bodies

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS, VIDEO REELS

The Coronavirus Is Messing With Our Minds As Well As Our Bodies, A Year Into The Pandemic

COVID-19 has hijacked people’s lives, families and work. And, it has hijacked their bodies and minds in ways that they may not even be aware of. As we see it, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is a sort of zombie virus, turning people not into the undead but rather into the unsick. By interfering with our bodies’ normal immune response and blocking pain, the virus keeps the infected on their feet, spreading the virus. People typically think of zombies as the stuff of science fiction. But in the biological world, zombies are all over the place, from the Ophiocordyceps fungus that perpetuates itself by zombifying ants; to Toxoplasma gondii, a single-celled parasite that completes its life cycle by leading rodents into the jaws of predators. Zombie viruses are also a real thing, i...

Sensors Monitor And Measure Our Bodies And The World Around Us

Sensors are all around. They are in automatic doors, at cash registers, in doctors’ offices and hospitals. They are used inside the body and outside. Sensors detect aspects of the physical world – matter, energy, force – similarly to a person’s or animal’s senses. But instead of translating the information into nerve impulses, sensors translate them into electrical signals. The signals can be stored, processed on a computer or displayed on a screen. They can be a current or voltage that is constant or varying with time. Sensors answer many important questions such as how well-inflated are a car’s tires, whether ice is building up on an airplane’s wings, whether carbon monoxide is in the air and how much oxygen is in your blood. As an electrical engineer, I work with sensors all the time...

Plants might be able to tell us about the location of dead bodies, helping families find missing people

The notion of plants talking to us about dead people sounds like a bad horror movie. But that’s the theme of a recent scientific paper I co-authored. Each day, over 160,000 people die in the world. Most people die with family members present or nearby; their family and friends mourn their loss, which includes having the loved-one’s body present. Sometimes people die in the wilderness, in war and under questionable circumstances. In so many of these cases the body is never recovered and loved ones don’t get closure. In cases of murder or genocide, perpetrators go unpunished without a recovered body. I didn’t usually think about this topic, until recently. I am a plant biologist who uses biotechnology and synthetic biology approaches in research. Nearly 20 years ago, I coined the word “phy...