Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
the revelation that the unseen underground world is just as complex, sophisticated and purposeful as the visible aboveground world we inhabit. Microbes are not simple, passive accessories to plants, but dynamic, powerful actors in their own right. Fungi can hoard nutrients, they can reward plants that are generous with their carbon reserves and punish ones that are stingy, and they can deftly move and trade resources to get the best “deal” for themselves in exchange.
fungi might not be just nutrient traders but also sophisticated information processors.
Soil’s Microbial Market Shows the Ruthless Side of Forests
What’s universal is danger, not fear. Because danger has to be important in the life of every human, no matter what culture they’re in, they’re going to have a system for understanding that within their culture. They’re going to have a word for it or some words for it. We have 36 words in our language for variations of fear and anxiety. So the experience that’s going to arise is going to be culturally determined and is going to be personally determined.
So what, then, is an emotion?
It’s a conscious awareness that something psychologically or biologically important is happening to you. Evolution gave us these behavioral responses to stimulus, but those are not yet emotions.
A good example of an exaptation is that feathers originally arose in bird-like reptiles for warmth, but then they were co-opted for flight in the wings.
How are emotions exaptations?
I see emotions as the result of other exaptations. One is language. We had certain kinds of communicative skills, and we put these together with other capacities, such as hierarchical relational reasoning, the ability to do mental time travel, to project yourself into the past and the future.
Human Emotions Are Personal Narratives
Every scientist is also a layperson, and brings everyday assumptions into the lab. We study psychological processes because we have psychological experiences, and want to know more about them. But in order to understand psychological experiences scientifically we have to go beyond mere intuitions and analogies and do research to uncover how things actually work.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once noted, “All the animals that have been carefully observed have behaved so as to confirm the philosophy in which the observer believed before his observations began.”
The Tricky Problem with Other Minds
This is an important signal speaking of the unprecedented change in the human age pyramid. This is a vital driver of new medical inventions, restorative and enhancement technologies and more. Other serious implications concern how we will educate and enable a smaller proportion of youth to become the scientists, engineers, professionals, and more that will be necessary for continued human adaptability.
Anti-ageing drugs are coming – an expert explains
There will be almost ten billion people living on Earth by 2050 and two billion of them will be over the age of 60.
Growing old is the primary risk factor for multiple chronic and life threatening conditions such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease. This burdensome morbidity is the most distressing aspect of old age – compromising individual independence and straining collective healthcare systems.
To help older people flourish, we must understand the biology of ageing at the tissue, cellular and molecular levels, and then turn that understanding into new preventative medicines. Indeed, it was recently suggested that an “anti-ageing pill” is just around the corner, enabling humans to live to 150 and regenerate organs by 2020 very cheaply. But how excited should we be about such claims? Let’s take a look at the evidence.
This is a good signal of the unprecedented shift in the human age pyramid - Boomers may continue to dominate consumer economies.
“At retirement communities these days, technology is no longer a selling point, it’s an expectation,” says Davis Park, executive director of the Center for Innovation and Wellbeing at Front Porch, a not-for-profit company that manages 12 retirement communities nationwide.
10,000 baby boomers turn 65 in the US every day – can Silicon Valley help with 'happier ageing'?
Companies are creating new devices and apps to mine seniors’ golden years and address the challenges of growing older
Now comes technology’s final frontier: old age. Tech that’s specifically designed for seniors is a growing market, fueled by inexorable demographic trends – about 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day.
Senior tech is increasingly showing up in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. A company called It’s Never Too Late proffers a massive 70in high-definition touchscreen computer that provides older people with little prior tech experience easy access to everything from travel videos and music playlists to a library of college lectures. Paro, a robotic seal stuffed with sensors and actuators that react to voice, light and touch, is being used to help those experiencing memory loss and social withdrawal. A movie system called 3Scape provides immersive 3D filmed content for the elderly and mobility-challenged in order to stimulate cognitive function and relieve depression and anxiety.
This shouldn’t be real news - but it is interesting how much more diverse the genetic base of humans are. The next decades will bring a lot more knowledge to the mosaic that we are.
Humans have been continuously evolving through the mixing of varied populations for hundreds of thousands of years. (In fact, Scally posits that our species did not originally evolve from a single population in Africa, but rather from many interconnected populations spread out across the continent.)
Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins
Modern humans and more ancient hominins interbred many times throughout Eurasia and Africa, and the genetic flow went both ways.
Humans today are mosaics, our genomes rich tapestries of interwoven ancestries. With every fossil discovered, with every DNA analysis performed, the story gets more complex: We, the sole survivors of the genus Homo, harbor genetic fragments from other closely related but long-extinct lineages. Modern humans are the products of a sprawling history of shifts and dispersals, separations and reunions — a history characterized by far more diversity, movement and mixture than seemed imaginable a mere decade ago.
But it’s one thing to say that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of modern Europeans, or that the recently discovered Denisovans interbred with some older mystery group, or that they all interbred with each other. It’s another to provide concrete details about when and where those couplings occurred. “We’ve got this picture where these events are happening all over the place,” said Aylwyn Scally, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge. “But it’s very hard for us to pin down any particular single event and say, yeah, we’re really confident that that one happened — unless we have ancient DNA.”
This is an important signal that shouldn’t be a surprise - but will increase the research into biosynthetics for all manner of uses.
Part of the appeal of ditching greenhouses for bioreactors boils down to cost. Currently, 1 kilogram of high-quality CBD extracted from plants sells for a wholesale price of more than $5,000. A deal in 2018 between Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic-biology company in Boston, Massachusetts, and Cronos Group, a Toronto-based cannabis producer, outlines a plan to manufacture pure CBD and other cannabinoids for less than $1,000 per kg in yeast.
“People are so focused on the big two — THC and CBD — that we’re sort of forgetting that there are potentially other really useful compounds in the plant,” says Tony Farina, chief scientific officer at synthetic biology company Librede in Carlsbad, California. “That’s the direction for which we should really be using this biosynthesis platform.”
The bioengineering of cannabis
Genetic modification could enable industrial-scale production of cannabinoids that have pharmaceutical potential.
Cannabis is the only plant known to produce tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), but it remains an imperfect vessel for producing the chemical on an industrial scale. The psychoactive substance is normally found only in small outgrowths from the plant known as trichomes, which means that its stalk, stems and leaves are wasted biomass.
Genetic engineering could provide more efficient alternatives. Some researchers and biotechnology companies are aspiring to replace cannabis plants with microorganisms that have been genetically enhanced to spit out THC, the non–psychoactive compound cannabidiol (CBD) and myriad other cannabinoids of pharmaceutical interest. Others are aiming to modify chemical synthesis in the cannabis plant by genetically altering its cells to make the desired molecules from shoot to tip, thereby boosting yield.
Either way, the goal is the same: to produce cannabinoids more cheaply, efficiently and reliably than by conventional plant cultivation in greenhouses or farmers’ fields. Further benefits of microbial synthesis include the ability to mass-produce rare cannabinoids that are usually present in plants in only trace amounts — or even molecules not found in nature. Transgenic plants can also be engineered for superior resistance to pests and environmental stresses.
Commercial interest in these strategies is picking up. In 2018, for example, Canopy Growth Corporation in Smiths Falls, Canada — the largest legal cannabis company in the world — paid more than US$300 million in cash and shares to acquire Ebbu, a small company in Evergreen, Colorado, that had developed one of the earliest platforms for manipulating the cannabis genome with the gene-editing system CRISPR–Cas9. And in April, Zenabis, a cannabis producer based in Vancouver, Canada, agreed to purchase 36 tonnes of almost-pure, bacterial-made CBD from medical-cannabis company Farmako in Frankfurt, Germany — the first deal of its kind for biosynthetic cannabinoids.
This is an amazing signal of the progress being made via the domestication of DNA.
Woman is first to receive cornea made from ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells
The Japanese woman’s vision has improved since the transplant, say her doctors.
A Japanese woman in her forties has become the first person in the world to have her cornea repaired using reprogrammed stem cells.
At a press conference on 29 August, ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida from Osaka University, Japan, said the woman has a disease in which the stem cells that repair the cornea, a transparent layer that covers and protects the eye, are lost. The condition makes vision blurry and can lead to blindness.
To treat the woman, Nishida says his team created sheets of corneal cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are made by reprogramming adult skin cells from a donor into an embryonic-like state from which they can transform into other cell types, such as corneal cells.
Japan has been ahead of the curve in approving the clinical use of iPS cells, which were discovered by stem-cell biologist Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, who won a Nobel prize for the work. Japanese physicians have also used iPS cells to treat spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s disease and another eye disease.
This signals progress in our understanding of the importance and impact of our microbial ecology.
A comprehensive catalogue of human digestive tract bacteria
The human digestive tract is home to thousands of different strains of bacteria. Many of these are beneficial, while others contribute to health problems such as inflammatory bowel disease. Researchers from MIT and the Broad Institute have now isolated and preserved samples of nearly 8,000 of these strains, while also clarifying their genetic and metabolic context.
This data set (BIO-ML), which is available to other researchers who want to use it, should help to shed light on the dynamics of microbial populations in the human gut and may help scientists develop new treatments for a variety of diseases, says Eric Alm, director of MIT's Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics and a professor of biological engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.
Humans have trillions of bacterial cells in their digestive tracts, and while scientists believe that these populations change and evolve over time, there has been little opportunity to observe this. Through the OpenBiome organization, which collects stool samples for research and therapeutic purposes, Alm and his colleagues at MIT and the Broad Institute had access to fecal samples from about 90 people.
A stronger signalling of the role of AI in accelerating human efforts to research and innovate - transformation of science.
An AI system identified a potential new drug in just 46 days
The approach is based on two popular AI techniques: generative adversarial networks and reinforcement learning.
A team from AI pharma startup Insilico Medicine, working with researchers at the University of Toronto, took 21 days to create 30,000 designs for molecules that target a protein linked with fibrosis (tissue scarring). They synthesized six of these molecules in the lab and then tested two in cells; the most promising one was tested in mice. The researchers concluded it was potent against the protein and showed “drug-like” qualities. All in all, the process took just 46 days. The research was published in Nature Biotechnology this week.
The system examines previous research and patents for molecules known to work against the drug target, prioritizing new structures that could be synthesized in the lab. It’s similar to what a human chemist might do to seek new therapies—just much faster.
Getting a new drug to market is hugely costly and time consuming: it can take 10 years and cost as much as $2.6 billion, with the vast majority of candidates failing at the testing stage, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. No wonder, then, that there’s so much work under way on using AI to expedite the process. DeepMind is among the companies exploring pharmaceutical research as a potential avenue for its algorithms.
This is an interesting signal of the potential for AI to enable Avatar’s (robotic or virtual) to provide counselling and inspiration for spiritual, emotional, psychological assistance.
Developed at a cost of almost US$1 million (S$1.38 million) in a joint project between the Zen temple and renowned robotics professor Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University, the humanoid - called Mindar - teaches about compassion and of the dangers of desire, anger and ego.
Buddhist temple in Japan puts faith in robot priest
A 400-year-old temple in Japan is attempting to hot-wire interest in Buddhism with a robotic priest that it believes will change the face of the religion despite critics comparing the android to "Frankenstein's monster".
The android Kannon, based on the Buddhist deity of mercy, preaches sermons at Kodaiji temple in Kyoto, and its human colleagues predict that with artificial intelligence (AI), it could one day acquire unlimited wisdom.
"This robot will never die, it will just keep updating itself and evolving," priest Tensho Goto told Agence France-Presse.
"That's the beauty of a robot. It can store knowledge forever and limitlessly. With AI, we hope it will grow in wisdom to help people overcome even the most difficult troubles. It's changing Buddhism," added Mr Goto.
The adult-sized robot was put into service earlier this year and is able to move its torso, arms and head. But only its hands, face and shoulders are covered in silicone to replicate human skin.
From smart toilets to virtual assistants
No area of life is safe from being disrupted by technology, not even the bathroom. The TrueLoo “smart toilet” optically scans and analyzes the contents of a toilet bowl to detect signs of dehydration, viruses and urinary tract infections. The TrueLoo is currently being tested at several northern California senior living communities and has secured a round of venture capital funding before it even hits the market.
I’m sure the porn industry has already reversed engineered this app or is in the process. A whole new Hollywood industry could arise everyone could actually be on the big screen - mass customized viewer cuts … So much more.
Chinese deepfake app Zao sparks privacy row after going viral
Critics say face-swap app could spread misinformation on a massive scale
A Chinese app that lets users convincingly swap their faces with film or TV characters has rapidly become one of the country’s most downloaded apps, triggering a privacy row.
Released on Friday, the Zao app went viral as Chinese users seized on the chance to see themselves act out scenes from well-known movies using deepfake technology, which has already prompted concerns elsewhere over potential misuse.
Users provide a series of selfies in which they blink, move their mouths and make facial expressions, which the app uses to realistically morph the person’s animated likeness on to movies, TV shows or other content.
Now here is another medical bot signaling new medical procedures for a range of problems - and who knows what affordances others will find to put it to even other weird uses. The 3 min video and other graphics provide clear visuals for understanding.
MIT Researchers Designed this Robotic Worm to Burrow Into Human Brains
Robotics engineers at MIT have built a threadlike robot worm that can be magnetically steered to deftly navigate the extremely narrow and winding arterial pathways of the human brain. One day it could be used to quickly clear blockages and clots that contribute to strokes and aneurysms, while at the same time making the current state of robotic evolution even more unsettling.
Strokes are a leading cause of death and disability in the United States, but relieving blood vessel blockages within the first 90 minutes of treatment has been found to dramatically increase survival rates of patients. The process is a complicated one, however, requiring skilled surgeons to manually guide a thin wire through a patient’s arteries up into a damaged brain vessel followed by a catheter that can deliver treatments or simply retrieve a clot. Not only is there the potential for these wires to damage vessel linings as they inch through the body, but during the process, surgeons are exposed to excess radiation from a fluoroscope which guides them by generating x-ray images in real-time. There’s a lot of room for improvement.
This article is a little old - but it does signal positive news of human action that could help mitigate Climate Change.
Human Activity in China and India Dominates the Greening of Earth, NASA Study Shows
The world is literally a greener place than it was 20 years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for much of this new foliage: China and India. A new study shows that the two emerging countries with the world’s biggest populations are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.
The greening phenomenon was first detected using satellite data in the mid-1990s by Ranga Myneni of Boston University and colleagues, but they did not know whether human activity was one of its chief, direct causes. This new insight was made possible by a nearly 20-year-long data record from a NASA instrument orbiting the Earth on two satellites. It’s called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, and its high-resolution data provides very accurate information, helping researchers work out details of what’s happening with Earth’s vegetation, down to the level of 500 meters, or about 1,600 feet, on the ground.
Taken all together, the greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year, compared to the early 2000s – a 5% increase.
This is a good discussion of the inevitable problem of presenting ‘real’ facts that include the inherent uncertainties in all science research results.
How to Get Better at Embracing Unknowns
Interpreting uncertainty through data visualizations
When tracking a hurricane, forecasters often show a map depicting a “cone of uncertainty.” It starts as a point—the hurricane's current position—and widens into a swath of territory the storm might cross in the upcoming days. The most likely path is along the centerline of the cone, with the probability falling off toward the edges. The problem: many people misinterpret the cone as the size of the future storm.
Researchers have found that the misunderstanding can be prevented if forecasters instead show a number of possible paths. Yet this approach can also introduce misunderstanding: lots of people think the probability of damage is greater where each path intersects land and less likely between the lines (maps).
I have often proposed that optimism is the most pragmatic orientation human can take. Who would have kids, take on a mortgage, engage in years long studies to commit to an occupation - unless they were optimistic. This is some small confirmation of other benefits of optimism.
"Resilience is our ability to bounce back, to recover," she says. "And what this study shows is that optimism actually plays a very big role in our ability to bounce — even if we experience setbacks."
Optimists For The Win: Finding The Bright Side Might Help You Live Longer
Good news for the cheery: A Boston study published this month suggests people who tend to be optimistic are likelier than others to live to be 85 years old or more.
That finding was independent of other factors thought to influence life's length — such as "socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors," the researchers from Boston University School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health say. Their work appears in a recent issue of the science journal PNAS.
Researchers already knew from previous work that optimistic individuals tend to have a reduced risk of depression, heart disease and other chronic diseases. But might optimism also be linked to exceptional longevity? Lee looked at medical records from two long term research studies — one involving female nurses and the other involving men, mostly veterans.
The study included 69,744 women and 1,429 men. Both groups completed survey measures to assess their level of optimism, as well as their overall health and health habits such as diet, smoking and alcohol use. In the survey, study participants were asked if they agreed with statements such as "in uncertain times I usually expect the best" or "I usually expect to succeed in things that I do."
Health outcomes from women in the study were tracked for 10 years, while the men's health was followed for 30 years. Researchers found that the most optimistic men and women demonstrated, on average, an 11-15% longer lifespan, and had far greater odds of reaching 85 years old, compared to the least optimistic group.
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