Tag: science

Somatic mutations

If somatic mutations are common in healthy bodies, then biomedical researchers can no longer assume that DNA aberrations point toward the causes of disease. Doctors won’t be able to trust that the DNA found in a blood or saliva sample actually reflects the gene sequences in the heart or the liver. Should somatic variation turn out to be not just common but also good for you, it will undermine the longstanding presumption that the healthiest genome gets replicated with perfect fidelity. The most highly functional bodies may be the ones that permit a little mutation, that encourage a certain amount of genetic wildness and disorder within

not only are you 90% bacterial, but the human parts of you can’t get their shit together.

within our bodies our cells are not all created equal at the genomic level. In other words, we are mosaics.

Viruses most ancient life?

these viruses “represent a form of life that either predated or coexisted with the most recent organism from which all other organisms on Earth are descended. If giant viruses are as old as Caetano-Anolles’ calculated, the implications are staggering. It means that a giant virus or one of its ancestors existed before other types of life and may have played a major role in shaping life as we know it. This could mean that viruses are one of the dominant evolutionary forces on this planet and that each organism has a deep, viral past.

2021-09-01: See also Giruses, giant viruses, which may have been there since the beginning.

Suffering in fundamental physics?

a really fun paper, mind expandingly strange:

This essay explores the speculative possibility that fundamental physical operations — atomic movements, electron orbits, photon collisions, etc. — could collectively deserve significant moral weight. While I’m personally doubtful about this, I suggest reasons to keep an open mind on the topic. In practice I might adopt a kind of moral-pluralism approach in which I maintain some concern for animal-like beings even if numerically, simple physics-based suffering dominates. I also explore whether, if the multiverse does contain enormous amounts of suffering from fundamental physical operations, there are ways we can change how much of it occurs and what distribution of “experiences” it entails. An argument based on vacuum fluctuations during the eternal lifetime of the universe suggests that if we give fundamental physics any nonzero weight, then almost all of our expected impact may come through how intelligence might transform fundamental physics to reduce the amount of suffering it contains.

Predicting mutations

soon it may even be possible to make evolutionary forecasts. Scientists may not be able to predict what life will be like 100 million years from now, but they may be able to make short-term forecasts for the next few months or years. And if they’re making predictions about viruses or other health threats, they might be able to save some lives in the process.

a procedure to predict influenza mutations every year with 90% precision, helping to produce the right vaccines for that season.

We can analyze any mutation, even those that haven’t been identified yet. This allows researchers to predict whether a novel mutation is likely to be dangerous or harmless — in essence, performing a screening test

and another one

10 years of work at Johns Hopkins has yielded a computer program that predicts, with far more accuracy than current methods, which mutations are likely to have the largest effect on the activity of the “dimmer switches” (which alter the cell’s gene activity) in DNA — suggesting new targets for diagnosis and treatment of many diseases.

The god effect

To intensify the ‘god effect’ in people already attracted to religious ideas, all we had to do was boost the activity of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. But should dopamine spike too high, murderous impulses like terrorism and jihad could rear up instead. The neurological line between the saint and the savage turns out to be razor-thin.

Gain of Function Research

i’m not one for moral panics, but this pathogen research is troubling:

The scientific benefit of making viruses more pathogenic is debatable: research tends to use old strains (may not be applicable to our current situation), there is a bias towards more spectacular and lethal virulence because it gets published and funded, there is no reason to think evolution will move in the same way (it is highly contingent, and hence what is learned may not help make vaccines or drugs), and the key experiment (doing it with humans) is unethical, and hence unfalsifiable. The ethics is also really problematic, since the rate of lab releases is not negligible and a flu outbreak can easily kill people – it has a skew distribution with a heavy tail.

The longevity gap

this has been called species bifurcation elsewhere.

After 1 week, tissue from older mice resembled that of 6-month-old mice. This would be like a 60-year-old converting to a 20-year-old before our eyes, combining the maturity and wisdom of age with the vitality of youth. Researchers hope to launch human trials soon.

and it ends in what is essentially a call for basic income.

Fossilized ideas

The recurrence of ideas over the course of history is something that Jung or Pauli would have attributed to archetypes in the collective unconscious. An alternative would be the finiteness of human imagination, and susceptibility to cultural influence. While scientific theories can become increasingly technical and abstract, the brains that struggle to interpret their meaning haven’t evolved much in the past 50 ka. If our own brain is a kind of living fossil, it’s hardly surprising that so much of what we do with it is metaphorically fossilised too.