Monthly Archives: December 2005

Death Sucks On

Yesterday I got word that my good friend Maynard Blake had died. Maynard had a brain tumor removed several months ago and had had clear MRIs ever since — the cancer was not coming back. However, the recovery was just too much for him. In the end, it was a host of little infections culminating in pneumonia that took him down. For all the medical progress we’ve made, it is still all too common an occurrence that an operation is a complete success, except for losing the patient.

Maynard was just a great guy. A talented musician. A good husband and father. A good friend. He worked for the last few years counseling people with substance abuse problems, making a real difference in the lives of who knows how many people. He will be sorely missed.

As these things often happen, just shortly after learning about Maynard’s passing, I found this e-mail from reader Robert Vreugde:

Just read your essay at link

I attend what would probably be best described as a fundamentalist, bible believing church and generally share most of the beliefs of the people in the church. But I do not share the belief that death is a good thing, a time of “going home”, etc.

Exactly one year ago yesterday my father died after being wasted away in a hospital for six months. He was well educated with engineering degrees from Stanford and Cal Tech, hard working and very creative in a variety of fields. All that he was as man, all that he had learned and was still capable of doing – all that rotted away and was destroyed. As you say, death sucks.

Even the bible presents the idea that humans were not originally created to die. Supposedly our physical systems were designed to continue living on indefinitely.

Scientists may not be able to devise a means to halt aging BUT at the least, we ought to eventually fully understand what aging is.

I am glad that there are people like you who are raising the voice that it is time that we start treating death as a (potentially) curable disease and not just resigning ourselves to death as some sort of inevitable fate.

500 years ago humans dreamed of flying but had no idea of how. Only gods or angels were thought to have that ability.

Then perhaps 200 years ago people began to develop technologies that suggested that flight might be possible.

120 years ago people realized that flight was possible – all we had to do was refine the technology.

And then in Dec. 1903 powered flight was accomplished.

And now we fly all the time. We don’t think of ourselves as gods or angels or master race supermen.

We just fly.

Well said. Here’s looking forward to the day when we “just fly” — when we don’t just assume that we’ll be losing those we care about any day now, or that they’ll be losing us.

(For anyone who’s interested, the original version of Death Sucks can be found here.)

Are Bees the New Mice?

Not that long ago, it seemed that every other Speculist entry had something to do with some amazing mouse-related achievement. Mice were everywhere: helping with breakthrough cancer treatments, showing us how to grow new neurons, baffling scientists with their appetite hormones, and becoming more and more and more valuable as they live longer and longer.

But here lately, it’s all been about the bees. First they were solving puzzles, then they were finding land mines, and now in BoingBoing, we read this:

Scientists have demonstrated that honeybees can recognize human faces, sometimes for days. Adrian Dyer of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues trained the bees to associate photographs of particular human faces with a sugary treat. Later, five bees were able to pick out the right face from a group of others. The results of the study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology, may eventually aid the development of computer vision systems.

Stephen recently posted a speculation that the world’s first true artificial intelligence might be a modified, oversized rat brain. Possibly. But I wouldn’t rule out a highly modified swarm of bees.

bees.jpg

Better All The Time #26

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s='color:white'>Dispatches from a rapidly changing,
rapidly improving world
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#26 12/10/05

Welcome to the In Search of Good News edition of Better All the
Time. This time out, we thought we would do a little experiment. Rather than
cherry-picking a few good news stories from numerous sources around the Web –
which is our normal modus operandi — this time we decided to see what a
general web search for good news would yield. We went to the Yahoo! and Google
news sites and grabbed 50 news stories from each. No, we didn’t just grab the
top 50 news stories from each. It would be all too easy to do that and then
bemoan the lack of good news coverage.

Instead, we did a search for "good news" on both the href="http://news.search.yahoo.com/search/news?p=%22good%2Bnews%22&sm=Yahoo%21%2BSearch&fr=FP-tab-news-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8">Yahoo!
and href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&q=%22good%2Bnews%22&btnG=Search%2BNews">Google
news sites. Having cranked out 25 previous editions of Better All the Time, we
know that good news doesn’t come leaping off the page from a casual perusal of
the headlines. But what happens if you go to the news sites and say, "Hey,
how about a little good news, please?"

What follows is a mash-up of the top 100 results.

Yes, but is it controlled by a mouse?

Thomas DeMarse of the biomedical engineering department at the University of Florida has developed a “living computational device” from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat embryo.

Then he taught it to fly a jet fighter. The F-22 to be precise.

The 25,000 neurons were suspended in a specialized liquid to keep them alive and then laid across a grid of 60 electrodes in a small glass dish.

Under the microscope they looked at first like grains of sand, but soon the cells begin to connect to form what scientists are calling a “live computation device” (a brain). The electrodes measure and stimulate neural activity in the network, allowing researchers to study how the brain processes, transforms and stores information.

In the most striking experiment, the brain was linked to the jet simulator. Manipulated by the electrodes and a desktop computer, it was taught to control the flight path, even in mock hurricane-strength winds.

“When we first hooked them up, the plane ‘crashed’ all the time,” Dr DeMarse said. “But over time, the neural network slowly adapts as the brain learns to control the pitch and roll of the aircraft. After a while, it produces a nice straight and level trajectory.”

The article doesn’t say, but DeMarse must have found a way to reward the brain for flying straight (or punish it for crashing) using hormones like serotonin. Otherwise, why would this brain-in-a-dish prefer level flight to crashing?

The implications are profound. DeMarse’ first goal is to study brain function. Until this development, scientists were only able to study a few neurons in a petri dish. Now DeMarse can observe how these neurons work together to compute. Obviously this is important brain research, but it could also be very important computer research. It could also be important to researchers interested in learning how to get a brain to directly communicate with a computer.

Individual neurons are slow by comparison to transistors, but a brain is superior to a contemporary computer in many ways – pattern recognition, redundant fail proofing (the loss of a few neurons doesn’t lead to a crash), self-organizing, and after a crash (a stroke) it can rewire itself. This could lead us to develop computers that are more like a brain.

In the meantime it might lead to hybrids – computers with electronic and biological components.

It could also be another route to greater-than-human intelligence. If this brain-in-a-dish is possible, why couldn’t this, ultimately, be ramped up to a 20 pound brain? Such a brain would not be limited by a size that is practical to be carried around in a human skull. Nor would it have to be concerned with the “mundane” tasks of managing a body.

Medical Fab, Part 2

Last January it was reported that a group of researchers in the U.K. was busy trying to beat competitors in Japan and the United States in the “printing” of body tissue.

This week Wired reported on progress in the U.S.

Led by University of Missouri-Columbia biological physics professor Gabor Forgacs and aided by a $5 million National Science Foundation grant, researchers at three universities have developed bio-ink and bio-paper that could make so-called organ printing a reality.

So far, they’ve made tubes similar to human blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells, printed in three dimensions on a special printer.

There is some hesitation from the scientists involved to speculate how far this technology could go. But one participate offered this:

“I think this is going to be a biggie,” said Glenn D. Prestwich, the University of Utah professor who developed the bio-paper. “A lot of things are going to be a pain in the butt to print, but I think we can do livers and kidneys as well.”

Read the whole thing.

Extreme Bugs

Cool. Er, rather, downright cold, actually:

Methane-producing microbes have been discovered in two extreme environments on Earth – buried under kilometres of ice in Greenland and living in hot, dry desert soil. The findings lend weight to the idea that similar organisms may have lived on Mars.

Live microbes making methane were found in a glacial ice core sample retrieved from three kilometres under Greenland by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, US. It is the first time such archaea have been found at that depth, says Buford Price, one of the research team…

Scientists had already noticed that the concentrations of methane in the lowest 90 metres of the ice core was 10 times as high as that at other depths. Now the Berkeley scientists have found the likely cause – correspondingly higher levels of microbes that produce methane, known as methanogens.

These robust microbes in Greenland might tell us something about the unaccounted-for concentrations of methane found in the Martian atmosphere. There is no way for methane to persist in the atmosphere of Mars unless it is somehow being renewed. (And volcanoes have already been ruled out as a source.) Could hardy Martian microbes be lacing the atmosphere with methane the same way these microbes are stinking up the deep ice in Greenland?

Maybe.

And who knows? Maybe the two varieties of microbe are cousins.

Volcanoes on Saturn

Okay, actually they’re on one of Saturn’s moons:

The international Cassini spacecraft has found visual evidence that Saturn’s moon Enceladus is geologically active.

Enceladus now joins an exclusive club along with Jupiter’s Io and Neptune’s Triton, which were previously observed to be geologically active.

Carnival of Tomorrow #14

Carnival of Tomorrow #14 is up at “Blueprint for Financial Prosperity!”

Carnival of Tomorrow #15 will be hosted back here at The Speculist.

If you would like to contribute to the 15th carnival or host #16, please write:

mrstg87 {@ symbol} yahoo {dot} com

or

bowermaster {@ symbol} gmail {dot} com

UPDATE: Phil reminds me that #16 will be hosted by The Ministry of Minor Perfidy.

If you would like to host a future carnival, let us know early.

Landscape of Configuration Space?

I think this idea sounds a lot like this one. Here’s my favorite part:

String theory, according to Susskind, presents a compelling explanation of why the cosmological constant is so small, without invoking an intelligent designer. The answer lies in what Susskind calls “the Landscape,” which is the set of all possible universes that are compatible with string theory. The Landscape can be thought of as having various locations, corresponding to different values of the cosmological constant and other parameters. In Susskind’s estimate, the Landscape contains 10500 types of possible universes — a stupendously large number far bigger than a googol (which is 10100.)

10500 types of universes seems like a good start. But I wonder…how many do we get of each type?