So we smell in stereo now? Have they not been telling us for years we do not? Did no one actually bother to check?

When the scent of morning coffee wafts past the nose, the brain encodes which nostril it enters, new research shows. Integrating information from both nostrils might help us to identify the odour. The results were published today in Current Biology.

A region of the brain called the piriform cortex, which spans the brain’s two hemispheres, is known to receive and process information about scents. However, scientists were unsure whether the two sides of the piriform cortex react to smells in unison or independently.

To investigate this question, researchers recruited people with epilepsy who were undergoing brain surgery to identify the areas of their brains responsible for their seizures. Participants were awake for the surgery, during which the scientists delivered scents to one or both nostrils through tiny tubes that reached roughly one centimetre into each nostril. The authors took advantage of electrodes placed in the study participants’ brains to take readings of activity in the piriform cortex.

In reality, scents rarely hit only one nostril. Instead, they’re likely to enter one nostril slightly ahead of the other. “The question to ask is, well, can the brain exploit these potential differences?” says Naz Dikecligil, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and a co-author of the study.

The findings suggest that the brain does make use of the different arrival times. When an odour was delivered to a single nostril, the side of the brain closest to that nostril reacted first, and a reaction then followed in the opposite side of the brain. “There seem to be actually two odour representations, corresponding to odour information coming from each nostril,” Dikecligil says.

When the researchers provided a scent to both nostrils simultaneously, they saw that both sides of the brain recognized the scent faster than either did when it was delivered through only one nostril. This suggests that the two sides do synergize to some degree, even though one lags behind the other in encoding a scent, Dikecligil says.
 
Tongue-twisters and AI work as a sobriety test

They trained a machine learning algorithm on people's voice, gave them some booze and the machine could tell if they had been drinking. It is interesting, and I could see an app in it, but I do not really get how it can have the applications claimed in the writeup:

Dr Brian Suffoletto, the first author of a study from Stanford University, said the approach has a number of potential future applications. “The most obvious one is as a form of ignition lock on cars which would not allow someone to start their car unless they could pass the ‘voice challenge’ which could be used in certain high-risk workplaces like school bus driver or heavy machine operator to ensure public safety.

“Another application could be in restaurants or bars so a bartender can know when to cut someone off.”

How it would work for "high risk workplaces" I do not get. If people are willing to turn up sloshed they will be willing to keep a recording of the tongue-twisters on their phone. How are bartenders going to get the baseline reading, make everyone do tongue-twisters when they get to the bar? Also they let their guard drop, they specifically talked about cars, and then said buses and heavy machinery. They want to put it everywhere.

Spoiler Abstract :
Objective:
Devices such as mobile phones and smart speakers could be useful to remotely identify voice alterations associated with alcohol intoxication that could be used to deliver just-in-time interventions, but data to support such approaches for the English language are lacking. In this controlled laboratory study, we compare how well English spectrographic voice features identify alcohol intoxication.

Method:
A total of 18 participants (72% male, ages 21–62 years) read a randomly assigned tongue twister before drinking and each hour for up to 7 hours after drinking a weight-based dose of alcohol. Vocal segments were cleaned and split into 1-second windows. We built support vector machine models for detecting alcohol intoxication, defined as breath alcohol concentration > .08%, comparing the baseline voice spectrographic signature to each subsequent timepoint and examined accuracy with 95% confidence intervals (CIs).

Results:
Alcohol intoxication was predicted with an accuracy of 98% (95% CI [97.1, 98.6]); mean sensitivity = .98; specificity = .97; positive predictive value = .97; and negative predictive value = .98.

Conclusions:
In this small, controlled laboratory study, voice spectrographic signatures collected from brief recorded English segments were useful in identifying alcohol intoxication. Larger studies using varied voice samples are needed to validate and expand models.


Paper Writeup
 
Why would bar tenders want to do a baseline reading ?
The way I read it you need a baseline soder reading for it to work (probably multiple), you cannot run it on a stranger. The paper is paywalled so I cannot be sure.
 
This isn't news, exactly, but a guy on a radio show I'm listening to just made the observation that there are an estimated 1 sextillion planets inside their star's "Goldilocks Zone" out there (I think he meant in the Milky Way, but I'm not sure). As he put it, that's one billion trillions. Or a trillion billions, if that's somehow easier to digest. A billion of something is about at the edge of my ability to grasp. A trillion is close to being a nonsense word, for me. If the Drake Equation or something like it is taken to be plausible, then the multi-planetary, multi-species space operas like Star Trek and Star Wars would each represent a tiny pinprick on the skin of the universe. In Star Trek canon, the collection of species we mainly see are confined to what they call the 'Alpha Quadrant', implying that they've explored only 25% of explorable space. But if the Drake Equation is anywhere in the neighborhood of accurate, and if the universe has a sextillion planets inside their star's Goldilocks Zone, then Star Trek's 'Alpha Quadrant' wouldn't even be .05% of the explorable universe, nvm 25%. I mean, how many intelligent species are there in Star Trek? A hundred? Two hundred? The Wikipedia page on the Drake Equation notes that, at the first SETI conference with Drake and Carl Sagan, the low estimate of the number of intelligent species was 1,000, and it went up to 100,000,000. Even our most ridiculous sci-fi - the stuff that's really just high-tech high-fantasy, with basically no science in it anymore - doesn't get its arms around the scope of the universe. Every fictional depiction of the greater galaxy in pop culture - Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, Stargate, BSG, Doctor Who, the Hitchhiker's Guide, etc, etc - could all be true simultaneously and we'd still only have scratched the surface. God-like beings like Time Lords, Magratheans and the Q Continuum could all be out there and stll have never met one another. The most implausible thing about all of these stories may be that Humans are always at the center of them. :lol:
 
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This isn't news, exactly, but a guy on a radio show I'm listening to just made the observation that there are an estimated 1 sextillion planets inside their star's "Goldilocks Zone" out there (I think he meant in the Milky Way, but I'm not sure). As he put it, that's one billion trillions. Or a trillion billions, if that's somehow easier to digest. A billion of something is about at the edge of my ability to grasp. A trillion is close to being a nonsense word, for me. If the Drake Equation or something like it is taken to be plausible, then the multi-planetary, multi-species space operas like Star Trek and Star Wars would each represent a tiny pinprick on the skin of the universe. In Star Trek canon, the collection of species we mainly see are confined to what they call the 'Alpha Quadrant', implying that they've explored only 25% of explorable space. But if the Drake Equation is anywhere in the neighborhood of accurate, and if the universe has a sextillion planets inside their star's Goldilocks Zone, then Star Trek's 'Alpha Quadrant' wouldn't even be .05% of the explorable universe, nvm 25%. I mean, how many intelligent species are there in Star Trek? A hundred? Two hundred? The Wikipedia page on the Drake Equation notes that, at the first SETI conference with Drake and Carl Sagan, the low estimate of the number of intelligent species was 1,000, and it went up to 100,000,000. Even our most ridiculous sci-fi - the stuff that's really just high-tech high-fantasy, with basically no science in it anymore - doesn't get its arms around the scope of the universe. Every fictional depiction of the greater galaxy in pop culture - Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, Stargate, BSG, Doctor Who, the Hitchhiker's Guide, etc, etc - could all be true simultaneously and we'd still only have scratched the surface.
There are 100 to 400 billion stars in the milky way, so ~10^11. Sextillion is 10^21. This puts the stars in the observable universe at 10^24, so one planet in the goldilocks zone per thousand stars sounds reasonable.

That does basically rule out every fictional depiction of the greater galaxy in pop culture, if you have FTL travel the observable universe is far larger than that, by whatever "warp factor" the universe has.
 
Individual base editing in specific tissues in the real world

It is a milestone for genomic medicine, but I am not convinced it is not a step too fast. I am not really up with the science of this, but there a few things more potentially carcinogenic than the CRISPR scissors if you do not get the Cas guide just right every time. However this is really cool, the precision that this is achieving is incredible.

First trial of ‘base editing’ in humans lowers cholesterol — but raises safety concerns

The first trial in humans of the precise gene-editing technique known as base editing has shown promising results for keeping cholesterol levels in check.

The approach injects into people a treatment called VERVE-101, which permanently deactivates a gene in the liver called PCSK9. That gene controls the level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or ‘bad’ cholesterol — a key contributor to heart disease.

Verve Therapeutics, the biotechnology firm in Boston, Massachusetts, behind the treatment, reported that a one-time injection of VERVE-101 reduced the amount of LDL in the blood by up to 55% in its trial participants, who had a condition that causes lifelong high LDL.

“It’s a tremendous scientific milestone because it’s the first time that they’ve been able to show that a single base pair of DNA editing, using CRISPR technology in humans, has had a clinical effect,” says Ritu Thamman, a cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. “From the clinical point of view, it has the potential to open a new way of treating coronary artery disease” that could involve people receiving a ‘one and done’ treatment rather than taking daily pills.

But the findings have also drawn criticism. Two serious adverse events in the trial, including a death, have raised safety concerns, and Verve’s share price plummeted by nearly 40% following the results’ release despite their promise.

VERVE-101 consists of two RNA molecules packaged in a lipid nanoparticle — an mRNA molecule that edits adenine bases in DNA and a ‘guide RNA’ molecule to recognize PCSK9. After the treatment is injected, liver cells take up these nanoparticles, and once inside cells they make their way into the nucleii. Then, the base editor makes a single-letter change to the PCSK9 gene sequence, swapping an adenosine base with a guanine base. This turns off the gene and prevents liver cells from producing PCSK9 proteins.

Spoiler :
Verve reported the findings, interim results from a phase 1b trial conducted in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, at a meeting of the American Heart Association in Philadelphia on 12 November. It will continue its trial next year in the United States, after receiving approval last month from the US Food and Drug Administration to enroll participants there.

Precise edits

By permanently switching off the PCSK9, VERVE-101 affects the enzymes encoded by the gene. These enzymes ordinarily prompt receptors for LDL-cholesterol, which are located on cell surfaces, to move inside the cell. With fewer available receptors to bind LDL, its levels in the blood increase. But when PCSK9 is deactivated, the enzyme loses function, reducing LDL levels.

The treatment aims to protect against heart attacks and strokes. “If the blood LDL-cholesterol is very low lifelong, it’s very hard to get a heart attack,” says Sekar Kathiresan, Verve’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

Dosing strategy

Verve trialled the treatment in 10 people who had a life-threatening inherited disease called heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH), which causes high LDL levels from birth. The condition, which affects more than three million people in the United States and Europe, can cause premature heart attacks, sometimes in childhood. The participants also suffered from severe advanced coronary disease and took maximum doses of lipid-lowering tablets such as statins.

Base editing uses CRISPR-Cas9 machinery to make very precise edits to a gene — chemically changing single nucleotide bases — without breaking the double strands of DNA as other gene-editing approaches do. The technique was developed by a team led by chemical biologist David Liu at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2018.

Before receiving VERVE-101, the study participants had an average LDL level of 193 mg/dL. After 28 days, participants treated with either a high or low dose of VERVE-101 had their PCSK9 levels reduced by up to 84%. Their LDL-cholesterol levels dropped by up to 55% .

That drop is large compared with conventional treatments. “We don’t see that with the statin — we never see that much of a difference,” says Thamman.

The 55% reduction of LDL persisted for 6 months in participants who received the higher dose of VERVE-101. In a preclinical study with monkeys, LDL-cholesterol reduction lasted 2.5 years after a single dose of the treatment.

“We learned that we get durable LDL lowering with the gene-editing strategy. This has never been done before,” said Karol Watson, a cardiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, at a 12 November press briefing announcing the findings.

Safety concerns

The treatment came with some side effects: participants experienced brief flu-like symptoms, including fever, headaches and body aches, as well as a temporary increase in liver enzymes, which returned to normal within days.

But two more serious events have raised some concerns. Two out of the ten participants experienced cardiovascular events, including one who died from a heart attack five weeks after receiving VERVE-101 another who had a heart attack after one day. An independent safety board concluded that the first event was expected in people who had such advanced heart disease and was not related to treatment. The board recommended the trial’s continuation of trial enrolment without changes to the drug protocol.

Some analysts blamed the sharp drop in Verve’s share price on the safety concerns, and say that potentially risky gene therapies are a hard sell for diseases that have working conventional treatments. Gene therapies should be prioritized for conditions that have no available treatments, say some researchers.

“The sentiment for editing when there are viable alternatives is going to be a challenge. Time will tell if non-rare is viable,” Michael Torres, cancer biologist and co-founder of genetic-medicines company ReCode Therapeutics, wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

“From a scientific standpoint, there is still a lot of going in terms of addressing some of the key aspects of this technology,” says Luigi Naldini, a gene therapist at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy. “The delivery by nanoparticles is still in early stages in terms of tolerability.”

Targeted changes

There are other unknowns about the long-term effects of these genetic changes, says Naldini.

Gene-editing approaches carry the risk of ‘off target’ edits elsewhere in the genome. In animal studies, the Verve team found no off-target editing in mice, and no evidence of the changes in the PSCK9 gene becoming heritable in monkeys. Verve aims to select the best therapeutic dose from the trial next year and to launch a phase 2 trial in 2025.

The firm must also follow trial participants for 14 years, as mandated by the FDA for gene-editing therapies. “This is a gene editing study — you are changing the genome forever. Safety is going to be of the utmost importance, especially because there are currently safe and efficacious strategies available for lipid lowering,” said Watson at the press briefing.
 
I think this could be really big if is scales. In the warming world trying to decarbonise we are using "heat pumps" more, both in air conditioning protecting people in extreme heat conditions and making household heating more efficient with heat pumps/reverse cycle ACs. These run on damaging refrigerants, the "big new" one being R134a which breaks down to trifluoroacetic acid which is bad for us, probably, and does not go away. Also the devices look cool, you can see them being fitted into little spaces.

‘Electrocaloric’ heat pump could transform air conditioning

The use of environmentally damaging gases in air conditioners and refrigerators could become redundant if a new kind of heat pump lives up to its promise. A prototype, described in a study published last week in Science, uses electric fields and a special ceramic instead of alternately vaporizing a refrigerant fluid and condensing it with a compressor to warm or cool air.

The technology combines a number of existing techniques and has “superlative performance”, says Neil Mathur, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Emmanuel Defay, a materials scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology in Belvaux, and his collaborators built their experimental device out of a ceramic with a strong electrocaloric effect. Materials that exhibit this effect heat up when exposed to electric fields.

In an electrocaloric material, the atoms have an electric polarization — a slight imbalance in their distribution of electrons, which gives these atoms a ‘plus’ and a ‘minus’ pole.

When the material is left alone, the polarization of these atoms continuously swivels around in random directions. But when the material is exposed to an electric field, all the electrostatic poles suddenly align, like hair combed in one direction. This transition from disorder to order means that the electrons’ entropy — physicists’ way of measuring disorder — suddenly drops, Defay explains.

But the laws of thermodynamics say that the total entropy of a system can never decline, so if it falls somewhere it must increase somewhere else. “The only possibility for the material to get rid of this extra mess is to pour it into the lattice” of its crystal structure, he says. That extra disorder means that the atoms themselves start vibrating faster, resulting in a rise in temperature.

The researchers then remove the heat by flowing a fluid between slabs of the electrocaloric material, while keeping the electric field on. The result is that the slab goes back to the original, ambient temperature, but has a lower polarization entropy. If the researchers then switch off the electric field, it produces the reverse effect: the polarizations become chaotic again, and entropy pours out of the atomic lattice of the ceramic, carrying heat away with it. The result is that the lattice becomes colder than the ambient temperature and it can cool fluid pumped between the slabs. The cycle then starts again.

In a refrigerator or air conditioner, heat from the warmed-up fluid would be dispersed in the environment, while the cooled fluid would serve to keep the interior or the room cold. For heating, the heat pump would cool down the external environment, extracting heat from it to be pumped into the building.

Defay says that although the technology is not yet ready to be commercialized, with further refinements, the efficiency of his team’s electrocaloric heat pump could be competitive with that of existing heat pumps. That’s a tough standard to meet, because heat pumps based on compressors are already very efficient: when used for heating buildings, for example, they can yield three or more times as much heat as space heaters do, for the same amount of electricity consumption. But unlike a standard heat pump, an electrocaloric heat pump would not need refrigerants such as hydrofluorocarbons or ammonia, which are potentially harmful to the environment. And because it removes the need for a compressor, it could potentially fit into a smaller, simpler device, Defay adds.

 
Great news. It was only a matter of time and who would be first:

Northvolt in new sodium-ion battery breakthrough​

Swedish start-up has developed an energy storage technology with no critical minerals including lithium which could minimise reliance on China

Northvolt has made a breakthrough in a new battery technology used for energy storage that the Swedish industrial start-up claims could minimise dependence on China for the green transition.The Swedish group, backed by Volkswagen, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, has developed a sodium-ion battery that has no lithium, cobalt or nickel — critical metals that manufacturers have scrambled to obtain, leading to volatility in prices.

Peter Carlsson, Northvolt’s chief executive and co-founder, told the Financial Times that the new technology could be worth tens of billions of dollars as it opens up regions such as the Middle East, Africa and India for battery-powered energy storage for the Swedish group.He estimated that in 10 years’ time the order book for energy storage could be “as big or potentially bigger than the current portfolio” of batteries for electric vehicles, for which Northvolt has received orders of $55bn.

 
I don't have a link handy, but I listened to a very interesting podcast about "lab-grown" meat the other day. Among other things, the guest on the show said,
  • "Cultivated meat" is the preferred industry term, rather than "lab-grown" (or worse, "vat-grown", which does sound a little icky to me, even being someone who laughed out loud at the Midnight show of Reanimator).
  • If the U.S. cut all carbon fuel emissions today, we'd still miss our targets under the Paris Agreement based on agricultural and animal emissions alone.
  • Cultivated meat doesn't require any antibiotics. I guess that never occurred to me before, but that's huge all by itself.
  • Cultivated meat also produces close to zero foodborne illnesses, at least so far.
  • We currently have to put 8 calories into a chicken to get 1 calorie out. That's, like, a lot, dude. And the guy said it's mainly soy, at least in the US.
  • The low estimate is that humanity will have to increase its production of proteins for human consumption by 60% over the next 50 years. Some estimates put that at 100%.
  • There are two restaurants in the US currently licensed to serve cultivated meats, one in Washington DC and the other in the Bay Area (the latter is a restaurant owned by Dominique Crenn, who fans of foodie television will know, and who fans of film & tv may know is married to Maria Bello). God only knows how expensive those dishes are, but they're proofs of concept.
Like I say, I don't have a link. I also can't remember who the guest was right now, and I can't vouch for any of his claims, but he certainly raised an eyebrow.
 
  • We currently have to put 8 calories into a chicken to get 1 calorie out. That's, like, a lot, dude. And the guy said it's mainly soy, at least in the US.
I can tell you that is wrong. Years ago when I learnt about this stuff the numbers for food conversion efficiency where something like 2.4 for chickens, 4 for pork and 10 for ruminants (but they are converting grass).

At the moment lab grown meat has a far greater carbon footprint than any conventionally cultivated meat. It could be a thing in the future, so we should be doing research, but at the moment the easy low hanging fruit is to eat more plants and less animals.

[EDIT]OK, perhaps 4.5 if you go to edible weight, but still a long way from 8.
Spoiler Food and protein conversion efficiencies :


 
At the moment lab grown meat has a far greater carbon footprint than any conventionally cultivated meat. It could be a thing in the future, so we should be doing research, but at the moment the easy low hanging fruit is to eat more plants and less animals.
I know what you mean by "low-hanging fruit", in the sense that for most individuals looking for ways to reduce their 'environmental footprint', eating cultivated meat isn't a real option yet, but I'm not convinced that enough people are interested in reducing their environmental footprint if it means they have to give up something. I actually think that, in terms of making real change, it'll be easier and quicker for science and business to develop cultivated meat and bring down the prices than it will be to get 7-10 billion people to eat less meat and more vegetables. Developing cultivated meat on a viable commercial scale and encouraging people to eat less meat aren't mutually-exclusive, though. There's no reason not to do both (well, unless some unforeseen problem with one of them arises - which is just an argument for doing both, in case one of them fails).
 
I know what you mean by "low-hanging fruit", in the sense that for most individuals looking for ways to reduce their 'environmental footprint', eating cultivated meat isn't a real option yet, but I'm not convinced that enough people are interested in reducing their environmental footprint if it means they have to give up something. I actually think that, in terms of making real change, it'll be easier and quicker for science and business to develop cultivated meat and bring down the prices than it will be to get 7-10 billion people to eat less meat and more vegetables. Developing cultivated meat on a viable commercial scale and encouraging people to eat less meat aren't mutually-exclusive, though. There's no reason not to do both (well, unless some unforeseen problem with one of them arises - which is just an argument for doing both, in case one of them fails).
Certainly we should be researching it, but from the points you quoted one could get the impression that this is currently an environmentally friendly way to eat. It really really is not.

It is like "the hydrogen economy" or "green aviation fuel". Sure, in a world where we are full on carbon neutral these things may have a role in particularly hard to electrify niches. However vaulting these things as tech we should be investing in rolling out now when we are still burning fossil fuels for electricity seems to me to be at best missing the point and at worse an intensional way to distract people's attention from the real fundamental changes we need to urgently make to the way the world works.
 
Did Firaxis make this video?
Or the Matrix people?

I'm not sure what the spiritual or other ramifications of an actual baby factory would be.


I know a few people that might be interested.

Also, anyone who wants 10 kids can get it done all in one go instead of being pregnant for a decade. :think:
 
Certainly we should be researching it, but from the points you quoted one could get the impression that this is currently an environmentally friendly way to eat. It really really is not.
Yeah, no, that would definitely be a misreading of what I wrote. :lol:

I guess if I needed to sum up why the podcast I heard was informative, it was that humanity's consumption of meat is really a bigger problem than a lot of us realize, but people are working the problem. I really think getting all of humanity to become vegan as a way to slow or reverse environmental damage is a misbegotten idea, but I don't really want to say that out loud, because it's a misbegotten idea that needs its champions anyway, and I wouldn't want them to stop trying. If they have to shoot for a meter of progress to get a centimeter, fine, we need the centimeter. And who knows, maybe in 200 years humanity will all be vegan, like in the sci-fi novels (I'm reading Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke right now, in fact). Great. But if that's the solution we're leaning on, I suspect it'll be too little, too late. I really think we need $3 chicken nuggets that didn't come from any chicken, and this podcast I listened to was simultaneously alarming and encouraging.
 
I did a little surfing on the subject of cultivated meat. I didn't find a ton with just a quick Googling, and a lot of what I found comes from sources or outlets I've never even heard of before, but here are a couple things. The first one, from Yale in 2016, claims 9 calories in for every calorie out for chicken, but doesn't provide a source, so... :dunno: The second one, from the NIH, is more in-depth and more recent (April of this year), but doesn't provide a calories-for-calories number in the abstract, and I haven't had time to read the whole thing. The NIH study's abstract does note that cultivated meat has an issue with nitrogen in wastewater, which I don't remember being mentioned at all in the podcast I listened to (conventionally-produced meat produces waste water too, but it sounds like cultivated meat is worse, in that regard).

 
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