Brain Research Notes

We are generally poor at describing our mental state. Our friends generally do a better job on identifying if we are depressed. 25% of the world will develop a serious brain malfunction in their lifetime. If you spend 10-100 hours in an fMRI, we can read your thoughts. 40 Hz flickering LED light induces gamma oscillations in the brain. After 1 hour of exposure, she saw a 50% reduction in amyloid plaques in a Alzheimer’s rat model. Expansion microscopy is the opposite of normal microscopy. Instead of zooming in on the brain, you make the brain bigger with a polymer expansion similar to the gel found in super-absorbent diapers. Ed Boyden’s team can trigger brain activity at a targeted deep area with a pair of acoustic waves at close frequencies, like 2.00 and 2.01 Hz

Destroying psychology

interesting piece on the replication crisis in psychology, and what’s next.

Lindsay talks with psychologists all the time who aren’t eager to embrace the updated rules, and he understands why. “Our literature is packed with unreliable findings. And I can imagine if you hitched your whole wagon to a concept that doesn’t seem to be a real thing, that could be threatening.” Like Heathers, Nick Brown sometimes shakes his head at the reluctance among researchers to acknowledge what, to him, seems obvious. To continue to defend a system that’s churned out stacks upon stacks of hopelessly flawed papers, rather than to own up to the truth and try to fix it, seems pointless. “I don’t know whether they genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing or there’s a sort of doubt niggling at the back of their mind, but they don’t want to acknowledge it. Maybe the people who need to make those changes, in that deep, dark moment before they go to sleep, they think to themselves, ‘How are we going to get out of this?’”

The Rock will become President

Robin Sloan has a charming new short story that imagines how Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will become President, first by playing the role in an imaginary movie. Along the way, there are some poignant thoughts about the nature of our political imaginations, the role of new media like Instagram in shaping public perception, and the ways leadership can, spell-like, be brought into being. Can you imagine him on the debate stage? The way he’ll look alongside his opponents in the primary? A line of normal, rumpled humans, and then this towering figure. A political revolution: his suit will fit.

Wow

Owen Wilson likes saying “wow” in movies, people like pointing out that Owen Wilson likes saying “wow” in movies, and this is a collection of those moments.

SWF+UBD

Matt Bruenig has published an excellent proposal that the United States charter a large sovereign (“social”) wealth fund and use its profits to fund a universal basic dividend. the fund would have to grow to hold something like 64% of all assets, or 80% of US “net worth”, to finance a “full” UBI at a 4% per annum payout rate

Mesa Verde exodus

An estimated 25-30k people lived at Mesa Verde between 1225 and 1260, and then the population declined rapidly. For a long time, archaeologists had no idea what had become of them. But Pueblo tribes—in what is now New Mexico and Arizona—had, for generations, told stories about an exodus from Mesa Verde, and they claimed the previous inhabitants as their ancestors.

The First

What “The First” does share with “House of Cards” is a sense of outlining an institution. Its energy is procedural. But the show scarcely cares whether the talking points of the political lobbying, or the engineers’ urgent conversations about the return vehicle, or the astronauts’ gasping debates during training drills, amount to mumbo jumbo. The workplace dramatics exist partly as mere trials for inspirational figures to survive, partly as a spur to the sober soap-operatics that play out around kitchen islands and among taupe interiors. An ode to exploration undercut with a vague sense of elegy, “The First” offers escapism in its dream of gaining distant colonies, and introspection in its study of human limits.

88 OOM Dark Matter Search

physicist Davide D’Angelo and geomicrobiologist Jennifer Macalady travel to Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso to see one of the latest efforts to detect dark matter, the SABRE detector. As with the search for neutrinos, looking for dark matter needs to happen under conditions of “cosmic silence” — in this case, beneath a mountain in Italy. D’Angelo, who is a collaborator on the project, likens the search to “hunting ghosts”.

2020-11-24:

the search spans 10e-21 eV to 10e67 eV, 88 orders of magnitude. perhaps the broadest search ever? The lightest that dark matter could possibly be is about one-thousandth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the electron’s mass — which would result in a particle that’s like an extremely low-energy wave, with a wavelength the size of a small galaxy. Lighter (and therefore longer) entities would be too diffuse to explain why galaxies stick together. The heaviest is a black hole of 30 solar masses.