference to G. Kron, 8/2003, - from here
.....
Andrei Petrov described Kuznetsov's work on the method of tensor analysis for the handling of physical systems of extreme complexity, based on earlier work by the American engineer Gabriel Kron, whom Kuznetsov held in high esteem. Petrov also recounted the origin of the discovery of the significance of what Kuznetsov called the "Principle of Conservation of Power," for the understanding of living systems as well as physical economies, whose evolution proceeds in the opposite direction as that implied by the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics. ...

Also: Gabriel Kron. Tensors for Circuits. Dover Publication, Inc., second Edition, 1959.

Some other links:
http://www-ec.njit.edu/civil/fabric/automated/CH9.pdf

A Genetic Locus Determining Altruism Identified in Microbial Eukaryotes

physorg |  Geneticists from the Universities of Manchester and Bath are celebrating the discovery of the elusive 'greenbeard gene' that helps explain why organisms are more likely to cooperate with some individuals than other.

The renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "greenbeard gene" in his 1976 best seller The Selfish Gene.

The greenbeard is a special type of gene that, said Dawkins, could solve the conundrum of how organisms identify and direct selfless behaviour to towards other selfless individuals.

The existence of greenbeard genes once seemed improbable, but work published in Nature Communications by the team of geneticists has identified a gene that causes a whole range of 'beard colours' in a social microbe.

The microbes - 'slime moulds' - live as single celled organisms, but clump together to form a slug like creature when they run out of food. The newly formed slug can move to help them find new sources of food, but this depends on successful cooperation.

With funding from the Wellcome Trust, NERC and the BBSRC the research team found that slime mould cells are able to decide who they collaborate with. By sequencing their genomes, they discovered that partnership choices are based on a greenbeard gene.

The gene encodes a molecule that sits on the surface of a slime mould cell, and is able to bind to the same molecule in another slime mould cell.

Greenbeard genes stand out because they harbour enormous diversity, with most slime mould strains having a unique version of the gene.

The team discovered that individuals prefer to partner with those that have similar versions of the gene, and the slugs formed with preferred partners do better than those with non-preferred partners.

This demonstrates, according to the team, that there is a whole range 'beard colours' that function to identify compatible partners for cooperation.

pseudoscience or a new kind of science?

theatlantic |   If his mushrooms could grow tailor-made weapons against any other types of fungi, would it be possible for them to do the same against any type of bacteria, too?

The rise of drug-resistant bacteria is sobering. Just last week, colistin-resistant E. coli––a “superbug” resistant to the antibiotic that’s considered the last resort for combatting particularly dangerous types of infections––landed in the U.S. Soon, public health officials anticipate, infections will be harder to stop; 10 million people could die of drug-resistant superbugs

It may be a long shot, but it’s conceivable that Cotter's process offers a new kind of hope. While scientists have been working on the problem of antibiotic resistance for many years—some are looking to harness the human immune system to better fight it; others are working on simply detecting the superbugs faster—his vision is to beat superbugs with medicine that actually adapts to destroy them. It’s not pharmaceuticals he has in mind; he's not planning to mass produce many different types of secondary metabolites. Rather, he believes it’s his unique style of co-culturing itself––the process of culturing two different microbes together to produce a defense entirely specific to the attacker––that may be able to create custom antibiotics that, at least in theory, could be inherently less susceptible to resistance.

His goal, in other words, is to grow mushrooms that are themselves medicine, because they could create whatever metabolites a sick person needs.

"The best situation I could describe is something everyone has gone through, like a strep throat culture,” Cotter says, imagining a scenario in which an infected patient walks into the doctor’s office, gets a throat swab, and then has the swab dropped into a specially designed module containing a fungus. That fungus would then sweat metabolites into a reservoir that would be naturally calibrated to combat the patient’s illness.

Cotter doesn’t know how the metabolites would be administered yet. A lollipop or throat spray for strep? Delivered topically for staph? His testing is still thoroughly ongoing. Should he receive the NIH grant he's applying for––a grant backed by a $1.2 billion White House Initiative to stop resistant diseases––answers could arrive rapidly. Analytical labs would go up, animal testing would begin, streptococcus lollipopus before we know it.

little things mean everything...,

thescientist |  Little things mean a lot. To any biologist, this time-worn maxim is old news. But it’s worth revisiting. As several articles in this issue of The Scientist illustrate, how researchers define and examine the “little things” does mean a lot.

Consider this month’s cover story, “Noncoding RNAs Not So Noncoding,” by TS correspondent Ruth Williams. Combing the human genome for open reading frames (ORFs), sequences bracketed by start and stop codons, yielded a protein-coding count somewhere in the neighborhood of 24,000. That left a lot of the genome relegated to the category of junk—or, later, to the tens of thousands of mostly mysterious long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). But because they had only been looking for ORFs that were 300 nucleotides or longer (i.e., coding for proteins at least 100 amino acids long), genome probers missed so-called short ORFs (sORFs), which encode small peptides. “Their diminutive size may have caused these peptides to be overlooked, their sORFs to be buried in statistical noise, and their RNAs to be miscategorized, but it does not prevent them from serving important, often essential functions, as the micropeptides characterized to date demonstrate,” writes Williams.

How little things work definitely informs another field of life science research: synthetic biology. As the functions of genes and gene networks are sussed out, bioengineers are using the information to design small, synthetic gene circuits that enable them to better understand natural networks. In “Synthetic Biology Comes into Its Own,” Richard Muscat summarizes the strides made by synthetic biologists over the last 15 years and offers an optimistic view of how such networks may be put to use in the future. And to prove him right, just as we go to press, a collaborative group led by one of syn bio’s founding fathers, MIT’s James Collins, has devised a paper-based test for Zika virus exposure that relies on a freeze-dried synthetic gene circuit that changes color upon detection of RNAs in the viral genome. The results are ready in a matter of hours, not the days or weeks current testing takes, and the test can distinguish Zika from dengue virus. “What’s really exciting here is you can leverage all this expertise that synthetic biologists are gaining in constructing genetic networks and use it in a real-world application that is important and can potentially transform how we do diagnostics,” commented one researcher about the test.

physics makes aging inevitable, not biology?

nautilus |  Four years ago, I published a book called Life’s Ratchet, which explains how molecular machines create order in our cells. My main concern was how life avoids a descent into chaos. To my great surprise, soon after the book was published, I was contacted by researchers who study biological aging. At first I couldn’t see the connection. I knew nothing about aging except for what I had learned from being forced to observe the process in my own body.

Then it dawned on me that by emphasizing the role of thermal chaos in animating molecular machines, I encouraged aging researchers to think more about it as a driver of aging. Thermal motion may seem beneficial in the short run, animating our molecular machines, but could it be detrimental in the long run? After all, in the absence of external energy input, random thermal motion tends to destroy order.

This tendency is codified in the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that everything ages and decays: Buildings and roads crumble; ships and rails rust; mountains wash into the sea. Lifeless structures are helpless against the ravages of thermal motion. But life is different: Protein machines constantly heal and renew their cells.

In this sense, life pits biology against physics in mortal combat. So why do living things die? Is aging the ultimate triumph of physics over biology? Or is aging part of biology itself?

do you ever wonder what your anthropocene antics look like from the bacterial apex?

pnas |  In most ecosystems, microbes are the dominant consumers, commandeering much of the heterotrophic biomass circulating through food webs. Characterizing functional diversity within the microbiome, therefore, is critical to understanding ecosystem functioning, particularly in an era of global biodiversity loss. Using isotopic fingerprinting, we investigated the trophic positions of a broad diversity of heterotrophic organisms. Specifically, we examined the naturally occurring stable isotopes of nitrogen (¹⁵N:¹⁴N) within amino acids extracted from proteobacteria, actinomycetes, ascomycetes, and basidiomycetes, as well as from vertebrate and invertebrate macrofauna (crustaceans, fish, insects, and mammals). Here, we report that patterns of intertrophic ¹⁵N-discrimination were remarkably similar among bacteria, fungi, and animals, which permitted unambiguous measurement of consumer trophic position, independent of phylogeny or ecosystem type. The observed similarities among bacterial, fungal, and animal consumers suggest that within a trophic hierarchy, microbiota are equivalent to, and can be interdigitated with, macrobiota. To further test the universality of this finding, we examined Neotropical fungus gardens, communities in which bacteria, fungi, and animals are entwined in an ancient, quadripartite symbiosis. We reveal that this symbiosis is a discrete four-level food chain, wherein bacteria function as the apex carnivores, animals and fungi are meso-consumers, and the sole herbivores are fungi. Together, our findings demonstrate that bacteria, fungi, and animals can be integrated within a food chain, effectively uniting the macro- and microbiome in food web ecology and facilitating greater inclusion of the microbiome in studies of functional diversity.

N-1 a literal diseased state?

biologydirect |  The variety of parasites that can affect host behavior suggests that the phenomena of parasitic host control might be more common in nature than currently established and could have been overlooked in humans. This warrants a detailed search for parasitic organisms that affect human behavior. One approach to search for “invisible” microbes that influence behavior is by comparing the microbiomes of control subjects and humans that consistently engage in irrational ritualistic behavioral activities, which contribute to the spreading of parasites and infections.

The modern anthropological view on religion is that it is a cultural meme that replicates through social communication [44]. While the meme itself may influence behavior, religious icons are known to be vectors of infectious diseases [45]. Most major religions have rituals that are likely to promote the transmission of infections. This includes circumcision [46], Christian common communion chalice [46], the Hindu ‘side-roll’[46] and Islamic ritual ablution [46] as well as the Hajj congregation in Mecca [47]. For example, the latter is specifically associated with outbreaks of meningococcal disease [48].

Also many religions are centered on sacred relics that are worshiped and frequently kissed by multiple people and thereby can act as vessels for microbial transmission. Crosses, icons, Bible covers are kissed in some denominations of the Christian tradition, the Black Stone (the eastern cornerstone of the Kaaba) is a relic that is kissed by millions of Muslims, kissing of the Wailing Wall is a religious tradition for the Jewish. It is unlikely, but possible that the rejection of condom use, vaccination and use of antibiotics present in some religious cultures, as well as the sacred status of specific domestic animals (possible definitive hosts to the parasites) may also be related to microbial host control. Finally, it has been noted that many parasites eliminate their hosts reproductive potential as they channel all available resources to maximize their own reproductive success [18]. Coincidentally celibacy is commonplace for holy individuals that are most devoted to their faith such as monks or nuns.

Thus it is possible that various religious practices could represent biomemes: manifestations of a symbiosis between informational memes [54] and biological organisms. This concept is somewhat similar to the fictional midichlorians of the Jedi Order from the popular series “Star Wars”[55].

Two particular parts of the human body seem to be most promising for the search of  behavior-altering parasites. First of all, the human gut microbiome may be of interest in light of the microbiome-gut-brain axis concept. Another promising area to search for behavioraltering parasites is the human brain. Several organisms that can bypass the mammalian blood–brain barrier and produce a latent infection without obvious symptoms are currently known. In mice with latent toxoplasmosis, Toxoplasma gondii cysts can be found in various regions of the brain, especially in the olfactory bulb, the entorhinal, somatosensory, motor and orbital, frontal association and visual cortices, the hippocampus and the amygdala [56]. In humans the brain also appears to be an important site for Toxoplasma gondii cyst formation and the parasite is capable of infecting a variety of brain cells, including astrocytes and neurons [57-59].

hyparchic folding and reality mechanics at the microcosmic scale

pbs |  Zeno’s paradox is solved, but the question of whether there is a smallest unit of length hasn’t gone away. Today, some physicists think that the existence of an absolute minimum length could help avoid another kind of logical nonsense; the infinities that arise when physicists make attempts at a quantum version of Einstein’s General Relativity, that is, a theory of “quantum gravity.” When physicists attempted to calculate probabilities in the new theory, the integrals just returned infinity, a result that couldn’t be more useless. In this case, the infinities were not mistakes but demonstrably a consequence of applying the rules of quantum theory to gravity. But by positing a smallest unit of length, just like Zeno did, theorists can reduce the infinities to manageable finite numbers. And one way to get a finite length is to chop up space and time into chunks, thereby making it discrete: Zeno would be pleased.

He would also be confused. While almost all approaches to quantum gravity bring in a minimal length one way or the other, not all approaches do so by means of “discretization”—that is, by “chunking” space and time. In some theories of quantum gravity, the minimal length emerges from a “resolution limit,” without the need of discreteness. Think of studying samples with a microscope, for example. Magnify too much, and you encounter a resolution-limit beyond which images remain blurry. And if you zoom into a digital photo, you eventually see single pixels: further zooming will not reveal any more detail. In both cases there is a limit to resolution, but only in the latter case is it due to discretization. 

In these examples the limits could be overcome with better imaging technology; they are not fundamental. But a resolution-limit due to quantum behavior of space-time would be fundamental. It could not be overcome with better technology. 

So, a resolution-limit seems necessary to avoid the problem with infinities in the development of quantum gravity. But does space-time remain smooth and continuous even on the shortest distance scales, or does it become coarse and grainy? Researchers cannot agree.

sheldrake's morphogenetic field theory reduced to rubble and rubbish...,

nature |  It was an otherwise normal day in November when Madeline Lancaster realized that she had accidentally grown a brain. For weeks, she had been trying to get human embryonic stem cells to form neural rosettes, clusters of cells that can become many different types of neuron. But for some reason her cells refused to stick to the bottom of the culture plate. Instead they floated, forming strange, milky-looking spheres.

“I didn't really know what they were,” says Lancaster, who was then a postdoc at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. That day in 2011, however, she spotted an odd dot of pigment in one of her spheres. Looking under the microscope, she realized that it was the dark cells of a developing retina, an outgrowth of the developing brain. And when she sliced one of the balls open, she could pick out a variety of neurons. Lancaster realized that the cells had assembled themselves into something unmistakably like an embryonic brain, and she went straight to her adviser, stem-cell biologist Jürgen Knoblich, with the news. “I've got something amazing,” she told him. “You've got to see it.”

Lancaster and her colleagues were not the first to grow a brain in a dish. In 2008, researchers in Japan reported¹ that they had prompted embryonic stem cells from mice and humans to form layered balls reminiscent of a cerebral cortex. Since then, efforts to grow stem cells into rudimentary organs have taken off. Using carefully timed chemical cues, researchers around the world have produced three-dimensional structures that resemble tissue from the eye, gut, liver, kidney, pancreas, prostate, lung, stomach and breast. These bits of tissue, called organoids because they mimic some of the structure and function of real organs, are furthering knowledge of human development, serving as disease models and drug-screening platforms, and might eventually be used to rescue damaged organs (see ‘The organoid bank’). “It's probably the most significant development in the stem-cell field in the last five or six years,” says Austin Smith, director of the Wellcome Trust/MRC Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The current crop of organoids isn't perfect. Some lack key cell types; others imitate only the earliest stages of organ development or vary from batch to batch. So researchers are toiling to refine their organoids — to make them more complex, more mature and more reproducible. Still, biologists have been amazed at how little encouragement cells need to self-assemble into elaborate structures. “It doesn't require any super-sophisticated bioengineering,” says Knoblich. “We just let the cells do what they want to do, and they make a brain.”

transhumans about the bidnis of enginnering biomes, as well...,

MIT |  No matter where you are, you are surrounded by your microbiome—the complex biological system of more than 100 trillion microorganisms on the human body, in airwaves, and in every environment.

“You may not know it, but you’re walking around with two pounds of microbes on you,” says Bernat Olle SM ’05, MBA ’07, PhD ’07. “But only recently have scientists discovered how important and how useful they can be.”

Research in the field of the microbiome is still in its early stages, but it has already shown that microbes play important roles in metabolism, digestion, and even mood. And Olle is one of a growing group of engineers focusing on this area.

“Modern habits have been to clean up and sterilize everything—make it clean as possible,” he says. “But we’re starting to find out this might not be a good idea—and we’re abusing anti-microbial chemicals. These microbial exposures can help develop key human functions.”

Olle is co-founder and COO of Vedanta Biosciences, a Boston-based startup that researches interactions between the human microbiome and the immune system. He spoke to Slice of MIT at the 2015 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, where he was part of a three-person panel that discussed the benefits of microbes and the impact they could have on medicine in the future.