Decoding the Mind's Eye

Researchers find a way to recreate our visual perceptions using YouTube

The dream-viewing machine is a device that has recurred in science fiction for decades. Our own dreams, our own thoughts are so real to us--as real or realer than images on a screen--that it makes perfect sense that we'd be able to project them somehow. We feel as though we should be able to attach some electrodes and plug them into the nearest display to convey what our third eye sees.

Of course, the brain is no camcorder, and we can't just extract the recordings of the mind's eye. At least, not yet. But scientists at UC Berkeley are getting awfully close.

Researchers have found a way to reconstruct images using an analysis of brain activity. They've found a way to pinpoint neurological patterns so precisely that they can almost tell what you're seeing by looking at what's going on in your skull. And the kicker? They've done it all using YouTube.

Seriously. That same revolutionary platform that allows you to watch Nyan Cat for ten continuous hours has now opened up a window into the mind. The scientists constructed an algorithm that associates certain types of imagery with certain patterns in the visual processing centers of the human brain. They gathered the data for this algorithm by spending hours inside an MRI watching YouTube videos, which sounds like it could be both fun and terrifying depending on what kind of personality you have. 

It makes sense intuitively that different types of images would elicit different brain responses. We're hard-wired to recognize and respond to faces, for example, so a video of a person talking would presumably create different patterns in the brain than a panoramic video of a landscape. But what's incredible is how accurate the images reconstructed from the algorithm are. Using the predictive algorithm developed from the MRI sessions, scientists created composite videos from YouTube's archives. And they resemble the original video in shape and movement pretty accurately. I mean, sure, they're still fuzzy, blobby composites--we're not onto drawing photographic details from brain patterns quite yet--but they're pretty impressive given that they're made from MRI scans and YouTube. 

Does this mean we're going to be able to see our memories and imagination on our TV screens someday? Well, it certainly looks like it might not be impossible. If further MRI data collection allows scientists to fill in those blurry recreations with more detail, we might just be on our way to a brain-scanner. It is nice to see someone using the inconceivably huge pile of public video on the internet as a data bank and not just a source of mindless entertainment for once. Hooray science!

BioCurious Opens In the Bay Area for DIY Biotechs

(Please no sexual commenting...believe me, it's been done.)

Have you ever had the desire to experiment in a biology lab, replete with all of the necessary tech and equipment? Were you the kind of kid that wanted to try tons of things in the science class labs that were not on the worksheet? Do your hobbies include experimenting with genetic splices? If the answer to any of these is yes (or even ”sure”), you may be excited to learn about DIYBio, a new organization that is designed to attract and support “citizen scientists” as they dabble in the fields of biology and biotechnology. An outgrowth of DIYBio has been BioCurious, a Sunnyvale, CA organization that has mixed the openness and networking from DIYBio into a physical space where people in the Bay Area community can work with equipment, under a code of ethics and a community of experts, and collaborate on others’ ideas and projects in a collaborative atmosphere.

BioCurious is a new 2,400 square foot space for amateurs, entrepreneurs, and professionals in the field of biology and biotechnology; a physical space with lab equipment and a knowledgeable community for people to lease for a month at a time and develop their individual projects. According to the website, it invites potential scientists to, “make genetically-engineered bacteria, sequence DNA, find the tools to get your bio-project growing, or make friends with amateurs and experts in the community. The non-profit, which essentially staffed, run, and grown by volunteers in the biotech field, promotes the belief that, “innovations in biology should be accessible, affordable, and open to everyone.” In an apparent pitch to the larger community to become involved in this social science experiment in creating communities of citizen scientists, BioCurious recommends classes for beginners that include injecting jellyfish DNA into bacteria to make them glow; “the ‘hello world’ experiment for synthetic biology.” The community members have already swelled to 580+, most of who are actively participating in the organization’s ongoing projects, although being a member is not required to utilize the space. Compared to many other labs across the country, one can lease a BioCurious lab for a song, at $150 a month.

BioCurious is just one more manifestation of a growing reliance and acceptance of non-traditional scientists in the fields of biotechnology, genetics, and robotics. Last month several gamers were able to unlock a protein structure present in primate AIDS that had eluded highly sophisticated algorithms and geneticists that had been working to discover it. They did this through the development of an open-source protein folding video game called FoldIt. It’s exciting to see what BioCurious’ own citizen scientists may discover or develop, and what that might mean for science going forward into the 21st century.

Brain Imaging Shows We're Hardwired for Optimism

Optimism has helped the species to be innovative and successful, but risk-taking can be dangerous.

Humanity is a pretty optimistic species. In terms of our evolution, we’ve had to be. Humans leapt into tiny canoes and migrated across vast oceans, optimistic that they would find new land at the end of their journey. We’ve built enormous cities, flown experimental aircraft, and put people on the moon, all with incredible (some might even say unrealistic) optimism about the outcomes. Despite what may be portrayed in the media, or what may be commonly socially accepted, as a species, we’re a pretty optimistic group of organisms. However, recent studies by neuroscientists have revealed that we may actually be hardwired for maintaining a positive outlook.

A team of neuroscientists from England and Germany have long believed that the secret to the “It can’t happen to me” cognitive process lay somewhere in the error processing center of the frontal lobe. To study this, they used brain imaging technology in addition to a number of interviews. The interviews asked respondents to estimate their chances of experiencing 80 different negative life events; divorce, Alzheimer’s, infidelity, job loss, cancer, etc. When patients had answers, the researchers told them the actual percentage likelihood that they would experience these life-impacting events. After respondents had been informed of their statistical chances of experiencing something like cancer, researchers watched brain scans as respondents again estimated their chances.

Researchers found that when respondents were told that their actual chances of experiencing certain negative life events were slim, their answers tended to change drastically the second time around to reflect that. However, when respondents found that their statistical chances of experiencing those events were greater, their second estimate was almost always the same as the first estimate. Brain scans revealed that when things were better than expected, brain activity in the frontal corticies associated with error estimation spiked, but when things were worse than expected, error estimation activity was much weaker. In other words, when we make estimations or decisions where chances of success are high, we tend to weigh errors in judgement and problem-solving more than when we make decisions where chances of success are low. In those cases we tend to dismiss information that may be undesirable to reaching our goals or feeling optimistic about the outcomes.

Evolutionary biology would suggest that this may have been a necessarily hardwired aspect to our neuro-physiology; a survival mechanism that allowed early humans to take chances necessary to continue to develop and innovate. However, in modern man, researchers point to the danger in dismissing those undesirable errors. “Unrealistic assessment of financial risk is widely seen as contributing factor to the 2008 global economic collapse,” the authors of the study write, “Dismissing undesirable errors in estimation renders us peculiarly susceptible to view the future through rose-colored glasses.”

Magnetic Fields

 

I love the band the Magnetic Fields, but I don't know anything about magnetic fields. So I thought I would do a bit of research and talk about these little guys in a way that even music nerds could understand.

Electric fields are present in everything. Although these fields once were just a theory, a scientist named Michael Faraday hypothesized these fields to be fact and proved them to be real in nature. Modern day scientists have not only given these electromagnetic fields equations, but they have also found them to be more prevalent in nature. Also, scientists fear that electromagnetic fields found in everyday appliances could play a dangerous part in the health of humans.

Electromagnetic fields are not a new discovery. In fact, the concept of electromagnetic fields was devised in 1845 by a scientist named Michael Faraday. He hypothesized that currents made an electric “tension” and that tension made an “electrotonic state,” otherwise known as a polarization of molecules which transmitted the electric force.

Eventually, Faraday abandoned this theory of “electrotonic forces” and made a new hypothesis of “lines of force.” A person, he said, could see this forces by using a magnet with iron fillings.

Faraday, who made many important scientific discoveries, one wouldn’t have thought he would ever become a scientist. Faraday, an Englishman, was a bookbinder who happened to be interested in electricity.  Not only that, but he also had no grasp on mathematics and had trouble understanding other scientist’s writings.

Electromagnetic fields play a big part in everyday things found in nature, such as water. In all water, electric fields strengthen the bonding between water molecules. Also, electron emission was found when supercooled water was frozen.

Many natural phenomena, like auroras, have been linked to electromagnetic sources. Sky cameras have found that aurora displays are linked with accelerated electron fields from space. These electron fields are on the Earth’s magnetic field lines. More recently, satellite photographs have proven the sky camera’s originally pictures to be correct.

Göran Marklund and his team of scientists proved these electric field’s existence.

According to a paper written by Marklund and his colleague’s, an electromagnetic current flows to Earth from space, goes through the ionosphere and then back into space.

In a figure, he draws two accelerated regions and explains that the electric fields of these regions have electric fields that accelerate electrons to the high energy fields that are needed to create aurora.

Some scientists have had trouble uniting the more recent studies of electron fields causing auroras with the older, more established plasma theory. The plasma theory said cold electrons in the ionosphere would move in the opposite direction to the electron field and cancel it.

 

Human Evolution Evident In Small Quebec Town

Natural Selection isn’t gone, we just don’t have the timeframe to see it. Until now.

Scientists have argued for decades that human evolution has stopped. Advances in technology, sanitation, medicine, and community standards have all but negated natural selection. The sick and infirm are living just as long, in many cases, as the perpetually healthy. Food, water, and shelter are more accessible than ever before. Fortunately for Darwin, a group of geneticists from the University of Quebec have uncovered evidence of biological evolution in humans within the last two hundreds years; a relative blink in evolutionary science, and within our contemporary frame of reference.

In the small French-Canadian town of Ile aux Coudres in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, UQ geneticist Emmanuel Milot and his colleagues found a pattern of rapid genetic changes among women. From documents kept by the town’s catholic church, researchers found that between 1800 and 1940 women gave birth at steadily earlier ages. The average age of first-time mothers, an indicator of fertility, dropped from 26 to 22. According to Milot, cultural and environmental factors don’t fit in explaining this drop in age of maternity, leaving only biological evolution. “Our study supports the idea that humans are still evolving,” Milot toled Wired.com, “It also demonstrates that microevolution is detectable over just a few generations.”

The idea that human biology could be changing in an evolutionary sense within a few generations has received skeptical attention with previous claims by other scientists. Decades ago the assertion that the ever increasing average height of modern people was due to some kind of rapid evolutionary progression was easily dismissed. We’re taller because we eat better and with more nutrition our bodies grow larger, faster. The truth is that many of the biological pressures of natural selection are largely absent in the developed world. Milot’s finding challenge that idea that a species even needs those pressures to evolve…that it may simply be part of an organisms natural progression.

However, Harvey Harpending, a geneticist with the University of Utah, says that genetic changes are often dismissed as environmental changes, with imperial data being correlated to circumstances around the studied population. “Here and elsewhere we are discovering that changes are due to genetic changes,” Harpending says, “not changes in the environment.” He also acknowledged that he is inclined to believe the claims of Milot’s study since they are “empirically derived within the genetics community.”

Although culture and environmental factors may attest for some of the deviation in Milot’s study, as the town’s women gave birth progressively earlier, Milot points out that even culture can effect natural selection. “Culture shapes the selection pressures acting on the age at first birth and the reproductive history of women in this population,” he said. “The cultural context was favoring the selection of some genes.”

Magnetic Fields

Magnetic Fields: One of the many banes of my existence.

 

Magnetic fields are the bane of my existence. I was in the Big Apple recently--no, not for a guest appearance on Letterman because I didn’t have the time and worried that good old Dave would be all over me. But because I didn’t go on Letterman, I had the tremendous pleasure of using the Metro to get around town. 

 

Which was all fine and dandy until my handy-dandy magnetic Metro card wouldn’t swipe correctly.  I wasn’t able to get through the turn stiles.

 

I expected impatience. New Yorkers are not known for their politeness. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. New Yorkers are known for being brash and for having loud and obnoxious accents. 

 

Lucky for me, most of the people in New York City aren’t native to the city, either and someone helped me through the turnstile. Apparently, my Metro card worked fine for him, but not for me. 

 

That isn’t the first instance that my strange electro-magnetic field has affected my immediate surroundings. I’m unlucky this way. Yesterday, my card wouldn’t go through at the grocery store. It wasn’t for a lack of funds; I know this for a fact because the checker at the grocery store was able to get the card through no problem. 

 

I’ve had the same problem with door swipe card keys, too. 

 

Of course, my little problem with the electro-magnetic field isn’t nearly as bad as the problem my friend had. Her electro-magnetic field was a force to be reckoned with. She couldn’t wear a watch without stopping the clock. She literally stopped time. I’m not joking. I don’t know how this was even possible, but it’s the 100% truth. Now there are even anti-magnetic watches on the market that aren’t affected at all by magnetism. 

 

Fortunately for both my friend and I, neither one of us affects train or bus levitations with our differently charged magnetic force-fields.

 According to THIS, a majority of magnetic fields aren’t in actual people and can instead be found in electronic devices such as computers and computer monitors. People who are affected by electro-magnetic fields can actually now buy shields to prevent electro-magnetic interference from the other devices around them. 

 

I’m going to try one out. Stay tuned and I’ll let you know in a few weeks how it works out for me. 

 

 

 

Colorado Clinic Skirts FDA To Provide Stem Cell Treatments

Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Broomfield, CO provides adults with stem cell treatments to repair bones and damaged joints.

The Federal Drug Administration has yet to approve stem cell treatments, which has been heavily politicized in the previous ten years by conservative lawmakers and evangelical activists. Regardless of this fact, Chris Centeno and John Schultz have formed Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Broomfield, Colorado. The clinic, which deals entirely in stem cell treatments called a Regennex procedure, extracts stem cell tissue from the patient's bone marrow, and then injects them in the damaged joint or bone tissues. No surgery needed. The clinic has, so far, treated over 350 patients, using more than 800 injections, reporting that 89% of their knee patients and 75% of their hip patients have shown significant improvements within months.Though the FDA has not approved stem cell treatments in any form, RSI still manages to operate. They can do this because they operate only within the borders of Colorado, and they only use stem cell treatments. This makes the clinic out-of-bounds for FDA regulation, which monitors interstate commerce and clinical trials. Although the agency's job is not to prevent individuals from seeking these procedures, they are trying to make sure they're safe. As a result, according to Singularity Hub, "medical tourism" has been increasing over the last several years, with American citizens traveling out of country to find medical clinics in other countries that offer stem cell treatments. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that stem cell therapies have been shown to successfully treat things as varied as bone and cartilage damage to genetic disorders and disease like diabetes,  corneal blindness, and even HIV.

Stem cell treatments, as in demand as they seem to be, are inaccessible to people for more than just regulatory reasons. After a 20-40 minute extraction of stem cells from pelvic bone marrow, along with some blood, the stem cells are cultured and multiply. From there each injection costs between $5,000 to $8,000 and a round of treatment could include as many as 10 injections. For those people able to produce a large amount of stem cells, subsequent injections in other areas run about $3,500 per injection.

Though these treatments seem to be miraculous, there are always reservations about so called "medical miracles", particularly when they have not been approved via federal oversight. That said, RSI provides research, case studies, patient testimonials, and more on both their website and YouTube channel. Watch an excerpt from ABCNews below.

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Metallic Cells Could Broaden our Definition of Life

 

It's long been thought that, if there were to be life somewhere out there in the void of space, it would probably be composed of more or less the same stuff that living things on earth are made of. If you're alive on this planet, chances are you've got a lot of carbon in you. Living matter seems to follow a few specific chemical patterns, and despite the diversity of elements in our physical vicinity, we living things are made up of only a few. 

But the universe is big. Absurdly big. And who's to say we've pinned down exactly what life can and can't be? Our conception of intelligent life includes some sort of consciousness like our own, but need that consciousness run on a similarly organic organism? Couldn't there be, somewhere in the vastness, something very much like life but made of entirely different materials from life as we know it? 

Scientists are now trying to figure out just that. We already had our conceptions of life rocked a little bit when NASA discovered arsenic in living bacteria at the bottom of a lake. An element previously thought to be toxic to all life was found to be metabolized by a very specific kind of living thing. Now, scientists are attempting to recreate biological life using completely inorganic materials--and they've experienced an interesting degree of success.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow have built new cells out of metal. The idea of life made out of metal might make you think of robots (or specifically The Iron Giant), but these scientists aren't interested in constructing computers that replicate sentience. They're starting from scratch, going down to the basic unit of life: the cell. By bonding metallic elements with oxygen and phosphorus, the team has created cell-like bubbles that can self-assemble and filter their surroundings with a porous membrane. They simulate cell function fairly accurately despite containing no carbon whatsoever. 

The scientists are hoping to create metallic cells that can carry out processes like photosynthesis and replication. They'd need to imbue the cells with some kind of DNA analog for the latter to occur, but it may yet be possible. If the cells could use each other as a template, they might just split off into more bubbles autonomously. And if they could figure out a way to harvest energy from light, we might just have made something very similar to life itself in a lab. 

So far, the cells are just porous bubbles, like tiny metal models of the real thing. But if scientists figure out a way to get them to function like real cells autonomously, it could mean that our search for life in the universe just got a lot more expansive. We'd no longer need to limit our definition of living things to organic material. We might not need to look for water or oxygen as definite harbingers of life. If metal cells could evolve on their own, who's to say what sort of creatures could arise from them? 

Growing Bioartificial Organs

 

It'd be a huge relief to the medical world if we could just make new organs. We've tried faking it with some degree of success--hearts, for example, are somewhat replicable with similar machines, and dialysis can replace kidneys from an external vantage point--but some organs are too subtle to simply swap out with cyborg parts. And some people prefer not to walk around like Darth Vader, with inorganic body parts powering their newly bizarre existence. 

Of course, growing organs presents a whole bunch of ethical qualms--not to mention scientific difficulties. I once heard stem cell research dismissed as "murder" during the Bush era when a GOP member defended the president's decision to cut its funding. Anything that even remotely involves potential babies is a huge no-no when it comes to science politics. Even human replication that has very little to do with babies is scorned as science's attempt to play God--even though I've never known God to grow a new kidney for anyone.

But there's a clear need for spare parts. Over 100,000 are on the organ transplant list in the United States at this moment. I and many other people are signed up to be organ donors, but that system doesn't really work until one of us dies. Even then, you've got to have a correct match so that the donor's body doesn't spit the new organ right back up. And every day 18 people on the transplant list die from waiting without results. Bodily breakdown is inevitable, but some of these people have got kids. Some of them are kids. It'd be nice if we could just grow them some more time in a lab in the form of a new body part. 

One new solution for the organ shortage comes from one Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Atala began growing bladders--not from stem cells, but from the patient's own, broken bladder itself. By taking specific types of cells and allowing them to grow in layers around a cartilage scaffold, researchers could make new, working organs that matched the patient's DNA perfectly. 30 people are currently walking around with functional homegrown bladders. Researchers would like to extend this procedure to even more complicated, solid organs one day.

Other groups of researchers are attempting to grow bioartificial organs as well. Yale made themselves a lung, the University of Michigan grew a kidney, and Columbia managed to produce a jawbone. Not all of them work exactly like the originals--the artificial kidney, for example, must be worn externally, but works more like a kidney than dialysis and has the added benefit of being portable. Researchers are even looking into growing things like ears for soldiers who have lost them. 

Ideally, these organs--once perfected--would be grown from stem cells so that they're ready to go when needed. Instead of waiting to grow an organ from a sick patient, doctors could simply select from one of many pre-grown organs after finding a perfect match. It would reduce the amount of time needed for a transplant and greatly improve the likelihood of survival for the patient. Wouldn't it be nice--if maybe a little creepy--if you could just have a kidney transplant like any other standard medical procedure?

U.S. Races to Ease Critical Drug Shortage Nationwide

Though you may not know it if you're not in regular need of these medications, there's a serious shortage in this country of vital drugs.

    

Federal officials, pharm companies and doctors are scrambling to find medications to fill a serious shortage, including drugs that treat bacterial infections and several forms of cancer. Dr. Michael Link, Director of the American Society of Clinical Oncology told the New York Times, “These shortages are just killing us... these drugs save lives, and it’s unconscionable that medicines that cost a couple of bucks a vial are unavailable.” This year a record number of drugs are unavailable for a range of diseases, including childhood leukemia, bacterial infections, and others; 180 different medicines in all.

     For many of these medications scarcity has drive up prices as much as twenty-fold, and created life-threatening lulls in treatment for many cancer patients. In addition, those drugs that are available are falling into short supply as people fall back on other brands or types that might have similar effects.

     The worst part about these shortages is that few people understand why we actually have them. Being the most wealthy nation in the world, and having the most large, active, and well-funded healthcare network in the world, these kinds of catastrophic drug shortages should logistically not be one of the issues that our country faces. Yet, here we are. One of the more prevalent reasons are problems with manufacturing the drugs, in which microbial violations of a compound have occurred in production or certain manufacturers simply can not keep up with capacity (which to means seems like an inherent fault of the company).

     Another one of the reasons is that when these manufacturers experience delays, there is no advanced warning to organizations and agencies like the FDA. In fact, a recent bipartisan bill by congressional lawmakers would give the FDA powers to force pharmaceutical companies to provide advanced notice in the case of supply shortages or production disruptions. Those companies are loathe to report their own shortcomings, it would allow government agencies like the FDA to avoid massive nationwide shortages like the ones we're seeing this summer.

     Another proposal by the Obama administration is to add an extra component to the CDC's medical stockpile. The Center for Disease Control already stockpiles antibiotics, antidotes, and other drugs for unforeseen events like natural disasters or terrorist attacks. The Obama administration would add cancer drugs to the list in their dry ingredient form, which could then be shipping out to [pharmacists who could then mix an injectable dose. Yet another possible solution by a group of leading oncologists is in forming a non-profit that will routinely ship medicines that are in shortage or are not available to the United States from abroad.

     There is a serious lack of incentive for manufacturers of older medicines to produce higher quantities. Generally older medicines prices are very low, but when they're in short supply their prices sore and there's little incentive for manufacturers to produce the older medicines in greater quantity only to see the price plunge again. Not only that, but many of the manufacturers are bound by government regulations and other constraints that make further production difficult. Ultimately, there must be movement by the government to change the incentive for drug companies, whether it means a fixed price scale, or an effort to incentivize production growth. As our country continues to get older, and the elderly create an ever growing need for certain drugs, there will need to be some change in the supply chain to make sure that these life-saving drugs are always available.

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