Content
Quotes:
What if all viruses disappeared?
Neuroscience has much to learn from Hume’s philosophy of emotions
How to Disguise Racism and Oligarchy: Use Economics
Articles:
The Conversation thrives during the pandemic
K-pop fans: A diverse, underestimated and powerful force
Self-driving bus services tested out in Tallinn
A Medical Device Maker Threatens iFixit Over Ventilator Repair Project
Creating a new paradigm for understanding the individual effects of diet
Study demonstrates feasibility of hologram technology in liver tumor ablation
An artificial skin made with graphene could revolutionize robotic surgery
Blood test to monitor cancer up to 10 times more sensitive than current methods
Viruses can steal our genetic code to create new human-virus genes
Food-grade wheatgrass variety released for public use
Low-cost solar-to-hydrogen cell achieves breakthrough 17.6% efficiency
If given the choice to magically wave a wand and cause all viruses to disappear, most people would probably jump at that opportunity, especially now. Yet this would be a deadly mistake – deadlier, in fact, than any virus could ever be.
“If all viruses suddenly disappeared, the world would be a wonderful place for about a day and a half, and then we’d all die – that’s the bottom line,” says Tony Goldberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “All the essential things they do in the world far outweigh the bad things.”
…. Nor do scientists know what percentage of total viruses are problematic toward humans. “If you looked numerically, it would be statistically close to zero,” says Curtis Suttle, an environmental virologist at the University of British Columbia. “Almost all viruses out there are not pathogenic to things we care about.”
viruses kill about 20% of all oceanic microbes, and about 50% of all oceanic bacteria, each day. By culling microbes, viruses ensure that oxygen-producing plankton have enough nutrients to undertake high rates of photosynthesis, ultimately sustaining much of life on Earth. “If we don’t have death, then we have no life, because life is completely dependent on recycling of materials,” Suttle says. “Viruses are so important in terms of recycling.”
“All organisms that can be infected with viruses have an opportunity to suck up viral genes and use them to their advantage,” Goldberg says. “The insertion of new DNA into genomes is a major mode of evolution.” The disappearance of viruses, in other words, would impact the evolutionary potential for all life on the planet – including Homo sapiens.
What if all viruses disappeared?
We are in the midst of a second Humean revolution. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions …’ By ‘passions’, Hume meant what we now call emotions. What gave him such faith in the passions that he could accept reason’s enslavement to them? Hume understood reason to be incapable of producing any action, and the passions to be the source of our motivations. So he insisted that we must attend to the passions if we want to understand how anything gets done. Much recent neuroscience has found that human rationality is weaker than is commonly presumed, and the emotions make it possible to make decisions by granting certain objects salience. Why does this second Humean revolution matter and what, if anything, can the second revolution learn from the first?
In his book The Strange Order of Things (2018), Antonio Damasio, one of the most influential neuroscientists today, defines the affects and emotions as ‘action programmes’, and by this he connects emotions to homeostasis, the process by which we keep ourselves alive. How better to grant the emotions scientific weight than to make them the key to human survival? Neuroscience also supports a growing recognition of the connections between the brain’s perceptual and motor systems; this has led scholars such as Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Andy Clark and Shaun Gallagher – ‘enactivists’ who argue that human thought is not brainbound but stems from connections between the mind and body and its environment – to conclude, to varying degrees, that human perceptions are for the purpose of action. Sometimes, however, I just want to look at something, not reduce it to a tool.
we can’t tell ourselves whom to fall in love with – means that our wrestling with the passions is what brings the self into being.
Habits consolidate what control we can have of our passions. Hume gives habit pride of place in his moral accounting, but the key here is to continually assess whether we have the right habits, not to passively accept existing habits. ‘Nothing can be more laudable,’ he writes, ‘than to have a value for ourselves, where we really have qualities that are valuable.’ In other words, he asks for empirical evidence of value, not just for our feeling of it.
Neuroscience has much to learn from Hume’s philosophy of emotions
Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”
With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a “revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.
MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan’s outpost at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters of corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors. Together they could push economic ideas to the public through media, promote new curricula for economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.
At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.
Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain. In his home country, the economist was deeply involved in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit government as the “problem” rather than the “solution.” The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.
when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the “shock-and-awe” tactics of shutting down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially George Mason University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious wave of partisan politics?
How to Disguise Racism and Oligarchy: Use Economics
The reason for these bursts in cultural activity is not to do with changes in our ancestors’ individual brains but in their collective brains – changes resulting from human demography and networks. Humans have a unique form of culture that is cumulative, and evolves in diversity and complexity over time. We achieve our great technological mastery not by individually inventing every tool, behaviour or cultural practice for ourselves, but by learning from the collective knowledge held by our social group, practising, remembering the details and passing this knowledge to others and down the generations. Over time, these practices evolve changes, improvements and additions, enabling us to benefit from a growing body of collective cultural knowledge and from practices that have been filtered by an evolutionary selection process over generations.
The practices and technologies that accumulate in our cultural toolbox have themselves emerged through countless iterations as they’re copied over the generations. Rather than survival of the fittest, it’s helpful to think of evolution as the failure of the less fit. Among the diversity of processes and techniques, some will fail, becoming rare or eliminated over generations. The rest will continue to be copied, and be socially available. Environmental change can trigger a burst of cultural variation, just as in biological evolution.
the most important decider seems to be group size: usually, the bigger the group, the bigger the diversity of cultural practices. Those that are particularly successful at increasing a society’s population – such as practices that improve nutrition, fertility or reduce infant mortality – will, of course, produce more carriers of that practice, so spread faster and further. This is how technologies fundamental to survival, such as fire-making, rapidly became universal. Practices less crucial to survival, such as artworks, require a large enough group to support practitioners with food and other resources. But, once group size increases enough, cultural innovation accelerates, because the group then holds a diversity of cultural practices that can be combined to produce further practices, and so on exponentially. In other words, a tipping point is reached whereby larger, connected populations experience cultural explosions.
Bigger, more culturally diverse populations can call upon a greater resource of potential solutions as the physical or social environment changes. They have more opportunities to adapt their cultural practices, so they are more resilient. So these societies could survive longer, giving their technologies and cultural practices longer to evolve. Evolution has no direction, but complexity takes time to build up through combinations of different cultural ideas and practices.
Similarly, the better a group’s connections to other groups – and the better the connections are within a group – the more chance for individuals to acquire new cultural practices and technologies. And the reverse is also true – small, isolated communities can experience a cultural evolution towards simpler, less diverse technologies, effectively losing culture.
Ancient yet cosmopolitan
Maybe the future of news media is not as dire as is often portrayed - maybe the future needs new business models for …. well everything.
The Conversation thrives during the pandemic
AT A TIME when journalism is being hit hard globally and some are predicting the end of independent journalism in some parts of the world, it’s time to take a look at what may survive. The Conversation—a nonprofit that brings together scholars and journalists to bring academic writing to a general audience—may tell us a bit about where nonprofit media is headed.
The Conversation—which was founded by Andrew Jaspan and Jack Rejtman in Australia in 2011 with $6 million in funding from four universities, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and the State of Victoria—is thriving amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Traffic is soaring, while its funding model insulates it from the collapse in advertising and subscription revenue hitting other outlets. Its stories are available for republication, for free, under a Creative Commons license—a model that seems particularly beneficial for other news outlets at this moment. “If there were ever a time for expertise and smart journalism, now is it, and we are doing it at a volume no one else is doing and there is no paywall. It is free to use and free to publish,” says Stephen Khan, the editor of The Conversation’s UK edition.
Today, The Conversation has 10 national and regional editions and more than 150 full-time staff, many of them former journalists with decades of experience at outlets like The Scotsman, Financial Mail, Huffington Post, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and Climate Change Weekly. The Conversation’s editors specialize in wrangling academics and editing their dense writing so that it can be understood by general readers, sometimes spending as much as 10 hours on one article. Since the pandemic started, submissions from contributors have tripled in some places. Global pageviews for April 2020, including republications, stand at 81 million, up from 40.1 million in April 2019. Google Analytics records that onsite visits have risen to 38.1 million in April 2020 from 15.9 million in April 2019.
This is a most fascinating signal of the evolution of online activism - one that melds culture and music toward political and social values.
K-pop fans: A diverse, underestimated and powerful force
How the largely apolitical scene came to attract fans who are very much political
Who are K-pop fans? It’s a question that not a lot of people bothered to ask until lately.
But that seems to be changing in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests across the world: K pop fans flooded the Dallas Police Department’s iWatch Dallas app with fancams and took over the hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter on Twitter with anti-racist messages. BTS fans raised $1 million in just over a day for organizations that help black people.
American actor and writer Jordan Peele said he “hearts #kpopstans” in a tweet, professional wrestler John Cena praised BTS and its fans, and the media covered the news extensively.
According to Michelle Cho, a media scholar at the University of Toronto, K-pop fans are “diverse, socially progressive, social media-savvy.”
“I’ve attended KCON a few times now and when you look at who attends K-pop fan conventions, who posts reaction videos, who makes themselves visible in the fandom, you see, at least in North America, that these are predominantly people of color,” she said.
While K-pop is not seen as progressive at home, where it is part of mainstream commercial culture, Cho says that elsewhere -- in places like North America and Latin America -- it remains subcultural.
The emergence of self-driving vehicles is as par for disruptive technology - taking longer than expected. But progress is ongoing.
Self-driving bus services tested out in Tallinn
Two types of self-driving bus are being tested out in Estonia this week as part of initiatives that could revolutionise public transport in Europe.
One of the services in tech-savvy Estonia, which is often used as a testing ground for innovation, offers free rides around a park in the capital Tallinn.
The other is part of an EU-funded project and is ferrying people around Ulemiste City, a sprawling business campus near the city's main airport.
Dubbed "e-stonia", the EU member of 1.3 million people is known for being a trailblazer in technology, with Estonians having already helped pioneer the likes of Skype, Transferwise, e-voting and delivery robots.
This is a good signal of emerging concern that the world needs a new economic paradigm - including a re-imagining of our patent and copyright regulations and laws.
A Medical Device Maker Threatens iFixit Over Ventilator Repair Project
iFixit has built a comprehensive online database of repair manuals for ventilators and medical equipment to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. Last week it received a letter claiming copyright infringement.
A popular website with a comprehensive database of repair manuals for ventilators and other medical devices has received a letter from a medical equipment company saying that its copyrights are being infringed.
Kyle Wiens, CEO of the repair website iFixit—which posts guides on how to repair anything from sewing machines to video game consoles—shared the letter on Twitter Thursday, sent to him by counsel for Steris Corporation, which makes sterilization and other medical equipment.
“It has come to my attention that you have been reproducing certain installation and maintenance manuals relating to our products, documentation which is protected by copyright law,” the letter said. The letter then went on to tell Wiens to remove all Steris copyrighted material from the iFixit website within 10 days of the letter.
As Motherboard reported in March, major manufacturers of medical devices have long made it difficult for their devices to be repaired through third party repair professionals. Manufacturers have often lobbied against right to repair legislation and many medical devices are controlled by artificial “software locks” that allow only those with authorization to make modifications.
This is a great signal for progress in understanding individual health - plus debunking the myth that a single diet can bring health to everyone.
"Based on the metabolic response to the four different diets, we were able to create a model that can predict the healthiness of a person's diet," Professor Holmes said. "We tested the model in two different populations and compared the chemical profiles to dietary records. This model will provide a framework for developing precision nutrition programs aimed at healthy weight loss or maintenance."
"This is a real paradigm shift in personalized nutrition research—for the first time we have tools that can rapidly evaluate the diet-microbiome interactions that affect individual responses to complex diet patterns in the real wood."
Creating a new paradigm for understanding the individual effects of diet
Researchers at the Australian National Phenome Centre at Murdoch University and partners at Imperial College London have made a major breakthrough in understanding how individuals can have different reactions to the same diets.
For decades, nutritionists and scientists have been debating whether weight loss is down to sheer will power and healthiness of diet, or whether maintaining a healthy weight is down to your genes.
In an article released today in the Nature Food journal, researchers show that people react differently to being fed exactly the same diet over a four-day period and that their urine contains different patterns of chemicals suggesting that we each have a unique response to diet.
A great signal of the emerging power of augmented reality to assist in medical and potentially many other domains.
Study demonstrates feasibility of hologram technology in liver tumor ablation
Data from one of the first clinical uses of augmented reality guidance with electromagnetically tracked tools shows that the technology may help doctors quickly, safely, and accurately deliver targeted liver cancer treatments, according to a research abstract presented during a virtual session of the Society of Interventional Radiology's 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting on June 14. The technology provides a three-dimensional holographic view inside a patient's body, allowing interventional radiologists to accurately burn away tumors while navigating to avoid organs and other critical structures.
"Converting traditional two-dimensional imaging into three-dimensional holograms which we can then utilize for guidance using augmented reality helps us to better view a patient's internal structures as we navigate our way to the point of treatment," said Gaurav Gadodia, MD, lead author of the study and radiology resident at Cleveland Clinic. "While conventional imaging like ultrasound and CT is safe, effective, and remains the gold-standard of care, augmented reality potentially improves the visualization of the tumor and surrounding structures, increasing the speed of localization and improving the treating-physician's confidence."
Another strong signal of the transformation of medical technologies involving robotics, AI, nano and other approaches.
An artificial skin made with graphene could revolutionize robotic surgery
Computer and Robot Assisted Surgery is an area receiving broad attention worldwide because of its strong potential to advance new levels of healthcare. In Europe, the robotics and cognitive science communities have been independently pursuing research in this field, making significant, but fragmented contributions. Furthermore, strong surgical instrument manufacturers are now present in Europe.
Graphene's large surface area, high electrical conductivity, unique optical properties and high thermal conductivity make it ideal for sensors. Ultra-sensitive graphene-based sensors can also be smaller, lighter and less expensive than traditional sensors.
a graphene-enabled, force-sensitive film that is transparent and can be affixed to curved plastic. Making force-touch interfaces flexible will allow a new design paradigm for electronic devices. This technology can be used as an electronic skin, which would allow any surface to become responsive to its environment, for applications including robotic surgery.
For example, a surgeon may be able to directly translate his or her hand and finger movement into a robotic surgery tool, by wearing a glove that contains the sensor film. This would allow the robotic surgery tool to have the dexterity of a surgeon with years of experience and the extreme-precision of a robotic arm with finely tuned motors."
This is a promising signal of better, faster testing for cancer and perhaps many more diseases.
"While this may be several years away from clinical use, our research shows what is possible when we push such approaches to an extreme. It demonstrates that the levels of sensitivity we've come to accept in recent years in relation to testing for ctDNA can be dramatically improved. At present this is still experimental, but technology is advancing rapidly, and in the near future tests with such sensitivity could make a real difference to patients."
This new technique looks for hundreds and sometimes thousands of mutations in each blood sample, routinely achieving a sensitivity of one mutant molecule per 100,000, and under optimal conditions can reach a level measured in parts per million.
Blood test to monitor cancer up to 10 times more sensitive than current methods
A new method of analyzing cancer patients' blood for evidence of the disease could be up to ten times more sensitive than previous methods according to new research led by the University of Cambridge.
In the coming years, this method and others based on this approach could lead to tests that more accurately determine if a patient is likely to relapse after treatment and could pave the way for the development of pinprick home blood tests to monitor patients. The research, funded by Cancer Research UK, is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine
The technique uses personalized genetic testing of a patient's tumor to search blood samples for hundreds of different genetic mutations in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA); DNA released by cancer cells into the bloodstream.
Combined with new methods to analyze this data to remove background noise and enhance the signal, the team was able to reach a level of sensitivity that in some cases could find one mutant DNA molecule among a million pieces of DNA—approximately ten times more sensitive than previous methods.
This is a good signal of how the human effort to domesticate DNA is really one dimension of achieving what viruses may be capable of.
Viruses can steal our genetic code to create new human-virus genes
Like a scene out of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," a virus infects a host and converts it into a factory for making more copies of itself. Now researchers have shown that a large group of viruses, including the influenza viruses and other serious pathogens, steal genetic signals from their hosts to expand their own genomes.
This finding is presented in a study published online today and in print June 25 in Cell. The cross-disciplinary collaborative study was led by researchers at the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, and at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research in the UK.
The cross-disciplinary team of virologists looked at a large group of viruses known as segmented negative-strand RNA viruses (sNSVs), which include widespread and serious pathogens of humans, domesticated animals and plants, including the influenza viruses and Lassa virus (the cause of Lassa fever). They showed that, by stealing genetic signals from their hosts, viruses can produce a wealth of previously undetected proteins. The researchers labeled them as UFO (Upstream Frankenstein Open reading frame) proteins, as they are encoded by stitching together the host and viral sequences. There was no knowledge of the existence of these kinds of proteins prior to this study.
These UFO proteins can alter the course of viral infection and could be exploited for vaccine purposes.
A good signal of a new health-food product that should be appearing on the markets and in our food soon. Maybe even growing it as a more natural lawn?
Food-grade wheatgrass variety released for public use
Wheatgrass is packed with beneficial nutrients, which makes the crop a popular superfood. And now, more farmers will have access to growing this beneficial crop.
"The Land Institute has been breeding Intermediate wheatgrass since 2002," explains James Anderson, a professor at the University of Minnesota. "Developed using germplasm provided by The Land Institute in 2011, this variety of wheatgrass is the first to be available for public use."
"Because wheatgrass is a perennial, it's known to be a soil builder," said Anderson. "It provides soil cover throughout the year."
Wheatgrass also has deep, dense roots that capture nutrients before it gets into groundwater. This helps to protect groundwater-based water systems.
Other benefits of this new wheatgrass variety compared to other crops like corn and soybeans, are:
Less soil loss from the field;
Fewer chemicals and fertilizers entering the groundwater system; and
Improved carbon storage.
The harvested wheatgrass goes well with wheat-based products. It can be used as a replacement for wheat, but it is best used with it. By using both wheat and wheatgrass as ingredients, the product can maintain its baking and functional properties while offering new flavors.
The rate of progress in renewable energy continues to accelerate on many fronts - hydrogen energy has been on the near-horizon for over a decade - maybe another decade till it really arrives. This is a good signal of ongoing progress.
Low-cost solar-to-hydrogen cell achieves breakthrough 17.6% efficiency
Hydrogen's impressive energy density offers some compelling advantages that could see it make a huge difference in the electric aviation and eVTOL sectors, as well as in renewable energy, where it's a lightweight and transportable, if not particularly efficient, way to store clean energy that's not necessarily generated where or when you need it. It's also being pushed as a means of exporting green energy, and Japan and Korea in particular are investing heavily in the idea of a hydrogen energy economy powering everything from vehicles to homes and industry.
For this to come about in a globally positive way, it's imperative that clean, green hydrogen production becomes cheaper, because right now, the easiest and cheapest ways to get yourself a tank full of hydrogen are things like steam reforming, which produces up to 12 times as much carbon dioxide as it does hydrogen by weight.
Green, renewable production methods are thus hot topics for researchers and industry, and a new breakthrough from scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) could make a significant contribution.
It's a photoelectrochemical (PEC) solar-to-hydrogen (STH) cell – a cell that takes in solar energy and water, and directly outputs hydrogen instead of powering an external electrolysis system. In this case, it puts a cutting-edge perovskite photovoltaic cell in tandem with a photoelectrode, and it works better than any similar devices that have been built, using relatively inexpensive semiconductors.
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