Another seven days has passed in this hot and steamy summer season, and it is finally time to open up yet another can of whoop-ass knowledge on your collective buttocks…. of science!
Luckily, the summer heat has not quite parboiled all of my forebrain yet, so I as yet remain sufficiently compis mentis to act in loco cognis for you and bring you the most au courant and de rigeur science stories of this week.
But enough of those languages. For one thing, my spell checker is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“None of these are WORDS! Why aren’t you DOING anything?”
Our first story is usually the light and breezy, optimistic story, so let’s talk about AIDS.
Big News On AIDS
Wait, come back! I meant… let’s talk about a possible proof that AIDS can be cured!
That’s right, cured. Not just handled, or treated, or controlled. Cured, as in gone, as in you go back to you life as if it had never happened.
Now the proof is slim, so to speak. It is largely in the form of this guy.
Timothy Brown, shown here with his pet human being dog.
Short version : he had AIDS, he got a bone marrow transplant to deal with a type of blood cancer, nobody expected that to cure his AIDS, but now he is five years AIDS free despite not taking his antivirals any more. Ta da!
So after almost thirty years of the word “cure” being quite firmly taboo in AIDS medicine due to the disease’s ability to hide in one’s DNA forever, now it just might be OK to talk cure again.
What’s the cure? Well, in one percent of the population, that HIV never leads to AIDS because their white blood cells have a slight mutation that HIV can’t handle.
These people are called elite controllers [1], and it was from an elite controller that Timothy Brown got his bone marrow transplant.
Now bone marrow transplants are not child’s play for either donor or recipient, so this is not exactly going to become the standard procedure. But it points the way towards a possible cure.
And if we take down AIDS, things are going to get freakay.
Never Forget A Password Again
Because basically, you will never actually remember it in the first place.
Not consciously, anyhow. Bear with me because this is a little complicated.
But basically, it relies on what is known as implicit learning, that is, learning things without knowing you are learning them. The volunteers played a video game in which they had to intercept falling blocks. There were six places the blocks could fall, each corresponding to a different key on their keyboards.
The trick is that the placement of the blocks was not always random. In fact, the same series of thirty blocks was repeated around 100 times while the people played the game for like 45 minutes. [2]
Each time that sequence was repeated, the volunteers would react a little faster, and hence were “memorizing” the sequence without even having a vocabulary to describe it.
This could lead to a system where you establish your password by playing the game with a random set pattern embedded in it, and then you are the only person in the world who would be able to consistently get that exact pattern right faster than you would just random blocks.
Even if someone played the game morning noon and night to get good at it, they would simply be faster at the game as a whole. They would still not be faster at only the right sequence of blocks.
And the bonus would be that nobody could force you to reveal your password, because you do not even know it to start with. Only your reflexes know it.
More trouble than it is worth for the average consumer, but I can see it having applications in very high security situations.
Science Wants To Be Free
Finally, a very interesting and stimulating story from the UK, where the government has ordered that all government funded research must be made freely available to the public by 2014.
This opens up a huge can of worms about how science works as an industry and as a phenomenon, as well as poking at the very substrata of scientific academia.
From the point of view of pure science and the advancement of human knowledge, it is a fantastic development. Nothing accelerates the cause of human knowledge and progress faster that the free and unfettered exchange of information, and having all public science be publicly available would mean that there would be no need for scientists to duplicate one another’s research all over the world because they are all hoarding knowledge in order to get funding.
Instead, everyone could have all the up to date data and results all the time, and hence, the state of the art (or in this case, science) would progress at a far faster rate.
And for a science loving, progress loving, big time intellectual nerd like me, that could not be more awesome if it tried.
But there are practical concerns. For one thing, there still has to be the regulatory effect of the scientific journals. They serve to evaluate various experiments and studies and weed out the junk science, the weak science, the incomplete science, and so forth.
That is why you cannot have, as some suggest, science published directly to the people. That would lead to far too much mass confusion about what was real science and what was not.
Still, I look forward to more nations taking this approach, and via the Internet, giving science the kind of supercharge it needs to face the problems of the future.
Which it sort of created.
