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Posted by: C C - Yesterday 07:21 PM - Forum: Food & Recipes - No Replies

I wouldn't eat an insect that was raw or uncooked, like they occasionally do on survival shows. Since they can contain parasites (a few of which might even progressively debilitate, impair, or kill you over time).
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The many flavors of edible ants
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1037271

INTRO: Insects are typically unwelcome visitors to a picnic, but they could be a flavorful, nutritious and sustainable addition to the menu. Eating insects is common in some parts of the world, and some species are even considered delicacies. Ants are one example, sometimes roasted whole for a snack or ground and used to add flavor and texture to dishes. Researchers now report the unique aroma profiles of four species of edible ants, which taste markedly different from one another.

The researchers will present their results today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2024 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in person March 17-21; it features nearly 12,000 presentations on a range of science topics.

“I'm interested in ants because I once led a summer field study in Oaxaca, Mexico,” says Changqi Liu, an associate professor of food science. “You can easily find different edible insects in the market there, just like other food ingredients.”

There have been few prior studies on the flavors of edible insects. But understanding flavor profiles could help the food industry formulate products with these readily available species. “If there are desirable flavors, scientists can investigate ways to promote their formation, and if there are undesirable flavors, they can find ways to eliminate or mask these odors,” says Liu.

To better understand which compounds contribute to the flavors of edible ants, Liu and his team at San Diego State University analyzed the odor profiles of four species: the chicatana ant, common black ant, spiny ant and weaver ant... (MORE - details, no ads)

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Posted by: C C - Yesterday 07:14 PM - Forum: Gadgets & Technology - No Replies

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biolo...in-brazil/

INTRO: Scientists have created a cow which can produce human insulin in its milk. The animal is transgenic – meaning DNA from another species, in this case human, was introduced into it through genetic engineering.

The research was led by Matt Wheeler, professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois in the US, who says it takes advantage of the special factors of the mammary gland. “Mother Nature designed the mammary gland as a factory to make protein really, really efficiently. We can take advantage of that system to produce a protein that can help hundreds of millions of people worldwide.”

The research described in a new study in Biotechnology Journal... (MORE - details)

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Posted by: C C - Yesterday 07:12 PM - Forum: Meteorology & Climatology - No Replies

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024...ate-crisis

INTRO: Record temperatures in 2024 on land and at sea have prompted scientists to question whether these anomalies are in line with predicted global heating patterns or if they represent a concerning acceleration of climate breakdown.

Heat above the oceans remains persistently, freakishly high, despite a weakening of El Niño, which has been one of the major drivers of record global temperatures over the past year.

Scientists are divided about the extraordinary temperatures of marine air. Some stress that current trends are within climate model projections of how the world will warm as a result of human burning of fossil fuels and forests. Others are perplexed and worried by the speed of change because the seas are the Earth’s great heat moderator and absorb more than 90% of anthropogenic warming.
Graphic

Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization announced that El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern associated with the warming of the Pacific Ocean, had peaked and there was an 80% chance of it fading completely between April and June, although its knock-on effects would continue.

The WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo, said El Niño contributed to making 2023 easily the warmest year on record, although the main culprit was emissions from fossil fuels.

When it came to oceans, she said, the picture was murkier and more disturbing: “The January 2024 sea surface temperature was by far the highest on record for January. This is worrying and can not be explained by El Niño alone.” (MORE - details)

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Posted by: C C - Yesterday 07:11 PM - Forum: Anthropology & Psychology - No Replies

Sounds a bit like "publish or perish" and pre-existing motivation knowing it was going to be stuck with having to magnify (interpret) the faintest signs as an indication of _X_, and then proceeding to do just that.
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Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240...-isolation

EXCERPT: . . . Clark and his colleagues did not notice this at the time. All they knew was that they were taking part in an unusual experiment, which involved tracking their own voices over time. This was done by making 10-minute recordings every few weeks. They would sit in front of a microphone and repeat the same 29 words as they appeared on a computer screen. Food. Coffee. Hid. Airflow. Most were words they used regularly during their day and contained vowel sounds known to differ in English accents.

When the recordings finally got back to a team of phonetics researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in Germany for analysis, they discovered that the pronunciation of some of the words had changed ever so slightly. What they were seeing was the beginning of a new accent emerging.

The Antarctic experiment offered a snapshot of something that has happened innumerable times throughout human history, as groups of people have become cut off from others, leading their accents, dialects and even languages to diverge from each other. On a grand scale, the researchers say it can provide insights into why American and British English has diverged in the way it has.

"We wanted to replicate, as closely as we could, what happened when the Mayflower went to North America and the people on board were isolated for a length of time," says Jonathan Harrington, professor of phonetics and speech processing at Ludwig-Maximillians-University of Munich. "Six months isn't very long, so we saw very, very small changes. But we found some of the vowels had shifted."

One of those changes was the "ou" sound in words such as "flow" and "sew" that shifted towards the front of the vocal tract. They also saw some of the winterers beginning to converge in the way they pronounced three other vowels.

The reason for this shift reveals a possible basic mechanism for how we pick up accents throughout our lives.

"When we speak to each other, we memorise that speech and then that has an influence on our own speech production," says Harrington. In effect, we transmit and infect one another with pronunciations every time we interact with others. Over time, if we have regular and prolonged contact with someone, we can start to pick up their sounds.

For people living in an isolated community – perhaps a village in a remote valley, or a settlement on the other side of an ocean – this would lead to accent drift as quirks or misperceptions of speech become exaggerated. But this can take time as accents are produced by extremely fine control of the vocal organs in order to produce the shifts in sounds such as nasalised vowels that characterise certain accents like American English... (MORE - missing details)

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Posted by: C C - Yesterday 07:04 PM - Forum: Astrophysics, Cosmology & Astronomy - No Replies

How did matter come to exist in our Universe?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...ter-exist/

KEY POINTS: In all the particle physics reactions we've ever created, measured, or observed here on Earth, matter and antimatter can only ever be created or destroyed in equal amounts. But somehow, what emerged from the ashes of the hot Big Bang led to a matter-dominated Universe, with scarcely any antimatter around at all. This is one of the greatest mysteries in physics: the puzzle of why we live in a matter-dominated Universe, also known as the baryogenesis puzzle. Here's what science knows about it today... (MORE - details)



New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter
https://www.uottawa.ca/about-us/media/ne...ark-matter

PRESS RELEASE: A University of Ottawa study published today challenges the current model of the universe by showing that, in fact, it has no room for dark matter.

In cosmology, the term “dark matter” describes all that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field, or that can only be explained through gravitational force. We can’t see it, nor do we know what it’s made of, but it helps us understand how galaxies, planets and stars behave.

Rajendra Gupta, a physics professor at the Faculty of Science, used a combination of the covarying coupling constants (CCC) and “tired light” (TL) theories (the CCC+TL model) to reach this conclusion. This model combines two ideas — about how the forces of nature decrease over cosmic time and about light losing energy when it travels a long distance. It’s been tested and has been shown to match up with several observations, such as about how galaxies are spread out and how light from the early universe has evolved.

This discovery challenges the prevailing understanding of the universe, which suggests that roughly 27% of it is composed of dark matter and less than 5% of ordinary matter, remaining being the dark energy.

“The study's findings confirm that our previous work (“JWST early Universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology”) about the age of the universe being 26.7billion years has allowed us to discover that the universe does not require dark matter to exist,” explains Gupta. “In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy.”

“Redshifts” refer to when light is shifted toward the red part of the spectrum. The researcher analyzed data from recent papers on the distribution of galaxies at low redshifts and the angular size of the sound horizon in the literature at high redshift.

“There are several papers that question the existence of dark matter, but mine is the first one, to my knowledge, that eliminates its cosmological existence while being consistent with key cosmological observations that we have had time to confirm,” says Gupta.

By challenging the need for dark matter in the universe and providing evidence for a new cosmological model, this study opens up new avenues for exploring the fundamental properties of the universe.

The study, Testing CCC+TL Cosmology with Observed Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Features,was published in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal.

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Posted by: C C - Yesterday 07:00 PM - Forum: Junk Science - No Replies

Two seemingly contrasting opinions. One pleading for more involvement from the humanities in science. And the other bemoaning the influences that humanities descended ideologies already have on science standards.
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Lessons for scientists from the All of Us Research Program backlash
https://www.statnews.com/2024/03/15/all-...sociology/

EXCERPTS: There are no easy solutions for these thorny problems, but one place to start would be to bring more humanities experts into GWAS, particularly anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. [...] In a society still grappling with dangerous debates directly related to historically excluded populations, I see in scientists not only a moral duty to minimize harm, but also the opportunity to break from a tradition of isolating ourselves from society... (MORE - details)



The NIH sacrifices scientific rigor for DEI
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nih-sac..._permalink

EXCERPT: It might seem counterintuitive to prioritize “diversity statements” while hiring neurobiologists—but not at the NIH. The agency for several years has pushed this practice across the country through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program—FIRST for short—which funds diversity-focused faculty hiring in the biomedical sciences.

Through dozens of public-records requests, I have acquired thousands of pages of documents related to the program—grant proposals, emails, hiring rubrics and more. The information reveals how the NIH enforces an ideological agenda, prompting universities and medical schools to vet potential biomedical scientists for wrongthink regarding diversity... (MORE - details)

RELATED (wikipedia): DEI

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Posted by: Magical Realist - Mar 17, 2024 11:10 PM - Forum: Logic, Metaphysics & Philosophy - Replies (2)

https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/4/2/16#:~...r%20qualia.

Abstract

"Time is one of the greatest subjects of interest to the disciplines of both Science and Philosophy, being seen to have a greater importance in the workings of reality than other entities. In this paper, a phenomenological analysis of time based on the general workings of the emergent structure of consciousness will be done, and time will be shown to be no different than any other qualia. It will be shown that, like any other qualia, time is an emergent level of consciousness, manifesting all the properties of emergence: inheritance of qualities from the previous levels, top-down influence in levels received from the higher levels and top-down influence in levels impressed on the lower levels."

Keywords: time; qualia; emergence; inheritance; top-down; phenomenology

Introduction

Because of the importance given to time by the disciplines of both Science and Philosophy, a detailed phenomenological analysis of time is fitting. The analysis that will be done in this paper is based on the general ideas presented in my previous paper “The Emergent Structure of Consciousness” [1]. An analysis of time is already presented there, but because the purpose of that paper was to present the general workings of the emergent structure of consciousness, the analysis of time was incomplete. This paper will thus undertake the task of exposing all the details of time as they derive from direct phenomenological experience, and as they are then framed by the more general theoretical framework of the emergent structure. Thus, no new fundamental ideas will be presented in this paper. However, the details of time that will be presented will benefit both the understanding of time as such, and exemplify even better the workings of the emergent structure that has been exposed in the previous paper. A reading of the previous paper might help the reader grasp some general ideas. But in order to make the current exposition self-contained, all the required concepts will also be presented here.

The easiest element of the phenomenology of time, the one that has also been taken by physics, is the succession. Interestingly enough, this proved so successful that physics didn’t make the effort to investigate more into the nature of time. But there is more to time than succession. Actually, there is so much more that the succession part is only a minor aspect of what time is. A proper investigation of the phenomenology of time will even show that there cannot even be a physical time, the only time that exist being the time of consciousness. The investigation will also show how the time of consciousness is no different in its properties from any other qualia, displaying properties such as inheritance of qualities from the lower levels of the emergent structure of consciousness, receiving of top-down influence in levels from the higher levels and impressing its own top-down influence on the lower levels. In what follows, by “time” I will only refer to the time of consciousness. If the need for the physical time will appear, it would be called specifically the “physical time”.

Because the analysis that follows is based directly upon the experience of time as it appears in consciousness, the analysis is intended to be independent of any other phenomenological analyses of time that are present in literature. We will mention Husserl’s account of time in the next section, but this is only for convenience, in order to make a quick start. We could have equally started from zero, but the most important part of the current paper is to show how time is one of the emergent levels of consciousness, no different than any other qualia, so we can make a quick start from Husserl’s analysis of time, and then analyze the emergent aspects of time. This paper hopes to offer a unified coherent way of looking at consciousness. If time, which traditionally was given more consideration than other aspects of consciousness, is shown to be no different than any other qualia, then this will offer a perspective from which the entire consciousness can be studied in a unitary way and thus open the doors for a systematization of consciousness and ultimately for a science of consciousness. Historically, time was so differently perceived than other qualia that an entire science of physics was developed from this one single aspect of consciousness. If time is understood to be just one of the many qualia present in consciousness, then physics might benefit from a rethinking that will push it in new and unexpected directions. So, let’s start our detailed analysis of time..."

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Posted by: C C - Mar 17, 2024 07:53 PM - Forum: Games, Sports & Hobbies - Replies (1)

https://www.forces.net/politics/britain-...nscription

RELEASE: Britain should consider conscription and a "total defence" model to deter Russian aggression, according to the Latvian foreign minister. Latvia reintroduced the model last year, based on Finland’s conscription system, which means all able-bodied men are required to complete 11 months of military service.

Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Krisjanis Karins said Britain should consider following suit as a way of combating any threat from Russia. "We would strongly recommend this," he said.

"We are developing and fleshing out a system of what we call a total defence involving all parts of civil society. We need to plan and train and supply and plan and train and supply and make that visible to the Russians. We will not stop them from wanting to have imperialistic ambitions, but we can make sure they don’t consider coming our way."

Mr Karins added that it was "inevitable" for Britain to increase their defence spending to 3% of gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the size of the economy.

Defence Secretary Grant Shapps this week called for that increase, but Mr Sunak has said he wants to raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP when economic circumstances allow.

In January, Armed Forces Minister James Heappy said any talk of the UK introducing conscription to the Army if Nato goes to war with Russia was "nonsense". He said the UK "long had plans" readied for "mobilising volunteers" in the event Britain does enter a new conflict, but stressed that "nobody is thinking" about bringing back conscription.

The remarks came after comments made by General Sir Patrick Sanders, the outgoing Chief of the General Staff, were interpreted as suggesting that conscription could be required in any potential future battle with Russia due to the British Army being too small.

No 10 ruled out any suggestion that conscription was under consideration, saying there were "no plans" to change the British military’s "proud tradition of being a voluntary force".

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