Dr. Tyson being wise, but I really do enjoy him most when he’s just straight giddy about space-time.
I enjoyed how the writer articulated this idea: brilliant successes are produced by traits that mirror some symptoms of psychiatric disorders. However, she argues cognitive control is the functional ingredient. I would have just called it wisdom. Wisdom includes: judgement aided by experience, emotional regulation and self discipline among other requisite nuances.
“If we could identify a gene for creativity, let’s call it the “creativity gene”, you would be hard pressed to find very many people who would consider it a “negative gene” or a hazard to possess or carry. But what if, purely hypothetically, we could identify a gene for Schizophrenia? Or Bipolar Disorder? Or Depressive Disorder? Or ADHD? Would you select for those traits if you could genetically engineer your offspring at will? If you wanted to give birth to a creative child, the answer should be yes. The very traits that make someone creative, passionate, and likely to achieve a high degree of success in their domain, are the same traits that define psychological disorders such as Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, and ADHD. So what is the difference between creativity and psychopathology? Where do we draw the line between functional excess of extreme traits and the point at which they define a psychological disorder? Is there a discriminating characteristic that separates these two groups? Yes, there is, and it’s called cognitive control, or high executive function. We’ll discuss this more in a bit.”—
Anyone who knows a thing or two about biology knows that stem cells have tremendous potential in medicine: anything from repairing and replenishing heart cells after an attack to replacing nerve cells that are progressively lost in the brain of a person with Parkinson’s. One of the big challenges of using stem cells as a therapy is coaxing them to grow into the specific type of tissue that is required. In the body this happens thanks to precise chemical and physical signals, not all of which are yet understood or characterised. Using chemicals to direct the fate of stem cells has worked in laboratories, but the outcomes are not always safe or predictable. Now, a team from Northwestern University in the US thinks it has a solution. They say that they can direct the developmental fate of stem cells using only physical cues, by adapting a well-known technique that traces three-dimensional microscopic shapes and reconstructs them on flat surfaces. The process is called scanning probe lithography. (via How nanotechnology is shaping stem cell research | Nanotechnology world | guardian.co.uk)
