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Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies.
Vast amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans.
In March, doctors warned of potentially life-threatening effects after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics.
The study, published in the journal Toxicological Sciences, involved dissolving the tissue samples and then analysing the plastic that remained.
The human testes had been routinely collected by the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator and were available following a seven-year storage requirement after which the samples are usually discarded.
Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruptions.
For those of you wondering how this is useful, tobacco is often used as a model organism in botany. The utility of this technique is less obvious in tobacco but more obvious in fruits, vegetables, etc. think seedless grapes, etc
Seedless grapes already exist, but I suppose you could now insert the gene into other plants/varieties to make those seedless as well.
I'm thinking more about how big ag companies could use this to prevent farmers from saving seeds/propagating a copyrighted variety (though I don't know if that's common with any crops where the seed itself isn't the end product) or maybe more charitably, preventing their copyrighted plants from cross pollinating neighboring fields of the same species (e.g. ruining that neighbor's non-gmo status).
Finally, this could be useful if it can be "switched on" i.e. by deliberately polluting an invasive plant's gene pool with this gene and then switching it on to stall the invasive's population growth. But I think most invasives are perennials, so would still need to be removed some other way.
To a certain degree, as they mentioned in the article regarding the casimir effect. While one cannot keep out the quantum foam entirely, it can be restricted to specific wavelengths by altering the volume of the space.
Consider this fact, some light waves like radio are large enough that a lot of matter is essentially invisible to their propagation; the radio waves just pass right by without any interactions. This becomes a similar problem when we try and measure such small quantum phenomena like zero-point energy. The quantum energy could be so small that they're invisible to our detectors, but are in fact still there - the two scales simple cannot interact in a measurable way. So, there'd like still be some quantum energy, just less and less until our detectors could not interact with the incredibly small quanta for measurement.
Nope, they actually appear and disappear. The idea is that even in vacuum there's a certain amount of background energy and that energy can randomly turn into matter-antimatter pairs in what is basically the inverse of matter-antimatter annihilation.
So I wonder, even if it's only appearing very briefly it's still going to exert some small gravitational effect. And who is to say the density of quantum foam is perfectly evenly distributed through the universe, within, through and between galaxies?
Could this be an alternative explanation to dark matter?
Would be nice if we could measure quantum-foam activity depending on gravity well intensity. Let's say somewhere around Venus and Pluto to compare (sun's well).
Correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it mass and energy is equivalent no? And it also still baffles us as to why rest mass and resultant mass from energy should be equivalent at all?
The laws of quantum mechanics are confusing, predicting that particles are also waves and that cats are simultaneously alive and dead.
Okay, so, like, that's punchier writing than the actual truth, but how am I supposed to buy anything else about physics in the article after that? The level of oversimplification of relatively commonly known concepts does not give me confidence that the rest won't be pop sci drivel.
Luckily you can check out the author’s bio right from the article:
Dr. Don Lincoln is a Senior Scientist at Fermilab, America’s leading particle physics laboratory, who has coauthored over 1,500 scientific papers. He was a member of the teams that discovered the top quark in 1995 and the Higgs boson in 2012.
I mean, they're both at least illustrative I guess. In the case of particles and waves I may be quibbling a bit over the distinction that something is a particle or a wave versus exhibiting the properties of one or the other.
In the case of Schrodinger's cat, the thought experiment suggests that if the life or death of the cat is tied to the collapse of the state vector, an eigenstate of the two implies simultaneous life and death. But the varying interpretations of this problem aren't so straightforward as 'both dead and alive', and it's kind of misleading to just leave it at that.
Personally, I find it odd that they'd discount the cat's own awareness of the state vector's collapse. Obviously when the atom decays and kills it, it's going to know before you are regardless of the presence of cardboard.
It just seems like a lot of kind of imprecise throw-away mentions of more complex ideas for one sentence. But again, maybe I'm being cynical.
I don't think he was planning to explain these concepts, just hint at them to the layman reading thr article who probably barely know what Schodinger's cat is.
And the cat observes it but that doesn't mean that the cat is now in a discrete state that is either alive or dead. It is both and will stay both and you'll only see which version of the cat is in your world. At least according to the many worlds theory which makes sense to me
Shrodinger’s cat wasn’t some simplified lesson for the layman. It wasn’t even an explanation. It was a commentary about the quantum model itself and how the current state of the model is laughably incomplete and unable to adequately answer or predict anything of value (yet). It wasn’t until more recently that some Newtonian physics might be explainable as emergent properties of quantum mechanics, but we are still a long ways away from a unified or blurred model.
Actually, cats really are alive and dead at the same time according to the many worlds interpretation. Under classical quantum mechanics, we say that superpositions collapse when observed, and since the cat is an observer of the quantum event (since the cat would die if the atom decayed), then the cat's presence resolves the superposition. Thus, the cat is never in superposition.
However, according to the many worlds interpretation, observation does not collapse superposition. Rather, it simply expands the superposition to include the observer. So the cat, as an observer of the quantum event, really is both alive and dead. And at the moment that you open the box to see whether the cat died, you will also observe the quantum event and become part of the superposition as well. You will both see a dead cat, and see a living cat. But your consciousness only experiences one of these possibilities. Presumably, you have another consciousness in the other possibility observing the cat in the other state. Two separate timelines have been created, which will each progress on their own according to causality. We may also call these timelines worlds or universes, seeing as they're mostly self contained.
I read the article but I'm still confused how this works.
My understanding is the herpes virus DNA is integrated into our own. So once the gene editing molecules snip at the herpes virus damaging it, how does the chromosome get put back together?
Is it actually sniping at two places in the herpes genome in a way that the two ends match up and reform while cutting out a section in the middle?
Meganucleases can work in quite a few ways. Typically speaking cleaving describes a process in which a section of genome is removed (cutting in two places), but not always. The article doesn't go into too much detail of the specifics of the meganucleases used in this study, but the literature they cite might.
My understanding is the herpes virus DNA is integrated into our own.
I'm not sure about the technique here (I'm sure part of the process puts it back together), but I just wanted to denote that this is how all retroviruses work - they infect a cell and incorporate themselves into the DNA, which is then replicated by normal cell processes.
Our DNA is littered with the corpses of many such remnants, and if we can figure out how to stop Herpes, it would be a path to also stopping HIV.
That's a really good question, the article doesn't go into specifics.
Then the body’s own repair systems recognize the damaged DNA as foreign and get rid of it.
This is somewhat ambiguous. It could mean that human DNA polymerases see the damaged DNA, scroll backwards and forwards to the START and STOP codons, and break the bonds to snip out the bits of viral DNA. Then endogenous DNA ligases patch the ends together. It could mean that it affects DNA in the viral particles themselves (but from the context in the article I don't think this is the case). Or it could be the case that the process triggers apoptosis to eliminate the infected cells entirely; I don't think this is the case because then you have necrotic tissue all over the place, and given that we're talking about herpes viruses this means fragile skin in tender places... ouch. That's kind of like using thermite to roast a marshmallow: Fun but overkill and potentially hazardous.
Quantum foam has been a mainstream thought for some time. It is referenced extensively in Michael Crichton's 1999 novel Timeline in which a sort of multiverse time travel is achieved by scientists using some vague method based on quantum science.
What is the ontology of a concept or idea? If nothing doesn't exist materially but strictly conceptually, does it not exist or is there a different term one should employ to refer to it? 🤔
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