1,721,094 research outputs found
Sensory Transduction and Subjective Experience: Expression of eight genes in three senses suggests a radical model of consciousness
Full text linkRecent research into whole genome mapping of the mouse brain has made possible direct investigation of the brain expression of unusual genes. A search of the Allen Brain Atlas database has provided genetic and neuro-anatomical evidence for widespread specific expression in the brain of eight genes specific to sensory transduction, in vision, hearing and touch. A novel biophysical model is proposed for the function of these proteins, in generating the internal model of experiential reality
A quantum physical argument for panpsychism
Full text linkIt has been widely thought that consciousness has no causal efficacy in the physical world. However, this may be not the case. In this paper, we show that a conscious being can distinguish definite perceptions and their quantum superpositions, while a physical measuring system without consciousness cannot distinguish such nonorthogonal quantum states. The possible existence of this distinct quantum physical effect of consciousness may have interesting implications for the science of consciousness. In particular, it suggests that consciousness is not emergent but a fundamental feature of the universe. This may provide a possible quantum basis for panpsychism
A quantum physical argument for panpsychism
Full text linkIt has been widely thought that consciousness has no causal efficacy in the physical world. However, this may be not the case. In this paper, we show that a conscious being can distinguish definite perceptions and their quantum superpositions, while a physical measuring system without consciousness cannot distinguish such nonorthogonal quantum states. The possible existence of this distinct quantum physical effect of consciousness may have interesting implications for the science of consciousness. In particular, it suggests that consciousness is not emergent but a fundamental feature of the universe. This may provide a possible quantum basis for panpsychism
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
A Search for the Physical Basis of the Genetic Code and Modeling Cancer Cell Response to Chemotherapy Using the Ising Model
Full text linkGenetic code and its origin are one the most challenging problems in biochemistry and cell biology. Studying the genetic code evolution and the logic behind it is an interesting but a very complicated problem. The logic of the genetic code from an energetic and probabilistic perspective, the occurrence frequency of protein mutations, and statistics of cytotoxicity effects on surviving cancer cell have been the main investigated topics in this thesis. The aim of this research is to implement the methods rooted in statistics, thermodynamics, and the physics of phase transitions in order to better face the challenges that experimental observations from genetics, molecular, and cell biology bring to the field of computational biophysics.
In this thesis, the first aim has been to find an underlying correlation between the Gibbs free energy and the naturally occurring frequency of codons and amino acids across extant life forms analyzed statistically. Using GAMESS software, the amino acid thermochemistry was estimated. For these calculations, we used the Hartee-Fock method with the PM3 basis sets. These energies were compared to the codon energies obtaining involving three energetic terms; nearest neighbor, stacking and nucleotide Gibbs free energy. The correlation between codon and amino acid energies could shed light on the rules behind the codon assignments in the genetic code. Unfortunately, only weak correlations were found in our study. Moreover, our investigation showed that, in human, amino acids that have a higher redundancy occur more commonly in nature, with examples including arginine and leucine. However, the higher abundance amino acids were not energetically cheaper to make in nature. In addition, among the dataset we studied such as; animal and fungal mitochondrial proteins, human body tissues and various species according to the phylogenetic tree of life (from bacteria to homo sapiens), the amino acid occurrence frequency was highly conserved. Also, we attempted to address the entropy reduction paradox in the transcription and translation process by accounting for the involvement of macromolecules ATP and GTP in these process and affecting the overall thermodynamic energy balance. We also investigated the hypothesis whether the amino acids have a higher affinity for their codons or anticodons according to the binding energy values obtained using computational docking simulations. However, the obtained docking scores showed no correlation between the codons or anticodons and the corresponding amino acids, and we have found some paradoxical examples that disprove the proposed hypothesis.
The next goal was to study p53 proteins mutations across a large set of various cancer types. The p53 protein has been selected due to its significant role in the cell cycle, cancer initiation, and progression. We showed that the highly represented mutants are R-H(79%), R-W(71%), R-Q(73%), G-S(55%), and R-S(48%) and at least one of these amino acid mutations occurs in 84% of the cases. Moreover, the Shannon entropy of p53 mutations has been computed in an effort to shed light on the epidemiological findings in terms of five-year-survival rate for cancer patients. However, the entropic approach to the analysis of the role of these important somatic mutations in cancer did not emerge as a prognostic factor in the analysis of cancer epidemiology data.
Finally, using the physical concepts of bistability and phase transitions, we were able to model the cancer cell response to a number of cytotoxic agents used in cancer chemotherapy. We applied the well-known model in the physics of critical phenomena, namely the Ising model and represented the two spin states (spin ‘up’ and ‘down’) in the context of cancer cell biology as a ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ state of cancerous cells, respectively. We explored both an interacting and non-interacting case of cancer cells in a culture with the latter corresponding to the well-studied “bystander effect”. The proposed model has been tested on 13 different cytotoxic compounds applied to various cancer cell lines in culture. The results were in strong agreement with our model showing high consistency among the tested chemotherapy agents. Also the results confirmed the prediction that the EC50 value corresponds to the peak of the susceptibility function, which is an important characteristic of systems at a critical point. The model has been tested successfully on experimental data from both a two-dimensional well-plate cell culture and a three-dimensional spheroid model
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
