Tag Archives: research

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Longevity personality traits

personalityTo those of us with an interest in living long enough to live forever any indicator of exceptional longevity is of interest. Here researchers have identified particular personality traits associated with longevity:

Because personality traits have been shown to have substantial heritable components, the researchers hypothesized that certain personality features may be important to the healthy aging observed in the offspring of centenarians.
…

Both the male and female offspring of centenarians scored in the low range of published norms for neuroticism and in the high range for extraversion. The women also scored comparatively high in agreeableness. Otherwise, both sexes scored within normal range for conscientiousness and openness, and the men scored within normal range for agreeableness.

Obviously you can’t do much to change your personality, but the conclusions are interesting.

[from Physorg][image from kol on flickr]

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And I, for one, welcome our new robot scientists

robot with laptopRobots are ideal for doing human tasks that are repetitive, like screwing lids on cosmetic bottles, welding car panels… and now making scientific discoveries. Columbia University’s “Adam” machine is “the first automated system to complete the cycle from hypothesis, to experiment, to reformulated hypothesis without human intervention”.

The demonstration of autonomous science breaks major ground. Researchers have been automating portions of the scientific process for decades, using robotic laboratory instruments to screen for drugs and sequence genomes, but humans are usually responsible for forming the hypotheses and designing the experiments themselves. After the experiments are complete, the humans must exert themselves again to draw conclusions.

[snip]

They armed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes and proteins involved in metabolism in other species. Then they set the mechanical beast loose, only intervening to remove waste or replace consumed solutions. […]

Adam sought out gaps in the metabolism model, specifically orphan enzymes, which scientists think exist, but which haven’t been linked to any parent genes. After selecting a desirable orphan, Adam scoured the database for similar enzymes in other organisms, along with the corresponding genes. Using this information, it hypothesized that similar genes in the yeast genome may code for the orphan enzyme.

The process might sound simple — and indeed, similar “scientific discovery” algorithms already exist — but Adam was only getting started. Still chugging along on its own, it designed experiments to test its hypotheses, and performed them using a fully automated array of centrifuges, incubators, pipettes, and growth analyzers.

After analyzing the data and running follow-up experiments — it can design and initiate over a thousand new experiments each day — Adam had uncovered three genes that together coded for an orphan enzyme. King’s group confirmed the novel findings by hand.

Score one for the Singularitarians – autonomous systems that can follow the scientific method without supervision would surely be a component of an emergent self-improving artificial intelligence, if I understand the theory correctly. [image by jurvetson]

And why not outsource our more tedious scientific tasks to robot underlings? After all, we’ve been fairly unhesitating in our rush to do the same with warfare… no matter how ethically blurred an idea that may be:

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Backyard biotech

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Lego DNAWe’ve mentioned garage-sized biotech start-ups before, but not everyone’s in it for the money. As the price barrier to genetic engineering falls, some folk are hacking genes in an attempt to make the world a better place – like Meredith Patterson, for example:

The 31-year-old ex-computer programmer and now biohacker is working on modifying jellyfish genes and adding them to yoghurt to detect the toxic chemical melamine, which was found in baby milk in China last year after causing a number of deaths, and kidney damage to thousands of infants. Her idea is to engineer yoghurt so that in the presence of the toxin it turns fluorescent green, warning the producer that the food is contaminated. If her experiment is successful, she will release the design into the public domain.

Great stuff… but as the article at The Guardian points out, easy-entry biohacking presents as many risks as it offers fixes:

… Helen Wallace of GeneWatch in the UK thinks biohacking could be dangerous. “It is increasingly easy to order genes by mail,” she says. “Something like smallpox is hard to get, but there are other organisms that could become harmful. If you change a living organism’s properties, you could also change its interactions with the environment or the human body.” She adds: “Scientists are notorious for not seeing the unintended consequences.”

“Where is the oversight?” asks another interviewee, and it’s a good point. Will a self-policing global community of genetic scientists emerge, keeping an eye on one another and sharing data in the hopes of collaborating their way to success? The tools are there to enable it, at least.

Of course, it would be easy for individuals to slip through the cracks if they really wanted to… but the same is true of the old system as well. Maybe the best way to make sure we don’t get wiped out by a rogue scientist is to do the best we can to avoid making them feel disenfranchised and unappreciated. [image by mknowles]

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‘The media’s deliberate stupidity’

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beePresident Obama’s budget includes a mere $1.7 million, or 0.00041 percent of spending, for honeybee research. Jamison Foser notes that some politicians find that outrageous or hilarious, but that the debate — if you can call it that — over budget earmarks misses an an important point as far as bees are concerned:

Honeybees are pretty important. See, humans need food. Without it, we die. And bees not only produce honey, they pollinate all kinds of crops — onions, cashews, celery, strawberries, beets, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, apples … you get the picture. Honeybees play an important role in our food supply, and our economy. And honeybees have been disappearing at an alarming rate in recent years, for reasons that are not fully known.

It might be useful to know why. And, while admitting that earmarks might not be the best way to fund research, it might also be useful if politicians would stop criticizing things they don’t understand just because they sound funny. Volcano monitoring, planetarium projectors, fruit-fly research, and studies of the DNA of  threatened species called grizzly bears all come to mind.

But if polticians can’t be bothered to understand, and behave like short-sighted anti-space senators in early Arthur C. Clarke, is it too much to ask that our media could be bothered to investigate claims and counterclaims, instead of chortling like Beavis and Butthead?

[Bee picture by Robert Seber]

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A cure for racism?

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If there’s one thing that the recent United States elections made plain to me, it’s that, sadly, there’s a lot more racism still about than I had realised – and that goes for this side of the pond as well, and pretty much everywhere.

But what if there was a way to ‘cure’ racism? It’s a tricky question, because prejudice of any kind isn’t a disease or pathology as such; it’s part of the way our minds are wired, but (to use an analogy which I hope isn’t too inaccurate) it’s more of a software issue rather than a hardware problem.

Nonetheless, a team of university researchers believe they may have found a short-cut method for eroding the race-focused deep bias:

Tarr’s findings overlap with other results suggesting that the key to reducing racial bias — at least in a short-term, laboratory setting — is exposure to people in personalized ways that challenge stereotypes. This is hardly a new notion: it’s the essence of the contact hypothesis, formulated in the mid-20th century and the basis of integrated schooling.

But unlike carefully structured social mixing, with precisely controlled conditions of interdependence and equality, Tarr and others raise the possibility of a a lab-based shortcut to bias reduction.

Even if this method turns out to be genuinely effective and harmless, I doubt we’ll be seeing it deployed en masse any time soon. Maybe it would be applied to serious recidivists as a punitive correctional method, but the legal implications of rewriting someone’s mind are going to be an ethical minefield for years to come. And to receive the cure voluntarily would be an admission of being racist, which is the principle barrier to defeating the bias in the first place… even so, an interesting insight into mental plasticity.

I wonder if they could remove my positive bias towards unhealthy foods?