Fun thought of the day: you can program an ant colony by laying down pheromone trails in a prearranged pattern. This idea reminds me a little bit of Logo, the programming language with the turtle.
Programming Ant Colonies
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Category Archives: Biology
Computer-Assisted Diagnosis is a bit strange
In that we are taking techniques which were developed to accommodate our human desire to deal with problems by looking at them, then trying to train computers, which have no innate sense of vision and which could be using any type of sensor imaginable, to understand visual data designed for human use.
…Just a thought.
If my diagnostic company succeeds, I do plan to pursue research into new non-visual sensing technology which is more appropriate for computerized detection. The future of diagnostics is digital.
Cold season actually begins in August
Anecdotal, but this is something I’ve seen for years. As an added piece of totally non-rigorous evidence (especially because including Australia throws all of my northern hemisphere seasonal biases off), Google seems to agree:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22runny+nose%22+%22sore+throat%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2010&sort=0
Diaphragm FES for ALS
Though restoring control of every muscle in the body to patients with ALS is far too invasive for current technology to suffice, electrodes on the motor strip and pons, connected to receivers in the lungs and diaphragm seem like they would suffice to prevent further deaths from the disease. And perhaps even tracheotomies.
Is there some reason I’m missing that this wouldn’t work? Because if I can’t find one, I may very well partner with a neurologist and pursue it. I certainly have the neuroinformatics and signal processing backgrounds; I know that this scope and granularity of FES is currently well within the range of what is technologically possible.
Betalactamasease
Some bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics via enzymes which break components of the antibiotic down (others just evolve completely different strategies to perform their biological functions, which render the antibiotics irrelevant). Trivial idea: subvert this by administering adjuvants which prevent these enzymes from working!
A thought on evolution and genetic algorithms
The key to creating an “intelligent” genetic algorithm is giving it “competition” from other genetic algorithms which also “evolve”. The most “intelligent” evolutionary behavior is seen when one organism exerts a selective pressure on another, not when the fitness function is static.
Thoughts on the Anthropocene Extinction
While it is true that humanity is killing off species at an alarming rate, I don’t think this trend will continue indefinitely. The previous mass extinctions were driven (or at least initiated) for the most part by external events to the ecosystem, with reductions in the sustaining energy of the ecosystem and other consequences lasting for millions of years.
The rate at which we destroy ecosystems, on the other hand, is kept in check by our own population. Unless we pass some dire tipping point and cause the destruction to spiral out of our control, we will eventually hit a population limit, beyond which the planet can’t sustain us. It’s possible that we have already passed this limit; in that case, much like the current recession was caused because people borrowed money that didn’t actually exist and corrected by a return to the amount of real money left in the economy, the human population will be forced to decline, either through some sort of saturated-ecology problem (hunger is a big one; war could also be considered a limiting factor when resources become scarce) or simply through lower birth rates. Either way, the current mass extinction will not be as dire as the previous ones because, even at a faster rate of extinction, it will last for a much shorter period of time.
If I’m wrong and Earth becomes an ecumenopolis, it would instead bode well for humanity’s continuous expansion to other planets and we would nevertheless have the room to save what species remained extant.
…Barring a runaway process which takes matters entirely out of our hands. Watch those greenhouse gases!
Possible factor toward all-cause mortality reduction with vitamin D intake
One of the all-cause mortality reductions of vitamin D may stem from the fact that it is synthesized from a cholesterol precursor, thus removing it from the bloodstream. Supplementing would not have this benefit.
This hypothesis is testable by following a group of sunlight-synthesized vitamin D patients and comparing them against a group which receives less sunlight exposure and supplements the difference.
Treating the toxin rather than the bacterium which produces it.
One treatment which would probably be fairly effective to counteract an infection with an antibiotic-resistant bacterium which causes symptoms by secreting a toxin (such as pathogenic E. Coli which releases a Shiga toxin) is to induce an immune response (via immunoglobulin) against the toxin rather than the bacterium for the duration of the traditional symptomatic period. This should alleviate the symptoms as long as treatment is followed, and when the treatment ends the underlying infection will have been fought off by the immune system. Thus patients would be technically infected (and infectious) but would not exhibit symptoms caused by the toxin.
Here’s a study which demonstrates that it is possible to induce an immune response against the Shiga toxin in mice:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC321607/
Seeding localized immunosuppressants
I’ve been thinking of ways to produce long-term localized immunosuppression recently in order to help people with autoimmune diseases. What I’ve dreamed up this time is a device similar to a radioactive “seed” used for prostate cancer, but delivering an inhibitor of cellular signaling (take your pick of interleukins) in direct response to a high concentration of inflammatory cytokines. By carefully controlling the dose in response to environmental conditions, it should be possible to produce a strong localized immunosuppressive response without too much of the drug entering systemic circulation.
Corticosteroids aren’t an option – one challenge is to find something that can be used long-term with few side effects.