Category: Body & Mind

How do We Define Life?

Most of the news that gets covered here is related to new discoveries and good events happening around the world, but sometimes we need to take a step back from those discoveries and think deeper about what it all means. Recently NASA launched its most ambitious mission to Mars and they hope to find evidence of life.

But what is life?

Philosophers for hundreds of years have tried to answer this question and depending on who you ask we are closer or no closer than we were when humanity first asked such a question. Some people rely on old writings or established mythos for defining life, but those generally don’t old up when looking for something truly alien to us. Which leads us to something relatively new to the world of science and that is figuring out a sound and comprehensive definition for life for the purposes of scientific research.

Defining life poses a challenge that’s downright philosophical. There’s no ambiguity in looking for water, because we have a clear definition of it. That definition is the same whether you’re on Earth, on Mars, or in intergalactic space. It is the same whether you’re dealing with water as ice, liquid, or vapor. But there is no definition of life that’s universally agreed upon. When Portland State University biologist Radu Popa was working on a book about defining life, he decided to count up all the definitions that scientists have published in books and scientific journals. Some scientists define life as something capable of metabolism. Others make the capacity to evolve the key distinction. Popa gave up counting after about 300 definitions.
Things haven’t gotten much better in the years since Popa published Between Necessity and Probability: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life in 2004. Scientists have unveiled even more definitions, yet none of them have been widely embraced. But now Edward Trifonov, a biologist at the University of Haifa in Israel, has come forward with a new attempt at defining life, based on a new strategy. Rather than add on yet another definition to the pile, he’s investigating the language that previous scientists have used when they talk about life.

Edward Trifonov: Life is self-reproduction with variations.

Read the rest of the article here.

Want Good Grades? Go Run Around!

There is strong evidence that physical activity and good grades at school are directly connected. It’s a good idea to let kids go outside and just run around!

“The findings of one high-quality intervention study and one high-quality observational study suggest that being more physically active is positively related to improved academic performance in children,” the authors write.

The article suggests several reasons for such a link:

  • Exercise improves blood and oxygen flow to the brain, improving cognition.
  • Exercise boosts levels of endorphins and norepinephrine, decreasing stress and improving mood.
  • Exercise helps to create new nerve cells and supports synaptic plasticity.

Read a bit more at the CBC.

A Charity That to Improves Afghanistan Using Skincare

A bizarre title that’s for sure and it’s by no means an exaggeration. ARGHAND is working in Afghanistan and employing locals to produce skincare products that are all-natural and are composed of plants only found in the country.

ARGHAND, the only all-natural, sustainable skincare line from Afghanistan, was founded by Sarah Chayes, a former correspondent for National Public Radio who covered the fall of the Taliban, then stayed behind to help rebuild the war-torn country.

Given the abundance of lush fruits and exotic herbs that have grown in the orchards and fields of southern Afghanistan for millenia, the need forsustainable economic development in the area, the ravages of the opium economy and the difficulty of transporting fresh fruit, Chayes and a group of Afghan friends got a great idea: Why not transform the exquisite produce, long the fame of the region, into high quality bath and body products, thus adding value while stabilizing the products for export?

Thanks to Lee!

Music Therapy Helps Brain Damaged Patients

Music therapy can help people who have severe brain damage regain control of their brain and heal faster. This is really nifty!

But how does music find a pathway inside a damaged brain that regular speech can’t negotiate? According to Morrow, it has to do with the parts of the brain where music comes from. And that there are so many of them.

“Music centres are all over the brain,” says Morrow. “I might be able to retrieve lyrics from the right side, from the middle, from the back of the brain. There are so many components to music that I can tap into … to reach words again and to reformulate them in the brain.”

In terms of human evolution, speech is a relatively recent addition to our compartmentalized brains. Some believe music may precede it. There’s no doubt that toddlers babble and vocalize long before they speak.

“It used to be thought that music was a superfluous thing, and no one understood why it developed from an evolutionary standpoint,” says Michael De Georgia, director of the Centre for Music and Medicine at Case Western Reserve University’s Medical Centre in Cleveland.

“In the last 10 years, we’ve just started to understand how broad and diffuse the effect of music is on all parts of the brain,” he added. “We are just starting to understand how powerful music can be.”

Read the rest of the article.

New Way to Examine Consciousness in Comatose Patients

There are a lot of ethical issues about what to do with a person in a vegetative state in a hospital, and sometimes pulling the plug (so to speak) isn’t the best course of action. Thanks to some smart researchers we can now tell which patients are still thinking and which patients have no activity in their brain.

“You spend a week with one of these patients and at no point does it seem at all they know what you are saying when you are talking to them. Then you do this experiment and find it’s the exact opposite — they do know what’s going on,” said Damian Cruse, a postdoctoral neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada who helped conduct the research. “That’s quite a profound feeling.”

The results and similar findings could also provide crucial insights into human consciousness — one of the most perplexing scientific puzzles — and lead to ways to better provide diagnoses and possibly rehabilitate brain-injury patients, the researchers said.

Read the rest of the article.