Tag: science

Better than steroids

The glove seemed to nearly erase his muscle fatigue; after multiple rounds, cooling allowed him to do just as many pull-ups as he did the first time around. Then in the next 6 weeks he went from doing 180 pull-ups total to over 620, an unprecedented rate of physical performance improvement.

Sahara fertilizes the Amazon

The Amazon basin is one of the world’s wondrous ecosystems, supporting massive amounts of life, both in kind and quantity. You might have thought about poison frogs or monkeys, but you’ve probably never stopped to wonder, “Where are all the nutrients that power this biotic explosion coming from?”

The answer is actually astonishing and delightful in that one-planet-one-love kind of way. As laid out in a 2006 paper, nearly 50% of the nutrients that power the Amazon come from a valley in the Sahara called the Bodélé depression. The area is 0.5% the size of the Amazon basin it supplies.

Face Mites

Rosacea – a common skin disease characterized by red blotches on one’s face – may be caused by “tiny bugs closely related to spiders living in the pores of your face.” Tiny bugs that “crawl about your face in the dark”, lay eggs in your pores, and release a burst of faeces when they die.

Also, you are only 0.7% human in terms of dna, the rest is bacterial dna, and bacterial cells on and in your body outnumber human cells 10:1.

Synthesis optimization

The software combines long syntheses of compounds into shorter and more economical routes, and identifies suspicious chemical recipes that could lead to chemical weapons.

Their main trick seems to be to combine multiple steps into steps that can happen at once, what they call “one pot”.
2022-02-23: Nice analogy on the energy landscape for reactions, twisty pathways along the edges of steep ridges.

What would it take to have software that showed you the best synthesis for a given compound, though? Now that’s a dream that even I think is out of reach for us, at least for as far out into the future as I can imagine. And this paper illustrates why! Look at all the tiny variations that end up making a difference, and sometimes a big difference. If we could model or compute our way to the answers in such situations, believe me, we would do that rather than set up endless arrays of reactions just to see what happens. Everyone who’s done research-level synthetic organic chemistry has experienced this: you flip one chiral center in your molecule, or made a chain 1 carbon longer, you change the solvent from one ether to another, raise or lower the temperature a bit, switch a sodium salt for a potassium one, change a ligand on your palladium catalyst, whatever, and all sorts of craziness breaks loose. And it’s often not easy to see why things changed so much. Ex post facto you can sometimes come up with hypotheses, and use those to fix things up if you’re right. But there are plenty of throw-your-hands-up moments that just never get explained at all.

Organic chemistry wobbles and teeters across an energy landscape that (from the viewpoint of any given reaction) is full of huge hills, deep valleys, and twisty little pathways that are followed by walking along the edges of steep, crumbling ridges. But from a distance, all that topography is compressed into a pretty narrow thermodynamic range. The differences between a reaction working and not working, between it giving you mostly Product A, mostly Product B, mostly returned starting material, or mostly scorched pan drippings are energetically very small. All sorts of little changes can send things off in different directions, and these can be largely inside the error bars of our attempts to model them. Organic chemistry is indeed a mature science, but don’t confuse that with thinking that it’s a solved problem. If you just want the molecules, damn the cost, to answer other questions we can generally provide them. But if you want them made elegantly, you’ll need to take a seat – and you better have packed some lunch with you.

2D MoS2

researchers — who struggled for several years to build electronic circuits out of graphene with very limited results (except for radio-frequency applications) — have now succeeded in making a variety of electronic components from an amazing new material: a 2D version of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). the material could help usher in radically new products, from whole walls that glow to clothing with embedded electronics to glasses with built-in display screens. “It’s the most exciting time for electronics in the last 20 or 30 years. It’s opening up the door to a completely new domain of electronic materials and devices.”

in general, materials science remains under-appreciated as the source of much of our wealth and comfort, both current and future.

winning isn’t everything

Freeman Dyson and William Press announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner’s dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other.

That’s a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner’s Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more.

amazing contribution by freeman dyson (yes, he of the dyson spheres, not of the overpriced vacuum cleaners): tit for tat is not the only strategy in iterated prisoner’s dilemmas. i wonder what would have happened had we known this during the cold war.

Brain Preservation

The Brain Preservation Foundation announces a prize for the first team to demonstrate a technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable.

2012-12-07: Eternal Brain. This is fascinating. It doesn’t really matter that much whether we’ll be able to reconstruct a brain from a 3D scan, brain plastination seems a much more appealing memento mori than the alternatives. Would I want my dear friends in the ground vs a urn vs a pretty paper weight? Definitely the paper weight.

2013-08-02: The real postmortem.

In the near future, a neurologist and 2 homicide detectives use experimental brain taping technology to question a murder victim about his final moments.

2014-10-09: Brain death after heart death

The largest scientific study of “life after death” and near death experiences in cardiac arrest patients (who were resuscitated) suggests that some people may sustain several minutes of awareness after the heart stops. Conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to 3 minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.”

2020-01-07: 2.5 ka brain scans

It was just amazing to think that a brain of someone who had died so many 1000s of years ago could persist just in wet ground. the first organ to really deteriorate and to basically go to liquid is the brain because of its high fat content. Axel Petzold had spent years researching 2 types of filaments in the brain – neurofilaments and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) – which act like scaffolds to hold brain matter together. He found both of these were still present in the Heslington brain, suggesting they played a key role in keeping the brain matter together

Louder Music

Music is getting louder and less interesting. scientific proof that music has largely become boring.

Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners’ attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than 50 years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness.

Stagnation at the olympics

without breaking records, the olympics are utterly boring. we can now only hope for more oscar pistorius types to lead us into the future.

Many scientists have concluded from recent events that athletic performance is hitting a wall. Geoffroy Berthelot of INSEP, a sports research institute in Paris, looked at competitions from 1896 to 2007 and found that peak scores stopped improving in 64% of track and field events after 1993. Giuseppe Lippi of the University of Verona examined 9 Olympic sports from 1900 to 2007 and found similar results. “Improvement has substantially stopped or reached a plateau in several specialities,” he wrote. Berthelot has predicted that the “human species’ physiological frontiers will be reached” in most sports around 2027.