Month: December 2020

Rethinking designs

Some fun entrants:


Amsterdam’s Smart System of Underground Garbage Bins

Liquid-Filled Window Absorbs Heat During the Day, Releases It at Night
2021-11-05: A bit more on underground trash systems:

While the wave of waste tubes hasn’t materialized, Roosevelt Island’s experience gives us reason to believe that the concept is more than a pipe dream. After 45 years, the island’s waste system is still humming along. It breaks down only occasionally, when residents shove a toaster oven or a Christmas tree or some other oversized piece of trash down one of the cutes, according to chief engineer Al Digregorio. He says workers can usually clear those blockages out in a few hours.

Continuous blood tests

“A blood test is great, but it can’t tell you, for example, whether insulin or glucose levels are increasing or decreasing in a patient” The Real-time ELISA is essentially an entire lab within a chip with tiny pipes and valves no wider than a human hair. An intravenous needle directs blood from the patient into the device’s tiny circuits where ELISA is performed over and over.

Waterline Square Park

New York City’s newest public park is a nominee for Untapped New York’s Best of New York Awards. Waterline Square Park, which opened over the summer of 2020, was chosen along with other New York City parks that opened this year by our panel of urban experts in the category of Best New Park. You can see all of the nominees and vote for your favorites here! Located between Manhattan’s Midtown and Upper West Side, this riverfront park features a huge children’s playground, lush greenery and unique water features.

Immune System Arms Race

The challenge for the immune system is that mammals do not evolve as fast as viruses. How then, in the face of this disadvantage, can the immune system hope to keep pace with viral evolution? If a protein is fragile, even small changes can render it completely unable to do its job. TRIM5α is not fragile; most random mutations increased, rather than decreased, the protein’s ability to prevent viral infection. TRIM5α can readily gain antiviral activity and, once gained, does not lose it easily during subsequent mutation.

2022-12-02: And new infections can be filmed

The early stages of the virus–cell interaction have long evaded observation by existing microscopy methods due to the rapid diffusion of virions in the extracellular space and the large 3D cellular structures involved. We present an active-feedback single-particle tracking method with simultaneous volumetric imaging of the live cell environment called 3D-TrIm to address this knowledge gap. 3D-TrIm captures the extracellular phase of the infectious cycle in what we believe is unprecedented detail. We report previously unobserved phenomena in the early stages of the virus–cell interaction, including skimming contact events at the millisecond timescale, orders of magnitude change in diffusion coefficient upon binding and cylindrical and linear diffusion modes along cellular protrusions. We demonstrate how this method can move single-particle tracking from simple monolayer culture toward more tissue-like conditions by tracking single virions in tightly packed epithelial cells. This multiresolution method presents opportunities for capturing fast, 3D processes in biological systems.

Bucatini Shortage

Around World War II, Carl explained, the established noodle industry (henceforth referred to as Big Pasta) was “upset” by the introduction of Nissin’s ramen noodles into the country, which were “completely out of spec” with what the United States then recognized as noodles — specifically because the ramen was being sold for a lower price and with what Carl called “lower standards” of nutrition. “They were really pressed”. That’s when the “standards of identity” were created: Big Pasta made sure that all noodles had to meet certain specifications to be considered “enriched macaroni products” and sold in the United States. As time went on, it would seem, the petty beef spun out into a juicier beef, with the main agitators of Big Pasta turning on each other. Nearly 120 years after the Macaroni and Noodle Manufacturers’s inception, that beef finally came for De Cecco. Weeks after we were first in touch, Courtney replied to tell me that De Cecco’s products were “collected as routine surveillance of imported products,” but Carl had a more intriguing theory: “It sounds as if someone was not happy with De Cecco’s product coming in and looked at it and saw that it was out of spec”. The FDA doesn’t typically go around looking. They’ve got plenty of other things to do.”

another example of the FDA being completely useless, here in the service of protectionism.

Single cell learning

The question of whether single cells can learn led to much debate in the early 20th century. The view prevailed that they were capable of non-associative learning but not of associative learning, such as Pavlovian conditioning. Experiments indicating the contrary were considered either non-reproducible or subject to more acceptable interpretations. Recent developments suggest that the time is right to reconsider this consensus.

Finite and Infinite Games

The wisdom held in this brief book now informs most of what I do in life. Its key distinction–that there are 2 types of games, finite and infinite–resolves my uncertainties about what to do next. Easy: always choose infinite games. The message is appealing because it is deeply cybernetic, yet it’s also genuinely mystical. I get an “aha” every time I return to it.