This week, we start with a subject unhealthily close to my heart, obesity.
The article is loaded with fascinating news from the bleeding edge of obesity theory (a lot of things make you fat, not just low willpower), but the thing that blew my mind was this :
Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas.
The hell? Animals are getting fatter? Try to blame that one on McDonald’s, folks. There has to be some sort of environmental explanation. Nothing else would fit.
Are we making them fatter by osmosis?
Your Ancestors Didn’t Sleep Like You
They slept on the ceiling.
Seriously though, before the era of electric light, people slept in two distinct periods. They slept, then got up for two or three hours, then slept again.
Between the two sleeping periods, they would do whatever struck their fancy. They would read, pray, eat, make love, and so on. And this was so common that it was simply assumed. It’s how everybody did it. Even back to the days of Canterbury’s Tales, people spoke of “first sleep” and “second sleep” as though it was the most commonplace thing in the world, just like we would talk about breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
It can’t have been entirely the lack of light and the expense of candles. This whole process took twleve hours, and it’s a rare day indeed when there are 12 hours between sunset and sunrise.
When my sleep issues were worse, I slept like that all the time.
Maybe I was on to something.
And now for the Fun With Carbon section of tonight’s news, starting with every girl’s favorite form of carbon, diamonds.
Tiny Diamonds Levitated By Lasers
Yes, they have done it. They levitated something bigger than an atom. Sure, it’s a nano-scale diamond, and thus still quote microscopic, but this is still a major step.
Turns out that when you focus a laser down fine enough, it can exert a force on physical objects. And get this… despite what you would think, the force is actually a pull, not a push.
You know what that means, don’t you? TRACTOR BEAMS!
And super-science involving both diamonds and lasers? How James Bond can you get?
The world becomes more sci fi every day, and I am loving every minute of it.
Beam me up now, Scotty!
Super-capacitors Amp Up To Replace Batteries
Now I will admit right now, I don’t know the difference between a capacitor and a battery.
But the articles says that these super-capacitors charge up extremely fast, and they do not wear out as fast as traditional chemical batteries. Plus they are much better for the environment than a bunch if heavy metals soaking in acid lying around a garbage dump.
But they main strength is that they can deliver a lot of energy fast, which regular batteries cannot do. With chemical batteries, you get the same energy no matter what.
So right now, super-capacitors are being used for things like storing energy gleaned from regenerative braking, and storing energy generated by wind turbines.
Currently, however, they are much larger than chemical batteries and much more expensive. So they will nto replace you cell phone battery yet.
Proponents are optimistic about the future.
It’s all theoretical so far, but scientists at Rice University have calculated that yet another way of sticking carbon together could result in a new substance called Carbyne that would be even stronger than diamond or graphene.
These names are getting increasingly silly sounding. The next nanocarbon miracle should be called Graphaloo or Carboinger.
Officially, carbyne is “…a chain of carbon atoms that are linked either by alternate triple and single bonds or by consecutive double bonds.” I recognize most of those words.
Anyhow, this new substance would be both stronger and stiffer than the competition. One small problem though… it’s probably not stable. In fact, for years it was thought that if two carbyne strands touched, they would explode. Yikes!
The Rice team says that is not true, that in fact, the stuff would likely last for days.
Hardly resolves the issue, but at it’s progress.
Alright, enough physics. You know what comes next. BRAIN SCIENCE!
We have two super creepy brain science stories tonight, and I am not sure which one is creepier, so I am just going to flip a coin.
Heads it’s lab grown brains, tails it’s mind control.
Tails! Mind control it is.
Controlling Someone Else’s Hand
For the first time ever, one researcher has been able to control the motions of another’s hand purely via the power of his mind, plus a nifty bit of technology of course.
These University of Washington scientists are touting this as the world’s first successful human brain to brain interface, and I am glad they used those exact words, because controlling someone else’s hand with your brain is definitely brain to brain, but not what you would call mind to mind.
Still, these people clearly think like I do :
“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.”
Like all modern brain science, this is both amazing and terrifying.
Imagine a future in which it is no longer true that we are always alone within our skulls…
And speaking of what’s inside our skulls…
They are called “cerebral organoids” (that is totally ready to attack Doctor Who) and they are the size of peas, but they have the three dimensional structure of brains and are made of brain tissue, so I am calling them brains.
Just teeny tiny pea brains. Insert your own political joke here.
To keep the creepiness level down, the Austrian researchers who made these little brainules say they are only for use in learning more about how the brain works by giving us something to test on that was never a person or somebody’s pet.
But they also admit that the brains are about at the complexity level of a fetus at nine weeks of gestation, and that means that it is only a matter of time before they can grow full grown adult human brains and make them do their bidding!
Isn’t brain science fun?
Seeya next week, folks!