June 2022 Nuggets 💡
A selection of science, technology, and other news from June 2022
June has come and gone. Here are a few interesting reads from the past month. Jumping genes in octopuses, not-so-intelligent AI, virtual influencers, neurons finding friends, and more.
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Science 🧬
Where does consciousness live? The idea of playing around with brain activity to elicit conscious experiences has a long history. A new paper now comes up with a thought experiment that includes some of the latest neuroscience technologies to make us wonder what the role of brain activity really could be. What if we ‘fake’ brain activity at the neuron level? What if we keep the action potentials but block the synapses? An actual mind-bender.
Jumping genes and smart octopuses. Transposable elements are stretches of DNA that can change their position in the genome - jumping genes. One of those jumping genes, LINE L1, is thought to be involved in human cognition. It affects the behavior and plasticity in our brains and (possibly) contributes to our cognitive prowess. Guess what? A recent study finds a full-length LINE element in the brains of octopuses… Briny brainiacs. (For more on octopuses, here’s a newsletter I wrote about them.)
Big bacteria. Bacteria are so small we need a microscope to see them. Well, except for this lanky, newly described one, that is. Candidatus Thiomargarita magnifica stretches up to a full centimeter in length, smashing the bacteria big boy club record by ~50-fold. Here are the not-so-little buggers next to a dime coin.
Finding friends. Excellent microcopy visual about two neurons finding each other.
Caged animals and human minds. A lot of psychological research begins in lab animals. I’m sure you’ve read about cocaine-addicted rats, depressed mice, clever pigeons, or aggressive monkeys. These animals, though, are often housed in artificial conditions that affect their behavior. This (slightly longer) piece harrowingly proposes:
… so long as we see laboratory animals only as mechanisms and neurocircuits, we will continue to miss the mark, not just in our understanding of mental illness but of other maladies – cancer, wound recovery, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease. These illnesses might flourish in animals only under the unnatural caged conditions that make life not worth living.
Technology 🖥️
Virtual influencers. Do you follow a virtual social media influencer? If deep fakes become good enough, would you even know? Would you care? Why?
AI and intelligence. A lot of current AI is based on deep learning neural networks that mimic some properties of our brains. Can some of the (current) hurdles also teach us something about how intelligence works? This article claims it does. In their words:
At stake are questions not just about contemporary problems in AI, but also questions about what intelligence is and how the brain works.
(I recently went in a slightly different direction by looking at creativity in AI systems.)
(Virtually) embodied AI? This is a major coincidence. Mere days after I sent you my thoughts on AI needing a (virtual) body, this great article (maybe I’m biased, confirmation is always nice) suggests that AI might benefit from having a virtual training ground. It’s almost exactly what I proposed in a slightly more science-fictional way. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
BLOOMing AI. Most large-scale language models built on deep learning are developed by companies. Proprietary, in other words. They also have the annoying tendency to reinforce existing biases. An international team of volunteer researchers is now developing a (multilingual) language model, BLOOM, that will rival the company ones and it will be open source.
Printable, health-tracking tattoos. Electronic circuits have been small for a while, but recently they’ve gotten flexible too. Add some 3D printing and it’s a party. Here’s a Janus on-skin electronic circuit that you can stick to your skin to record a bunch of stuff. And here’s a graphene-based ‘tattoo’ that can continuously monitor your blood pressure.
Society 🧑🏿🤝🧑🏻
Scientific progress as a human right? This short article makes the case for seeing scientific progress as a human right. That will require us to embrace a plurality of perspectives on what scientific progress entails and figure out how to ensure that it is a cosmopolitan right, a right for everyone as a world citizen.
Social complexity & military technology. For a long time, humanity lived in scattered bands and tribes. Then, a (relatively) sudden boom in social complexity happened and we began huddling in crowded cities. We often think agriculture had something to do with it. It likely did, but a new study that used a model based on data from a global history databank suggests that the invention and adoption of military technologies also played an important causal role.
Bonus
If you need more to read (and who doesn’t?), check out Refind. Sign up for free, choose your topics of interest, and Refind gives you a nice morning injection of ideas.