Tag: science

Deep Brain Stimulation

Electrical brain stimulation rouses people from deep coma sometimes and is bound to wreak havoc with ethics and braindead determinations. Terri Schiavo was nothing.

For someone left for dead 12 years ago, Candice Ivey seems to be doing pretty well. She’s still got her homecoming queen looks and A-student smarts. She has earned a college degree and holds a job as a recreational therapist in a retirement community. She has, however, lost her ballerina grace and now walks a bit like her feet are asleep. She slurs her words a little, too, which sometimes leads to trouble. “One time I got pulled over. The cop looked at me and said, ‘What have you been drinking?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘Get out here and walk the line.’ I was staggering all over the place. He said, ‘All right, blow into this.’ Of course I blew a 0, and he had to let me go.”

2008-09-15: Wireheads

Soon after insertion of the nVPL electrode, the patient noted that stimulation also produced erotic sensations. This pleasurable response was heightened by continuous stimulation at 75% maximal amplitude, frequently augmented by short bursts at maximal amplitude. Though sexual arousal was prominent, no orgasm occurred with these brief increases in stimulation intensity. Despite several episodes of paroxysmal atrial tachycardia and development of adverse behavioral and neurological symptoms during maximal stimulation, compulsive use of the stimulator developed. At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting personal hygiene and family commitments. A chronic ulceration developed at the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial and she frequently tampered with the device in an effort to increase the stimulation amplitude.

2013-06-25: Consider: brain computer interfaces. Without this, this poor guy would have a pretty miserable life.

2015-06-14: Neurophilic implants

But with our injectable electronics, it’s as if it’s not there at all. They are 1m times more flexible than any state-of-the-art flexible electronics and have subcellular feature sizes. They’re what I call ‘neurophilic’ — they actually like to interact with neurons.

2015-11-09: Self-experimentation

Last year, Kennedy, a 67-year-old neurologist and inventor, did something unprecedented in the annals of self-experimentation. He paid a surgeon in Central America $25K to implant electrodes into his brain in order to establish a connection between his motor cortex and a computer.

2016-05-14: Brainjacking

A group of neurosurgeons round up a set of dire, terrifying warnings about the way that neural implants are vulnerable to networked attacks. Most of the article turns on deep brain stimulation devices, which can be used to stimulate or suppress activity in different parts of the brain, already used to treat some forms of mental illness, chronic pain and other disorders. The researchers round up a whole dystopia’s worth of potential attacks on these implants, including tampering with the victim’s reward system “to exert substantial control over a patient’s behavior”; pain attacks that induce “severe pain in these patients”; and attacks on impulse control that could induce “Mania, hypersexuality, and pathological gambling.”

2021-07-06: Perhaps everyone could lead better lives with a bit of DBS.

Why is Deep Brain Stimulation so transformative – not just eliminating OCD symptoms, but increasing self-confidence and openness to the world? And how can we make sense of self-confidence in the context of electrically induced changes in the brain? It could be that changes in the brain and an increase in self-confidence are both needed to set the sick person right. Understanding the effects of DBS on the brain might therefore be only a part of the explanation of how DBS changes the person.

It is the whole person who responds to DBS, and not only the parts of their brain where the electrodes are implanted. DBS changes many aspects of how a person engages with the world. Their social interactions, tendency to reflect and ruminate, mood, interests and, more generally, their self-confidence in life. Even for those without a pathology, the experience of over- and under-confidence can be common throughout life. Think of going into an interview where your dream job is at stake. In this kind of situation, many might experience a lack of self-confidence. Overconfidence on the job, on the other hand, can lead to precipitous calculations and risks. Too much self-confidence can tip over into impulsive acts that appear pathological; too little self-confidence can lead to anxiety and lack of trust in oneself and the world.

Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community

We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes. These changes include allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new technologies will facilitate this transformation. 2 examples are self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information sharing websites known as Blogs.

The Thin Pill

“metabolic syndrome” is the new euphemism for being fat

That is the demographic ripple effect of metabolic syndrome. As the medical establishment reaches further down the causal chain to identify more risk factors and spot them earlier, and as it assigns names, definitions, and treatments to these diagnoses, more and more people are swept into the disease net. Add in our genetic biomarkers and it’s clear that disease won’t be something we can avoid anymore. It will be something we simply have, just as we have freckles or wear glasses. We will all carry our disease portfolios and will be identified through our ailments – or more precisely, our inclinations toward certain ailments. Metabolic syndrome is just the latest step on this path.

Working on a biochemistry problem

Rosetta@Home screen saver

It’s good to know my computer is actually just doing that, with near 100% efficiency, instead of being mostly idle. Plus, looking at the protein folds and wishing to be able to nudge the search algorithm closer to the lowest-energy state is quite mesmerizing. You also gotta admit that they do have a cool line for their advertising.
2023-08-09: A coda for BOINC

BOINC had some success. It enabled lots of science, and it got lots of people all over the world interested in science. Thanks to NSF, it paid my bills for 15 years, and it gave me freedom to do what I wanted, to travel, and to work with lots of great people. As a piece of software, BOINC is (mostly) beautiful, and I enjoyed designing and writing it.

But BOINC never fully achieved any aspect the vision I outlined earlier. There were moments when it seemed like it might: for example, the HTC and Suzuki projects, the Open Science Grid collaboration, the Anbince thing, and a dozen others. Each of these seemed, initially, like it might put BOINC “over the top”. But all the initiatives petered out, for reasons outside my control. The cycle of hope followed by disappointment, over and over, has worn me down.

Obesity

Riding on the metro in DC, I was informed that the 69M obese in the US are hype. I’m glad the food industry is looking out for me and even providing me with helpful cartoons.
2007-03-31: The obesity gas connection

US citizens are burning 3.7B liters of gas a year more than they did in 1960, because they are much heavier. That’s about $2.2B worth of fuel, and a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

2007-04-27: Congress promotes obesity through agricultural subsidies. Ever heard of HFCS?
2007-09-11: plus the reduction in burger and fries consumption would cause less brazilian forest to be burned, further reducing emissions.

$1 in real gasoline prices would reduce obesity in the US by 15% after 5 years.

2007-09-18: No comment necessary.

Many 5-passenger vehicles are rated 385 kg, maxing out if their 5 occupants weigh more than 77 kg each. 6 90 kg people would overload the 7-passenger Dodge Grand Caravan minivan.

2008-03-29: More fatties are found, unsurprisingly.

More than 50% of American adults considered to have normal body weight have high body fat percentages — greater than 20% for men and 30% for women — as well as heart and metabolic disturbances. The finding conflicts with the widely held belief that maintaining a normal weight automatically guards against disorders such as high levels of circulating blood fats and a tendency to develop metabolic syndrome, which often leads to type 2 diabetes.

2008-12-22: The war against fat people has begun.
2010-06-08: Fighting obesity with that other staple, security. brilliant!

27% of all Americans ages 17 to 24 are too overweight to join the military. Now, the group of retired military officers that prepared the report is asking Congress to pass a nutrition bill that would make school lunches healthier.

2011-03-25: Obesity deaths

Since 2001, premature death from obesity has exceeded death from malnutrition.

2015-07-27: a large part of the decline is due to people drinking fewer sodas.

Calories consumed daily by the typical American adult, which peaked around 2003, are in the midst of their first sustained decline since federal statistics began to track the subject, more than 40 years ago.

2015-08-11: There are few public health interventions as beneficial as destroying the soft drinks industry.

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, is backing a new “science-based” solution to the obesity crisis: To maintain a healthy weight, get more exercise and worry less about cutting calories.

The beverage giant has teamed up with influential scientists who are advancing this message in medical journals, at conferences and through social media. To help the scientists get the word out, Coke has provided financial and logistical support to a new nonprofit organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, which promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.

2016-03-23: soda taxes are very odd:

Why not just target the output, rather than some random subset of inputs? We could tax obesity if we wanted to. Or if we want to seem less punitive, we could award tax credits to obese people who lose weight. A tax directly pegged to reduced obesity would certainly be a much more efficient way to achieve the stated policy goal of reducing obesity. We are unwilling to humiliate the obese by taxing them directly, and so our chosen policies do less to help…the obese.

2016-12-31: Viral components of obesity?

During the experiment, both groups of chickens consumed the same amount of food. By the end of the experiment, only the chickens infected with the SMAM-1 virus had become fat. However, even though the infected chickens were fatter, they had lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels in their blood than the uninfected birds. “It was quite paradoxical,because if you have a fatter chicken, you would expect them to have greater cholesterol and circulating triglycerides, but instead those levels went in the wrong direction.” Though Dhurandhar and Atkinson have conducted several strong studies showing the contribution of Ad-36 to fatness, skepticism remains. “I remember giving a talk at a conference where I presented 15 different studies in which Ad-36 either caused or was correlated to fatness. At the end of it, a good friend said to me, ‘I just don’t believe it.’ He didn’t give a reason; he just didn’t believe it. People are really stuck on eating and exercise as the only contributors to fatness. But there is more to it.”

2018-08-16: Sugar is everywhere

Yes, we ate more in 1976, but differently. Today, we buy 50% as much fresh milk per person, but 5x more yoghurt, 3x more ice cream and – wait for it – 39x as many dairy desserts. We buy 50% as many eggs as in 1976, but a 33% more breakfast cereals and 2x the cereal snacks; 50% the total potatoes, but 3x the crisps. While our direct purchases of sugar have sharply declined, the sugar we consume in drinks and confectionery is likely to have rocketed (there are purchase numbers only from 1992, at which point they were rising rapidly. Perhaps, as we consumed just 9kcal a day in the form of drinks in 1976, no one thought the numbers were worth collecting.) In other words, the opportunities to load our food with sugar have boomed. As some experts have long proposed, this seems to be the issue.

2022-01-29: The energy balance theory is bogus

“People get fat because they take in more calories than they expend” is wrong. “Consider using the identical logic to describe, say, why people get wealthy. Economists would be embarrassed by a money-balance theory of wealth: People get rich because they take in more money than they spend. Clearly wealthy people did. We know that because they’re wealthy. The increase in wealth is the positive money balance. But this says nothing about how or why they accumulate such wealth. In obesity research, this tautological logic — saying the same thing in two different ways but offering no explanation for either — was allowed to become the central dogmatic truth.“ Then what does cause obesity? “People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.“

2022-08-14: Wegovy uses a hormone to regulate hunger. It’s wildly effective.

Once it becomes obese, the human body tends to push itself to rebound to its previous highest weight. Scientists don’t fully understand why, or how to stop it. Many speculate that our brains have not adjusted to living in a time of plenty. “There’s been a selection bias towards those people who could better protect body weight during times of famine. But now we don’t have a shortage of food.” When a patient stops taking Wegovy, their appetite returns within weeks and they pack on weight. Patients who came off the drug regained 7% of their body weight. “We used to think that behavior causes the weight state, but now we think the weight state actually causes the behavior”.

Digital Unroll

Multi-spectral imaging technology is bringing a hoard of texts from antiquity back to life. I wonder if the hoard contains a copy of the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, his missing treatise on comedy? Hopefully, it also contains ‘lesser works’ that would shed light on scenarios that were seriously considered by the relevant historical personalities, leading to possible alternative courses of history.

2013-12-19: Over 100 years ago, archaeologists discovered a 2 ka old trash dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, chock full of 1000s of ancient documents, and preserved by the desert and pure chance. From Wikipedia on Oxyrhynchus:

Because Egyptian society under the Greeks and Romans was governed bureaucratically, and because Oxyrhynchus was the capital of the 19th nome, the material at the Oxyrhynchus dumps included vast amounts of paper. Accounts, tax returns, census material, invoices, receipts, correspondence on administrative, military, religious, economic, and political matters, certificates and licenses of all kinds—all these were periodically cleaned out of government offices, put in wicker baskets, and dumped out in the desert. Private citizens added their own piles of unwanted paper. Because papyrus was expensive, paper was often reused: a document might have farm accounts on one side, and a student’s text of Homer on the other. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, therefore, contained a complete record of the life of the town, and of the civilizations and empires of which the town was a part.

In the century since they were uncovered, only a small fraction of the 1000 briefcase-sized storage boxes of papyrus fragments have been edited and published. There are ongoing efforts to speed this up using multispectral imaging, high resolution CT scanning, and transcription by crowdsourcing.

2013-12-23: Using CT imaging at the micron instead of a millimeter scale to virtually unroll a scroll and bring the libraries of Herculaneum back to life.

However, unraveling was still a problem so scientists kept searching for a mechanism by which to examine the scrolls while they remained closed.

A computer science professor from the University of Kentucky thought he had the answer. Working with 2 preserved Herculaneum scrolls, Brent Seales used micro-CT imaging techniques to attempt to “virtually unroll a scroll.” Micro-CT works at a higher resolution than regular CT scans, operating on the much-smaller micron scale instead of a millimeter scale. Experiments on similar objects seemed promising.

2015-11-17: X-ray phase-contrast tomography

Hundreds of papyrus rolls, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and belonging to the only library passed on from Antiquity, were discovered 260 years ago at Herculaneum. These carbonized papyri are extremely fragile and are inevitably damaged or destroyed in the process of trying to open them to read their contents. In recent years, new imaging techniques have been developed to read the texts without unwrapping the rolls. Until now, specialists have been unable to view the carbon-based ink of these papyri, even when they could penetrate the different layers of their spiral structure. Here for the first time, we show that X-ray phase-contrast tomography can reveal various letters hidden inside the precious papyri without unrolling them.

2022-03-09: Now combine this with ML to make sense of text fragments.

Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy—the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions—for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. Ithaca is designed to assist and expand the historian’s workflow. The architecture of Ithaca focuses on collaboration, decision support and interpretability. While Ithaca alone achieves 62% accuracy when restoring damaged texts, the use of Ithaca by historians improved their accuracy from 25% to 72%, confirming the synergistic effect of this research tool. Ithaca can attribute inscriptions to their original location with an accuracy of 71% and can date them to less than 30 years of their ground-truth ranges, redating key texts of Classical Athens and contributing to topical debates in ancient history. This research shows how models such as Ithaca can unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, transformationally impacting the way that we study and write about one of the most important periods in human history.

2023-04-04: What we might find at Herculaneum

There would have been a great deal else. Literature, history, science. Epistolaries, miscellanies, essays. Memoirs, novels, biographies. Satires. The work of orators and poets. Philosophy and mathematics. Scientific studies and technical manuals. Dictionaries and encyclopedias; and more. For example, a prominent Latin collector near to Rome is likely to have had the epistolaries (published letter collections) of Cicero. While we already have copies of those, finding editions scribed within decades of his death would still be of considerable use. More importantly, medieval Christians chose not to preserve almost all ancient literature; so there could be epistolaries from other authors here, famous and obscure. And even poets and orators and novelists, besides being priceless to recover just in respect to the history of art, would also have commented on various subjects of importance, such as popular religion and events.

Road to reality

i got to hear sir roger penrose talk about his new book the road to reality. (review)
penrose has this knack of dropping mind bombs with a couple short sentences (that is, if you know some physics). he spent some time (both in the book and the lecture) to comment on some of the theories du jour, from quantum gravity to superstrings.
i especially liked his objection to how thermalization is used to make the case for inflation. arguing with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, there is a 10^10^123 likelihood for the initial state of the universe (basically, it requires very very low entropy while singularities have very high entropy). yet inflation has happened, so what gives? surprisingly, this kind of reasoning hasn’t been used for inflationary cosmology…
i am sure there were lots of other references like that, but my physics were not nearly strong enough to understand what he talked about 🙂

origins of wrestling?

Gladiator combat had become a martial art by the beginning of the first millennium. To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives. “Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood. But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was spectator-oriented.”.

it would be interesting to pit the panem et circenses of those times against the ESPN of today. some starting points

Tutankhamun


what they don’t say in the amazing exhibit about old boy tut and his gold treasure: how he may have looked like.
2015-08-16:

this is Nefertiti’s tomb. Tutankhamun has been sleeping on the couch in his mother-in-law’s living room.

2022-02-14:

More than 170 pharaohs ruled across 30 dynasties for more than 3 ka; Tutankhamun ruled for only 10 years, starting at age 8. The King’s accomplishments, many of them undertaken by one of his advisers, who succeeded Tutankhamun as pharaoh, amounted to reversing his father’s cultural reforms: he restored Thebes (now Luxor) as the capital of the New Kingdom and returned to polytheism after Akhenaten had promoted the worship of Aten above all other gods. (Born Tutankhaten, he changed his name to reflect his renewed worship of Amun-Ra.) Before the discovery of his tomb, he was rarely mentioned in histories of Egypt. Today, many more people can recount his biography than that of Neferkare, thought to have reigned the longest of any pharaoh, for between 64 and 94 years, starting when he was 6; or that of Khufu, who was buried in the Great Pyramid of Giza; or even that of Ramses II, who is regarded as the most powerful of all the ancient rulers of Egypt. More children have worshipped Tutankhamun during the past 100 years than ever did in his lifetime; whatever his authority in the ancient world, he now rules over the kingdom populated by dinosaurs and pirates, horses and astronauts.