A Real Bird's Eye View

Technology marches on with fancy new airborne platforms for fancy camera shots...

The Future Has Arrived

Here's a bit from the BBC with a wonderful story about new technology:

Scientists have succeeded in forming a "feedback loop" between a computer and a common yeast to precisely control the switching on and off of specific genes.

The computer controlled flashes of light to start and stop this gene expression, "learning" how to reach and maintain a set value.

The groundbreaking approach could find use in future efforts to control biological processes, such as the production of biofuel from microbes.

It appears in Nature Biotechnology.

The approach is a comparatively simple means to take control of fantastically complex biochemical processes to achieve a desired result.

"The neat thing about this is that there are many people who have tried to do things like this by, for example, coding in the cell itself a synthetic circuit, putting genes and mechanisms in the cell," said senior author John Lygeros, of the Automatic Control Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

"That's had limited success up to now."

...

"It's quite difficult to engineer synthetic circuits that do something robustly in the cell, and the hope is that by augmenting this with external signals, you can get them to behave better," he said.

"That for example may have applications in biofuel production, or antibiotic production, where they use genetically engineered organisms to increase the yields of reactions."

Go read the whole article to get all the details.

This is a big step into "the future". I can foresee all kinds of new production and processing done using biological techniques. Chemists must be licking their chops with visions of gearing up to produce all kinds of hard-to-make molecules.

This is a huge step into the nano world with a wonderful new control technique. This isn't the grey goo doomsday scare story that the anti-technologists love to trot out. This is a technique that gives very precise control at human scale to nano processing.

Cephalopod Tricks

I love the ability of cephalopods to do camouflage as well as mesmerize predators and prey. My favourite is the cuttlefish.

Here's a scientist explaining an octopus:



Go read the original post and/or watch the bigger video.

Future Manufacturing and Construction

Here is a talk by MIT researcher Skylar Tibbits on self-assembling constructions:



It is an interesting concept and does appear to be the right direction for the future, but it is utterly obvious that this is decades from anything usable in the real world.

Putting Photography Skills to Work

Here's a fun Rube Goldberg device based on the theme of photography:



From the makers of the video:

http://2dphotography.ca/blog/2011/07/rube-goldberg/ - This is our Photography-themed Rube Goldberg Machine. We hope you all enjoy the clip!

Watch our video explaining some of the process of getting this video done here: http://youtu.be/qfrmTN0Ly94

You can watch the teasers we put out in the months leading up to our Rube Goldberg Machine here:
Teaser #1: http://youtu.be/1Z-yvoslbn4
Teaser #2: http://youtu.be/M-4qPNObTcI

Special thanks to everyone who helped make this video possible!! Check out the blog post above for more information.

How the Natural World Really Works

Everybody "just knows" that what is natural is better than the artificial man-made stuff. Everybody "knows" that before Western society brought their brutal colonizing ways to the rest of the world, the primitives and other cultures lived in a natural harmony because nature is good and kind. Like the Bible says: in the natural world the lion lies down with the lamb.

But scientists didn't get the memo. They go out and look at the "natural" world and bring back some real horror stories. Here's a blog post by Robert Lamb on Tor.com that helps dissolve the illusion that "natural is better, natural is good, natural is beautiful"...

To quote esteemed mad scientist Seth Brundle, “Insects don’t have politics.” Theirs is a world of intricate brutality and wasps have been excelling in it for more than a hundred million years.

This latest example comes to us in this paper from France’s CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange) and it concerns a wasp that not only hatches from its egg inside the belly of a ladybug, but upon emerging forces its eviscerated host to guard its cocoon while it transitions from larva to full-grown horror wasp.

Dinocampus coccinellae is its name and one can only imagine that Zombie author Joyce Carol Oates keeps a few of them as pets.

To recap, parasitism runs big in the wasp world. As I explain in How Wasps Work, the ancient wasps of the Cretaceous period were predatory and carnivorous. They ate arachnids and other insects and they LOVED it. But then the rise of the angiosperms introduced an even better food source: nectar and pollen. So the wasps of old largely abandoned their flesh-eating ways, except for the carnivorous feasts required by their squirming young. Some wasps abandoned this practice all together (and became bees), but you’ll still find countless varieties of wasps that either deposit their eggs inside a living host (that’s what the stinger evolved for) or who fill larval chambers in their nest with stunned meals.

So the fact that that Dinocampus coccinellae hatches inside the belly of a host bug following some makeshift, catastrophic surgery by its parent is nothing out of the ordinary. But when it celebrates its Chest-Burst Mitzvah, that’s when it gets all weird and noteworthy. Normally, the host organism mercifully dies at this point, but DC’s ladybug is not so lucky. Not only does it live, but a little behavior modification forces it to hang around and “guard” its parasite-baby as it grows into adulthood beneath its protective bulk. Scientists believe that secretions left by the larva when it bursts out might play a role in reprograming the host.

But then the ladybug dies right? Surely once the wasp reaches adulthood, our long-suffering host can at last rest in peace. No such luck. This is the insect world, after all. The researchers found that 25 percent of the manipulated ladybugs recovered normal behavior following their ordeal.

I’m really hoping this makes it into the next PIXAR A Bug’s Life movie.

I get a chuckle out of people who believe that "natural" cures are better than scientifically developed drugs. They are so deluded. But the joke is on me. This kind of anti-science and looney thinking is spreading. A hundred and fifty years ago you could have destroyed science and the world would have trudged on to miserable future compared to what we live in, but it would have struggled on without a mass die off. But if you removed science today, something like 80% of the population would die within a few years. We can't feed or clothe ourselves without modern science. Despite this, a rising majority shun science and hold tight to a warm-and-fuzzy lie that "natural is best".

People buy "organic" groceries not realizing that (1) everything is "organic" unless you redefine it from its original meaning of "from organisms" and (2) all plants are loaded with poisons to try to protect themselves from grazers and modern chemicals are really just more of the same (sure some of them are really bad for you, but that's why we have government and regulations to protect us from bad stuff like that).

Nothing is more "natural" than to be parasitized (or at least co-habited by other organisms). Right now I'm host to 100 trillion bacteria and only 10 trillion human cells. I'm ten times more bacteria than I am "human". Bacteria are only one of a range of "natural" organisms that live in and on me. This includes fungi and arachnea. This is the human microbiome.

Surviving Rabies

This video has an incredible tale of surviving rabies...

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


This was a disease with a 0% survival rate. But according to Wikipedia, the above protocol for treatment now means:

In 2005, the first patient was treated with the Milwaukee protocol, and Jeanna Giese became the first person ever recorded to survive rabies without receiving successful post-exposure prophylaxis. An intention to treat analysis has since found that this protocol has a survival rate of about 8%.

There is more detail in Wikipedia about the use of this "Milwaukee Protocol":

Giese's treatment regimen has since undergone revision (the second version omits the use of ribavirin). There were 2 survivors out of 25 patients treated under the first protocol. A further 10 patients have been treated under the revised protocol and there have been a further 2 survivors.

In June 2011, yet another young child survived infection with rabies without the benefit of treatment. An eight year old girl named Precious Reynolds, of Willow Creek, Calif., contracted the disease sometime in April 2011, but she did not receive medical care till mid May, after her grandmother took her to the doctor because of flulike symptoms that grew so serious her grandmother said they began to resemble polio. The hospital said doctors followed the protocol first established with Giese. Precious was placed in a drug-induced coma as she received anti-viral medications. She spent two weeks in intensive care undergoing the treatments, and immediately showed that her immune system was strong. She was then moved to the hospital's general pediatric unit.

Only two other people have survived documented rabies in the United States - a Wisconsin teenager in 2004 (Jeanna Giese), and a Texas girl in 2009.

This is an incredible story. It is truly amazing how our great collective wisdom -- aka science -- slowly gives us tools to go where we have never gone before and abilities that were previously inconceivable. I can't understand why everybody is not a fan of science. I do know that not everybody has what it takes to be a scientist, but I don't understand why people would rather believe in superstitions and old wives tales than support the advance of science. We are in a constant battle with "nature" and only science gives us the possibility to improve on the hand of cards we've been dealt from the deck that life makes available.

Everyday Exceptional Physics

I found this story about the Mpemba effect to be very interesting. From the Skulls in the Stars blog I've excerpted some interesting bits:

Mpemba made his accidental discovery in Tanzania in 1963, when he was only 13 years old and in secondary school. In spite of widespread disdain from his classmates, he surreptitiously continued experiments on the phenomenon until he had the good fortune in high school to interact with Professor Denis Osborne of the University College Dar es Salaam. Osborne was intrigued, carried out his own experiments, and in 1969 the two published a paper in the journal Physics Education.

This article is, in my opinion, one of the most remarkable in all of the history of physics. Aside from its title, “Cool?”, it is also unusual in being presented in two parts: Mpemba gives a first person account in his own words of his discovery in the first half, and Osborne picks up the story and describes the follow-up experiments in the second half. Mpemba’s own account is so charming and fascinating that it is worth quoting from liberally:

My name is Erasto B Mpemba, and I am going to tell you about my discovery, which was due to misusing a refrigerator. All of you know that it is advisable not to put hot things in a refrigerator, for you somehow shock it; and it will not last long.

In 1963, when I was in form 3 in Magamba Secondary School, Tanzania, I used to make ice-cream. The boys at the school do this by boiling milk, mixing it with sugar and putting it into the freezing chamber in the refrigerator, after it has first cooled nearly to room temperature. A lot of boys make it and there is a rush to get space in the refrigerator.

One day after buying milk from the local women, I started boiling it. Another boy, who had bought some milk for making ice-cream, ran to the refrigerator when he saw me boiling up milk and quickly mixed his milk with sugar and poured it into the icetray without boiling it; so that he may not miss his chance. Knowing that if I waited for the boiled milk to cool before placing it in the refrigerator I would lose the last available ice-tray, I decided to risk ruin to the refrigerator on that day by putting hot milk into it. The other boy and I went back an hour and a half later and found that my tray of milk had frozen into ice-cream while his was still only a thick liquid, not yet frozen.

I asked my physics teacher why it happened like that, with the milk that was hot freezing first, and the answer he gave me was that “You were confused, that cannot happen”. Then I believed his answer.

Here we have the beginnings of a classic story of science — an accidental discovery, scoffed at by the “establishment scientists”.

... Professor Osborne came to lecture on physics, giving Mpemba a valuable opportunity:

When Dr Osborne visited our school we were allowed to ask him some questions, mainly in physics. I asked: “If you take two similar containers with equal volumes Of water, one at 35 °C and the other at 100 °C, and put them into a refrigerator, the one that started at 100 °C freezes first. Why?” He first smiled and asked me to repeat the question. After I repeated it he said: “Is it true, have you done it?” I said: “Yes.” Then he said: “I do not know, but I promise to try this experiment when I am back in Dar es Salaam.” Next day my classmates in form six were saying to me that I had shamed them by asking that question and that my aim was to ask a question which Dr Osborne would not be able to answer. Some said to me: “But Mpemba did you understand your chapter on Newton’s law of cooling?” I told them: “Theory differs from practical.” Some said : “We do not wonder, for that was Mpemba’s physics.”

There are many remarkable points in this short passage. First of all, we see an admirable open-mindedness of Professor Osborne in his dealings with Mpemba, and that open-mindedness would quickly benefit them both. Conversely, we see a dangerous “groupthink” amongst Mpemba’s classmates regarding science, in which they are genuinely offended by Mpemba questioning the status quo. Mpemba shows great wisdom in his answer: “Theory differs from practical”. This is an important point for anyone studying physics: we like to create simplified models to explain nature, but those models often lose real-world aspects in the process of stripping them down.

Mpemba actually continued his experiments in a kitchen refrigerator, with the permission of kitchen staff, and convinced his classmates and the headmaster of his school of the accuracy of his findings.

At Dar es Salaam, Osborne was true to his word and looked into the phenomenon himself. As he notes in the continuation of the paper,

It seemed an unlikely happening, but the student insisted that he was sure of the facts. I confess that I thought he was mistaken but fortunately remembered the need to encourage students to develop questioning and critical attitudes. No question should be ridiculed. In this case there was an added reason for caution, for everyday events are seldom as simple as they seem and it is dangerous to pass a superficial judgment on what can and cannot be. I said that the facts as they were given surprised me because they appeared to contradict the physics I know. But I added that it was possible that the rate of cooling might be affected by some factor I had not considered.

Osborne sets a great example for all physics educators! It can be difficult at times, but “No question should be ridiculed” would be a great part of a “Hippocratic oath” for teachers.

One other anecdote from Osborne’s account is worth quotation:

At the University College in Dar es Salaam I asked a young technician to test the facts. The technician reported that the water that started hot did indeed freeze first and added in a moment of unscientific enthusiasm: “But we’ll keep on repeating the experiment until we get the right result.”

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to explain what is scientifically wrong with the technician’s attitude!

I like the story for many reasons. First, it is a mystery. It sounds wrong, but experiments actually produce the effect, so there must be a cause. Second, I like the "underdog" aspect of it. A student is maligned for reporting a result and struggles against social opprobrium and finally gets his experiments validated. Third, the write-up is very good with the author making points about the science, the practice of science, and the practice of teaching. Valuable stuff.

Now for something completely different... the professor of optics who runs the Skulls in the Stars blog has this post which I find amusing. Be sure to watch the video of David Brooks watching the elaboration of the David Brooks meme!

Chile's Puyehue Volcano

Watching an eruption reminds you of how tiny humans are in the scheme of things. We love to think that we are "changing the planet" but an eruption shows us that our influence is still small compared to natural processes:



Here are some nice pictures of the volcano in The Atlantic magazine.

Update 2011jun15: Here is a video of the eruption:



And here is a video of ash on Lake Nahuel Huapi:



From the Montreal Gazette:

Chilean experts said Puyehue's "plume" had almost made a complete circuit of Earth, with the circumference of the planet being some 24,900 miles (40,000 kilometers).

The ash cloud belching out over the past 12 days, and carried eastward by winds of up to 100 kilometers (60 miles) per hour was expected to reach Chile again by the end of this week.

"The plume is already at (Easter Island's capital) Rapa Nui and should be tapping us on the back on Saturday," said Pablo Ortega, the secretary general of Chile's civil aviation agency.

Easter Island is in the Pacific Ocean, 3,500 kilometers from the coast of mainland Chile.

Chile's National Geology and Mining Service said the volcano was showing "instability" as measured by seismic readings and the height of the ash cloud, which initially reached nine kilometers into the troposphere but now floated at seven kilometers.

That meant "it is possible there will be a return to increased eruptive activity," it said in its last bulletin.

Sally Cutter, from Australia's Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, said the lower level of the ash near Perth did pose a risk.

"Volcanic ash makes it dangerous to fly, particularly for jet engines, due to the fact it can cause the engines to stop, so it's really up to each individual airlines to assess the risk they're prepared to take," she told reporters.

Update 2011jul06: The Boston Globe newspapers site The Big Picture has some very nice pictures from the previous month's ash fallout.

Brian Christian's "The Most Human Human"

This was an amazingly entertaining book. It was a grand tour of knowledge dressed up as reportage about competing at the Turing Prize as a contestant trying to convince judges you are human while computers do their best to convince the judges that they are in fact "the humans". Like a good Hollywood move, the guys in the white hats win, Cristian comes out... spoiler alert!... triumphant and wins the "most human human" prize.

As a tale of prepping to present himself as a "genuine human" in the Turing test for the Loebner Prize, this book presents an interesting and entertaining tale. The author delves into a richness of subject matter that is unexpected. He explores what it means to be a real person and just how you could use language to try to convince a blind judge that your are really a "human". Getting there involves many detours into arcane specialized knowledge.

What I liked about the book was the amazing depth of knowledge of many fields served up as a charming story in the context of prepping and competing in the Turing test. I actually learned many new things in philosophy and computers, my two fields of expertise, from reading this book. I also learned interesting bits about psychology, linguistics, chess, poetics, and poetry. All this learning while being cleverly entertained!

I learned of entropy, lossless and lossy compression, of aposiopesis, synecdoche, and enthymemes. of computability and complexity theory, of the chatterbots ELIZA and PARRY, and so on. Delightful stuff.

By the way, he points us at the "Shannon Game" and invites us to play it (click here). I can honestly say it is one of the most frustrating things I've ever done. It humiliates you because you think you know language and what letters to expect when, but as confident as I was, I came out a loser, a humbling experience.

Like a delightful musical composition, this book ends with a coda, an epilogue where he looks at another field of computers -- computer graphics -- and in less than a dozen pages riffs a variation on the theme of the book how the effort to present "real stuff" makes you much more critical and appreciative of the reality:

Being a computer graphics person brings with it, as most jobs do, a certain way of looking at and of noticing the world. My own poetry background, for instance, gives me an urge to read things against the grain of the author's intended meaning. I read a newspaper headline the other day that said "UK Minister's Charm Offensive." This to me was hilarious. Of course they mean "offensive" as a noun, as in the tactical deployment of charm for diplomacy purposes, but I kept reading it as an adjective, as though the minister's creepy unctuousness had really crossed the line this time. My friends in the police force and the military can't enter a room without sussing out its entrances and exits; for the one in the fire department, it's alarms and extinguishers.

...

Reflection and refraction are difficult to simulate on a computer. So is water distortion. So-called "caustics," the way that a glass of wine refocuses its light into a red point on your table, are particularly hard to render.

Reflection and refraction are also fairly computationally nasty because they have the habit of multiplying off of each other. You put two mirrors in front of each other, and the images multiply to infinity in no time flat. Light travels roughly 200,000 miles per second: that's a lot of ping-pong,and way beyond the where most rendering algorithms tap out. Usually a programmer will specify the maximum acceptable number of reflections or refractions and cap it there, after which point a kind of software deus ex machina sends the light directly back to the eye: no more bouncing.

...

I love these moments when the theory, the models, the approximations, as good as they are, aren't good enough. You simply must watch. Ah, so this is how nature does it. This is what it looks like. I think it's important to know these things, to know what can't be simulated, can't be made up, can't be imagined -- and to seek it.

Try the book. I think you will be surprised at how enjoyable it is.

Know Your Sea Creatures

Here's a beautiful and informative video on the variety of sea creatures without backbones. This is a provocative video claiming "there is no such thing as a jellyfish":

By all accounts, jellyfish are creatures that kill people, eat microbes, grow to tens of meters, filter phytoplankton, take over ecosystems, and live forever. Because of the immense diversity of gelatinous plankton, jelly-like creatures can individually have each of these properties. However this way of looking at them both overstates and underestimates their true diversity. Taxonomically, they are far more varied than a handful of exemplars that are used to represent jellyfish or especially the so-called "true" jellyfish. Ecologically, they are even more adaptable than one would expect by looking only at the conspicuous bloom forming families and species that draw most of the attention. In reality, the most abundant and diverse gelatinous groups in the ocean are not the ones that anyone ever sees.

The above is from the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Why Identical Twins Are Not Always Identical

I found this post by Kevin Mitchell in his blog Wiring the Brain to be fascinating. It explains why identical twins are not always identical:

... these studies also highlight the limits of genetic determinism, which is especially evident in comparisons of monozygotic (identical) twins, who share all their genetic inheritance in common. Though they are obviously much more like each other in psychological traits than people who are not related to each other, they are clearly NOT identical to each other for these traits. For example, if one twin has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the chance that the other one will also suffer from the disorder is about 50% - massively higher than the population prevalence of the disorder (around 1%), but also clearly much less than 100%.

What is the source of this extra variance? What forces make monozygotic twins less identical? I have argued previously that random variation in the course of development is a major contributor. The developmental programme that specifies brain connectivity is less like a blueprint than a recipe (a recipe without a cook) – an incredibly complicated set of processes carried out by mindless biochemical algorithms mediated by local interactions between billions of individual components. As each of these processes is subject to some level of “noise” at the molecular level, it is not surprising that the outcome of this process varies considerably, even between monozygotic twins.

While such developmental variation can be referred to as “non-genetic”, a new study suggests that one important component of this variation may be genetic after all, just not inherited. Mutations can be passed on from parents to offspring or arise during generation of sperm or eggs and thus be inherited, but they can also arise any time DNA is replicated. So, each time a cell divides as an embryo grows and develops, there is a very small chance of new mutations being introduced. These “somatic” mutations (meaning ones that happen in the body and not in the germline) will be inherited by all the cells that are descendants of that new cell and so will be present in some fraction of the final cells of the individual. Mutations arising earlier in development will be inherited by more cells than those arising later.

Each person will therefore be a mosaic of cells with slightly different genetic make-up. The vast majority of such mutations will not have any effect of course (with the obvious exception of those that cause dysregulation of cellular differentiation and result in cancer). But sometimes a new mutation will affect a trait and cause a detectable difference. The most obvious examples are in genes affecting hair or eye colour – where a patch of hair may be a different colour, or the two eyes may be different colours.

But what if the mutations in question are linked to a psychiatric disorder? If such a mutation arises early in the development of the brain and is therefore inherited by many of the cells in the brain then this could lead to the psychiatric disorder, just as if the mutation had been inherited in a germ cell.

A new study adds to the evidence that such mutations do indeed occur at an appreciable frequency and may help explain the discordance in phenotype between pairs of twins where one has schizophrenia and the other does not. The authors analysed the DNA from blood cells of pairs of twins discordant for schizophrenia and their parents. They were looking for two different kinds of mutation: ones that changes the identity of a single base of DNA (one letter of the genetic code to another), called point mutations, and ones that delete or duplicate whole chunks of chromosomes, called copy number variants, or CNVs.

As expected, they were able to detect both inherited mutations (present in one of the parents) and de novo mutations (present in both twins but not in the blood cells of either parent). What is more remarkable though, is that they also detected de novo mutations present in the blood cells of one twin but not the other – lots of them. About 1,000 point mutations and 2-3 new CNVs not shared by the other twin. The implication is that these mutations arose during the somatic development of one twin. They identify a couple CNVs in the twins affected by schizophrenia, raising the (very speculative) possibility that those mutations may contribute to the development of the disorder. It will obviously require a lot more work to test that specific hypothesis.

All of this is fascinating, but especially interesting is that this effect is visible at the macro level. You can see it with the condition heterochromia iridum (the two eyes having different colours).

Click to Enlarge

A Surprising Journey

I enjoy reading Carl Zimmer's articles on science. He has a way with words and ideas and gives the reader a wonderful insight into nooks and crannies of contemporary science. This bit from an article in the NY Times shows how a career in science can be full of surprises:

At the studio Mr. Pell helped Dr. Wainwright and his colleagues build models to test their ideas about biomechanics, creating models of spinal cords, muscles, jaws and dozens of other animal parts. “These models can physically surprise you,” said Mr. Pell. “They can show you things that you didn’t think of before you built them.”

One of Mr. Pell’s biggest surprises came when he tried to make a simple model of a swimming fish. He built a rubber tube with a rounded front and then stuck a rod a quarter of the way down its length. When he put the tube in water and turned the rod back and forth between his fingers, it generated a wave with its tail. While making a new version of that tube, Mr. Pell accidentally nicked the tail end. That new shape, he discovered, caused the water to flow in a different pattern around the tube, creating thrust.

Mr. Pell, Dr. Wainwright and their colleagues got a patent for the design and started a company called Nekton to develop products from it. First, they turned it into a commercially successful bathtub toy. But when the Navy discovered Mr. Pell and his colleagues could get fishlike thrust from something without any moving parts, they encouraged him to get into the business of building underwater robots. Mr. Pell and his colleague at Nekton ended up making a highly maneuverable yardlong robot called the Pilot Fish.

“We started out as a toy company; we ended up as a defense contractor,” said Mr. Pell.

We need a world in which people with the quirky skills and interests needed to create have free rein to create. Innovation makes us all wealthier. Sadly our institutions are set up for rote learning and text book skills and not dreams and innovation. We need to "breed" more eccentrics and dreamers.

Glass Blowing

Here's a documentary on Kiva Ford, a guy who does glass blowing to create scientific instruments as well as to create fine art. I love this itsy-bitsy glass art objects:

Using Game Technology to Develop New Robotic Technology

It is funny how ideas feed on each other. Normally you think of game developers as parasitic on research by universities doing computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, and motion sensing research. But here's a case where university researchers are building on some game technology:



You can find the news story here.

Snake Venom, a Cornucopia of Medicines

I take ramipril for high blood pressure. I didn't realize it was developed from snake venom. From an article by Carl Zimmer in Discover magazine:

As a result of this evolution, scientists have lots of different venoms to explore to see if they’re useful in medicine. Millions of people rely on venom to keep their blood pressure in check, for example. ACE inhibitors were isolated from Brazilian pitvipers, which use the molecule to make their prey black out from a drop in blood pressure. Saw-scaled vipers make blood-thinning venoms, which have been turned into an anticoagulant drug called tirobifan. A number of venom drugs are now in the pipeline to treat cancer, bacterial infections, and other ailments.

And here's a bit about how snake venom helped decode the disease myasthenia gravis:

Just as Changeux had hoped, the krait venom latched onto one receptor in particular. Using the venom as their guide, the scientists could purify a big enough supply of the receptors to figure out its structure–the first time such a feat had ever been accomplished for a receptor on a neuron.
Soon, this discovery bore medical fruit, by allowing scientists to understand a disease called myasthenia gravis. Myasthenia gravis slowly weakens the muscles, making it hard to swallow, talk, and keep one’s eyelids open. In 1973 scientists at Johns Hopkins applied radioactive α-bungarotoxin to muscle tissue from people with myasthenia gravis. The radioactive venom latched onto their acetylcholine receptors, allowing the scientists to count them up. They discovered that people with the disease had fewer receptors than normal.
Researchers wondered if the immune system was mistakenly attacking the receptors and destroying them. If that were true, then you’d expect people with myasthenia gravis to have antibodies to the receptors. In 1976, scientists from the Salk Institute mixed together radioactive αbungarotoxin and acetylcholine detectors and then added them to a serum taken from people with myasthenia gravis. Just as the researchers had predicted, the serum was loaded with antibodies that attacked the receptors.

Here's a video from the article:

A Little Night Music

I ran across this just as I'm closing shop for the day. It is a glorious rendition of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Enjoy!

Extraordinary Story

Ben Underwood developed a skill with echo location that is phenomenal. This video introduces him:

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:


Part 5:


I like this story because it is both inspiring and cautionary. Ben is amazing, but he is full of hubris and it is only when he meets Daniel Kish that he is forced to face this. And the killer, the real killer, is that Ben's life ends short. He died at age 16 from the cancer that first took his eyes. But his life story is both inspirational and a blow to the gut. That is life with its ups and downs.

Here's a web site dedicated to Ben Underwood.

Robot Ready to be Injected into your Veins

I remember watching Fantastic Voyage and thinking it was pretty cheezy back in the 1960s. But 50 years later, somebody is trying to build a robot that can get in your veins and maneuver do "do stuff" that will be medically useful.

Here's a bit from New Scientist:

... while microbots exist, and they can be made to swim, it's getting them to change direction that has been tricky so far - a bit of an issue if you're even planning on sticking them in a human body, for instance.

Now a system used to propel swimming microbots without the need for on-board fuel has brought this idea one step closer. Researchers at North Carolina State University have coaxed their bots to perform U-turns on command.

The microbot, a mere 1.3 millimetres long, is essentially a diode - an electrical element that only allows current to pass in one direction. The diode is exposed to an alternating electric field, which induces a voltage across it, creating an electric dipole. This dipole pushes on ions in the water, driving them backward and propelling the microbot forward.

...

Miniaturisation will be vital if the robots are ever to navigate human bodies., like in Fantastic Voyage. The group is also investigating "yeast-boats", which use metabolic reactions to motor through glucose or hydrogen peroxide solutions. A similar vehicle may one day carry a molecular doctor on board to make a diagnosis - or dock with diseased tissue to deliver a shipment of drugs.

I won't be first in line for this new medical treatment. I would need to be convinced that it isn't going to cause interesting problems like blocked capillaries or rogue microbots delivering drugs in the wrong locations.

Intelligent Machines

Here is a nice graph that depicts the difference between the new IBM Watson engine and the Wolfram "computational knowledge engine":

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And here is a discussion of the difference between the two by Stephen Wolfram from his blog:

IBM’s basic approach has a long history, with a lineage in the field of information retrieval that is in many ways shared with search engines. The essential idea is to start with textual documents, and then to build a system to statistically match questions that are asked to answers that are represented in the documents. (The first step is to search for textual matches to a question—using thesaurus-like and other linguistic transformations. The harder work is then to take the list of potential answers, use a diversity of different methods to score them, and finally combine these scores to choose a top answer.)

Early versions of this approach go back nearly 50 years, to the first phase of artificial intelligence research. And incremental progress has been made—notably as tracked for the past 20 years in the annual TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) question answering competition. IBM’s Jeopardy system is very much in this tradition—though with more sophisticated systems engineering, and with special features aimed at the particular (complex) task of competing on Jeopardy.

Wolfram|Alpha is a completely different kind of thing—something much more radical, based on a quite different paradigm. The key point is that Wolfram|Alpha is not dealing with documents, or anything derived from them. Instead, it is dealing directly with raw, precise, computable knowledge. And what’s inside it is not statistical representations of text, but actual representations of knowledge.

The input to Wolfram|Alpha can be a question in natural language. But what Wolfram|Alpha does is to convert this natural language into a precise computable internal form. And then it takes this form, and uses its computable knowledge to compute an answer to the question.

There’s a lot of technology and new ideas that are required to make this work. And I must say that when I started out developing Wolfram|Alpha I wasn’t at all sure it was going to be possible. But after years of hard work—and some breakthroughs—I’m happy to say it’s turned out really well. And Wolfram|Alpha is now successfully answering millions of questions on the web and elsewhere about a huge variety of different topics every day.