Week of September 9, 2024
Empty nest week one down. I am both surprised and not surprised to find I am now remote technical support (can I have the Netflix login?), a telehealth dermatologist (Dad, what is this mark on my skin?), and a travel agent (can we rebook my flights home for fall break?). "Empty" is relative.
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COVID rates are falling, but the absolute infection levels are still very high - with approximately 1.4 million daily infections or 1 in 35 Americans (as calculated from wastewater RNA concentrations). Please be careful out there.
https://x.com/JPWeiland/status/1832186283482841481
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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COVID articles
A quick visual reminder of how vaccines decrease mortality.
https://x.com/tmprowell/status/1829951721516515717/photo/1
from
https://x.com/tmprowell/status/1829951721516515717
Nasal and inhaled COVID vaccines yield durable and effective antibody responses that may last longer than injectable vaccines. A consortium of vaccine scientists (mainly from NIH) published research demonstrating they could successfully induce immuno-protection from coronavirus with mucosal vaccines in non-human primates. (I want my inhaled/nasal vaccine!) Per the article's data, an inhaled (via a nebulizer) vaccine may offer the best protection.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-024-01951-5
and
https://x.com/Chris_Said/status/1831326694491496738
and
https://x.com/erictopol/status/1830962518791266733
Medical Trends and Technology
Cornell engineering and bioengineering students created a fungus interface for a robotic body that translates a mushroom's electrical signals into walking and other motile activities. The mushroom walks and moves in response to various stimuli. While not quite Elon's Nueralink, empowering plants this way is fantastic and horrifying. I, for one, look forward to the rebellion against our embodied mushroom A.I. overlords by letting them walk right into a dish of chicken marsala.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/08/biohybrid-robots-controlled-electrical-impulses-mushrooms
and
https://www.saltandlavender.com/chicken-in-a-mushroom-and-marsala-sauce/
Food coloring Yellow No. 5 applied to a live mouse's skin makes the skin clear—temporarily allowing visualization of the underlying organs and blood vessels. This research feels like science fiction, but the data are what the data are. We can temporarily make mice's skin transparent.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm6869
and
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-make-living-mices-skin-transparent-with-simple-food-dye/
Infographics
After four years of looking for infographics, I only now find the 2022 "Analysis of Compound Curse Words Used on Reddit." I feel like a dumb ass. And the article taught me the phrase "hapax legomena."
https://flowingdata.com/2022/07/01/analysis-of-compound-curse-words-used-on-reddit/
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon
You may recall the 2014 Fast Company article on the history of curse words.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3040266/the-oldest-english-swear-words-visualized
from a 2020 issue of WAiR
http://www.whatadamisreading.com/2020/12/what-adam-is-reading-12-9-20.html
Things I learned this week
Thanks to the Paralympics, I learned about Goalball, a soccer-like game with teams of 3 visually impaired athletes using a ball with a bell inside in a non-physical rugby + soccer-like game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goalball
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyXHYvGnJuU
Thanks to my wife (who shared this article), I now know the Finnish embassy in D.C. is a "hotbed" of naked diplomacy - influential politicians meet in saunas. Seriously. "The Diplomatic Sauna Society, as the gatherings are now called, is now a coveted invitation in the Beltway, thanks to Finland's growing influence in international affairs and the desire of busy professionals to live healthier lives."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/25/style/sauna-finnish-embassy-washington.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE4.uka5.ljI2JdFYv_qC&smid=url-share
I learned about the Pharmacologist Peter Witt, who started research in the 1940s looking at the impact of psychoactive drugs on spiders (and how different drugs impact the shape/patterns of the webs the drugged spiders weave.
https://www.drpeterwitt.com/project/peter-witt-biography/
and
https://web.archive.org/web/20210327150247/https://arachnidlady.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/nasa-tech-brief.pdf
The spider webs are surprisingly apropos for the drugs used.
The Wikipedia article about all the animal psychoactive drug research is worth reading. I understand testing fish, monkeys, and mollusks, but I do not understand why anyone would give an elephant LSD - big, strong, hallucinating animals seem like unideal research subjects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_psychoactive_drugs_on_animals
and
https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_history4.shtml
Living with A.I.
Politico offered a fascinating look at a lobbying firm purporting to use A.I. to understand trends amongst disparate data sources, such as hearing transcripts, voting patterns, and other vertical data sources. More concerning, the article highlights the criminal past of the leaders who run this particular lobbying group. The takeaway, however, is that A.I. hype is high, a wide variety of people are pushing A.I. tools, and there is a policy world need for tools beyond the capabilities of generative A.I., including data summarization and analysis. (I wonder which of the highlighted company's four employees validates their A.I. engine's output and monitors for bias?)
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/02/jacob-wohl-jack-burkman-ai-lobbying-pseudonyms-00176917
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick published a fantastic blog post about how A.I. can hurt student learning and how educators think about A.I. in unhelpful ways. But A.I. can be helpful - Mollick also offers ways to employ A.I. to enhance education. He cites several provocative studies, such as "Turkish students were given access to GPT-4 to help with homework, either through the standard ChatGPT interface (no prompt engineering) or using ChatGPT with a tutor prompt. Student homework scores shot up, but the use of unprompted standard ChatGPT to help with homework undermined learning by acting like a crutch. Even though students thought they learned a lot from ChatGPT, they learned less - scoring 17% worse on their final exam."
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/post-apocalyptic-education
and
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4895486
A.I. art of the week (A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter).
A spider and an elephant are drinking at a bar. The Bartender is a mushroom mounted in a robot frame. The elephant appears inebriated and sad. There is a voice bubble from the elephant that says, "My mushroom just walked out on me."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ttu5nc30s5z-FDQjkaoU68XrOj_hWedV/view?usp=sharing
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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