PARIS: In experiments that would make Dr Frankenstein jealous, US scientists have coaxed recycled hearts taken from animal cadavers into beating in the laboratory after reseeding them with live cells, a study released today says.
Although entirely fictional, Dr Frankenstein was an egotistical and envious man . Literary experts agree that he would not have approved of anybody else doing work involving the revival of dead flesh, at least without speaking to his tax accountant first. When contacted for comment, the US scientists expressed surprise that anyone would raise the topic of Frankenstein in an interview.
If extended to humans, the researchers' procedure could provide an almost limitless supply of hearts, and possibly other organs, to millions of terminally ill people waiting helplessly for a new lease on life.
If extended to monkeys, the procedure could create a new super race of human-hearted monkeys, capable of love, greed and heartburn. It is predicted that of the millions waiting helplessly for a new lease on life, 612 will be able to afford the procedure.
About 50,000 patients in the United States die every year for lack of a donor heart, and about 22 million people worldwide are living with the threat of heart failure.
"The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells," said the lead researcher, Doris Taylor, director of the Centre of Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota.
Intellectual property lawyer Steven Brodagge stressed the importance of patenting the bejesus out of the technology, enriching ourselves, our institutions, and most importantly our country in the process.
Philosopher of medicine Gordon Cumming mused: "I think of humans as 100-sided dice. Each side represents a category of illness - heart disease, cancer, depression, infectious disease. We have only enough resources to work on a few tens of faces. Cui bono? Plenty do, plentier don't. That is all."
The study is published in the journal Nature Medicine.
Co-opted from an Agence France-Presse article and given an Artful Science twist.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
When you don’t understand why someone you like isn’t famous
I’m rereading I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. I wouldn’t say it’s his best work, but it’s still damn good. It’s essentially a summary of his thoughts on how a self, an ‘I’, a ‘light on inside’, a mind’s eye can come from a lump of squishy grey stuff.
I’m only a couple chapters in, but I keep feeling compelled to write notes about what he’s written, on account of it triggers so many thoughts and ideas in mine head. In fact, if I go through with this audacious, yet bodacious plan, I’ll have a book by the end of it! It could be the first ever book written entirely in response to, and while reading, another book. At least I assume so. The working title is I Know You Are But What Am I: Reflections on DRH’s I Am A Strange Loop. Another working title is I Agree, And Here’s Why…
Look, what I’m trying to say is I get sick and sleepy with having to all the time explain who Douglas Hofstadter is. To my way of thinking, he’s one of the clearest, most perceptive, easy to read, riveting authors out there, and he’s written about many a topic that would interest many and many a person. Yet he just isn’t up there with the Richard Dawkinses, Carl Saganses and Tim Flanneryses of this world.
Likewise in music, there are phenomenal performers who go unheard of, unrewarded, and unsullied day in, day out. I must confess I make no claims to know and like any obscure but brilliant bands (but watch this space for Looking Glass). Though they are in an overall minority, I know there are thousands of others who, like me, really dig the Mars Volta, Crash Test Dummies, Split Enz and Ween (almost certainly not this combination though).
In fact, I believe that each and every person that this sentence refers to could list several awesome authors, musicians and whoevers that have touched their lives, delicately and deeply, but that can’t seem to get no respect, or at least general public awareness. I challenge these people to make that list.
These days the situation isn’t so bad with the internet. F’cryin’ out loud, I can now find people with a mutual interest in my newly acquired, top 10 All Time Coolest book, Codex Seraphinianus. Without the internet, I challenge anyone, anywhere to have heard of this amazing book (yes, I know the challenge was issued using the internet, a’F’eh!).
I guess this is all about information – how we get it, who controls its flow, and what it smells like. It’s also about personal differences in the kinds of things that profoundly resonate with (in?) our minds and hearts.
One last thing, it’s interesting to note that there is no analogous situation in sports. The best basketballers, sprinters and football players aren’t competing in D-Leagues, mid-week suburban track meets and lower grade Auckland comps. Aside from the scouts’ mythical undiscovered sporting geniuses tending sheep in a field somewhere, this phenomena just doesn’t happen in sport.
I’m only a couple chapters in, but I keep feeling compelled to write notes about what he’s written, on account of it triggers so many thoughts and ideas in mine head. In fact, if I go through with this audacious, yet bodacious plan, I’ll have a book by the end of it! It could be the first ever book written entirely in response to, and while reading, another book. At least I assume so. The working title is I Know You Are But What Am I: Reflections on DRH’s I Am A Strange Loop. Another working title is I Agree, And Here’s Why…
Look, what I’m trying to say is I get sick and sleepy with having to all the time explain who Douglas Hofstadter is. To my way of thinking, he’s one of the clearest, most perceptive, easy to read, riveting authors out there, and he’s written about many a topic that would interest many and many a person. Yet he just isn’t up there with the Richard Dawkinses, Carl Saganses and Tim Flanneryses of this world.
Likewise in music, there are phenomenal performers who go unheard of, unrewarded, and unsullied day in, day out. I must confess I make no claims to know and like any obscure but brilliant bands (but watch this space for Looking Glass). Though they are in an overall minority, I know there are thousands of others who, like me, really dig the Mars Volta, Crash Test Dummies, Split Enz and Ween (almost certainly not this combination though).
In fact, I believe that each and every person that this sentence refers to could list several awesome authors, musicians and whoevers that have touched their lives, delicately and deeply, but that can’t seem to get no respect, or at least general public awareness. I challenge these people to make that list.
These days the situation isn’t so bad with the internet. F’cryin’ out loud, I can now find people with a mutual interest in my newly acquired, top 10 All Time Coolest book, Codex Seraphinianus. Without the internet, I challenge anyone, anywhere to have heard of this amazing book (yes, I know the challenge was issued using the internet, a’F’eh!).
I guess this is all about information – how we get it, who controls its flow, and what it smells like. It’s also about personal differences in the kinds of things that profoundly resonate with (in?) our minds and hearts.
One last thing, it’s interesting to note that there is no analogous situation in sports. The best basketballers, sprinters and football players aren’t competing in D-Leagues, mid-week suburban track meets and lower grade Auckland comps. Aside from the scouts’ mythical undiscovered sporting geniuses tending sheep in a field somewhere, this phenomena just doesn’t happen in sport.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Free Won't
They say we have free will. They say we are free to choose how we act. The things we say, the thoughts we have, the things we like. However, it is self-evident that we are not free in many ways. We are not free to flap our arms and start flying. We are not free to hurt people we don't want to hurt, or like food we don't like. In short, we face some pretty hefty roadblocks to freedom, roadblocks inherent in the way our bodies and minds work.
We're freer, they say, to not do things. Free not to go here, not to buy that, not to kiss that. That has lead some(one?) to coin the term "free won't". That is, it is more fitting to define our special kind of freedom in terms of what we are free not to do.
I like this idea, although it is subject to the same criticisms as free will. Sometimes we're not free to not do something e.g. spill the beans about our friends' lovelives to our partner.
Perhaps we could rephrase the whole thing. Instead of having free will, maybe we have free tryingness. This new term has the added benefit of catchiness. It means that we are free to try to do (or not do) certain things. Delta Goodrem encapsulated this deep philosophical position in a very melodious way with her hit single Born To Try. Who said she has absolutely no idea about the human condition? Not I. No, not me, not I.
You could probably see this coming, but I'm afraid we're not always free to try (or try not to do) certain things. You might think I could try to enjoy Robbie Williams for a minute, but it's just not possible. Try as I might (hehe), I could not try to consider JW Howard Australia's finest Primer Minister since Keating. OK, this isn't the best example, but my point is this: There's always strings attached to our freedom. So the next time you're at the Philosophical Diner on Main St, don't forget to order Strings Attached with your Free Will. Ah, yeah.
We're freer, they say, to not do things. Free not to go here, not to buy that, not to kiss that. That has lead some(one?) to coin the term "free won't". That is, it is more fitting to define our special kind of freedom in terms of what we are free not to do.
I like this idea, although it is subject to the same criticisms as free will. Sometimes we're not free to not do something e.g. spill the beans about our friends' lovelives to our partner.
Perhaps we could rephrase the whole thing. Instead of having free will, maybe we have free tryingness. This new term has the added benefit of catchiness. It means that we are free to try to do (or not do) certain things. Delta Goodrem encapsulated this deep philosophical position in a very melodious way with her hit single Born To Try. Who said she has absolutely no idea about the human condition? Not I. No, not me, not I.
You could probably see this coming, but I'm afraid we're not always free to try (or try not to do) certain things. You might think I could try to enjoy Robbie Williams for a minute, but it's just not possible. Try as I might (hehe), I could not try to consider JW Howard Australia's finest Primer Minister since Keating. OK, this isn't the best example, but my point is this: There's always strings attached to our freedom. So the next time you're at the Philosophical Diner on Main St, don't forget to order Strings Attached with your Free Will. Ah, yeah.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Brain = Google ?
A microcosm of all that's good and bad about science in the media.
I just came across an article at New Scientist talking about research that compares our brains to Google's page rank procedure. The idea of the brain being googlesque is quite catchy, the kind of thing you could drop into conversation and seem quite intelligent for doing so. But before we go spreading that meme, it's worth taking a closer look. When we scratch the surface, things get a bit murky, although hopefully my scratching around clears some things up too.
It's only a short article, so I might as well let it speak for itself, with my self speaking for me in between. I will deal with the ideas as they are presented, but the problem is that without reading the journal article it's about, who's really to say what's going on? Very few readers will ever take the time to read the original journal article, and I'd bet that very few writers do either - at least to the level that allows a bit of perspective and criticism. This issue is absolutely ubiquitous in science writing, but I don't have time to address it now. Suffice to say it places a huge burden on the science writer's measly shoulders. Anyway....
Our memory for words can be modelled as a network in which each point represents a different word, with each linked to words that relate to it.
Ok, so we're talking about a model. Here in a nutshell is the daily focal point of most scientists - a model. It stands before them, naked and exposed to the world, doing its best to represent reality. Of course, scientists are equally (hopefully more, maybe less) focused on the reality their model is modelling too. In this case, we're trying understand... what? Something about the way our mind uses words. So let's build a model. It is a clearly fallacious to represent a word as a solid, defined entity in its own right, but we'll forgive them that because all models must necessarily simplify somewhere. Still, I can't help wondering whether they're putting the cart before horse in already specifying which words are related to which. Isn't how the mind super-specially figures this out for us a mystery worth investigating?
Psychologist Tom Griffiths and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether the ease with which the brain retrieves words is similar to the way that websites are ranked by PageRank: by the number of sites that link to them.
It's essential for a science writer to mention the author, and preferably host institution, of the research. That way interested folk are just a hop, click and jump from finding the original research article, or the researcher's general interests, or commercial interests, or whatever.
I couldn't help but wondering just where Google popped up in all of this. Did it drive the research? Did it emerge unbidden from the pure experimental results? Was it a cute rejoinder in the original paper's discussion, aimed at lightening the tone? Was it added by the researcher or someone from their uni's PR department to get the mercilessly fickle attention of media Monitors in science mags? Anyway, it seems like a reasonable hypothesis - the more words that "link to" a given word, be it in terms of spelling, etymology, the sound of the word or whatever, the easier the word will be to retrieve. The more hits it will get!
It seems it might. In tests against other word-retrieval algorithms, PageRank most clearly matched the human model (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 1069).
Ok, so the crucial missing ingredient is some, any kind of description of a) the other word-retrieval algorithms, and b) some perspective as to how big a deal this is in the field. Was it unexpected? Was there another model that previously occupied the position of best model, that has now been ceremoniously (publishing results is a ceremony of sorts!) dumped in favour of the PageRank model of human word retrieval? Just what the Dickens are the implications of all this??
The results suggest human memory studies could be improved by examining the tricks that search engines employ, and vice versa, says Griffiths.
Ok, there they are. Just who is going to follow this new approach? The authors? Anyone else? Ultimately, they rely on the validity of the analogy between human brains and computers/internets.
I just came across an article at New Scientist talking about research that compares our brains to Google's page rank procedure. The idea of the brain being googlesque is quite catchy, the kind of thing you could drop into conversation and seem quite intelligent for doing so. But before we go spreading that meme, it's worth taking a closer look. When we scratch the surface, things get a bit murky, although hopefully my scratching around clears some things up too.
It's only a short article, so I might as well let it speak for itself, with my self speaking for me in between. I will deal with the ideas as they are presented, but the problem is that without reading the journal article it's about, who's really to say what's going on? Very few readers will ever take the time to read the original journal article, and I'd bet that very few writers do either - at least to the level that allows a bit of perspective and criticism. This issue is absolutely ubiquitous in science writing, but I don't have time to address it now. Suffice to say it places a huge burden on the science writer's measly shoulders. Anyway....
Our memory for words can be modelled as a network in which each point represents a different word, with each linked to words that relate to it.
Ok, so we're talking about a model. Here in a nutshell is the daily focal point of most scientists - a model. It stands before them, naked and exposed to the world, doing its best to represent reality. Of course, scientists are equally (hopefully more, maybe less) focused on the reality their model is modelling too. In this case, we're trying understand... what? Something about the way our mind uses words. So let's build a model. It is a clearly fallacious to represent a word as a solid, defined entity in its own right, but we'll forgive them that because all models must necessarily simplify somewhere. Still, I can't help wondering whether they're putting the cart before horse in already specifying which words are related to which. Isn't how the mind super-specially figures this out for us a mystery worth investigating?
Psychologist Tom Griffiths and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether the ease with which the brain retrieves words is similar to the way that websites are ranked by PageRank: by the number of sites that link to them.
It's essential for a science writer to mention the author, and preferably host institution, of the research. That way interested folk are just a hop, click and jump from finding the original research article, or the researcher's general interests, or commercial interests, or whatever.
I couldn't help but wondering just where Google popped up in all of this. Did it drive the research? Did it emerge unbidden from the pure experimental results? Was it a cute rejoinder in the original paper's discussion, aimed at lightening the tone? Was it added by the researcher or someone from their uni's PR department to get the mercilessly fickle attention of media Monitors in science mags? Anyway, it seems like a reasonable hypothesis - the more words that "link to" a given word, be it in terms of spelling, etymology, the sound of the word or whatever, the easier the word will be to retrieve. The more hits it will get!
It seems it might. In tests against other word-retrieval algorithms, PageRank most clearly matched the human model (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 1069).
Ok, so the crucial missing ingredient is some, any kind of description of a) the other word-retrieval algorithms, and b) some perspective as to how big a deal this is in the field. Was it unexpected? Was there another model that previously occupied the position of best model, that has now been ceremoniously (publishing results is a ceremony of sorts!) dumped in favour of the PageRank model of human word retrieval? Just what the Dickens are the implications of all this??
The results suggest human memory studies could be improved by examining the tricks that search engines employ, and vice versa, says Griffiths.
Ok, there they are. Just who is going to follow this new approach? The authors? Anyone else? Ultimately, they rely on the validity of the analogy between human brains and computers/internets.
Friday, December 7, 2007
The Latest Science Headlines
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER LINK BETWEEN OWN EXISTENCE AND AMAZING BREAKTHROUGHS
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER LINK BETWEEN VIEWING PORNOGRAPHY AND MALE SEXUAL AROUSAL.
Study is the largest of its kind in the world, in terms of both length and girth.
SCIENTISTS CONFIDENT OF CANCER BREAKTRHOUGH - IN GENERAL.
"This isn't based on any particular study or theoretical progress - it's just a general confidence. We're feeling pretty good."
SCIENTISTS "JUST WISH PEOPLE WOULD LEAVE US ALONE"
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE NOT A SCIENCE, SAY SCIENTISTS.
"We're rich and we can prove it," say management scientists.
PROCRASTINATION STUDY DELAYED AGAIN
STUDENTS STUDY STUDY STUDY.
A review of studying methods has been put under the microscope by students.
ENVIRONMENT IN "DEEP SHIT", SAY SCIENTISTS.
Environment agrees.
SCIENTIST THINKS OWN SHIT DOESN'T STINK
"We don't know shit," said JC Venter. "Which is why I've decided to make my lab the first to sequence the metagenome of a human's turd - my own of course."
SCIENCE IN THE MEDIA - AGAIN
INFRASTRUCTURE COLLAPSES
You would too if you'd been through what it has.
STEM CELL BREAKTHROUGH
Ethics committee approves research proposal.
MINDFUCK
Scientists have pinpointed 54 different areas of the brain associated with each of the 54 uses of the word "fuck".
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER LINK BETWEEN VIEWING PORNOGRAPHY AND MALE SEXUAL AROUSAL.
Study is the largest of its kind in the world, in terms of both length and girth.
SCIENTISTS CONFIDENT OF CANCER BREAKTRHOUGH - IN GENERAL.
"This isn't based on any particular study or theoretical progress - it's just a general confidence. We're feeling pretty good."
SCIENTISTS "JUST WISH PEOPLE WOULD LEAVE US ALONE"
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE NOT A SCIENCE, SAY SCIENTISTS.
"We're rich and we can prove it," say management scientists.
PROCRASTINATION STUDY DELAYED AGAIN
STUDENTS STUDY STUDY STUDY.
A review of studying methods has been put under the microscope by students.
ENVIRONMENT IN "DEEP SHIT", SAY SCIENTISTS.
Environment agrees.
SCIENTIST THINKS OWN SHIT DOESN'T STINK
"We don't know shit," said JC Venter. "Which is why I've decided to make my lab the first to sequence the metagenome of a human's turd - my own of course."
SCIENCE IN THE MEDIA - AGAIN
INFRASTRUCTURE COLLAPSES
You would too if you'd been through what it has.
STEM CELL BREAKTHROUGH
Ethics committee approves research proposal.
MINDFUCK
Scientists have pinpointed 54 different areas of the brain associated with each of the 54 uses of the word "fuck".
Friday, October 19, 2007
Logolution and large celestial objects
Some measure words and others, birds. Some measure stars and others, Mars.
Some measure holes that can't be seen. I write about them with Charles Sheen.
I described the story about words in my last post. All I would add at this juncture is that I like to call the study of the evolution of words and languages logolution. Sadly this fondness was not shared by Professor Jim Hurford, from the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit at the University of Edinburgh, who I asked about the research. "I can't see the point of the neologism 'logolution'," he said. "For one thing it focusses too much on words, as opposed to other features of language." I've taken Jim's comments on board, and hereby propose lingolution as a legit solution. In five years when there's a journal called Nature Lingolution, I want acknowledgement, royalties, and a wikipedia entry. In five years...
There's also been some amazing research done on black holes. Y'see, they've just found the biggest ever stellar black hole. Before you go calling your mum, bear in mind that it's not the biggest black hole - just the biggest stellar black hole.
A stellar black hole is formed from a collapsed star (typically out of exhaustion or its own gravitational pull, or both) and weighs exactly between 3 and 13 times the mass of our sun.
Some educated people believe that all galaxies have superdupermassive black holes at their centre, which are thousands to millions of times as heavy as our sun. They are called supermassive black holes. I don't know how they are formed, but if it's not from collapsing stars, what is it? Huh? Answer me! (There's also a song by the band Muse called supermassive black hole, which I suspect the physicists have ripped off)
The black hole they've just found is 16 solar masses. Ok, so it's not supermassive, but it's still freakin' big right? I mean, if you were standing next to it in a photo, you'd look bloody tiny. And get this, it's also in tight, tight orbit with a 70-solar-mass star. That's some big celestial objects.
So the next time you look up at the sun, see it for what it is - a pitiful 1/16th the size of the biggest stellar black hole, and an embarrassing 1/70th the size of this SBH's companion star. I'm so ashamed.
Some measure holes that can't be seen. I write about them with Charles Sheen.
I described the story about words in my last post. All I would add at this juncture is that I like to call the study of the evolution of words and languages logolution. Sadly this fondness was not shared by Professor Jim Hurford, from the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit at the University of Edinburgh, who I asked about the research. "I can't see the point of the neologism 'logolution'," he said. "For one thing it focusses too much on words, as opposed to other features of language." I've taken Jim's comments on board, and hereby propose lingolution as a legit solution. In five years when there's a journal called Nature Lingolution, I want acknowledgement, royalties, and a wikipedia entry. In five years...
There's also been some amazing research done on black holes. Y'see, they've just found the biggest ever stellar black hole. Before you go calling your mum, bear in mind that it's not the biggest black hole - just the biggest stellar black hole.
A stellar black hole is formed from a collapsed star (typically out of exhaustion or its own gravitational pull, or both) and weighs exactly between 3 and 13 times the mass of our sun.
Some educated people believe that all galaxies have superdupermassive black holes at their centre, which are thousands to millions of times as heavy as our sun. They are called supermassive black holes. I don't know how they are formed, but if it's not from collapsing stars, what is it? Huh? Answer me! (There's also a song by the band Muse called supermassive black hole, which I suspect the physicists have ripped off)
The black hole they've just found is 16 solar masses. Ok, so it's not supermassive, but it's still freakin' big right? I mean, if you were standing next to it in a photo, you'd look bloody tiny. And get this, it's also in tight, tight orbit with a 70-solar-mass star. That's some big celestial objects.
So the next time you look up at the sun, see it for what it is - a pitiful 1/16th the size of the biggest stellar black hole, and an embarrassing 1/70th the size of this SBH's companion star. I'm so ashamed.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Bugs in space
For the first time, scientists have paid attention to microbes (which are related to bugs, but not as much as humans are) IN SPACE!
This article is worth reading for a couple of reasons.
- the future of astronauts depends on it. Or so some would have you believe. Essentially they think that microbes may be more deadly in space. They figured this out by taking salmonella on a shuttle, then infecting mice on earth and finding they died more than controls. What I really would have liked to see is mice in space being infected. After all, it's astronauts in space they're worried about, not astronauts on earth.
- it mentions the word panspermia. This is a mildly funny word. But it's used with deadly seriousness, for famed panspermioso Chandra Wickramasinghe believes the experiment suggests bacteria are evolved for space travel
There they are. The couple of reasons, laid out for you in the English language. My next article will be about the shock revelation that words that are used more often take longer to morph into other words than words that are rarely used. Alas, this probably means panspermiosi will have changed by its second usage. In the same story, there's research about how more and more English words end in 'ed' in the past tense, even though they used to not! This process is called regularisation, and it's happening as we speak. What else is being regularised? Our minds? Our media? Our owls? The answer is all around us.
Finally, I was pleased to see that research I covered in exciting depth won an Ig Nobel prize. I am prepared to wager a doubloon that this research, about the anti-jetlag effects of viagra (and cialis walium? Further tests required) in hamsters, becomes the first to claim the Ig Nobel / Nobel Prize sweep. You heard it first here, folks.
This article is worth reading for a couple of reasons.
- the future of astronauts depends on it. Or so some would have you believe. Essentially they think that microbes may be more deadly in space. They figured this out by taking salmonella on a shuttle, then infecting mice on earth and finding they died more than controls. What I really would have liked to see is mice in space being infected. After all, it's astronauts in space they're worried about, not astronauts on earth.
- it mentions the word panspermia. This is a mildly funny word. But it's used with deadly seriousness, for famed panspermioso Chandra Wickramasinghe believes the experiment suggests bacteria are evolved for space travel
There they are. The couple of reasons, laid out for you in the English language. My next article will be about the shock revelation that words that are used more often take longer to morph into other words than words that are rarely used. Alas, this probably means panspermiosi will have changed by its second usage. In the same story, there's research about how more and more English words end in 'ed' in the past tense, even though they used to not! This process is called regularisation, and it's happening as we speak. What else is being regularised? Our minds? Our media? Our owls? The answer is all around us.
Finally, I was pleased to see that research I covered in exciting depth won an Ig Nobel prize. I am prepared to wager a doubloon that this research, about the anti-jetlag effects of viagra (and cialis walium? Further tests required) in hamsters, becomes the first to claim the Ig Nobel / Nobel Prize sweep. You heard it first here, folks.
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