Week of August 21, 2023
Our Airbnb host randomly texted a picture of a bear on Thursday of last week, the day before we arrived in rural Massachusetts for a weekend wedding. Accompanying the photo, the owner cheerfully noted, "I captured this last week. Take precaution - bears are most active in the early morning and evening." When we reached the house on Friday, we found an assortment of printed trail cam pictures in the foyer (bears and mountain lions seen on the property) and a jauntily placed newspaper clipping in the kitchen ("Local Mass woman finds bear eating in her kitchen").
The lions and bears did not appear during our stay. But the intense, multimodal messaging crossed the line from helpful guidance to anxiety-provoking - leading us to wonder if we were part of some Airbnb-sponsored psychology study (like a low-key Truman show), "Using doorbell cameras to capture the reactions of suburban visitors threatened with rural carnivorous woodland creature interactions." I hope the Ring Camera footage of four Marylanders (returning two nights in a row from wedding celebrations) waving iPhone lights and speaking loudly about bear defense tactics provided high-quality data. Please let me know if you see us on social media.
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Hospitalizations continue to rise. Wastewater RNA concentrations are also rising, paralleling late summer 2021 and 2022 trends. Aside from the below links, here is a good analysis from Twitter:
https://twitter.com/JPWeiland/status/1692307567123546355
The N.Y. Times COVID Tracker reflects the changing data quality - only CDC-gathered hospital data as a surrogate (lagging) indicator.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html
Wastewater monitoring is more of a LEADING indicator.
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COVID articles
Here is a smattering of information about the newest variants moving around the globe, from person to person.
Symptoms precede positive at-home tests by days:
https://twitter.com/katepri14608408/status/1692535266383421603
BA.2.86 has numerous mutations that confer immune evasion:
https://twitter.com/COVID19_disease/status/1692887302362800373
Dr. Ashish Jha discusses how to assess new variants. Regarding BA.2.86, the questions to look for an answer include: 1) Is the variant more transmissible? 2) Does it cause more severe disease? 3)Will our tests, vax, & treatments still work?"
https://twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1692496885238423878
There is still hope for a nasal-spray administered COVID vaccine. Yale researchers published their recent efforts using a "polymer nanoparticle (polyplex)" system.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.abq0603
Dr. Monica Gandhi updates the end of her March 2023 Twitter thread on this topic with the data from this study.
https://twitter.com/MonicaGandhi9/status/1692258209858560163
Medical Trends and Technology
Brain-computer interface technologies (like Neuralink or Synchron) only address part of the opportunity for biological computing. Two articles caught my attention this week.
Wired published an article on wiring temperature sensors to the nerves of missing limbs, allowing prosthetics to offer a broader range of sensations (in addition to motion).
https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-make-bionic-limbs-literally-very-cool/
Taking the human-IT connection one step further, I learned that there are techniques to print circuits directly on cells. While experimental at the moment (they call it proof of concept), there are limitless applications of "'tattooing living cells and tissues with flexible arrays of gold nanodots and nanowires."
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c01960
and
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/08/230810141018.htm
We are getting closer to xenotransplantation. University of Alabama surgeons published a case report about successfully transplanting a genetically modified pig kidney into a dialysis-dependent brain-dead patient. When the study ended, the porcine kidney had kept the patient off dialysis for seven days. One step closer to helping alleviate the enormous backlog of transplant waiting lists.
Infographics
Given our Airbnb experience, I revisited the Bearmageddon comic book website infographic demonstrating how to use Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu on bears.
https://www.bearmageddon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BJJ.jpg
Things I learned this week
Medscape shared an article reminding readers that sunscreen is less effective during heat waves due to chemical breakdown and increased sweating. It is a great example of an unexpected impact of global warming – the functional breakdown of a common product. (I also note that one of the doctors quoted has the last name Watchmaker, which leads to some weird wording.)
https://www.medscape.com/s/viewarticle/995580
There are (street performers? social media stars? gonzo comedians?) running spin classes in New York City using parked rental bikes. Of note, when docked, these bikes only pedal backward. Oddly, this has been happening for years (based on 2012 and more recent videos).
https://twitter.com/Leann_Abad/status/1691679152095551724
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgmsuLtRp8Q
(I note that the chosen name of the YouTube comedian in the link is The Fat Jewish. I suspect his 2012 video is comedy - but he does a good job illustrating the potential of free spin classes. You can see his channel.)
Living with A.I.
"A New York company Somatic is offering a US$1,000 per month service in which an autonomous trolley-bot will live at an office and clean bathrooms for 40 hours a week." Click to see the videos, then imagine the new genre of horror films involving rogue bathroom-cleaning robots.
https://newatlas.com/robotics/toilet-cleaning-robot-somatic/
Given the bathroom bots, revisiting the Turing test is wise. Wired offered a thoughtful article about how we should consider sentience related to A.I. and the need for updated tools in measuring "consciousness." This article also introduced me to the phrase "stochastic parrot."
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-new-turing-test/
And I will leave with one last A.I. article - using brain electrical patterns from iEEG (a type of electroencephalogram - the sticky pads and wires on the head) readings, "Neuroscientists recorded electrical activity from areas of the brain as patients listened to the Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1." Using artificial intelligence software, they were able to reconstruct the song from the brain recordings." Fear not; however, iEEG requires surgical implantation of the electrodes. We are still some time away from easy or surreptitious thought reading. You can listen to the reconstructed song on the press release page.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/08/15/releases-20230811
and
https://x.com/rowancheung/status/1693270090555281864
A.I. art of the week
"A 1-arm industrial robot holding a sword and dueling with a bear dressed as a musketeer."
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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