cas_group - Network

"Science, at its core, is about contributing to human knowledge: to making discoveries that describe the world as it is. [...] Every...

"Science, at its core, is about contributing to human knowledge: to making discoveries that describe the world as it is. [...] Every new finding contributes not only an answer ... but also brand-new questions, ones that no one even thought to ask. Science is like a puzzle of infinite shape and scale, pieced together by many people across the globe."
~ Katalin Karikó in "Breaking Through: My Life in Science"

#TRex Tristan at the museum of natural history in #Berlin for #FossilFriday. The #Cassowary bird in Australia and Indonesia is probably the...

#TRex Tristan at the museum of natural history in #Berlin for #FossilFriday. The #Cassowary bird in Australia and Indonesia is probably the living being that comes closest to him. Almost like a living dinosaur which has similar feet and a strange, creepy call.
https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en

Nature is a brilliant biochemist. It is constantly reshuffling genetic material - moving, substituting, splicing, recombining. It makes...

Nature is a brilliant biochemist. It is constantly reshuffling genetic material - moving, substituting, splicing, recombining. It makes tweaks. It mixes things up. Each new life-form, every individual organism, is, in its own way, a tiny experiment.
~ Katalin Karikó ( in "Breaking Through: My Life in Science" )
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/462526/breaking-through-by-kariko-katalin/9781529936391

This is unexpected: #cancer cells use #mitochondria stolen from immune cells to escape detection and...

This is unexpected: #cancer cells use #mitochondria stolen from immune cells to escape detection and spread.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00123-9

Jason White on #plastic #pollution in the food...

Jason White on #plastic #pollution in the food chain
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2026/jan/03/jason-white-plastic-pollution-food-chain-cartoon

And here is the blog post for it: why cinemas are "frame synchronization tools" which help to unravel the mysteries of the social...

And here is the blog post for it: why cinemas are "frame synchronization tools" which help to unravel the mysteries of the social world 🌎
https://blog.cas-group.net/2026/01/unravelling-the-mysteries-of-the-social-world/

The hard problem is to cross the boundary between inside and outside, if we try to understand the first-person view in others (the hard...

The hard problem is to cross the boundary between inside and outside, if we try to understand the first-person view in others (the hard problem of subjective consciousness) or the third-person view of ourselves (related to self-awareness and the problem of free will). From this point of view the two fundamental problems of the hard problem of subjective consciousness and the problem of free will are related, because we have to cross the inside/outside boundary in both cases.

Explaining and understanding our inner experience requires to cross the inside/outside boundary of inside experiences and outside objects. Language in spoken and especially in written form that our minds are able to master after years of learning and school education allows us to cross the inside/outside boundary. No new physics or #philosophy required. Only new machines to make it easier to cross from one side to the other: we know them well as theaters and cinemas. They are in fact machines we are building to solve the hard problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

In his book "Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of...

In his book "Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe", George Musser @gmusser defines the inside/outside problem as a fundamental tension between the third-person description of the objective world that physical science traditionally seeks and the first-person perspective of an embedded, subjective observer.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374721794/puttingourselvesbackintheequation/

How is the inside/outside problem related to the classic distinction between physical reality (matter) and mental ideas (mind)? This is a deep question philosophers have discussed since #Descartes ("I think, therefore I am") for centuries. Descartes' dualism says that the mind is a non-physical, thinking substance, and the body a physical, extended substance. They would be two fundamentally different kind of things, yet able to interact.

As we now know the points of interaction are of course simply the sense organs which transform the light and sound waves that describe the outside world into pulses and patterns of the neural networks inside our brains. And our muscles which convert electric pulses back into physical movement. The mind is obviously related to all the inside stuff, encoded in the neurons and synapses inside our brains, and the physical reality is related to the outside objects.

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"Dark Renaissance" from Stephen Greenblatt is a nice #book. It describes the life of Shakespeare's rival Christopher Marlowe,...

"Dark Renaissance" from Stephen Greenblatt is a nice #book. It describes the life of Shakespeare's rival Christopher Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker from Canterbury who studied at #Cambridge university and died far too young. Interesting insights into life 500 years ago when most ordinary people had no proper school education and when early universities still resembled monasteries
https://www.greenblattrenaissance.com/dark-renaissance

One of the books I am reading is "The Seneca Effect" from Ugo Bardi. The basic idea is that systems often exhibit slow growth...

One of the books I am reading is "The Seneca Effect" from Ugo Bardi. The basic idea is that systems often exhibit slow growth followed by rapid decline.

In the first chapter about the collapse of the Roman Empire he argues that the Romans ran out of silver and gold coins which they used to buy silk from the Silk Road. This contradicts another book I am reading from Kyle Harper named "The Fate of Rome" which argues that the "Late Antique Little Ice Age" and the plague caused the collapse. Can both be true? Well the causality of #collapse can be complicated 🙂

The Seneca Effect itself is simple to understand. It describes a system dynamics where a quantity builds up slowly but collapses quickly once limits are reached. To explain the Seneca Effect Ugo Bardi uses a three part food chain model (similar to the Hastings-Powell model which exhibits chaotic dynamics). But the basic idea of the Seneca Effect is simple to explain: the more we #overshoot a system, the more rapid the collapse and decline which inevitably follows. Overshoot means we deny the actual state of resources and try to consume more although resources are actually declining.