How Could We Recognize Pain in an Octopus?
By William Skaggs
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At the level of personal experience, there is nothing that seems easier to understand than pain. When I jam my finger in a doorway, I have no difficulty at all recognizing the sensation that results. But this superficial simplicity covers up a world of complexity at the level of brain mechanisms, and the complexities are even greater when we try to identify pain in other people or other species of animals. Some of the complexities are purely scientific, but others are caused by moral or philosophical issues getting mixed up with scientific issues.
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In her blog post, Harmon listed three elements that are involved in feeling pain: (1) nociception, that is, having mechanisms in the body that are capable of detecting damage and transmuting it into neural signals; (2) the experience of pain; (3) the ability to communicate pain information from sensation to perception. I’m not sure I understand the third aspect, but I take it to mean the ability to transform nociception into experience.
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But as philosophers are well aware, there’s a big problem with that approach. The problem with thinking of pain as a private experience is that it leaves us helpless to identify pain in other people, much less in other species of animals. If it is unobservable from the outside, how could we possibly know whether it exists? This is what philosophers call the Problem of Other Minds.
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To help you see why the similarity-to-us approach is off the mark, I’d like to present you with four simple thought experiments. I claim that the pain-as-experience and similarity-to-us theory gives answers to them that most people will feel are wrong. If we don’t have clear answers to these sorts of scenarios, we will not be in a good position to make use of scientific data about octopi or other animals—maybe not even data about ourselves. . .
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What are oncogenes?
By PZ Myers
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Here’s a metaphor, a car with a dangerous defect. It has acquired a glitch in the accelerator so that every time you start it up, it immediately roars up to full speed, as if you’d floored the pedal. The problem hasn’t created anything new in the car, it’s just taken something you normally need to do, that is, regulate the speed of the machine, and stripped you of all ability to control it. That’s what an oncogene does; it is a gene that is normally involved in controlling the rate of cell proliferation, for instance, and a mutation has broken it in such a way that it now tells the cell to divide as rapidly as possible.
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The first concern that comes to everyone’s mind is that you don’t want to have your cells running amuck — no one wants cancer. Just as you can do your best to maintain your car, you can also live sensibly — eat in moderation, avoid carcinogens or other behaviors that expose you to radiation, and get regular checkups — to reduce the likelihood of deleterious mutations. But they can happen anyway, through no fault of your own. Every time your cells divide, there is a very small chance of an error in replication that inserts a mutation into an oncogene. Just existing, even while doing everything exactly right to maximize your health, brings with it a base chance for a mutation. Given normal rates of cell division, every single one of you reading this is going to acquire about 20,000 DNA lesions today and every day. Almost every one of them will be patched up by DNA repair mechanisms (you have no idea how important DNA repair is to your continued health), but even so, one will occasionally slip through — over your lifetime, your cells will acquire an estimated 10,000 mutations. Live long enough, playing these odds, and cancer is essentially inevitable.
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The most common cancer-inducing mutation in Ras is a single amino acid change in the 12th codon of its gene that greatly reduces the effectiveness of its GTPase activity. It binds GTP, becomes active, and then does not cleave the GTP — it clings to it instead. It switches from being a reluctant activator of cell division to instead being an avid, hyperactive activator — any transient signal, even a bit of noise, becomes an excuse to tell the cell to start dividing madly.
And that’s the beginning of a cancer, a rogue protein, made by an oncogene, that’s telling the normal, healthy cellular machinery to do its thing when it shouldn’t.
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For Scientists, Early to Press Means Success
By (ScienceDaily)
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A provocative new study suggests it is straightforward to predict which academics will succeed as publishing scientists. Those who publish earlier and more often while young are typically the long-term winners.
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"It doesn't matter if you go to Harvard or a low-ranked university. If you begin publishing scientific articles when you're still a graduate student, you are far more likely to succeed in the long run."
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"Women have to jump a lot of hurdles in science," said Carolina Useche of the Humboldt Institute in Colombia. "Family responsibilities weigh heavily on them, and they don't seem to promote themselves as aggressively as some men do."
Language also plays a role, according to Ms Useche. "Those who grow up speaking and writing English have an advantage, because most scientific journals are in English," she said.
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Has Alien Life Been Discovered?
By Greg Laden
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No.
First, let me tell you that the Journal of Cosmology has a very checkered history and anything published in it can not be trusted in the same way one might trust counter-intuitive results, provisionally at least, in a legit journal.
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They give the argument that it must be from a comet because they did their sampling of it during a time when comet dust would be likely found in the region (because a comet’s remains,a meteor swarm, was bombarding the Earth). They plan to test this idea further by sampling again at a later time. Unfortunately, rather than sampling during a period of little or no comet-remnant activity, they will sample again during high commet-remnant activity. This way they can establish the TRUTH of WHAT IS OUT THERE using the best available method: CONFIRMATION BIAS.
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Diatoms, or fragments of them, are tiny itty bitty things and tend to make up a good proportion of air-dust. Probably, this is air dust.
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In Life, Man Immune To HIV Helped Scientists Fight Virus
By Maanvi Singh
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Stephen Crohn, a man best known for staying alive during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, died Aug. 23 at age 66. Throughout his lifetime, the New York artist helped researchers uncover vital clues about HIV and how to stop it.
Crohn's partner was one of the first people to die from AIDS in 1978. Over the years, Crohn watched boyfriends and acquaintances die from the disease. But he never got sick.
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Crohn was an artist and freelance editor. His paintings have been exhibited in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere. He committed suicide last month. His sister, Amy Crohn Santagata, told The New York Times that he suffered from survivor's guilt.
. . .
Talk a little bit about how Crohn came to the medical community. I mean, how did he view his role in all of this.
Well, I mean, Steve was quite phenomenal. When I met him, we clicked instantly. There was a rapport between us. He understood, you know, before scientists that he had this resistance to AIDS. He said, 'I have this protection. I have something. Study me.'
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And I think the thing which for me was most striking was at the end, we could say to Steve, 'You were right. And you have this molecule missing. That is advancing science.' And I think Steve took a lot from that. Through all the misery, actually at the end, from studying him and people like him, we actually did move HIV research forward. And there are drugs out there now which, from Steve's findings, are highly beneficial to stop the virus from replicating.
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Women are less tolerant of corruption in democracies
By (UPI)
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"The relationship between gender and corruption appears to depend on context," lead author Justin Esarey, an assistant professor of political science at Rice University, said in a statement. "When corruption is stigmatized, as in most democracies, women will be less tolerant and less likely to engage in it compared with men. But if 'corrupt' behaviors are an ordinary part of governance supported by political institutions, there will be no corruption gender gap."
Esarey said previous research showed greater female participation in government -- in the legislature -- was associated with lower levels of perceived corruption. However, his research revealed this relationship did not exist in autocracies, where women might feel more compelled to go along with the status quo than challenge the system.
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"In short, recruiting women into government would be unlikely to reduce corruption across the board," Esarey said.
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Charging Smokers Higher Health Insurance Rates: Is it Ethical?
By David B. Resnik
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Smoking-related illnesses cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars a year in health care expenditures and lost productivity, and claim hundreds of thousands of lives.” Given the enormous medical and economic toll of smoking, it is not surprising that 58 percent of Americans favor charging smokers higher rates for health insurance to provide them with an incentive to stop smoking.
President Barack Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), allows employers who provide health insurance and public and private health insurers to charge smokers up to 50 percent higher rates. Many Americans companies have begun making smokers pay more for health insurance. Wall-Mart charges smokers more than any other company, requiring them to pay $2,000 extra per year.
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The main problem with the actuarial fairness argument is that different smokers may have different risks. A person who has been smoking two packs a day for 30 years has a significantly greater chance of developing lung cancer than someone who has been smoking only a few cigarettes a week for a few years. To be fair, policies adopted by employers or insurers would need to apply different rates to different smokers, depending on their individual risk. Moreover, if smokers are charged higher rates, then other higher-risk groups should also be charged higher rates, since it would be unfair to single out smokers. Thus, charging smokers higher rates would imply a commitment to higher rates for people who are obese, have high cholesterol, or engage in hazardous activities, such as motorcycle riding. Genetic factors can also increase health risks, but genetic discrimination in employment and insurance is illegal in the U.S. and many countries.
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While it is important to encourage people to stop smoking, charging smokers higher insurance rates may not be a fair or effective method of achieving this goal. Employers and insurers should carefully consider the implications of such policies before they adopt them. Policies that are adopted should be fair and not undermine smokers’ access to health care. Policies should account for individual variations in health risk and may need to be revised if they produce have unintended negative consequences for smokers’ access to care and health.
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A Point of View: Why people give into temptation when no-one's watching
By AL Kennedy
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After World War II showed our species just how many hells on earth it could create, a whole generation of researchers devoted themselves to what I find a much more vital question. "Why do apparently good and normal people do abnormal and appalling things ?" Interestingly, those post-war researchers - psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists - found answers to that question. They found reliable, repeatable results which offer a map we could follow to better places, a guide we could offer to children everywhere, as necessary as instructions on how to cross roads safely - how to be human safely, how not to behave like a sociopath.
But in fact, much of the research has been forgotten or misunderstood and we continue to put human beings into desperately toxic situations which can make them go astray. If, for example, we remember Stanley Milgram's name at all, we associate it with an experiment that apparently proved one person can be persuaded to electrocute another with horrifying ease, sometimes even beyond the level at which shocks would be fatal. Of course, the allegedly instructional shocks Milgram had volunteers administer were fake and their recipients only pretended to be in pain. He was testing how obedient volunteer "teachers" would be to an authority figure's instructions, even when being told to carry out apparently immoral acts.
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In short, we know the recipe for harmful behaviour - stress, poor or absent guidelines, a strict hierarchy with dissociation from others and from the consequences of our actions, established group culture and lack of oversight. These factors create sick workplaces, rogue military units, feral banks, abusive care homes, abusive marriages, countries apparently consumed by madness. Surveys now show bankers and doctors amongst the least trusted professions. They used to be touchstones of reliability - what happened? Highly influential bad situations happened.
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But, naturally, if there's a recipe for wrongdoing, there's a recipe to encourage its opposite. Reverse all the above. Really. Remove stress and moral uncertainty, promote leadership ahead of dictatorship, introduce collaboration, guidelines, support, keep humanity's humanity and action's consequences in view. And introduce appropriate oversight. Ever wondered why sending a postcard to someone unjustly imprisoned can improve their conditions? Partly because it lets their guards know someone's watching. Why do you think our idea of God has that omnipotent reputation? Partly because God watches everything.
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Germany hits science high
By Quirin Schiermeier
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A physicist by training, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has a proven affinity for science. Thanks to generous government funding, German research has thrived since she first came to power eight years ago. But as she prepares for a probable third term in office after elections on 22 September — the governing coalition between her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and the Free Democrats is well ahead in polls — scientists and science organizations are concerned that the years of plenty may soon be over.
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These investments have paid off. This month, the World Economic Forum, based in Switzerland, moved Germany up two notches on its ranking of the world’s most competitive economies, noting that heavy investment in research and development has added to Germany’s strengths. It now stands at number four, behind Switzerland, Singapore and Finland.
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The scientific landscape is more clear-cut. In their election programmes, all parties represented in the current parliament — including the Greens and the Left party — have taken a decidedly pro-science stance. They all, for example, see energy research as a priority to support Germany’s planned transition, known as the Energiewende, to a non-nuclear, low-carbon system dominated by renewable energy sources (see Nature 496, 156–158; 2013). Likewise, there is cross-party agreement that health research must be strengthened and remodelled, a policy driven by Germany’s rapidly ageing population (see ‘Health considerations’).
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But by and large, the mood is upbeat. German science has shed its narrow outlook over the past decade. At Max Planck institutes, almost 90% of postdocs, half of all postgraduate students and more than 40% of scientific directors recruited in the past decade came from abroad. And the society has created cutting-edge institutes in emerging fields. In Mühlheim, scientists are exploring ways to improve chemical energy conversion and energy storage. And ocean scientists are looking forward to the completion of a €450-million icebreaker that is to replace the ageing flagship of Germany’s research fleet.
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If states had similar healthcare standards, 86,000 fewer deaths
By (UPI)
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The Commonwealth Fund study found there were two Americas when it comes to healthcare, divided by geography and income. However, having a low income does not mean worse healthcare or worse health.
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The Scorecard documented sharp healthcare disparities among states -- between leading and lagging states, up to a fourfold disparity in performance exists on a range of key healthcare indicators for low-income populations.
There are also wide differences within states by income. However, if all states could reach the benchmarks set by leading states, an estimated 86,000 fewer people would die prematurely and tens of millions more adults and children would receive timely preventive care, the report said.
. . . The percentage uninsured or underinsured ranged from a low of 36 percent in Massachusetts to more than 60 percent in 10 states -- Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
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NASA Mars rover finds no sign of methane, telltale sign of life
By Irene Klotz
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NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has come up empty-handed in its search for methane in the planet's atmosphere, a gas that on Earth is a strong indicator of life, officials said on Thursday.
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The gas, which lasts about 300 years in Earth's atmosphere, could be expected to stick around for 200 years on Mars. But Curiosity's findings, compiled over eight months, indicate that the methane may have virtually disappeared in a matter of years.
Based on the previous observations, scientists had expected to find about six times more methane in the atmosphere than the negligible amounts Curiosity found.
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The search is not over. Curiosity will continue to take air samples and test for methane as it continues its geology mission.
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Followers' Actions Affect an Organization's Leadership Capacity
By (ScienceDaily)
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Members of an educational organization contribute to its leadership and can blend personal and social needs to help leaders encourage cooperation, a Wayne State University researcher has found.
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The results, titled "The Feeling's Mutual: Student Participation in Leadership as a Cooperative Effort," were published recently in The Review of Higher Education. Participants saw themselves in a take-then-give interaction, Owens said, meaning that over time their participation changed from primarily receiving behaviors to a mix of giving and taking leadership practices.
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Owens said understanding how students influence educational leaders is vital in understanding how to prepare those leaders for their roles in schools and other educational organizations. He believes his study lays the groundwork for further research in similar settings, saying that a better understanding of students' influence on leaders can empower organizations to develop leadership practices that reflect the wants and needs of those they serve.
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Conservative Lobbyist Derails Bipartisan 'Science Laureate' Bill
By Frank James
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So why not a science laureate to sing the praises of scientific discovery, a science ambassador who could get more young people considering science careers?
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If this were a movie, right about now you'd hear a loud skidding car sound, like someone had suddenly slammed the brakes. That someone would be Larry Hart, legislative director of the American Conservative Union, who happened to notice the science laureate bill on the House legislative calendar.
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According to the bill's language, the laureate would be appointed by the president, unlike the poet laureate, who is appointed by the Librarian of Congress. The bill would also allow for the naming of as many as three laureates, whose terms could be constantly renewed, another difference from the poet laureate.
"What I couldn't understand," Hart told me, "was why [Republican] folks who constantly give speeches saying that they're upset with President Obama's appointments would give him the power for new appointments, particularly in the area of science, which he has a particular view of — in my opinion — a very politicized view of science. And his appointments in that area, on the regulatory side, have been very political."
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A Chronicle of a Whale's Life, Captured in Earwax
By (Science Friday with John Dankosky)
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DANKOSKY: Now, tell us about the rings that you're finding in here. What are you able to learn by cutting through, looking into the earwax of a whale?
USENKO: Well, what we're able to is essentially to go back in time. You know, similarly, you mentioned the tree rings. The farther we go into the center of the tree, the farther we're going back in time. And so when we actually cut the earplug in half, we can actually see the light and dark lamina or layers in there. And so when we measure contaminates or hormones or mercury in each layer, the farther we go towards the center, the father back in time we go. And so, really, for the first time, we're able to reconstruct an animal's lifetime chemical exposure, or for the natural hormones, the chemical profile.
. . . the blabber actually just tells us that the animal was exposed to - if we look at the contaminants - exposed those contaminants. But the earwax allows us to understand when that occurred in the animal's lifetime. So it's a significant difference between those two matrices. But in blabber, typically, you might look at, you know, persist organic pollutants, organic pesticides such as DDT but - which we might expect to accumulate in those lipid matrices, these lipid tissues. But, you know, for us - Doctor Trumble and myself - were actually able to measure the less persistent or more degradable contaminants, such as the natural hormones, which also another advantage.
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And the museums hold hundreds of these samples. They've been collecting through - collecting these things throughout the decades, from the 1950s. And, you know, I can get them from, you know, dead animals. So you can't, you know, swim out in the ocean, draw yourself earplug off a whale. This wouldn't work. So, you know, I get them from beached calves and things like that. So museums like - so they have, you know, Smithsonian alone has upwards of 500 of them identified so.
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Online Time Can Hobble Brain's Important Work
By (ScienceDaily)
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Erik Fransén, whose research focuses on short-term memory and ways to treat diseased neurons, says that a brain exposed to a typical session of social media browsing can easily become hobbled by information overload. The result is that less information gets filed away in your memory.
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Models show why it has limits. At any given time, the working memory can carry up to three or four items, Fransén says. When we attempt to stuff more information in the working memory, our capacity for processing information begins to fail.
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You're also robbing the brain of time it needs to do some necessary housekeeping. The brain is designed for both activity and relaxation, he says. "The brain is made to go into a less active state, which we might think is wasteful; but probably memory consolidation, and transferring information into memory takes place in this state. Theories of how memory works explain why these two different states are needed.
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Lifestyle Influences Metabolism Via DNA Methylation
By (ScienceDaily)
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An unhealthy lifestyle leaves traces in the DNA. These may have specific effects on metabolism, causing organ damage or disease. Scientists of Helmholtz Zentrum München have now identified 28 DNA alterations associated with metabolic traits. This world-first epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) of modified genes and metabolites has been now published in the journal Human Molecular Genetics.
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In the course of life, aging processes, environmental influences and lifestyle factors such as smoking or diet induce biochemical alterations to the DNA. Frequently, these lead to DNA methylation, a process in which methyl groups are added to particular DNA segments, without changing the DNA sequence. Such processes can influence gene function and are known as epigenetics. Scientists of the Institute of Genetic Epidemiology (IGE) and the Research Unit Molecular Epidemiology (AME) at Helmholtz Zentrum München are seeking to determine what association exists between these epigenetic processes and the health consequences, in particular for the metabolism.
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In the relevant DNA regions there were also already known disease-related genes: for example, the TXNIP gene that regulates glucose metabolism and is associated with the development of diabetes mellitus. Appropriately, with the methylated TXNIP there were altered concentrations of metabolites from the lipid and glucose metabolism. Also genes that are known to be biochemically altered due to smoking affect different metabolic activities, and specifically those with corresponding biological functions.
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