Natural compounds obtained from plants as alternatives for meat and meat products preservation

The purpose of this review is to demonstrate the findings on the use of natural compounds as preservatives in meat and meat products as a healthier and safer alternative compared to the use of synthetic preservatives. Due to its biological composition, meat and its derivatives are susceptible to spoilage, a process that can be delayed with the use of synthetic food preservatives. However, it is known that some products can trigger undesirable effects on consumer health. In recent years, there has been a greater demand for products obtained naturally or directly from a biological organism without laboratory interference in their composition, in order to reduce risks to the consumer. The most promising compounds belong to the groups of phenolic and flavonoid compounds, which have a proven, positive effect on oxidation and microbial development. Findings on the use of natural compounds as preservatives in meat and meat products demonstrate an alternative to increased shelf life without risking consumer health.

MSBOTS: a multiple small biological organism tracking system robust against non-ideal detection and segmentation conditions

Accurately tracking a group of small biological organisms using algorithms to obtain their movement trajectories is essential to biomedical and pharmaceutical research. However, object mis-detection, segmentation errors and overlapped individual trajectories are particularly common issues that restrict the development of automatic multiple small organism tracking research. Extending on previous work, this paper presents an accurate and generalised Multiple Small Biological Organism Tracking System (MSBOTS), whose general feasibility is tested on three types of organisms. Evaluated on zebrafish, Artemia and Daphnia video datasets with a wide variety of imaging conditions, the proposed system exhibited decreased overall Multiple Object Tracking Precision (MOTP) errors of up to 77.59%. Moreover, MSBOTS obtained more reliable tracking trajectories with a decreased standard deviation of up to 47.68 pixels compared with the state-of-the-art idTracker system. This paper also presents a behaviour analysis module to study the locomotive characteristics of individual organisms from the obtained tracking trajectories. The developed MSBOTS with the locomotive analysis module and the tested video datasets are made freely available online for public research use.

The Emergence of the Bilateral Symmetry in Animals: A Review and a New Hypothesis

Most biological organisms exhibit different kinds of symmetry; an Animal (Metazoa), which is our Darwinist ancestor, has bilateral symmetry, and many plants exhibit rotational symmetry. It raises some questions: I. How can the evolution from an undifferentiated cell without bilateral symmetry to a complex biological organism with symmetry, which is based on asymmetric DNA and enzymes, lead to the bilateral symmetry? II. Is this evolution to an organism with bilateral symmetry obtained by other factors than DNA and enzymatic reactions? The existing literature about the evolution of the bilateral symmetry has been reviewed, and a new hypothesis has been formulated based on these reviews. The hypothesis is that the morphogenesis of biosystems is connected with the metabolism and that the oscillating kinetics in the Glycolysis have played a role in the polarity of the biological cells and in the establishment of the bilateral symmetry in Animals.

Organism and environment in Auguste Comte

This article focuses on Auguste Comte’s understanding of the organism–environment relationship. It makes three key claims therein: (a) Comte’s metaphysical position privileged materiality and relativized the intellect along two dimensions: one related to the biological organism, one related to the social environment; (b) this twofold materiality confounds attempts to reduce cognition to either nature or nurture, so Comte’s position has interesting parallels to the field of ‘epigenetics’, which sees the social environment as a causative factor in biology; and (c) although Comte ultimately diverged from the ‘postgenomic’ view in crucial ways, he remains a forerunner of the trend towards viewing the social and biological as entangled. Tending to these dimensions challenges the view that Comte is notable from a classical standpoint but ignorable from a contemporary one. It consequently invites renewed attention to his theoretical system.

Personal identity and the psychological continuity theory

According to the psychological continuity theory - which is one of the most popular philosophical approaches to the problem of personal identity -some sort of psychological relation represents the necessary (although, perhaps not the sufficient) criterion of a person?s persistence through time. The main aim of this paper is to provide a detailed critical analysis of two well-known arguments against the psychological continuity theory, both of which heavily rely on the animalist view on personal identity; that is to say, on the view according to which the essential property of persons is that they are biological organisms. The first argument purports to refute the psychological continuity theory by appealing to the fact that all persons are numerically identical to fetuses and that it is utterly implausible to attribute psychological properties or capacities to fetuses. The second argument attempts to show that every person is numerically identical to the biological organism that remains after its death and which does not have any psychological properties and capabilities. Hopefully, the final result of the analysis in this paper will show that the two arguments do not represent a satisfactory alternative to the psychological continuity theory.

SELF-OWNERSHIP AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HUMAN BODY

In this essay I attempt to vindicate the “asymmetry thesis,” according to which ownership of one’s own body is intrinsically different from ownership of other objects, and the view that self-ownership, as libertarians normally understand the concept, enjoys a special “fact-insensitive” status as a fundamental right. In particular, I argue in favor of the following claims. First, the right of self-ownership is most plausibly understood as based on the more fundamental notion of respect for persons, where the concept of a person is in turn understood, along the lines set out by P. F. Strawson and P. M. S. Hacker, as referring to an entire biological organism with a certain set of mental and corporeal characteristics. If we restrict our attention to human persons, we can say on this basis that there is a special moral status attaching to the entire human body, and to no more than the human body. Second, self-ownership is not, as critics have sometimes supposed, based on a more fundamental right to equal freedom or autonomy. Criticisms of self-ownership as insufficiently justified on the basis of such rights are therefore off target. Rather, equal freedom and self-ownership are each based directly on the more fundamental notion of respect for persons. For left-libertarians, the asymmetry thesis serves to give priority to self-ownership when delineating a set of original property rights, given that there are many alternative ways of realizing equal freedom not all of which involve fully respecting people’s property rights in themselves.

FROM INTEGRAL TOWARDS NATIONAL SECURITY

The term security often covers a whole range of different aspects of human existence and action in society and nature. The conscious struggle to establish a state of security is a civilization and cultural category that covers all aspects of contemporary security: economic, social, cultural, political, environmental, defense, etc. Establishing a state of security covers all those emergent forms of social life that are also among the social values. Security can be treated as a condition in which the physical, spiritual, mental and material survival of the individual and of the social community in a perfect balance with other individuals, social communities and with the nature. From a development point of view, security is incorporated as a biological organism, as a struggle of the organism for survival, as an adaptation of the organism to the threatening influences of its own environment.

Beyond the Neuro-Realism Fallacy

This article examines visual practices inside the laboratory and in the arts, highlighting a problem of reductionism in the transformation from data to images and in the visual incarnation of the neuro-realism fallacy, that is the extreme images of brain scan. Neurosciences are not inherently reductionist. John R. Mallard’s work around data visualisation problems in the development of biomedical imaging shows how scientists themselves can be attentive to the construction of visual practices and their meaning. If neuro-realism is a fallacy within the neurosciences, are art-neuroscience collaborative projects reproducing this fallacy at visual level? The article analysis how neuroscience-art projects can enable us (or not) to foster and maintain a stereoscopic vision in the way in which we approach the conundrum of what it is like to be both a biological organism made up of molecules, neurons, cells, and an entity equipped with intentionality, desires, thoughts, values.