July 2005 Archives

A team at the University of California, San Diego have developed a cheap way of testing blood or other biological samples for particular proteins and eventually even genes. At present, the machines to identify molecules in biological samples cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. When CD's are played on a computer CD drive, the computer automatically notes the errors, which are normally thought of as a bad thing. In this system, you inkjet print an alcohol-based mixture of protein receptors onto the CD from a regular printer with a special cartridge. You dunk it in the biological sample, clean it, and then play it on the computer. The computer counts an error every time a protein molecule binds to the surface and blocks the laser in the CD drive. These protein molecules are glued to the surface, so they don't wash off when you clean the disk. You can literally hear the molecules, as they've tried playing music CDs to hear the errors. For example they were able to detect an enzyme that turns starch into sugar. They had someone spit onto a receptor-printed CD of Beethoven's Fifth symphony, clean it up, and then listen for the differences in the music. This is a little like the artists who grow fungus on their music CDs and photo CDs and then play them for the groovy results of lasers being diffracted by fungus microfibres growing from spilt beer. For more accurate readings the team have developed software to run on linux home PCs, comparing the errors and bytes on the CD before and after exposure to a biological sample. They plan to release the software as open source free to download from the net, so that anybody can play with it.

At the University of California, Berkeley, scientists Stanley, Li and Dan can jack into brains and extract video.

This is a step towards a future portrayed in the movie "Strange Days" and the movie "Brainstorm", where not only vision, but all your other sensory experiences could be measured, recorded, and played back using superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDS. Using a SQUID means that unlike the Californians, you could pick up tiny specific brain signals without surgery, wearing a helmet that can pick up the weak magnetic fields. SQUID technology that good is still science fiction.

In 1999 the team recorded the electrical signals from one hundred and seventy-seven neurons in the brains of cats selected for good vision. They recorded signals from a part of the cat's thalamus, which integrates all of the brain's sensory input, while they showed the cats sixteen second movies of indoor and outdoor scenes; trees and faces. By applying mathematical filtering software to the signals, they could generate movies of what the cat had actually seen. The limitations of the early technology meant that the movies lack colour and were blurrier than what the cat actually saw, they've turned out to be stunningly faithful to the original movies. They weren't looking at the cat's memories, but at the signals that were being processed by the cat's brain from its eyes as it watched the movies. Seeing what the cat saw.

In 1999 they were only able to look at ten neurons at a time and so they couldn't reconstruct the video in real-time, but this is an amazing beginning. Sampling more cells will give a clearer picture and colour information. From the structure of cat's eyes we can guess that they see less of the red and brown than we see, but more of the purple and green. The team have since been recording and decoding other senses and also looking at sending back encoded signals directly to the nervous system. The future of this technology could see people using their own eyes and brain as a video camera. You will literally see the director's vision of the movie.

For those cat lovers out there, I can assure you that although the experiment might have looked like something out of "A Clockwork Orange", the cats were gently anesthetized, and didn't suffer any pain or distress.

We now know what raw experience looks like inside the brain of another being. This means that entire philosophies of mind that were based on the idea that internal experience would forever be private and therefore not subject to objective investigation, have been rendered obsolete. We will be able to see how other people look at things. The researchers are also working on brain signals controlling prosthetics such as an artificial larynx for people who have lost their voice-box to cancer.

They are working on a wireless brain recording system based on surgically implanting electrodes and a tiny radio transmitter. The raw signals would be picked up by a receiver and decoded by computer. Their first use of this will be to record the complex environmental information that rats sense from their whiskers brushing against things as they move. Recording their sense of touch.

This technology has the potential to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and mobility to the paralyzed and injured.

Being able to record and play back movies, sounds and maybe one day touch, straight to the brain could be the ultimate theatre experience.

The Sea Gypsy Moken people who live among the islands of Thailand and Myanmar can see twice as clearly underwater as anybody else, but without needing goggles. They have normal vision above the water. Anna Gislén, of Sweden's Lund University studied the nomadic hunter-gatherers who dive for tiny shellfish and other food from the ocean floor at depths of down to twenty-three metres underwater. The children are able to pick out small brown clams from amongst small brown stones that the Swedish scientists were unable to see even with goggles. Underwater, the human eye normally needs an extra layer of air from goggles to see anything more than a blur. This is because the light bends more travelling from air into the eye than from water into the eye. The Moken people have learned to control the muscles around their lenses so that they can voluntarily bend their lenses beyond what untrained people can do. More remarkably they have conscious control of the size of their pupils, and they contract their pupils to a tiny dot to better focus the light underwater. Its just like getting a better picture from a camera by using a smaller aperature, or hole for the light. Back in Sweden, they were able to teach school-children the tricks of shrinking their pupils and bending their lenses more, with about six months of training. The researchers fail to mention that the other time your eyes' pupil size changes, is when you are more interested in someone - its a social signal. The dilated pupils of someone who is interested, is more attractive. Learning the Moken skill of being able to consciously control your pupils to dilate when you want, could give you an edge not only underwater, but in flirting.

How to hatch the dinosaur eggs in your oatmeal.

Watch the Eggs hatch!
The dinosaurs are hard candy.

I have put the first link on the blog to a file I've uploaded to archive.org via ourmedia.org. Ourmedia.org offer free unlimited storage and high bandwidth for stuff you own the copyright to, or which is public domain. Ideal for podcasts. I'd like to do this for my personal stuff like Light Fission and also for the weekly Discovery podcasts. The only problem is that they use Drupal as a content management system, and its XML generation for podcasting is broken. So we've tried using dircaster.php instead. The problem is that ourmedia.org has a unique way of storing every single uploaded file. Instead of the traditional and functional system of a directory for the user, and then files under that, or under directories under that, ourmedia.org generates a NEW directory based on the Creator and the Title of the file. This means you can't use an automated system like dircaster.php to scan the directory for MP3 files and create the XML for us. There isn't a directory of just Discovery files to scan. There isn't a directory of just my files to scan. Instead there is a general downloads directory and every single individual file has its private directory under this. I'm stumped as to how to automate a remote generation of the podcast XML with such a lack of structure. The ourmedia tech guys assure me that whenever it is that they upgrade their hardware, the new server will have software that will generate XML for podcasting. Its a shame, because ourmedia.org offers everything else we need, including a way for any of the Discovery team to upload a show for podcast. We just don't have any way to automate a podcast XML file from these strange directory structures. Ultimately, if the ourmedia.org XML doesn't happen soon, I'm going to have to find some way of searching ourmedia.org by way of username and somehow extracting the unique URLs of all the associated MP3 and ASF files. Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated

I really like having little spots on the blog that come up with something fun and different every time you refresh the page. I've added a random photo from my flickr collection on the main index page, and random GoogleAd link words on my individual entry pages. I noticed that even Cosmos magazine are using Google Ads when I did a search recently to see what publicity was on the net about Science On Tap. So I thought I might play around with GoogleAds again, even though I didn't make any money at all with them the last time. I've discovered they can be unintentionally fun. I've put them against recommendation, at the bottom of the individual entry pages, so that you don't have to look at them if you don't want to. However, when I use the "link units", Google's search engine picks out a little haiku sentence for me based on what the algorythm thinks my entry is about. The fact that none of the entries about Cosmos summon any Cosmos ads should tell you how hit and miss it can be with my MoveableType-based blog. For my Futurian report "Technological Singularity is a buzzword", GoogleAds gave the line: Islam Invented Christianity Science Fiction Another Futurian report "Length is Important" was about a meeting on the topic of the rise and fall of galactic empires. The first Google link? "Black writers". The link ads words are picked from a pool thats partly determined by the content, and partly determined by the advertisers preferences, and partyly determined at random. So some pages will have a different set of link words every time you look, and some will be exactly the same. For my Sexy Lettuce article, it just gave up and went blank.

Cosmos magazine have printed this up for the Science on Tap Immortality talk Thursday night. I worked at the Culgoora Solar Observatory which is on the same grounds as the Paul Wilde Observatory, and I see they are finally putting their images on the web in real time. I still can't find the beautiful colour image of the Type II solar event I observed in 1992 that IPS used as the image for their advertising poster that year. Culgoora is the observatory where my back was permanently injured in one of those astronomy accidents. I met Paul Wilde's niece, who expressed surprize that they've named the Observatory after him, as he's still alive. Immortality by name before you're dead? No traditions are sacred.

Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorin has solved the puzzle of why lettuce sap has been used in ancient Rome to dampen sexual desire, and in ancient Egypt to inflame sexual desire.

In ancient Greece and Rome, the milky sap from lettuce has been used as a sedative and painkiller. In the 1st Century AD, the Roman army used it to drive out sexual dreams of soldiers. Pliny the Elder wrote about its ability to dampen sexual desire a hundred years later. However archaelogical evidence also shows that it was used as an aphrodisac in ancient Egypt, in an offering to the fertility and sexuality god Min. For more than a hundred years archaeologists have wondered why a vegetable used to calm dreams was associated with the exuberant sexuality of Min.

Samorin tested the hormone-like phytochemicals in lettuce sap, and found that the effect depends on the dose. The milky sap comes from cutting the stem of the plant.

A small dose of one gram of lettuce sap, causes the calming and pain killing effects to appear, because of the presence of lactucin and lactucopicrin.

At the higher doses of two to three grams, the stimulating effects of cocaine-like tropane alkaloids dominate, acting like an aphrodisiac.

So the Romans had a small amount of lettuce sap to calm down, and the Egyptians used a larger dose of wild lettuce sap, to get excited.

Further tests are needed to confirm Samorin's results at of the Civic Museum in Rovereto. Luckily Lettuce is legal, grows wild in several countries, and is safe to eat.

The fliers just arrived from rachel at Cosmos magazine for this week's Science on Tap: A Beginners Guide to Immortality. I'll be the philosophical physicist who wants the science fiction to be made a reality on a panel with public health expert Stephen Leeder and biochemist Mark Jones. Its not enough to cure all fatal diseases, you've got to be able to survive assassination attempts as well. As the transhumanists would say; we need a backup! Wouldn't that be the ultimate life assurance policy? In the event of involuntary death, we'll resurrect you.

Actual physical changes in the brain caused by hypnosis have been shown by Amir Raz and his colleagues at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Over the last few decades, scientific study has explored how hypnosis can change memory, and pain perception. Hypnosis has been both a boon for pain control, and a danger with false memory syndrome. This new research suggests that hypnosis can also make it easier to solve certain types of problems.

Raz has hypnotised his subjects and then put them into a functional magnetic resonance imager.
He had sixteen subjects, of whom eight were easily hypnotisable, and eight were not. They were to take a test after being hypnotised.

The volunteers were hypnotised for twenty-five minutes, and told that when they later heard a cue, such as a coughing sound, they would see the printed words as gibberish and only be able to focus on the ink.

Researchers then brought them out of their trance state, and ten minutes later asked them to take the Stroop test while in a brain scanner.

The Stroop test has subjects name the colour of the ink of letters that spell out different colours. So that "Blue" might be spelled out in red ink. This kind of problem is known as a "cognitive conflict", and makes your brain work harder. Your brain has to use the anterior cingulate cortex to monitor the conflict, and plan for your future actions, as well as call on the visual areas and memory to identify the colour. It takes extra time. Other researchers have previously suggested that the anterior cingulate cortex is the part of the brain affected by hypnosis.

In the test, the easily hypnotizable individuals had better accuracy and quicker reaction times compared to the volunteers who were less responsive to hypnosis, and their brain scans showed reduced activity in the visual areas and the anterior cingulate cortex.

This gives a lot of support to those who have faced skepticism for years over the reality of hypnosis as an altered brain state, and not just some game played by hypnotist and a subject who just pretends to be hypnotised. Magician James Randi has been promoting this idea for decades, based largely on the stunts of stage hypnotists. Magicians Penn and Teller have debunked hypnosis on their TV show "Bullshit", despite admitting that there are some aspects that they can't explain with their theory that the subject is just following instructions and acting.

Amir Raz says "Words can form suggestions, and suggestions can have very, very strong effects on neurological activity".

Biopsychology newsletter
" Scans Show How Hypnosis Affects Brain Activity" Scientific American June 28