General Mills issues recall of flour after detection of salmonella

by NICK WEIG

April 30th 2023

General Mills has issued a nationwide recall of its bleached and unbleached flour after discovering salmonella during a sampling of a 5-pound (2.3-kilogram) bag.

The company is recalling 2-, 5- and 10-pound (0.9-, 2.3- and 4.5-kilogram) bags of its Gold Medal Unbleached and Bleached All Purpose Flour with a “better if used by” date of March 27, 2024, and March 28, 2024, according to a notice posted Friday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say people should not consume raw products made with flour. Salmonella is killed by heat through baking, frying or boiling products made with flour.

Sumber :

https://katu.com/news/nation-world/general-mills-issues-recall-of-flour-after-detection-of-salmonella-gold-medal-bleached-unbleached-baking-cooking-raw-boiling-food-and-drug-administration-public-health-safety-best-if-used-by

Green growth approach to climate change will do more harm than good

A Green New Deal requires large amounts of fossil fuels, significantly worsening ecological overshoot

MAY 1, 2023

Opinion: For many of those who understand the importance of dealing with climate change, the green energy transition is the popularly accepted pathway. Electrify everything and produce electricity with solar panels, wind turbines and geothermal installations. 

The green energy transition is part of a broader response generally labelled green growth, or a Green New Deal. It includes the circular economy notion, as well as the idea of decoupling energy and material use from economic activity and or environmental harm. Transitioning away from fossil fuels is part of this movement, at least in principle.

But is green growth really the answer to climate change and a future of continued economic growth with electricity? There is growing evidence that many of the basic elements of green growth will actually make both the climate crisis and the broader ecological crisis even worse.

There are several critiques of the green growth movement, drawing into question whether it will do more harm than good. Here are some of the main points.

The “renewability” of the green growth technologies of choice – solar panels and wind turbines – is more marketing than reality. Building these technologies requires a considerable amount of non-renewable raw materials, all of which have to be mined.

Calling these technologies renewable is yet another example of using words to obfuscate and make us feel as if things are in control. Another example is calling something sustainable when it is actually just less unsustainable (and often by an insignificant amount compared with the level of unsustainability we are dealing with).

A more accurate term for these green growth technologies would be replaceable. They could be replaced when they eventually wear out in a few decades.

Building them initially and replacing them will require enormous amounts of fossil fuels. Fossil energy is essential for the mining of raw materials, manufacturing, transporting, constructing on site, and maintaining these technologies. Oh, and don’t forget the fossil fuels needed to build new road access to get the wind turbines to their desired locations.

Mining requires fossil fuels. These technologies therefore require continued use of non-renewable carbon-intensive materials. Hence, these supposed green technologies are neither renewable nor sustainable.

Various independent research groups have looked at the greenhouse gas emissions that would be associated with this process of providing most of global energy with solar and wind. The results indicate the associated emissions would push global temperatures well beyond the 1.5C safe zone.

Ramping up this “renewable” energy transition quickly would increase greenhouse gas emissions when we are supposed to be struggling to reduce emissions dramatically.

Another major obstacle to electrifying everything as proposed by green growth advocates is the scarcity of many key raw materials, and not just the exotic ones. Enormous amounts of copper, for instance, are required for a single wind turbine, and even more copper would be needed to electrify everything. 

Mining has expanded significantly over the past few decades, and the quality of ore is declining. More and more earth has to be moved to provide the same quantity of desired minerals.

The raw materials required to build a global infrastructure to replace fossil fuels would require more key materials than are available in known reserves. Because many of these raw materials have been mined for decades, the easily accessed resources have already been tapped. 

For many materials, the yields have been declining. Decreasing amounts of the desired ore is captured from increasing amounts of earth. This raises the energy required for the mining at a time when fossil fuel use must decline. It also causes more environmental destruction for less benefit.

Limited availability of certain materials may not stop wealthy countries from grabbing what they can. But most of the world will not be able to obtain a fair share of what is available. This will increase international tensions and conflicts at a time when we urgently need ever more cooperation to face our shared existential challenges.  

The war against Ukraine, for example, is at least partly a resource war. Ukraine has one of the richest supplies of essential resources in all of Europe.

The social costs of mining in poor nations, or poor areas of rich nations, will also cause further alienation and social tensions. More mining will also expose wealthy nation hypocrisy regarding justice and social equity. Financial wealth has replaced racism and colonialism as a means of extracting valuable resources from the poor.

Yet another dynamic that draws the green growth approach into question is the phenomenon of energy cannibalism. The case is most dramatic with our most critical fossil fuel – petroleum. Most of the easy sources of petroleum in the ground have been used already. This was the easily extracted oil that required relatively small energy inputs to do the extracting.

Natural systems evolved over eons to create enormous biodiversity and abundance for all living creatures. Our ecological overshoot is destroying nature’s capacity to continue the evolutionary marvel of a self-regulating biosphere

Now more and more unconventional oil is being used, from much harder to extract sources. These include Arctic and deep sea oil, as well as tar sands and fracking. These sources require significantly more energy inputs to extract from the earth.

It is projected that by 2050 half the oil extracted will have to be used to extract more oil. This will dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions for less benefit. The same phenomenon exists for natural gas.

The emissions associated with “renewable” technologies over the coming decades will be increasing to ever more dangerous levels.

The evidence above speaks to the difficulties associated with the current concept of green growth. It points out that the notion of electrifying everything is not quite as green as suggested. The only genuine green growth is plant and animal biomass. 

In the not too distant past renewable natural resources fed and clothed us, provided most of our energy, and provided the raw materials to build structures to shelter us. This relationship with the natural world will become a growing part of our future.

Parts of the green growth approach is the circular economy and the notion of decoupling. The circular economy involves reducing waste by design, and recycling what cannot be composted. There are clearly benefits from such practices which imitate natural processes of recycling. An important difference is that nature recycles 100 percent of what is produced.

Recycling non-renewable resources is never 100 percent. In fact, we currently recycle little of what we produce, and the highest rates, in the over 90 percent range, occur for very few products. But even at 90 percent, only six iterations through the recycling process reduce the original materials to roughly half of what we started with. This is clearly not a sustainable process in the long run. Again, it is only natural processes that attain the gold standard. All our technical ingenuity cannot do as well as nature.

Various trends in the past century have created expectations that whatever we wish for we are entitled to. The magic of fossil fuels, along with a trillion dollar a year marketing and advertising industry, has made those manufactured wishes feel like needs 

The decoupling process is another mainstay of the green growth movement. It involves attempting to decouple energy and raw material use from economic activity or environmental impact. Attempts to do this have been explored for several decades – with no empirical evidence that it is possible.  

It is true some nations have recorded reduced energy or material throughput while maintaining economic growth. However, this is generally accomplished by outsourcing the dirty industries to poor nations – it’s an accounting trick rather than an actual decoupling on a global scale. Nature requires absolute decoupling in the real world, not accounting tricks.

Another major difficulty with the green growth approach is that it focuses largely on reducing carbon emissions to address climate change. Decarbonisation is clearly critical for a safe climate, but alone will not deal with all the existential treats we face. 

Climate change is only one symptom of a more fundamental existential threat – ecological overshoot. We have too many people consuming too much of nature. 

Natural systems evolved over eons to create enormous biodiversity and abundance for all living creatures. Our ecological overshoot is destroying nature’s capacity to continue the evolutionary marvel of a self-regulating biosphere.

In reality, green growth is an extractive process requiring large amounts of fossil fuels, the combination significantly worsening ecological overshoot.

This is one of the important but ignored consequences of our current green growth paradigm. It does not recognise the scope, scale and speed of biosphere destruction we have already done. It is bringing seemingly attractive but physically impossible “solutions” to the wrong problem. It is not climate change alone, but ecological overshoot that is a terminal condition. And our current concept of green growth will make ecological overshoot worse.

Along with its emphasis on decarbonisation, green growth assumes we can replace the energy from fossil fuels with “renewable” technologies. But these are two quite different issues. We could decarbonise without a huge build-up of alternative technologies by rethinking what we use energy for. We could prioritise essential services with the hydro and geothermal energy sources we already have. 

New Zealand is one of the highest per capita energy users on the planet. We waste a lot of energy to do things that are unnecessary for our fundamental wellbeing.

Various trends in the past century have created expectations that whatever we wish for we are entitled to. The magic of fossil fuels, along with a trillion dollar a year marketing and advertising industry, has made those manufactured wishes feel like needs. 

Part of learning to live sustainably, with genuine green growth based on biomass production, is understanding those expectations, and their implications. These expectations and sense of entitlement are not friends of living well sustainably. Changing our mindsets is as critical as changing our energy source.

Sumber :

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/green-growth-approach-to-climate-change-will-do-more-harm-than-good

Mathematics Behind Wiggly Worm Knots Could Inspire Shapeshifting Robotics

By GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY APRIL 29, 2023

Unraveling the Mathematics Behind Wiggly Worm Knots

California black worms tightly tangled together in a blob. Research into the unique tangling and untangling behaviors of California blackworms could influence the design of advanced, shapeshifting robotics, according to a collaborative study by Georgia Tech and MIT researchers. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

Georgia Tech and MIT researchers have used ultrasound imaging and meticulous data tracking to understand the rapid tangling and untangling behaviors of California blackworms. Their study, which provided the first mathematical model of these behaviors, could inspire the design of advanced, shapeshifting robotics and multifunctional materials.

For millennia, humans have used knots for all kinds of reasons — to tie rope, braid hair, or weave fabrics. But there are organisms that are better at tying knots and far superior — and faster — at untangling them.

Tiny California blackworms intricately tangle themselves by the thousands to form ball-shaped blobs that allow them to execute a wide range of biological functions. But, most striking of all, while the worms tangle over a period of several minutes, they can untangle in mere milliseconds, escaping at the first sign of a threat from a predator.

Saad Bhamla, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, wanted to understand precisely how the blackworms execute their tangling and untangling movements. To investigate, Bhamla and a team of researchers at Georgia Tech linked up with mathematicians at MIT. Their research, published on April 27 in the journal Science, could influence the design of fiber-like, shapeshifting robotics that self-assemble and move in ways that are fast and reversible. The study also highlights how cross-disciplinary collaboration can answer some of the most perplexing questions in disparate fields.

Capturing the Inside of a Worm Blob

Fascinated by the science of ultrafast movement and collective behavior, Bhamla and Harry Tuazon, a graduate student in Bhamla’s lab, have studied California blackworms for years, observing how they use collective movement to form blobs and then disperse.

“We wanted to understand the exact mechanics behind how the worms change their movement dynamics to achieve tangling and ultrafast untangling,” Bhamla said. “Also, these are not just typical filaments like string, ethernet cables, or spaghetti — these are living, active tangles that are out of equilibrium, which adds a fascinating layer to the question.”

Worm Ball Untangled

A blob of worms untangling at ultrafast speed. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

Tuazon, a co-first author of the study, collected videos of his experiments with the worms, including macro videos of the worms’ collective dispersal mechanism and microscopic videos of one, two, three, and several worms to capture their movements.

“I was shocked when I pointed a UV light toward the worm blobs and they dispersed so explosively,” Tuazon said. “But to understand this complex and mesmerizing maneuver, I started conducting experiments with only a few worms.”

“Knots and tangles are a fascinating area where physics and mechanics meet some very interesting math. These worms seemed like a good playground to investigate topological principles in systems made up of filaments.” — Vishal Patil

Bhamla and Tuazon approached MIT mathematicians Jörn Dunkel and Vishal Patil (a graduate student at the time and now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University) about a collaboration. After seeing Tuazon’s videos, the two theorists, who specialize in knots and topology, were eager to join.

“Knots and tangles are a fascinating area where physics and mechanics meet some very interesting math,” said Patil, co-first author on the paper. “These worms seemed like a good playground to investigate topological principles in systems made up of filaments.”

A key moment for Patil was when he viewed Tuazon’s video of a single worm that had been provoked into the escape response. Patil noticed the worm moved in a figure-eight pattern, turning its head in clockwise and counterclockwise spirals as its body followed.

Worm Swimming Figure 8

A single California black worm moves in a helical gait. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

The researchers thought this helical gait pattern might play a role in the worms’ ability to tangle and untangle. But to mathematically quantify the worm tangle structures and model how they braid around each other, Patil and Dunkel needed experimental data.

Bhamla and Tuazon set about to find an imaging technique that would allow them to peer inside the worm blob so they could gather more data. After much trial and error, they landed on an unexpected solution: ultrasound. By placing a live worm blob in nontoxic jelly and using a commercial ultrasound machine, they were finally able to observe the inside of the intricate worm tangles.

“Capturing the inside structure of a live worm blob was a real challenge,” Tuazon said. “We tried all sorts of imaging techniques for months, including X-rays, confocal microscopy, and tomography, but none of them gave us the real-time resolution we needed. Ultimately, ultrasound turned out to be the solution.”

After analyzing the ultrasound videos, Tuazon and other researchers in Bhamla’s lab painstakingly tracked the movement of the worms by hand, plotting more than 46,000 data points for Patil and Dunkel to use to understand the mathematics behind the movements.

Explaining Tangling and Untangling

Answering the questions of how the worms untangle quickly required a combination of mechanics and topology. Patil built a mathematical model to explain how helical gaits can lead to tangling and untangling. By testing the model using a simulation framework, Patil was able to create a visualization of worms tangling.

The model predicted that each worm formed a tangle with at least two other worms, revealing why the worm blobs were so cohesive. Patil then showed that the same class of helical gaits could explain how they untangle. The simulations were uncanny in their resemblance to real ultrasound images and showed that the worms’ alternating helical wave motions enabled the tangling and the ultrafast untangling escape mechanism.

“What’s striking is these tangled structures are extremely complicated. They are disordered and complex structures, but these living worm structures are able to manipulate these knots for crucial functions,” Patil said.

“Just as the worm blobs perform remarkable tangling and untangling feats, so may future bioinspired materials defy the limits of conventional structures by exploiting the interplay between mechanics, geometry, and activity.” — Eva Kanso

While it has been known for decades that the worms move in a helical gait, no one had ever made the connection between that movement and how they escape. The researchers’ work revealed how the mechanical movements of individual worms determine their emergent collective behavior and topological dynamics. It is also the first mathematical theory of active tangling and untangling.

“This observation may seem like a mere curiosity, but its implications are far-reaching. Active filaments are ubiquitous in biological structures, from DNA strands to entire organisms,” said Eva Kanso, program director at the National Science Foundation and professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California.

Mathematics Behind Wiggly Worm Knots

Simulation of worms untangling (left) and tangling (right). Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“These filaments serve myriads of functions and can provide a general motif for engineering multifunctional structures and materials that change properties on demand. Just as the worm blobs perform remarkable tangling and untangling feats, so may future bioinspired materials defy the limits of conventional structures by exploiting the interplay between mechanics, geometry, and activity.”

Looking Forward

The researchers’ model demonstrates the advantages of different types of tangles, which could allow for programming a wide range of behaviors into multifunctional, filament-like materials, from polymers to shapeshifting soft robotic systems. Many companies, such as 3M, already use nonwoven materials made of tangling fibers in products, including bandages and N95 masks. The worms could inspire new nonwoven materials and topological shifting matter.

“Actively shapeshifting topological matter is currently the stuff of science fiction,” said Bhamla. “Imagine a soft, nonwoven material made of millions of stringlike filaments that can tangle and untangle on command, forming a smart adhesive bandage that shape-morphs as a wound heals, or a smart filtration material that alters pore topology to trap particles of different sizes or chemical properties. The possibilities are endless.”

Sumber :

https://scitechdaily.com/mathematics-behind-wiggly-worm-knots-could-inspire-shapeshifting-robotics/

Worm Model Weeds Out New Insight Into Endocannabinoid System

April 23, 2023

Summary: A new study of worms brings new insight into the workings of the endocannabinoid system and helps answer the question of why cannabis consumption enhances mood and gives people “the munchies”. Researchers found cannabis consumption activates the endocannabinoid system and evokes cravings for higher-calorie foods.

If you give a worm some weed, he might just need a snack to go with it.

Worms exposed to a cannabinoid become even more interested in the kind of food that they’d already prefer, new UO research shows. The effect is similar to craving potato chips and ice cream after a few puffs of marijuana—a phenomenon known scientifically as “hedonic feeding,” but colloquially called “the munchies.”

The study, led by neuroscientist Shawn Lockery in the College of Arts and Sciences, points to worms as a useful tool for understanding more about the many roles that cannabinoids naturally play in the body. And it could help researchers develop better drugs that target this system.

He and his team published their findings April 20 in Current Biology.

The endocannabinoid system is a far-reaching signaling network that helps regulate key body systems like appetite, mood, and pain sensation. Molecules called endocannabinoids send chemical messages by interacting with cannabinoid receptors, special proteins that are sprinkled throughout the body and brain.

Normally, these messages help keep different body systems in balance. But molecules in marijuana—like THC—also interact with cannabinoid receptors, making you feel high after partaking and causing other effects, too.

When Lockery and his team started this research, marijuana had just been legalized recreationally in Oregon, “so we thought, well heck, let’s just try this!” said Lockery. “We thought it would be amusing if it worked.”

The idea wasn’t totally out of left field. Research in the Lockery lab focuses on the neurobiology of decision-making, using a species of tiny bacteria-eating worms called C. elegans that eats bacteria as a simple system to test hypotheses. He often uses food choice experiments, tempting the animals with bacterial blends to see which they prefer under different conditions.

To see how marijuana-like substances might affect the worms’ food preferences, Lockery’s team soaked them in anandamide. Anandamide is an endocannabinoid, a molecule made by the body that activates the body’s cannabinoid receptors.

Then, they put the worms into a T-shaped maze. On one side of the maze was high quality food; on the other side, lower quality food. Previous research has shown that on high quality food sources, the worms grow quickly; on lower-quality ones, they grow more slowly. Worms also find high quality food more desirable, and preferentially seek it out.

In the T-maze experiment, under normal conditions, the worms indeed prefered the higher-quality food. But when soaked in anandamide, that preference became even stronger—they flocked to the high quality food and stayed there longer than they usually did.

“We suggest that this increase in existing preference is analogous to eating more of the foods you would crave anyway,” Lockery said. “It’s like choosing pizza versus oatmeal.”

Higher quality food might call to mind a nutritious spread of fruits, veggies, and whole grains. But evolutionarily, “higher quality” food is the kind packed with calories to ensure survival. So in this case, “higher quality” worm food is more like human junk food—it packs in a lot of calories quickly.

This shows a genetically engineered worm

Image of worm that is genetically engineered so that certain neurons and muscles are fluorescent. Green dots are neurons that respond to cannabinoids. Credit: Stacy Levichev

“The endocannabinoid system helps make sure that an animal that’s starving goes for high fat and sugar content food,” Lockery said. It’s one reason why, after consuming cannabis, you’re more likely to reach for chocolate pudding, but not necessarily hungry for a salad.

In follow-up experiments, Lockery’s team was able to identify some of the neurons affected by anandamide. Under the influence, these neurons became more sensitive to the smell of higher quality food, and less sensitive to the smell of lower quality food.

The results drive home just how old the endocannabinoid system is, evolutionarily speaking. Worms and humans last shared a common ancestor more than 600 million years ago, yet cannabinoids affect our food preferences in a similar way. “It’s a really beautiful example of what the endocannabinoid system was probably for at the beginning,” Lockery said.

The similarity in response between worms and humans also suggests that worms can be a useful model for studying the endocannabinoid system.

In particular, one current limitation with tapping into the medicinal properties of cannabinoids is their broad-ranging effects. Cannabinoid receptors are found throughout the body, so a drug targeting these receptors could help the problem at hand, but might also have lots of undesired side effects. For instance, smoking weed might relieve your pain, but could also make it hard to focus on work.

But the other nearby proteins that are also involved in the cascade of chemical messages varies depending on the body system at play. So better drugs could aim at these other proteins, narrowing the effects of the drug.

Because scientists know so much about worm genetics, they’re are a good study system for picking apart these kinds of pathways, Lockery suggests. “The ability to rapidly find signaling pathways in the worm could help identify-better drug targets, with fewer side effects.”

Sumber :

https://neurosciencenews.com/endocannabinoid-worms-23086/

Newly Observed Effect Makes Atoms Transparent to Certain Frequencies of Light

April 26, 2023

A newly discovered phenomenon dubbed "collectively induced transparency" (CIT) causes groups of atoms to abruptly stop reflecting light at specific frequencies.

CIT was discovered by confining ytterbium atoms inside an optical cavity—essentially, a tiny box for light—and blasting them with a laser. Although the laser's light will bounce off the atoms up to a point, as the frequency of the light is adjusted, a transparency window appears in which the light simply passes through the cavity unimpeded.

"We never knew this transparency window existed," says Caltech's Andrei Faraon (BS '04), William L. Valentine Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, and co-corresponding author of a paper on the discovery that was published on April 26 in the journal Nature. "Our research has primarily become a journey to find out why."

An analysis of the transparency window points to it being the result of interactions in the cavity between groups of atoms and light. This phenomenon is akin to destructive interference, in which waves from two or more sources can cancel one another out. The groups of atoms continually absorb and re-emit light, which generally results in the reflection of the laser's light. However, at the CIT frequency, there is a balance created by the re-emitted light from each of the atoms in a group, resulting in a drop in reflection.

"An ensemble of atoms strongly coupled to the same optical field can lead to unexpected results," says co-lead author Mi Lei, a graduate student at Caltech.

The optical resonator, which measures just 20 microns in length and includes features smaller than 1 micron, was fabricated at the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech.

"Through conventional quantum optics measurement techniques, we found that our system had reached an unexplored regime, revealing new physics," says graduate student Rikuto Fukumori, co-lead author of the paper.

Besides the transparency phenomenon, the researchers also observed that the collection of atoms can absorb and emit light from the laser either much faster or much slower compared to a single atom depending on the intensity of the laser. These processes, called superradiance and subradiance, and their underlying physics are still poorly understood because of the large number of interacting quantum particles.

"We were able to monitor and control quantum mechanical light–matter interactions at nanoscale," says co-corresponding author Joonhee Choi, a former postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who is now an assistant professor at Stanford University.

Though the research is primarily fundamental and expands our understanding of the mysterious world of quantum effects, this discovery has the potential to one day help pave the way to more efficient quantum memories in which information is stored in an ensemble of strongly coupled atoms. Faraon has also worked on creating quantum storage by manipulating the interactions of multiple vanadium atoms.

"Besides memories, these experimental systems provide important insight about developing future connections between quantum computers," says Manuel Endres, professor of physics and Rosenberg Scholar, who is a co-author of the study.

The study is titled "Many-body cavity quantum electrodynamics with driven inhomogeneous emitters." Coauthors include Bihui Zhu of the University of Oklahoma and Jake Rochman (MS '19, PhD '22). This research was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.

Sumber :

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/newly-observed-effect-makes-atoms-transparent-to-certain-frequencies-of-light

Nagomi: The Japanese philosophy of finding balance in a turbulent life

APRIL 27, 2023

Nagomi helps us find balance in discord by unifying the elements of life while staying true to ourselves.

It can be difficult to find a sense of balance in the turbulence of modern life. Kenichiro “Ken” Mogi believes the Japanese philosophy of nagomi can help people cultivate a greater sense of harmony. Nagomi is about blending seemingly disparate elements until they form a unified, harmonious whole.

Finding balance in life can be difficult. Sometimes, it feels like we are fighting invisible forces pulling us in different directions. We work to make a living, but then find we don’t have the time to enjoy life. There are novel diets to try, better habits to form, and social ills to solve. Then there is the ever-present question of how much we can change something — about ourselves, our relationships, and even our society — while still being true to what we valued about it in the first place. 

And as soon as we seem to have it figured out, our lives are upended, the world changes, and we have to restart the whole process. How can we not only discover but also preserve that sense of harmony we so desperately seek?

Kenichiro “Ken” Mogi, a senior researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, believes that Japanese culture has incubated a philosophy of life to help us answer that question. It’s called nagomi, and through it, we can better realize that balance isn’t about finding the one correct direction. It’s about discovering how we can blend life’s disparate elements in ways that work for us — a unifying act that, depending on the context, can take on subtle nuances.

I recently spoke* with him about what that means and how we can cultivate nagomi into our lives.

Kevin: You’ve published many books in Japan, and you’ve recently been writing about Japanese philosophy for other markets. Your first book was on ikigai — that is, how one can find purpose and joy in life. Your most recent is about nagomi.

To lay the foundation for our readers, what led you to explore the Japanese philosophy of life and bring those ideas to other cultures?

Mogi: In Japan, I have been publishing books mainly on neuroscience, consciousness, and self-help in addition to a few fiction novels. When it comes to publishing in English, some books from Japan, like The Book of Tea and Bushido, did really well in the West and elsewhere. Since then, I think there has been a vacancy of books on the Japanese philosophy of life. Of course, Marie Kondo’s books are wonderful, but from the Japanese perspective, they represent a wonderful but partial part of that philosophy. I wanted to do a more comprehensive coverage.

Kevin: For my own curiosity, why start with ikigai before nagomi?

Mogi: The ikigai book was commissioned by the UK publisher. They were looking for somebody who could write about ikigai in English, which is probably a short list in Tokyo. [Laughs.] Japanese people are not known to express themselves freely in English. That’s why I wrote about it. It’s quite nice that it has been well-received all over the world. 

As you know, Japan has been sluggish for the last three decades. So, the Japanese people are kind of losing confidence in their country, so the fact that ikigai is being noticed by people around the world is giving some Japanese people more self-confidence and self-assertion. I think that’s a really nice thing — without overconfidence, of course.

Kevin: Not just ikigai either. Japanese art and culture have really taken off in America. I personally love the movies of [Yasujirō] Ozu and [Akira] Kurosawa.

Mogi: You know, the remake of Ikiru by Kurosawa — the U.K. film Living — was written by Kazuo [Ishiguro] and was nominated for the best script at the Oscars. It didn’t win, but the film is all about ikigai. That film could have been titled Ikigai. [Laughs.]

Kevin: Ikiru is one of my favorites. I adore it.

Mogi: I didn’t write about it in my book because it would have been too presumptuous, but I think that Kurosawa’s film is about ikigai. Definitely.

Nagomi: Finding harmony in diversity

Kevin: Your new book is The Way of Nagomi. It’s a deep concept, but what’s a succinct definition our readers can take away with them?

Mogi: Nagomi is balance. It’s about harmony, sustainability, and agreeableness. It’s a very ancient Japanese word and heavily embedded in Japanese history. That concept of harmony, of things being in balance, is found elsewhere in the world, but in Japan, I think it has reached a level of sophistication that might be an inspiration for others. It’s something unique.

For example, the Japanese imperial household is the longest-running hereditary monarchy in the world. Unlike many other nations, we didn’t have a change of the royal household, and that’s probably due to nagomi. Another aspect is that the Japanese people are very good at being successful but at the same time keeping a low profile. I think that’s also due to nagomi.

Another interesting example: [Japan has] different political parties, but we have seen fewer changes of government in the post-World War II era. The LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) has been ruling Japan, more or less. Some people may say that is because Japan is an immature democracy. We don’t have changes of ruling parties as often, like in the States or the UK. 

On the other hand, that is probably because the opposition parties really aren’t the opposition. The proposals of the opposition parties are often taken up by the LDP. Policies go through. There’s a sense of nagomi there.

Kevin: Can you give me an example of nagomi as expressed in everyday life?

Mogi: We have this concept of wayochu. It represents the three main culinary influences in modern Japan. Wa means Japanese, yo means Western, and chu means Chinese. In terms of food diversity, I think Japan is arguably one of the most diverse countries in the world. Even a typical person would think about making a balance of wayochu cooking — nowadays probably Indian, too. It’s how we find a balance between different dietary needs. As you know, Japan is one of the countries where longevity and good health are maintained.

Kevin: It’s one of the blue zones, right?

Mogi: That’s right, and a typical example of nagomi at play is mixing elements of different origins. One wonderful apotheosis of this principle is katsu curry. The cutlet is originally a French meat dish, and curry, of course, is originally from India. Katsu curry is a Japanese dish [that combines those with rice], and it is available everywhere, all over Japan. It is also popular in countries like the UK. I don’t know about the States.

[Author’s note: The katsu in “katsu curry” comes from the Japanese word tonkatsu, which translates as “pork cutlet.”]

Kevin: I don’t know how widespread it is, but there are a few restaurants that serve it in my area.

Mogi: Another example is matcha ice cream. Matcha is very Japanese, and ice cream is very Western. So in the process of modernization, I think the Japanese people mixed them in a nagomi principle, and now we have matcha ice cream, which is really wonderful.

Kevin: It is. I indulge every time I get the chance.

Mogi: The Japanese people have very few taboos [about food]. We feel free to mix things up.

Manga, too. Many people may not realize it, but manga and anime were influenced by American culture, especially anime. Many anime makers were influenced by Disney, but the way Japanese anime was made was on a very low budget, so they had to come up with ways of moving characters with fewer frames per second. That led anime to become an independent genre of animated film. That is very nagomi, too.

So, I think the Japanese people are curious, and they have incorporated many external influences, and through that, they have created a well-balanced and sustainable mix of culture. One of the reasons I think nagomi is so important is that many countries are becoming like Japan. Japan has always imported external influences: Chinese influences, European influences, American influences, and so on. I think the same thing is happening for every nation because we are living in a more globalized world.

Barak Obama eats green tea ice cream during a visit to Japan.

Barak Obama eats matcha ice cream during a visit to Japan. Matcha ice cream combines both Japanese and Western foods to create something new – a tasty example a nagomi at play. (Credit: The White House/Wikimedia Commons)

The way of nagomi in relationships

Kevin: In the book, you discuss nine areas of life where readers should consider cultivating nagomi. We don’t have time to talk about them all, and I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, so let’s focus on one in particular: relationships. How can we bring a sense of harmony and balance — that is, nagomi — into our relationships?

[Authors note: The other eight areas are life, food, health, the self, society, nature, creativity, and lifelong learning.]

Mogi: That’s a great question. In Japan, I think the ideal person would be selfless and full of altruism. Of course, everyone is kind of self-centered and wants happiness. But in Japan, self-serving, selfish people have always been disdained. The idea is to serve the community, to play for the team.

The concept of nagomi tells you that altruism is not necessarily self-negation. It’s self-serving. If you do something for others, in the long run, it is good for you, too. This has been supported by evidence from neuroscience in recent years. For example, in the brain, there are reward-related circuits like the dopamine circuit, so altruism is very much embedded in our brain circuits, independent of culture.

If you do something for others, and it can also be satisfying for you, that would be the ultimate lifestyle and one that’s very nagomi. I think it’s the same in the States and elsewhere. People just don’t say it in so many words. I think that’s the difference.

But when I watch American TV — especially Fox News [Laughs.] — people tend to be so self-concerned and so aggressive. You know what I mean?

Kevin: I know what you mean.

Mogi: When I see that, I think there might be other ways to do something that would be more beneficial to you, in the long run, by appearing more reserved and altruistic and community-spirited. I feel that sometimes there’s a huge missed opportunity there. There could be a more nagomi way of doing something for you, your family, your company, and so on. What’s your take?

Japan has always imported external influences: Chinese influences, European influences, American influences, and so on. I  think the same thing is happening for every nation because we are living in a more globalized world.

– Ken Mogi

Kevin: I think it goes to the promotional aspect of American culture. You’ve got to be the one people listen to. All eyes have to be on you. That’s how you get ahead.

On the other hand, I recently interviewed Dacher Keltner, and his research shows that when we witness kind acts, we not only feel more connected but enjoy a greater sense of awe in life. So, I think our perception is changing in certain corners. It’s just not diffused throughout the culture as I would like yet.

Mogi: That’s good to know. One interesting twist is that we do not have a celebrity culture like in the U.S. I mean, we have rich and famous people, but they do not show off (typically, I mean). They keep a low profile. Again, if you look at the Imperial Family — the Emperor, Empress, and Crown Prince — they keep a low profile. It’s not like Prince William and Prince Harry. And that’s probably due to this concept of nagomi.

In fact, the earliest mention of nagomi comes from the first Japanese constitution. It’s called the Seventeen Article Constitution by Prince Shōtoku. Actually, Prince Shōtoku is the guy who came up with the branding of “the land of the rising sun.” At the time China was powerful, and Prince Shōtoku wrote a letter to China where he described Japan as the land of the rising sun, which is true for China with Japan in the east. But of course, it angered the Chinese emperor at the time.

Kevin: [Laughs.]

Mogi: He was clever. But the first article of his constitution said nagomi is the most important principle in this land.

Kevin: That’s fascinating. Expanding on relationships a bit, how can we bring nagomi into our personal relationships? Our families, our coworkers, and so on?

Mogi: In Japan, the wisdom is to be friends with your enemy. We don’t have a culture of confrontation. Even if we don’t agree with somebody or we don’t like them, the way for nagomi is to keep friendly with them.

If you look at your network structure, it’s a small world, right? Your friend’s-friend’s-friend’s-friend’s-friend’s friend is Barack Obama. You know, the “six degrees of separation.” So if you do business dealings or social activities, eventually you are going to interact with the guy you don’t like or agree with. 

The Japanese way of nagomi is to keep a certain degree of friendship. I think that’s one of the key insights into Japanese society. Of course, Japanese people have their own opinions, but the way of nagomi is to not make it into a catastrophic confrontation.

Now, a culture of confrontation could be great in some cases. Occupy Wall Street: I think that was great. But if you look at France, they have street demonstrations at the moment. Israel, too. But in Tokyo, we don’t see that quite as often, especially in recent years. I think that’s probably because the Japanese people try to seek other ways to change society, in an affirmative but more gradual and sustainable manner. It’s a different approach to social reform.

A pile of colorful paper clips.

In a thought experiment proposed by Nick Bostrum, an AI is tasked with optimizing paper clip output. To meet that goal, the AI turns everything in the world into paper clips – though not necessarily this colorful. Ken Mogi thinks this thought experiment also shows the dangers of uncritical optimization. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The dangers of a life overly optimized

Kevin: That reminds me of someone you mentioned in your book: [Eiichi] Shibusawa, the father of Japanese capitalism. He had that kind of reform mentality.

Mogi: Yes!

Kevin: Could we discuss him for a bit? I found his ethical and philosophical approach to business interesting.

Mogi: He founded many important companies, but unlike American companies, his concern was not to maximize profit. He was always thinking about society. By the way, rumor has it that he had 130-something children.

Kevin: [Laughs.]

Mogi: That may be why his empire didn’t continue to exist, because all his riches were divided by his children. That’s one rumor anyway. [Laughs.]

In a way, Shibusawa’s approach was quite similar to the open-source movement, in the sense of sharing profit among all participants. People don’t talk much about DAOs and Web 3.0 anymore, but I think these things are nagomi and in line with what Shibusawa mentioned. Even today, if you look at Japanese companies, the pay CEOs receive is much less than their American counterparts. The difference between the CEOs and company employees is not so great. That’s the legacy of Shibusawa: to share profit among people. 

A group of men standing next to each other in front of a door.

Eiichi Shibusawa (left) meets with members of the Capital Restoration Board – Itō Miyoji (center) and Katō Takaaki (right) – after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. Shibusawa’s philosophy influences Japanese businesses today. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Kevin: As I read your book, I kept thinking about optimization. We revere making things optimal. Corporations, as you mentioned, are all about optimizing profits. People try to optimize their day. But you seem to suggest that when we optimize one thing, we lose focus of something else, and that other thing could be crucially important, too. What do you think?

Mogi: Spot on. You know, I’m interested in artificial intelligence, too. Maybe you’ve come across this concept of the paper clip maximizer?

Kevin: Can you give me a refresher? 

Mogi: It’s a thought experiment by Nick Bostrom, and it’s wonderful. The idea is that there’s an AI designed to maximize the production of paper clips, and the world becomes a place where there are only paper clips. It shows the ridiculous nature of optimization. As you mentioned, if you optimize the system in one respect, that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole thing will get better.

Sometimes, inefficiency can be the result of nagomi. The sub-optimal might be the result of nagomi. That’s something we should keep in mind when looking at many things.

– Ken Mogi

From the perspective of Japan, I think one of the fascinating aspects of the United States is that it’s always concerned with progress, and that’s wonderful. I’m a part of that. But at the same time, that could mean that optimizing in one dimension might not be so beneficial for other aspects of life. Sometimes, inefficiency can be the result of nagomi. The sub-optimal might be the result of nagomi. That’s something we should keep in mind when looking at many things. 

Do you have friends who are not focused on success so much as enjoying themselves? I mean, people may look at them and say, “They’re not doing their best; they’re a failure.” But they might actually have established nagomi between work and life. 

I have a great friend who has been studying the philosophy of time for many years, but he doesn’t have any university positions, and he’s not very successful. But he’s really fond of eating a good meal. He’s happily married to his wife. He’s not a failure. He’s great. His way of life is just nagomi.

Kevin: I have a friend like that, and I think of him when I’m struggling to find balance. I find I’m at my most stressed and least fulfilled when one area of my life takes control. Meanwhile, he’s walking through life with a permanent smile on his face. [Laughs.]

Mogi: Exactly. I know some people in Japan who are musicians. They haven’t won any Grammys, but they’re enjoying their musical lives very much. Nobody can say that their life is a failure. If you establish your nagomi, I think you can be really happy.

People running in the rain during a marathon

To cultivate nagomi in your life, Ken Mogi recommends trying something different. Because he spends all day working on a computer, Mogi likes to run and recently completed the Tokyo Marathon. (Credit: Alextype/Adobe Stock)

Cultivate nagomi in your life

Kevin: I like that insight into happiness. I’m going to have to ponder that one more. 

Final question: What is one thing our readers could do over the weekend to bring a sense of nagomi into their lives? 

Mogi: I think whatever you’re doing, do the opposite. [Laughs.] In my case, I work from morning to night, but I go for a run every day. I actually just finished the Tokyo Marathon this March. That’s what I do to establish nagomi; otherwise, I’m glued to the computer.

So, if you’re an indoor person, go outdoors. If you are always driving, go for a walk. If your comfort zone is with your friends and family, find a situation where you have to meet new people. Alternatively, if you are always uneasy and surrounded by strangers, go back to your friends and enjoy some time with them. Going in a diagonal direction from your usual routines would be a dynamic way to establish nagomi. I recommend that.

Kevin: It was great talking with you. Thank you for your time. Where can people find you online if they want to learn more about nagomi, neuroscience, or consciousness? 

Mogi: I have my Twitter account (@kenmogi) and also my YouTube channel. Check them out, please.

Sumber :

https://bigthink.com/the-learning-curve/nagomi/

Newly discovered electrical activity within cells could change the way researchers think about biological chemistry

by Ken Kingery, Duke University

The human body relies heavily on electrical charges. Lightning-like pulses of energy fly through the brain and nerves and most biological processes depend on electrical ions traveling across the membranes of each cell in our body.

These electrical signals are possible, in part, because of an imbalance in electrical charges that exists on either side of a cellular membrane. Until recently, researchers believed the membrane was an essential component to creating this imbalance. But that thought was turned on its head when researchers at Stanford University discovered that similar imbalanced electrical charges can exist between microdroplets of water and air.

Now, researchers at Duke University have discovered that these types of electric fields also exist within and around another type of cellular structure called biological condensates. Like oil droplets floating in water, these structures exist because of differences in density. They form compartments inside the cell without needing the physical boundary of a membrane.

Inspired by previous research demonstrating that microdroplets of water interacting with air or solid surfaces create tiny electrical imbalances, the researchers decided to see if the same was true for small biological condensates. They also wanted to see if these imbalances sparked reactive oxygen, "redox," reactions like these other systems.

Appearing on April 28 in the journal Chem, their foundational discovery could change the way researchers think about biological chemistry. It could also provide a clue as to how the first life on Earth harnessed the energy needed to arise.

"In a prebiotic environment without enzymes to catalyze reactions, where would the energy come from?" asked Yifan Dai, a Duke postdoctoral researcher working in the laboratory of Ashutosh Chilkoti, the Alan L. Kaganov Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Lingchong You, the James L. Meriam Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

"This discovery provides a plausible explanation of where the reaction energy could have come from, just as the potential energy that is imparted on a point charge placed in an electric field," Dai said.

When electric charges jump between one material and another, they can produce molecular fragments that can pair up and form hydroxyl radicals, which have the chemical formula OH. These can then pair again to form hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in tiny but detectable amounts.

"But interfaces have seldom been studied in biological regimes other than the cellular membrane, which is one of the most essential part of biology," said Dai. "So we were wondering what might be happening at the interface of biological condensates, that is, if it is an asymmetric system too."

Cells can build biological condensates to either separate or trap together certain proteins and molecules, either hindering or promoting their activity. Researchers are just beginning to understand how condensates work and what they could be used for.

Because the Chilkoti laboratory specializes in creating synthetic versions of naturally occurring biological condensates, the researchers were easily able to create a test bed for their theory. After combining the right formula of building blocks to create minuscule condensates, with help from postdoctoral scholar Marco Messina in? Christopher J. Chang's group at the University of California—Berkeley, they added a dye to the system that glows in the presence of reactive oxygen species.

Their hunch was right. When the environmental conditions were right, a solid glow started from the edges of the condensates, confirming that a previously unknown phenomenon was at work. Dai next talked with Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Chemistry at Stanford, whose group established the electric behavior of water droplets. Zare was excited to hear about the new behavior in biological systems, and started to work with the group on the underlying mechanism.

"Inspired by previous work on water droplets, my graduate student, Christian Chamberlayne, and I thought that the same physical principles might apply and promote redox chemistry, such as the formation of hydrogen peroxide molecules," Zare said. "These findings suggest why condensates are so important in the functioning of cells."

"Most previous work on biomolecular condensates has focused on their innards," Chilkoti said. "Yifan's discovery that biomolecular condensates appear to be universally redox-active suggests that condensates did not simply evolve to carry out specific biological functions as is commonly understood, but that they are also endowed with a critical chemical function that is essential to cells."

While the biological implications of this ongoing reaction within our cells is not known, Dai points to a prebiotic example of how powerful its effects might be. The powerhouses of our cells, called mitochondria, create energy for all of our life's functions through the same basic chemical process. But before mitochondria or even the simplest of cells existed, something had to provide energy for the very first of life's functions to begin working.

Researchers have proposed that the energy was provided by thermal vents in the oceans or hot springs. Others have suggested this same redox reaction that occurs in water microdroplets was created by the spray of ocean waves.

But why not condensates instead?

"Magic can happen when substances get tiny and the interfacial volume becomes enormous compared to its volume," Dai said. "I think the implications are important to many different fields."

Sumber :

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-newly-electrical-cells-biological-chemistry.html

Enzyme That Clears Fat By-Products Could Be Key To Delayed Aging

Combating the toxic effects of glycerol and glyceraldehyde may be the path to longevity.

Laura Simmons

March 9, 2023

Glycerol and glyceraldehyde are natural by-products that build up in stored fat tissue over time. 

A new mechanism by which toxic substances are metabolized by an enzyme, mitigating their harmful effects and considerably lengthening lifespan, has been discovered. Experiments in the model worm Caenorhabditis elegans and in yeast revealed that increasing the expression of the adh-1 gene was enough to delay aging, and the researchers suspect that the same could be true in humans too.

“The discovery was unexpected,” explained senior author Dr Eyleen Jorgelina O’Rourke in a statement. “We went after a very well-supported hypothesis that the secret to longevity was the activation of a cell-rejuvenating process named autophagy and ended up finding an unrecognized mechanism of health and lifespan extension.”

C. elegans shares more than 70 percent of its genes with humans, and over the years this unassuming little worm has proven itself to be an incredibly valuable tool for scientific discovery. Previous research in C. elegans and other organisms had led O’Rourke and the team to believe that autophagy – a process of cellular recycling – could be the cornerstone to anti-aging. 

You can imagine their surprise, then, when they were able to increase the worms’ lifespan by 50 percent with no increase in autophagy at all.

They dubbed the mechanism they discovered AMAR, which happens to be the Sanskrit word for “immortal” as well as being an acronym for “Alcohol and aldehyde dehydrogenase Mediated Anti-aging Response”. 

The team predicted that activating this mechanism would lead to increased metabolism of two by-products of fat that naturally build up in our bodies over time. One of these, glycerol, would be directly broken down; this, in turn, would indirectly lead to the breakdown of the other, glyceraldehyde. Glycerol and glyceraldehyde are thought to have toxic effects, so removing them should promote healthier aging and longevity.

In another unexpected finding, the researchers were able to activate the AMAR effect by simply increasing the expression of one single gene – adh-1 – which codes for an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase.

Buoyed by the success of their worm experiments, the team also tested the findings in yeast, and were able to achieve a similarly beneficial effect on lifespan. What’s more, they looked at the literature and found a correlation between increased alcohol dehydrogenase levels and fasting/caloric restriction (which they consider an anti-aging intervention) in mammals – including humans. 

The researchers suggest that glycerol and glyceraldehyde naturally increase over time, as the body stores more fat as it ages. Their observations hint at the possibility of activating the protective AMAR mechanism in other animals, to circumvent the potentially toxic side effects of glycerol and glyceraldehyde, and maybe increase longevity.

“We hope to attract interest in developing therapeutics that target AMAR,” said O’Rourke. “With age-related diseases currently being the major health burden for patients, their families and the healthcare system, targeting the process of aging itself would be most effective way to reduce this burden and increase the number of years of independent healthy living for all of us.”

Sumber :

https://www.iflscience.com/enzyme-that-clears-fat-by-products-could-be-key-to-delayed-aging-67909

Scientists slow aging by engineering longevity in cells

by University of California - San Diego

Engineered cells show oscillating abundance of a master aging regulator. Credit: Hao Lab, UC San Diego

Human lifespan is related to the aging of our individual cells. Three years ago a group of University of California San Diego researchers deciphered essential mechanisms behind the aging process. After identifying two distinct directions that cells follow during aging, the researchers genetically manipulated these processes to extend the lifespan of cells.

As described in a new article published April 27, 2023, in Science, the team has now extended this research using synthetic biology to engineer a solution that keeps cells from reaching their normal levels of deterioration associated with aging.

Cells, including those of yeast, plants, animals and humans, all contain gene regulatory circuits that are responsible for many physiological functions, including aging. "These gene circuits can operate like our home electric circuits that control devices like appliances and automobiles," said Professor Nan Hao of the School of Biological Sciences' Department of Molecular Biology, the senior author of the study and co-director of UC San Diego's Synthetic Biology Institute.

However, the UC San Diego group uncovered that, under the control of a central gene regulatory circuit, cells don't necessarily age the same way. Imagine a car that ages either as the engine deteriorates or as the transmission wears out, but not both at the same time. The UC San Diego team envisioned a "smart aging process" that extends cellular longevity by cycling deterioration from one aging mechanism to another.

In the new study, the researchers genetically rewired the circuit that controls cell aging. From its normal role functioning like a toggle switch, they engineered a negative feedback loop to stall the aging process. The rewired circuit operates as a clock-like device, called a gene oscillator, that drives the cell to periodically switch between two detrimental "aged" states, avoiding prolonged commitment to either, and thereby slowing the cell's degeneration.

These advances resulted in a dramatically extended cellular lifespan, setting a new record for life extension through genetic and chemical interventions.

As electrical engineers often do, the researchers in this study first used computer simulations of how the core aging circuit operates. This helped them design and test ideas before building or modifying the circuit in the cell. This approach has advantages in saving time and resources to identify effective pro-longevity strategies, compared to more traditional genetic strategies.

"This is the first time computationally guided synthetic biology and engineering principles were used to rationally redesign gene circuits and reprogram the aging process to effectively promote longevity," said Hao.

Several years ago the multidisciplinary UC San Diego research team began studying the mechanisms behind cell aging, a complex biological process that underlies human longevity and many diseases. They discovered that cells follow a cascade of molecular changes through their entire lifespan until they eventually degenerate and die. But they noticed that cells of the same genetic material and within the same environment can travel along distinct aging routes. About half of the cells age through a gradual decline in the stability of DNA, where genetic information is stored. The other half ages along a path tied to the decline of mitochondria, the energy production units of cells.

The new synthetic biology achievement has the potential to reconfigure scientific approaches to age delay. Distinct from numerous chemical and genetic attempts to force cells into artificial states of "youth," the new research provides evidence that slowing the ticks of the aging clock is possible by actively preventing cells from committing to a pre-destined path of decline and death, and the clock-like gene oscillators could be a universal system to achieve that.

"Our results establish a connection between gene network architecture and cellular longevity that could lead to rationally-designed gene circuits that slow aging," the researchers note in their study.

During their research, the team studied Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast cells as a model for the aging of human cells. They developed and employed microfluidics and time-lapse microscopy to track the aging processes across the cell's lifespan.

In the current study, yeast cells that were synthetically rewired and aged under the direction of the synthetic oscillator device resulted in an 82% increase in lifespan compared with control cells that aged under normal circumstances. The results revealed "the most pronounced lifespan extension in yeast that we have observed with genetic perturbations," they noted.

"Our oscillator cells live longer than any of the longest-lived strains previously identified by unbiased genetic screens," said Hao.

"Our work represents a proof-of-concept example, demonstrating the successful application of synthetic biology to reprogram the cellular aging process," the authors wrote, "and may lay the foundation for designing synthetic gene circuits to effectively promote longevity in more complex organisms."

The team is currently expanding their research to the aging of diverse human cell types, including stem cells and neurons.

Sumber :

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-scientists-aging-longevity-cells.html

Unraveling the mathematics behind wiggly worm knots

by Georgia Institute of Technology

A single California black worm moves in a helical gait. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

For millennia, humans have used knots for all kinds of reasons—to tie rope, braid hair, or weave fabrics. But there are organisms that are better at tying knots and far superior—and faster—at untangling them.

Tiny California blackworms intricately tangle themselves by the thousands to form ball-shaped blobs that allow them to execute a wide range of biological functions. But, most striking of all, while the worms tangle over a period of several minutes, they can untangle in mere milliseconds, escaping at the first sign of a threat from a predator.

Saad Bhamla, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, wanted to understand precisely how the blackworms execute their tangling and untangling movements. To investigate, Bhamla and a team of researchers at Georgia Tech linked up with mathematicians at MIT. Their research, published in Science, could influence the design of fiber-like, shapeshifting robotics that self-assemble and move in ways that are fast and reversible. The study also highlights how cross-disciplinary collaboration can answer some of the most perplexing questions in disparate fields.

Capturing the inside of a worm blob

Fascinated by the science of ultrafast movement and collective behavior, Bhamla and Harry Tuazon, a graduate student in Bhamla's lab, have studied California blackworms for years, observing how they use collective movement to form blobs and then disperse.

"We wanted to understand the exact mechanics behind how the worms change their movement dynamics to achieve tangling and ultrafast untangling," Bhamla said. "Also, these are not just typical filaments like string, ethernet cables, or spaghetti—these are living, active tangles that are out of equilibrium, which adds a fascinating layer to the question."

Tuazon, a co-first author of the study, collected videos of his experiments with the worms, including macro videos of the worms' collective dispersal mechanism and microscopic videos of one, two, three, and several worms to capture their movements.

"I was shocked when I pointed a UV light toward the worm blobs and they dispersed so explosively," Tuazon said. "But to understand this complex and mesmerizing maneuver, I started conducting experiments with only a few worms."

Bhamla and Tuazon approached MIT mathematicians Jörn Dunkel and Vishal Patil (a graduate student at the time and now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University) about a collaboration. After seeing Tuazon's videos, the two theorists, who specialize in knots and topology, were eager to join.

"Knots and tangles are a fascinating area where physics and mechanics meet some very interesting math," said Patil, co-first author on the paper. "These worms seemed like a good playground to investigate topological principles in systems made up of filaments."

A key moment for Patil was when he viewed Tuazon's video of a single worm that had been provoked into the escape response. Patil noticed the worm moved in a figure-eight pattern, turning its head in clockwise and counterclockwise spirals as its body followed.

The researchers thought this helical gait pattern might play a role in the worms' ability to tangle and untangle. But to mathematically quantify the worm tangle structures and model how they braid around each other, Patil and Dunkel needed experimental data.

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Simulation of worms untangling (left) and tangling (right). Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bhamla and Tuazon set about to find an imaging technique that would allow them to peer inside the worm blob so they could gather more data. After much trial and error, they landed on an unexpected solution: ultrasound. By placing a live worm blob in nontoxic jelly and using a commercial ultrasound machine, they were finally able to observe the inside of the intricate worm tangles.

"Capturing the inside structure of a live worm blob was a real challenge," Tuazon said. "We tried all sorts of imaging techniques for months, including X-rays, confocal microscopy, and tomography, but none of them gave us the real-time resolution we needed. Ultimately, ultrasound turned out to be the solution."

After analyzing the ultrasound videos, Tuazon and other researchers in Bhamla's lab painstakingly tracked the movement of the worms by hand, plotting more than 46,000 data points for Patil and Dunkel to use to understand the mathematics behind the movements.

Explaining tangling and untangling

Answering the questions of how the worms untangle quickly required a combination of mechanics and topology. Patil built a mathematical model to explain how helical gaits can lead to tangling and untangling. By testing the model using a simulation framework, Patil was able to create a visualization of worms tangling.

The model predicted that each worm formed a tangle with at least two other worms, revealing why the worm blobs were so cohesive. Patil then showed that the same class of helical gaits could explain how they untangle. The simulations were uncanny in their resemblance to real ultrasound images and showed that the worms' alternating helical wave motions enabled the tangling and the ultrafast untangling escape mechanism.

"What's striking is these tangled structures are extremely complicated. They are disordered and complex structures, but these living worm structures are able to manipulate these knots for crucial functions," Patil said.

While it has been known for decades that the worms move in a helical gait, no one had ever made the connection between that movement and how they escape. The researchers' work revealed how the mechanical movements of individual worms determine their emergent collective behavior and topological dynamics. It is also the first mathematical theory of active tangling and untangling.

"This observation may seem like a mere curiosity, but its implications are far-reaching. Active filaments are ubiquitous in biological structures, from DNA strands to entire organisms," said Eva Kanso, program director at the National Science Foundation and professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California.

"These filaments serve myriads of functions and can provide a general motif for engineering multifunctional structures and materials that change properties on demand. Just as the worm blobs perform remarkable tangling and untangling feats, so may future bioinspired materials defy the limits of conventional structures by exploiting the interplay between mechanics, geometry, and activity."

The researchers' model demonstrates the advantages of different types of tangles, which could allow for programming a wide range of behaviors into multifunctional, filament-like materials, from polymers to shapeshifting soft robotic systems. Many companies, such as 3M, already use nonwoven materials made of tangling fibers in products, including bandages and N95 masks. The worms could inspire new nonwoven materials and topological shifting matter.

"Actively shapeshifting topological matter is currently the stuff of science fiction," said Bhamla. "Imagine a soft, nonwoven material made of millions of stringlike filaments that can tangle and untangle on command, forming a smart adhesive bandage that shape-morphs as a wound heals, or a smart filtration material that alters pore topology to trap particles of different sizes or chemical properties. The possibilities are endless."

Sumber :

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-unraveling-mathematics-wiggly-worm.html

Fighting giants: eco-activist Vandana Shiva on her battle against GM multinationals

The formidable Indian environmentalist discusses her 50-year struggle to protect seeds and farmers from the ‘poison cartel’ of corporate agriculture

Fri 28 Apr 2023 06.00 BST

You don’t have to look very far to find the essence of life, says Vandana Shiva. But in a society caught up in a blur of technological advances, bio-hacks and attempts to improve ourselves and the natural world, she fears we are hellbent on destroying it.

“Everything comes from the seed, but we have forgotten that the seed isn’t a machine,” says Shiva. “We think we can engineer life, we can change the carefully organised DNA of a living organism, and there will be no wider impact. But this is a dangerous illusion.”

For almost five decades, Shiva has been deeply engaged in the fight for environmental justice in India. Regarded as one of the world’s most formidable environmentalists, she has worked to save forests, shut down polluting mines, exposed the dangers of pesticides, spurred on the global campaign for organic farming, championed ecofeminism and gone up against powerful giant chemical corporations.

Her battle to protect the world’s seeds in their natural form – rather than genetically altered and commercially controlled versions – continues to be her life’s work.

Shiva’s anti-globalisation philosophy and pilgrimages across India have often been compared to Mahatma Gandhi. Yet while Gandhi became synonymous with the spinning wheel as a symbol of self-reliance, Shiva’s emblem is the seed.

Now 70, Shiva – who is divorced and has one son – has spent her life refusing to conform to the patriarchal norms so often imposed on women in India, particularly in the 1950s. She has published more than 20 books and when she is not travelling the world for workshops or speaking tours, she spends her time between her office in Delhi and her organic farm in the foothills of the Himalayas.

She credits her spirit of resistance to her parents, who were “feminists at a higher level than I’ve ever known – long before we even knew the word ‘feminism’”. After 1947, when India gained independence, her father left the military for a job in the forests of the mountainous state of Uttarakhand, where Shiva was born and brought up always to believe she was equal to men. “The forests were my identity and from an early age the laws of nature captivated me,” she says.

There was a race on to develop and patent GM crops, but no one was stopping to ask: what will be the impact on the environment?

She was about six when she stumbled on a book of quotes by Albert Einstein buried in a small, musty library in a forest lodge. She was transfixed, determined against all odds to be a physicist. Though science was not taught at her rural convent school, Shiva’s parents encouraged her curiosity and found ways for her to learn. By the time she was in her 20s, she was completing her PhD in quantum physics at a Canadian university.

Yet as logging, dams and development wreaked ecological devastation on Uttarakhand’s forests and local peasant women rose up to fight it – a movement known as Chipko – Shiva realised, on returning to India, that her heart lay not with quantum physics but with a different, nagging question. “I couldn’t understand why were we told that new technology brings progress, but everywhere I looked, local people were getting poorer and landscapes were being devastated as soon as this development or new technology came in,” she says.

In 1982, in her mother’s cow shed in the mountain town of Dehradun, Shiva set up her research foundation, exploring the crossover between science, technology and ecology. She began to document the “green revolution” that swept rural India from the late 1960s, where in a bid to drive up crop yields and avert famine, the government had pushed farmers to introduce technology, mechanisation and agrochemicals.

It instilled in her a lifelong opposition to industrial interference in agriculture. Though the green revolution is acknowledged to have prevented widespread starvation and introduced some necessary modernisation into rural communities, it was also the beginning of a continuing system of monoculture in India, where farmers were pushed to abandon native varieties and instead plant a few high-yielding wheat and rice crops in quick-turnaround cycles, burning the stubble in their fields in between.

It also created a reliance on subsidised fertilisers and chemicals that, though costly and environmentally disastrous, lasts to this day. Soil in fertile states such as Punjab, once known as the breadbasket of India, has been stripped of its rich minerals, with watercourses running dry, rivers polluted with chemical run-off and farmers in a perpetual state of deep crisis and anger.

Shiva’s suspicions about the chemical industry worsened further when, in the early 1990s, she was privy to some of the first multilateral discussions around agricultural biotechnology and plans by chemical companies to alter crop genes for commercial purposes.

“There was a race on by companies to develop and patent these GM crops, but no one was stopping to ask: what will be the impact on the environment? How will they impact on diversity? What will this cost the farmers? They only wanted to win the race and control all the world’s seeds. To me, it all seemed so wrong,” says Shiva.

In 1991, five years before the first genetically modified (GM) crops had been planted, she founded Navdanya, meaning “nine seeds”, an initiative to save India’s native seeds and spread their use among farmers. Eight years later, she took the chemical monolith Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of seeds, to the supreme court for bringing its GM cotton into India without permission.

Monsanto became notorious in the 1960s for producing the herbicide Agent Orange for the US military during the Vietnam war, and subsequently led the development of GM crops in the 1990s. It moved quickly to penetrate the international market with its privatised seeds, particularly in developing, predominantly agricultural countries.

The company, which was bought in 2018 by the German pharmaceutical and biotech company Bayer, became embroiled in legal action. In 2020 it announced a $11bn (£8.7bn) payout to settle claims of links between its herbicide and cancer on behalf of almost 100,000 people but denied any wrongdoing. In 2016, dozens of civil society groups staged a “people’s tribunal” in The Hague, finding Monsanto guilty of human rights violations and developing an unsustainable system of farming.

Shiva says taking Monsanto to court felt like going up against a mafia and alleges that many attempts were made to threaten and pressure her into not filing the case.

Sumber :

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/apr/28/fighting-giants-eco-activist-vandana-shiva-on-her-battle-against-gm-multinationals

Not just green: Natural farming in Andhra yielded more produce than conventional methods, shows study

Apart from the higher yield, nutrient availability was also unaffected in Zero Budget Natural Farming

By Shagun

Published: Wednesday 12 April 2023

The yield of groundnut kernels was around 30-40 per cent higher in the ZBNF treatment, an important finding with groundnut being a crucial oilseed crop in India and covering 0.537 million hectares (ha) in Andhra Pradesh. Photo: iStock.

The yield of groundnut kernels was around 30-40 per cent higher in the ZBNF treatment, an important finding with groundnut being a crucial oilseed crop in India and covering 0.537 million hectares (ha) in Andhra Pradesh. Photo: iStock. The yield of groundnut kernels was around 30-40 per cent higher in the ZBNF treatment, an important finding with groundnut being a crucial oilseed crop in India and covering 0.537 million hectares (ha) in Andhra Pradesh. Photo: iStock.

Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) in Andhra Pradesh has led to significantly higher crop yield compared to organic or conventional (synthetic fertilisers and pesticides) farming, a new study of the state’s natural farming programme has found. 

The southern state has been pushing 100 per cent chemical-free agriculture under the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) programme it launched in 2016. In the last six years, it has worked with 0.63 million farmers out of a total estimated six million farmers in the state, on natural farming. 

Researchers from the University of Reading, the United Kingdom and Rythu Sadikara Samstha, a non-profit set up by the government in 2014 observed that when compared to the conventional treatment, yields were maintained in the case of organic farming and increased in ZBNF.

Conventional treatment involves the use of synthetic pesticides / fertilisers. Organic treatment does not use any synthetic pesticides or fertilisers and mulch but uses purchased organic inputs, such as farmyard manure and vermicompost. ZBNF involves not using any synthetic pesticides or fertilisers and uses home-made inputs comprising desi cow dung and urine with mulch. It does not involve any purchase of inputs.

Apart from the higher yield, nutrient availability was also unaffected in ZBNF, noted the study published in Agronomy for Sustainable Development journal March 23, 2023. This is a significant finding as there have been arguments that conventional treatment, which uses synthetic fertilisers, increases extractable nutrient concentrations compared to organic and ZBNF treatments. 

The researchers carried out controlled field experiments in 28 farms over three cropping seasons from June 2019-2020, comparing ZBNF to conventional and organic treatments.

Comparisons were made in terms of yield, soil pH, temperature, moisture content, nutrient content and earthworm abundance. The farms were spread across six districts in Andhra Pradesh (Anantapur, Kadapa, Krishna, Nellore, Prakasam and Visakhapatnam), spanning over 800 kilometres, representing different agro-climatic zones. 

The results revealed that ZBNF yield was significantly higher than both conventional and organic treatments in Prakasam, Nellore and Kadapa. Whereas, in Krishna, ZBNF was significantly higher than the conventional treatment only, and in Anantapur, ZBNF was significantly higher than the organic treatment only. 

It was observed that the yield for the conventional treatment reduced from the first to the third season (1>2>3), whereas the organic and ZBNF mean yield increased slightly through the three seasons. The researchers called it the most extensive on-ground assessment of ZBNF performance in the region to date.

The yield of groundnut kernels was around 30-40 per cent higher in the ZBNF treatment, an important finding with groundnut being a crucial oilseed crop in India and covering 537,000 hectares (ha) in Andhra Pradesh alone. 

“However, the efficacy of the ZBNF treatment was context specific and varied according to district and the crop in question. The ZBNF yield benefit is likely attributed to mulching, generating a cooler soil, with a higher moisture content and a larger earthworm population,” the researchers noted. 

It has been estimated earlier that if ZBNF covered 25 per cent of the total crop area in Andhra Pradesh, $70 million would be saved in fertiliser subsidies every year.

Intensive use of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers comes with a number of associated risks to farmers’ finances, human health, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and environmental pollution. Reduced use of purchased inputs and less involvement of agri-business could also have financial benefits whilst yields are improved or maintained.

The yield benefit is of significance for Andhra Pradesh, a state with the highest percentage (42.3 per cent) of tenant holding, compared to the national average of 13.7 per cent.

A recent survey by Rythu Swarjya Vedika, a farmers’ organisation based in Hyderabad, estimated that 79 per cent of these tenant farmers in Andhra Pradesh are either landless or own less than one acre of land and are therefore almost entirely dependent on leased land for their income from agriculture. 

“This immediate yield benefit observed after adopting ZBNF practices will be of particular interest to farmers on short-term land leases, as they may not be able to farm the same land every season,” the study said. 

There are parallels between ZBNF and conservation agriculture in terms of the adoption of reduced tillage, application of crop residues and intercropping to minimise soil disturbance . What sets ZBNF apart is the combination of practices like reduced tillage and intercropping with unique home-made amendments like bijamrita and Jeevamrutha.

Sumber :

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/agriculture/not-just-green-natural-farming-in-andhra-yielded-more-produce-than-conventional-methods-shows-study-88713

New nanoparticle source generates high-frequency light

April 27, 2023 12.14pm WIB

High-frequency light is useful. The higher the frequency of light, the shorter its wavelength – and the shorter the wavelength, the smaller the objects and details the light can be used to see.

So violet light can show you smaller details than red light, for example, because it has a shorter wavelength. But to see really, really small things – down to the scale of billionths of a metre, thousands of times less than the width of a human hair – to see those things, you need extreme ultraviolet light (and a good microscope).

Extreme ultraviolet light, with wavelengths between 10 and 120 nanometres, has many applications in medical imaging, studying biological objects, and deciphering the fine details of computer chips during their manufacture. However, producing small and affordable sources of this light has been very challenging.

We have found a way to make nanoparticles of a common semiconductor material emit light with a frequency up to seven times higher than the frequency of light sent to it. We generated blue-violet light from infrared light, and it will be possible to generate extreme ultraviolet light from red light with the same principles. Our research, carried out with colleagues from the University of Brescia, the University of Arizona and Korea University, is published in Science Advances.

The power of harmonics

Our system starts out with an ordinary laser that produces long-wavelength infrared light. This is called the pump laser, and there’s nothing special about it – such lasers are commercially available, and they can be compact and affordable.

A diagram illustrating the setup of the light-emitting system

Incoming laser light hitting a nanoparticle which then emits higher frequency light. Zalogina et al. / Science Advances, Author provided

But next we fire short pulses of light from this laser at a specially engineered nanoparticle of a material called aluminium gallium arsenide, and that’s where things get interesting.

The nanoparticle absorbs energy from the laser pulses, and then emits its own burst of light. By carefully engineering the size and shape of the nanoparticle, we can create powerful resonances to amplify certain harmonics of the emitted light.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, we can make a useful analogy with sound.

A diagram showing the first seven harmonics of a guitar string.

Harmonics in a guitar string: in the fundamental frequency, the wavelength is the length of the whole string, but in the higher harmonics multiple shorter wavelengths fit within the length of the string. Wikimedia / Y Landman

When you pluck a string on a guitar, it vibrates with what’s called its fundamental frequency – which makes the main note you hear – plus small amounts of higher frequencies called harmonics, which are multiples of the fundamental frequency. The body of the guitar is designed to produce resonances that amplify some of these harmonics and dampen others, creating the overall sound you hear.

Both light and sound share similarities in their physics – these are both propagating waves (acoustic waves in the case of sound, and electromagnetic waves in the case of light).

A close up of a hand strumming an acoustic guitar

Just as the body of a guitar dampens some frequencies and amplifies others, carefully designed nanoparticles can boost high-frequency harmonics of laser light. Shutterstock

In our light source, the pump laser is like the main note of the string, and the nanoparticles are like the guitar body. Except what’s special about the nanoparticles is that they massively amplify those higher harmonics of the pump laser, producing light with a higher frequency (up to seven times higher in our case, and a wavelength correspondingly seven times shorter).

What it’s good for

This technology allows us to create new sources of light in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum such as the extreme ultraviolet, where there are no natural sources of light and where current engineered sources are too large or too expensive.

Conventional microscopes using visible light can only study objects down to a size of about a ten-millionth of a metre. The resolution is limited by the wavelength of light: violet light has the wavelength of about 400 nanometres (one nanometre is one billionth of a metre).

But there are plenty of applications, such as biological imaging and electronics manufacturing, where being able to see down to a billionth of a metre or so would be a huge help.

At present, to see at those scales you need “super-resolution” microscopy, which lets you see details smaller than the wavelength of the light you are using, or electron microscopes, which do not use light at all and create image using a flux of electrons. However, such methods are quite slow and expensive.

To understand the advantages of a light source like ours, consider computer chips: they are made of very tiny components with feature sizes almost as small as a billionth of a metre. During the production process, it would be useful for manufacturers to use extreme ultraviolet light to monitor the process in real time.

This would save resources and time on bad batches of chips. The scale of the industry is such that even a 1% increase in chip yields could save billions of dollars each year.

In future, nanoparticles like ours could be used to produce tiny, inexpensive sources of extreme ultraviolet light, illuminating the world of extremely small things.

Sumber :

https://theconversation.com/new-nanoparticle-source-generates-high-frequency-light-204618