Right now, smartphones are touch screens. Why not make them bendable?
The obvious answer is that no one wants to interact with the phone this way, but the objects displayed on the phone. I don’t want to twist my phone to turn a page, I want to turn the damn page. Haptic holographics, baby.
Any thoughts, Bret Victor?
Do you like science? Do you like thinking about science? Do you like thinking about thinking about science?
Oh, well then do I have a gift for you.
Discover Magazine has launched their newest group blog, The Crux. The Crux is about science, meaning it covers everything scientific and Science itself, as an object of analysis. As the resident ethicist and futurist, I’ll add a much needed hyper-meta perspective to that detailed obsessed field while other brilliant minds blog about topics ranging from health care policy to astrophysics to neuroscience to economics.
Think of it as your one-stop-shop for finding how science has made your world better today.
You love science. You love me. You’ll love the Crux.
You can’t make this stuff up. In Scientific American, Eric Michael Johnson tells the sad story of Russian physiologist Il’ya Ivanov’s efforts to cross-breed humans with anthropoid apes. Ivanov was not planning to make super-soldiers, nor was he up to any comic book scale medical mischief. As is so often the case, Ivanov just wanted to see if a human-ape hybrid was possible via cross-breeding. As Johnson puts it, “Ivanov represents a scientist, widely respected in his field, whose dedication to find out if something could be done blinded him to ask whether it should be done.” Johnson’s investigation into Ivanov underlines the fact that this kind of atrocious research was conducted not by some rogue lunatic, but by a highly respected individual with the support of major institutions in Russia and France.
Once he got the support, here is how things went down:
With his small budget and use of Institut Pasteur’s facility Ivanov and his son traveled to French Guinea in Western Africa to carry out his artificial insemination experiments in March, 1926. However, his research was hounded at every turn. The “research station” had only two veterinarians on staff and Ivanov’s presence resulted in outrage that he might report on the atrocious conditions:
Ivanov explained that the hostility of the station’s staff arose from their fears that he would report back to Paris about the real problems at the facility. According to the documentation that he managed to see, about seven hundred chimpanzees had been bought from native hunters since the founding of the station in 1923, and more than half of them had died before they could be shipped to Paris for biomedical experiments.
Local hunters had kidnapped the chimpanzees from the wild as infants and all were still juveniles when Ivanov arrived. He only attempted to inseminate three females before being forced to abandon the project as useless. Desperate to make use of his limited funding, Ivanov then made the horrific decision to attempt the insemination of African women with chimpanzee sperm without their knowledge. He made a proposal to doctors at a local hospital about his experiment and was ready to proceed when the General Governor of French Guinea, Paul Poiret, rejected the plan. Out of options and funding, Ivanov and his son decided to return home.
The pursuit of science became a blinding force for Ivanov. Ivanov’s efforts were repudiated by the very foundations that supported him upon discovery of what he’d done to the African women.
My larger question here is what would Ivanov have done if successful? Raised the hybrid? How? In what conditions? With what expectations? His zeal to prove the possible did nothing to take into account the outcomes of his actions.
Discoveries open up not only new scientific possibilities, but new ethical obligations as well. We cannot remind ourselves of that too often.
Embodied cognition is the idea that my way of thinking is not independent of the body in which I live. My metaphors, imagination, and logical processes are influenced by my body’s position in space, relative height, closeness, or contact with other bodies and my perception of the environment. For those whose bodies have been modified or are outside of the species-typical spectrum (i.e. amputees) or, in the future, are largely cybernetic, the shape of the mind will change due to the different information coming in from a different body.
Samuel McNerney takes us through some simple associations between haptic response and judgment calls.
• Thinking about the future caused participants to lean slightly forward whilethinking about the past caused participants to lean slightly backwards. Future is Ahead
• Squeezing a soft ball influenced subjects to perceive gender neutral faces as female while squeezing a hard ball influenced subjects to perceive gender neutral faces as male. Female is Soft
• Those who held heavier clipboards judged currencies to be more valuable and their opinions and leaders to be more important. Important is Heavy.
• Subjects asked to think about a moral transgression like adultery or cheating on a test were more likely to request an antiseptic cloth after the experiment than those who had thought about good deeds. Morality is Purity
Studies like these confirm Lakoff’s initial hunch – that our rationality is greatly influenced by our bodies in large part via an extensive system of metaphorical thought.
The entire essay is a must read.
The placebo effect is well known. Tell someone, “Hey, this pill will make your headache go away” and, though the pill is just a sugar pill and has no pain mediating qualities, will indeed make the headache go away in some small percentage of the population. The placebo effect is the power of suggestion in medicine.
The placebo effect has a kind of evil twin, known as the nocebo effect. If I tell you that the placebo pill you are taking will have the side-effects of dry mouth and diarrhea, guess what you’ll be more likely to experience? So here is the problem. With real medicines with real side-effects, those side-effects are more likely to occur if the patient knows about them. So we have ourselves a dilemma here. I as a hypothetical doctor have two options: 1) warn you about all possible side-effects because it is my duty to ensure you are informed so you can care for yourself or 2) not warn you about all possible side-effects because my doing so is a potentially harmful act, worsening your condition. What is a doctor good to do? What would you want your doctor to do?
Penny Sarchet, winner of the Wellcome Trust Science Writing prize, dives into how scientists are working to counter the dreaded nocebo so that being informed doesn’t mean being in pain.
Until recently, we knew very little about how the nocebo effect works. Now, however, a number of scientists are beginning to make headway. A study in February led by Oxford’s Professor Irene Tracey showed that when volunteers feel nocebo pain, corresponding brain activity is detectable in an MRI scanner. This shows that, at the neurological level at least, these volunteers really are responding to actual, non-imaginary, pain. Fabrizio Benedetti, of the University of Turin, and his colleagues have managed to determine one of the neurochemicals responsible for converting the expectation of pain into this genuine pain perception. The chemical is called cholecystokinin and carries messages between nerve cells. When drugs are used to block cholecystokinin from functioning, patients feel no nocebo pain, despite being just as anxious.
The findings of Benedetti and Tracey not only offer the first glimpses into the neurology underlying the nocebo effect, but also have very real medical implications. Benedetti’s work on blocking cholecystokinin could pave the way for techniques that remove nocebo outcomes from medical procedures, as well as hinting at more general treatments for both pain and anxiety. The findings of Tracey’s team carry startling implications for the way we practise modern medicine. By monitoring pain levels in volunteers who had been given a strong opioid painkiller, they found that telling a volunteer the drug had now worn off was enough for a person’s pain to return to the levels it was at before they were given the drug. This indicates that a patient’s negative expectations have the power to undermine the effectiveness of a treatment, and suggests that doctors would do well to treat the beliefs of their patients, not just their physical symptoms.
Doctors have found what is potentially a new way to determine if a patient who appears to be in a permanent vegetative state is actually conscious:
The research team, led by Damian Cruse and Adrian M. Owen of the University of Western Ontario, gave simple instructions to 16 people said to be “vegetative”: each time you hear a beep, imagine squeezing your right hand into a fist. The subjects were given this task and another — hear a beep, wiggle your toes — and ran through up to 200 repetitions.
In healthy people who executed these instructions, the EEG picked up a clear pattern in the premotor cortex, the area of the brain that plans and prepares movements; the electrical flare associated with the hand was distinct from that associated with the toes.
The brains of three of the supposedly vegetative people showed precisely that; the subjects were a 29-year-old, a 35-year-old and a 45-year-old, all men who had been pronounced vegetative three months to two years previously.
Heh.
More than 5,000 people signed a petition demanding that the White House disclose the government’s knowledge of extraterrestrial beings. More than 12,000 signed another petition seeking formal acknowledgment of an extraterrestrial presence engaging with the human race.
In response, Phil Larson of the White House office of science and technology policy wrote that the US government has no evidence that life exists outside Earth, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted any member of the human race.
“In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye,” Larson wrote.
However, he did not close the door entirely on a close encounter of an alien kind, noting that many scientists and mathematicians believe the chances are high that there is life somewhere among the “trillions and trillions of stars in the universe” – although the chances that humans might make contact with non-humans are remote.
So can we petition the White House to disclose the government’s stance on God?
Iraq, Afghanistan, and the decade or so of not-war-but-still-war that’s been going on has not killed large number of soldiers (relative to past conflicts), but has maimed a huge percentage of those returning home from battle. Those returning previously faced few options to repair their injuries. Now, there looks to be some real progress in regenerative muscle medicine:
[Dr. Stephen] Badylak and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine are only one of several groups leading far-out research projects that are part of the Pentagon’s Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM), a massive, $250 million undertaking meant to quickly usher regenerative medicine into the mainstream. Already, military brass have fast-tracked clinical trials for “bone cement” to replace metal screws and plates and accelerated the sophistication of face and hand transplants — a handful of which have now been conducted in the United States.
The tantalizing prospect of regrowing tissue using Badylak’s technique first made headlines in 2007, when he announced the successful regrowth of a small portion of fingertip using a concoction based on cells derived from a pig’s bladder. His approach with muscle tissue is similar: Surgeons start by implanting what’s called an extracellular matrix, a sort of “cellular glue,” whose key components are growth factor proteins from pig bladders. Those proteins trigger the body’s own stem cells to flock to the area and initiate the process of tissue growth and wound repair — which adult muscles normally wouldn’t do. Combined with an intensive rehab program to essentially “exercise” the nascent muscle, the body is able to restore not only basic muscle tissue, but the tendons and nerves that are necessary for function.
“The patient needs to do their part, and that involves a lot of work — we aren’t just putting a cast on the leg and waiting,” Badylak said. “But these soldiers coming in with 60, 70 percent muscle loss, they’ll do anything to get their lives back.”
The only interface that has every really mattered: how do I translate my thoughts into action?
The body can be bypassed.
Project Black Mirror should have a kickstarter soon. Fund them.
Oh my goodness. The happiness this brings.
