Posts Tagged ‘physiology’
“Nanotechnology is an idea that most people simply didn’t believe”*…
Indeed, in the 1980s, even as nanotech pioneer Erik Drexler, a graduate student at MIT at the time, was doing the early work of defining and charting a course for the nascent field, MIT’s departments of electric engineering and computer science refused to approve his Ph.D. topic and plan of study (though ultimately the Media Lab did, and Erik earned his doctorate).
Today the reality– and centrality– of the field are only too apparent and have become the subject of trade and industrial policy… because while the U.S. led in the development of nanotech science, it lags in manufacturing and commercialization. In an excerpt from their book Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries, Ian Fletcher and Marc Fasteau explain…
Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter at scales from a fraction of a nanometer to a few hundred nanometers — sizes between individual atoms and small single-celled organisms — at which it has radically different properties. Nanotech is already significant in many industries. Integrated circuits are a form of nanotech. Other nanotech provides the light, strong composites in aircraft and space vehicles. Still other nanotech powers the solid-state lasers used to transmit information through the internet and the light-emitting diodes in LED light bulbs and flat-screen TVs. Nanotech also makes possible solar cells, the batteries in electric cars, and medical technologies such as vaccines. It is thus the unifying thread of many of today’s most advanced technologies. Unfortunately, America is falling behind.
In the future, nanotech-based quantum computing and communications will lead to more powerful computers, transforming national security and internet commerce by making currently secret communications insecure. Medical nanotechnologies will permit targeted interventions at the cellular level, providing new weapons against diseases, biological weapons, and defenses against them. China is known to be working on these.
Much of the science underpinning these advances was developed at firms and universities in the US. But the huge manufacturing industries built on it are mostly overseas. For example, the organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology Kodak created didn’t save that firm from going bankrupt in 2012. But it did enable lucrative businesses for Korea’s Samsung, to whom Kodak licensed the technology, and LG, which bought Kodak’s entire OLED business in 2009. Today, American firms like Nanosys and Universal Display develop important nanotechnologies, but do not actually manufacture the end products and are thus relatively small.
How did the US get itself into this situation? A major government program, the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), has been funded since 2001, but Washington failed to appreciate the importance of having both a technology and a manufacturing strategy. The prevailing wisdom was that if the academic science was supported, mass manufacturing would follow automatically. By contrast, successful rival nations in nanotech have focused on making these technologies manufacturable at scale, employing every policy tool from R&D subsidies to cheap capital to tariffs. A 2020 National Academies review of the NNI urged that the US recognize that ‘the recent, focused, and in some cases novel commercialization approaches of other nations may be yielding better societal outcomes.’…
A little wonky, but both fascinating and important: “Nanotechnology,” via the invaluable Delanceyplace.com.
(Image above: source)
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As we get small, we might send miniscule birthday greetings to a man who whose work has contributed to the development of medical applications of nanotech: Bert Sakmann; he was born on this date in 1942. A cell physiologist, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Erwin Neher) in 1991 for their work on “the function of single ion channels in cells”– work made possible in part by their invention of the patch clamp.
“Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.”*…
These days, we tend to believe that the heart and the brain are the crucial human organs. It wasn’t always so– in medicine nor, as this article in Hepatology Communications explains, in literature and the arts…
Hepatocentrism was a medical doctrine that considered the liver the center of the whole human being. It originated in ancient populations (Mesopotamic civilization) and persisted in Western countries until the seventeenth century. Hidden references to hepatocentrism may be found in artistic representations and literary works, from the myth of Prometheus in the Greco‐Roman world to the crucifixion iconography throughout the Middle Ages. In the mid‐1600s, fundamental discoveries irrefutably demonstrated the central role of the heart in human physiology, which laid the foundations for creating cardiocentrism, shifting the life’s center from the liver to the heart. The advent of cardiocentrism immediately restricted the importance given to the liver, favoring the heart in the fine arts. Nevertheless, the liver maintained its importance in literature and popular belief as is evidenced by the widely acclaimed literary texts “Snow White” by the Brothers Grimm, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, and “Ode to the Liver” by Pablo Neruda. Our aim is to analyze the most significant artistic representations and literary works that contain references to hepatocentrism, evaluating the changing ideas and beliefs regarding the role and function of the liver throughout history. We want to underline the tight relationship between art and medicine; fine art and literature could be a valuable source for understanding the history of hepatology…
Fascinating: “‘I Miss My Liver.’ Nonmedical Sources in the History of Hepatocentrism,” from @HepCommJournal. (via Robin Sloan)
(Image above: source)
* William James
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As we analyze anatomical art, we might send well-seasoned birthday greetings to Cat Cora; she was born on this date in 1967. A chef, restaurateur, television personality, and cookbook author, she made television history in 2005 as the first female Iron Chef, joining Bobby Flay, Mario Batali and Masaharu Morimoto on the first season of Food Network’s Iron Chef America, ultimately spending 10 seasons on the show.
She sautes a mean liver.
“You are the music while the music lasts”*…
Composer (and Stanford professor) Jonathan Berger explains how music works its magic on our brains…
One evening, some 40 years ago, I got lost in time. I was at a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. During the second movement I had the unnerving feeling that time was literally grinding to a halt. The sensation was powerful, visceral, overwhelming. It was a life-changing moment, or, as it felt at the time, a life-changing eon.
It has been my goal ever since to compose music that usurps the perceived flow of time and commandeers the sense of how time passes. Although I’ve learned to manipulate subjective time, I still stand in awe of Schubert’s unparalleled power. Nearly two centuries ago, the composer anticipated the neurological underpinnings of time perception that science has underscored in the past few decades.
The human brain, we have learned, adjusts and recalibrates temporal perception. Our ability to encode and decode sequential information, to integrate and segregate simultaneous signals, is fundamental to human survival. It allows us to find our place in, and navigate, our physical world. But music also demonstrates that time perception is inherently subjective—and an integral part of our lives. “For the time element in music is single,” wrote Thomas Mann in his novel, The Magic Mountain. “Into a section of mortal time music pours itself, thereby inexpressibly enhancing and ennobling what it fills.”
We conceive of time as a continuum, but we perceive it in discretized units—or, rather, as discretized units. It has long been held that, just as objective time is dictated by clocks, subjective time (barring external influences) aligns to physiological metronomes. Music creates discrete temporal units but ones that do not typically align with the discrete temporal units in which we measure time. Rather, music embodies (or, rather, is embodied within) a separate, quasi-independent concept of time, able to distort or negate “clock-time.” This other time creates a parallel temporal world in which we are prone to lose ourselves, or at least to lose all semblance of objective time.
In recent years, numerous studies have shown how music hijacks our relationship with everyday time…
The fascinating story of “How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time,” in @NautilusMag.
* T. S. Eliot
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As we tangle with tempo, we might spare a thought for Charles Sumner Tainter; he died on this date in 1940. A scientific instrument maker, engineer, and inventor, he is best known for his collaborations with Alexander Graham Bell, and for his significant improvements to Thomas Edison’s phonograph, resulting in the Graphophone— which, beyond bringing music to living rooms around the world by making Edison’s idea commercially feasible, also spawned the Dictaphone.
“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub”*…
I’m not the first person to note that our understanding of ourselves and our society is heavily influenced by technological change – think of how we analogized biological and social functions to clockwork, then steam engines, then computers.
I used to think that this was just a way of understanding how we get stuff hilariously wrong – think of Taylor’s Scientific Management, how its grounding in mechanical systems inflicted such cruelty on workers whom Taylor demanded ape those mechanisms.
But just as interesting is how our technological metaphors illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our society: because there ARE ways in which clockwork, steam power and digital computers resemble bodies and social structures.
Any lens that brings either into sharper focus opens the possibility of making our lives better, sometimes much better.
Bodies and societies are important, poorly understood and deeply mysterious.
Take sleep. Sleep is very weird.
Once a day, we fall unconscious. We are largely paralyzed, insensate, vulnerable, and we spend hours and hours having incredibly bizarre hallucinations, most of which we can’t remember upon waking. That is (objectively) super weird.
But sleep is nearly universal in the animal kingdom, and dreaming is incredibly common too. A lot of different models have been proposed to explain our nightly hallucinatory comas, and while they had some explanatory power, they also had glaring deficits.
Thankfully, we’ve got a new hot technology to provide a new metaphor for dreaming: machine learning through deep neural networks.
DNNs, of course, are a machine learning technique that comes from our theories about how animal learning works at a biological, neural level.
So perhaps it’s unsurprising that DNN – based on how we think brains work – has stimulated new hypotheses on how brains work!
Erik P Hoel is a Tufts University neuroscientist. He’s a proponent of something called the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis (OBH).
To understand OBH, you first have to understand how overfitting works in machine learning: “overfitting” is what happens when a statistical model overgeneralizes.
For example, if Tinder photos of queer men are highly correlated with a certain camera angle, then a researcher might claim to have trained a “gaydar model” that “can predict sexual orientation from faces.”
That’s overfitting (and researchers who do this are assholes).
Overfitting is a big problem in ML: if all the training pics of Republicans come from rallies in Phoenix, the model might decide that suntans are correlated with Republican politics – and then make bad guesses about the politics of subjects in photos from LA or Miami.
To combat overfitting, ML researchers sometimes inject noise into the training data, as an effort to break up these spurious correlations.
And that’s what Hoel thinks are brains are doing while we sleep: injecting noisy “training data” into our conceptions of the universe so we aren’t led astray by overgeneralization.
Overfitting is a real problem for people (another word for “overfitting” is “prejudice”)…
Sleeping, dreaming, and the importance of a nightly dose of irrationality– Corey Doctorow (@doctorow) explains: “Dreaming and overfitting,” from his ever-illuminating newsletter, Pluralistic. Eminently worthy of reading in full.
(Image above: Gontzal García del Caño, CC BY-NC-SA, modified)
* Shakespeare, Hamlet
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As we nod off, we might send fully-oxygenated birthday greetings to Corneille Jean François Heymans; he was born on this date in 1892. A physiologist, he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1938 for showing how blood pressure and the oxygen content of the blood are measured by the body and transmitted to the brain via the nerves and not by the blood itself, as had previously been believed.
“Count your blessings, but count your calories too”*…
We’re skating into that time year… the onslaught of celebratory meals and Holiday parties that promise to test our waistbands. But help– or at least a nagging caution– is at hand. The app Calorific uses simple, pastel images to reveal how much of virtually any food adds up to 200 calories.
From God’s condiment…
…to rabbit food…
More at “What 200 Calories of Every Food Looks Like.”
* Erma Bombeck
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As we go down for the count, we might send well-digested birthday greetings to William Beaumont; he was born on this date in 1785. An American army surgeon, Beaumont was the first person to observe and study human digestion as it occurs in the stomach. As a young medic stationed on Mackinac Island in Michigan, Beaumont was asked to treat a shotgun wound “more than the size of the palm of a man’s hand” (as Beaumont wrote). The patient, Alexis St. Martin, survived, but was left with a permanent opening into his stomach from the outside. Over the next few years, Dr. Beaumont used this crude fistula to sample gastric secretions. He identified hydrochloric acid as the principal agent in gastric juice and recognized its digestive and bacteriostatic functions. Many of his conclusions about the regulation of secretion and motility remain valid to this day.
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