GENE JEANIE SCIENTISTS UNRAVEL AN INTRIGUING LINK BETWEEN MEDITATION AND IMMUNITY

For Vijayendran Chandran, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida, the event at the Tennessee mountain retreat center provided an excellent chance to examine the impact of meditation at the molecular level within the body. Because participants’ diet and sleep schedules were closely monitored, he could compare before-and-after blood samples and know that those factors weren’t influencing any changes seen.

“It’s very well-controlled,” Chandran told Inverse. “Everyone eats the same, everyone sleeps the same.”

Meditation seemed to activate genes associated with the immune system. Specifically, Chandran and his co-authors found 220 genes known to be involved in generating an immune response that was effectively turned up following the retreat.

Read more at Inverse

Is the universe actually a fractal?

 If you take a look at the structures that form in the Universe, many of the things we see on large scales appears at smaller scales, too. The dark matter halos that form around the largest bound structures we know of appear identical to the ones that form around Milky Way-sized galaxies, as well as the tiny substructure clumps that exist both around smaller galaxies and in intergalactic space itself. On the largest scales in the Universe, gravitation is the only force that matters. Under many circumstances, if you wait long enough, gravitational collapse will produce identical structures, just scaled up or down in size depending on the size of your system.

The idea that, if you zoom in far enough, you’ll eventually encounter a structure that repeats the initial pattern you saw on larger scales, is mathematically realized in the concept of a fractal. When similar patterns repeatedly emerge at smaller and smaller scales, we can analyze them mathematically and see if they have the same statistical characteristics as the larger structures; if they do, it’s fractal-like in nature. So, is the Universe itself a fractal?

The answer appears to be almost, but not quite. Here’s the science behind why.

Read More at Big Think