#Cooperative Human Tissue Network

[b1asho]

Round one of the species introduction!!!!

Prectikar Master Post:

Here's some info on them, and if you want to see some other drawings I've done of them (albeit some occasionally older n crustier ones), check out my deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/blasho

Anyway:

Prectikar are a large sentient species, usually standing at around 8-9 feet tall when fully upright and weighing anywhere close to or upwards if 1000 pounds

They are covered in feather-like fur (or is it fur-like feathers? They're occasionally branched like feathers, and all have quills, but some are more hairlike) due to the cold climate they evolved in, though length and thickness of it now varies by region.

They are omnivorous, and while they have many traits to help them hunt and kill, most of their diet tends to be plants.

Originally rush-down predators, they use their considerable strength to move in quick bursts and their specialized tusks to either ram prey to death or gouge into it as they grapple it.

Their jaw strength is also insane,with their skull actually sacrificing brain space in favor of it, which helps them eat pretty much anything they come across. They pay a lot of attention to food and cooking because of their high calorie needs and very sensitive nose/tongue.

They have manganese as an oxygen carrier is a result of the scarcity of other metals in their environment and potentially because of its general affinity for oxygen.

This causes their blood to be an amber/orange brown and shades of pink depending on its exposure to oxygen.

Through a network of cooperative bonding and other adaptations (like better oxygen retention in muscles and the easily carried size and longevity of the molecule) they’ve managed to bring this manganese transport molecule close to hemoglobin in terms of effectiveness, though they can also make use of manganese’s catalyst properties to temporarily push it to bring lots more oxygen to their tissues at a time (used for short bursts of speed and strength that allow them to take down large prey and plants for food).

their large body size (selected by their colder environment) lets them use their own high body heat to keep the O2 fixation and liberation going in their highly effective lungs.

An extensive understanding of their internal chemistry is unknown (aka gatekept by their colonizers/"uplifters" who ill get to later) but it seems like they also have a network of bacteria in their body just to manage the more reactive and damaging oxides that form, and to remove/convert the spent manganese into connective tissue and aid in bone maintenance.

They have higher calorie needs from keeping up the body temp and recycling/removing all that stuff, alongside just being big in general. Alongside a lot of sleeping, they also basically just eat all the time (compared to other species) to compensate, though their mammal-like fat retention and other metabolic adaptations for scarcity mean that they can handle long periods without resources(though this causes increasingly compounded problems for them)

Some other downsides include low tolerance of changes in oxygen levels (particularly low) and temperature levels, and poor adaptation to environments outside of their biosphere/without all the microorganisms since these things upset their delicate balance.

(part of why so many tribes were nomadic was/is to chase temperate and ‘warm’ seasons, even though to us that’s still cold. Prectikar living in human dominated areas often just take a lot of supplements with beneficial bacteria in them to cope with thr lack of that in their environent, and any food printers need an 'ink' cartridge containing these things or else theyre basically useless.),

They also experience faster general wear and tear from having constant complex and intensive chemical reactions(sometimes with dangerous chemicals) going on in their bloodstream and tissues.

( I’m not a biochemist, so if there’s any glaring issues with this then just explain it away to yourself with ‘they have a gland for that’ or ‘just don’t think about it actually’ which is what I did. I just wanted the fun color with a metal that can reversibly bond with oxygen :). )

They have one nasal passageway for smell/air and a second, bigger cavity for just vocalization (which they can’t breathe in from as easily).

This second cavity is between their first set of eyes, and has a phonic lip structure inside to produce higher pitched sounds.

The upper nasal opening has muscled nostrils that act as lips to further help control sound. The noise coming from here sounds very high to them, but to us it sounds like a nasally human voice, broken uobhere and there with squeaks, buzzes, and clicks).

They can pitch this nose voice very high, closer to dolphin-like clicking noises but not quite echolocation level.

Their throat vocal cords by their air sac are very long and thick, used for making very deep noises that carry long distances.

However, the vocal control they have through their mouth is very poor due to this and the inarticulate lips and tongue they have, and due to the more limited air they can bring in and out of it, so when speaking only through their mouth they sound a lot like seals or dogs and can only really go in short bursts before having to refill the sac.

Most of their languages are spoken with the nose and mouth sounds in tandem, where the high and low mix to make a more even sounding voice.

It’s fairly easy to understand them, but nearly impossible for us to truly speak any of their native languages, and if they wanted to they could also just start making sounds we cant hear.

They see it as strange that humans and other species speak with a single tone without difficulty.

The red flaps pictured on the drawing of their mouth and nasal passages can be moved to seal off the passage and direct airflow elsewhere.

The big red one in their throat acts as a “diaphragm” to fill and empty the air sac (which is left over from when their digestive and respiratory tracts were more connected like ours, but time in the water heavily shifted it to a more ‘blowhole’ type outline to help them breathe and vocalize from the surface).

The other flap by the air sac and its vocal cords moves upwards to block off the digestive tract whenever the mouth or nose is opened to allow air to be drawn in by this diaphragm.

The two red flaps making a pinched shape can move independently or with the other red flap, but never at the same time with each other. The main airway is always separate from the digestive tract, though the flap to the middle, non vocal nasal passage can be moved so that it’s a part of either the vocal nasal passage to draw in air or the air sac part to act as another resonance chamber.

Air can be drawn in by the diaphragm via open mouth and through the nose via open top red flap at the same time, and can be released at the same time, resulting in their near continuous double speak sound they use for their own language.

Their characteristic large tusks are retractable and housed in a cone-shaped bony socket on the side of their jaw.

A muscle is attached to the bony root of the tooth, and pushes it out. As it slides towards the front of the mouth, the cone socket narrows and wedges a protrusion on the tooth into a hole in the socket, and then the muscle stiffens, locking it in there.

When the tusk retracts, the muscle quickly jimmies the tooth forward then draws it back to get it out of the hole, and then pulls it back into the wider part of the socket.

This is mainly because their tusks are ever growing (but very slowly) but not great at self sharpening, and are their main weapon in self defense and hunting,so it seems this just happened to keep them safe.

If a tusk is broken, as long as it was not cracked at the root, it can be regrown with extensive time in the socket, but otherwise they stay safely stowed in da socket where the majority of its sharp edge can stay protected from chewing and other mouth stuff. Tusks won't start growing in until their teenage years.

They are primarily bipedal/ quadrupedal and switch between the two occasionally.

Knuckle walking helps distribute their top-heavy weight and give them more balance for long and short distance, while walking upright gives them better visibility, less stress on their neck/upper back, and quicker but unsteadier movement.

Their gallop/sprint utilizes both arms and legs to propel them forward in a gait halfway between a bear and a gorilla (since their big mid arms are set like a bears) to overtake prey after an ambush or drive them into the rest of the pack waiting elsewhere. Quad walking also helps them get around in buildings meant for species half their size.

Their hands are some of their only places without hair, but as they age, they loose it on their arms and face too.

Prectikar have different uses for each of their pairs of limbs, and have for all stages of their evolution.

The front ones specialized for grappling prey and grabbing things, and so have a ‘sprawling’ shoulder position like humans and have hands with relatively nimble fingers, the outer two are angled inwards but can also move in a pamprodactyl ish fashion (which acts as their version of a thumb, and lets them switch from big to little grabbing motions) .

Their mid limbs used to be wings with hands, and still have a basically zygodactyl finger position that was helpful for holding onto branches (with the backwards facing finger), but over time they have been converted into terrestrial knuckle-walking limbs, with the one that swings back and forth being brought forwards to walk or swung back to adjust grip on big things they want to move or for balance on unstable terrain like ice . The fingers on this one are big and clumsy, pretty much only useful for digging, walking, or slashing.

Their back limbs also used to be for grasping but were mainly counterbalances, but have now turned into plantigrade walking limbs (and much like humans, that’s pretty much all they use them for). All have nonretractable claws.

Prectikar are viviparous and usually give birth to litters of up to 8.

They have a specific mating season, where their dimorphic traits will become more pronounced.

Males in rut will shed the feathers on their throat sac region and it will become a bright ambery yellow color, and they will also grow in longer feathers on their butt region (in a fan shape for display purposes. The dont have a true post anal tail like humans).

They will also develop some of that pinkish orange/yellow on their chest skin. Females go throguh estrus cycles and will also grow a more prominent butt feather crest, as well as some very long feathers around their neck, shoulders, and abdomen for babies to hold onto.

Their skin patches turn a much brighter shade of yellow to help direct newborns to where they can feed from. Once they give birth, they will start making an oily and thick secretion across the skin patch which is collected into a divot which the infant licks from. Part of why the babies hold onto them is so they can constantly lick the 'milk'so they can grow.

Newborns come out blind and hairless, but quickly grow in a thick down and open their eyes so they can climb on mom.

Once they're weaned, they'll drop off and use the muscles they gained hanging on and climbing to start moving with the adults. They grow very fast, and canes are a common sight in teens to help deal with the rapid bone and muscle growth.

Usually, it is only during this season where chest/skin related nudity standards change to be more conservative, since showing those colors means youre down to fuck and so doing that is usually restricted to in private with their partner or for bachelors.

They have very strict binaries for sex and gender based on this seasonal divide and religion.

Most tribes show gender identity through a piercing on their lower nose for male or chin for female (so dont worry, the main guy up there is showing some male presenting chest outside of the mating season, so hes fine).

Normally, only some cultures pierce their ears, which are like if owls had a little mobile flap of outer ear to swivel I stead of their whole head. Very little of it is actually flesh, and the sound is mainly captured by the feathers around it.

While they have a reputation otherwise, Prectikar are highly social within their tribal/family groups.

They regularly allogroom, greet each other with hugs, and usually travel in sibling groups. Households are multi generational.

They have a reputation as standoffish or irritable because they take things very differently and have other standards/specific body language truggers. also most other species treat them differently/with fear by default.

their upper pair of eyes is larger and focused on long distance vision while their lower pair is for close up vision, creatign a bifocal effect for them when using both at once.

Aaaaaand that oretty much everything, I think. I'll post some other arts related to them soon, but consider this the Master Post on the things you should know about them!!

[damnbrosius]

*leaves James for Ambrosius*

Leave an object in my ask and my muse will react to it being given to them.

"Oh? No grand Atlesian machines or--forgive me--another weapon?"

It takes a minute for him to realize James himself is the object he's intended to examine, and forgive him, because he lets his utter delight be known on his face.

"Really? You'll let me see?"

Cue the eye loupe. He floats quite close, peering at everything he can find, gaze shifting from one internal component to the next. The machinery alone is fascinating--tubes and wires filling a metal frame in the shape of a human body. Electrical impulses shot through, moving it with the same dexterity.

And so many processes that had to be replicated! He had examined human anatomy here and there, and knew it for a truly complicated network of interlocking systems. Just in the torso alone, vascular, nervous, lymph, pulmonary, and skeletal functions all had to be replicated.

Please, General, forgive him his wandering hands. They land on his shoulder and elbow, lifting his right arm so that he can watch the parts inside move in total cooperation. The loupe vanishes in favor of just drawing closer, close enough to see all of the insides, the details, eyes scanning deeper and deeper. Everywhere he looks, he finds something new.

It's the hand he spends the most attention on at one time, and he returns to it several times. The fingers, he spreads and lifts, peering at them as if there's something written on them. The palm and fingers, they're hollow metal casts, insides lined with numerous razor-thin pads and sensors, and small impulses...what are those? Nanomachines, perhaps? To help the sensory pads in case of damage? No, no, to remove microbes and other filth that could damage them in the first place? Both?

Around and around he goes, circling the General and looking at everything, from the structures making up his leg and calf to the plating occupying the place where a shoulder blade would be. He loses himself just a tad in the abundance of things to examine and observe, being perhaps a bit rude in how thoughtlessly and openly he's just...looking, looking, looking, at everything!

But more fascinating even than the metal and plastic crafted to replace human flesh is where and how that human flesh interacts with it. Floating there before Ironwood, his eyes linger on the place where smooth metal became fused and whitened skin tissue, drawing a line down from his neck to his waist. His hand stretches out, lingering in the air before he finally remembers his manners and withdraws it.

A mechanical sack of filters that sorted impurities out... A complicated system of tubes replacing intestines that must've been torn away ages ago... A fully mechanical spine, holding him straight and connecting to a lengthy set of nerves. A lung tucked within the metal frame of the ribcage that sat snug against the heart, which is the last place his eyes linger. Some pieces of metal here and there, and it's flowing with those same nanomachines...but otherwise, completely organic, sitting there wearing its proud red, pumping defiantly in that chest of his.

The last thing he examines, floating up horizontally to get a much, much too close look, is what's going on in Ironwood's head. He trails upward, looking at the insides. The spine connected to a half-metal clavicle attaching to the shoulders, of course, which itself led to an intact esophagus supported with a strange fabric-like mesh. The spinal cords, of course, led up into the brain, which was intact, but with a few mechanical implants slotted inbetween it and the skull frame. Ambrosius' next touch is very deliberate, coming up to cup Ironwood's head (gently!) by the jaw, just holding him still while he looks closer.

"Your eyes..."

What are those small wires in his ocular plates for? Just stabilizers? Too simple to comprise any form of enhanced vision... Ah, but of course. They kept the eyes clean. Whatever incident had warranted all these grafts might've damaged a tear duct, or some background organ that released retinal fluids.

His hands fall away from Ironwood's face, and he slowly floats backwards, his analysis all but complete, but eyes drifting back down to the place on his chest where metal met flesh. His next words are overflowing with rapturous wonder.

"This is amazing, this is beautiful...!" he breathes out, overcome. "You're a masterpiece!"

[aioleis]

"Every human is a walking, thinking collection of cells. The material of which we are made has agency — each cell, molecular network, tissue and organ has inherited through millenia of evolution its own agenda and problem-solving competencies in physiological, anatomical and metabolic spaces. Although it is hard for us to notice these kinds of protocognitive processes, we are the result of a huge collection of overlapping, nested agents that cooperate, compete and navigate their worlds as we navigate ours." ***

[rnomics]

IJMS, Vol. 23, Pages 16069: Contingent Synergistic Interactions between Non-Coding #RNAs and DNA-Modifying Enzymes in Myelodysplastic Syndromes

Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are a heterogeneous group of clonal hematopoietic stem cell disorders with maturation and differentiation defects exhibiting morphological dysplasia in one or more hematopoietic cell lineages. They are associated with peripheral blood cytopenias and by increased risk for progression into acute myelogenous leukemia. Among their multifactorial pathogenesis, age-related epigenetic instability and the error-rate DNA methylation maintenance have been recognized as critical factors for both the initial steps of their pathogenesis and for disease progression. Although lower-risk MDS is associated with an inflammatory bone marrow microenvironment, higher-risk disease is delineated by immunosuppression and clonal expansion. “Epigenetics” is a multidimensional level of gene regulation that determines the specific gene networks expressed in tissues under physiological conditions and guides appropriate chromatin rearrangements upon influence of environmental stimulation. Regulation of this level consists of biochemical modifications in amino acid residues of the histone proteins’ N-terminal tails and their concomitant effects on chromatin structure, DNA methylation patterns in CpG dinucleotides and the tissue-specific non-coding #RNAs repertoire, which are directed against various gene targets. The role of epigenetic modifications is widely recognized as pivotal both in gene expression control and differential molecular response to drug therapies in humans. Insights to the potential of synergistic cooperations of epigenetic mechanisms provide new avenues for treatment development to comfort human diseases with a known epigenetic shift, such as MDS. Hypomethylating agents (HMAs), such as epigenetic modulating drugs, have been widely used in the past years as first line treatment for elderly higher-risk MDS patients; however, just half of them respond to therapy and are benefited. Rational outcome predictors following epigenetic therapy in MDS and biomarkers associated with disease relapse are of high importance to improve our efforts in developing patient-tailored clinical approaches. https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/24/16069?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[ethanskinnerthefatboygainer]

An idea I've had in regards to gaining. Part 1 - tagged #idea_0

I’ve noticed something about a particular sect of gaining, the extreme weight gain feeders often desire stupidity in those they call “their pigs”. In their literature they often fixate on the hypothetical “pigs” losing their minds to the throes of extreme overindulgence. They seem to take joy in the destruction of intelligence. I find it completely abhorrent. It is absolutely irresponsible to let a tool as potent as the human brain go to waste. Even small cultures of neural cells can be used to create a simple neural network that, while somewhat less accurate than a conventional digital AI, can reach functionality earlier I believe that the advances in the technologies behind the newly emerging brain interfaces and VR optic technologies will allow mankind to prosper by granting humanity the ability to use their neurological tissue to directly control machines and ultimately become part of a network infrastructure. Some of you may already see some of the applications to this technology, but only focusing on the “tantalizing” idea of any fat person being able to order McDonalds on a whim. This is uninspired, unimaginative, unprofitable, and above all else boring. Using this technology to simply spend money faster is such a small minded application. Given this assertion, one may be wondering why I brought up these technologies in the first place and what I intend to propose. The ultimate feeder is not a man but a machine, the very concept of automation (most feedees simply want companionship and some feeders take advantage of this to impose their possessive desires upon someone else). I personally like to have a life outside of getting fat, I even like to lose weight on occasion to either experience something different or to experience the weight gain all over again, I have many aspirations that more than completely eclipse my occasional impulses to stuff my face- they consume those impulses and can halt them in their tracks. What of those who wish to go all the way? What of those whose sole desire is to grow large and fat? They could use these technologies to simply order them food every time their brain registers hunger, but I find this to be just as inefficient as ordering from one’s phone- and as I’ve said before this is unprofitable. This is where sadistic feeders and their vicious opportunism strike, offering to support the gainer for their absolute cooperation- absolutely disgusting. These degenerates are pretenders, ambush predators with bravado. In truth those malicious feeders are simply (and quite ironically) a cattle-race, they are expendable and interchangeable. All they do is provide food and resources, something many other feeders would be willing to do. Sometimes they are such parasites that they use videos of “their pigs” to fund the acquisition of resources while pretending that the gainer isn’t doing anything but eating and being a drain on their fiscal well-being. They want “their pigs” dumb, because then they won’t realize how valuable they are to the dynamic.

[maxksx]

Nick Land: (Digression on Horror: If today belongs to terror, tomorrow and eternity belong to horror. When an apparent agency arrives at its zone of non-existence horror irrupts, activating the phobic mechanisms of an entire organic lineage. In relation to this reaction the concept of horror might be dissociated on an intensive spectrum: from ‘hot’ meat- reflex revulsion condensed upon threatened boundaries, to ‘cold’ thanatonic affect fusing into the anorganic plane. Horror films typically trigger recollections of zero-fusional ecstasies associated with body panic, catatonic fugues cut violently with accelerated heart-rate and other somatic emergency signals. When a creature encounters the terminus of its own possibility it recoils in horror, but the entire horror genre – the horror industry – relies on the fact that it does not simply recoil. This in part accounts for the pulp-genre convention that makes horror the demonic destination of lust, a sub-organic tropism to the utterly alien – compared to which any anthropomorphic ‘libido’ is a restriction. (Mother of Abominations!) It also suggests that the truth of horror is drawn from the Thing itself, especially from its antipathy to every aspect of local, specific, or familiar modes of organization. These features make of horror an avatar of the Outside.) ključ RŠ  Nick Land: The difference between parasitism and symbiosis is very slippery, as you suggest. Merely contributing to stability can be construed as a cooperative function, whilst at the other pole the recent movie Parasite Eve anticipates a mitochondrial insurgency – triggered at a threshold of biomolecular science – that unmasks the ‘symbiotic’ mitochondria as strategic parasites. The trend of the Parasite Eve story is to dismantle apparent agencies into ‘deep biopolitics’ or interphyletic collisions. The refrain ‘I waited so long for you’ slides from human lyricism into microbial megatrategy, spanning aeons yet dissociated entirely amongst a diffuse distribution of bioparticles (and patently subverting the story’s romantic resolution). Despite genre differences, GAS seems to exhibit features of Parasite Eve. Both interconnect with Pest, or meltdown-plague, since they conceive strategy as an emergent wave arising out of tactical multiplicities and their ‘coincidences,’ propagating as a hypermutative virus. R. Negarestani: Militant tactical lines as intensity-probes need surfaces and dimensions to flow, conflict and run over each other – Follow their chemical attractions for surface integral, vector fields, surface modifications and 'flux = p/a' (where p is power and a is the representation of surface and dimensionality) – ... the work-ground of tactics is solidus in circulation or solidity through the slope process i.e. Pseudo-flux (See the conversation with Mehrdad Iravanian on Solidus in circulation and its surplus value: solidity ) whose oversimplified mode is that we may call monolithism, rigidity, masculinity or the body of despot. Solidus in circulation propels flows to stream through its metrons, slopes, dimensions, signifying processes and phantom surfaces, unfolding them through streams of fertilization and cultivation ... or the architectonic sphere ... or when the flux surges as the sedimentation processes (fluvial / alluvial) that is to say never-ending dynamism of consolidation processes by means of the sediments in the flux – unsettled sediments – which are distributed all over the unbounded horizon of solidus in circulation and ground to maintain the survival of solidity in an over-cultivated circulation (sediment process as an ever-modernizing process of solidity). Once flowing sedimentation process – working as a dynamic fertilizer and cultivator of solidity – arrives as disguised crisscrossing tides and flows, it genetically embodies (as of assemblages in Genesis) the terrains (terrenus) of solidity or the lattice-works of the sediments (Lands, territories, frontiers, boundaries, terra firma, plain of alluvium, ...) on which the militant (conflictual lines) tactical influxes / outfluxes are disseminated. What could be more efficiently bound to the circulatory hunger of solidity than a vein full of hot streaming manure, than the maneuvering lines investing ground with more slopes and complex fertilizing / irrigating architectures, than non-linear sedimentation and the desertificative (over-cultivating) emissions of fertilizer through the pseudo-fluxes of solidus in circulation (Dynamic sedimentation process is a post-industrial representation for introduction of phallo-erective materials – solids – to everything through the slope- flux, through the pseudo-flux of solidity)? However, there is a fatal twist in the whole panorama that also lies at the heart of Paranoia: all these frantic hungers for never-ending consolidations, filling-in / hollowing-out processes, furious transportations, dynamic sediments and facing processes (white walling / black holing) or the 'republic state of solid and void' (as Plato's Cave: the commonwealth of solid and void as the backbone economy of solidus in circulation) induce an excessive scarring process over the face of solidity ... scaring process (excessive and avert investments of solid and void) lies at the heart of paranoia, the face, the commonwealth of solid and void. 'Scarring process in excess' (auto- collapse of tissue ... fibrosis) germinates moldering infestations of solid and void, verminated depositions, desolated residua of slimed architectures and finally the fibroproliferative mess of rotting lands, tissues, faces, organs and membranes, lost their connective (regulative) tissues and economical nexuses to an epidemic openness (as what you discussed in the depths of biopolitics: the zero-genetic contagia of the interphyletic collisions) as an epidemic, the plague. Fibroproliferation or delirial scarring is triggered automatically in the hunger for the new networks and consolidation processes of solid and void and facing processes (a plague from within and from without), spreading septic, desolated and basically ill compositions of 'solid / void' in a zero-health manner. Fibroproliferation or delirial scarring is imminent to face, sur- face, consolidation, sedimentation process, all healing processes through solidity (Scar is the horror of healing process.) and militant tactical lines; subverting solidity (not through eradication) by activating the loathsome machinery of 'becoming corpse' or where solidity is not purged or introduced to Zero (S=0) but becomes a corpse necrotized by diabolic scarring (S/0), with the defunct dimensions and rotting compositions of solid and void, that is to say, it becomes an unground (ungrund) of mutations, pest technology, Druj's avatars (Mother of Abominations) and a black earth (the New Earth?). This fibroproliferative mess is the swarming multiplicities of terminal tactics from which (as you discussed) a miasmatic plague called strategy rises without genesis. Terminal tactics, terminal lines of multiplicities or black intensities are germinated on the corpse-of-solidus (necrotized solidity) where all attributes, ingredients and modifications of surfaces, metrons, the economical nexuses and dimensionalities (f = p/a) have been messed up under the machinery of fibroproliferation. ... And solidus is overrun by the defacing worms. Corpse of solidus – ungrounded by Anonymous until Now i.e. imperfectable mess – is a good meal for black intensities (terminal tactic). Jungle war, Parasite Eve, Terminal tactics, Strategy and Pest all infect with the horror of Anonymous Until Now or '...' without Genesis (Thing?). Nano-attack has been infested with such an anonymous GAS or unground; each nanite is a tank full of nuclear nihilism, a perforating machine for messing with dimensions instead of challenging them, conflicting or running across them. The nano-attack is the attack of imperceptible; to become imperceptible is to commence a nano-attack. In the wake of such a war (imperceptible war or the war of imperceptible?) how do you see our classic discourses over peace, terror, solidity, masculinity, even nomad war-machines and the New Earth (Deleuze)? R. Negarestani: (from the conversation with Nick Land ... on meltdown, Chernobyl and sarcophagus: "Metallurgical Transmutation of Plants into Iron") "An ancient ruin rises up to reinvent destruction." (Tunnel, W.H. Gass) Paranoid cultures and their artifacts always leave security leaks; they breed more holes and more solids than everyone; neither all these augment nor purge the solidus and grund but leave them as the corpses necrotized by heavy scarring (fibroproliferative mess ) or the chaotic investments of solid and void, entangling to anonymous compositions: ... hole ... solid ... hole ... solid ... solid ... hole ... hole ... hole ... de- faced. Ground is left as the corpse-of-solidus (a cryptogenic intensity), ready to be proliferated, to be putrefied and engineered as mess. Putrefaction is the valor of transmutation. Although the sarcophagus (as in Chernobyl or an ancient death-raum) seems to be an architecture of entombment and surface modification, a metron for dimensioning, localizing and restricting horror (and transforming it to terror), but its fatal architecture is the architecture of excavation and exhumation (it always summons the exhuming forces to itself), messing up surfaces and necrophilia, a snuffed architecture for necrophilic engineers, bringing a terminal contamination cryptogenic between 'arrival and emergence' (your suggested one), ascent and descent so the architecture of collapse into Anonymous-until-Now. Sarcophagus brings the architectonic energy (of solidus) of liveware to an ex-architectural dump: laying waste, rotting erect, oozing pores. "Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl" (Howard Philip Lovecraft) R. Negarestani: Referring to your argument about a crashed car; what do you think about the architectural aspects of a crash and particularly a car crash? Mehrdad Iravanian: Crash is a final stage of producing chain. The realization of exaggerated components and departments. Somehow, it seems the crash product is an error or contradictory to the established aim; since it cannot fulfil the primary program but the object is capable of reprogramming according to the new status. It is not an automobile (as soon as it stops running) but rather a composition of elements. We are usually reprogramming the buildings.... A crashed car is under the title of rehabilitation; it means a program after an actual event. The architectural analysis of the car totally depends on the type of crash and consequently the type of product that comes out of the crash.

When I am pointing to the crash as an entity, I compare the matter with the relativity theory and the subject of an observational entity which is based on coincidence of two or more point-objects at a particular instance of time. Somehow, these definitions remind me of the effective and necessary elements for happening the so-called crash; that is time, space, points, line, and surfaces collide in a very particular and exclusive manner which (by present dimension of analytical ability counted obscure and untraceable) contributes a unique behaviour each single time to a crash object’s elements. After a crash many dynamic elements appear that won’t follow the known linear movement; so many parts broken and live in a suspense situation that can move naturally by means of turbulence. So the crash is not the end of flexural movement but could be the beginning of different types of none linear operandums. An automobile cannot impose any location prior to that moment. It loses its linear movement. As soon as it stops, it’s not more than a crash machine: a mere composition that can simulate a building, a hole, a cave, an anchor object.

https://rhizzone.net/articles/complicity-anonymous-materials/

[leghorn]

hey so I thought id post the list of web resources my college provides for Agriculture students in case anybody is interested in learning more about agriculture and are looking for organizations/sources. 

Global Resources

CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security Organization that addresses the increasing challenge of global warming and declining food security on agricultural practices, policies and measures.

Community Agroecology Network Mission: to sustain rural livelihoods and environments by integrating research, education and trade innovations to ensure a global economy where people, healthy food systems, and the environment come first.

International Society of Organic Agriculture Research Promotes and supports research in all areas of Organic Agriculture by facilitating global cooperation in research, methodological development, education, and knowledge exchange.

Slow Food International Global, grassroots organization founded to prevent the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions.

Worldwatch Institute This organization works to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world that meets human needs.

______________________

Nationwide Resources

Center for Integrated Agricultural SystemsLearn and educate others about integrated farming systems that can contribute to environmental, economic, social, and inter-generational sustainability.

Ecological Farming AssociationNurture safe, healthy, just, and ecologically sustainable farms, food systems, and communities by providing education, alliance building, and advocacy.

Nourish An educational initiative designed to open a meaningful conversation about food, health, and sustainability.

Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (SARE)To advance innovations that improve profitability, stewardship, and quality of life in agriculture.

Sustainable Agriculture Education Assocation (SAEA)Promoting the teaching and learning of environmentally sound, economically viable, socially responsible, non-exploitative, and humane systems.

Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE)Revitalizes sustainable urban-edge agriculture, fosters healthy local and regional food systems, and connects diverse urban communities with the people and places that grow their food.

ATTRA Sustainable Agriculture Program Committed to providing high value information and technical assistance to farmers, ranchers, Extension agents, educators and others involved in sustainable agriculture. Offers many free publications on a wide variety of topics. 

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Texas Resources

Agencies

Texas Department of AgricultureEnsures the integrity of organic agriculture products in Texas through certification and regulation.

Find out more about obtaining your Organic Certification.

Education

Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Provides educational opportunities about agriculture through 250 county Extension offices and 900 professional educators in Texas.

Aggie Horticulture Provides factsheets, guides, and databases about horticultural crop production in Texas.

Soil, Water and Forage Testing Laboratory Provides research based analysis and non-bias recommendations of soil analysis, plant tissue analysis, forage nutritive analysis, and non-drinking water. Housed in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences.

Associations/Organizations

Texas Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association Supports Texas producers of organic and sustainable food through educational and marketing support.

Farm-1-1 A community based organization providing a network of tools, equipment, expertise and volunteer labor to beginning farmers.

Sustainable Urban Agriculture and Community Garden Program (SUACG) Established by the Austin City Council, established to streamline the process for establishing community gardens and sustainable agriculture on city land.

Urban Patchwork Neighborhood Farms A large network of people working to turn private and public space into productive gardens, farms, educational spaces and activity centers.

[tinyshe]

SCIENCEDAILY: MIND & BODY

Novel small molecule potently attenuates neuroinflammation in brain and glial cells

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 04:11 PM PDT

In a preclinical study show that their small molecule drug, SRI-42127, can potently attenuate the triggers of neuroinflammation. These experiments in glial cell cultures and mice now open the door to testing SRI-42127 in models of acute and chronic neurological injury.

Mapping words to colors

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 12:33 PM PDT

While the range of colors your eyes may perceive extends beyond the words language provides, languages around the globe are remarkably similar in how they partition the space of colors into a vocabulary. Yet differences exist. In a study examining 130 diverse languages around the world, researchers developed an algorithm to infer the communicative needs that different linguistic communities place on colors.

Decoding birds’ brain signals into syllables of song

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 12:33 PM PDT

Researchers can predict what syllables a bird will sing -- and when it will sing them -- by reading electrical signals in its brain, reports a new study. The work is an early step toward building vocal prostheses for humans who have lost the ability to speak.

How tactile vibrations create illusions

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 08:56 AM PDT

Among the traditional five human senses, touch is perhaps the least studied. Yet, it is solicited everywhere, all the time, and even more so in recent years with the widespread daily use of electronic devices that emit vibrations. Indeed, any moving object transmits oscillatory signals that propagate through solid substrates. Our body detects them by means of mechanoreceptors located below the skin and transmits the information to the brain similarly to auditory, olfactory or visual stimuli. By studying how mice and humans perceive tactile vibrations, researchers discovered that the brain does not reliably perceive the frequency of a vibration when its amplitude varies. An illusory phenomenon is thereby created, which highlights how far our perception of the world around us can deviate from its physical reality.

Child abuse and neglect linked to early death in adulthood

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 08:56 AM PDT

A new study found that adults who reported experiencing sexual abuse by the age of 16 had a 2.6 times higher risk of dying in middle age -- that is, between 45 and 58 -- than those who did not report sexual abuse.

Adjusting fatty acid intake may help with mood variability in bipolar disorders

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 08:56 AM PDT

Can specific dietary guidelines help people living with bipolar disorders better manage their health? Clinical trial results showed that a diet designed to alter levels of specific fatty acids consumed by participants may help patients have less variability in their mood.

Therapy using dual immune system cells effectively controls neuroblastoma

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 08:56 AM PDT

A newly developed immunotherapy that simultaneously uses modified immune-fighting cells to home in on and attack two antigens, or foreign substances, on cancer cells was highly effective in mice implanted with human neuroblastoma tissue.

Infection hinders blood vessel repair following traumatic brain or cerebrovascular injuries

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 08:55 AM PDT

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and other injuries to blood vessels in the brain, like stroke, are a leading cause of long-term disability or death. Researchers have found a possible explanation for why some patients recover much more poorly from brain injury if they later become infected.

Insulin resistance doubles risk of major depressive disorder

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 05:29 AM PDT

Scientists have linked insulin resistance to an increased risk of developing major depressive disorder.

Different types of cancers are likely to spread to specific areas of the brain

Posted: 23 Sep 2021 05:29 AM PDT

Brain metastasis occurs when cancer in one part of the body spreads to the brain. The lifetime incidence of such metastatic brain tumors in cancer patients is between 20%-45%, research shows.

New avenue for study of diseases like multiple sclerosis

Posted: 22 Sep 2021 03:15 PM PDT

A surprising discovery may offer a promising new direction in the study of multiple sclerosis and other diseases of hypomyelination -- when axons of neurons are not covered sufficiently in fatty sheaths (myelin), which disrupts communication between nerve cells.

How do migraines affect the sleep cycle?

Posted: 22 Sep 2021 01:06 PM PDT

Adults and children with migraines may get less quality, REM sleep time than people who don't have migraines. That's according to a meta-analysis. Children with migraines were also found to get less total sleep time than their healthy peers but took less time to fall asleep.

Adults with neurologic conditions more likely to have experienced childhood trauma

Posted: 22 Sep 2021 01:06 PM PDT

Adults with neurologic conditions are more likely than the general population to have had adverse childhood experiences such as abuse, neglect or household dysfunction, according to a new study. The study does not prove that neurologic conditions are caused by such experiences. It only shows an association between the two.

Immune cells in the brain share the work

Posted: 22 Sep 2021 10:30 AM PDT

To break down toxic proteins more quickly, immune cells in the brain can join together to form networks when needed. However, in certain mutations that can cause Parkinson's disease, this cooperation is impaired

[themedicalstate]

How Groups of Cells Cooperate to Build Organs and Organisms

By Michael Levin. Top image: STOCK.COM, LUCKYSTEP48. Infographic: © N.R. FULLER, SAYO-ART, LLC.

Efforts to use regenerative medicine—which seeks to address ailments as diverse as birth defects, traumatic injury, aging, degenerative disease, and the disorganized growth of cancer—would be greatly aided by solving one fundamental puzzle: How do cellular collectives orchestrate the building of complex, three-dimensional structures?

While genomes predictably encode the proteins present in cells, a simple molecular parts list does not tell us enough about the anatomical layout or regenerative potential of the body that the cells will work to construct. Genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy, and genome editing is fundamentally limited by the fact that it’s very hard to infer which genes to tweak, and how, to achieve desired complex anatomical outcomes. Similarly, stem cells generate the building blocks of organs, but the ability to organize specific cell types into a working human hand or eye has been and will be beyond the grasp of direct manipulation for a very long time.

But researchers working in the fields of synthetic morphology and regenerative biophysics are beginning to understand the rules governing the plasticity of organ growth and repair. Rather than micromanaging tasks that are too complex to implement directly at the cellular or molecular level, what if we solved the mystery of how groups of cells cooperate to construct specific multicellular bodies during embryogenesis and regeneration? Perhaps then we could figure out how to motivate cell collectives to build whatever anatomical features we want.

New approaches now allow us to target the processes that implement anatomical decision-making without genetic engineering. In January, using such tools, crafted in my lab at Tufts University’s Allen Discovery Center and by computer scientists in Josh Bongard’s lab at the University of Vermont, we were able to create novel living machines, artificial bodies with morphologies and behaviors completely different from the default anatomy of the frog species (Xenopus laevis) whose cells we used. These cells rebooted their multicellularity into a new form, without genomic changes. This represents an extremely exciting sandbox in which bioengineers can play, with the aim of decoding the logic of anatomical and behavioral control, as well as understanding the plasticity of cells and the relationship of genomes to anatomies.

Deciphering how an organism puts itself together is truly an interdisciplinary undertaking. Resolving the whole picture will involve understanding not only the mechanisms by which cells operate, but also elucidating the computations that cells and groups of cells carry out to orchestrate tissue and organ construction on a whole-body scale. The next generation of advances in this area of research will emerge from the flow of ideas between computer scientists and biologists. Unlocking the full potential of regenerative medicine will require biology to take the journey computer science has already taken, from focusing on the hardware—the proteins and biochemical pathways that carry out cellular operations—to the physiological software that enables networks of cells to acquire, store, and act on information about organ and indeed whole-body geometry.

In the computer world, this transition from rewiring hardware to reprogramming the information flow by changing the inputs gave rise to the information technology revolution. This shift of perspective could transform biology, allowing scientists to achieve the still-futuristic visions of regenerative medicine. An understanding of how independent, competent agents such as cells cooperate and compete toward robust outcomes, despite noise and changing environmental conditions, would also inform engineering. Swarm robotics, Internet of Things, and even the development of general artificial intelligence will all be enriched by the ability to read out and set the anatomical states toward which cell collectives build, because they share a fundamental underlying problem: how to control the emergent outcomes of systems composed of many interacting units or individuals.

(Re)Building a body

Many types of embryos can regenerate entirely if cut in half, and some species are proficient regenerators as adults. Axolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum) regenerate their limbs, eyes, spinal cords, jaws, and portions of the brain throughout life. Planarian flatworms (class Turbellaria), meanwhile, can regrow absolutely any part of their body; when the animal is cut into pieces, each piece knows exactly what’s missing and regenerates to be a perfect, tiny worm.

The remarkable thing is not simply that growth begins after wounding and that various cell types are generated, but that these bodies will grow and remodel until a correct anatomy is complete, and then they stop. How does the system identify the correct target morphology, orchestrate individual cell behaviors to get there, and determine when the job is done? How does it communicate this information to control underlying cell activities?  

Several years ago, my lab found that Xenopus tadpoles with their facial organs experimentally mixed up into incorrect positions still have largely normal faces once they’ve matured, as the organs move and remodel through unnatural paths. Last year, a colleague at Tufts came to a similar conclusion: the Xenopus genome does not encode a hardwired set of instructions for the movements of different organs during metamorphosis from tadpole to frog, but rather encodes molecular hardware that executes a kind of “error minimization loop,” comparing the current anatomy to the target frog morphology and working to progressively reduce the difference between them. Once a rough spatial specification of the layout is achieved, that triggers the cessation of further remodeling.

The deep puzzle of how competent agents such as cells work together to pursue goals such as building, remodeling, or repairing a complex organ to a predetermined spec is well illustrated by planaria. Despite having a mechanistic understanding of stem cell specification pathways and axial chemical gradients, scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head. It is also unknown how planaria perfectly regenerate the same anatomy, even as their genomes have accrued mutations over eons of somatic inheritance. Because some species of planaria reproduce by fission and regeneration, any mutation that doesn’t kill the neoblast—the adult stem cell that gives rise to cells that regenerate new tissue—is propagated to the next generation. The worm’s incredibly messy genome shows evidence of this process, and cells in an individual planarian can have different numbers of chromosomes. Still, fragmented planaria regenerate their body shape with nearly 100 percent anatomical fidelity.

So how do cell groups encode the patterns they build, and how do they know to stop once a target anatomy is achieved? What would happen, for example, if neoblasts from a planarian species with a flat head were transplanted into a worm of a species with a round or triangular head that had the head amputated? Which shape would result from this heterogeneous mixture? To date, none of the high-resolution molecular genetic studies of planaria give any prediction for the results of this experiment, because so far they have all focused on the cellular hardware, not on the logic of the software—implemented by chemical, mechanical, and electrical signaling among cells—that controls large-scale outcomes and enables remodeling to stop when a specific morphology has been achieved.

Understanding how cells and tissues make real-time anatomical decisions is central not only to achieving regenerative outcomes too complex for us to manage directly, but also to solving problems such as cancer. While the view of cancer as a genetic disorder still largely drives clinical approaches, recent literature supports a view of cancer as cells simply not being able to receive the physiological signals that maintain the normally tight controls of anatomical homeostasis. Cut off from these patterning cues, individual cells revert to their ancient unicellular lifestyle and treat the rest of the body as external environment, often to ruinous effect. If we understand the mechanisms that scale single-cell homeostatic setpoints into tissue- and organ-level anatomical goal states and the conditions under which the anatomical error reduction control loop breaks down, we may be able to provide stimuli to gain control of rogue cancer cells without either gene therapy or chemotherapy.

Bioelectrical software: Beyond the brain

The software of life, which exploits the laws of physics and computation, is enabled by chemical, mechanical, and electrical signaling across cellular networks. While the chemical and mechanical mechanisms of morphogenesis have long been appreciated by molecular and cell biologists, the role of electrical signaling has largely been overlooked. But the same reprogrammability of neural circuits in the brain that supports learning, memory, and behavioral plasticity applies to all cells, not just neurons. Indeed, bacterial colonies can communicate via ionic currents, with recent research revealing brain-like dynamics in which information is propagated across and stored in a kind of proto-body formed by bacterial biofilms. So it should really come as no surprise that bioelectric signaling is a highly tractable component of morphological outcomes in multicellular organisms.

A few years ago, we studied the electrical dynamics that normally set the size and borders of the nascent Xenopus brain, and built a computer model of this process to shed light on how a range of various brain defects arise from disruptions to this bioelectric signaling. Our model suggested that specific modifications with mRNA or small molecules could restore the endogenous bioelectric patterns back to their correct layout. By using our computational platform to select drugs to open existing ion channels in nascent neural tissue or even a remote body tissue, we were able to prevent and even reverse brain defects caused not only by chemical teratogens—compounds that disrupt embryonic development—but by mutations in key neurogenesis genes.

Similarly, we used optogenetics to stimulate electrical activity in various somatic cell types to trigger regeneration of an entire tadpole tail—an appendage with spinal cord, muscle, and peripheral innervation—and to normalize the behavior of cancer cells in tadpoles strongly expressing human oncogenes such as KRAS mutations. We used a similar approach to trigger posterior regions, such as the gut, to build an entire frog eye. In both the eye and tail cases, the information on how exactly to build these complex structures, and where all the cells should go, did not have to be specified by the experimenter; rather, they arose from the cells themselves. Such findings reveal how ion channel mutations result in numerous human developmental channelopathies, and provide a roadmap for how they may be treated by altering the bioelectric map that tells cells what to build.  

We also recently found a striking example of such reprogrammable bioelectrical software in control of regeneration in planaria. In 2011, we discovered that an endogenous electric circuit establishes a pattern of depolarization and hyperpolarization in planarian fragments that regulate the orientation of the anterior-posterior axis to be rebuilt. Last year, we discovered that this circuit controls the gene expression needed to build a head or tail within six hours of amputation, and by using molecules that make cell membranes permeable to certain ions to depolarize or hyperpolarize cells, we induced fragments of such worms to give rise to a symmetrical two-headed form, despite their wildtype genomes. Even more shockingly, the worms continued to generate two-headed progeny in additional rounds of cutting with no further manipulation. In further experiments, we demonstrated that briefly reducing gap junction-mediated connectivity between adjacent cells in the bioelectric network that guides regeneration led worms to regenerate head and brain shapes appropriate to other worm species whose lineages split more than 100 million years ago.

My group has developed the use of voltage-sensitive dyes to visualize the bioelectric pattern memory that guides gene expression and cell behavior toward morphogenetic outcomes. Meanwhile, my Allen Center colleagues are using synthetic artificial electric tissues made of human cells and computer models of ion channel activity to understand how electrical dynamics across groups of non-neural cells can set up the voltage patterns that control downstream gene expression, distribution of morphogen molecules, and cell behaviors to orchestrate morphogenesis.

The emerging picture in this field is that anatomical software is highly modular—a key property that computer scientists exploit as subroutines and that most likely contributes in large part to biological evolvability and evolutionary plasticity. A simple bioelectric state, whether produced endogenously during development or induced by an experimenter, triggers very complex redistributions of morphogens and gene expression cascades that are needed to build various anatomies. The information stored in the body’s bioelectric circuits can be permanently rewritten once we understand the dynamics of the biophysical circuits that make the critical morphological decisions. This permanent editing of the encoded target morphology without genomic editing reveals a new kind of epigenetics, information that is stored in a medium other than DNA sequences and chromatin.

Synthetic living machines and beyond

Cells can clearly build structures that are different from their genomic-default anatomical outcomes. But are cells universal constructors? Could they make anything if only we knew how to motivate them to do it?  

The most recent advances in the new field at the intersection of developmental biology and computer science are driven by synthetic living machines known as biobots. Built from multiple interacting cell populations, these engineered machines have applications in disease modeling and drug development, and as sensors that detect and respond to biological signals. We recently tested the plasticity of cells by evolving in silico designs with specific movement and behavior capabilities and used this information to sculpt self-organized growth of aggregated Xenopus skin and muscle cells. In a novel environment—in vitro, as opposed to inside a frog embryo—swarms of genetically normal cells were able to reimagine their multicellular form. With minimal sculpting post self-assembly, these cells form “Xenobots” with structures, movements, and other behaviors quite different from what might be expected if one simply sequenced their genome and identified them as wildtype X. laevis.

These living creations are a powerful platform to assess and model the computations that these cell swarms use to determine what to build. Such insights will help us to understand evolvability of body forms, robustness, and the true relationship between genomes and anatomy, greatly potentiating the impact of genome editing tools and making genomics more predictive for large-scale phenotypes. Moreover, testing regimes of biochemical, biomechanical, and bioelectrical stimuli in these biobots will enable the discovery of optimal stimuli for use in regenerative therapies and bioengineered organ construction. Finally, learning to program highly competent individual builders (cells) toward group-level, goal-driven behaviors (complex anatomies) will significantly advance swarm robotics and help avoid catastrophes of unintended consequences during the inevitable deployment of large numbers of artificial agents with complex behaviors.

The emerging field of synthetic morphology emphasizes a conceptual point that has been embraced by computer scientists but thus far resisted by biologists: the hardware-software distinction. In the 1940s, to change a computer’s behavior, the operator had to literally move wires around—in other words, she had to directly alter the hardware. The information technology revolution resulted from the realization that certain kinds of hardware are reprogrammable: drastic changes in function could be made at the software level, by changing inputs, not the hardware itself.

In molecular biomedicine, we are still focused largely on manipulating the cellular hardware—the proteins that each cell can exploit. But evolution has ensured that cellular collectives use this versatile machinery to process information flexibly and implement a wide range of large-scale body shape outcomes. This is biology’s software: the memory, plasticity, and reprogrammability of morphogenetic control networks.

The coming decades will be an extremely exciting time for multidisciplinary efforts in developmental physiology, robotics, and basal cognition to understand how individual cells merge together into a collective with global goals not belonging to any individual cell. This will drive the creation of new artificial intelligence platforms based not on copying brain architectures, but on the multiscale problem-solving capacities of cells and tissues. Conversely, the insights of cognitive neurobiology and computer science will give us a completely new window on the information processing and decision-making dynamics in cellular collectives that can very effectively be targeted for transformative regenerative therapies of complex organs.

[atlasobscurarp]

Technology

Robotics

In 2571, the world has evolved past virtual assistants to automatons that exist in various forms to execute unique and individual functions. Most are employed for menial, repetitive tasks, but almost all are outfitted with state-of-the-art machine learning that allows them to serve as companions and assistants across a number of professional fields. These bots or droids offer direct access to the colony’s database and digital networks, and in any given situation, they may operate vehicles remotely, act as navigational guides, and perform designated, pre-programmed actions. Depending on their make and model, some may be equipped with face modules that display ideograms or emojis and may adapt overtime to develop individualized personalities. Most are manufactured to be compact and portable in size, capable of independent movement through the use of sensors. At this time, advances in robotics have not progressed to androids or human-like artificial intelligence.

Portal

The Annulus was first discovered by a research facility at Astralis Corp. The largest particle accelerator in the world was fed enough energy to blackout an entire urban city. The objective: to stabilize a wormhole that would potentially allow near-instantaneous travel through space or time. Years of probing eventually ascertained the exact location of the arrival point—a habitable world with an atmospheric makeup to sustain human life.

The portal provides one-way access and remains highly unstable without a massive energy source equivalent to a quadrillion BTU (more than the energy consumption of the United States per day). Each pilgrimage requires years of preparation, recalibrations and cooperation on a global level to fund and fuel the venture.

Communication

With satellites and relay stations in place, on-world communication is instant including both video and audio feeds. Speed of data exchange depends only on radio signals that have been built to offer planet-wide coverage but may be disrupted by solar or electrical events. Off-world contact is limited to short form, text-based communication, often encrypted and funneled through the orbiting Comms station where manned personnel oversee all outbound and inbound data streams. Messages may take days to be relayed and decrypted depending on packet sizes and are, therefore, required to be brief.

Communication devices largely resemble those of the twenty-first century i.e. smartphones and portable personal computers that come in various screen sizes. They’re the manner in which citizens use and access Credits, the currency used across the colony and Earth. They’re linked to identification information and personal data through retinal scan, the primary method of authentication across the colony.

Ancient Technology

In the wake of the first pilgrimage, it became evident that humans were not the first to settle Izanagi: the planet was littered with mysterious ruins of a bygone spacefaring civilization. Artifacts proliferated the planet’s strata, as no matter where the colonists constructed their buildings, they would inevitably excavate numerous relics and fragments of ancient technology left by the planet’s previous inhabitants.

It was only natural that the researchers of the first pilgrimage began to study these ancient remnants. They found the technology was far more advanced than anything humans had ever developed, and that they were theoretically still operational. Schematic documentation showed the ancient tech was powered by a network of undetermined energy channels that flowed within the planet’s surface. Such channels have since been further charted, with ongoing experiments to enable the colony to siphon and convert the channels into a reliable energy source.

Within the past seventy years, the study of this ancient technology has yielded unprecedented technological progress for humans. Communications, aerospace transportation, and energy technology have especially benefited from the insights discovered by major research projects. Such focus areas have historically dominated the research efforts in the colony, but with the arrival of more specialists in later pilgrimages, researchers have implemented branching minor studies on a variety of topics (e.g. textiles, biofuels, pharmaceuticals, and explosives).

Vehicles

Vehicles for personal use are largely unheard of beyond carbon-neutral motorized bicycles. Transportation across the colony consists of rovers utilized by peacekeepers and for scouting or exploration purposes. Most space-faring ships fall under the jurisdiction of Project Horizon, but barges and transport ships are also operated by civilians for the purposes of resupplying manned satellites and the lunar outpost. A railway system remains in construction but is a large, long term project.

Medical

Medical technology has continued to make advances into the twenty-sixth century with miraculous strides in organ transplants and human prosthetics. Newly patented synthetic polymers are capable of mimicking the sensory and motor function of organic tissue, eliminating many of the setbacks of the early millennia. On Earth, however, healthcare is a commodity that is not easily accessible to all, and seeking treatment can quickly eat away at livelihoods and plunge families into debt. While Gemini colony aims to avoid privatized systems as a means of accessing public services, their resources are not infinite, nor is the colony equipped for large-scale medical crises.

Weapons

Access to weaponry is limited to peacekeepers and explorer subdivisions on active duty, and most are locked to nonlethal settings. Stun phasers that use high-energy projectiles can incapacitate potential aggressors, but each individual weapon is tracked and must be accounted for. Weapons smuggled into the colony may come in various shapes—old school firearms in lightweight alloys or modern day phasers.

[starsailorstories]

So! Given, uh, everything, any chance you could talk about how various Astraea cultures deal with sicknesses and quarantine? Especially since some (especially Bell Town) are extremely or entirely genetically identical, and so more at risk?

Also, how would the cast members react to self isolation and social distancing?

FIRST OFF, sorry this took 10 years to answer, I was super busy and there’s kind of A Lot Of Spec Bio to discuss here

Also, this question made me feel very Seen lol…why yes i DO use worldbuilding as a coping mechanism for the stress of watching the wet tissue paper my country calls a social safety net dissolve

Most sickness that astraeas deal with day to day isn’t actually contagious*, but more a result of individual reaction to the environment (in terms of public health response, think seasonal allergies, although physiologically speaking it’s nothing like that). Communicable, infectious disease tends to be a less frequent problem but purely for that reason is more feared, especially as the most common source for novel diseases is interplanetary shipping (like, astraeas on one planet who have immunity to something unknowingly ship contaminated goods to another planet where people don’t). All that is nowhere near as devastating as it could be in a human context–for one thing astraeas’ bodies are hella dry compared to ours, so if a microbe isn’t airborne it’s almost a non-issue (on the other hand, infection is almost a guarantee if you have an open wound)–but most planets, stations and orbiters have a list of OTHER planets, stations and orbiters categorized by how long it’s been since first contact and how long shipments need to be in quarantine based on that, and that kind of thing runs the same gamut from “rigorously evidence-based” to “completely political and petty” that it does on earth.

Speaking of which, the issue of genetic similarity as a disease risk is as politicized as you’d expect in a society where people said “oh, with our genetic technology we can just design the working class to be however we want.” The Hyperians, being, you know, A Rigidly Hierarchal Interstellar Empire In A Space Opera as they are, tend to present the genetic homogeneity as sort of a good thing, what makes Us Us and Them Them, and the royal family themselves subscribe to the very historically royal (and also very eugenicist) idea that genetic “purity”–which for astraeas mostly just means having children in a very chemically controlled environment–helps keep em’ royal or something. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t it just makes hemophilia, and the more conservative Basileans minimize the environmental variance that keeps them from wiping each other out like some kind of aggressively graceful banana monocrop, the easier it is for epidemics to escalate in general because whole colonies become vectors together.

You won’t read about it in your galactic history book til after the revolution, but the dangers of genetic homogeneity were actually observed by lux units, who noticed that “variant” and “off-order” clones were a bit more likely to survive outbreaks of disease. Supervisors in clone factories have tried HARD to excise the superstition that variant units who remain un-decommissioned into adulthood are good luck to have on your cabin crew or manufacturing-plant shift, but it’s never completely gone away, and once Bell Town goes topside their medics and scientists immediately get to work testing, peer reviewing and proving the mechanics of diversity as a factor of public health because it’s a helpful argument for legitimizing their seizure of the means of their own reproduction and fighting the prejudice against “defective” lux that don’t fit the mold.

To really get into your question, Bell Town at least has the advantage of being small and having a busybody mom friend for a de facto head medic, so I don’t think they’ve ever had a quarantine situation get much bigger than four or five people just because Bolt is very up on how everyone’s doing and very very persuasive–the medics know that that’s just a matter of luck though, and I’m sure a factor in the push to go topside is the potential for tragedy involved in having a settlement of mostly/nearly genetically identical people in somewhat adverse and scarce conditions. That’s not to say there’s no plan–the shortages in Bell Town tend to be of immediately consumable raw materials, like air and fuel and very basic multi-use medicines, whereas raw materials for manufacturing specialized equipment are a lot easier to get because organized factories in DT’s network can have them smuggled out. And a majority of the town’s population, at least by vol. 2, are former manufacturing-plant labor with working radio receivers in their heads, so it’s fairly feasible to expect even a small portion of them, with an emergency push, to manufacture A Lot of vaccines, or intensive care equipment, or whatever was needed practically overnight with the direct guidance of the medics to ensure as much safety in the process as possible (they do just that with medical and defense supplies in vol. 2 for various spoilery things).

Up top, the aula’s responses to any and all large-scale social crises tend to be erratic but sweeping. There are some advantages–in terms of expertise, there are certainly things that well-paid doctors with fully equipped research hospitals can accomplish that a dedicated crack team of self-educated medics can’t, including proactive study of new strains of disease. There’s also feudal insanity–technically individual hospitals/institutions aren’t supposed to issue info without the aula’s permission, though legally local nobles can give it on the Hyperians’ behalf if they’re willing to risk Drama. The internal weirdness of the court both logistical and interpersonal (which I need to make a post about) can sometimes mean, in any emergency, that different parts of the empire receive conflicting information, or an edict followed after a day’s delay in the satellite network by a retraction. Public trust (among citizens of relative status at least) that the Hyperians know what they’re doing tends to decline exponentially as you move out from the inner Rings for this exact reason.

Derafior City on Caesura B dealt with a wave of multiple epidemics a couple hundred turns before the official rise of the empire that still affect how the city is laid out–leaders at the time issued quarantine orders in cooperation with individual colony matriarchs, and as those orders became enforced in physical “zones” neighborhood identities, reputations, and rivalries became increasingly defined (Crater culture being what it is, quarantine boundaries were often pretty literal battle lines as the situation became desperate). A lot of historians trace the factionalism of the Crater to this era, although outside imperialism was also a major instigator of both factional conflicts and disease exposure. Keep in mind too that while outsiders like to portray Derafior as violently fractured and there’s a grain of truth to that, there are just as many deep loyalties between neighborhood/colony factions as there are rivalries and as we see in vol. 3, Caesurans are certainly not allergic to closing ranks when shit really hits the fan. 

I don’t have specific canon examples from other ante-dome cultures but another thing of possible interest that I’d like to talk about is that in places touched by Basilean culture, a lot of what we consider “social distancing” is just normal because cleanliness is highly ritualized and valued. Although platonic adult friendships tend to be very cuddly by American and British standards, at the same time, hand touches between strangers outside specific social rituals are seen as quite inappropriate, so things are more thoroughly designed to prevent them–for example, most trading of goods is done purely on paper at the point of sale and nothing actually passes from hand to hand, you go get it out of the crate or pick it out of the field yourself (which is also a practicality of the relative non-ubiquity of flexible currency–and actually, one of the complaints about the use of currency among more traditional astraeas is that it spreads germs). Basically everyone who can afford it wears gloves in public, which are changed and washed every time a person re-enters her home (disposable gloves are mostly limited to medical and laboratory settings, although it’s not unheard of to use them in a pinch if you don’t have a place to launder gloves at home. Side note, if you’re translating directly Altamaian actually refers to manual labor that makes it impractical to wear gloves as “barehanded” labor and the summary conceptualization of such as unhygienic represents a MAJOR vein of classism among Basilean citizens). The reason for the glove thing is that for a species with an exoskeleton regular hand washing can be kind of involved (You know how sometimes it takes a lot of scrubbing to get the dirt out from under your fingernails? Now imagine you have fingernails all over your hands). 

Oh and to answer your second question: out of the main cast the one you’d think would suffer most with self-isolation is Bolt, but being a healthcare worker she’d still see people. Rugsy would complain the loudest but also paradoxically be secretly kind of relieved to not have to worry about People for a while. DT experiences virtually no change from her normal lifestyle lmao

*There’s two kinds of disease that can affect astraeas–what they call “miasmic”, and infectious. Miasmic disease (which as you might guess I named after the precursor to modern germ theory–it’s kind of true in this instance!) is basically when an individual’s body and light chemistry can’t maintain its normal balance in certain atmosphere conditions. A big reason for the kickoff of the artificial atmosphere industry after the settling of Altamai is that the cloud cover tends to trap a lot of carbon dioxide, and for i.e. Basillans and Sitherians (who have come to be based on G-type stars, like the sun, and K-type stars, slightly smaller and cooler than the sun) there’s just not enough hydrogen atoms in there to run their bodies optimally. This mostly affects very young children, the elderly, and those whose cores were formed in suboptimal conditions (comparable to a human who has a chronic health condition because of a birth defect) and if it can’t be remedied by a move to more hydrogen/helium rich air, it’s treated by sucking the pure hydrogen out of a water electrolysis device through a hose on the daily, which side note, is also a reliable hangover remedy for them.

[sciencespies]

How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer

https://sciencespies.com/nature/how-evolution-helps-us-understand-and-treat-cancer/

How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer

President Nixon declared the “War on Cancer” with the National Cancer Act of 1971, and in the decades since then cancer researchers have delivered new targeted therapies and immunotherapies that radically improved treatment. Even as more weapons are added to the medical arsenal, however, cancer cells find new ways to resist them.

In a provocative new book, Athena Aktipis — director of the interdisciplinary cooperation initiative at Arizona State University who studies conflict and cooperation, in a whole range of systems from human societies to cancer cells — argues that humanity may need to rethink our war on cancer by focusing not on eliminating it, but on transforming cancer from a set of deadly, acute diseases to chronic, manageable ones. She writes: “Cancer evolves, but we have the ability to anticipate that evolution and strategically plan our response. We can trick it, send it down a blind alley, sucker it into vulnerability, and shape it into something we can live with.”

Aktipis’s book, The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer, came out earlier this spring and she tells Smithsonian how taking an ecological and evolutionary approach to cancer has led to novel treatment strategies—and why cancer is a lot like the mafia.

What was the impetus for writing this book?

There was a need for a book that would explain the origins of cancer. Why is cancer something that we face as humans, and why do other organisms get cancer? People think cancer is just a modern phenomenon, but it has been around since the beginning of multicellularity. I wanted to tell the story of how evolution operates within our bodies—among our cells over the course of our lifetime—to give rise to cancer.

Cancer treatment traditionally uses high doses of toxic drugs to wipe out cancer cells. But some oncologists have started taking a different approach, inspired by integrated pest management, that seeks to control rather than eliminate. Tell us more about this approach to cancer treatment.

Imagine you have a field and you’re trying to grow crops, but there are pests. If you use high doses of chemical pesticides, then you end up selecting for the pests that can survive despite the pesticide. In cancer treatment, the approach has been to use the highest dose that can be tolerated by the patient.

With integrated pest management, by contrast, you limit the use of pesticides to try to avoid selecting for resistance. You may not get rid of the pests completely, but you can keep their population under control so they do limited harm to the crops. Adaptive cancer therapy is based on the idea that resistance is going to evolve unless we manage the evolution of the resistance itself.

Adaptive therapy is an approach pioneered by Bob Gatenby at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, who was inspired by integrated pest management approaches. The idea of it is to try to keep the tumor a manageable size and to maintain the ability to treat it with the therapy that’s being used. This is very different from hitting it with the highest dose that the patient can tolerate to make it go away, which is the traditional approach. With adaptive therapy, you’re just trying to keep the tumor at a stable size and not use so much chemotherapy that you get the evolution of resistance. It is taking a long-term time perspective and thinking about not just what’s the immediate effect of the treatment, but what’s the long-term effect on the ability to keep the tumor under control.

There are some cancers that we know are curable with high-dose therapy, and so for those, we should continue doing what works. But when it comes to advanced metastatic cancer, that is cancer that has spread from the primary tumor to other organs in the body, it is often the case that you can’t eradicate the cancer. You can’t achieve a full cure at that point. So it makes sense to change the strategy in those cases to thinking about how the patient can most effectively live with the tumor and how we can keep it from becoming more aggressive. These are important approaches as we truly integrate this evolutionary and ecological cooperation theory for cancer biology.

Breast cancer cells

(National Cancer Institute)

You call cancer cells “cheaters” because they take advantage of healthy cells without offering any benefit to the body. Why do these harmful cellular cheaters exist across the tree of life?

There’s an epic struggle between the way that evolution works on populations of organisms to help suppress cancer and then how evolution works within our bodies. In a population of organisms, the individuals that are the best at resisting cancer are favored. But within an individual body, the cells that are best at replicating and monopolizing resources—and therefore more prone to cancerous behavior—are the ones that are selected. So you have two evolutionary processes in conflict.

A complicating factor is that there can be trade-offs between suppressing cancer and other traits that might enhance your fitness, like having more rapid reproduction and growth. Wound healing is a great example. It is very clear how the same cellular characteristics can both help you heal a wound quickly and lead to susceptibility to cancer. When a wound occurs, the nearby cells need to replicate and migrate to heal the wound. In that environment, the cells in the neighborhood are temporarily more tolerant of cells that replicate and move.

That creates a vulnerability to cancer. You have this possibility that cells will replicate more quickly and move, and that they also create the signaling environment that calls off the immune system. One of the oldest ways to refer to a cancer is actually “the wound that will not heal.”

What tricks have other species evolved to resist cancer that we might be able to use to treat cancer in people?

Cancer is extremely widespread across the tree of life. Some factors seem to predict having more cancer suppression mechanisms. For example, we can think of the cancer suppression gene TP53 as the “cheater detector” of the genome. It is part of this large network that takes in information that could indicate a cell has gone rogue. If the combination of signals is not right, then TP53 triggers a response such as stopping the cell cycle to repair DNA. If that doesn’t work, it triggers cell suicide.

This gene is really important for cancer suppression in a lot of species. Elephants have 22 copies of this gene, while humans only have two. It’s not clear if all the copies in elephants are functional, but elephant cells do have more cell death in response to radiation. The more copies of TP53 your cells have, the more likely they are to undergo programmed cell suicide if they are exposed to a carcinogenic situation. The fact that elephants have more copies of TP53 is an interesting example of how large size can select for having more cancer suppression mechanisms.

In addition to cheating healthy cells, cancer cells cooperate. How can cancer treatments take advantage of this?

Cooperation is not always good. The mafia is an amazing example of cooperation to cheat. There are many parallels in cancer with the way that organized crime uses cooperation within the organization to exploit a broader system. For example, during the 1920s, members of the mafia worked together to take advantage of prohibition and began procuring and selling illegal alcohol. The fortunes that factions made doing this allowed them to dominate organized crime in their cities.

There are several potential approaches involving cell cooperation that we should be exploring more in cancer treatment. Rather than trying to just kill the cancer cells, we can try to disrupt their communication and their adhesion to one another. Those are good targets for intervening in the processes that seem to require cell cooperation, like invasion and metastasis, which are the processes by which cancer cells leave the tumor of origin, circulate in the bloodstream, then invade the tissue of a distant organ. Those invasion events are the seeds of metastases: the spread of cancer throughout the body.

#Nature

[jerseydeanne]

https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/health-and-fitness/6828342/boobs-droop-penises-shrink-but-your-earlobes-grow-the-bizarre-reasons-why-some-body-parts-get-shorter-and-others-get-longer/

Boobs droop and penises shrink but your earlobes grow: the bizarre reasons why some body parts get shorter and others get longer

Ever wondered why some people have bigger noses, longer feet and droopy earlobes? Alarmingly, it’s because some parts of our body keep getting longer while others get shorter

Tanith Carey23rd July 2018, 4:38 pmUpdated: 23rd July 2018, 6:06 pm

FROM getting wrinkles and grey hair to having droopy earlobes and big noses – the human body goes through numerous changes as we get older.

And alarmingly, although it may not be immediately obvious, over time, most of the changes the body goes through are caused by parts of our body getting either longer or shorter.

From drooping earlobes to protruding feet – here’s your guide to the long and the short of ageing.

Your boobs will drop by up to 11 cm

A woman’s breasts are held in place by a network of connective tissue called Cooper’s ligaments, which connect breast tissue and milk ducts to the skin and act like an internal bra.

These ligaments are only 2-3cm long in your twenties – but over time, gravity and excess weight can stretch them by as much as 11cms.

This process is known as ptosis and can be split into three stages.

And there’s essentially nothing we can do to stop it.

John Dixey, CEO of Playtex said: “We have no medical evidence that wearing a bra could prevent sagging, because the breast itself is not muscle so keeping it toned up is an impossibility.”

Your penis shrinks by up to 2.5 cm

And it’s bad news for the boys too – over time penises get shorter.

As we age, the arteries in the penis get clogged up with fatty deposits which impact circulation, and the collagen in the erectile tissue loses elasticity – making it harder to get erections.

Experts say this means that if a man’s erect penis is 6in long when he is in his thirties, it might be an inch – or 2.5 cms – less by the time he reaches his seventies.

Consultant urologist Zaki Almallah, who is based at Birmingham’s BMI Priory Hospital and University Hospital Birmingham says the testicles and penis can also look smaller as a man gains weight around his middle.

He told Sun Online: “A built up of excess fat in the torso can lead to part of the penis getting buried in the fat so it ends up looking smaller.”

Your shoes won’t fit you when you’re 40

You may have dainty feet like Meghan Markle – who is often pictured wearing elegant pretty shoes – but as you age, expect to need a bigger size.

Over time, your feet flatten out under the weight of your body and connective tendons and ligaments lose their elasticity and don’t hold the joints and bones together as well.

The result is when you hit 40, your foot can increase by as much as half a shoe size – about 3 to 4 mm – every ten years.

As we age, leaky veins also allow fluid to leak into the feet and ankles, making them swell.

Your nails get shorter

As we age, our nails get shorter because they grow at about a third of the rate they do when we’re young.

They grow fastest in our teens when they reach a peak of about three to four millimetres a month.

After the age of 20, the rate drops off by about 0.5 per cent a year as blood supply to the tips of the fingers becomes less efficient.

Mineral deficiencies, hormonal imbalances and some medications can also slow down their growth.

You lose your doe-eyed look

There’s a reason why you look doe-eyed when you’re younger – we’re looking at you Muggy Meg – and more beady-eyed when you get older

Just like in the rest of the body, the eye muscles lose tone and mass with age, making the pupils dilate less.

A 30-year-old has an average pupil diameter of between 6mm and 8mm, but by the age of 90, it has dropped to between 4mm and 6mm.

Your earlobes get longer

Got a pair of chunky, earrings? You may want to think twice about wearing them.

From your thirties onwards, your ear lobes get longer by an average by 0.22mm a year.

Wearing the brand new #SortaSweet palette from @kyliecosmetics, launching Thursday at 3pm pst on KylieCosmetics.com + the new coconut lip liner, available now, and Maliboo liquid lipstick

A post shared by Kris Jenner (@krisjenner) on Jun 26, 2018 at 3:39pm PDT

Kris Jenner steps up her earrings game after getting her earlobes fixed on Keeping Up With The Kardashians

Ear nose and throat surgeon Santdeep Paun, of London Bridge Hospital, says: “It’s not clear whether the lobe grows of whether it just stretches as the skin loses elasticity and then gets pulled down by gravity.”

Your nose will get half a centimetre longer

Your nose will also get longer over time  – and it will be nothing to do with how many lies you tell.

This is because the soft flexible tissue and the skin which covers it loses elasticity with age, making it look droopy.

Noses also tend to look larger because over the years, the surrounding face and cheeks lose volume, making the nose look more prominent.

One Swiss study found that if the average length of a woman’s nose is about 5cm at the age of 40, it may lengthen to around 5.5cm by the age of 90.

The length of the philtrum – the channel from the base of the nose to the upper lip –  was also found to get longer – growing from 1.8cm to just under 2cm over the same period as the face loses tone and sags.

Mr Santdeep Paun –  head of Ear Nose and Throat Medicine at London’s St Bartholemew’s Hospital  – says: “The various bits of cartilage in the nose are joined with elastic tissue which weakens with time and gravity begins to pull the nose downwards, making the nose look longer.”

You get long in the tooth

Although we do not literally get longer in the tooth, it looks as though we do.

Over time, the gums recede due to factors like gum disease and erosion – meaning a front tooth can end up appearing as long as 15 to 17 mm.

Rule of thumb is that one millimetre is lost for every ten years after the age of 20. People with progressive gum disease can lose as much as 9mm through their lifetime.

Your nose and ear hair can grow up to 3cm long

While hair growth on our heads tends to slow down by as much as a third as we age – probably due to less efficient blood circulation- hair on other parts on the body grows longer.

Places where hair seems to grow to greater lengths with age include the inside of the ears, the eye brows and the nostrils – in some cases growing up to 2-3cm.

Iain Sallis, consultant trichologist, says: “We really don’t know why nasal and ear hair appear to grow longer and faster in old age.

“From a health point of view there is no huge benefit from a hairy nose and ears.”

You really do shrink with age

On average, women shrink by about 5cm and men by 3cm by the age of 70 – due to shrinkage of the spine.

The reason is that in childhood, bones grow and repair very quickly.

As part of the natural ageing process from your mid-thirties onwards they don’t repair as rapidly and lose density.

Gravity also makes the 23 jelly-like discs in between our vertebrae, which act as the spine’s shock absorbers – lose fluid and flatten out, bringing the bones closer together.

LATEST NEWS:

[healthcare-market]

Cell & Tissue Preservation Market Projected to Witness Vigorous Expansion by 2031

Cell & Tissue Preservation Market: Introduction

According to the report, the global cell & tissue preservation market was valued at US$ 2.95 Bn in 2020. It is projected to expand at a CAGR of 11.9% from 2021 to 2031. Cell & tissue preservation must be maintained at appropriate temperatures to preserve integrity of the tissue. The receiving facility is responsible for maintaining records; documenting that allograft tissue is maintained at adequate environmental requirements during transportation and stored as per the manufacturer’s recommendations for the specific tissue.

The current methods of cell & tissue preservation involve freeze-drying, deep-freezing, and cryopreservation. Each of these techniques could be utilized for storage of ligament and meniscal allografts. Deep-freezing is a highly common preservation method for ligament and meniscal allografts, entailing simply freezing the tissue to −80°C. The grafts could be preserved for 3 to 5 years. In the freeze-drying process, moisture is removed from the tissue and the graft is vacuum packaged. It could be stored at room temperature for 3 to 5 years; however, it requires rehydration before implantation. Deep-freezing and freeze-drying allograft tissue reduces immunogenicity by killing antigen-bearing cells. Cryopreservation is a process of controlled-rate freezing with extraction of cellular water by means of glycerol and dimethyl sulfoxide. This process preserves some cells and provides a 10-year shelf life.

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Increase in Healthcare Expenditure

The increase in healthcare expenditure is estimated to further allow access to quality healthcare and advanced products that include biopreservation facilities, thereby broadening growth prospects. Additionally, gene banks, hospitals, and biobanks that are significant end users of the market, are encouraging most players to develop technologically advanced biopreservation products to enhance patient outcomes. The presence of government healthcare initiatives that provide funds, grants, and contracts for research has fueled R&D activities deployed by various companies. This, in turn, has boosted the scope for adoption of advanced bio-preservation services, which, in turn, is anticipated to fuel the penetration rate during the forecast period.

Rising R&D investments by companies and research communities to improve their capabilities and render efficient products & services are estimated to further create opportunities. For instance, the establishment of the Cooperative Human Tissue Network (CHTN), which addressed the operational dimension of bio-banking, exemplifies consistent efforts by the research community.

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Tissues to Lead Cell & Tissue Preservation Market

In terms of type, the global cell & tissue preservation market has been classified into cells & tissues. Cells have been split into mammalian cells and others (microorganisms and plant cells). The tissues segment has been split into blood, bone, soft tissues, skin, and others. The tissues segment accounted for 47.6% share of the market in 2020. The segment is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 11.7% from 2021 to 2031.

Rising investments in the field of regenerative medicine research is projected to boost the cell & tissue preservation market. The knowledge of human cells and tissues being used for further research and development novel treatment therapies led to the introduction of bio banking. Collection, processing, and storage of the samples and the regarding data are the basic function of biobanks.

Therapeutics to Dominate Cell & Tissue Preservation Market

Based on application, the global cell & tissue preservation market has been categorized into therapeutics, research & development, drug discovery, and others. The therapeutics segment accounted for 40.1% share of the cell & tissue preservation market in 2020. The segment is projected to expand at a CAGR of 11.8% from 2021 to 2031. Clinical/therapeutic applications majorly utilize tissue banking, as it involves different types of grafting such as cord blood, stem cell, and others.

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Equipment to be Highly Lucrative Segment

In terms of product, the global cell & tissue preservation market has been divided into equipment, bio preservation media, and software. The equipment segment has been further sub-segmented into freezers, thawing equipment, refrigerators, storage systems, and others. The bio preservation media segment has been further bifurcated into home-brew media and pre-formulated media. The equipment segment was valued at US$ 2,026.1 Mn in 2020 and is projected to reach US$ 6,805.9 Mn in 2031, expanding at a CAGR of 11.8% from 2021 to 2031. This can be attributed to an increase in the demand for biobanks for the past few years and its extensive usage in DNA, plasma, stem cell, and tissue research.

Biobanks to be Key End User

Based on end user, the global cell & tissue preservation market has been divided into biobanks, hospitals & others. The biobanks segment accounted for 68.7% share of the market in 2020. The segment is projected to gain market share marginally to reach 70.5% in 2031. This can be attributed to the growing awareness among researchers about the benefits of stem cells preservation. Furthermore, increasing number of sperm & egg banks and adoption of assisted reproductive technology in animals are key factors estimated to fuel the cell & tissue preservation market growth.

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North America to Lead Cell & Tissue Preservation Market

In terms of region, the global cell & tissue preservation market has been divided into North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. North America is projected to be a highly attractive market and exhibit an attractiveness index of 2.0 during the forecast period. The market in the region is anticipated to expand at a higher CAGR from 2021 to 2031, owing to consistent drug developments as well as advent of advanced therapies in the field of biomedical research.

A significant rise in patient base requiring high-end treatment of chronic diseases is also responsible for the high demand for biopreservation products and services across the region. Major pharmaceutical companies are engaged in the commercialization of advanced preservation equipment and their subsequent adoption in the research community.

Competition Landscape

The global cell & tissue preservation market is fragmented due to the presence of a large number of prominent players. Key players operating in the global cell & tissue market include Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Lonza, BD, Merck KGaA, Cytiva, Agilent Technologies, Inc., Avantor, Inc., FUJIFILM Irvine Scientific, BioLifeSolutions Inc., AMSBIO, Princeton CryoTech, STEMCELL Technologies Inc., LGC SeraCare, Corning Incorporated, and CellGenix GmbH.

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[diaspora9ja]

Nashville explosion: Possible human remains found near site of blast, police chief says

Drake mentioned tissue that was discovered shall be examined to see whether or not it’s human stays. He couldn’t say how shut the tissue was to the location the place a motor house exploded.

CBS Information first reported details about the potential human stays.

Extra individuals might have been damage, authorities mentioned, however six cops evacuated close by residents after they heard a recording coming from the car that mentioned a bomb was about to blow up.

Three civilians who have been injured are in secure situation. A minimum of 41 companies have been broken, the mayor mentioned.

Witnesses recalled the terrifying moments earlier than the explosion and its aftermath. “I’ve by no means seen something prefer it,” resident Betsy Williams told CNN. “It shook every little thing.”

Newest developments

• Police tweeted a photograph of the RV and mentioned it arrived on 2nd Avenue at 1:22 a.m.

• The FBI area workplace in Memphis is main the investigation and Particular Agent in Cost Matt Foster urged the general public to submit any tips or information.

• One witness mentioned three automobiles have been among the many many objects on fireplace after the blast.

• AT&T spokesman Jim Greer informed CNN that the corporate’s network hub in the city was damaged in the explosion and repair within the Nashville space was affected.

• Mayor Cooper issued a curfew for the realm surrounding the explosion website. The curfew lasts till 4:30 p.m. Sunday.

Recorded voice counted down

Metro Nashville Police Division officers have been responding to a name of pictures fired round 5:30 a.m. CT Friday after they discovered a motor house parked in entrance of an AT&T transmission constructing at 166 2nd Avenue North.

Nashville Vice Mayor Jim Shulman informed CNN’s Anderson Cooper {that a} feminine voice was talking within the warning message performed from the RV earlier than the explosion.

“There have been quite a lot of individuals who did evacuate after which we all know of some individuals, it did not go off when the message mentioned it might and so individuals began coming again in, after which it went off,” he defined.

Officers noticed no fast proof of pictures fired however they requested the division’s hazardous gadgets unit and began to evacuate neighborhood residents, police mentioned.

The RV exploded at 6:30 a.m. CT because the bomb squad was responding, police spokesman Don Aaron mentioned.

“We do imagine this to have been an intentional act,” he mentioned.

Authorities: No credible threats signaling impending assault earlier than Christmas

The pressure of the explosion knocked down one officer, Aaron mentioned, and precipitated listening to loss in one other — hopefully briefly, he mentioned. However no officers have been considerably injured.

Officers don’t have any details about whether or not anybody was contained in the RV when it exploded.

There have been no recognized credible threats within the Nashville space that will have signaled an impending assault on or earlier than Christmas, a federal legislation enforcement supply informed CNN.

A second legislation enforcement supply mentioned federal authorities should not conscious of any elevated chatter nationally by recognized extremist teams that will point out any credible plans for conducting assaults across the holidays.

Performing US Legal professional Normal Jeff Rosen was briefed on the incident, in line with his spokesman, “and directed that each one DOJ sources be made obtainable to help within the investigation.”

The White Home mentioned that President Donald Trump has been briefed and would obtain “common updates.” President-elect Joe Biden has additionally been briefed.

Tennessee Gov. Invoice Lee mentioned in an announcement on Twitter that the state would “provide all of the sources wanted” to find out the reason for the explosion.

‘All the pieces on the road was on fireplace’

Buck McCoy informed CNN the explosion passed off proper in entrance of his house, inflicting his home windows to be blown in.

“All the pieces on the road was on fireplace,” he mentioned. “There have been three automobiles that have been absolutely engulfed.”

McCoy mentioned he was initially woken up by what he believed have been gunshots previous to the explosion. He acquired up and seemed out the window, he mentioned, however went again to mattress when he did not see something.

Requested if the noise he heard might have been one thing apart from gunfire, McCoy emphasised that he believed it was, saying he owns a gun and goes taking pictures, so he is accustomed to the sound of gunshots.

McCoy informed CNN that when he seemed exterior after the explosion, timber had fallen and damaged glass was in all places. He noticed individuals submitting out of their residences with their animals. Firefighters informed him to get as far-off from the realm as potential, he mentioned.

“There’s simply nothing left on 2nd Avenue,” he mentioned.

‘Lives have been saved’ by evacuations

Previous to the explosion, officers had gone door-to-door or apartment-to-apartment to tell residents of the scenario, Aaron mentioned. One man strolling a canine on 2nd Avenue was redirected by an officer simply earlier than the RV exploded.

“We predict lives have been saved by these officers doing simply that,” Aaron mentioned Friday afternoon.

Technical specialists from the FBI lab and proof response groups have been introduced in from across the nation to “assist course of this huge crime scene,” Foster mentioned.

ATF Particular Agent in Cost Mickey French mentioned his company had activated its nationwide response groups and was working alongside the FBI and MNPD. The company has explosive specialists, chemists and engineers concerned within the proof restoration course of.

The road is on the sting of the Tennessee metropolis’s hospitality and vacationer district in a historic a part of city.

CNN’s Hollie Silverman, Paul P. Murphy, Carma Hassan, Evan Perez, Josh Campbell, Brian Stelter and Devon Sayers contributed to this report.

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