Up to Date | Cell Adaptation, Creativity Measurement, and Visual Perception
Mar 17, 2022
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This week on the podcast, they discuss how certain cancer cells help understand cellular adaptation, measuring creativity using narrative theory, and studying visual perception through the hunting method of archerfish.
Certain types of cancer cells can adapt by substituting depleted amino acids, providing insights into cancer cell metabolism.
Incorporating narrative elements in creativity assessments can lead to more accurate measures of creative thinking.
Deep dives
Evidence of Amino Acid Substitution in Cancer Cells
A recent study from the Netherlands Cancer Institute published in Nature has discovered that certain types of cancer cells can substitute one amino acid for another when the typical amino acid is depleted due to immune system responses. This adaptation, known as substitutants, allows cancer cells to continue protein production despite amino acid depletion. The findings have significant implications for understanding cancer cell metabolism and may open up new avenues for cancer treatment.
The Role of Narrative in Enhancing Creativity
In a recent paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste propose the use of narrative training techniques to enhance creativity. Traditional measures of creativity often focus on divergent thinking, but the authors argue that incorporating narrative elements can lead to more ecologically valid assessments of creativity. By utilizing techniques such as word building, perspective shifting, and action generation, individuals can enhance their creative thinking abilities. The paper provides insights for educators, researchers, and anyone interested in fostering creativity.
Archer Fish and Visual Perception
Researchers from Ben Gurion University in Israel have studied archer fish to understand how they recognize prey from under the water surface. By presenting stimuli on a screen above the water and rewarding the fish for squirting water at the correct images, the researchers discovered that the fish primarily relied on shape features to discriminate between insects and non-insect objects. The research sheds light on the visual processing abilities of non-mammal fish and provides valuable insights into object recognition.
This week, we examine a recent discovery that certain types of cancer cells may allow us to better understand how cells adapt to the intracellular environment (and explain what the intracellular environment is). Indre discusses how she and her students have recently been working on methods of measuring creativity. And we look at some new research focusing on the hunting method used by archerfish in order to study aspects of visual perception.