TheBigUpshot

Alert reader Robert “sent in” an article from Neuron this month (actually, he just walked over and showed it to me since we’re in the same lab). It is in keeping with the string of “brain chip” articles that The Big Upshot has been pleased to bring to the table. Miyawaki et. al. report in their article, “Visual Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity using a Combination of Multiscale Local Image Decoders” that they have successfully used fMRI brain scanning to reconstruct a person’s visual field.

Let me be perfectly clear. The Japanese can scan a person’s brain and determine what that person is seeing. How long before they can tell what a person is dreaming?

My grandmother told me that, years ago, people were worried about being hooked up to an electroenceephalogram. They would ask “you can’t read what I’m thinking, can you?”

Of course not. The EEG was far too low-resolution. But this… well… you don’t have anything to hide, right?

To be fair, the reconstituted image quality is not great. So at best these dream images would be of voyeur-tabloid quality. I don’t know if that makes the whole scenario better or worse.

-Peter

P.S. Here’s a PBF comic that predicted the whole mess:

Tags: Humor, Science by Peter
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This article at Esquire paints a fascinating picture of Dr. Mark Roth. The way this article tells the story, Dr. Roth went into the Fringe and came back with an interesting research subject. He figured out how to put mice into a state of near suspended animation.

Another scientist, Dr. Luca Turin gave a TED talk about the Science of Scent. I found it fascinating for several reasons, not the least of which is it iconoclasm. The accepted view on receptor-ligand interactions (that happen when you smell something) is based on the shape of the molecule. Dr. Turin suggests something quite different. He suggests that the interaction is (in a sense) spectroscopic/vibrational. And it sounds vaguely like some ideas from homeopathy which are pretty fringey.

That leads to the my real topic for today: what is to be done with an idea that is interesting, worth investigating, but that sounds like quackery? The danger of the fringe is that the majority is crap. It’s the kind of thing that will capture a scientist’s imagination and take them on a never-ending wild goose chase. That’s called pathological science. And it’s worth avoiding. The people who chase it get a bad reputation.

These two gentlemen, Dr. Roth and Dr. Turin risked madness and explored potentially career-ending hypotheses and came out on the far side successful. As Morgan Freeman put it, they crawled through a river of crap and came out clean on the other side.

-Peter

Tags: Science by Peter
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So, according to this guy, Prof Makoto Tominaga, the wasabi receptor is the same as the alkaline/ammonia receptor. So… does that mean lemon lysol a good substitute on sushi?

“It has the first report showing molecular entity for the alkali-sensor. You could feel pain when you eat too much WASABI with Japanese Sushi. We found that this pain sensation is the same with that caused by ammonia”, said Prof Tominaga.

For those of you who have never had whiff of ammonia or tasted wasabi, there is a remarkable, nasal clearing similarity. I had read some time ago that the active chemical was an isothiocyanate and wikipedia backs me up. I gather that info comes from Wasabia. In any case, don’t snort it. If you really want to see a bad decision in action, feel free to watch the mistakes of others.

-Peter

Tags: Humor, Science by Peter
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The Chronicle of Higher Education (an institution known for its sweeping intellectualism) started an article with the following assertion: Society is growing increasingly nervous about some of the applications of brain science. Frankly, I doubt society cares. Oh, there are a few crazies out there who worry that implantable ID chips are a forerunner to brain chips. But they are crazy. Normal people don’t worry about the implications of bioethics. That’s science fiction.

What is on the normal person’s radar? Tatoos.

We have a world divided in three parts:

1. Those worried about brain implants and the coming End Times (Did you know that Obama is the Antichrist*? It’s True™!)
2. Those actually building brain implants (also, killing babies* and hastening the coming End Times*)
3. And those who don’t care.

It’s nice to have a choice.

-The Jester

Truth is a registered trademark of our publisher*
*not actually true

Tags: Humor, Science by Jester
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The film “Unbreakable” builds on the premise that there may exist a human who is virtually invincible, but who does not know of his ability. After all, who would want to put that to the test?

It is an interesting premise from a  scientific standpoint. How might one go about finding such a rare case? It’s a different take on the so-called “Black Swan Problem”. If we study the averages, we come out with a picture of “how things are” that works most of the time. For instance, the average person’s temperature is 98.6 deg F. If a person has a temperature of 100 deg F, you would suspect something is wrong with them; that they are sick. For most people it would be true. But I think that it is likely that there is someone out there (in a population of 6 billion) whose normal body temperature is 100 degrees F.

Here’s another one. Let’s take it for granted that someone, somewhere, is totally immune to HIV. How would you go about looking for them? Certainly, it would be unethical to go trying to infect random people and examining the cases for whom your attempt fails. But it would be OK to look at high-risk individuals who (statistically speaking) should have been infected but were not.

Here’s the thing: that takes a lot of data. A lot of data requires a lot of money. No two ways about it. But given that, we can do some amazing things. The old way to look for a cure was to study the average, normal disease progression (that takes a lot less data). Once it is understood, an appropriate intervention can be made (drug, lifestyle, diet, etc.). It worked for scurvy, it worked for Malaria (to a degree) and it worked for erectile dysfunction (go Pfizer!). This new way is different. This suggests that to cure a disease, we should take a huge collection of data, sift through and find the cases where a cure has arisen spontaneously. Then, understand this spontaneous cure and propagate it.

Via slashdot, here are two stories that purport to do just that. In 2004, doctors looked for people with natural immunity to HIV. In 2006, a man was given a bone marrow transplant to treat leukaemia; the bone marrow donor was a known carrier of such natural immunity. The bone marrow recipient was HIV free as of 2008 without anti-retro-virals. Bone marrow transplants do not constitute a viable treatment for AIDS (with a reported 30% mortality rate). But it’s a start of a whole different paradigm.

-Peter

Tags: Science by Peter
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