ANON DIG ON POTENTIAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN OPTONGENETICS, LUCERFERASE, BLUE LIGHT AND BLUE LASER (488 nm).

The development of Lucerferase (Fluorescent proteins) made Optogenetics possible. Is it coincidence that blue street lights exist and blue lasers are in the same nm range? See also previous bread: >>19615989, >>19616081, >>19616126 Dr. Lee Merritt on Optogenetics, nanotech, mrna, and light/sound frequency waves as related to Oct 4 FEMA/FCC pulses and alert.

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(Headline) Optogenetics: Controlling the Brain with Light

Optogenetics is the combination of genetics and optics to control well-defined events within specific cells of living tissue. It includes the discovery and insertion into cells of genes that confer light responsiveness; it also includes the associated technologies for delivering light deep into organisms as complex as freely moving mammals, for targeting light-sensitivity to cells of interest, and for assessing specific readouts, or effects, of this optical control.

What excites neuroscientists about optogenetics is control over defined events within defined cell types at defined times—a level of precision that is most likely crucial to biological understanding even beyond neuroscience. The significance of any event in a cell has full meaning only in the context of the other events occurring around it in the rest of the tissue, the whole organism or even the larger environment. Even a shift of a few milliseconds in the timing of a neuron's firing, for example, can sometimes completely reverse the effect of its signal on the rest of the nervous system. And millisecond-scale timing precision within behaving mammals has been essential for key insights into both normal brain function and into clinical problems such as parkinsonism.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/optogenetics-controlling/

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Roger Y. Tsien (inventor of Lucerferase)

Fluorescent proteins

The multicolored fluorescent proteins developed in Tsien's lab are used by scientists to track where and when certain genes are expressed in cells or in whole organisms. Typically, the gene coding for a protein of interest is fused with the gene for a fluorescent protein, which causes the protein of interest to glow inside the cell when the cell is irradiated with a suitable wavelength of light and allows microscopists to track its location in real time. This is such a popular technique that it has added a new dimension to the fields of molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry.[9]

Since the discovery of the wild type GFP, numerous different mutants of GFP have been engineered and tested.[23] The first significant leap forward was a single point mutation (S65T) reported by Tsien in 1995 in Nature.[24] This mutation dramatically improved the fluorescent (both intensity and photostability) and spectral characteristics of GFP. A shift of the major excitation peak to 488 nm with the emission peak staying at 509 nm thus can be clearly observed, which matched very well the spectral characteristics of commonly available FITC facilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Y._Tsien

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Fluorophores for the Blue (488 nm) Laser

Overview

The blue laser is versatile due to its ability to excite both FITC (and similar fluorophores), PE, and PE tandems. PE is also excitable by the 561 nm laser and so PE based fluorophores appear on both lists. However, as PE is maximally excited at 546 nm, where possible it is advisable to use the 561 nm laser to get the maximal signal and to reduce spillover and therefore compensation. This also frees up space on the blue laser for additional fluorophores.

Table 1. 488 nm excitable dyes for flow cytometry.

(To view chart see link)

A488 (ex max 495, ex max 419)

With similar fluorescence properties to FITC, Alexa Fluor 488 is not compatible with FITC or GFP. However, as it is brighter and more photostable, it is a great alternative, especially for intracellular staining and in fluorescence microscopy.

(To view chart see link)

https://www.bio-rad-antibodies.com/flow-blue-laser-fluorophores.html?JSESSIONID_STERLING=DE37A5C63CA692687CF5995C0D88A8BD.ecommerce1&&evCntryLang=NL-enthirdPartyCookieEnabled=false

>>19618046

Vermont town wants to get rid of the only source of income for the state. The tourists.

Vermont town shuts down road to keep out annual influencer invasion

By Hannah Frishberg

Published Sep. 22, 2023, 3:40 p.m. ET

These locals have had it with leaf-peeping pests.

Residents of Pomfret, Vermont’s Cloudland Road have taken a stand against the annual fever pitch of fall foliage tourists by temporarily closing the most impacted road during the season’s peak.

In recent years, the tiny town’s stunning autumnal display has become a social media sensation, and as a result the area now gets annually inundated with influencers and their ilk keen to take selfies with the beautiful backdrop — private property be damned.

“Something had to be done,” Mike Doten, who owns an 80-acre farm on Cloudland Road, told the Boston Globe of the disrespectful internet creators who’ve begun inundating the narrow dirt road with vehicles and trespassing onto his and his neighbors’ land every fall. “It was too much.”

https://nypost.com/2023/09/22/vermont-town-shuts-down-road-to-keep-out-influencer-invasion/

Also ran in the Vermont Standard (lol)

(photo) Mike Doten and Amy Robb of Cloudland Road.

>>19618088

Vermont tourism link:

https://nypost.com/2023/09/22/vermont-town-shuts-down-road-to-keep-out-influencer-invasion/

>>19618191

Flicker rate info in this article. Link below. However, I don't know what the range or impact of the flicker rate on humans without more info.

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I introduced channelrhodopsin-2 into mammalian neurons in culture by the well-established techniques of transfection—that is, by splicing the gene for ChR2 and a specific kind of on switch, or promoter, into a vector (like a benign virus) that ferried the added genetic material into the cells. Promoters can ensure that only selected kinds of neurons (such as those able to secrete the neurotransmitter glutamate) will express, or make, the encoded proteins.

Against all odds, the experiments worked shockingly well. Using nothing more than safe pulses of visible light, we attained reliable, millisecond-precision control over the cells' patterns of firing of action potentials—the voltage blips, or impulses, that enable one neuron to convey information to another. In August 2005 my team published the first report that by introducing a microbial opsin gene, we could make neurons precisely responsive to light. Channelrhodopsins (and, eventually as we found, the bacteriorhodopsin from 1971 and the halorhodopsins, too) all proved able to turn neurons on or off, efficiently and safely in response to light. They worked in part because mammalian tissues contain naturally robust quantities of all-trans retinal—the one chemical cofactor essential for photons to activate microbial opsins—so nothing beyond an opsin gene needs to be added to targeted neurons. Microbial opsin genes provided the long-sought single-component strategy. Improving on nature

The number of optogenetic tools, along with the diversity of their capabilities, has since expanded rapidly because of a remarkable convergence of ecology and engineering. Investigators are adding new opsins to their tool kits by scouring the natural world for novel ones; they are also applying molecular engineering to tweak the known opsins to make them even more useful for diverse experiments in a wider range of organisms.

In 2008, for instance, our genome searches led by Feng Zhang on a different algal species, Volvox carteri, revealed a third channelrhodopsin (VChR1), which responds to yellow light instead of blue as we showed together with Peter Hegemann. Using VChR1 and the other channelrhodopsins together, we can simultaneously control mixed populations of cells, with yellow light exerting one type of control over some of them and blue light sending a different command to others. And we now have found that the most potent channelrhodopsin of all is actually a hybrid of VChR1 and ChR1 (with no contribution from ChR2 at all). Our other modified opsins (created with Ofer Yizhar, Lief Fenno, Lisa Gunaydin and Hegemann and his students) now include "fast" and "slow" channelrhodopsin mutants that offer exquisite control over the timing and duration of action potentials: the former can drive action potentials more than 200 times per second, whereas the latter can push cells into or out of stable excitable states with single pulses of light. Our newest opsins can also now respond to deep red light that borders on the infrared, which stays more sharply focused, penetrates tissues more easily and is very well tolerated by subjects. Many groups are now also pushing opsin engineering forward, including those of Hiromu Yawo in Japan, Ernst Bamberg in Frankfurt and Roger Tsien in San Diego.

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With fiber-optic tools we developed and published in 2006 and 2007, investigators can now deliver light for optogenetic control to any area of the brain—whether surface or deep—in freely moving mammals. And to enable simultaneous readouts of the dynamic electrical signals elicited by optogenetic control, we also have published millisecond-scale instruments that are integrated hybrids of fiber optics and electrodes ("optrodes"). A long-sought synergy can emerge between optical stimulation and electrical recording because the two can be set up to not interfere with each other. We can now, for instance, directly observe the changing electrical activity in the neural circuits involved in motor control at the same time that we are optically controlling those circuits with microbial opsins. The more rich and complex that both our optogenetic inputs and the electrical-output measures of neural circuits become, the more powerfully we can infer the computational and informational roles of neural circuits from how they transform our signals.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/optogenetics-controlling/

Silent Sound Kills

Posted to Technology December 14, 2017 by Bill Kahn

With sound as the culprit, at the right frequency, amplitude and duration, health may be at risk. Go to a heavy-metal concert for an hour or so, it is hoped without ear damage. However, there might be nausea as a side effect. In that situation, sound has made the body vibrate and react.

The span of sound that a person hears is termed frequency range; the unit of measurement, Hertz (hz). Although there is considerable variation between individuals, the hearing range is commonly accepted to be 20 to 20,000 hz. To place that in perspective, the low frequency of a Tuba is 29 hz and of a Bass 27 hz. Below 20 hz, it’s called “Infrasound.” Those sounds are imperceptible to the human ear, but the body hears it, although, one may not be aware of the bombardment.

These sounds might occur from the whir of motors, water pumps, construction site noise, equipment room near your residence, or close-by traffic. Daria Vaisman, a research editor at the New York Press told of an incident with Walt Disney and his team of cartoonists. They slowed down a 60-cycle tone in a short cartoon to 12 Hz; they became sick for days afterward. A good example of extreme low frequencies that might be encountered is the church pipe organ. It can cause sensations of sorrow, coldness, anxiety and even shivers down the spine.

Sounds around 19 hz, matches the resonant frequency of the human eyeball, with reports of apparitions as detailed by the Coventry Telegraph newspaper. The most dangerous frequency is at the median alpha-rhythm frequencies of the brain, 7 hz. This is also the resonant frequency of the body’s organs. At high volumes, infrasound can directly affect the human central nervous system causing disorientation, anxiety, panic, bowel spasms, nausea, vomiting and eventually organ rupture, even death from prolonged exposure.

https://insidesources.com/silent-sound-kills/