Tag: science

Social solutions for addiction don’t work

there’s a solution to heroin addiction, but we can’t have it:

People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution.

an interesting, if overly optimistic a counterpoint, things are indeed getting less crazy.

Possible wormholes

This paper uses the Universal Rotation Curve (URC) dark matter model to obtain analogous results for the central parts of the halo. This result is an important complement to the earlier result, thereby confirming the possible existence of wormholes in most of the spiral galaxies.

that’d be a fun bit of mega scale engineering.

Direct Electron Transfer

“It shouldn’t be possible. Those things just keep growing on the electrode, and there’s no other source of energy there.” Growing on the electrode. It sounds incredible. “It is kind of like science fiction”. To a biologist, finding life that chugs along without a molecular energy source such as carbohydrates is about as unlikely as seeing passengers flying through the air without an airplane.

2016-06-22: Now with a mechanism

one of the most exciting possibilities is finding life-forms that might survive in extreme environments. Mars, for example, is iron-rich and has water flowing beneath its surface. If you have a system that can pick up electrons from iron and have some water, then you have all the ingredients for a conceivable metabolism. Perhaps a former mine 1600m underneath South Dakota won’t be the most surprising place that researchers find electron-eating life. The microbes’ apparent ability to ingest electrons — known as direct electron transfer — is particularly intriguing because it seems to defy the basic rules of biophysics. The fatty membranes that enclose cells act as an insulator, creating an electrically neutral zone once thought impossible for an electron to cross.

Lab-grown bacteria breakthrough

a more literate article about the recent progress in culturing the 99% of bacteria that don’t grow in lab conditions.

This idea of going after cryptic bacterial strains has been around for a long time, but getting it to work has been another thing entirely. This is the most solid example that I’m aware of, and I hope that it’s just the opening of a new platform for antibiotic drug discovery. The traditional search for natural product antibiotics has pretty well come to a shuddering halt over the years – no matter how much effort you put into increasingly exotic soil samples and the like, you keep finding the same things (if you find anything at all). Unculturable organisms are the new frontier, and the iChip is going to be nowhere near the last word in exploring it. And at the same time, you have outfits like Warp Drive Bio trying to get organisms to express unusual compounds that aren’t normally seen, so the hope is that there are a lot of useful things out there that that we have never heard of.