Our new preprint “Cardiac Activity Impacts Cortical Motor Excitability” is now out. In this work, we found that cardiac cycle 🫀 regulates motor activity 👋 through changes in cortical excitability. > bit.ly/3n6btjn ⬇️Thread

I also want to say that I hold Jewish life to be as sacred as Palestinian life. This is a truth for which I live and for which I'll die if necessary. This isn't a slogan, it's an article of faith that I believe as deeply and passionately as I believe that there is no god but God.

Seriously, just a couple of minutes to watch this:

"I'm not crying for my parents - I am crying for those who will lose their lives in this war. We must stop the war." Powerful testimony from @maozinon on @BBCNews - just days after his parents, Bilha and Yakov, were killed by Hamas.

"One woman could barely get words out through her tears. Another ran to the restroom as soon as she was done, wordless, wretched sobs wracking her tiny body. A third threw up on the witness stand." One year since the fall of Roe, women are suffering because of abortion bans.  texastribune.org/2023/07/19/…

A mind-blowing paper has come out today in @Nature In 2016, JC Venter Institute scientists trimmed a bacterial genome to its barest minimum required for life to synthesize what they called a "minimal genome" (science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…). Today, a group of scientists from Indiana University reports how that minimal genome evolved over 2000 generations in comparison to the non-minimal genome. The authors found that even when you reduce a bacterial genome to its absolute minimum where every nucleotide matters, the genome undergoes mutational events generation after generation as much as the non-minimal genome. One simply cannot stop the evolution. Just over 300 days of evolution (equivalent to 40,000 years in humans) the minimal cell has gained everything it lacked in fitness on day one in comparison to the non-minimal cell. When comparing the evolved traits between the minimal and non-minimal cells, the scientists found something striking. The evolutionary process increased the cell size of non-minimal cells but not that of the minimal cell. But that is not the striking part. The scientists were able to identify the key mutation that resulted in cell size evolution. And it turned out that the mutation that helped the non-minimal cells to grow bigger is the same that helped the minimal cells to stay smaller. Growing bigger had a survival advantage for non-minimal cells and not growing bigger had a survival advantage for minimal cells. So, the mutation had a context-dependent effect. This just demonstrates that the evolutionary effects on traits have no absolute direction. All that matter is what is beneficial for the organism's survival. The conclusion of the paper is metaphorically a quote from the Jurassic Park movie: “Listen, if there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us is that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, and it crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but . . . life finds a way". (scienmag.com/artificial-cell…) nature.com/articles/s41586-0…