“hundreds of mini-brains on a chip”

This Wired article talks about tiny balls of mouse brain cells complete with blood vessels connected to a “microfluidic” chip that essentially acts as a heart.

In the last five years, researchers have engineered lots of dish-dwelling micro-organs, from itsy bitsy intestines to Lilliputian livers. They’ve simultaneously made major advances in biochips: small, Flash-drive-sized structures lined with a layer or two of cells and studded with biosensors and microfluidic channels. Those two-dimensional chips are useful for testing, say, how lung cells react to a piped-in toxin, but they’re too simplistic to truly mimic organs. That’s where organoids like Hoffman-Kim’s brain balls come in. For the first time, 2-D biochips are colliding with 3-D mini-organs—and together they’re making some of the best organ simulations ever.

Using these mashups, the idea is that scientists will be able to take a few of your skin cells, grow miniature versions of all your major organs, and put them on a chip. Then doctors can test out the best compounds for whatever disease you might have—not in a mouse, but in a mini-you. “This will enable a new era of personalized medicine,” says Ali Khademhosseini, a bioengineer at Harvard’s Wyss Institute who has been working on both mini-organs and biochips for the last decade.

In a paper that will be published later this month, Khademhosseini’s team created a series of chips connecting liver organoids and cancer cells with loops of tiny tubes. They pumped an anticancer drug through the system, tracking whether it killed the tumor cells and whether the liver cells could survive the toxic onslaught. That way, they could optimize a drug dosage that maxed cancer-killing power while keeping the liver out of harm’s way.

I can’t help wondering if these body-less mouse brains are sentient on some level, or if they could be. Do they have a natural life span, or can they regenerate and repair themselves indefinitely? Could someone create a human consciousness this way? If so, could it survive and develop in the absence of a body? Could it be plugged into a simulation so it thought it had a body? Could it be plugged into a spacecraft or a submarine and sent out to explore?

do we want a strong or weak dollar

This Economist article tries to explain whether a stronger or weaker dollar is better. The answer is both or possibly neither. A strong dollar makes imported stuff at the store cheaper for consumers, but it lowers the demand for exports and makes it hard for those same consumers to get well-paying jobs making stuff to export. It encourages trade deficits (more imports than exports) for this reason. Because it holds down wages for the working and middle classes, it makes income inequality worse. All other things being equal, the value of the currency should fall relative to foreign currencies in this situation until things are in balance again. This doesn’t happen to the U.S. dollar because it is the world’s reserve currency, meaning other countries are always willing to buy it – people consider it a safe investment even if it is paying very little interest. So this is one thing that is holding our interest rates artificially low. The author concludes that being the only reserve currency is actually not in the country’s long-term interests.

An overvalued currency and persistent trade deficits are fine for America’s consumers, but painful for its producers. The reserve accumulation of the past two decades has gone hand-in-hand with a soaring current-account deficit in America. Imports have grown faster than exports; new jobs in exporting industries have not appeared in numbers great enough to absorb workers displaced by increased foreign competition. Tariffs cannot fix this problem. The current-account gap is a product of underlying financial flows, and taxing imports will simply cause the dollar to rise in an offsetting fashion.

America’s privilege also increases inequality, since lost jobs in factories hurt workers while outsize investment performance benefits richer Americans with big portfolios. Because the rich are less inclined to spend an extra dollar than the typical worker, this shift in resources creates weakness in American demand—and sluggish economic growth—except when consumer debt rises as the rich lend their purchasing power to the rest.

Chalk the headaches generated by low interest rates up to the dollar standard, too. Some economists reckon they reflect global appetite outstripping the supply of the safe assets America is uniquely equipped to provide—dollar-denominated government bonds. As the price of safe bonds rises, rates on those bonds fall close to zero, leaving central banks with ever less room to stimulate their economies when they run into trouble.

One thing I know from painful experience is that when you live abroad, a falling dollar can hurt, because I was getting paid in U.S. dollars and had to pay my rent in Singapore dollars. So my rent was going up every month in U.S. dollar terms, and also going up every year in Singapore dollar terms. Ouch. Well, the life experience gained had a certain value I suppose. That was one of the only times lately that the U.S. dollar has been falling relative to Asian currencies, so I am just unlucky.

lead, crime and teen pregnancy

Leaded gasoline peaked around the year I was born, and both crime and teen pregnancy peaked while I was a teenager. I managed to steer clear of these two things (or maybe I left no evidence in either case…), but maybe I would have been the next Einstein if it weren’t for lead, we’ll never know.

Lead Exposure and Behavior: Effects on Antisocial and Risky Behavior among Children and Adolescents Jessica Wolpaw Reyes NBER Working Paper No. 20366 August 2014

It is well known that exposure to lead has numerous adverse effects on behavior and development. Using data on two cohorts of children from the NLSY, this paper investigates the effect of early childhood lead exposure on behavior problems from childhood through early adulthood. I find large negative consequences of early childhood lead exposure, in the form of an unfolding series of adverse behavioral outcomes: behavior problems as a child, pregnancy and aggression as a teen, and criminal behavior as a young adult. At the levels of lead that were the norm in United States until the late 1980s, estimated elasticities of these behaviors with respect to lead range between 0.1 and 1.0.

Maybe we learned our lesson with lead and mercury and have moved on. Or maybe something as bad or worse is hiding in plain site in our consumer products and we just haven’t figured it out yet.

Just for the archives, here is a key 2000 study by Rick Nevin on the subject: How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy.

This study compares changes in children’s blood lead levels in the United States with subsequent changes in IQ, based on norm comparisons for the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) given to representative national samples of children in 1984 and 1992. The CogAT norm comparisons indicate shifts in IQ levels consistent with the blood lead to IQ relationship reported by an earlier study and population shifts in average blood lead for children under age 6 between 1976 and 1991. The CogAT norm comparisons also support studies indicating that the IQ to blood lead slope may increase at lower blood lead levels. Furthermore, long-term trends in population exposure to gasoline lead were found to be remarkably consistent with subsequent changes in violent crime and unwed pregnancy. Long-term trends in paint and gasoline lead exposure are also strongly associated with subsequent trends in murder rates going back to 1900. The Andings on violent crime and unwed pregnancy are consistent with published data describing the relationship between IQ and social behavior. The Andings with respect to violent crime are also consistent with studies indicating that children with higher bone lead tend to display more aggressive and delinquent behavior. This analysis demonstrates that widespread exposure to lead is likely to have profound implications for a wide array of socially undesirable outcomes.

fish-free fish food

With wild fish reserves more and more depleted, fish farming seems like a more sustainable and downright necessary alternative. And it has gotten huge. The problem though, as this Wired article explains, is that the food given to farmed fish is also made from wild fish. In this case, the smaller ones like anchovies that people don’t eat as much. So not only have humans sifted out most of the big fish, we are now vacuuming up the small ones that form the base of the wild food web for all the other creatures in the sea. There are some attempt to develop alternatives such as “feed made from seaweed extracts, yeast, and algae grown in bioreactors”. Basically, if humans are not going to go vegetarian, which might be the most sustainable option of all, we can at least try to eat vegetarian fish.

Fish meal—dried and ground up fish bits—and its more lubricious counterpart, fish oil, are made from cheap species that humans don’t eat that much: sardines, herring, anchovies, krill. But lots of other ocean animals do eat them; they’re kind of the linchpin of marine ecosystems. Lose the forage fish, lose a lot more. And as those forage fish catches are getting smaller, fish meal and oil-based diets are getting more expensive. Since 2012, prices have risen more than 80 percent. “Aquaculture is growing so fast that it can’t possibly continue to use any more,” says Kevin Fitzsimmons, a biologist at the University of Arizona and former president of the World Aquaculture Society. “Forage fish are just maxed out…”

Any kind of plant- or algae-based feed still relies on photosynthesis, and that requires surface area on the Earth, unless and until we go to all artificial light in high rises or in orbit powered by something like nuclear power. Yeast is interesting because it doesn’t require photosynthesis, only some kind of organic input. But if we hit the limit caused by the Earth’s footprint, then go to a technology that is not limited by Earth’s footprint, we will just tend to expand until we hit another limit. And our original natural ecosystems get completely lost somewhere along the way, if they have not been already.

how a U.S.-China war could happen

A full-blown U.S.-China war seems so stupid for both countries and the entire world as to be unthinkable. But it is thinkable because both countries may think they have something to gain from brinksmanship, and the Trump administration seems willing to take a lot of risks and to be unlikely to back down. Here is a scenario described in Foreign Policy:

Consider the testimony offered by Trump’s Secretary of State pick Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, in his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 11, as he warned of a more confrontational South China Sea policy: “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.” There are only so many ways the Trump team can go about sending such signals given its vow to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which America’s allies had been hoping the United States would complete. By preemptively eliminating tools like economic statecraft from its foreign-policy toolbox, the Trump administration will be leaving itself with only hard power to counteract China’s ambitions. That would probably mean an attempted military blockade against the Chinese navy in the South China Sea…

Trump’s demonstrated willingness to toss out the rulebook on the one-China policy, with his phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, has already ratcheted up tensions with Beijing to a level not seen since 1996, when President Bill Clinton sent two carrier battle groups through the Taiwan Strait. The passage of China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait at the end of December was largely interpreted as a stern indictment directed at Taipei and the incoming Trump administration. The carrier group then transited past Okinawa, which hosts more than half of the 50,000 American troops in Japan, into the South China Sea. A simultaneous op-ed appearing in China’s state-affiliate mouthpiece, the Global Times, warned, “If the fleet is able to enter areas where the US has core interests, the situation when the US unilaterally imposes pressure on China will change…”

Moving more U.S. naval assets into the Pacific will add to Beijing’s perceptions of U.S. containment while increasing the odds that a minor accident or hostile encounter could trigger armed conflict. One could imagine China deploying underwater submarine detection defenses in the South or East China Sea to monitor U.S. Navy movements. If Washington were to seek to destroy these assets to preempt Chinese primacy or look to extend American military superiority in the region, Beijing would feel compelled to retaliate. Trump’s team might then be tempted to think a shocking use of force could deter Beijing from escalating conflict. It’s not clear at what point Trump would decide the costs of conflict outweigh the benefits of winning such a clash.

peak bacon?

This headline in USA Today says Nation’s bacon reserves hit 50-year low as prices rise. That pretty much covers it. The reason is not lack of supply but increased foreign demand.

In December 2016, frozen pork belly inventory totaled 17.8 million pounds, the lowest level since 1957, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As a result, prices are on the rise. The council reports pork belly prices have increased 20 percent in January. Officials said increased foreign demand might account for the decline in inventory. Hog farmers export approximately 26 percent of total productions, the council said.

free trade and big ag

When I think of the controversial side of trade, I tend to think of manufactured goods being produced cheaply abroad and imported to the U.S. But there is also a huge global trade in food and agriculture, and the U.S. is a huge player in it, both in exports and imports. It is not only big business but big politics too. This industry has lobbied heavily for trade deals like NAFTA and TPP. This Mother Jones article has a lot of interesting facts and figures. Okay, maybe Mother Jones is not a completely apolitical non-partisan voice, but this article has a lot of links you can follow up on if you want to draw your own conclusions from the raw data.

It’s interesting, we have a nominally business-friendly administration elected by voters in rural states that seems hostile to the priorities of politicians bought and paid for by the biggest and most powerful business lobby in those same rural states.

Silicon Valley Preppers

I don’t love this New Yorker article all that much, because it is mostly a bunch of anecdotes strung together with the opinions of “high net worth individuals”, as though we should care more about their opinions than the opinions of other people. I don’t. But the article had a few interesting parts, including this description of a “the Survival Condo Project, a fifteen-story luxury apartment complex built in an underground Atlas missile silo” in Kansas.

The original silo of Hall’s complex was built by the Army Corps of Engineers to withstand a nuclear strike. The interior can support a total of seventy-five people. It has enough food and fuel for five years off the grid; by raising tilapia in fish tanks, and hydroponic vegetables under grow lamps, with renewable power, it could function indefinitely, Hall said. In a crisis, his swat-team-style trucks (“the Pit-Bull VX, armored up to fifty-calibre”) will pick up any owner within four hundred miles. Residents with private planes can land in Salina, about thirty miles away…

The complex is a tall cylinder that resembles a corncob. Some levels are dedicated to private apartments and others offer shared amenities: a seventy-five-foot-long pool, a rock-climbing wall, an Astro-Turf “pet park,” a classroom with a line of Mac desktops, a gym, a movie theatre, and a library. It felt compact but not claustrophobic. We visited an armory packed with guns and ammo in case of an attack by non-members, and then a bare-walled room with a toilet. “We can lock people up and give them an adult time-out,” he said. In general, the rules are set by a condo association, which can vote to amend them. During a crisis, a “life-or-death situation,” Hall said, each adult would be required to work for four hours a day, and would not be allowed to leave without permission. “There’s controlled access in and out, and it’s governed by the board,” he said.

The “medical wing” contains a hospital bed, a procedure table, and a dentist’s chair.

It’s easy for me to say “no thanks” since, not being a “high net worth individual”, this is not an option for me. But even if I were sitting on a billion dollars I don’t think I would be interested in this.

de-extinction

Here’s the Amazon description of a new (to me) book called Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction.

If you could bring back just one animal from the past, what would you choose? It can be anyone or anything from history, from the King of the Dinosaurs, T. rex, to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, and beyond.

De-extinction, the ability to bring extinct species back to life is fast becoming reality. Around the globe, scientists are trying to de-extinct all manner of animals, including the woolly mammoth, the passenger pigeon and a bizarre species of flatulent frog. But de-extinction is more than just bringing back the dead. It’s a science that can be used to save species, shape evolution and sculpt the future of life on our planet.

In Bring Back the King, scientist and comedy writer Helen Pilcher goes on a quest to identify the perfect de-extinction candidate. Along the way, she asks if Elvis could be recreated from the DNA inside a pickled wart, investigates whether it’s possible to raise a pet dodo, and considers the odds of a 21st century Neanderthal turning heads on public transport.

Pondering the practicalities and the point of de-extinction, Bring Back the King is a witty and wry exploration of what is bound to become one of the hottest topics in conservation if not in science as a whole in the years to come.