A new study tested whether people believe free will arises from a metaphysical basis or mental capacity. Even though most respondents said they believed humans to have souls, they judged free will and assigned blame for transgressions based on pragmatic considerations — such as whether the actor in question had the capacity to make an intentional and independent choice.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Across the board, even if they believed in the concept of a soul, people in a new study ascribed free will based on down-to-Earth criteria: Did the actor in question have the capacity to make an intentional and independent choice? The study suggests that while grand metaphysical views of the universe remain common, they have little to do with how people assess each other’s behavior. (more…)
Controversy exists over what some mental health experts call “hypersexuality,” or sexual “addiction.” Namely, is it a mental disorder at all, or something else? It failed to make the cut in the recently updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, considered the bible for diagnosing mental disorders. Yet sex addiction has been blamed for ruining relationships, lives and careers.
Now, for the first time, UCLA researchers have measured how the brain behaves in so-called hypersexual people who have problems regulating their viewing of sexual images. The study found that the brain response of these individuals to sexual images was not related in any way to the severity of their hypersexuality but was instead tied only to their level of sexual desire. (more…)
Berkeley Lab Researchers Develop New Tool for Making Genetic Engineering of Microbial Circuits Reliably Predictable
Synthetic biology is the latest and most advanced phase of genetic engineering, holding great promise for helping to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, including the sustainable production of energy fuels and critical medical drugs, and the safe removal of toxic and radioactive waste from the environment. However, for synthetic biology to reach its promise, the design and construction of biological systems must be as predictable as the assembly of computer hardware.
An important step towards attaining a higher degree of predictability in synthetic biology has been taken by a group of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) under the leadership of computational biologist Adam Arkin. Arkin and his team have developed an “adaptor” that makes the genetic engineering of microbial components substantially easier and more predictable by converting regulators of translation into regulators of transcription in Escherichia coli. Transcription and translation make up the two-step process by which the coded instructions of genes are used to synthesize proteins. (more…)
