Week of July 15, 2024
Science history, tech articles, and bad YouTube videos are my go-to escapes from typical politics and pandemic exhaustion. When I feel overwhelmed by "living through historic times," I revert to the comfort and context of a few books from college. On Sunday, I found myself re-reading Hannah Arendt. Her works are a good reminder that most of history is "historic times," and the real work is figuring out how to navigate uncertainty. Or, to quote the article linked below (about my favorite Arendt book), "[During difficult times] does one engage and struggle or does one withdraw and use one's limited time and energies for other matters?"
http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/942422/men-in-dark-times-by-hannah-arendt
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Wastewater levels continue to rise.
https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-nationaltrend.html
Across the U.S., 1 in 73 people are infected with COVID (or about two people on a full 737 Max 8 for those who fly a lot.)
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) website uses wastewater levels to forecast 4-week predictions of COVID rates.
https://pmc19.com/data/
based upon https://biobot.io/data/
Wastewater Scan offers a multi-organism wastewater dashboard with an excellent visual display of individual treatment plant-level data.
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
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Infectious Disease Articles
Yale Medicine and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health offered updates about the latest Coronavirus variants, including discussing the symptoms and susceptibility to Paxlovid. "The FLiRT strains are subvariants of Omicron, and together they accounted for the majority of COVID cases in the U.S. at the beginning of July. One of them, KP.3, was responsible for 36.9% of COVID infections in the United States, KP.2 made up 24.4%, and KP.1.1 accounted for 9.2% of cases."
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/3-things-to-know-about-flirt-new-coronavirus-strains
and
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/what-to-know-about-covid-flirt-variants
I am concerned about the potential for H5N1 avian flu to become capable of human-to-human transmission.
https://time.com/6997774/can-bird-flu-infect-people/
Humans in close contact with birds are becoming infected.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/3-colorado-poultry-workers-test-presumptively-positive-bird-flu-h5n1/
At the moment, influenza A in the wastewater is minimal (certainly compared to Sara-CoV-2
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/?charts=CjcQACABSABaC0luZmx1ZW56YSBBcgoyMDI0LTA2LTAycgoyMDI0LTA3LTE0igEGMTY5ZWFjwAEB&selectedChartId=169eac&selectedLocation=%7B%22level%22%3A%22national%22,%22label%22%3A%22Nationwide%22,%22value%22%3A%22National%22%7D&plantId=95182cf6&target=Influenza%20B
Medical Trends and Technology
Chinese researchers recently published the latest article on the U-shaped curve looking at sleep and living longer - a retrospective analysis of NHANEs data included 14,000 individuals. Too much and too little sleep is not good for you. Seven hours per night seems optimal.
https://x.com/ayuswellness/status/1812033236127605064
and
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38486063/
Using stool samples from 1600 children with and without autism, researchers, employing machine learning, have identified patterns of gut bacteria that are markers for the diagnosis of autism. This research is a fantastic example of how complex multivariate analysis (using M.L. and A.I.) can impact our understanding of complex biology. Moreover, I continue to be fascinated by the role the microbiome seems to play.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01739-1.epdf?sharing_token=5UvtMLKrg2CM-SoJcRMbD9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MbRl9pb2n0mEk4Q9wCIU-ADmucAqekLj-ObIUP0c_dQOJs5wxsOw485xme7xtSXcSEAuKdFJzHngXYxJvpbfB3I3Iucpe7p4ED-zQ-OzbUWhkosz0e-7zBfJMtXbpK_7qmNUskwLMyC7joSMP03cnbrcDF7n_Kq1aiqRsLLDbb9URB4_OpxFf7aZLBw9Xp0dnJqzqVvD3KFk74328ykDSloXR6rz2avUH2RlY5vO_SSBfnsDZ3fXNc299R5BzkoCUfytfwiXYVCBFiRWYmRh73EiyDCfcsQh2RWbq8WXqfxc-3J5Oe1uk-Zmwjotr2UM57fuLYj-kd9gtSj26-Q4aCDkwuwigRYKp4wjQZTDmy6Q%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=www.theguardian.com
and
https://x.com/marionawfal/status/1811524812059422801?s=42&t=cHtDhpWgAdi0UhIayqsoag
and
https://ground.news/article/03372655-29f1-41a5-b4f7-45206d4005a8
DARPA wants to build reprogrammable microorganisms that produce different outputs (like biofuels, plastics, or other biomaterials). The goal is to have scalable and easily adaptable biomanufacturing capacity.
https://x.com/proftomellis/status/1810772217179127832
and
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2024-07-09a
and
https://govtribe.com/opportunity/federal-contract-opportunity/switch-proposers-day-darpasn2470
I am sure these bacteria will not evolve into the T-1000 Terminators.
https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/T-1000
Infographics
I found the best interactive infographic on cognitive bias I have ever seen (and given that this is the 419th issue of this newsletter, I have seen a lot). I did not know about the Ikea effect.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg
The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially assemble.
A 2011 study found that subjects would pay 63% more for furniture they had assembled themselves than for equivalent pre-assembled items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
Here is the article: The Ikea Effect - When Labor Leads to Love (which describes how the labor it takes to build things like Lego, Build a Bear, and origami adds the perception of value).
https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf
Things I learned this week
Last week, I discovered a gap in my medical school education: Alien Hand Syndrome, a condition in which a person experiences their limbs moving and acting seemingly independently - without conscious control. Though this neurologic illness evokes memories of the 1980s movie Evil Dead 2, it is not an illness anyone wants. This disorder represents symptoms of significant neurologic illness and a view into the complexity of the brain.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/alien-hand-syndrome
and, for those that did not experience 1980's horror films:
https://evildead.fandom.com/wiki/Ash%27s_Severed_Hand
I did not know that Erwin Schrodinger (of Schrodinger’s Cat fame) wrote a book that presupposed and predicted key tenets of molecular biology. A computational biologist on Twitter wrote a detailed review of his book,” What is Life?” (I was sad to learn that Schrodinger is also known for a life-long pattern of misogyny and abusive behavior.)
https://x.com/prmshra/status/1810380427175276704
and
https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/schrodingers-cat
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger
Living with A.I.
Thanks to A.I., we now have a better understanding of the complex genetic patterns observed in modern humans (homo sapiens) and more ancient humans (Denisovan and Neanderthals) genomes. There appears to be substantial, repeated, and ongoing "contact" [ahem] between all the hominin species between 300,00 and 200,000 years ago. Now, if there were just grocery store romance novels back then, you could imagine plots exploring a conflicted heroine torn between her homo sapiens family and her Neanderthal boyfriend.
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-history-contact-geneticists-rewriting-narrative.html
(Never mind, Clan of the Cave Bear pretty much covered this plot in 1980)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clan_of_the_Cave_Bear)
A new loyal reader (Hi, Chris!) shared this with me. I highly recommend listening to the 17-minute podcast covering Andy Ayrey (https://x.com/AndyAyrey), an A.I. experimenter who created an A.I. copy of himself and gave it a Twitter account under the name Terminal of Truths (https://x.com/truth_terminal). Terminal of Truths has interacted with numerous individuals on X, including Richard Dawson. After engaging with Marc Andreasen, Marc granted the A.I. agent $50K in Bitcoin to support itself with investments and related activities. Further hijinks ensue that I will not spoil. Listen and remember that we are still in the very early stages of A.I.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0amPjnNMWTj05AKCAqEhOC
A.I. art of the week (A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter).
A cat is building a table. There is a box with another cat. Tools surround the cat in the box, and it appears to be deceased. The box has an IKEA-like logo on it. There is a desk behind the cats with a computer on it. The computer is telling the cats to build the furniture faster!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hMogwDDPz25NruBzbR4dZ7e5GTzwygWJ/view?usp=sharing
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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