Not sure I spelled that one right. Never actually had to type it before. Nor have I ever seen it in print. And the Windows Dictionary sure as heck never heard of it.

Anyhow, heya folks, and a Happy Blue Moon to you all! Yes, when the moon rises tonight, it will be a Blue Moon, which alas does not refer to its color in any way (I know, boo, hiss) but which only means a second full moon in a calendar month.

It is, however, quite rare, as our calendar is vaguely lunar, so while the moon is the same old moon color as always tonight, at least now you have an excuse to do all those things that you say you do only “once in a blue moon”.

Tonight’s the night!

Now, on with the science!

The Enemy Of My Enemy

An intriguing story out of France suggests that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could be used to create new drugs to fight cancer.

The idea is to exploit HIV’s ability to create slightly different versions of its protein coat with each generation to trick it into producing slightly different versions of proteins we find useful, and thus turn the HIV virus into a little protein laboratory for our use as a species.

It will just keep churning out protein variations every generation, and we can collect them, test them, and see which ones are better. The French study produced a version of a protein used in activating anti-cancer drugs that is 300 times more potent than the usual version, meaning one three-hundredth of the dose will be needed to treat the patient, meaning one three-hundredth of the side-effects.

I particularly like this concept, and not just because of the delicious irony of turning one of our deadliest and most implacable enemies into something that will actually save lives.

I love it because this could easily result in better drugs for all kinds of diseases, not just cancer. These tiny variants on important proteins are a real problem for modern medicine, and a way to mass-produce and test variants could speed up drug development by the speed of life at the microscopic level.

And that is a mighty fast speed.

And who knows, maybe we could even trick the AIDS virus into creating a cure for AIDS.

Wouldn’t that be the ultimate revenge on that goddamned fucking disease?

How Ants Network

Surprisingly, they mostly use LinkedIn.

Just kidding. But the story is that ants and computers share information in sort of the same way.

They used to think that ants could somehow transmit complex information to one another via things like chemical trails and antennae wagging.

And Deborah Gordon’s study of harvester ants does not disprove any of those other theories, but it suggest there may be a far simpler control mechanism.

Basically, in order to gather food efficiently, the ants simply base the number of ants being sent out to forage on the basis of how many are coming back with food. The more returning with food, the more they send out. The fewer, the fewer. Brilliantly simple, isn’t it?

And it turns out, that is exactly how TCP, the protocol that only runs, like, the ENTIRE INTERNET, works as well. The more packets coming in (ack packets, short for ‘acknowledgement packets’), the more packets it knows it can send out.

Ant colonies and internet nodes even start off the same way. The ant colony sends out a whole whack of scout ants at the start of the day, and then waits to see how many come back before deciding how many to send back out again. And every TCP node of the Internet does the same thing : starts a connection by sending out a whole whack of packets then sees how many make it back with an ‘ack’. That way it knows how good the connection is, and can adjust bandwidth accordingly.

No point in sending out more packets than will make it back, right?

Which just goes to show something that I have known since I was a kid watching an anthill in my front yard : ants are cool! Such complex behaviour from such simple creatures. I knew they must have some extremely efficient programming for that to be possible.

Rise Of The Cyborg

Finally, as you know, I always save the hottest, most interesting, and/or creepiest story for last, and this week’s story of the first successful interfacing of living tissue and machine on the cellular level pretty much maxes out all three of those criteria.

As you might expect, it involves nanotech. Some Harvard mad scientists managed to get some nano-wires to interface with some engineered human tissue, and voila, we have cyborg tissue.

Pretty funkin’ groovy, I don’t mind saying. And in case you think this “cyborg” label is a little premature, scope this quote from one of the authors of the study, Charles M. Lieber :

With this technology, for the first time, we can work at the same scale as the unit of biological system without interrupting it. Ultimately, this is about merging tissue with electronics in a way that it becomes difficult to determine where the tissue ends and the electronics begin.

Can I get a hell yeah? Paging Doctor Frankenstein! The immediate goal of such awesome tinkering is to aid in the creation of implantable medical devices which can interface directly with the control systems of the host body and use those, instead of needing to have their own (ultimately redundant) sensing and control systems built into them.

After all, your heart does not have its own brain. It runs on the same autonomic systems as the rest of the body. Why shouldn’t our implantable medical devices tap into those same systems?

But we video game nerds know where we want this to ultimate lead : controlling computers with your mind! And none of this having to learn to control your brain waves to play pong shit.

We want to control our characters on the screen as easily and fluidly as we control our limbs!

Actually, given how clumsy we tend to be, maybe even more than that.

Well that’s it for this week, folks! Seeya next time!