Flowers get an electrifying buzz out of visiting bees - life - 21 February 2013 Plants could turn out to be one of the more chatty organisms. Recent studies have shown they can communicate with a surprising range of cues. Now it turns out they could be sending out electrical signals, too. As they fly through the air, bees – like all insects – acquire a positive electric charge. To test the idea, the team created artificial flowers, filling some with sucrose and others with quinine, a substance bees don't feed on. "That was the first hint that had us jumping up and down in the lab," says Robert. Next, his team looked at whether the bees were influenced by the shape of a flower's electric field, which is determined by the flower's shape. Ruthless evolution The researchers don't know exactly what information is contained in the flowers' electrical signals, but they speculate that flowers could evolve different shaped fields in their competition to attract pollinators. Of course, there may be a few cheaters out there that won't budge a millivolt when visited, he says.
Quantum 'weirdness' used by plants, animals - Technology & Science Birds like the European robin have an internal compass which appears to make use of a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. ((Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)) Bird navigation, plant photosynthesis and the human sense of smell all represent ways living things appear to exploit the oddities of quantum physics, scientists are finding. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics dealing with the strange behaviour of very tiny things like elementary particles and atoms, and is extremely different from the physics that humans experience every day. "Down at that level, everything is pretty darn weird," Seth Lloyd said before giving a lecture about quantum aspects of biology Wednesday evening in Waterloo, Ont. "Electrons can be in two places in once, or five places at once, or a thousand places at once. "When things get bigger, certainly on the scale of human beings or even at the scale of bacteria, then this kind of quantum weirdness tends to go away." Sensor, solar cell lessons Quantum Hanky-Panky
The Spooky World Of Quantum Biology Michael Garfield The new science of quantum biology is teaching us about how the actual behavior of evolution is governed by disconcertingly spooky processes – time travel being one of them. Will quantum computation finally be realized by biomimicry, in organic systems? Evolution is the new (old) computation...and we're about to take the reins. One hundred and fifty years ago, paleontologist Thomas Henry Huxley (an autodidact and philosopher who coined the term “agnostic” and was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his passionate defense of natural selection) asserted that humankind would eventually take the processes of evolution into our own hands. The premise is simple. Quantum computation, a science still in its infancy, promises swiftness and efficiency vastly superior to anything possible with conventional silicon chips. It’s a promising avenue for people with big plans for strong AI or virtual reality. What does this all mean?
In Pursuit of Quantum Biology With Birgitta Whaley As an undergraduate at Oxford University in the mid-1970s, K. Birgitta Whaley struggled to choose between chemistry and physics. Now, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of its Quantum Information and Computation Center, she doesn’t have to: Her research interests span all realms quantum, including both chemistry and physics, as well as computer science and her newest pursuit, quantum biology, where physics meets the life sciences. Whaley turned her attention to biology in 2007 after experimentalists demonstrated that green sulphur bacteria can synthesize sugar from light by biologically controlling quantum mechanical effects at temperatures up to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Moving beyond simple bacteria, birds are now thought to map their travels using quantum mechanics, and that may have applications to quantum science. Another important concept in quantum biology is entanglement. QUANTA MAGAZINE: Is quantum biology a new new thing or an old new thing? K.
Does DNA Emit Light? Dan Eden for viewzone.com An incredible story! I get lots of suggestions for stories, and I really appreciate them. But some of them are too good to be true. An example of this was a story of a giant human skeleton -- maybe 40 feet tall -- that was discovered by a Russian archaeological team. I had this same experience this week when I was sent an article where a Russian (again) scientist, Pjotr Garjajev, had managed to intercept communication from a DNA molecule in the form of ultraviolet photons -- light! But this was just the beginning. Dr. I tried to find a scientific journal that had this experiment. Fritz-Albert Popp thought he had discovered a cure for cancer. It was 1970, and Popp, a theoretical biophysicist at the University of Marburg in Germany, had been teaching radiology -- the interaction of electromagnetic (EM) radiation on biological systems. Why Ultra-violet light? [Above] All vibrations of energy are part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Photorepair Light inside the body
Unusual quantum effect discovered in earliest stages of photosynthesis Quantum physics and plant biology seem like two branches of science that could not be more different, but surprisingly they may in fact be intimately tied. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame used ultrafast spectroscopy to see what happens at the subatomic level during the very first stage of photosynthesis. While different species of plants, algae and bacteria have evolved a variety of different mechanisms to harvest light energy, they all share a feature known as a photosynthetic reaction center. These pigment molecules, or chromophores, are responsible for absorbing the energy carried by incoming light. "The behavior we were able to see at these very fast time scales implies a much more sophisticated mixing of electronic states," Tiede said. An article based on the study appeared online in the March 12 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Listen to Your Intuition, Because Your Body Can Predict Future Events Without Conscious Clues Pre-cognition might really exist, at least in some limited fashion, according to a new study of studies. Humans can anticipate near-future events even without any evidence presaging the event--and apparently without realizing it. One researcher even hints that quantum behavior might be involved. It's not necessarily extra-sensory perception, but "presentiment" can be real, and it may be based on physiological cues that biology still can't explain. It's something we've all experienced to some degree--like when you just know the driver in the lane next to you is coming over, or when you can feel that your boss is coming down the hall and you'd better look busy. Predicting the near future is actually very common, notes Julia Mossbridge, lead author of the study and research associate in the Visual Perception, Cognition and Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. The study examines other studies that support this hypothesis, and examine how people respond to stimuli.
UCI, fellow chemists find a way to unboil eggs Irvine, Calif., Jan. 23, 2015 – UC Irvine and Australian chemists have figured out how to unboil egg whites – an innovation that could dramatically reduce costs for cancer treatments, food production and other segments of the $160 billion global biotechnology industry, according to findings published today in the journal ChemBioChem. “Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,” said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology & biochemistry. “In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold. We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order.” Like many researchers, he has struggled to efficiently produce or recycle valuable molecular proteins that have a wide range of applications but which frequently “misfold” into structurally incorrect shapes when they are formed, rendering them useless.