Category: Science

Natural evolution has produced the eye, butterfly wings and other wonders that would put any inventor to shame. But who’s to say evolution couldn’t be improved with the help of a little technology?

So argues James Auger in his controversial and sometimes unsettling book, Augmented Animals. A designer and former research associate with MIT Media Lab Europe, Auger envisions animals, birds, reptiles and even fish becoming appreciative techno-geeks, using specially engineered gadgets to help them overcome their evolutionary shortcomings, promote their chances of survival or just simply lead easier and more comfortable lives.

On tap for the future: Rodents zooming around with night-vision survival goggles, squirrels hoarding nuts using GPS locators and fish armed with metal detectors to avoid the angler’s hook…

"To offset the cruelty of factory-farming, routine implants of smart microchips in the pleasure centers may be feasible," says David Pearce, associate editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology. "Since there is no physiological tolerance to pure pleasure, factory-farmed animals could lead a lifetime of pure bliss instead of misery. Unnatural? Yes, but so is factory farming. Immoral? No, certainly not compared to the terrible suffering we inflict on factory-farmed animals today."

There is more here, and yes Wired is essential reading.

Click through here.  Yes I know most of you don’t look at the links, but this is not to be missed.  Let’s hope it is not too late to save Hubble as a working piece of equipment.

An important new paper, Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress, provides some dramatic evidence consistent with the telomere theory of aging.

Here is the abstract:

Numerous studies demonstrate links between chronic stress and
indices of poor health, including risk factors for cardiovascular
disease and poorer immune function. Nevertheless, the exact
mechanisms of how stress gets ”under the skin” remain elusive.
We investigated the hypothesis that stress impacts health by
modulating the rate of cellular aging. Here we provide evidence
that psychological stress–both perceived stress and chronicity of
stress–is significantly associated with higher oxidative stress,
lower telomerase activity, and shorter telomere length, which are
known determinants of cell senescence and longevity, in peripheral
blood mononuclear cells from healthy premenopausal women.
Women with the highest levels of perceived stress have telomeres
shorter on average by the equivalent of at least one decade of
additional aging compared to low stress women. These findings
have implications for understanding how, at the cellular level,
stress may promote earlier onset of age-related diseases.

…a raft of experiments by Mr. Csányi’s team and another led by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, showed that dogs were far more skilled then either chimps or wolves at using human social cues to find food. Those results left researchers with this question: If dogs can pick up on human cues, do they turn the tables and put out cues for humans to understand?

To find out, Mr. Csányi and Réka Polgárdi, a graduate student, went to the homes of Budapest’s many dog owners. After introducing the researchers to the dogs, the owners would leave the room. Then the dogs would watch Mr. Csányi hide a piece of food somewhere inaccessible to them. When the owners returned, the dogs would run or glance back and forth from master to hiding place, clearly signaling its location. More-recent experiments substituted nonfood objects and had similar results, which suggests the dogs may be placing themselves in their owner’s shoes, and realizing that the humans are ignorant of the object’s location.

The Hungarian researchers also discovered that dogs excel at imitating humans. In one of the laboratories down the hall from Mr. Csányi’s office, Zsófia Virányi, a post-doctoral researcher, demonstrates with Tódor, an enthusiastic little mutt that she hand-raised to serve as a member of a control group for another experiment. Tódor sits attentively as Ms. Virányi spins around in a circle and comes to a stop. "Csinal!" or "you do it!" she says, at which Tódor does a little 360 on the tiled floor and lets out an enthusiastic bark. He easily imitates Ms. Virányi’s bowing and lifting an arm (or paw, in his case).

Here is the full story, which contains much, much more.

The title of the post is not an oxymoron.  The Amish have been enthusiastic adopters of genetically modified crops.  Ironically, the higher productivity of the crop substitutes for the fact that the Amish harvest it by hand.  Less ironically the GM crops use fewer pesticides and herbicides.

Amish scholars say genetically enhanced
crops are not inconsistent with the simple life that is central to Amish
beliefs because it helps them continue their ties
to agriculture, allowing families to
work together.

Hat tip to Stewart Brand’s recent essay Environmental Heresies which also contains this insight on a question that has long bothered me.

Why was water fluoridization rejected by the political right and
“frankenfood” by the political left? The answer, I suspect, is that
fluoridization came from government and genetically modified (GM) crops
from corporations. If the origins had been reversed–as they could have
been–the positions would be reversed, too.

Seth Roberts is a psychologist at Berkeley who for the past twelve years has obsessively kept data on himself in an effort to generate and test new ideas.  In a recent paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences he explains some of his methods and findings (a number of comments, most of which I think are blah, blah, blah are also included).

Roberts, for example, drank 5 liters (!) of water every day for 4 months to test a theory of weight loss (he lost weight but he couldn’t keep up the drinking!).  He also began standing for more than 8 hours a day, initially to test the affect on weight loss but instead he found that standing, especially 10 hours or more a day, dramatically improved his sleep.  Eventually, he did find a novel form of weight loss involving fructose water (read the paper).  Some of his findings seem bizarre, such as watching faces on tv in the morning improved his mood the next day but lowered it that night. 

It’s tempting to dismiss all of this (especially before reading the paper and looking at the care with which Roberts kept his data) and clearly, I wouldn’t take any experiment with 1 subject as definitive.  Roberts, however, is making the case that careful measurement of self-response is a way of generating new ideas.  Roberts, for example, did not set out to test the idea that viewing faces improved mood this was a surprising discovery. 

A virtue of self-experimentation is that it doesn’t take a million dollar lab and a bevy of graduate students, with some willpower and a willingness to carefully document and measure results, anyone can do cutting-edge science.   

Here is one attempted answer to the dark energy puzzle; it implies that black holes do not exist, vindicating an old view of Einstein’s.

I read the following in USA Today:

A decade ago, one in every 2,500 U.S. children had autism; now it’s one in 166, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

But is it true?  Autism Diva (a new blog) raises some serious doubts.  Autism may still be rising, but this number may be the latest "urban legend."  Using Google alone, I could not track down the ultimate source (beyond the CDC press release) of the "1 in 166" claim.  I can, however, tell you this.  A search for "autism 166" yields (repetitive) riches on google.com, but nothing real on scholar.google.com.

Addendum: Here is one serious piece; it supports my skepticism.  Thanks to Daniel Starr for the pointer.

NASA, in partnership with the Spaceward Foundation, will offer prizes for advances in strong lightweight tethers and for methods of transmitting power wirelessly, both key aspects of a space elevator.  More from the NYTimes.

By attaching electrodes to regular
eating utensils, inventor James Larsson has created knives and forks
that can pick up on whether the person across the table feels
uncomfortable or pleased.

London-based
Larsson hopes to help those who have difficulty reading signals such as
body language from their date. "Geeks have major challenges dating," he
says. The device analyses data from the cutlery to provide information
about how their dinner companion is feeling.

I doubt this will help; if you need the cutlery your own banter is probably falling flat.  My query is how and where business negotiations will take place, once these technologies are widely available. And hey guys, let’s play poker over my house tonight…

Here is the full story.

Read them here.  My favorite:

Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone [children: do not try this at home]. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don’t know.

Here is one more puzzle on string theory, courtesy of Craig Newmark.  Or try this one, on what it is like to be watched by a robot.