Practice of the Wim Hof Method made Hof’s skin temperature relatively invariant to cold exposure, a finding the researchers attributed to his increased sympathetic innervation and glucose consumption in intercostal muscle revealed by PET imaging. The method appeared to allow him to generate heat that dissipates to lung tissue and warms circulating blood in the pulmonary capillaries.
Source: wayne.edu
For decades, descriptions of viruses have straddled life and nonlife, a divide that usually isn’t difficult to navigate. Their hallmark characteristics, namely their small size, tiny genomes and parasitic dependence on cellular hosts for replication, set them apart from all other living things despite their animation. But that story has gotten far more puzzling — particularly since the discovery of the first giant virus in 2003, which was so large that researchers initially thought it was a bacterium.
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This is an example of what’s called an adversarial image: an image specifically designed to fool neural networks into making an incorrect determination about what they’re looking at. Researchers at Google Brain decided to try and figure out whether the same techniques that fool artificial neural networks can also fool the biological neural networks inside of our heads, by developing adversarial images capable of making both computers and humans think that they’re looking at something they aren’t.
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New research published today by Cairney and his colleagues in Current Biology has made significant headway on this issue by linking sleep spindles—spontaneous bursts of brain activity—to memory processing in a sleeping brain. Incredibly, the researchers claim it is possible to determine the content of the memory being processed by analyzing this brain activity.
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