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ebola-kun · 5 years ago

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The measurements of Spider-Man's feets, the sound of (older) music and also what the Romans in fact provided for ...

1. Baboons, like the British, like to queue

Baboons discover meals places by enjoying those around them. Yet receiving access to the food relies on the facility power structures of a baboon men, and those reduced down the hierarchy can easily wind up queuing for leftovers. Find out more

2. Sometimes, people are offered unlimited sauce by scientific research

Researchers gave volunteers an all-you-can-eat buffet of chicken korma along with three alternatives controlled to look as well as taste the exact same, however through which the fat deposits material supplied twenty% (reduced), 40% (channel) and 60% (higher) of the fats. They located that people that lug a particular genetic alternative consumed even more of the higher fat deposits meals-- although they said they all sampled the same. Review even more

3. You may fossilise a marinaded brain

A tiny brownish marble, located through an amateur fossil seeker in Sussex, is actually the first recognized example of fossilised brain cells from a dinosaur. The specimen, which likely belonged to a dinosaur identical to the Iguanodon, was thus well-preserved given that it was 'pickled' in an ancient overload. Learn more

4. Spider-Man will need to have measurements 145 shoes to go up a wall surface

By researching geckos, the most extensive pets able to size smooth vertical wall surfaces, scientists point out that an individual will need to have unmanageably huge sticky footpads to stroll up a wall structure like Spider-Man-- footwear in European measurements 145 or even US measurements 114. Learn more

5. The true North-South divide remains in how our team articulate 'scone'...

Regional diversity in dialect words and also pronunciations might be decreasing as much of England falls much more according to exactly how British is communicated in Greater london as well as the south-east, according to end results from the English Dialects App. Exactly how you articulate 'bun' still relies on where you live. Learn more

6. ... Though our team still don't understand how a wolf would certainly pronounce it

The largest ever research study of shouting in the 'canid' family members of types-- which features wolves, jackals as well as residential dogs-- showed that the several species and also subspecies have differentiating collections of shouting-- "howling vocabularies". Read much more

7. No one truly recognizes what takes place to an egg after day 7

Growing eggs in a laboratory is actually difficult, as well as up until this year no one has managed to surpass day 7. However our scientists dealt with to fix this issue this year-- and also it is actually opened up an argument concerning whether our team must prolong the legal restriction for embryo research study past the current 14 day limit. Learn more

8. You can organize 128 ping pong balls 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different techniques

The answer to an overwelming natural science problem could possibly help our company understand concerns ranging from forecasting the buildup of deserts, to making expert system even more dependable. Or even perhaps a quite uninteresting sensible for an unlucky student. Find out more

9. The response to Monty Python's "What have the Romans ever before provided for our company?" is "Spreading parasites".

The Romans might possess taken our company cleanliness, however as opposed to creating our company healthier, they aided boost the escalate of intestinal parasites such as whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica. Find out more

10. One day, our experts might all of be actually residing in metropolitan areas crafted from bone tissue ...

Simply because our experts can build our areas away from steel and also concrete, does that way our team should? Is it time our team appeared at completely brand-new techniques of building cities? Designers functioning in biomimetics-- actually 'replicating lifestyle'-- are building samples of artificial bone and eggshell that might be utilized as clinical implants, and even be actually sized up and also made use of as low-carbon building materials. Learn more

11. ... And in wooden high-rise buildings

Property high-rises away from hardwood might possess a variety of possible perks, the absolute most obvious being actually that it is a renewable energy. Wood structures might even be cheaper as well as faster to build-- and also much lighter than their concrete substitutes. Learn more

12. Elvis Presley assisted exterminate polio in the USA

Back in the 1950s, hygienics advocates recruited the Master of Rock 'n' Roll to aid bring up recognition of the significance of shot against polio. A little a lot less talk as well as a bit even more vaccination, maybe? Learn more

thirteen. We have actually gone to war for even longer than our experts believed

Our archaeologists found the fossilised bone tissues of a team of prehistoric hunter-gatherers who were actually massacred around 10,000 years ago in Kenya. They have actually delivered distinct proof of an intense encounter in between conflicting teams of historical hunter-gatherers, and also proposes that also late Stone Age seeking societies fought. Documentation of a prehistoric carnage expands the background of warfare

14. If your pub serves white wine in big red or white wine glasses, you're a lot more most likely to become drunk due to the edge of the evening

Marketing red wine in much larger red or white wine glasses might promote people to drink additional, also when the quantity of red or white wine continues to be the same, according to a research which located that improving the measurements of red or white wine glasses caused a nearly 10% boost in red or white wine purchases. Learn more

15. Dune may sing

When solids flow like liquids they can easily create dune sing. As surfaces of sand slide down the side of particular dunes, they create resonances that may be heard for miles around. The dunes are vital with the sand of songs! Find out more

16. Your Labrador can not aid being fatty tissue-- it is actually genetically programmed to become greedy

Researchers found a genetic variant linked with being overweight and appetite in Labrador retrievers that might clarify why Labrador retrievers are actually most likely to come to be overweight than pets of other species. For every copy of the genetics lugged, the pet dog was actually on ordinary 1.9 kilograms bigger Learn more

17. There is actually a very exclusive cuckoo called Disco Tony

He is actually gray with a yellow ring around his eyes, he's travelled over 5,000 kilometers and also he is actually a cuckoo. However this is not merely any kind of cuckoo-- this is Disco Tony. He is one of a quite exclusive group of birds whose every relocation is actually being checked. Learn more

18. Einstein could have received it incorrect (presuming deep space contains at the very least five measurements)

Just times after the very first detection of gravitational surges, first predicted by Einstein, was declared, our scientists discovered that the great guy could have received some points inappropriate. It involves a truly huge donut. Find out more

19. The Clangers would have appeared like plane engines when they were experiencing frisky

How is actually a mouse like a jet engine? The answer is actually in the method they create noise. Mice court each other along with ultrasound passion tracks that are actually faint to the individual ear, creating one-of-a-kind high regularity appears utilizing a system that has actually only earlier been actually observed in fast plane engines. Go through a lot more

twenty. A German scholar swiped a 1000 years of age part of music from our Collection in the 1840s. (Our company've got it back and our company right now recognize how it sounds.)

After some investigator work and also scrupulous investigation, the 11th century 'Cambridge Songs' were done for the first opportunity in 1,000 years back in Easter. Learn more

21. Man-made intelligence could help you shake off your worry of spiders without you also seeing

Making use of a blend of synthetic cleverness as well as brain scanning modern technology, researchers feel they can remove our worries without having to expose us to the very points our company're terrified of (which for a lot of became 2016). Find out more

22. People in Peterborough survived on stilts in the course of the Bronze Age

Over recent year, Should Ranch in the Cambridgeshire fens has actually generated Britain's largest selections of Bronze Grow older fabrics, beads as well as residential artefacts. Along with hardwoods of many roundhouses, the finds offer a sensational picture of an area growing 3,000 years ago-- little wonder it is actually been referred to as the 'Pompeii of the fens'. Learn more

23. Our experts could really be actually transforming the tide on dementia (however only in guys)

The so-called alzheimer's disease 'tsunami' may not be unpreventable. The UK has actually observed a twenty% fall in the occurrence of dementia over the previous 2 many years, depending on to our scientists. This has resulted in an approximated 40,000 fewer situations of mental deterioration than formerly forecasted-- but primarily in men. Read extra

24. You may learn A GREAT DEAL concerning the human brain only coming from reading Peter Pan

JM Barrie had a deep-seated understanding of the scientific research of cognition-- as well as was many years in advance of his attend determining vital phases of youngster advancement, apparently. Find out more To discover even more concerning how Cambridge's ideas and developments have shaped the planet over recent 800 years, view "Dearest World ... Yours, Cambridge" . To find out more about the most recent investigation from the College of Cambridge, please browse through our internet site .

This content was originally published here.

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donnnoir · 6 years ago

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I am back, well for the most part. This process being contingent upon my time management and allotment of same. Believe me it is not from lack of desire, rather it is dealing with the typical Luciferian practice of distraction and delay; added to that is their ubiquitous practice of poisoning those they target, along with the microwave and other energy / frequency weapons used on targeted individuals. An if ever there was a target on their BINGO List I am in the top three. I live only by the grace of God. Presently it appears individuals are putting some petroleum based distillate into my drinks and food. I suspect that there are several other types of unhealthy food additives being put into that which I consume. The other items I suspect are some sort of heavy metal salts like Thallium, Arsenic, or similar. The only good thing that can be said about what is presently occurring is that thus far they have not resorted to using metal salts which have been irradiated, like they did when I was being Fox-ed in Southern California around the Long Beach and Wilmington areas primarily. Even so the amounts have been sufficient that if I was anybody else, I would be very concerned and more than highly upset at several persons around me, all the more so given the great lengths they go in saying we are fast friends, family even. An although I know I will survive I am needless to say highly upset. Yet my circumstance is not such that I can easily or directly deal with the matter. Instead as it is part of the larger issues I have dealt with all my Life I prefer to just add it to an ongoing tab. Soon enough the paradigms and social conventions we Live by shall come undone, and my hands will be free. When the Kid gloves come off, and I am given leave from my G-d I will commence to balancing the scales. Until then I must suffer the indignation and deprivations to my soul. This exposition project will continue as time and situation permits.

Thus in consideration to this process I have undertaken it is abundantly clear that I should present myself and a general perspective of the terms I have strove to have all my Life. All the more so since in pursuit of the purpose of this blog and my venturing out into the media of sorts will invariably bring the entirety of my life under the scrutiny of those that will for one reason or another seek to discredit what I intend to present. An I being the disreputable soul that I am will be an easy target. Wherefore it is incumbent upon me to get out ahead of the ball on this, so to speak. I know that no matter how I attempt to be forthcoming on matters of my personal life and the manner in which I have Lived. I will invariably miss many details that in due course will bite me in the arse. I am fond of reminding persons that Life is in the Living; and that last I checked Living was and is a very messy process. Or, rather it can be. An all things considered I have done a bang up job of leaving a mound of detritus in my wake. A side effect that has only increased as of late, albeit with a helping hand from those that would rule over the world. At the time of my composing this my Life has become defined as a series of ongoing train-wrecks. What chance I had to have any kind of Life resembling normality is no longer serviced by the train station. Regrettable as it may be I am at least comfortable with that reality. Wherefore how best to succinctly present a proper representation of the Life I have lead which represents a degree of my thought processes and a degree of my character and nature. A usually straight forward idea, yet for myself I find it immensely difficult. Yes I am a son of Light, I have always professed the Truth. Nonetheless I was raised to be a Man, a hard Man of character meant for vastly more difficult and dynamic social and cultural circumstances than has thus far been required of me or us in general as the human race. Yes we have Lived through challenging times even survived an insane period of global ego paranoia we commonly referred to as MAD. The legacy of which will yet play out in the not too distant future. What we as in the entire World must struggle and fight Our way through beginning shortly within the coming months, to frame it in proper temporal perspective. These events will exceed all that has happened in the past. The Seers of Old were shown many of these things, they however lacked the conceptual context or even words whereby to begin to explain what had been revealed to them. My mother worked hard to raise four Men, as she understood that to mean. We all were each individual anachronisms for the present. We belong to times five hundred to five thousand years ago. Understanding this, perhaps the rest will find context and help those that wish to maintain perspective. Elsewise my existence and life’s work will seem almost contradictory to my stated purpose and desires. Hell I will be the first to admit I am a living ball of contradictions; nonetheless I have maintained a course that has been exemplified as of late. A portion of the story we shall attend to a bit later; sooner than it would in chronological order.

Thus Be it Known I was born August 31, 1960, in the year of Our Lord. In the humble back water town of Socorro, New Mexico. And yes, New Mexico is a State in the Union of the United States of America. My Christian given name is as my fathers, thus making me a junior. My father is your typical WASP American. Gifted with a Highly keen intellect and analytical mind. My Mother’s people are a unique blend of Native American and Spanish. Our Spanish roots go back five hundred years. Two brothers were shipped to further point in the Spanish Empire to protect their bloodline till the end of time. They came in chains as Crypto Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. My father later was one of the engineers working on the Mercury and Saturn / Apollo Rockets which eventually landed men on the moon. My parents being the strongwilled dynamic individuals that they were eventually divorced, with my Mother taking us from California back to New Mexico. I was blessed to have lived in New Mexico when it was an open confluence of differing forces and ideologies. It is sadly no longer such a place. I grew up in the company of different beliefs and fellow students who came from backgrounds that valued intelligence and knowledge. At the same time others taught me that a person needed to see beyond the bonds of knowledge and see the foundations of the world and universe as they were originally cast that being spiritual and some would say ethereal. Thus to me understanding Our World from more than one perspective or level of sight is normal. As a matter of fact this perception of reality goes all the way back to my earliest memories back to being in my crib. An when it comes to sighted, I in previous conversations with others have described how my vision worked when I was younger. As many of us may recall from our halcion days of being in elementary school. There were those overhead projectors which our teachers would then apply various overlays. Well that is a very good analogy of how I actually would see my world. There was/ is the reality that everyone sees, then there were generally two additional overlays, usually one in front of and one behind the norm. But this could also be two behind or two in front of the norm. On rare occasions there would be more than two in a variety of configurations. At times the overlays would have no obvious association to the normal view. Matter of fact I have had here recently cause to remember images I saw almost fifty years ago. Some things that go back to before I was two. Now I have always thought I was a bit different, and naively I to this day can’t fathom that everyone doesn’t in some way or another see the world similar to how I have. Being a precocious young man to say the least, I do recall the statement that if you would be great that you should select a great adversary. An as Lucifer is Humanities great adversary it was natural that I would select him. Now it was also an extension of my visions from when I was nine. So as I listened to the conflicts of the day, did I become aware that there among the idyllic images of society that I heard Lucifer’s voice spreading his lies and vile beliefs. Since no one else was pointing a finger or raising an alarm in that sector I figured I might as well go poking around. That when I was approximately sixteen, needless to say it has been one hell of ride. Now, bit by bit I have slipped into the abyss which is present in all part of our society and culture. Because, well that is where I was needed the most. However it takes a toll and like some foul ichor adheres to those who travel extensively in it, such that for fear it may infect anyone not disposed to it I avoid deceit folk. I have made my way doing business and working often in the byways of this abyss. As a female friend of mine once cried to me that I couldn’t let myself be killed because in all the world I was the only person who did what I did. That I would actually willingly go into to the places that these Luciferians inhabit to take the women and child out. Others might help, but none of them would go into the place alone and face them down. To this I must admit is the Truth. An for anyone else to do it would be a fool errand. Because as they stare at me with fake smiles wanting only to kill me; I would stare back and challenge them to bring it. They wouldn’t because what they see when they look at me is a blackness darker than any they have seen before. Now along the way I have become a felon more than on one occasion. My record shows several convictions, some I am not guilty of what I am convicted of having done. As is often the case the Truth is the first victim of a good fight. And believe me I have been fighting the good fight for a long time, up until recently I have generally gotten a big return on my investment. Recently I have been handed my ass to me in spades, with nothing to thus far show for what it has cost. Believe me it has come at an immense cost, with no end in sight. Yet it is the ticket I bought on my way to Creation; so Hell be Damned if I am going to start whining now. I do at time bitch a little, but I am only human after all. Hahahaha……..

So, having accepted responsibility for having lived the woolly life that I have. To say I have a checker board past is to be kind but nonetheless True. Consequently what I share with you is the Truth. I wish I could say it was assembled in a coherent manner so as to be easily understood. Sorry such is not the case. More Over I will no doubt go off into various tangent issues and share what at times is my unique history and understanding of a given issue. Somethings may offend some of the more “sensible” readers. I can accept that. Know that I once thought as almost everyone else in the world. It is only because of my life’s experiences and knowledge acquired by other means that I now believe as I do. What is particularly ironic is that no matter how large my “craziness coefficient” may get; I am withholding the more extreme things I have come to know. Hang on as best you can an hopefully my writings will permit some of you to prepare for that which shall shortly come to pass. Granted my current biggest obstacles are getting past the AI’s that are acting as guardians at the gates. We shall do our best.

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debaditya89-blog · 6 years ago

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Automation : Emergence of a New Job Market and Disappearance of the Existing One

A photo showing robots in the automobile manufacturing industry.

Source: http://www.moltecinternational.com/markets/robotics.html

In the lifetime of every civilization there arrives a crucial juncture where the organisms that exhibit and conform to the “survival of the fittest” doctrine continue to thrive and the rest move into the dark corridors of oblivion.

Automation and the new Industrial Revolution

In the globalized world of today, we as a nation are standing at a crucial juncture. The term – “Automation” , still a relatively new term in Indian households is the driving force behind a new Industrial Revolution. The 1st Industrial Revolution was originated by the invention of the steam engine by James Watt. Thus got initiated a new methodology of manufacture and production of goods. India could never really become a manufacturing superpower due to its inability to align itself to the waves of the 1st Industrial Revolution. That is history, lets travel back to the present. The new age Industrial Revolution is getting characterized by the availability of trillions of gigabytes of raw data generated by various industrial sectors. This data is getting processed, analyzed and results of these analytics are being utilized for production, sales and management across the globe.

A general perception is that Automation is something which is solely associated with the fields of IT and Computer Science. But this is a gross misconception. Automation is impacting and will continue to impact every industrial sector from BFS (Banking & Financial Services) to the logistics industry, from IT to tourism, from healthcare to legal services. These new methods of production and service delivery will lead to greater production volumes within stipulated times, better quality products in terms of market competition. So, in a nutshell this is going to affect the entire design, production and delivery ecosystem in terms of efficiency, quality and quantity.

The impact of Automation on various Industrial Sectors

In the Financial Services sector, the stock/securities trading companies have reduced the recruitment of financial consultants, market analysts and portfolio managers. Instead, they are using automated predictive-analysis based tools which use the concepts of Big-Data to analyze and predict the ups and downs of the stock market.

Regarding healthcare and legal services, I would like to mention the development of IBM WATSON. It is an Artificial Intelligence based expert-query system, which is up to 90-95% accurate till date. It has already started eating up consultancy based occupations like that of the doctors and the lawyers. It is expected that IBM WATSON and other AI based expert-query models will change the face of healthcare and legal consultancy occupations within the next decade.

Coming to the field of IT & ITES sector, all leading mass recruiters of graduate engineers, i.e. TCS, Cognizant have started decreasing their freshers’ intake systematically. Lots of iterative IT jobs like blackbox testing, recursive code development, log maintenance etc. are now being automated using various marketplace tools. These tools provide basic templates which can be edited and manipulated in accordance with client and project requirements. Low level back office processing and support systems are likely to be automated many folds in the recent future and spread among a much depleted workforce strength.

In the e-commerce industry, all major global players like Amazon, Alibaba etc. are using data analytics to analyze consumers’ purchasing trends and thus create customer target zones product wise. This helps in reaching out to the targeted customer base with attractive offers which a normal kinara shop dealing in multi-brand retail can never imagine of. Grey Orange Robotics Pvt. Ltd. is designing fully automated e-commerce warehouse systems. ‘Butler’ robots are being built which can fetch and store products in e-commerce warehouses. ‘Sorter’ robotics is being used to automatically scan and sort packages in these warehouses. These robotics-based technologies are being used by Indian e-commerce giants like Flipkart, Myntra and Jabong. These butler robots can pick up 600 items per hour, whereas a human labour can pick up to 100 items per hour. So, human intervention is being reduced to the minimal in order to increase efficiency in the delivery system.

Finally, coming to the avenue of government organizations, many of the low and middle-rung clerical jobs like certificate generation, registrations, stock maintenance and paperwork for seeking permissions are getting substituted by automated ERP systems. All these repetitive jobs are moving from the paradigm of manual-natured to automated ones.

So, basically what I have tried to harp upon is that across all industrial sectors, human intervention at multiple levels of the production ecosystem is getting replaced by advanced technologies of robotics, simulation, predictive analysis, machine learning and AI.

The impact of Automation on the employment and job generation scenario

Mckinsey Global Institute reports that an estimated 400-800 million job roles or occupations will disappear into oblivion by 2030 across the globe. NASSCOM annual review report in early 2017 predicted a walloping 20-25% reduction in jobs in the IT industry over the next 3 years. The Indian IT and ITES allied services industry alone is set to lose 6.4 lakh low-skilled positions to automation by 2021. According to a World Bank report, automation threatens 69% of the jobs that exist today in India and it is pegged at 77% in China. This is a grave situation indeed. But just as any major transition in history has shown us, that during a transition chaos and problems will arise. In the same way, newer opportunities will also surface and the nations which will be able to embrace them swiftly will become the next global superpowers. PWC report states that AI will contribute an additional $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030. Given India’s strength and prowess in the field of technological education and a knack for studying mathematical solutions, AI and machine learning has the potential to add $950 billion to India’s GDP. These new technologies will require new skilled workforce. These fields will be the drivers of employment not only for the $150 billion IT industry, but will also provide automated tools required in all other majors industrial sectors. This represents the opportunity of the future. India is the fastest growing large economy today. India’s youth population will surpass that of other leading economies by a large margin by 2035. These favourable conditions along with opportunities which are on offer provide India with its biggest chance of being world economy’s biggest player. But the risks too are galore. According to the Economic Survey report of 2007-08, 93% of India’s workforce (including agriculture) was in the unorganized and informal sector . The latest Economic Survey report of 2017-18 says that approximately 69-70% of India’s workforce (excluding agriculture) is still in the unorganized sector. A majority of this unorganized sector labours are unskilled or semi-skilled. This workforce is bound to lose their jobs in the new production mechanism.

The duty and role of the Government in the field of Skill Development

The Indian youth of today along with the unskilled labour force needs to undergo extensive skill development programmes and courses to generate the skilled labour force India needs today. If this skill development does not take place, then India’s huge youth force can turn out to be its greatest liability instead of being an asset. Just as newer skilled job roles will appear on the horizon, the older unskilled ones will disappear at the speed of lightening. It is the Government’s duty to devise skill-centric courses and programmes and revamp the existing syllabi in colleges and universities so that India can truly arrive at the global stage. The Universities and colleges need to devise their syllabi in such a manner which can cater to the needs of both the emerging job market and the fields of research in these emerging trends. For instance, a degree course in Economics can teach the students the art of data structuring and deciphering which will generate the socio-political or economic data which can be used for exploratory analysis, growth in production and increase in efficiency. Contrary to public perception, students from Social Sciences background can actually contribute immensely in the new job arena with the help of their domain knowledge. The students from Sciences and Engineering backgrounds should be encouraged to participate in larger number of data analysis, data exploration, computer programming and robotics related courses. Courses in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning are not only about coding, but they are also about the exploratory analysis to unearth the various relationships among the data, which can in turn help in increasing production and efficiency. The students from Commerce background should learn the art of industrial indices data, stock market data prediction using various automated tools, which will help them to land jobs in the future. In a nutshell, what I mean is that this new emerging job market will not be limited to technical expertise, but will also include domain level expertise. Thus it will be inclusive of people from social sciences, commerce, pure science and engineering backgrounds. For instance, if a Multi-brand Retail Company decides to conduct interviews on villagers hailing from rural Bengal to identify the various popular products amongst them in order to increase profitability by enhancing production and distribution selectively, they can think of building a Automated Voice Recognition System for the Bengali tongue. For building such a voice recognition system which would automatically analyze the interviews and produce results, we would need both computer programming expertise(students from engineering background) and domain level expertise to recognize the various dialects of the Bengali tongue(students from humanities background). Thus an interdisciplinary approach would be needed for these type of projects. The courses for undergraduate students should also be designed keeping in mind the interwoven nature of the requirements of real-life projects. But if the Government fails to perform its duty in the sphere of higher education, soon enough we will be left with massive swathes of unemployed youth. It is our immediate duty to focus on the Education (especially technical education and domain level expertise) sector in order to produce the skilled employable graduates that India needs to tame the tiger – Automation and take this nation to greater heights.

#automation #jobs #employment #production #services #manufacturing #artificial intelligence #machine learning

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architectnews · 3 years ago

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Sochi Waterfront Masterplan, Russia

Sochi Waterfront concept masterplan, UNStudio Russian Architecture Images, Building Design

Sochi Waterfront concept masterplan

21 July 2021

image © UNStudio

Sochi Waterfront Masterplan Design

Design: UNStudio

Location: Sochi, Russia

Thursday 22nd July 2021

‘A place for all’ – UNStudio’s inclusive masterplan selected as the winning proposal for Sochi Waterfront

UNStudio’s concept masterplan has been selected as the winning proposal in the competition for the development of Sochi Waterfront on the Russian Black Sea coast.

image © UNStudio

In the intervention proposal, Sochi Coast becomes SoCo: the ultimate destination, designed to create opportunities for locals and attractions for visitors. SoCo is a revitalising leisure resort that celebrates a healthy life, provides grades of luxury, fun, and glamour, as well as unique adventures and memorable experiences.

SoCo builds new trends on the backbone of existing resources. Nature, culture, and innovation are enhanced and integrated into SoCo’s identity. Embedded technology supports short and long terms targets and executes, monitors and enhances a built and green environment. But above all, SoCo is an inclusive community, ‘a place for all’.

image © UNStudio

About Sochi

Sochi Coast, with its characteristic contemporary architecture, retail, gastronomic experiences, and extensive green areas is recognised as one of Russia’s most important holiday destinations and is considered to be the main anchor among the Black Sea Coast Resorts.

In addition to being a well-known holiday destination, Sochi is famous for hosting the Winter Olympics in 2014, meaning that it also enjoys a considerable network of connections and existing infrastructure.

image © ZOA

Sochi is also a historical seaport that is home to the most famous concert hall in the south of Russia, a museum of art, the Winter & Summer Theatre, and numerous other cultural venues. A goal of the masterplan is to integrate and activate these venues within the new development, in order to create a familiar yet strong and unified identity.

UNStudio’s waterfront masterplan proposal rebrands Sochi as a vibrant and inclusive mixed-use programme that focuses on hospitality, business, and culture while benefiting from the grand cultural legacy of the existing context of the city.

The goal of the city’s future development is to make Sochi the most progressive and international harbour for culture, technology, health, and innovation and to enrich the life of a local community and visitors. image © UNStudio

Inclusive approach

Design goals of the intervention are linked to the creation of a community that will rejuvenate the population and ensures the life cycle of different micro-neighbourhoods. Purposeful green areas will interconnect various smart green ecosystems, which have different lifestyles, while the presence of cultural, design, and innovative districts will encourage health, wellbeing, creativity, and tech innovation.

One of the parameters to create a successful 21st-century district is to ensure inclusivity and accessibility for an ever-changing society. In order to achieve this, the proposal follows three important concepts:

Year Round Destination: providing a well-balanced combination of principally flexible programme components ensures that 24-hour activity and winter-summer transitions are always organic, versatile, and engaging. Our goal is to create tendencies and platforms for various businesses and entrepreneurs to experiment with long or short-term projects.

Nurture-Nature: create a built environment that promotes a healthy lifestyle and public spaces that foster positive emotionsby enhancing our connection to the environment.

Inclusive Neighborhood: integrates nature with human living, different demographics, and social groups.

image © ZOA

Urban Design

A framework for the masterplan – nature and human-scale interventions – forms core urban design principles, while a ‘cultural spine’ connects all the important cultural venues within the city and creates a platform for creative minds to work perform and exhibit their work. Not only throughout the year but also during events such as the Sochi Architectural Biennale, Sochi Design weeks, Sochi Film Festival and Sochi Fashion weeks.

The design concept for the masterplan follows five key interventions:

1. Extension: a beach area expands outwards, while a new marina appears at the end of the plot. Marina City is a business and innovation centre for either business or leisure travelers with international standard conference facilities, high-end hotels, vibrant nightlife, a globally recognised Design and Innovation Museum, and a Yacht club.

2. Magnets and anchors: two very different attractors are established at opposite ends of the beach. A relaxed and open Festival Village, located close to the city centre, forms a north anchor. It is designated for local activities, community use, and casual gathering. Friends can meet for a beach party around fire pits or browse bookstalls at the weekend markets. Visitors from further away will be attracted to the annual calendar of events – carnival, street parties, and outdoor summer concerts. This is a low-stress, low intensity, community-focused face of SoCo at the south end.

image © ZOA

A new Marina City at the other end of the beach creates a completely new urban quarter with business and innovation functions and a focus on nightlife. This south anchor is a lively, expressive, pulsating, and exciting place.

3. Intensity increase: as you move from Festival Village towards the new Marina City, physical and visual intensity increases in both experience and scale; there is a change in vibe and an increase in volume. In between the two anchors three themed districts emerge from design principles and attractions: SoCo Playgrounds, SoCo Arts & Culture, and SoCo Healthy Lifestyle. Each district is defined by a different character, different urban fabric, green environment, and functional mix, with various services and potential target groups.

4. Catch a wave: three different routes (The Lanes, The Boardwalk and The Green Wave), each with its own distinct character, connect either end of the waterfront, providing three different speeds, atmospheres and experiences as you move along the waterfront.

The Lanes is lined with shops, restaurants, and bars and sheltered from the waterfront. The Boardwalk, on the other hand, is lined with palm trees, beach bars, and bathing spots. Weaving in between these two routes is The Green Wave, a meandering bio-diverse corridor and nature walk that interconnects all layers of activity.

5. The ‘Pops’: at key intersections with local landmarks, each of the three routes is punctuated by ‘Pops’; attractions and destinations such as concert halls, pop-up galleries, a local market, botanical gardens, university outposts, satellite cultural institutions, open-air cinemas, etc.

image © ZOA

Technology and sustainability

Technology forms an integrated part of the design that can set up short and long terms targets, execute, monitor and enhance a built and green environment.

Together, pockets form a network of healthy green spaces with real-time data on outdoor environmental health. This data creates new ways for residents and visitors to interact with each other and the green environment.

More fully, the proposed master plan aims to define new targets for the city of Sochi as part of an overarching metropolitan and European health strategy.

The sustainable environmental strategy should be part of any new city development, thus, carbon neutrality targets, biodiversity, urban climate resilience, and life quality are base targets that the proposal aims to achieve.

Concept – Culture:

Concept – Inclusive Approach:

Concept – Nature:

Concept – Public Space:

CGI Visualisations by: ©ZOA and ©UNStudio

Sochi Waterfront Masterplan in Russia – Design Information

Urban Design and Architecture: UNStudio: Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos, Frans van Vuure with Dana Behrman, Alexander Kalachev and Melinda Matuz, Roman Kristesiashvili, Saba Nabavi Tafreshi, Vlad Cuc, Nataliya Kuznetsova, Olga Kotta, Yimin Yang

Consultants:

Placemaking & Branding: JTP Studio Engineering & Cost: Spectrum Group Local Architecture: Amirov Architects Video Production: Boma Video Production Visualisation: ZOA Studio Education and Culture: European Cultural Academy Academic and Culture: Kuban State University

Masterplan:

Experience Innovation:

Nature:

Theme:

UNStudio

Sochi Waterfront Masterplan, Russia images / information received 210721 from UNStudio

Location: Sochi, southern Russia

Architecture in Russia

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Capital Hill Residence, Barvikha Forest, near Moscow, north west Russia Design: Zaha Hadid Architects image courtesy of ZHA Capital Hill Residence

Admiral Serebryakov Embankment Masterplanning Competition, Novorossiysk, Southern Russia Design: Zaha Hadid Architects image : VA Admiral Serebryakov Embankment Masterplan

Lakhta Centre, St Petersburg, North West Russia photo : Anton Galakhov Lakhta Centre St Petersburg building news – Europe’s tallest tower

Riverside Terrace, Tatyshev Island Design: OOO “ADM”, Architects image courtesy of architects Riverside Terrace on Tatyshev Island, Krasnoyarsk

St Petersburg Architectural Tours

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Photos for the Sochi Waterfront Masterplan, Russia design by UNStudio Architects in The Netherlands page welcome

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sciencespies · 4 years ago

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Forests and climate change: 'We can't plant our way out of the climate crisis'

https://sciencespies.com/nature/forests-and-climate-change-we-cant-plant-our-way-out-of-the-climate-crisis/

Forests and climate change: 'We can't plant our way out of the climate crisis'

Some climate activists advocate large-scale tree-planting campaigns in forests around the world to suck up heat-trapping carbon dioxide and help rein in climate change.

But in a Perspectives article scheduled for publication May 21 in the journal Science, a University of Michigan climate scientist and his University of Arizona colleague say the idea of planting trees as a substitute for the direct reduction of greenhouse gas emissions could be a pipe dream.

“We can’t plant our way out of the climate crisis,” said Arizona’s David Breshears, a top expert on tree mortality and forest die-off in the West. His co-author is Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability and an expert on paleoclimate and climate-vegetation interactions.

Instead of wasting money by planting lots of trees in a way that is destined to fail, it makes more sense to focus on keeping existing forests healthy so they can continue to act as carbon “sinks,” removing carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and storing it in trees and soils, according to the researchers. At the same time, emissions must be reduced as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

Overpeck and Breshears say they hope the role of the world’s forests — and specifically the urgent need to protect existing forests and keep them intact — is thoroughly debated when the world’s climate action leaders gather at the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow this November.

“Policymakers need to enable new science, policy and finance mechanisms optimized for the disturbance and vegetation change that is unstoppable, and also to ensure that the trees and forests we wish to plant or preserve for the carbon they sequester survive in the face of climate change and other human threats,” Overpeck and Breshears wrote.

“Failure to meet this challenge will mean that large terrestrial stores of carbon will be lost to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change and the impacts on vegetation that threaten many more of the ecosystem services on which humans depend.”

Keeping forests healthy will require a new approach to forest management, one that Overpeck and Breshears call managing for change. As a first step, policymakers and land managers need to acknowledge that additional large-scale vegetation changes are inevitable.

Climate change has been implicated in record-setting wildfires in the western United States, Australia and elsewhere, as well as extensive tree die-offs that are largely due to hotter, drier climate extremes. Those disturbing trends are expected to accelerate as the climate warms, according to Overpeck and Breshears.

“Even in a world where climate change is soon halted, global temperature rise will likely reach between 1.5 and 2 C above pre-industrial levels, with all the associated extreme heat waves that brings, and thus global vegetation will face up to double the climate change already experienced,” they wrote.

At the same time, deforestation continues to expand globally and is especially damaging in tropical forests, which hold vast amounts of biodiversity and sequestered carbon.

The next step toward a new managing-for-change paradigm is to manage forests proactively for the vegetation changes that can be anticipated — instead of trying to maintain forests as they were in the 20th century, Overpeck and Breshears say.

Managing for change means, for example, more aggressive thinning of forests to reduce the buildup of fuels that stoke massive wildfires. It also means selectively replacing some trees — after a wildfire, for example — that are no longer in optimal climate zones with new species that will thrive now and in coming decades.

Such activities, where needed, will inevitably increase the costs of forest management, according to the researchers. But such costs should be considered a prudent investment, one that helps preserve an underappreciated service that forests provide to humanity for free: carbon storage, also known as carbon sequestration.

Forests are already managed to preserve the natural resources and ecosystem services they provide. In addition to supplying timber, fuelwood, fiber and other products, forests clean the air, filter the water, and help control erosion and flooding. They preserve biodiversity and promote soil formation and nutrient cycling, while offering recreational opportunities such as hiking, camping, fishing and hunting.

Carbon sequestration should rank high on the list of invaluable services that forests provide, and efforts to preserve and enhance this vital function should be funded accordingly, Overpeck and Breshears say.

For example, there’s a big opportunity to improve the ability of forests to store carbon through increased use of biochar, a form of charcoal produced by exposing organic waste matter — such as wood chips, crop residue or manure — to heat in a low-oxygen environment. Large amounts of wood generated during forest thinning projects could be converted to biochar, then added to forest soils to improve their health and increase the amount of carbon that is locked away, Overpeck says.

“Thinning of forests, conversion of the removed wood to biochar and burial of the biochar in forest soils is a way to bring new jobs to forested rural areas while allowing forests to play a bigger role in keeping carbon out of the atmosphere and thus fighting climate change,” he said. “Forest carbon management could be a boon for rural areas in need of new economic engines.”

In the long run, such projects are likely to benefit forests and enhance their ability to store carbon far more than massive tree-planting campaigns conducted without appropriate management strategies, according to Overpeck and Breshears.

“Tree-planting has great appeal to some climate activists because it is easy and not that expensive,” Breshears said. “But it’s like bailing water with a big hole in the bucket: While adding more trees can help slow ongoing warming, we’re simultaneously losing trees because of that ongoing warming.”

#Nature

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anjuumkhanna · 4 years ago

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Anjuum Khanna – Top 3 Natural Language Process projects for Beginners

Anjuum Khanna – Natural Language Processing or NLP is an AI segment worried about the connection between human language and PCs. At the point when you are a novice in the field of programming advancement, it may very well be interesting to discover NLP extends that coordinate your adapting needs. Along these lines, we have examined a few guides to kick you off. Thus, on the off chance that you are a Machine Learning amateur, the best thing you can accomplish is work on some NLP ventures.

The practical approach as a theoretical approach alone won’t be of help in an ongoing workplace. In this article, we will investigate some fascinating NLP ventures which learners can chip away at to put their insight to test. In this article, you will discover top NLP venture thoughts for apprentices to get involved in NLP.

With regards to professions in software development, it is an unquestionable requirement for hopeful designers to chip away at their own ventures. Growing genuine tasks is the most ideal approach to sharpen your aptitudes and emerge your hypothetical information into pragmatic experience.

NLP is tied in with examining and speaking to human language computationally. It prepares PCs to react utilizing setting hints much the same as a human would. Some regular uses of NLP around us incorporate spell check, autocomplete, spam channels, voice text informing, and menial helpers like Alexa, Siri, and so forth As you begin dealing with NLP ventures, you won’t simply have the option to test your qualities and shortcomings, yet you will likewise pick up presentation that can be massively useful to help your profession. Over the most recent couple of years, NLP has earned extensive consideration across ventures. Also, the ascent of advancements like content and discourse acknowledgment, feeling investigation, and machine-to-human interchanges, has roused a few developments. Examination proposes that the worldwide NLP market will hit US$ 28.6 billion in market incentives in 2026.

With regards to building genuine applications, information on AI fundamentals is vital. In any case, it isn’t fundamental to have a concentrated foundation in arithmetic or hypothetical software engineering. With an undertaking based methodology, you can create and prepare your models even without specialized accreditations. Get familiar with NLP Applications.

To help you in this excursion, we have assembled a rundown of NLP venture thoughts, which are propelled by genuine software items sold by organizations. You can go through these assets to brush your ML basics, comprehend their applications, and get new aptitudes during the execution stage. The more you explore different avenues regarding diverse NLP extends, the more information you pick up.

Top 3 NLP projects for Beginners by Anjuum Khanna

ChatterBot

This project is available on Github. Created by Gunther Cox. ChatterBot is a machine learning, conversational dialog engine for creating chat bots. ChatterBot is a machine-learning based conversational dialog engine build in Python which makes it possible to generate responses based on collections of known conversations. The language independent design of ChatterBot allows it to be trained to speak any language.

For Example, System Working –

user: Good morning! How are you doing?

bot: I am doing very well, thank you for asking.

user: You’re welcome.

bot: Do you like hats?

Gunther Cox said, “An untrained instance of ChatterBot starts off with no knowledge of how to communicate. Each time a user enters a statement, the library saves the text that they entered and the text that the statement was in response to. As ChatterBot receives more input the number of responses that it can reply and the accuracy of each response in relation to the input statement increase. The program selects the closest matching response by searching for the closest matching known statement that matches the input, it then returns the most likely response to that statement based on how frequently each response is issued by the people the bot communicates with.”

Text Generator

This project is available on Github. Created by Shiv Sondhi. A text generator made in python3 using Keras and TensorFlow, that takes a single word/character as a seed and generates text using that seed. Takes an input word or character and generates text either character-by-character or word-by-word. There are two different files for each technique (char-by-char and word-by-word). The code is implemented using keras and tensorflow in python 3. The two main modes in both textGenerator.py files are trained and generated. The word-by-word file has an extra mode called retrain and the char-by-char file has an extra mode called exp. These modes are explained in the Files section.

Shiv Sondhi said, “The loss and number of epochs for each trial is included in the headers of both of the files. Both of the techniques have their advantages and disadvantages. The results of the char-by-char algorithm are slightly better than the word-by-word algorithm in the sense that after a point of training the repetition of certain characters completely disappears. In the word-by-word model, repetition is a problem even with relatively low loss. On the flip side, the word-by-word generator is guaranteed to make at least some sense, since we are dealing directly with words. The char-by-char model does not really make much sense even at its lowest loss.”

Customer Support Chatbot

This project is available on Github. Created by Momchil Hardalov. Momchil Hardalov said, “Recent years have seen growing interest in conversational agents, such as chatbots, which are a very good fit for automated customer support because the domain in which they need to operate is narrow. This interest was in part inspired by recent advances in neural machine translation, esp. the rise of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) and attention-based models such as the Transformer, which have been applied to various other tasks and have opened new research directions in question answering, chatbots, and conversational systems. Still, in many cases, it might be feasible and even preferable to use simple information retrieval techniques. Thus, here we compare three different models:(i) a retrieval model, (ii) a sequence-to-sequence model with attention, and (iii) Transformer. Our experiments with the Twitter Customer Support Dataset, which contains over two million posts from customer support services of twenty major brands, show that the seq2seq model outperforms the other two in terms of semantics and word overlap.”

About Anjuum Khanna, Tech Blogger

Anjuum Khanna a strategic leader with a proven track record of over 19 years in spread heading profitable ventures within Fintech, eCom Startups, BPOs, Telecom & D2H, spearheaded domestic & Global Business Operations with large team sizes. Championed change management & enterprise wise automation initiatives within organizations in India & Middle East. Presently working as Vice President at Mswipe Technologies.

#anjuum khanna blogs #anjuum khanna tech blogger #anjuum khanna consultant #anjuum khanna #natural language processing #anjuum khanna nlp projects #anjuum khanna nlp

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lupine-publishers-rrhoaj · 4 years ago

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LupinePublishers|Recent Breakthroughs in Textile Materials for Wound Care

Abstract

The article surveys some significant trends in the textile wound dressing during recent years. An ideal wound Dressing need to be redefined based on the nature of wound and wound classifications. Since generations, wound have been defined as selfhealing process, but chronic wounds and other wound requires handling and care from different parameters like moist conditions, biocompatibility, microbial infection to mention a few. Bioactive dressings based on different materials sodium alginate, chitosan, hydrocolloid, iodine have been explored. The future of fiber technology for medical applications depends largely on the future needs of our civilization. The use of new fibers for healthcare textiles application has increased rapidly over the past quarter of a century. With the recent advances in tissue engineering, drug delivery, and gene delivery‐ alginate, chitin/chitosan and their derivatives present a novel and useful class of biomaterials. Hence small changes in their molecular structure can bring large changes in their interactions with components of biological tissues or drugs. These polymers are excellent candidates for applications in the biomedical field because of their versatility, biocompatibility, bio absorbability and significant absence of cytotoxicity. Modern wound dressings combine medical textiles with active compounds that stimulate wound healing while protecting against infection. Electrospun wound dressings have been extensively studied and the electrospinning technique recognized as an efficient approach for the production of nanoscale fibrous mats.

Keywords: Electrospun polymeric dressings; Wound healing; Bioactive; Polysaccharides

Introduction

Human body has strong immune system with capabilities of self-healing. The protective layer of the skin protects the body against the external environment. The important layers of skin are Epidermis (outermost layer), Dermis (middle layer) and subcutaneous fat (deepest layer). The Epidermis consists of dead cells of keratin, which makes this layer water proof whereas dermis consist of living cells, blood vessels and nerves running through it, which provides structure and support. The subcutaneous fat layer is responsible for insulation and shock absorbency [1]. In normal skin, there exists an equilibrium between epidermis and dermis [2]. Wound dressing design and fabrication are important segments of the textile medical and pharmaceutical wound care market worldwide. In the past, traditional dressings were used to simply manage the wound, to keep it dry and prevent bacterial entrance. Nowadays, the fabrication of wound dressings aims to create an optimal environment that accelerates wound healing, while promoting oxygen exchange and intensively preventing microbial colonization [3]. The use of natural fibers in medical applications spans to ancient times. These fibers afford a bioactive matrix for design of more biocompatible and intelligent materials owing to their remarkable molecular structure. Oligosaccharides and polysaccharides are biopolymers commonly found in living organisms, and are known to reveal the physiological functions by forming a specific conformation. There has been an intensified effort in recent years in identifying the biological functions of polysaccharides as related to potential biomedical applications.

Wound Dressings of Third Generation

Wound is defined as any cut or break in the layer of skin. The normal process of wound healing starts operating once the protective barrier is broken. Majority of wounds heal without any complication. because cells on the surface of the skin are constantly replaced by regeneration from below with the top layers sloughing off. However, in case of chronic non- healing wounds, there is more tissue loss and the natural process of healing is disturbed, thus special care is required for rapid and hygienic healing [4]. This thus poses the biggest challenge for wound care product researchers and developers. The purpose or aim of choosing a wound dressing is to protect the wound from infection, ease pain, promote healing and to avoid maceration. Usually, the selection of wound dressing depends on the type of the wound. Traditionally, different materials like neem paste, honey paste, turmeric, animal fats, etc. were used as wound dressing materials. But these traditional or homemade wound healing methods could not control the infection which hampers the healing process. Continuous efforts are in progress to develop wound dressings which can improve the healing process. Nowadays, different materials are in use for rapid and cosmetically acceptable healing. Thus materials are being developed with special emphasis on solving complexities of the healing process, speedy healing and prevention of scarring i.e., keloid formation or contractures.

Wound management and wound care has gained importance in recent years. Global market is flooded with different varieties of wound dressings. Some of the polymeric materials used in wound dressings are based on hydrogel materials, sodium alginate, hydrocolloid, collagen to mention a few. Different wound dressings are selected based on the type of wounds. The major problem of exudate management is a matter of concern. Advances have been made to achieve wound management with better absorption systems using super absorbent polymers and developing layer dressing (composite dressings). The various advances made in wound dressings have been reviewed with special focus on layered dressings with superabsorbent polymers.

Chitosan Dressings

Chitosan is a valuable natural polymer derived from chitin. Chitosan is known in the wound management field for its anti-viral, anti-fungal, non-toxic, non-allergic, biocompatible, biodegradable properties and helps in faster wound healing but it exhibits excellent anti-bacterial activity [5,6]. Chitosan dressings show scar prevention which is the most important criteria in today’s world of wound dressing technology [5]. Chitosan wound dressing has excellent oxygen permeability, controlled water loss and wateruptake capability. There are number of references on chitosan in wound treatment [6-11]. Wound dressing and wound management is an active area of research developing biocompatible dressings with more focus on bioactive materials incorporating growth factors. Speciality absorbents are the need for treatment of chronic wounds, highly exudating wounds, and in total cosmetically acceptable healing.

Electrospun Polymeric Dressings for Improved Wound Healing

Electro spinning has become one of the most popular processes to produce medical textiles in the form of wound dressings. This is a simple and effective method to produce nanoscale fibrous mats with controlled pore size and structure, from both natural and synthetic origin polymers. This technique has gain much attention because of its versatility, reproducibility, volume-to-surface ratio and submicron range [12-14] [2-4]. Recently, functionalizing these electrospun wound dressings with active compounds that accelerate wound healing and tissue regeneration has become the major goal [15]. The rising of antibiotic-resistant infection agents has increased the need for such therapies. While antibiotics act selectively against bacteria, dressings functionalized with antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) act at multiple sites within microbial cells, reducing the likelihood of bacteria to develop resistance [16]. The combination of collagen type I (Col I), one of the most important extracellular. matrix (ECM) proteins to wound healing, with these AMP-polymer mat systems has yet to be investigated. Col I has been highlighted as uniquely suited for wound dressing therapies because of its involvement in all phases of wound-healing [17]. Thus the combination of Col I with the AMPs would represent a new step further in the optimization/development of new generation wound dressings.

Due to the continue rising of antimicrobial resistant pathogens, the need for engineered alternated treatments for acute to chronic wound care has increased. As a first strategy to overcome this issue, AMPs have been loaded onto existing textile medical dressings to improve their healing and antimicrobial capacities [18]. We highlighted the most well known AMPs and the most appropriate methods to functionalize the surface of electro spun mats with such molecules. This is still a very new formulation and further research should be conducted. Indeed, long-term therapeutics using AMPs. functionalized dressings should be carefully evaluated to prevent the risk of compromising our innate immune defense and, therefore, the ability to control commensal microbiome and microbial infections. Functionalizing surfaces with AMPs should be managed by standardized tests that not only evaluate the action of the AMPs but as well its stability, releasing abilities and tunable performance. The level of control in peptide loading and release timescales that are required in applications that could benefit from such antimicrobial profile has thus far not been demonstrated. Because they are still being developed and tested, these systems, AMPs-polymeric mat, should be cautiously defined so that the best combination between selected polymer, mechanism of action, AMPs and immobilization process is achieved. Although Col I has been extensively used in wound healing and its potential already demonstrated, the combination with AMPs-polymeric mats systems has yet to be explored. In a near future, we intend to examine the synergistic performance of these molecules in the treatment of chronic wounds, namely diabetic ulcers. It is expected that these new systems aside from acting against the pathogens will also accelerate the wound healing process by establishing a symbiotic action.

Role of Polysaccharide Fibres In Wound Management

Polysaccharides appear in many different forms in plants. They might be neutral polymers or they might be poly anionic consisting of only one type of monosaccharide, or they might have two or more, up to six different monosaccharide types. They can be linear or branched and they might be substituted with different types of organic groups, such as methyl and acetyl groups. Other types of polysaccharides isolated from plants used in the traditional medicine were identified as having their biologically active sites in the complementary system, the case of arabinans and arabinogalactans [19]. In moist healing concept, alginate fiber becomes one of the most important fibers in the wound dressing [20]. The incorporation of biological agents into the fiber used for nonwoven wound dressings provide a means for directly introducing such agents to the wound without a separate application and with no additional discomfort to the patient. Many authors discussed the wound healing ability of the alginate fiber with different modification [21,22]. The Second part discusses the chitin and chitosan polysaccharides and their applications in various medical fields. The specialty of chitin and chitosan fiber is, its high biocompatibility, non toxic and ability to improve wound healing and therefore it is evaluated in a number of medical applications10 such as drug delivery wound dressing, etc [23-26].

Alginate in Wound Dressings

Physical and chemical properties of alginate dressing depend on the relative content of calcium and sodium ions and the relative concentration and arrangements of the mannuronic and guluronic monomers. Dressing rich in guluronic acid react readily with sodium ions and form stronger gels. On the other hand, mannuronic acid rich dressings form fewer gels. Alginate fibers have a unique ion exchange property [27]. On contact with wound exudates, the calcium ions in the fiber exchange with the sodium ions in the body fluid and as a result, part of the fiber becomes sodium alginate. Since sodium alginate is water soluble, this ion‐exchange leads to the swelling of the fiber and the insitu formation of gel on the wound surface. This Now a days there are various types of alginate fibers and dressings available, utilizing the diversified properties of the different types of alginate extracted from different sources of seaweeds and the availability of many types of salts of alginate, such as zinc and silver alginate, which are used for zinc‐deficient people and for antimicrobial properties respectively [28]. Due to their unique properties and the fact that the dressings can be used in the dry form or hydrated form, alginate dressings can be used for a wide range of wounds, providing a cost‐effective treatment that involves a minimum number of dressing changes.

Chitin and Chitosan in Wound Dressings

Especially using the two polymers in medical applications has attracted interest because of having a lot of advantages as being natural renewable resources, being the most abundant polymeric material in the earth, biocompatibility, biodegradability, easy availability, nontoxicity, the ability to chelate heavy metals, Interestingly, some antibacterial and antifimgal activities have been described with chitosan and modified chitosan derivatives. Due to the antimicrobial property both Chitin and chitosan has long been known as being able to accelerate the wound‐healing process. It has been shown that by applying chitin dressings, the wound healing process can be accelerated by up to 75% [29]. Textile materials are very important in all aspects of medicine, surgery and healthcare and extend of applications to which the materials used because of the versatility of textile materials. Advances in fiber sciences have resulted with a new breed of wound dressing, which contributing healing process in an effective way [30]. The role of polysaccharide fibres in wound management has been highlighted. Also the different properties and requirements of various polysaccharide fibers to the healing of different wounds have been discussed. In particular special properties of Alginate, chitin and chitosan were summarized with the various experimental results of different researchers.

Conclusion

Traditional methods have been continuously worked upon to deliver better products. Starting from simple gauze dressings in 1900’s to bioactive dressings till today have been worked upon. Bioactive dressings based on different materials sodium alginate, chitosan, hydrocolloid, iodine has been covered in this review. Based on wounds different classifications of type of wounds, correlation of wounds with wound dressing have also been focussed upon. This has led to development of interactive dressings which are further developed as per wound requirement viz. semipermeable and hydrogel dressings. Efforts are in process to develop super absorbing and bioactive material for critical wound care. The conventional primary and secondary dressings have been replaced by composite dressings composed by 4 to 5 layers with super absorbing materials incorporated in one of the layers which accumulates exudates from the wounds and also provides protection from leakage and thus avoiding cross infections which at times become a major concern. This article focuses on changing trends in the area of wound dressings through three decades. Wound healing rate depends mainly on proper dressing materials. Over the last few years there has been a rapidly expanding interest in polysaccharides from both a fundamental viewpoint and also from an applications viewpoint. With different varieties of polysaccharides in modern wound dressings, this article discusses the effective utilization of polysaccharide fibers like alginate, chitin and chitosan for the medical application, specifically for wound management. Further it explains the current research status and also summarizes the different findings of researchers. The unique diverse function and architecture of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) has attracted considerable attention as a tool for the design of new anti-infective drugs. Functionalizing electrospun wound dressings with these AMPs is nowadays being researched. These new systems have been explored by highlighting the most important characteristics of electropsun wound dressings, revealing the importance of AMPs to wound healing, and the methods available to functionalize the electrospun mats with these molecules. The combined therapeutic potential of collagen type I and these AMP functionalized dressings will be highlighted as well; the significance of these new strategies for the future of wound healing will be clarified.

For more Lupine Publishers Open Access Journals Please visit our website: http://lupinepublishers.us/ For more Research and Reviews on Healthcare articles Please Click Here: https://lupinepublishers.com/research-and-reviews-journal/ To Know More About Open Access Publishers Please Click on Lupine Publishers Follow on Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/company/lupinepublishersFollow on Twitter : https://twitter.com/lupine_onlineFollow on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/lupinepublishers

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universallyexpertcollective-blog · 7 years ago

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rahulagawane123 · 5 years ago

Text

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muthur9000 · 7 years ago

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Thanks to @londonjb for the lead.

This article explains a lot of the psychological motivations of the Prometheus Crew and David. Very long and may require a tea, coffee or whisky.

There's been a lot of speculation around Prometheus, mainly over whether certain elements of the plot constitute sloppiness on the parts of Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott, or whether they are intentional elements of a puzzle film. In a way, the reception to the film is a lot like Blade Runner, and the film shares as much DNA with that Ridley Scott work as it does with Alien. In fact, I could imagine the three pictures now representing three points on a single timeline of future human history. Certainly, the interpretation of Phillip Dick's Replicants in Scott's Blade Runner and his portrayal of synthetic humans in Prometheus and Alien express certain misgivings over the nature of humanity and whether we are too immature to be creators of responsible entities. They are related metaphors from a single author.

The current brou-ha-ha in the web community is, of all things, "were the Engineers mad at humanity for killing Jesus?" I'm going to leave this to theologians who like science fiction. In short, this way-out-there question is based on the fact that parts of the facility in the film were about 2000 years old, and that Ridley Scott seems to have implied in a recent interview that he and Lindelof discussed whether Jesus was an Engineer sent to redirect humanity at the start of the Roman Empire. Much like the "Is Deckard a Replicant?" question from Blade Runner, this will provide fans with decades of debate that is largely besides the point. It is true that the film can be seen as a twisted spin on the New Testament, with wanderers arriving to an inhospitable desert sanctuary on Christmas Eve, an impossible birth announced by a sexless homunculus, isolation to a "manger" for an impossible delivery, an amoral potentate seeking miracles without redemptive faith, shattering of a "Temple Curtain," a resurrection of the Impossible Child from his tomb, and bodily assumption of the Mother into Heaven. The designation of the moonbase, LV 223, apparently leads to a verse in Leviticus (22:3) that has to do with defiling the Temple and angering the Israelite God. But again, these are matters beyond my ability to discuss them above a cocktail party level.

Instead, let's just deal with two main aspects of the film, and where psychiatric theories can give us insight and further appreciation of the narrative. Both concern the filmmakers' ideas about empathy versus individualistic survivalism. One thread runs through the relationship between the Engineers and Humanity, as illustrated by the puzzle in the film, the responses of different crew members to the Engineer trap being sprung, and Liz Shaw's story. The other thread concerns the very odd familial triad of Weyland, his daughter Vickers, and most importantly, the inhuman "child" David. I'll get back to this triad in the next diary, and touch back on Blade Runner and Alien in the process.

At its simplest level, the conflict between empathy and individualistic survivalism is one of sacrifice versus self-preservation. The latter has always seemed to be the evolutionary imperative, the "animal" nature of humanity, leaving empathy seemingly in the provenance of theology and certain secular philosophies. Even the early psychoanalysts saw the "base impulses" of Id to be primary, consuming and reproducing as the animals did, and the "civilizing influences" of Superego to magically appear through the ministrations of parents and societal rules. We are now just coming to challenge these notions in earnest, as we find brain circuits vital to a sense of feeling the pain of others, and realizing that they are highly overlapping with the social learning circuits that likely gave our hominid ancestors a literal "leg up" on the quadrapedal competition through the manufacture and instruction in tool making/use. Cognitive neuroscientists like Jean Decety have found that self-reflection, painful remorse, identification with others, social responsiveness and autognosis (understanding one's own emotional/cognitive state) are all dependent on some of the same cortical real estate, and that learning from others is intimately tied into all of this on a basic wiring level. Paleoanthropology has begun to debate to what extent our balance of individual autonomy and group dynamics gave us advantages over other primates, apes and hominids. Richard Leakey succinctly expresses this as the idea that a bipedal creature will have great evolutionary pressure to cooperate, as an asocial biped with a broken leg will not be likely to survive. It doesn't just take a village to raise a child, it takes a village to live long enough to conceive one.

On its surface, of course, Prometheus is a Von Daniken-Esque story that steals back the holiness of empathy from these scholars of human brains, development and evolution. We have these impulses because our creators were the kinds of beings who would kill themselves in order to seed new worlds. They were also white and blue eyed, but let's not get too far off track now. The thing is, the film never conclusively establishes that they made us. The mythos hints at their visiting periodically and influencing cultures, as well as having a change of heart sometime in the early Roman Imperial period (although the root cause may have been in Asia or Africa or America or everywhere at once). It also states clearly that they are related to us genetically, and by extension, to Bonobos and Chimps. The thing is, the mythos is open-ended enough that it doesn't negate what we know scientifically, and several characters raise the incongruity of Shaw's interpretation with known biology. She sees the DNA match as validating her theories, but it only establishes a common lineage. The Engineers may have been a culture of humans so far advanced that they left Earth tens of millennia prior. Ridley Scott states that the opening sequence is meant to establish the Engineers' psychology, rather than it showing what happened on Earth. They are seeding many worlds, and they have an aim for the hominids here on Earth. More than that we do not find out.

Thus, Von Daniken-Esque or not, the story is one of humanity falling short of loftier goals that involve the denial of self-preservation. This isn't just the Prometheus crew, or us chimps down here on Terra, but the Engineers of the LV 223 installation. The first we see them on LV 223, in a holo-playback, they are fleeing something. This something leads to widespread death and bodily defilement. It is the interaction of the bioactive muck with them that has led to this something. However, we know that the muck can do different things to different beings. It may have mutated some of the worms on the planet into body rending serpents. It turns the craven geologist into a rampaging wendigo gone amok. On the Engineer head with the panic center (locus ceruleus) activated, it is literally explosive, a dark mirror image to the gradual dissolve at the start of the film. And mixed with reproductive cells in humans, it leads to a rapidly gestating Xenomorph face hugger. At least one Xenomorph has already been unleashed by this process before the Prometheus gets there, as it is in a wall mural in the storage room, and this may have been the Something that hunted down the Engineers. But this is ostensibly the same (or similar) muck to the stuff at the start of the film, which is harsh but ultimately benevolent in result. Is the muck different, or does its effect depend on the user? What if the fear in the LV223 Engineers is what weaponized the substance? And conversely, what if the subtle effects of the substance on the Engineers made their motivations darker than that of their brethren? If they were as willing to die as their kinsperson at the beginning of the film, they could have launched a suicide mission, loaded up with the goop in their own bodies, and unleashed it upon landing and coming out of stasis. That isn't their plan. And that mural of the Xenomorph doesn't look like a warning. It looks like a shrine. Something is different about the psychology of these Engineers.

I wouldn't be a Science Fiction fan without my own pet theory. What if they never turned on us per se? What if they had some of this muck in select locations, away from most people's view, in various places on Earth? Then, whatever we did that was so messed up, whether it was unseating the Roman Republic, crucifying Jesus, destroying the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem (that's a good place to hide bioactive muck), having Russell Crowe fight Joaquin Phoenix, or some Dynastic Coup in China ... whatever it was polluted the goop with hostile intentions, and the Engineers took it to the LV 223 "Human-Engineer Visitor's Center" to see if they could fix it. This makes more sense than setting up a weapons facility on the moon to which they gave directions already. The Earth Embassy was retconned into a decontamination site for the Earth biomuck. This failed. It unleashed nightmarish biotech, but also changed the Engineers on the moon itself. At some point, the muck changed the thinking of the Engineers on that world, hence the mural deifying the Xenomorph and the stockpiling of the muck to unleash (or perhaps to venerate).

The best evidence for this failure of empathy on LV 223 is that one of the Engineers finally decides: "Screw this. I'm safe in this ship, so I'm going into stasis." When he comes out, he is not a high-minded angel. He is disappointed at Weyland, and responds by using the human's creation (David) as a blunt weapon. Now, he doesn't owe Weyland any more of an explanation than Dr Tyrell did for Roy Batty, when Roy had the same wish to look upon his creator and ask for more life. But when Tyrell hems and haws and refuses to try, we are supposed to see it as a flawed human move, and we almost sympathize with Batty's extreme reaction. Here, the clearly flawed being is the Engineer, and Shaw merely asks what went wrong. The Engineer believes itself to be above its creations, above its dead comrades, and above reproach. When it is stopped by an act of sacrifice by the Prometheus flight crew, it does not question its judgment of the little humans. It goes on a rampage to kill the human who questioned it. There is a lot of dialogue devoted to the flawed nature of David's creation and tutelage, but the implied narrative about creation is that our "guides" are also a decidedly mortal/flawed lot. David is the only character to explicitly state this, but the behavior of the Engineers, as much as it can be deciphered, is one of seemingly condemning behavior that they themselves are prone to carrying out. In a pinch, or under the effects of bad bioactive muck, or both, they opt for saving their own skins and lashing back at any and all who would threaten it.

Maybe, then, the Engineers are the stand-in for the innate capacity for great acts in either direction. They are not the past, so much as what we could become. They are what we know instinctively is "in us." We can elect to take an inclusive view that sees all our acts, creations and neighbors as carrying pieces of us, and that leads to a wide net of preservation that may motivate us to act in a fashion that does not prioritize our own immediate interests or even our immediate safety. Or we can focus on threats, excluding others, attacking others, and seeing legacy in a very narrow light. As Pinker points out in "Better Angels of Our Nature," you can't take the group minded view if everyone around you is slashing their sword, so neither is automatically more adaptive. The flexibility to go back and forth is adaptive, so long as the overall trend among all people is towards the broader view. This is also not purely partisan, for those keeping score at home, although it is political. Here, most people would say, "Oh, we're progressives, so we take the altruistic view." Not when we focus on the threat from conservatives, and from my POV, rightly so. In fact, the "pearl clutchers" vs. "red meat progressive" arguments here are between the empathic vs. survivalist viewpoints. And I myself have alternated camps, depending on the item being debated.

But back to Prometheus, and how the crew of tiny people is as variable as the Engineers. With the exception of three members, the crew is representative of a humanity without mythos. Here at DailyKos, we might see this as a good thing, an Earth clear-eyed and unbound from ancient superstition. However, mythology is a good thing. As first articulated by Henry James and later by Carl Jung, myth provides metaphors for the unfathomable, and allows people to cope with capriciousness in life. Not everything can be known in one person's lifetime, and this will confound the person who lacks stories to root his or her experience. Failure to have a sense of one's own story at the end of life is associated with despair or desperate actions, as per Erikson, and this task is difficult to achieve without a broader cultural story. Carrying myths is not the same as substituting belief for knowledge, as secular individuals who avidly read speculative fiction have a cosmic mythos without any degree of faith in it. Prometheus' crew, for the most part, are not these kinds of secular individuals. They speak in terms of money, sex, power, and discoverable fact. Even Weyland, who has some degree of unscientific belief, does not want a cosmic framework for his life, only cosmic powers; he has not achieved Eriksonian ego integrity at the end, serving as an Ozymandias figure placed into space opera. It is really Shaw and her partner who strive to rediscover a mythos, and neither utilizes it to allow for mystery. They must have a personal relationship with the Engineers, which places them on equal footing. Given that the Engineers are not gods, this is logically reasonable, but in so far as they are inscrutable this is not a recipe for success. Perhaps we could even go so far as to say that the rise of personal-level theology and the decline of mystery about 2000 years ago is what caused the catastrophe with/among the Engineers.

Many of the crew have been locked in by a lifetime of exposure to corporate materialism. The geologist is so set on his job that he is more frightened of the mission expanding into archeo-biomedicine than he is at the sight of the dead bodies or malevolent biotech, although the latter disturb him plenty. He has become overly specialized.

The biologist is almost a parody of how fundamentalists see many of us here, unwilling to challenge past theory and implicitly trusting of fauna that clearly looks sinister to us. Neither of them can see well anymore, nor critically examine information outside their training. No wonder we witness signal glitches and errant static and broken visors do them in: outside data is increasingly meaningless to their thought processes. And the LV 223 trap plays on their flawed singular-mindedness when it transforms them. The more motivated biologist is hollowed out by the creatures he wishes to study. The greedier geologist is transformed into a singular minded killing machine, mowing down anything living in his path.

Even the doctor, who does not meet a bitter end, merely acts as a functionary. Eventually, unquestioning of her directives, she is a willing pawn in David's side projects. She has become slave to a machine, less creative than a robot. There is no meaning left in any of these professionals' lives, a lack which is merely made explicit as the Prometheus mission goes off the rails. The corporation has hollowed out and stripped much of the empathic thinking from these people. More tragically, their survivalism is no longer individualistic, having been utilized by Weyland Corporation as a subversive means of control. Slavoj Zizek, a popular psychoanalyst and philosopher in Slovenia, has written volumes on the lack created by the modern materialist imperative to continually consume in the pursuit of individual enjoyment. I await his response to this element of the film, as I am pretty sure he will carry out an even more detailed analysis of it.

This control is not absolute, however, as the flight crew manages to break out of it. For much of the film, they speak flippantly about bets and sex and collector's items they have bought. They retaliate impotently against their female boss by using objectifying language, brought to a head by Idris Elba's captain challenging her humanity by daring her to have sex with him. If she can satisfy lust, then she's not a machine, recapitulating the erroneous thinking of the humans in Blade Runner. Even his devil-may-care warbling of "Love the One You're With," which elicited a chuckle from the audience, has a darker undertone that the sexual revolution has reached a flaccidly unsatisfying and meaningless hedonistic conclusion. To touch back to Freud, there is only Id craving other things, with atrophied Egos that cannot generate complete senses of autonomous selves. Yet, faced with the destruction of the planet, these men find something else to prize on it. We never know their individual motivations in detail, although the Captain speaks for a time on the imperative that the rest of humanity be able to go on. They will not receive things or even recognition for this. They will not collect on their bets with each other. It does not seem that they anticipate heavenly reward either, although they allude vaguely to "the other side." Instead, the idea that they share enough basic humanity with those back home is sufficient to trigger the "other circuitry" that acts in opposition to consuming and persisting. Even unrecognized, something of themselves will remain in distant and close relatives who will live to see another day. They cannot articulate it, but their bravery speaks it. And it is instinctual, whereas the other impulses have been reinforced by the civilization, in concert with more recent psychological theory that does not see one or the other impulse as more innate.

Let's finish by looking a bit at Shaw. She has been turned into an outsider by her own life circumstances. She has serially lost both parents as a child and has discovered she is infertile. Thus, she is cut off from the most immediate level of the biological thread early on. Her deeply held theories on human development are not widely accepted, as she must rely on an eccentric billionaire for funding (although the state of governmental grants is unclear in this world's backstory). Her talents do not readily bring her acclaim or power. There is nothing driving her other than personal satisfaction. She wants to be proven right, but since she already believes she is correct, data is always spun into confirming her narrative. There is very little narcissistic weakness for the world of 2089 to play off of and manipulate. That said, she is hardly concerned with humanity as a whole, except as a study piece. She and her partner form a pair walled off to some extent from others, and she herself seems largely walled off from instinct. The drive present is one to know. In some fashion, she is the character most alike to David, rather than Vickers.

According to Jeffrey Arnett, who formulated the concept of Emerging Adulthood about 20 years ago, the transition from adolescence to full adulthood in the modern age is one of determining where to live, what to do, and who to love. His ideas are an expansion on concepts of adult identity first articulated by the first generation of Freudians, as well as the young adult conflict of Intimacy vs. Isolation postulated by Erikson. This phase of development is supposed to be marked by repeated failure, as well as multiple breaks and rapprochement with the elder generation. Inability to have a solid sense of answers to the three lifestyle questions by the mid-30s is often associated with continued immaturity in interpersonal interactions and/or a midlife crisis. Shaw, who has been robbed of an elder generation and does not appear to have replacement proxies, has followed the example of her widowed father. There has never been a chance for rebellion. She sees her life's work as primary, which determines her partner and her world-traversing lifestyle. She enters her mid-30s without a hint of crisis, but also without much ability to interact with people outside her work. This is not the careerism present in the other crew, as she can think critically about a wide range of topics, but her social development seems frozen. She relies upon her partner as the spokesperson and interlocutor for much of the first half of the film. In fact, until the crisis reaches its climax, she almost appears to have a less rich emotional inner life than David (who as we will discuss in the next diary, is likely hiding his responses).

This changes as her partner is ripped from her. This not only challenges her assumptions about the benevolence of the Engineers, but strips her of her intermediary. She is exposed to the hostile world for the first time since the death of her father, making David's touch back to this event all the more cruel. Having opted for one clearly intimate relationship, she can choose total Isolation or find a way to rely on others. As she is betrayed by David, by the medical crew, by Vickers and Weyland, and by the Engineer, she relies more and more on her life's mission. Her quest for answers, never at odds with whatever the details of her Christian faith are, becomes even more central. And her Christian faith cannot be that of the literalist, even if she believes that Jesus and the Engineers are one and the same, as she has ideas clearly divergent from the account in Genesis. Pursuing that mission first takes her on a survivalist path, and then shifts to a more inclusive view.

The medical bay Caesarean is a survivalist action in some ways but not others. On one level, she is the archetypal female action heroine, socking out anyone standing between her and the med bay. She endures pain and injury to live another day. However, here, it is an unearthly child that threatens to kill her. Her child, in a sense, as it shares some genetic material with her, or at the very least with that of her partner. But Shaw is uniquely qualified to recognize that this creature is an invader rather than part of a continuing biological thread, as she already sees herself as outside that ongoing chain. Since this is not reproduction, there is no primal level gain in sacrificing herself for it. I am shocked that the Fundamentalists have not seized on this scene as a grotesque of the Virgin Birth, but more surprised still that either side in the Culture Wars has not seen how this is a reflection of the zeitgeist as we confront questions of delivering or terminating pregnancies with foreknowledge of congenital/genetic malformations. The dedicated modern woman, with an adult existence centered outside of home and hearth, who elects to live another day rather than bring something she does not recognize as hers into this world. This is not to boil down difficult questions to simple science fiction struggles for life and death: no potential mother (or her partner) can see any real world pregnancy as merely an alien invader. Nonetheless, uncanny narrative threads in horror or gothic or any speculative story where reality's rules are suspended ends up reflecting that which cannot be spoken of comfortably in the real world. This is what Freud called Unheimlich, which means both Uncanny and "The Un-Hidden." This pregnancy, both enabled and poisoned by the Man of Technology (who is also a Corporate Man!), is only a terrible choice thrust upon her. And she must rely upon yet more corporate technology to save her, which she must both appropriate forcibly and then convince/reprogram to do the job. Is this not the impossible nightmare our moral arguments and advanced knowledge have thrust upon every woman, the seemingly barren and the fertile alike? Even now, do we not hear the Corporatist funded scolds redirecting women and their physicians to always choose measures to bring every pregnancy to delivery, like David and his effortless take-over of the Weyland med crew? Even in nations where access is not an issue and pollution is being addressed, is the foreknowledge we can now have not the genesis of such nightmares, made all the more scary by the fact that the developing fetus is part of our biological chain? This is survivalism turned in on itself.

Having made the terrible choice to rip a creature from her womb, Shaw is now met with almost preternatural calm by David, Vickers and Weyland. She is not taken back to the cryo-beds, nor arrested, or even reprimanded. Weyland is more concerned with her accompanying them on his quest for more life. The corporation and its godhead must persist. The implied option is: "If you will not bear a child for the corporation, will you nurture the corporation itself? If you will not act solely for yourself, can you broaden your worldview to support me?" However, these are purchases, not empathic pleas. Weyland does not come as the weary senescent in need of help. He announces that this has been his plan, that he is in control. Having just come from one crisis of modern feminism, are we now not smack dab in the middle of the other? If you will not bear a child, then you must be a company man. This is also the crisis of our aging population, where so much of the work is now in health care and elder care. Vickers and David are along for the ride, both for their own ends, and we will return to this in the next installment. But neither accompanies Weyland entirely because they want to take care of him, even though David has followed his programming and been attentive. They have farmed this work out to others: the scientists, the crew, the technology, the medics, and the Engineer. People who take "pink collar" jobs in our world may often start off entirely fueled by empathy and purpose, but can quickly get drawn into much more materialistic and unempathic motivations. This is survivalism masquerading as an emphatic plea. Shaw does not take the bait, agreeing to go along but beginning to remember her core motivations.

Everything changes when she witnesses the battle between the Engineer and Weyland. Denied his individualist/survivalist aims, Weyland is struck down by the Engineer, who is unimpressed with the narcissistic achievement of arriving to wake him up. Nevertheless, the Engineer is no less driven by the same instincts, refusing to engage in a discussion about actions/morals and simply maneuvering to continue his own existence. False gods abound in this room of mere mortals. Remembering her discussion with the Captain, and how his motivations are already in the process of change, she takes a chance and reaches out to another for help. She asks him to make a sacrifice that only he can, on behalf of countless people that neither of them will see again. And then, she takes an even bigger risk, providing David with a chance to help her and offering to help him. It is at this point that she regains her cross, lost when she was first infected with the growing invader within her. She has begun to participate in a genuine dialogue with others, offering assistance that may not be reciprocated and making requests that may not be fulfilled. She trusts not just in her life's mission, but in others that she is not intimate with, others who have betrayed her before. She does this because it is the only way to allow for Earth to survive, and as it turns out, her bet pays off for herself and for Earth. Ironically, the purely survivalist Xenomorph Facehugger acts as the Deus Ex Machina, bringing the corrupted Engineer to his end in the same way he had denied Weyland further existence. But it acts in its singular minded way, as it has no empathic instincts.

In the end, Shaw's growth and reconnecting to her full human nature allows David to learn the benefit of an empathic sense. The Immortal Man made Invalid, he is now the homunculus with broken legs, dependent on another person to help him along. Without him, Shaw cannot achieve her more intellectual mission; without her, David has life without further experience. We have seen the theoretical dawn of human empathy reborn, its survival advantage spelled out for us. This recapitulates the pre-denouement of Blade Runner with Deckard and Batty, but with a happier resolution for both actors, and stands in contrast to Alien where Ripley is left alone. In the next diary, we will go back and review the unhappy family of Vickers, Weyland and David, and speak of narcissism and malignant narcissism in more detail. In the process, we will see how such persons (corporate and human) that lack a full capacity for a sense of the other loom large as chief antagonists in Prometheus and our own world.

By Ptolemy Thursday Jun 21, 2012 · 3:56 AM AUSEST

Part II

#prometheus #david 8 #meredith vickers #sir peter weyland #janek #ravel #chance #ford #elizabeth shaw #charlie holloway #alien prequel #alien movie #alien franchise #space horror #science fiction #scifi horror

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digitaldarshan29 · 5 years ago

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Digital Marketing Trends To Watch Out For In 2020

If you would like to travel wherever the individuals square measure, you wish to move on-line. The influence of the digital landscape, or 'cyberspace,' has been steady growing since the 1990's, and now, simply many decades later, it's a serious virtual atmosphere for the overwhelming majority of individuals on the earth.

1. Facebook could also be Peaking

It's important for future digital marketers to essentially explore United Nations agency their target market could also be, as a result of Facebook could also be terribly unsuitable for a few campaigns, particularly because it continues to trend down with younger demographics. create no mistake, Facebook continues to be huge, and lots of Americans still sign up on that, however be additional considered with United Nations agency you are marketing to, and make certain they are still on Facebook, or you are targeting the incorrect social media platform.

2. Instagram is very useful

Fortunately for Facebook, their greatest threat isn't any threat in any respect since they bought Instagram. The image and video-based social media platform is optimized to create it terribly straightforward for users to share photos and videos from their phone, that is currently the foremost omnipresent data processor information processing system machine on the earth and chop-chop growing because the computer of selection for the final public.

Instagram’s meteoric rise has already passed one billion users, a powerful accomplishment. meaning it's one among the foremost chop-chop growing social media platforms and, maybe additional significantly, a lot of its user-base is that the in demand younger demographic, particularly below thirty, that Facebook is losing, thanks to its name because the social media platform for “old individuals.”

3. Chatbot Use can Increase

Chatbots square measure simply a specialised style of software system that acts as a virtual "concierge," communication with users and aiding them in finishing their goals. Chatbots act with humans in an exceedingly natural approach, primarily through the utilization of text chat windows, however verbal interactions are potential.

4. Video marketing should

A total of seventy three of all Americans have interaction with YouTube. meaning over 1/2 all Americans square measure observation videos, and a great deal of these videos square measure created within the service of digital marketing. whereas YouTube could also be the foremost standard thanks to consume videos, even additional standard than Facebook, that does not mean that you just should not be swing videos on Facebook or any of the opposite social media platform for that matter.

Video digital marketing, in some ways that, offers the simplest of each worlds. The particular budgeting and mechanics of video production square measure well understood and documented, since video itself may be a twentieth century medium. However, currently video is paired with the unbelievably correct and valuable user metrics of digital media to supply rather more helpful knowledge on however specific efforts square measure performing arts. whether or not you are making videos for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or perhaps your own web site, it's a top-tier, unbelievably effective digital marketing tool. You'll capture and convey a great deal of knowledge and your brand's temperament with video. As long as you stick with the basics of excellent video production, you'll create spectacular gains.

5. Live Video may be a Separate nonetheless necessary factor

While video may be a valuable tool, one among the quickest rising stars in digital marketing is that the use of live video. a part of this is often thanks to the huge spike in streaming services, because of standard channels like "Twitch," that permits individuals to simply stream game play, or perhaps devices like Sony’s PS4 game console that go together with live streaming talents engineered right into the box.

#digitalmarketing #digitalmarketingtrends #eduvogue #scope #eduvogueiskey

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bestseocompanynmsk856-blog · 5 years ago

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ezatluba · 5 years ago

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The northwest corner of Newark Bay is the kind of place comedians have in mind when they mock New Jersey as a cesspool. The grim industrial coast the bay shares with the Passaic River is lined with the hulks of old chemical plants that treated their surroundings like a toilet. The most infamous of these facilities produced nearly a million gallons of Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant whose extensive use during the Vietnam War has caused generations of suffering. The Agent Orange plant discharged unholy amounts of carcinogenic dioxin—so much, in fact, that New Jersey's governor declared a state of emergency in June 1983. Though the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a $1.4 billion cleanup effort, the waters closest to Newark's Ironbound neighborhood remain highly contaminated; there are few worse spots in America to go for a swim.

And yet upper Newark Bay is not devoid of life. Beneath its dull green surface teems a population of Atlantic killifish, a silvery topminnow that's common along the Eastern Seaboard. These fish are virtually indistinguishable from most other members of their species, save for their peculiar ability to thrive in conditions that are lethal to their kin. When killifish plucked from less polluted environments are exposed to dioxin levels like those in the bay, they either fail to reproduce or their offspring die before hatching; their cousins from Newark, by contrast, swim and breed happily in the noxious soup.

Eight years ago, while he was an associate professor at Louisiana State University, an environmental toxicologist named Andrew Whitehead decided to find out what makes Newark's killifish so tough. He and his research group collected sample fish from an inlet near the city's airport and began to deconstruct their genomes, sifting through millions of lines of genetic code in search of tiny quirks that might explain the creatures' immunity to the ravages of dioxin.

In late 2014, two years after having moved to UC Davis, Whitehead zeroed in on the genes linked to the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, a protein that regulates an array of cellular functions. When most adult killifish encounter dioxin, this receptor's signaling pathway revs to life in the hope of metabolizing the chemical invader. But try as it might, the protein can't break down the insidious substance. Instead of acting as a defense mechanism, the frustrated signaling pathway wreaks havoc during development—causing severe birth defects or death in embryos. “If you inappropriately activate this pathway when your organs are being developed, you're really hosed,” Whitehead says. But that ugly fate never befalls the Newark Bay killifish because their bodies are wise to dioxin's cunning; the genes that control their aryl hydrocarbon receptors, which have slightly different DNA sequences than those found in other killifish, lie dormant when confronted by the toxin.

As he explained in a landmark Science paper in 2016, Whitehead and his colleagues also discovered that Newark Bay's killifish are not alone in using this clever genetic tactic to survive in tainted water. He identified similarly resilient killifish in three other East Coast cities whose estuaries have been befouled by industry: New Bedford, Massachusetts; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Portsmouth, Virginia. Since killifish never roam far from where they're born, these resistant populations must have developed the identical tweaks to their genomes without mixing with one another—or, put more plainly, the far-flung fish all evolved in remarkably similar ways in response to the same environmental pressures. This is compelling evidence in favor of the notion that evolution, that most sublime of nature's engines, is not some chaotic phenomenon but, rather, an orderly one whose outcomes we might be able to predict.

Whitehead's work on killifish is one of the signature triumphs of urban evolution, an emergent discipline devoted to figuring out why certain animals, plants, and microbes survive or even flourish no matter how much we transform their habitats. Humans rarely give much thought to the creatures that flit or crawl or skitter about our apartment blocks and strip malls, in part because we tend to dismiss them as either ordinary or less than fully wild. But we should instead marvel at how these organisms have managed to keep pace with our relentless drive to build and cluster in cities. Rather than wilt away as Homo sapiens have spread forth bearing concrete, bitumen, and steel, a select number of species have developed elegant adaptations to cope with the peculiarities of urban life: more rigid cellular membranes that may ward off heat, digestive systems that can absorb sugary garbage, altered limbs and torsos that enhance agility atop asphalt or in runoff-fattened streams.

The story that the pioneers of urban evolution are piecing together is tinged with darkness.

Whitehead and his colleagues, many of whom are at the dawn of their careers, are now beginning to pinpoint the subtle genetic changes that underlie these novel traits. Their sleuthing promises to solve a conundrum that has vexed biologists for 160 years, and in the process reveal how we might be able to manipulate evolution to make the world's cities—projected to be home to two-thirds of humanity by 2050—resilient enough to endure the catastrophes that are coming their way.

Weary as we are of despairing over the mass extinctions being caused by hyperdevelopment, it's tempting to take comfort in the ability of some animals to shrug off our brutalization of the planet. But the story that the pioneers of urban evolution are piecing together is tinged with darkness.

When Carlen started the doctoral program at Fordham in 2015, other students had already claimed some good animals for study—rats, salamanders, coyotes—but no one had yet staked a claim to a bird. She nabbed pigeons.

Charles Darwin's place in the scientific pantheon is deservedly secure, but he made his share of blunders. One of the gravest was maintaining that the effects of natural selection, the linchpin of evolution, could not be observed in a single human lifetime. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin of Species in 1859. “And then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.”

But soon after Darwin's death in 1882, the first wave of biologists to have grown up on his teachings took note of a curious occurrence in the realm of insects: During the second half of the 19th century, the predominant color of England's peppered moths had steadily shifted from mostly white to almost entirely black. One theory was that the bugs' wings were being tarnished by all the coal soot in the air, a result of the boom in heavy industry from London to Newcastle. But Darwin's disciples came to suspect that natural selection was at play. As England had become more urban, moths who possessed the rare mutation for black pigmentation appeared to enjoy a fitness advantage over their white peers.

It wasn't until the 1950s that Oxford University's Bernard Kettlewell conducted a legendary experiment that demonstrated why the black moths had evolved much faster than Darwin thought possible. Over a three-year period, Kettlewell tracked the fates of hundreds of marked moths that he released in two English forests, one by the pristine southwest coast, the other near the polluted metropolis of Birmingham. In the Birmingham woods—a stand-in for the industry-ravaged landscape of the Victorian era—black moths avoided predation by birds because they blended into the soot-stained trees; the white moths, by contrast, were easy to spot and thus became snacks for sparrows. The opposite occurred in the coastal woods: The black moths stood out when they alighted on the light-colored trees and were gobbled up.

Kettlewell's experiment on “industrial melanism” became a staple of high school biology textbooks because it succinctly illustrates how species can, when subjected to intense environmental pressures, evolve in a matter of years rather than over millennia. But the next few generations of evolutionary biologists were less attracted to hives of human commotion like Birmingham. Researchers raised on episodes of Wild Kingdom and the books of Jane Goodall gravitated toward fieldwork in remote places populated by animals they'd never otherwise encounter. Their mentors encouraged them to go abroad because they knew that faculty hiring committees were wowed by the exotic. The road to a tenure-track job ran through the jungles of the Amazon, not the parking lots of Houston or Columbus, Ohio.

For the first chunk of his career in evolutionary biology, Jason Munshi-South harbored all the standard romantic notions about which projects he should pursue. He studied the mating habits of tree shrews in Borneo and the demographics of elephants in Gabon, while earning his PhD from the University of Maryland and doing a postdoc at the Smithsonian. But in 2007, Munshi-South became an assistant professor at Baruch College in New York City, shortly after which his first child was born—two events that curtailed his globe-trotting. Restless, he looked for ways to scratch his fieldwork itch within range of the subway. His search for convenient subjects led him to study the white-footed mice that have colonized New York's parks.

Munshi-South and his assistants trapped scores of live mice and clipped off bits of their tails to get genetic material. Financial constraints and the state of technology at the time meant Munshi-South couldn't sequence the animals' entire genomes. Instead he used a shortcut called transcriptome analysis, which centers on the messenger RNA molecules that carry DNA's instructions for protein synthesis into cells. Since only the crucial bits of an organism's DNA get written into messenger RNA, researchers can work backward to infer, with impressive precision, the composition of the genes where it originated.

Munshi-South found there was scant gene flow between New York's various white-footed mouse populations—mice from the Bronx showed no signs of having recently mated with mice from Manhattan. Of greater note, however, were the sharp genetic differences between city mice and their country relatives: The city mice had conspicuous alterations in genes linked to metabolism, immune response, and detoxification. (“Linked,” of course, is a word that oversimplifies the relationship: Traits are usually the product of a complex stew of interactions among genes and with the environment.)

As he sorted through the possible reasons for these changes, which included the need to tolerate a certain type of poisonous fungus, Munshi-South came to realize that his side project was destined to become his life's work. He was now enamored with the idea that urban cauldrons of noise, heat, and filth are not only as authentically “natural” as any other habitat but also the perfect venues in which to observe evolution at its fastest and most inventive. A bearded and slightly cherubic man, Munshi-South speaks engagingly about his epiphany despite the notable softness of his voice. “For most organisms, cities are incredibly stressful,” he says. “So you'd expect that the evolutionary responses would have to be pretty strong for them to exist in that environment.”

Scores of evolutionary biologists are now investigating how city-dwelling creatures have adapted to life among buildings, traffic, and discarded Big Macs. These are some of the most intriguing urban evolution studies to have emerged in recent years.

Munshi-South next turned his attention to Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat, an especially reviled New York City inhabitant. Though the rodents have been darting around America since colonial times, Munshi-South was stunned by how little was known about the genetic reasons for their success. “There was a golden age of rat research in Baltimore in the '40s and '50s, out of Johns Hopkins, which was mostly done in the interest of public health,” he says. “They did things we wouldn't be allowed to do, like they'd go catch 50 rats from one place and dump them in another place and see what happened. And that would basically cause a rat war.” But no one in recent years had spent much time pondering whether rats might be evolving in sync with the cities where they abound.

Not long after moving to Fordham University in the Bronx in 2013, Munshi-South started setting traps in New York's dingiest nooks: subway platforms, storm drains, and the grease-slicked pavement outside pizza joints. (Unlike white-footed mice, brown rats tend to be too vicious to be collected alive.) In just a few years, the genetic tools at his disposal had become exponentially more advanced. It was now possible to sequence the whole genomes of individual rats for a reasonable price, and he could compare his results to a Rattus norvegicus reference genome that had been compiled as part of a federally funded project. Munshi-South and his collaborators found evidence that the genes controlling the olfactory sensors of New York's rats have been dramatically transformed by natural selection. The researchers believe the alterations in the genes' DNA sequences are linked to the rats' ability to navigate New York's subterranean passages, which are bathed in an ever-shifting barrage of smells.

The concept of rats evolving quickly enough to handle whatever humans throw their way has captivated the general public, and Munshi-South has become his field's preeminent evangelist—the scientist likeliest to pop up in a panel discussion to explain how cities are shaking up the genetics of wildlife with astonishing swiftness. But he's only the most visible member of a community of researchers, each focused on an animal usually thought of as mundane.

So when Munshi-South coauthored a 2017 Science review paper entitled “Evolution of Life in Urban Environments,” he was able to list more than 100 recent and ongoing projects involving a range of city-dwelling organisms: moths that shed their species' fatal attraction to artificial lights, finches able to communicate above the din of traffic, swans that possess a genetic variant that makes them less nervous around humans.

When I asked Munshi-South why urban evolution is suddenly hot, I expected him to cite the proliferation of accessible DNA-sequencing technologies—an obvious boon to smaller, more unconventional labs like his that struggle for funding. But his primary explanation was more of a downer: He sees a kind of resignation to a dark environmental future, especially among younger biologists who have no memory of more idealistic days and who see little point in examining any instances of evolution that aren't driven primarily by human activity. “I don't want to call it capitulation,” he says, “but it's kind of reconciling with our changed world.”

Jason Munshi-South, who has studied the adaptations of city rats and mice, has become the preeminent evangelist in the field of urban evolution.

On a pleasantly bright morning last February, Elizabeth Carlen took me to the northern Bronx to catch pigeons. A Californian who's now a doctoral candidate in Munshi-South's lab at Fordham, Carlen has spent the past four years studying the genetics of one of New York's most common birds. It is a line of research that requires her to trap hundreds of pigeons and collect samples of their blood.

Carlen and I camped out by a triangular patch of asphalt along West Kingsbridge Road, across the street from a check-cashing store and a carnicería. Whenever a flock of pigeons alighted to peck at the stale bread crumbs that elderly locals leave on the pavement, Carlen would fire her flashlight-shaped net gun at the throng. A few birds would inevitably become entangled in the nylon net, and Carlen would kneel down to untangle them one by one before drawing a vial's worth of blood from a vein between their toes. Once each needle prick had clotted, she would let the pigeon flap away toward the eaves of an abandoned red-brick armory.

On several occasions, the loud thwump of the net's deployment startled passersby. In one instance a bemused woman pushing a cart filled with groceries came over to ask—with more than a hint of suspicion—what on earth we were doing. Carlen had a disarming reply at the ready: “I'm a scientist and I'm trying to find out how New York pigeons are evolving.” She then invited her inquisitor to hold and release a pigeon who'd already provided a blood sample. An ecstatic grin spread across the woman's face as she cradled the docile bird in her hands; as Carlen would later note, people tend to feel a sort of primal joy when given the rare opportunity to handle wildlife.

As she drove us north on I-87 with a sizable amount of pigeon blood in her trunk, Carlen recounted the roots of her obsession with the oft-disparaged “rat with wings.” Her love for biology dates back to early childhood, when she was enthralled by the brittle stars and hermit crabs she saw in Baja California's tide pools during family camping trips. But she didn't have a clear sense of how to turn her passion into a lifelong career until April 2012, five years after she'd obtained her bachelor's degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It was then that she heard Jason Munshi-South discuss his research on the public radio show Science Friday. By the time the episode ended, Carlen had decided that urban evolution was her calling—a way to explore the ingenious ways in which nature refuses to be squelched by human dominance.

Carlen went back to school to pursue a master's in biology, with the express goal of gaining the technological chops necessary to join Munshi-South's lab. When she started the doctoral program at Fordham in 2015, she was required to pick a New York City animal as her specialty. Munshi-South's other students had already nabbed some good ones—the rats, the salamanders, the coyotes who lurk around the rim of Queens. But no one had yet staked a claim to a bird.

A bit of work has been done on the evolutionary adaptations of urban pigeons, but the field was mostly wide open for someone like Carlen. “Basic things, like what a pigeon's range is, how long they live—people probably assume we know all that already, but we don't,” said Carlen, now 35, who was wearing an I STAND WITH REFUGEES T-shirt beneath her coat, along with frayed black pants she doesn't mind getting blotched with droppings. She added that she's even had trouble finding preserved pigeons in the archives of natural history museums, complicating her efforts to compare today's birds to those of decades past.

After stopping in a casino parking lot to harvest blood from a few last pigeons, Carlen and I headed toward Fordham's biological research station, located on a bucolic former estate in the suburban town of Armonk. That is where Carlen sequences the DNA in the blood samples by a employing a technique called ddRAD, which uses a special enzyme to isolate the most revealing portions of an organism's genome. Carlen's priority at the moment is to sketch out how the myriad Columba liviapopulations found between Washington, DC, and Boston are related—essentially 23andMe for the Northeast Corridor's feral pigeons.

Her long-term goal, however, is to divine the birds' recent genetic adaptations. One mystery she's eager to solve is whether urban pigeons have lately evolved the means to process refined sugar without suffering health consequences—a trait that would explain their ability to subsist on diets rich in discarded cookies and doughnuts. (Carlen has already used off-the-shelf blood glucose monitors to determine that, against her expectations, New York pigeons who feast on sweets do not suffer from hyperglycemia.)

“If you can't pick up a dead raccoon for your best friend, what kind of friend are you?”

As we rounded an uphill curve near the field station's entrance, Carlen hit her Subaru's brakes and glanced back through the rear window at an enticing slab of roadkill. “Should I go back and get it for Kristin?” she asked. “I mean, if you can't pick up a dead raccoon for your best friend, what kind of friend are you?”

The friend she had in mind is Kristin Winchell, a 35-year-old postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis and one of urban evolution's foremost stars. She and Carlen, who first met at an academic conference five years ago, rarely see each other in person but text multiple times every day. Along with Lindsay Miles, who studies milkweed insects in Toronto, they also coedit Life in the City, the flagship blog of the urban evolution movement, which highlights discoveries being made by young researchers. And whenever Carlen comes across potentially useful roadkill, she scoops it up and freezes it for Winchell to eventually sequence. (The “trash panda” by the field station turned out to be too smooshed to be of value, so she left it.)

Kristin Winchell studies lizards that are native to Puerto Rico. “People didn't think animals could adapt on human time scales,” she says. “So people are excited that some animals are dealing with what we're doing to them.”

As a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Winchell chose to focus on Anolis cristatellus, a lizard species native to Puerto Rico. She collected lizards in both unspoiled forests and from the densely populated neighborhoods of San Juan, Arecibo, and Mayagüez. She quickly noticed that every city lizard had significantly longer limbs and larger toe pads than their forest-dwelling counterparts—morphological differences that, unlike the majority of urban adaptations, can be seen with the naked eye.

To test how these differences affect locomotion, Winchell built a series of straight, 1.5-meter racetracks. The tracks were made from common Puerto Rican building materials such as painted concrete and aluminum sheeting. She then unleashed the lizards on these surfaces, and the city natives beat the country bumpkins without fail. The morphological changes had clearly made the city lizards consistently faster sprinters—a crucial fitness edge in urban environments, where the reptiles are vulnerable to feral cats and heat while skittering across wide-open expanses.

The lizard races may have been clever, but they didn't prove that the city lizards had actually evolved. Before even running the races, Winchell developed a way to show that the changes had a genetic component and were therefore heritable. Adaptations can often be the result of plasticity—the capacity of individual animals to change in response to stimuli during their lifetimes, yet remain unaltered at the genetic level. (Think of bodybuilders who manage to develop improbable physiques by subjecting their muscles to stress; their offspring do not inherit that appearance.)

Some urban evolution researchers fear that, in their rush to trumpet exciting results, fellow scientists aren't differentiating between plasticity and natural selection. “To only look at traits but not do it experimentally doesn't give you the opportunity to understand whether that trait is genetically based,” says Max Lambert, a postdoc jointly at the University of Washington and UC Berkeley, who is studying how red-legged frogs are adapting to life in polluted stormwater ponds. “And overselling the field as being all urban evolution does a disservice to getting the public to understand what evolution is.”

Mindful of the distinction between evolution and plasticity, Winchell conducted what is known as a common garden experiment. She collected adult lizards from Puerto Rico, bred them in her Boston lab, and then took eggs from both city and county lizards and hatched them in an incubator. Once the babies hatched, she distributed them to isolated cages in which the conditions were identical: Each contained a single turtle vine and a wooden rod measuring three-quarters of an inch in diameter, for example, and each was bathed in 12 hours of UV light per day. After a year of raising the lizards on live crickets dusted with vitamins, Winchell examined their legs and toes. Her measurements and observations, which she published in a 2016 paper in the journal Evolution, confirmed that the urban lizards were true products of rapid evolution.

Winchell, who intends to investigate the evolution of squirrels and raccoons in St. Louis, Boston, and New York, understands that her work might provide a rare source of hope for those anguished by depressing environmental news. “People didn't think animals could adapt on human time scales,” she says. “So people are excited that some animals are dealing with what we're doing to them.” Those survivors, though relatively few in number, possess genes that have much to tell us about how to prepare for our hostile future.

In 2016 Andrew Whitehead coauthored a seminal paper on the rapid adaptation of killifish in Newark Bay.

As the severity of the climate crisis becomes more apparent with each record-breaking heat wave or melting slab of Arctic ice, humankind is coming to terms with the fact that much of the damage we've wrought is irreversible. That means making peace with the permanent disappearance of a fair portion of the animal kingdom: According to a May report from the United Nations, at least 1 million species are in imminent danger of extinction, including 40 percent of amphibians and a third of marine mammals. Even if all nations were to magically cooperate and take unprecedented steps to protect biodiversity, it would be too late for thousands of species.

Like so many of their scientific peers, urban evolution researchers are grappling with the question of how their work can help us make this new environmental reality a bit less grim. On the surface, at least, their inquiries can seem largely aimed at addressing theoretical matters—notably the issue of whether the evolution of complex organisms is a replicable phenomenon, like any ordinary chemical reaction. Cities provide an accidental global network of ad hoc laboratories to test this question: Office towers the world over are fabricated from the same glass panels and steel beams, night skies are illuminated by the same artificial lights, auditory landscapes thrum with the noise of the same cars, food waste comes from the same KFCs and Subways.

This urban sameness is allowing researchers to determine whether isolated populations of the same species develop similar adaptations when placed in parallel environments. “What cities offer us is this amazingly large-scale, worldwide experiment in evolution, where you've got thousands of life-forms that are experiencing the same factors,” says Marc Johnson, who heads an evolutionary ecology lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Laypeople can be forgiven for not instinctively sharing that enthusiasm, however: At first glance, settling the decades-long debate over evolution's replicability doesn't appear likely to make our post-climate-change lives any less hellish.

But in the quest to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, urban evolution researchers are also revealing the fundamental genetic attributes that make some species adept at adjusting to urban life—intelligence that could give us the power to forecast evolution's winners and losers in a world that's increasingly hot and crammed with people. When he concluded that killifish in four US cities had developed the same form of toxin resistance, for example, Andrew Whitehead ascribed the species' evolutionary success to its high degree of genetic diversity—that is, the killifish genome naturally contains an abundance of genetic information that isn't usually expressed. So the key to desensitizing the aryl hydrocarbon receptor was probably already present inside killifish DNA, and natural selection simply brought it to the fore.

“When the environment changes very rapidly, and changes in a way that poses fitness challenges, then species that are going to be able to adaptively respond to that are ones that already have the necessary genetic diversity in hand,” Whitehead says. “The environment is changing right now. You can't wait for migrants. You can't wait for new mutations.”

Urban evolution researchers are grappling with the question of how their work can help make the reality of a ravaged environment less grim.

Perhaps the greatest asset any creature can have hidden in its genome, of course, is the capacity to withstand heat. With global temperatures set to rise by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the turn of the century, the species likeliest to survive will be those that develop traits to guard against the broil. Today's cities, which are typically 2 to 5 degrees warmer than their surroundings, offer a sneak preview of how evolution will reshape wildlife on a sweltering planet.

The humble acorn ant is among the city-loving harbingers of the genetic churn that lies ahead. Two researchers at Case Western Reserve University, Sarah Diamond and Ryan Martin, have found that acorn ants they collected in both Cleveland and Knoxville, Tennessee, are able to thrive and reproduce in much warmer conditions than those from rural habitats. They hypothesize that natural selection may have favored urban ants whose genes manufacture more robust heat-shock proteins. If they can sort out the genetic markers linked to that suddenly useful trait, we may be able to tell which other species have the potential to adapt when the mercury rises and which are in danger of roasting into extinction.

Diamond hopes that evolutionary prediction will lead to smarter conservation choices. “If we know which taxa are most vulnerable to urbanization,” she says, “then we can do something about it before biodiversity might be adversely impacted.” That could involve simple things, such as building strategically situated green spaces within cities. In extreme cases, though, our only option for preserving some species may be to uproot and transport entire populations to distant lands.

There is an intriguing flip side to the idea that urban evolution research can be used to rescue species that lack the capacity to flourish in megacities: If we can identify which animals are genetically primed to adapt well to living amid glass and steel, we might be able to use that knowledge to engineer a more hospitable world for ourselves. That's because certain species, once tweaked in clever ways, have the potential to help heal the environment.

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Take oysters, whose feeding process involves filtering harmful bacteria and contaminants out of up to 50 gallons of water per day. The gelatinous mollusks were once abundant in America's urban rivers and bays, but they were largely gobbled up by shellfish lovers decades ago. By the time anyone realized it might be environmentally wise to have massive oyster beds in places like New York, it was too late for the populations to be easily revived: Underwater landscapes had been ruined by decades of dredging and dumping, as well as saturated in anthropogenic pollutants that cause fatal oyster diseases.

One solution is to toughen up oysters by tinkering with their DNA. A blunt method of doing so would be to use Crispr, the gene-editing technology that promises to give us the power to add, delete, or scramble an animal's nucleotides at will. But such an approach remains in the realm of the hypothetical for now, and it's possible the traits we desire in our oysters—disease resistance and faster breeding cycles, for example—are too complex to be created through simple snips and splices.

Fortunately there's a more nuanced option at our immediate disposal, one that makes use of the genetic insight now being gathered by urban evolution researchers. If we can peer deep into genomes and identify the species most likely to develop the specific traits we crave, we can place those animals in environments where natural selection will do the dirty work of shaping them into long-term survivors.

“Like, we could select for oysters that are most effective at growing huge beds and filtering water and protecting us from storm surges,” Jason Munshi-South says. “We want to look for these urban-adapted genotypes and see if we can harness them to clean air and cool things down, provide some service.”

Certain urban design choices can help us nudge evolution in whatever directions we choose. It is in our best interest, for example, to encourage the proliferation of the frogs that have adapted to living in man-made ponds where both storm runoff and toxic chemicals collect. These amphibians prey on mosquitoes and other insects that can carry disease, a threat likely to increase as the world heats up. So it would be smart to establish connections between ponds where the pollution-resistant frogs are abundant and those they've yet to colonize—say, by digging narrow tunnels beneath roadways. Bats are also desirable in cities for their pest-control talents; can we encourage them to adapt to urban areas by favoring particular types of artificial light, or by making sure the sonic environment won't interfere with the way they hunt?

Granted, a certain amount of hubris is required to believe we'll soon master the wondrous mechanism that turned lone cells into whales and giraffes in a mere few billion years. But as evidenced by the terrible environmental bind we've gotten ourselves into, hubris is what Homo sapiens do best.

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