The doctrine of Shadchakra (six chakras) forms an essential part of yoga, tantra and Ayurvedic philosophy. These chakras are described as subtle centers of energy located along the spinal pathway, each influencing human physiology, psychology and spiritual evolution. The six principal chakras - Mūlādhāra, Svādhisthāna, Maņipūra, Anāhata, Viśuddha and Ājñā are interconnected with specific organs, emotions and higher faculties of awareness. Proper alignment and activation of these chakras are believed to foster balance, vitality, emotional stability and self-realization, whereas disharmony may contribute to illness or psychological disturbances. Therapeutic approaches such as yoga postures, breathing practices, meditation, mantra recitation, dietary regulation and Ayurvedic treatments are employed to harmonize Chakra function and restore energy flow. Thus, the Shadchakra framework provides an integrated perspective on health, linking the body, mind and consciousness and offering preventive as well as promotive measures for holistic well-being.

Bacterial responses to antibiotics determine the pattern of manganese biomineralization.

New avenues in insect heat tolerance: towards an integrative understanding of climate change responses.

Raman spectral analyses to investigate the physiological and metabolic development of a 3D hepatocellular carcinoma model.

The issue of the medical significance of diapause is considered from the standpoint of evolutionary physiology. According to it, in the course of evolution, due to the emergence of new morphophysiological and physiological adaptations, the regulatory systems of the body were built up. Obsolete mechanisms passed into an inactive state, as a result of which the regulatory physiological system became multi-stage and hierarchical. At the same time, it is based on dormant processes of normal ontogenesis of ancestors. They can awaken in pathological situations, when later emerging regulatory adaptations fail to cope with their functions. Activation of dormant mechanisms of ancestors is a pathological condition, and cancer is, perhaps, the awakening of the process of embryonic diapause in invertebrates. The purpose of the article is to present a hypothesis according to which deciphering the mechanism of embryonic diapause is the way to a better understanding of the causes of cancer.

Background: This study introduces the Adaptive Graph Fusion Network, an interpretable graph-based learning framework developed for large-scale prediction of intensive care outcomes. The proposed model dynamically constructs patient similarity networks through a density-aware kernel that adjusts neighborhood size based on local data distribution, thereby representing both frequent and rare clinical patterns. Methods: To characterize physiological evolution over time, the framework integrates a short-horizon convolutional encoder that captures acute variations in vital signs and laboratory results with a long-horizon recurrent memory unit that models gradual temporal trends. The approach was trained and internally validated on the publicly available eICU Collaborative Research Database, which includes more than 200,000 admissions from 208 hospitals across the United States. Results: The model achieved a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.91 across six critical outcomes, with in-hospital mortality reaching 0.96, outperforming logistic regression, temporal long short-term memory networks, and calibrated Transformer-based architectures. Feature attribution analysis using SHAP and temporal contribution mapping identified lactate trajectories, creatinine fluctuations, and vasopressor administration as dominant determinants of risk, consistent with established clinical understanding while revealing additional temporal dependencies overlooked by existing scoring systems. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that adaptive graph construction combined with multi-horizon temporal reasoning improves predictive reliability and interpretability in heterogeneous intensive care populations, offering a transparent and reproducible foundation for future research in clinical machine learning.

Background. Chronic pain is a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon that integrates somatic, psycho-emotional, and social dimensions. One of its key complications is the development of operant (dysfunctional) pain behavior, which increases the risk of therapeutic inefficacy and dependence on opioid analgesia. Materials and methods. The study included 302 outpatients aged 18–70 years diagnosed with chronic pain lasting more than 3 months. Sociodemographic, clinical, and clinico-psychopathological characteristics of patients with chronic pain disorders and syndromes were analyzed. All participants were divided into 5 groups: primary psychogenic pain (PPР1); psychophysiological pain (PPP2); mixed primary psychogenic and psychophysiological pain (PPP3); secondary mixed pain (SMP); secondary organic pain (SOP). All patients were assessed using the DIRE scale to determine suitability for opioid therapy and behavioral risk. Results. Significant differences between groups were observed, primarily associated with the pathogenesis of pain, rather than sociodemographic characteristics. Patients in group PPP3 demonstrated the highest risk of operant behavior and opioid dependence, while those in group SOP had the lowest risk. The findings in groups PPP1, PPP2, and SMP indicate that PPP1 and PPP2 did not differ significantly and showed intermediate risk levels, whereas SMP was associated with slightly lower risks. ­Conclusions. The transition from secondary organic pain to secondary mixed pain should not be considered a physiological evolution of pain but rather a consequence of unrecognized psychosocial factors. Prevention of such transition is possible only through integrated patient management in which the clinician simultaneously addresses the somatic process and modulates the psycho-emotional response.

Redefining human heat limits: integrating molecular and evolutionary physiology.

Background: The cerebral compliance (or compensatory reserve) index, RAP, is a critical yet underutilized physiological marker in the management of moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). While RAP offers promise as a continuous bedside metric, its broader cerebral physiological context remains partly understood. This study aims to characterize the burden of impaired RAP in relation to other key components of cerebral physiology. Methods: Archived data from 379 moderate-to-severe TBI patients were analyzed using descriptive and threshold-based methods across three RAP states (impaired, intact/transitional, and exhausted). Agglomerative hierarchical clustering, principal component analysis, and kernel-based clustering were applied to explore multivariate covariance structures. Then, high-frequency temporal analyses, including vector autoregressive integrated moving average impulse response functions (VARIMA IRF), cross-correlation, and Granger causality, were performed to assess dynamic coupling between RAP and other physiological signals. Results: Impaired and exhausted RAP states were associated with elevated intracranial pressure (p = 0.021). Regarding AMP, impaired RAP was associated with elevated levels, while exhausted RAP was associated with reduced pulse amplitude (p = 3.94 × 10−9). These two RAP states were also associated with compromised autoregulation and diminished perfusion. Clustering analyses consistently grouped RAP with its constituent signals (ICP and AMP), followed by brain oxygenation parameters (brain tissue oxygenation (PbtO2) and regional cerebral oxygen saturation (rSO2)). Cerebral autoregulation (CA) indices clustered more closely with RAP under impaired autoregulatory states. Temporal analyses revealed that RAP exhibited comparatively stronger responses to ICP and arterial blood pressure (ABP) at 1-min resolution. Moreover, when comparing ICP-derived and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)-derived CA indices, they clustered more closely to RAP, and RAP demonstrated greater sensitivity to changes in these ICP-derived CA indices in high-frequency temporal analyses. These trends remained consistent at lower temporal resolutions as well. Conclusion: RAP relationships with other parameters remain consistent and differ meaningfully across compliance states. Integrating RAP into patient trajectory modelling and developing predictive frameworks based on these findings across different RAP states can map the evolution of cerebral physiology over time. This approach may improve prognostication and guide individualized interventions in TBI management. Therefore, these findings support RAP’s potential as a valuable metric for bedside monitoring and its prospective role in guiding patient trajectory modeling and interventional studies in TBI.

Misty Riddle is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA. Her research group uses the Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus, to understand how genetic changes alter development and drive the evolution of morphology and physiology. We caught up with Misty to find out about her path from the vet clinic to the lab bench, her research into cavefish and her transition to becoming a group leader.

Skeletal muscle regeneration depends on muscle stem cells, which give rise to myoblasts that drive muscle growth, repair, and maintenance. In bats-the only mammals capable of powered flight-these processes must also sustain contractile performance under extreme mechanical and metabolic stress. However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying bat muscle physiology remain largely unknown. To enable mechanistic investigation of these traits, we established the first myoblast cell lines from the pectoralis muscle of Pteronotus mesoamericanus, a highly maneuverable aerial insectivore. Using both spontaneous immortalization and exogenous hTERT/CDK4 gene overexpression, we generated two stable cell lines that retain proliferative capacity and differentiate into contractile myotubes. These cells exhibit frequent spontaneous contractions, suggesting robust functional integrity at the neuromuscular junction. In parallel, we performed transcriptomic and metabolic profiling of native pectoralis tissue in the closely related Pteronotus parnellii to define molecular programs supporting muscle specialization. Gene expression analyses revealed enriched pathways for muscle metabolism, development, and regeneration, highlighting supporting roles in tissue maintenance and repair. Consistent with this profile, the flight muscle is triglyceride-rich, which serves as an important fuel source for energetically demanding processes, including muscle contraction and cellular recovery. Integration of transcriptomic and metabolic data identified three key metabolic modules-glucose utilization, lipid handling, and nutrient signaling-that likely coordinate ATP production and support metabolic flexibility. Together, these complementary tools and datasets provide the first in vitro platform for investigating bat muscle research, enabling direct exploration of muscle regeneration, metabolic resilience, and evolutionary physiology.

The baby's first thousand days are crucial for child growth and development, as well as for the formation of eating habits. The objective of this study was to evaluate, through a literature review, when and how to introduce complementary feeding in the baby's first thousand days, with a view to stimulating the development of the stomatognathic system and supporting eating habits for adult life. Exclusive breastfeeding for six months is essential, bringing immunological, nutritional and psychological benefits to the baby and the mother. The introduction of complementary feeding should be gradual, safe and based on natural and minimally processed foods. Breast milk is irreplaceable, offering essential nutrients to the immune system and the stomatognathic system. It should be exclusive until the sixth month, after the introduction of complementary feeding gradually, respecting the physiological evolution of the child. Ultraprocessed products have negative consequences for children's health, as well as the introduction of sugar should be carried out after two years of age. The inadequate practice of food introduction favors the emergence of diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory disorders and orofacial development problems and negatively impacts the formation of healthy habits. The active performance of health professionals, especially dentists, nutritionists and pediatricians, is essential in the education and guidance of mothers and/or guardians, establishing strategies for the construction of healthy habits from early childhood.

Marine phytoplankton face eco-evolutionary pressure to regulate their vertical position in the ocean to access light, which is abundant towards the surface, and nutrients, which are found deeper down the water column. All phytoplankton experience gravitational sinking, which can contribute to their vertical migration. However, the biophysical and molecular mechanisms that impact gravitational sinking have not been systematically characterized across taxa and environmental conditions. Here, we combine simulations with measurements of cell mass, volume, and composition to investigate the effects of nutrient availability on gravitational sinking in 9 representative unicellular pico- and nanoplankton species. We find that gravitational sinking becomes faster in most species when starved, but the biophysical changes responsible for this vary across species and starvation conditions. For example, the faster sinking of Chaetoceros calcitrans is nearly exclusively driven by cell density whereas that of Emiliania huxleyi is due to cell volume. On the molecular level, the altered sinking is predominantly attributed to changes in cellular dry contents, rather than water. For example, starch accumulation increases sinking in 3 green algae species, and lipid accumulation decreases sinking in Phaeodactylum tricornutum. Overall, our work reveals that phytoplankton physiology has evolved multiple mechanisms that impact gravitational sinking in response to starvation, possibly to support the vertical migration of the cell.

Background Despite of massive development in health sciences, maternal mortality in Pakistan is still highest in Southeast Asia. Derailment of widespread physiological changes or evolution of any highrisk pregnancy induced condition may necessitate admission to an intensive care unit (ICU) during the course of pregnancy or postpartum. The purpose of this study is to identify the factors leading to ICU admissions and outcomes of obstetric patients in surgical ICU of a tertiary care hospital. Methods A descriptive study was conducted in Department of Anaesthesiology, the Surgical ICU and Pain Management, Civil Hospital Karachi for 6 months from June to December 2022.A Total 138 patients with antepartum and postpartum conditions requiring ICU admission were recruited in this study. All demographic details were recorded in a predesigned proforma. The patient’s parturient status as antepartum or postpartum and the comorbidities with which they presented were recorded. Results Patients’ mean age was 26.68 ± 5.67 years. Hypertensive disorder was the commonest factor (51.45%) leading to ICU admission followed by obstetric hemorrhage 37.86% and sepsis was observed in 10.87%. There were 15.94% (22 of 138) women who were expired and 81.06% (116 of 18) were discharged from surgical ICU. Mortality rate was significantly high in those women whose causes were obstetric hemorrhage and sepsis. (p=0.0005). Conclusion The most frequent cause of ICU admission was the hypertensive condition of pregnancy, which was followed by obstetric hemorrhage and infection. It is essential to approach these patients meticulously and embark on rapid management protocol with a team approach to save these precious lives. BJMS, Vol. 24 No. 03 July’25 Page : 807-814

Environmental salinity levels vary naturally across terrestrial ecosystems but can be heightened locally by coastal proximity and desertification as well as human activities such as road salt application and agriculture. Since salt is essential for many physiological processes in insects, rising environmental sodium concentrations may drive behavioral changes, where insects select environments and food sources with suitable sodium levels, or evolutionary changes in constitutive or plastic physiological mechanisms to process salt, potentially altering ecological dynamics and species interactions.Numerous hematophagous (blood feeding) insects such as the yellow-fever mosquito Aedes aeqypti are known to be able to breed in relatively saline environments. Among phytophagous (plant feeding) insects, grasshoppers can be important herbivores in arid and coastal salt-affected regions, whereas the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) appears to perform relatively well on milkweed host plants growing in roadsides influenced by salt runoff. Several of these insects share a common trait: amino acid substitutions in the first extracellular loop of the Na+/K+-ATPase (NKA), a sodium pump crucial for maintaining ion balance. For the monarch these substitutions confer resistance to toxic cardenolides from milkweeds, but it is unclear whether NKA substitutions may influence salt tolerance.Here, we investigate whether the NKA substitutions found in these insects may contribute to salt tolerance using gene-edited Drosophila melanogaster mutant strains as models. We show that flies with substitution Q111L (found in Aedes mosquitoes) or a combination of Q111L and A119S (found in grasshoppers) exhibited greater salt tolerance, whereas flies carrying the combination of substitutions found in the monarch (Q111V, A119S, and N122H) did not.Our results suggest that the monarch may rely on alternate mechanisms for salt tolerance and that its NKA substitutions are important primarily for cardenolide resistance. However, substitution Q111L and the combination of Q111L and A119S may be relevant for salt tolerance in a variety of insects. Uncovering mechanisms of salt tolerance enhances our understanding of species distributions, ecological interactions, and evolutionary physiology in response to changing environmental salinity levels.

Skeletal muscle regeneration depends on muscle stem cells, which give rise to myoblasts that drive muscle growth, repair, and maintenance. In bats-the only mammals capable of powered flight-these processes must also sustain contractile performance under extreme mechanical and metabolic stress. However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying bat muscle physiology remain largely unknown. To enable mechanistic investigation of these traits (Graphical Abstract), we established the first myoblast cell lines from the pectoralis muscle of Pteronotus mesoamericanus , a highly maneuverable aerial insectivore. Using both spontaneous immortalization and exogenous hTERT/CDK4 overexpression, we generated two stable cell lines that retain proliferative capacity and differentiate into contractile myotubes. These cells exhibit frequent spontaneous contractions, suggesting robust functional integrity at the neuromuscular junction. In parallel, we performed transcriptomic and metabolic profiling of native pectoralis tissue to define molecular programs supporting muscle specialization. Gene expression analyses revealed enriched pathways for muscle metabolism, development, and regeneration, highlighting the supporting roles in tissue maintenance and repair. Consistent with this profile, the flight muscle is triglyceride-rich, which serves as an important fuel source for energetically demanding processes, including muscle contraction and cellular recovery. Integration of transcriptomic and metabolic data identified three key metabolic modules-glucose utilization, lipid handling, and nutrient signaling-that likely coordinate ATP production and support metabolic flexibility. Together, these complementary tools and datasets provide the first in vitro platform for investigating bat muscle research, enabling direct exploration of muscle regeneration, metabolic resilience, and evolutionary physiology.

Hans Selye’s stress concept, first introduced in the 1930s, has undergone substantial evolution, extending beyond biology and medicine to influence diverse academic disciplines. Initially, Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) described nonspecific physiological responses to stressors exclusively in mammals, without addressing other biological systems. Consequently, the concept of stress developed independently in biology and medicine, shaped by distinct physiological contexts. This review provides a historical overview of stress research, highlights both parallels and divergences between the stress responses of plants and animals, and integrates insights from traditional Eastern philosophies. We propose an updated GAS framework that incorporates the dynamic balance among reactive oxygen species (ROS), reactive nitrogen species (RNS), and reactive sulfur species (RSS) within the broader context of oxidative stress. We highlight the ionotropic glutamate receptor (iGluR) family and the transient receptor potential (TRP) channel superfamily as minimal molecular architectures for achieving GAS. This perspective expands the classical stress paradigm, providing new insights into redox biology, interspecies stress adaptation, and evolutionary physiology.

Another article on the Russian Northern Tradition is devoted to further understanding of its historical roots and conceptual understanding of its content. Our goal is to show that the Russian tradition, based on the initial concepts of Right, Nav, and Reality, as a manifestation of the collective unconscious, according to C. G. Jung, exists, contains information about the origins of the tradition itself, deep in the meaning of cosmogonic and cosmological teachings, and covers all areas of human existence. For a proper understanding of our Orthodox tradition, which glorifies the Rule associated with God, it is necessary to distinguish between theological teaching as the word of God and the word about God, transmitted to our distant ancestors by the highly developed civilization of the Arctic, and religious teaching in the form of Christianity as the word of church teachers speaking on behalf of God. It is important that theology transmitted orally in the form of mythological images is protected from editing, and religious teaching presented in the form of a canonical text, the Bible, can be rewritten and interpreted by representatives of the church to meet the needs of the current political situation. Communion with the life-giving Spirit has been replaced by faith in the letter of Orthodox teaching, the meaning of which is interpreted by lay religious professionals. Living in the Spirit has been replaced by “book learning” and solemn rituals. The simplification of the basic dogmas of the original theology, actualized in our era by Christ in the Western European world, splits Christianity into Orthodoxy and Catholicism, and then Protestantism. The purpose of our current article on the Russian Northern Tradition is to conceptually show the content of the original Orthodox theology, its practical significance both in determining the meaning of life in a person’s personal life, and in understanding the modern global processes of humanity and its possible future. The Arcts, wanderers along the World Tree, brought to earthlings the word of God about how our world works, in images accessible to the ancient anthropoid in its biotic existence, and attributed to it a vertical semantic coordinate, thanks to which the anthropoid - an upright animal - became an upright, cultured man. It was from this moment that the human civilization of “Homo sapiens” began. Not as a product of physiological evolution in the spirit of Darwinism, but as a product of spiritual evolution. This is where Orthodox Theology fundamentally diverges from the materialist paradigm: Spirit organizes matter, but Spirit is not a product of self-organized matter. The latter is paradoxical, because the subject of organized existence is put out of brackets and materialism turns into a kind of religion that is absolutely unverifiable. Theology begins with the recognition that there is a Creator, the subject of the source of order and harmony. To turn in a difficult situation, on the border of life, to the Subject of creation, who laid down the laws of the existence of the world, is understandable. It is paradoxical to turn to a material object for help: a stone on the road, a favorite computer, artificial intelligence. In Tradition, the beginning of Orthodox theology is represented in the form of three dogmas: the One, the Trinity, and the Twelve. This is the “right world” - the Great Swarga. The life-giving Spirit, having decided to experience the fullness of his creative freedom, creates a world based on an alternative: Me and the World. This is a Small Swarga. The realization of the Creation of such a world is determined by the three laws of the creation of space. The first law conceptualizes the concept of space: Multiplying alternatives create Space. The created world turned out to be fundamentally binary: if there is good, then there must necessarily be evil, if there is God as the source of good, then there must be Satan as the source of evil, peaceful life awaits war, etc. The theology of the Northern Tradition points the way out of this wrong world: consistently overcoming the twelve types of separation in order to gain wholeness in the Spirit. The essence of these types of separation is found in the teaching of the Zodiac - the twelve cosmic zodiacal constellations. Constellations are described by a triglav of concepts: star Number, star Quality, three Faces of star quality. Each quality goes through three stages of growth in its development: an indefinite state, a definite state, and an ultimate state. By consistently mastering them, a person acquires this zodiac quality, the corresponding forces and energies of the soul and moves on to the next level of his spiritual development. This is the meaning of the idea of “Salvation” in the Orthodox tradition.

Late-life diseases result from the poorly understood process of senescence (aging), that is largely genetically determined. According to a recently proposed evolutionary physiology-based account, the multifactorial model, senescence is largely caused by evolved but non-adaptive programmatic mechanisms specified by the wild-type (i.e. normal) genome. These act together with disruptions to wild-type function (due e.g. to infectious pathogens, mechanical injury and malnutrition) in a variety of combinations to generate diverse late-life diseases. Here the utility of this model is explored by testing its capacity to provide an account of one complex, late-life disease, osteoarthritis (OA), and a framework for understanding OA etiology suggested. In this framework, the core OA disease mechanism is a futile endochondral ossification quasi-program (non-adaptive developmental program), in which hypertrophic articular chondrocytes alter joint architecture. Programmatic changes prime chondrocytes for quasi-program activation, which can be triggered by secondary causes of OA (e.g. joint mechanical injury). A suggested evolutionary cause of this priming, involving antagonistic pleiotropy, is selection to maximize early life tissue repair benefits at the expense of late-life programmatic costs.

The form and change of animal biogeography reflects the long-term interplay between organisms and their environment, involving physiological limitation, dispersal capability, and adaptive evolution versus plate tectonics, global climatic shifts, and changing landscapes. This is especially manifest for lineages with extended geological histories, which, therefore, evokes questions as to the associated processes producing such patterns. Insects, as the earliest flying animals, have exceptional abilities for expanding their range and habitats and to avoid detrimental conditions. They are ideal for exploring historical biogeography augmented via adaptation. Here, we employ beaded lacewings as a model to explore such patterns and likely processes, particularly given that they differ notably from the commonly observed pattern of a latitudinal diversity gradient. Furthermore, owing to their good fossil record it can be observed that their distributions varied remarkably through time. Ecological niche modeling and evaluation demonstrate their niche variation and niche breadth expansion intermittently accompanying global climate change. However, different niche relevant variables changed under patterns of either phylogenetic conservatism or evolutionary lability. By assessing wing morphological disparity and modeling flight aerodynamics, we uncovered a continuous improvement of flight efficiency through beaded-lacewing history as well as a Paleogene divergence in strategy, which reveals a long-term associated path with the niche variation. Our results unveil the adaptive evolution and dispersal history of beaded lacewings through 170 My, achieved by dynamic strategies in niche shift and flight adaptation as responses to a changing planet.