Café com física: “MERDA – the fingerprint of life history”
The principle is well established in particle physics that, intrinsic in every particle, is information that is influenced by the physical nature of the particle, as well as its history. In a multi-particle system, every particle represents an information-rich entity that contributes in some definable way to the properties of the entire system. This same lens can be used to view microbes that inhabit the human body. All environmentally exposed surfaces of animals are saturated with microbes. The gut houses the vast majority (about 1014) of microbes associated with humans, because it is rich in the elements that support microbial life – high water and nutritional content. Like physical particles, each microbe in the gut ecosystem possesses information – there is a history as to how it got there, it has specific properties that are allowing it to stay and even proliferate there, etc.. Microbes of the gut are not a random assemblage. There are about 1000 different abundant microbial species in the typical gut, and many more species occurring in low numbers along the very long tail of the decay curve descending from 1014. Many of the most abundant microbes in the gut are initially aquired when the largely sterile baby transits the birth canal. Other usually rarer microbes derive from the diet, transmission between individuals, and the environment. Some may become long time residents of the gut, and others may just pass through. Since bacteria have the ability to replicate in the gut, the relative representation of a particular type of bacterium is defined by properties including metabolic capabilities of that microbe, and their compatibility with the environmental conditions within the gut. Environmental conditions within the gut are determined by such factors as diet, supportive or antagonistic factors produced by other resident microbes, and supportive and antagonistic factors secreted into the gut by the host. Host determinants of the microbial population composition and structure include rate of mucous secretion, rate of secretion of antimicrobial defense factors in the mucous, pH changes along the length of the gut, glucose and other nutrient content of the host secretions into the gut, temperature, water content, and many other factors. Factors that influence what the host secretes into the gut include age and state of development of the host immune system, sex of the host, diseases of the host (e.g., gut inflammation, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, etc.), relative activity of the host, and other factors that affect gut contraction rates and transit time. Other factors that influence the population structure within the gut include the rate of nutrient consumption by the host in relationship to the ability of that host to digest and absorb the nutritional content, such that excess consumption leads to a surplus of nutrients in the gut available to the microbial community. The main point is that the composition of gut microbes is highly unique to each person or animal, and depends on the specific properties of both the microbe as well as the host. Each microbe within the population conveys information about the history of the animal (such as the identity of its mother), about its diet and rate of consumption/over consumption, about its health, about its history of antibiotic use or intestinal disease, and many other traits. That is, gut flora are a highly specific historic and metabolic fingerprint of each animal. With the development of “Next Generation” DNA sequencing, we now have the ability to identify and enumerate about 99.9999% of the microbes in the gut of each animal. Based on a growing body of data, we are just beginning to develop the bioinformatic tools and rules necessary to correlate the microbial content of the gut with health. In the near future, analysis of gut flora (feces) will be a relatively painless and rapid means for comprehensively understanding the health and natural history of humans and animals. The objective is to reach a point where we understand the information content of each of the 1014 particles that constitute the human gut community.
During this seminar, the following topics will be dealt with:
De acordo com os últimos dados do INCA (Instituto Nacional do Câncer), 6.000 novos casos de câncer melanoma surgiram em 2014. Este é o tipo de câncer mais perigoso, porque possui uma alta taxa de metástase levando em muitos casos ao óbito. Atualmente, o melanoma é resistente à maioria dos tratamentos quimioterápicos e radioterápicos e por isso é estudado novos métodos de tratamentos. Nesse contexto, a terapia fotodinâmica é uma alternativa ao tratamento com o a vantagem de não ser invasiva. Um dos grandes desafios para terapia é superar a alta produção de melanina pelos melanócitos, que impede a penetração da luz e, portanto, a ativação do fotosensibilizador. Neste estudo foi investigada a morte celular do melanoma murino em modelo de monocamada através da avaliação de viabilidade celular usando diferentes fluências de luz. Além disso, foi observada a captação do fotossensibilizador, Photodithazine (PDZ), pelas células melanóticas em diferentes tempos, e a sua co-localização com organelas celulares. Assim buscamos um melhor entendimento do mecanismo de atuação deste fotosensibilizador e a sua ação contra o câncer melanoma.
In standard characterizations, science is self-correcting. Scientists examine each other’s work skeptically, try to replicate important discoveries, and thereby expose latent errors. Thus, while science is tentative, it also seems to have a system for correcting whatever mistakes arise. It powerfully explains and justifies the authority of science. Self-correction thus often serves emblematically in promoting science as a superior form of knowledge. But errors can and do occur. Some errors remain uncorrected for long periods. I present five sets of historical observations that indicate a need to rethink the widespread mythos of self-correction. First, some errors persist for decades, wholly undetected. Second, some corrections to erroneous theories have themselves been rejected when initially presented. Third, many errors seem corrected fortuitously, by independent happenstance, not by any methodical appraisal. Fourth, some errors have fostered further serious errors without the first error being noticed. Finally, some errors have been “corrected” in a cascade of successive errors that did not effectively remedy the ultimate source of the error. In all these cases, scientists failed to identify and correct the errors in a timely manner, or according to any uniform self-correcting mechanism. These historical perspectives underscore that error correction in science requires epistemic work. An understanding of errors forms an important type of negative knowledge.
The beauty of soap bubbles has long fascinated children and adults, and a quantitative model for explaining their burst was first developed by Lord Rayleigh in 1891. Slow-motion imaging of the rupture of soap bubbles generally shows the edges of liquid films retracting at a constant speed (known as the Taylor-Culick velocity), which is determined by momentum balance for the liquid rim collected at the film edge. In this talk we will report on our investigation[1] of soap bubbles formed from simple solutions of a cationic surfactant (cetyltrimethylammonium bromide – CTAB) and sodium salicylate, which have a viscolestic behavior due to the formation of “polymer-like” surfactant aggregates known as wormlike micelles. We demonstrate that these elastic bubbles collapse at a velocity up to thirty times higher than the Taylor-Culick limit, which has never been surpassed. This can be explained by a simple model that includes the elastic energy stored in the liquid film while the bubble is inflated, which is released when the film is ruptured, yielding an additional driving force for film retraction (besides surface tension). This new mechanism for the bursting of elastic liquid bubbles may have important implications to the breakup of viscoelastic sprays in industrial applications.
A proposta do programa é reunir estudantes e cientistas interessados em discutir temas relevantes na física de partículas, cosmologia e astrofísica de partículas.