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COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

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Dynamic Multi-System Resilience in Human Aging/SusanFitzpatrick

From Complex Time

Notes by user Susan Fitzpatrick (JSMF) for Dynamic Multi-System Resilience in Human Aging

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

  • Presentation highlights
  • Open questions that came up
  • How your perspective changed
  • Impact on your own work
  • e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

Notes from day 1

In general I think we need to have the core theory group come up with terms and definitions that would be used consistently across all the working groups so words like robustness, resilience, homeostasis, energy, etc are understood to mean the same thing in different topics.

Regarding the challenges to resilience - some recent work by Eve Marder is relevant. She has some knockouts in the crab STG that have wide molecular variability but produce the same phenotype - except under conditions of environmental variability. One of t(e conditions she looked at was temp since crabs in the wild naturally experience a range. The KOs crashed at different points - so stressors can separate out variants that would not be seen under controlled conditions.

A question I had was differentiating homeostasis from resilience from persistence from perseverance.

I also though it might be interesting to look at how ideas, fields, disciplines, and academic institutions age?

I like that Dervis raised the issue of how systems break - this linked back to the Breaking Brains working group.

I may be making a spurious connection here but the idea that you need 65 % of nodes to avoid failing reminded me that whole brain energy metabolism has to be about 65% to maintain conscious awareness.

Peter’s talk also made me think about what cells we should be paying attention to in the brain - so much of the focus is on neurons but what do we know about the aging of the heterogeneous cells in brain tissue?

Another challenge we have is going back and forth between general theories and empirical case studies. At some point in the future be nice to test theory with very specific case study data.

Reference material notes

Some examples:

  • Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
  • Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
  • This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
  • Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).

Reference Materials

Title Author name Source name Year Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days. Page views Related file
Asking the Right Questions in Alzheimer’s Research Susan Fitzpatrick Issues in Science and Technology 2018 0 4