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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend with the ongoing historical snippet about transferable memory in animals. A firestorm was created by the first publication of such a finding in platyhelminthes, which initiated a flood of publications that tried to reproduce the phenomena, but with very mixed success. Recently, new methods have been applied, with surprising results. View in LinkedIn

MEMORY TRACES. "Worms that had regenerated from headless fragments from original familiarized worms displayed significant shorter feeding latency compared with unfamiliarized worms, suggesting that memory of the original environment was not located exclusively in the brain, and had become imprinted onto the newly built brain during regeneration. In the past, such results have been received with skepticism." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

OTHER POSSIBILITIES. "This really puts into question whether or not the way biology does things now is the only possible way that life could be organized on a molecular level." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

CONFIRMATION OF RESULTS. "Our results support the findings of Best and Rubinstein, and show a statistically significant shorter feeding delay for the familiarized worms compared with unfamiliarized worms. Most importantly, the memory survives long enough to allow for regeneration after amputation, and indeed we show that memory traces survive entire brain regeneration in a ‘savings’ paradigm." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

MANY OPTIONS IN CHEMICAL SYSTEMS. "Our findings show that there is a bewildering variety of imaginable ways that chemical systems could self-replicate and evolve." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

DOLDRUM PERIOD. "Although extensive work on planarians' learning and memory has long suggested that memories can survive brain regeneration (McConnell, 1966), the limitations of previous manual experiments have led to these important questions being largely neglected by recent workers; these limitations included small sample sizes, difficulties in precise reproduction of protocols, and lack of quantitative analysis." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

IRREVERSIBILITY AND ENTROPY. "From the standpoint of physics, this observation contains an intriguing hint of how the properties of self-replicators must be constrained by thermodynamic laws, which dictate that irreversibility is always accompanied by an increase of entropy." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

THERMAL FORWARD REACTIONS. "Every species of living thing can make a copy of itself by exchanging energy and matter with its surroundings. One feature common to all such examples of spontaneous “self-replication” is their statistical irreversibility: clearly, it is much more likely that one bacterium should turn into two than that two should somehow spontaneously revert back into one." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

ENERGY FINDINGS. "We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION ENERGY. "Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn