Science, it definitely still works bitches. - The Bear and Badger

davyK

That article about the frog's arse eye is fascinating. The glimpse it gives into what people are working on is awe inspiring.

Pun not intended BTW.

GurtTractor

Yeah I'm completely hooked on the potential implications now, forget cyberpunk, the future is going to be biopunk.

This is the overall mission statement for his lab -

Embodied Minds: understanding diverse intelligence in evolved, designed, and hybrid complex systems

Each of us took the remarkable journey from matter to mind. Once we were quiescent egg cells; slowly, gradually, we became human beings capable of advanced metacognition. Our group studies the processes by which intelligence, in myriad conventional and unconventional embodiments, operates in the physical world. We combine developmental biophysics, computer science, and behavioral science to understand how cognition scales up: from the metabolic and physiological competencies of single cells, through the organ-building and repair capabilities of cellular collectives, to the classical behavioral repertoires of whole organisms and swarms. While looking for scale-invariant principles, current work focuses on interrogating non-neural cognition, in particular on the emergence of proto-cognition in cell collectives at both evolutionary and developmental timescales.

We work at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science. Seeking general principles of life-as-it-can-be, we use a wide range of natural animal models and also create novel synthetic and chimeric life forms. Our goal is to develop generative conceptual frameworks that help us detect, understand, predict, and communicate with truly diverse intelligences, including cells, tissues, organs, synthetic living constructs, robots, and software-based AIs.

Our main model system is morphogenesis: the ability of multicellular bodies to self-assemble, repair, and improvise novel solutions to anatomical goals. We ask questions about the mechanisms required to achieve robust, multiscale, adaptive order in vivo, and about the algorithms sufficient to reproduce this capacity in other substrates. One of our unique specialties is the study of developmental bioelectricity: ways in which all cells connect in somatic electrical networks that store, process, and act on information to control large-scale body structure. Our lab creates and employs tools to read and edit the bioelectric code that guides the proto-cognitive computations of the body, much as neuroscientists are learning to read and write the mental content of the brain.

Our mission is to develop fundamental understanding of how minds of all kinds arise, scale, persist, and change; we seek to use that knowledge to benefit the embodied experience of sentient beings, through biomedicine and beyond.

A recent presentation -

SpaceGazelle

I'm not sure any of this is a good idea.

GurtTractor

What about treatment of cancer, birth defects, and traumatic injuries? Because that's what this research is leading to in the near-future.

SpaceGazelle

I don't have a problem with AI but I do have a problem with using animals. Problems like protein folding can be done without them and the purely AI approach to new drugs does not involve extra eyes on frogs arses.

SpaceGazelle

I mean, we'll need to test the new pills work but I suspect that'll be done on human patients.

GurtTractor

The analogy that he uses for the bioelectrical approach vs "classical" medicine that just deals with proteins and DNA is that the latter is a bit like how programming used to be done in the earliest days of computing, by repatching wires around to change what a program does, and bioelectrics is more like a higher level language that can do multiple things and solve problems without having to change the underlying hardware. The experiments demonstrate how this is possible.

It's quite likely that eventually they'll be able to use mostly AI approaches to simulate this stuff, but until you've done the experiments on real organisms to get a baseline understanding of what's actually happening you're probably not going to get very far.

Being squeamish about this kind of research is understandable, but I think you have to take a step back and consider it in terms of the immense amount of suffering that many humans and animals will have to continue to endure if it isn't done.

SpaceGazelle

Animal suffering increasingly tends to be caused by humans. Don't bring animals in as an argument.

GurtTractor

This point is that this research will almost certainly yield a net reduction in overall planetary suffering, so pick your poison I guess. I would tend to agree with Levin that there's a moral imperative to push this kind of science and engineering forward, it goes beyond medicine and has implications for all kinds of systems design problems from computing to societal organisation.

SpaceGazelle

GurtTractor wrote:

This point is that this research will almost certainly yield a net reduction in overall planetary suffering

I'm going to be generous and call that optimistic.

GurtTractor

You think it will increase suffering?

SpaceGazelle

Yes, I think more humans tends to on a planetary scale. I think advances will increasingly be the preserve of the rich but I don't want to bring politics and capitalism into an already complex argument.

GurtTractor

What do you think humanity should do in general then? I'm not clear on what your philosophical position is.

SpaceGazelle

Dunno but it doesn't involve eyes on frogs arses. I think they should certainly bring in assisted dying for the terminally ill.

davyK

I see experimenting with animals as a way to gain insight to the process in humans, not as a direct solution.

SpaceGazelle

It's had its place but it's clearly not an ethical solution in any shape or form. Happily, it might prove the case with AI drugs that it's also pointless.

Blue Swirl

SpaceGazelle wrote:

I'm not sure any of this is a good idea.

What could possibly go wrong?

Life finds a way etc.

GurtTractor

SpaceGazelle

Yep.

Blue Swirl

Haven't watched that, but yes, academia sucks. Way too much pressure to publish from the outside, and a disturbing amount of interpersonal and departmental politics on the inside. Add the money-grubbing nature of the people who run the places, and my fantasies of the ivory tower turned out to be a pipe dream.

Blue Swirl

Let's put it this way: when I say my PhD nearly killed me, that's not hyperbole. I started the mental health thread while I was getting my doctorate finished off.

SpaceGazelle

I just got frustrated and annoyed with everything. Innovative thinking is discouraged, which can be a good thing in case everyone pursues batshit ideas, but to put so much cash into string theory is madness but that's where the money lies. It doesn't help that profs are allowed to run their own businesses on the side based on their funded research. Nearly all my old profs had a side venture, many very profitable.

New international money from overseas students has gone into new buildings to make the places bigger, not better. Plus the peer review system is fucked in other countries, notably India, and it has flooded academia with torrents of inaccurate bullshit.

Much of working for AI startups involves going to see some prof for a week or two to get their expertise, during term time I might add. They're often paid well or are offered some shares.

cockbeard

Ouch, I realised that my work life was killing me, or helping me to kill myself. I have wondered whether going into academia might be less stressful than industry. My favourite bit of work was mentoring, so it seemed levturing might be a fun and relatively stress free life. Grass is always greener syndrome probably

Blue Swirl

Don't get me wrong, I'd go back in a heart beat. But, like I said, the ivory tower has gone.

cockbeard

I think not having been inside it, it just seems like a cushy life. I hate politics and try to ignore it which leads me to being pretty outspoken and drawing a big target on myself. I've little doubt that the same would happen in a scholarly setting, despite me thinking that at least a few hundred jobs aren't on line with decisions I make there would be other pressures related to getting published and raising the school's profile instead

SpaceGazelle

It can be deeply frustrating if you care about the subject you're studying, which is everybody. You're pushed into researching things you don't want to and it's not as free as you might imagine. Often you're looking into stuff the Prof is interested in or has cash to spend on something in particular.

It can be cushy in a way but it's hard to switch off like a regular job. Answering loads of emails is a necessary chore that I hated. The amount of work you get to spend on interesting things is limited and although the travel can be nice it gets boring quickly. It's more stressful than you think. If it's getting away from internal politics that you seek, academia is not the place.

SpaceGazelle

Sounds like I'm completely bad mouthing it there but it has plenty of merits too.

Blue Swirl

SpaceGazelle wrote:

Sounds like I'm completely bad mouthing it there but it has plenty of merits too.

Like I said, I'd go back in a heart beat. It was great, figuring things out, making new equipment, and meeting truly interesting people. But sadly, academia and academics is just like the rest of the planet: who's friends with who (and who's shagging who) can be more important than the work you're doing. And like anything else, it's a business. There's some bluesky research out there, but not much. The focus is, more and more, on the bottom line. (Which is self-defeating, imho, but you try explaining that to the bean counters.)

I really did like the research, and I loved the aspect of self-management. If I was bit knackered, I'd just go in late and stay late. No one would even bat an eye. I miss having my own office, with the walls plastered with random stuff I found online, things to do lists, and papers I need to read. Like Gazelle said, the travel can be great; I went to Texas and Iceland on the uni's penny. I met an astronaut and slept in a place where the sun didn't set.

Blue Swirl

That time the moon turned itself inside out.

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The University of Arizona team suggests the moon formed rapidly, leaving it entirely covered with a hot magma ocean at first. As this ocean cooled and hardened, it would have formed the outer layers of the moon, including its mantle and crust. Yet, at lower layers, the infant moon would have still been in turmoil.

Models of moon formation suggest the last remains of this giant lunar ocean crystallized into dense materials including ilmenite, a mineral rich in iron and titanium.

"Because these heavy minerals are denser than the mantle underneath, they create a gravitational instability, and you would expect this layer to sink deeper into the moon's interior," said research leader and former LPL doctoral candidate Weigang Liang, said.

davyK

On a similar note.....only learnt this recently despite it being old news.

Take that anti-nuclear energy heads!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/nuclear-fission-confirmed-as-source-of-more-than-half-of-earths-heat/

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