Science! (5 Viewers)

Nearly every sea turtle born on the beaches of Florida in the past four years has been female, according to scientists.

The spike in female baby turtles comes as a result of intense heatwaves triggered by a growing climate crisis that is significantly warming up the sands on some beaches, as CNN reported this week.

According to the National Ocean Service, if a turtle’s eggs incubate below 27C (82F), the turtle hatchlings will be male. If the eggs incubate above 31C (89F), the hatchlings will be female. Temperatures that waver between the two extremes will result in a mix of male and female baby turtles……


In theory that could create a population boom (think one rooster, dozens of hens) though I'm sure there are lots of other factors at play. The effects won't be known for a really long time though, since from what I understand turtles don't start boning for a while
 
In theory that could create a population boom (think one rooster, dozens of hens) though I'm sure there are lots of other factors at play. The effects won't be known for a really long time though, since from what I understand turtles don't start boning for a while
Sounds like a great time to be a male turtle....even an ugly fat one.
 
Hours after pumping synthetic fluids through the bodies of dead pigs, a team of researchers from Yale University observed their hearts beginning to beat faintly. Blood circulation was restored, and some cellular functions were revived in vital organs such as the heart and liver.


The peer-reviewed findings, published Wednesday in Nature, have far-reaching consequences in medical fields such as organ transplantation.

But they also add to the thorny ethical issues surrounding the definition of death, as the distinction between the dead and the living becomes increasingly blurred.


According to the Nature article, the Yale research team used the OrganEx system — consisting of a device similar to the heart-lung machines used in surgery and the experimental mixture of fluids that promotes cellular health and reduces inflammation — on pigs one hour after they no longer had a pulse.

Another group of dead pigs was put on ECMO, a life-support measure that oxygenates the blood outside of the body. By the end of the six-hour trial, the scientists found that the OrganEx technology was capable of delivering “adequate levels of oxygen” to the pigs’ whole bodies, which restored certain key cellular functions in organs such as the heart, liver and kidneys.


“Under the microscope, it was difficult to tell the difference between a healthy organ and one which had been treated with OrganEx technology after death,” Zvonimir Vrselja, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine who took part in the study, said in a news release……..

 
Hours after pumping synthetic fluids through the bodies of dead pigs, a team of researchers from Yale University observed their hearts beginning to beat faintly. Blood circulation was restored, and some cellular functions were revived in vital organs such as the heart and liver.


The peer-reviewed findings, published Wednesday in Nature, have far-reaching consequences in medical fields such as organ transplantation.

But they also add to the thorny ethical issues surrounding the definition of death, as the distinction between the dead and the living becomes increasingly blurred.


According to the Nature article, the Yale research team used the OrganEx system — consisting of a device similar to the heart-lung machines used in surgery and the experimental mixture of fluids that promotes cellular health and reduces inflammation — on pigs one hour after they no longer had a pulse.

Another group of dead pigs was put on ECMO, a life-support measure that oxygenates the blood outside of the body. By the end of the six-hour trial, the scientists found that the OrganEx technology was capable of delivering “adequate levels of oxygen” to the pigs’ whole bodies, which restored certain key cellular functions in organs such as the heart, liver and kidneys.


“Under the microscope, it was difficult to tell the difference between a healthy organ and one which had been treated with OrganEx technology after death,” Zvonimir Vrselja, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine who took part in the study, said in a news release……..

But, without brain activity, death is death. You can keep a body alive mechanically, but not a brain. Once the brain is dead, it's all over.
 
But, without brain activity, death is death. You can keep a body alive mechanically, but not a brain. Once the brain is dead, it's all over.

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists restored some activity within the brains of pigs that had been slaughtered hours before, raising hopes for some medical advances and questions about the definition of death.

The brains could not think or sense anything, researchers stressed. By medical standards “this is not a living brain,”said Nenad Sestan of the Yale School of Medicine, one of the researchers reporting the results Wednesday in the journal Nature.

But the work revealed a surprising degree of resilience among cells within a brain that has lost its supply of blood and oxygen, he said.

“Cell death in the brain occurs across a longer time window than we previously thought,” Sestan said…..



The brain is fragile, and if deprived of oxygen — for example from a massive heart attack, or through drowning — it will quickly and catastrophically degrade, leading to irreversible brain death. And that’s it — the end.

But that medical orthodoxy now must contend with a major report published Wednesday in the journal Nature that is simultaneously fascinating and disturbing: Researchers at Yale School of Medicine say they have restored some cellular function in pig brains from animals decapitated four hours earlier at a local slaughterhouse.

Over the course of a six-hour treatment, the brains were infused with a cocktail of synthetic fluids designed to halt cellular degeneration and restore cellular functions, such as metabolic activity.

It worked: The brains continued to consume oxygen and glucose.

Many brain cells, including neurons, which send messages within the brain and to the rest of the body, ceased decaying and appear to have been revived in dramatic and detectable ways……

 
NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists restored some activity within the brains of pigs that had been slaughtered hours before, raising hopes for some medical advances and questions about the definition of death.

The brains could not think or sense anything, researchers stressed. By medical standards “this is not a living brain,”said Nenad Sestan of the Yale School of Medicine, one of the researchers reporting the results Wednesday in the journal Nature.

But the work revealed a surprising degree of resilience among cells within a brain that has lost its supply of blood and oxygen, he said.

“Cell death in the brain occurs across a longer time window than we previously thought,” Sestan said…..



The brain is fragile, and if deprived of oxygen — for example from a massive heart attack, or through drowning — it will quickly and catastrophically degrade, leading to irreversible brain death. And that’s it — the end.

But that medical orthodoxy now must contend with a major report published Wednesday in the journal Nature that is simultaneously fascinating and disturbing: Researchers at Yale School of Medicine say they have restored some cellular function in pig brains from animals decapitated four hours earlier at a local slaughterhouse.

Over the course of a six-hour treatment, the brains were infused with a cocktail of synthetic fluids designed to halt cellular degeneration and restore cellular functions, such as metabolic activity.

It worked: The brains continued to consume oxygen and glucose.

Many brain cells, including neurons, which send messages within the brain and to the rest of the body, ceased decaying and appear to have been revived in dramatic and detectable ways……

I guess we're getting closer. Maybe in about 100 years or so, we'll be able to cheat death. When that happens, I hope we are better people as a whole.
 
Interesting
=========
The French philosopher René Descartes, whose views on animals were highly influential, argued that these creatures acted purely by reflex — they had no intellectual capabilities.

But there has been a Copernican revolution since then: We now know that sophisticated minds are all around us in the animal queendom — not just in close relatives of humans such as chimps and apes, but also in “aliens from inner space” such as the octopus.


And now we are learning just how smart insects can be. As I show in my new book, “The Mind of a Bee,” the latest research indicates that even tiny-brained bees are profoundly intelligent creatures that can memorize not only flowers but also human faces, solve problems by thinking rather than by trial and error, and learn to use tools by observing skilled bees.

They even appear to experience basic emotions, or at least something like optimism and pessimism.

The possibility of sentience in these animals raises important ethical questions for their ecological conservation, as well as their treatment in the crop pollination industry and in research laboratories.

Social insects are traditionally thought to be wholly governed by instinct: They can build complex nests and efficiently divide up their labor through innate behaviors, but are considered stupid as individuals, with complexity emerging only at the group level.

But there is significant evidence that bees have an inner world of thought — that they are not responding to stimuli only with hard-wired responses…….

 
Six million years ago, a relative of today’s giant panda roamed ancient forests — but in Bulgaria, not China, scientists say.


Researchers used a set of fossilized teeth discovered in the 1970s to uncover a new species of panda. The teeth were first discovered by paleontologist Ivan Nikolov, and the species bears his name — Agriarctos nikolovi.


The find is described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The teeth are shiny and black because they fossilized in coal deposits in Bulgaria. Researchers believe they date from the Messinian age — 7.2 million to 5.3 million years ago — and that the animal lived in humid forests and swamps. It was probably comparable in size to modern pandas, which can weigh up to 250 pounds…..

 
Six million years ago, a relative of today’s giant panda roamed ancient forests — but in Bulgaria, not China, scientists say.


Researchers used a set of fossilized teeth discovered in the 1970s to uncover a new species of panda. The teeth were first discovered by paleontologist Ivan Nikolov, and the species bears his name — Agriarctos nikolovi.


The find is described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The teeth are shiny and black because they fossilized in coal deposits in Bulgaria. Researchers believe they date from the Messinian age — 7.2 million to 5.3 million years ago — and that the animal lived in humid forests and swamps. It was probably comparable in size to modern pandas, which can weigh up to 250 pounds…..

 

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