Scientist Share Phenomenon That Will Blow Your Mind (r/AskReddit)

scientists offered it what's a phenomenon in your field that the average person hasn't heard of that would blow their mind my research involves Parkinson's disease and recently there's been findings that contracting an infection such as flu whilst having PD will make the disease progress much faster as your immune system will kill the brain cells responsible in a kind of accidental collateral damage response so we're looking at how some anti-inflammatories could slow the progress of PD by stopping infections from taking their toll early days though but very promising just started a PhD in astrobiology does that make me a scientist looking at microbe behavior in low gravity environments it turns out that microgravity has a tendency to make microbe populations into these superbugs that are incredibly resistant to antibiotics there's some worry that this will be a pretty big problem as human space exploration develops dialect Continuum's in linguistics among certain languages such as the Slavic languages in the Western Romance languages Portuguese Galician Spanish Catalan et Cie there is no fine line from where one language ends and another begins however due to standardization this is largely no longer the case instead you would have one language gradually changing into another as you go farther and farther away think of it like in Britain where the farther north you go the more Scottish the dialect becomes until eventually you have full-on Scots sort of along the same lines I was fascinated to learn that there are regional dialects and British sign language for example there are at least three separate signs for the holiday depending on where you are in the country everyone always associates dopamine with enjoyable experiences or happiness but in a certain part of the brain how much dopamine is released can be calculated as amount of reward received amount of reward expected this is literally a quantitative signal if you expected there to be ten sweeps in the bag but there were actually twelve then you'll get an increase in the opening release but not as much as if there were fourteen sweets in the bag similarly if you expect a 10 and only receive eight you dock get a dip in the dopamine signal but not as much as if you'd only received six etc this is one of those rare examples where a quantitative theory or model reinforcement learning can be mapped straight onto a neuroscientific phenomenon I work with CR is PR Cass 9 system it is essentially allows us to edit a genome adding and removing nucleotides or whole genes or altering nucleotides while there were previous methods for editing genome this is quite simple requires a few plus meds less than $100 basic research lab and someone who can do fairly basic molecular biology research researchers in China are using it on humans now for cancer therapy it also has possibility for HIV treatment additionally the part I find most fascinating and most scary are gene drives we are able to use it to kill off all mosquitoes thus eliminating Zika and malaria in a matter of a few mosquito generations this would also be theoretically possible for other species hasn't been researched I have a good one into bad one but more than 2 out of every three people in the world carry a virus that causes oral genital herpes HSV one and two good if you genetically remove one of HS these key genes Gd you get two vaccine strain that's protected might against 10x the lethal dose of the deadliest her pious strains every discovered mute Leah transmutation it is 100% possible to turn lead into gold by yanking three protons out of a lead nucleus it was first done in the 1920s of course it's prohibitively expensive and ultimately a waste of money and energy but it can be done I'm an earthquake geophysicist I study something most people have never heard of slow earthquakes in a regular earthquake a fault a crack between big pieces of rock moves or slips very quickly typically an earthquake takes a few seconds to occur this rapid Morvant excites seismic waves which are similar to sounds waves that travel through the earth and cause shaking in slow earthquakes everything is the same except that high temperatures and/or fluid pressure cause the speed off fall slip to max out at a fairly low value so we might get movement equivalent to what we would see in magnitude 7 earthquake but instead of occurring over seconds it occurs over weeks months or even years the slowness means no seismic waves and no damage in fact the traditional instrument used to study earthquakes the seismometer went CDs and so we use scientific grade GPS instead and literally watch the rocks move unfortunately slow earthquakes while they relieve the forces where they occur actually increase the probability of regular earthquakes on other faults or other parts of the same fault there are documented cases of slow earthquakes triggering regular ones the great Tohoku Japan earthquake of 2011 actually started off two weeks earlier with a slow earthquake I'm working on trying to find ways to use slow earthquakes to forecast regular ones Fito maternal transfer I learned about it in a neuroscience class essentially when a woman is pregnant stem cells can travel from the fetus to the mother and actually survive for long periods of time in the hippocampus an area of the brain used for memory formation I'm pretty sure the stem cells can survive in other parts of the body but it's really cool to think that some of your DNA is in the part of your mother's brain where new memories are formed so you've heard of stem cells right long story short cells that can transform into other kinds of cells while also dividing and reproducing forever they're responsible for making new blood cells driving wound healing etc' etc neat stuff it is now fairly accepted in my field that cancers also have stem cells we think that these cancer stem cells aren't as susceptible to chemotherapy and is partly responsible for why cancers seem to come back after even very aggressive chemo but as to their exact identity strategies to destroy them and where they come from we are working on it many animals use the location of the Sun in the sky for navigational purposes medicine or animals use the way sunlight is polarizing as a proxy for the location of the Sun in the sky this allows for a mental and is how many animals keep moving in their required direction many although few animals also use the moon for the same purpose however only one known species the dung beetle uses the way the moon's light is polarized to keep rolling their dung in straight lines however when the moon is absent from the sky the beetles default to using the location of the Milky Way and the sky for navigation 15 days of the month of October from the equator have both no moon and Milky Way out of vision of the beetles for these 15 days their role in almost random directions turning frequently and just generally looking drunk tropospheric ducting shortwave radio signals up to about 30 megahertz bounced off a layer of charged particles in the atmosphere and are reflected back down to earth which is why you hear so many AM stations at night normally higher frequencies just poke straight through and go out into space bit under certain conditions they pass through a gap in one layer hit another and bounce along between the two like when you get the bull trap behind the bricks in arkanoid until eventually it bounces back out hundreds of miles away with almost no loss so by a sheer accident of meteorology you can sometimes bounce VHF and UHF signals far further than they normally go and they sound like they're from just down the road post-mortem brain examination of kids with autism has shown improper cortical distribution a little background the layers of your cortex are established very specifically before birth if you have a healthy brain you will exit your mother with clearly defined cortical distribution and that layer the Ferengi ation does not continue post birth thus we can conclude that the disrupted cortex structure being found in autistic children cannot be attributed to vaccines which are administered after birth furthermore we can also conclude that autism begins affecting children and the wound c-section babies are on average less healthy and have more compromised immune systems this is likely because the birth canal is smearing the last bit of moms immune system programming before breast milk as well as helping create a healthy bacterial environment for the newborn essentially a those canal walls are coated in things that will help the baby adjust to life outside the womb but c-section babies are starting to get the benefits of this by wiping mom's canal wall fluids onto the baby's face and mouth and head surface science van der valves forces between materials are almost universally attractive but it is possible to create a three material stack of a surface intermediate a liquid or potentially a thin film and contacting material that has a repulsive interaction meaning that the surface and contacting material will repel each other like two north ends of a magnet applications would include surfaces that would be water oil dirt biohazard whatever proof and frictionless interfaces tested by AFM and undetectable at the Pico Newton level unfortunately the thin films required are not easy or cheap to make and development would be dollar sign dollar sign dollar sign not quite mind-blowing but definitely exciting we now have microscopes that can achieve resolution in the low-end range in living cells we can now start to research the dynamics of small sub cellular organelles that are important for a wide range of things such as embryonic development cancer progression and cell signaling I'm a dentistry student and yesterday a paper was published where a group of scientists managed to use an anti Alzheimer drug in order to build new dentin and damaged teeth pulp tissues are already capable of doing that but research is desperately trying to find agents that can speed up the process so this is great news give a person superpowers in VR for example the power of flight will prime concepts of superpowers and the heroes we associate with it and will increase helping behavior long story short there was a study wherein people had to fly with the helicopter or use hand gestures think Superman to fly in VR after the experiment the conductor accidentally spilled a pen case the people flying like Superman were significantly more prone to jump in and help the conductor to pick up the pens I really like the idea that people tend to have the desire to use their powers for good rather than to go full-on villain there is a documentary that has been released lately and it's called most likely to succeed it's about a new education method where it is 90% project-based the teachers don't do much other than just let the students do their projects and give guidance as well as organize what projects to do it's a unique way of teaching that only works in specific schools some teachers members of society think it's the greatest idea and every school should be using it me and other teachers don't see it as straightforward as it seems to be I recommend giving it a watch though right now as we talk you're being crossed by millions of particles per second and per centimeter square of your body these very same particles will be able to fly across the earth as easily as if they flew through a vacuum in fact to reliably stop them you'd have to build a three light-years thick LED wall that says a wall that would be 2/3 of the distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri the nearest star said particles are electrically neutral do not interact through nuclear force and are 150 0 0 0 times lighter than an electron or perhaps even lighter 10 - 36 kilograms yet we can detect them every day mute reno's are cool pretty much everything about sleep is terrifying most of all that we don't really know what it is or why we do it or how it works why do you sleep because you get tired how do you sleep well here's a list of things that change while you sleep what is sleep when you want to wake what I find most disturbing is sleepwalking parasomnias watching people sit up during a sleep study and seeing that they're still asleep opening their eyes looking around and then usually they pick out the wires maybe lifting them up and tugging gently on them or touching where they are placed on their heads that's not the creepy part the creepy part is that they don't pull them off or anything instead I have so far only ever seen them all do the same thing they give up like you can read the facial expression saying frigate this is too complicated for me to deal with and they just lie back down and don't go back to sleep because they didn't wake up but they just close their eyes it's not that the lights are on but nobody is home it's the lights but you aren't in there that has sound pressure level of zero DB doesn't mean no sound malaria parasites have shown resistance to every single anti-malarial drug in existence and can develop a resistance before new drugs are even finished in trials not that there is a big push for anti-malarial drug development last I checked there were seven new drugs for erectile dysfunction in the pipeline for every anti malarial and sixty-four drugs for heart disease a problem a lot of people in malaria endemic countries would like to live to have not a scientist but Cherenkov radiation is really freaking cool when electrons travel faster than the speed of light does in water it gives off an awesome blue glow around nuclear reactors google it for some really cool images this is also what that blue flash is supposed to be when the enterprise goes to warp that when I refer to a wiggly hyper surface when presenting my statistics I'm not kidding at all where earth methyls key ingredients in our modern technologies especially the green energy and computer worlds are almost completely mined in China 90% from less than a handful of mines or the need for rare earths is only increasing that about 1% of the noise you see on a TV when it's not tuned the black and white dots with the horrible noise everyone hates is interference from the cosmic background radiation the leftovers of the Big Bang some people know but it blew my mind as a kid now I am a physicist it still does put simply you can see with pretty good confidence what a chemical compound is by throwing some light at it and seeing what wavelengths come back me plants are really good at sensing gravity it's how they keep their shoots growing up and their roots growing down literally anyone who will listen but I thought that light me yes like - but gravity person but why would you study me specimens person but me whispering spacer plants piezoelectric s-- shove the current into a piezoelectric material and it expands potential to be stacked on top of one another and axes microactuators and vice versa if you apply a stress to a piezoelectric material it produces a current but this is being used in energy harvesting technologies imagine the stress being imparted by your trainer impacting the ground as you run your trainers could be used to charge your phone galaxy lensing I think it's just beautiful just like the way a magnifying glass works to make things appear bigger large chunks of mass in our universe that says galaxies have a strong gravitational pull over large amounts of space that focuses light giving a distorted look which leads to some special cases results in an Einstein ring but not all cases result in this amazing picture this phenomenon has been used to probe universe and can give good insight into finding better measurements on Hubble constant without local contamination like many other methods computer scientist here genetic algorithms are pretty neat it's a branch of heuristics methods for solving a problem that work but have no proof because they are trial and error you may have seen the jiff of the polygonal rendered ostrich Velociraptor type thing that's learning to walk to the cool thing is that the rendering is literally evolving it starts off with little to no information on how to walk and just does something random but it has favorable trays set by the programmer to pass on to the next generation just like real-world natural selection basically the rendering falls over and passes beta onto the next generation which also does something random each generation gets more and more data on how to walk and usually by 1000 or so generations the rendering can walk just like how you'd expect an animal to these are the same techniques used in development of neural networks and Ani you just give it a set of conditions to look for and just let it go the Casimir effect simply put if two uncharged plates are brought very close together due to the presence of virtual particles the plates are forced together only smaller whathe functions can fit between the plates meaning less virtuals pairs are created there creating a pressure difference between the inside and outside forcing the plates together power industry power quality and the relation of real and reactive power is pretty neat imagine electricity is like beer real power is the liquid real active power is the foam you don't want your beer flat but you also don't want a glass full of foam reddit is pretty high on wind energy but one major issue is wind turbines eat up reactive power without providing much into the grid you have to compensate for it with really expensive complicated capacitor banks or other means to provide reactive power I think it's pretty fascinating brain-computer interfaces BCI maybe people have already heard of them but I suppose many people might be surprised that it is actually possible to for example type just using your brain with a non-invasive outside the skull sensor that directly measures the electrical activity of your brain not only can you type but there are prototypes where you can drive your wheelchair around etc and in addition to the explicit command BCI there are also systems where you can passively detect how a person interpreted a stimulus for example we can detect whether a person found certain key word all scientific abstract relevant to their interests or whether they found a joke funny or not well we can say with more than fifty percent accuracy anyway in addition to BCI's other physiological signals like heart rate skin conductivity pupil size activity of any particular muscle etc can be used in many surprising ways Google physiological computing and effective computing extracellular matrix will be able to regrow limbs probably in our lifetime spray-on skin cells they take your own stem cells and spray them on severe burns in the skin regrows this is pizza cat he looks for people like you to befriend and give them the gift of unlimited pizza this can only be granted if you comment pizza please thanks for watching if you are new to the channel you can subscribe I publish new videos every day until then check another video or don't either way have a great day you magnificent people [Music]

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Id: 2g3NA5mLIRg

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 15 2019