Extraordinary Science of 2014

it in gold launch it into Space list. We likely missed some things that you thought were amazing, and we definitely would love to hear from you about those, uh, those particular topics, those particular studies. But this is what was what was on our brain. Yes, the stuff that we thought was pretty extraordinary and wanted to share with you. Now, I do want to just throw in here real quick though. Um,

there was some of these issues. There might be a slight uh so called shrimp on a treadmill scenario that can pop up if you're not familiar with that. I think we've talked about in the podcast before you have to study where essentially a shrimp was put on a treadmill all and it became kind of the uh, this kind of just pointless science money on this even though it was actually a very good study. Was it had

some importance to it. It wasn't just you know, rogue scientists doing silly things with no with no payoff, which is kind of the charge. And I'm not even sure if it was actually federally federally fund in the first place. Yeah, I'd have to I'd have to to review the story to get into the details of it. But you still see this, uh, this idea kind of continue on our

Facebook page. UM I share not only our content, but we try and share links to you know, current science, it's trending, neat studies, that sort of thing, And invariably there's one particular user who will chime in, we'll find uh, well, you know, find flight three seventy instead, why can't we find find flight three seventy if we're you know, chronicling the genome of the of the Mantish shrimp or doing this study or that, always chiming in with well where

the three So what you're saying is that you'll post something you're like, oh, like extraordinary science, and then someone will be like, but but where's that fight? Yeah, like how can and and I don't want to completely discredit it because it's uh. On one level, yes, it's your your kind of poo pooing on our celebration of science here um and and it's not that fun. But on the other hand, I understand how, you know, one can

look around at this world. We're finding so much about the world around is we're landing things on commets for the first time in human history. And and then to turn around and say, but wait, how can we do that and not do this? How can there? How are there still so many holes in our understanding of the world and and just our ability to even keep track of our things in this world? Well, and yes, there are very there are so many unanswered questions and um and,

and many of them will remain that way. But of course we have accums razor at our disposal, so we can always turn to logic to try to cull out what matters and what doesn't and what we can't answer and what we can't and oncom's razor and logic and all of that is predicated on something called symbolic thought.

And that just happens to be the first thing that we're going to talk about in terms of extraordinary science, because we Homo sapiens are so proud of our neo cortex sitting atop our brain, those cortical folds that help us manage our lives and ascribe meaning and symbolism to them. But it turns out that Homo erectus was also doing the same thing way back when. Yeah, this was pretty groundbreaking. I mean, we already had some strong evidence that Neanderthals

engaged in this. We had there's some fifty thousand year old perforated painted seashells and pignic containers that were discovered on the Iberian Peninsula and a while back region that

was inhabited solely by Neanderthals at the time. But but here is another non human hominid who seems to have have I mean, in a sense, it's almost like some sort of ones attempted to make some sort of biblical comparison to you know, myths of of eating the fruit of of one sacred tree or another, like taking that that crucial step towards becoming uh, this kind of uh, this kind of rational being that stands apart from everything

else on earth. Yeah, and this symbolism um we far too often take as sort of a modern Homo sapien thing. But this year researchers discovered a shell engraved with a geometric pattern at an h erectus site known as Tranil on the Indianesian island of Java that dates to between five hundred and forty thousand and four hundred and thirty thousand years ago. Yeah, that is crazy because that is at least three hundred thousand years older than the the

oldest previously known engravings from US South Africa. And when they analyze the engraving, they feel that it was probably made with like a sharp tooth or another hard pointed object to create that that that that fascinating geometric design. Yeah, now why is this important? Well? Uh, someone like Peter also say, the professor of psychological and brain sciences that Dark Mouth might say, well, it's because the emergence of

symbolic thought had profound consequences for human moral cognition. And he says, you might say that the birth of symbolic thought gave rise to the possibility of true morality and immorality of good and evil. Once acts become symbolized, they could now stand for and be instances of abstract classes of action, such as good, evil, right or wrong. Symbolic

thought permitted new dimensions of behavior. And I thought that was very interesting because in this way, symbolic thought, which is of course what our languages are built upon, is the organizing factor. Yeah, I mean, this is the basics of language here, this is the basics of the brains operating system itself. You know that that we're able to take symbols, were able to take signifiers uh, written or verbal, and we're able to have these stand in for more

complicated ideas. And then and then essentially, then you can combine two complicated ideas, you can combine a third, you can start It's almost an externalization of of of of of thinking and UH and cognition, and then a a re to to reincorporate that back into the mental processes. Yeah, and um, I mean the fact of that matters is that Homo sapiens are but one of several human lineages that use abstract intellect to ponder the world. So that

tells us that it's far more ancient than we ever knew. Yeah, And it just drives home again that the fact that humans have ascended to this UH status in the world. I mean a lot of it simply has to do with with our our ability to adapt a different environments and uh, and to what extent we were we were able to roll with with with with catastrophic changes that

were occurring well. And it also means that something as rudimentary as a line drawing of a woman in a dress or a skirt that's put on a bathroom door to indicate that this this room is for females has so many more layers upon it than you could ever imagine. In your brain, there's the whole database built up about that one image, and there are consequences for that image

as well. Now, another important thing about the power of simple is of course that that that when you engage with a symbol, uh, be it the symbol in the bathroom, be it be a cross beat, the Apple logo, be it a swastika, uh, you know, Eastern or or western. Um, you are actually your brain is actually doing an unconscious analysis and interpretation of that symbol before it ever enters into your into your conscious mind. Like that's how powerful

symbol is. And as we discussed in our Symbols on the Brain episode that published, I think uh um a couple of years ago. Perhaps maybe it was um as we discussed in that episode. I mean, that's that's kind of core to the power of these things, and that's why when you walk around through your environment, you're just bombarded with symbols, be it symbols for the bathroom or corporate, political,

religious iconography, you name it. Yeah, And I think that goes back to David Eagleman and his assertations that the conscious I is really sitting on the sidelines of the unconscious, that all of this decisions that we're making, all those judgment calls are happening under cover, and all of that stuff gets served up in this kind of like uh consciousness belch of the brain and we think, oh, I

just had this epiphany or I just happened to think this. Well, no, this this thinking thing that you just made about that bathroom symbol has been in the works for years and whatever I is that come along with it. Well, and there have been studies before that have have suggested that the Christians behave more honestly when they're exposed to a crucifix, that people think more creatively if they're exposed to that

applehole like the light bulb or the apple logo. So if you have the if you're culturally preloaded to be affected by that symbol. Then you're kind of it's kind of like having like little magnets on the wall pushing a little metal do Dad down the hallway, and we're the metal do Dad my now, which always gets back to the whole thing of constructing your own reality, And yeah, what is reality? What is illusion in the first place?

So that's that's another But that's all the reason why this is a great study and one that was easy to miss. It's easy to you know, just scroll through the headlines and you see, oh, well they found a shell with some scratches on it. Big deal. I'm gonna go to read about, um, you know, what's happening with curiosity. But but when you get down into the deep power of it, and it really drives home how how substantial the finding was. Indeed it does. Alright, we're gonn take

a quick break. When we get back, we're gonna talk about chromosomes and tractor beans. All right, we're back. Um, Yeah, let's talk about let's talk about chromosomes and more specifically, let's talk about yeast. Let's talk about yeast, shall we This? It sounds like a p S A Uh. In March of this year, undergraduate students in John Hopkins University, UH, their their course called Build a Genome recreated yeast chromosome three,

which controls sexual reproduction. This is kind of huge. Yeah, this marks the first time in history, uh that a a chromosome has been synthesized by humans and adopted by the yeast, which and by the way, yeast serves as one of biotechnologies model organisms. So this is kind of ground level for any kind of future UM breakthroughs that

will happen. Among those future breakthroughs that they hope to up to one day, UM synthesize all sixteen yeast chromosomes and achieve the goal of what they call synthetic yeast two point oh. Now, the researchers designed the chromosome to include special markers on genes thought to be non essential, and the markers were engineered so that they could be triggered by an enzyme to scramble, delete or duplicate genes

duplica jeens. And then they made fifty thousand changes to the synthetic chromosome at specific points in the code which could have easily killed off the yeast cell, but instead it took the mutations and stride and reproduced. So that was the other part of this is that could you kind of tinker with this mess with it and and could it still survive? And then even though it's synthetic.

Now the hope here is that in the future this will lead to new tests, new methods to uh, to go after specific genes and to alove a better understanding of junk DNA cell division and evolution itself. So we're getting down here to the the core building blocks, and and as we discover how to make some of the building blocks ourselves, there you go. And does that mean that we'll have our teas and all synthetic loaves of bread? Now? That would be that would be interesting. And when when

do we get the first Frankenstein bread? The first because you know they'll call it that in the Stein meat as well, right, it's made from Alright. The next entry that we have is a tiny little tractor beam. And when you think about tractor beans, you probably think about the Death Star or really any sort of alien civilization trying to suck us up into the spaceship. That's right, Uh, you know, you think of sci fi and it it makes perfect sense because the term comes from sci fi.

The term tractor beam was coined by E. Smith. Uh is also a PhD by the way, and a food engineer. UH. And this was in his novel novel named a Space Hounds of I p C. I p C stood for Interplanetary Corporation. Uh. Smith was is considered by many kind of one of one of the fathers, at least of space opera, which, of course we you know, we see in in Star Wars seeing doun Uh. Any of these properties, Um,

he was. A lot of stuff was published in the Pulpse of the Day, Amazing Stories and the like, but he was also widely read by scientists and engineers and

future scientists and engineers at the time. Uh. From the nineteen thirties and on up into the nineteen seventies, his his series, such as the Linsman series of Skylark series, and so he ended up accidentally coining a number of scientific terms, terms for things that did not yet exist, that were purely science fiction, that ended up becoming a part of the language of science in the decades to follow,

including the tractor being. Indeed, all right, the tractor beam we're about to talk about is not actually on par with say something like the Death Stars tractor beam. And we just want to mention that because we really want to square your expectations here. Yeah, it's kind of like advances that we've seen over the years with so called invisibility cloak technology. UH. It's not as awesome as somebody putting on a Harry Potter invisibility cloak or a predator

stealth system. UH. What we're able to do and those experiences takes place at a at a very small level and in the future could have much larger possibilities. And the same thing with the tractor beams. Tractor beams have have been a matter of study, UH for for years now. But this particular study comes to us from Australian National

University UM. They have a laser based tractor beam that they wrote to successfully a pull the part of pull these tiny particles a distance about eight inches or twenty centimeters, which is about a hundred times farther than any previous

experiments with tractor beams UH. During there During the experiment, the researchers used a laser that projected a kind of uh Ring shaped beam of light UM with a without with a hot outer ring and a cool center and they used this, uh, this light being to suck in tiny glass spheres, each of which measured about point two millimeters or point zero zero eight inches wide. So the key here is is heat. Okay, this is how this

is working. The laser warms up the air around the tiny glass sphere, causing tiny hot spots on the surface. The air particles hit the hot spots and they bounce off and that propels the sphere in the opposite direction. So you want to make the back hotter than the front and then you can propel it along. So yeah, this is not the stuff of moving around starships or capturing the millennium falcon. But uh, the scientists believe that

there could be possible applications, say dealing with pollution. Uh, you could you could successfully extract toxic particles from a given body. Uh. Of course, we have a long way to go before this can can deal with with greater distances than those plunged in the study. He also wanted to mentioned that there was another chapter being Shenanigan's thing going on here, and I'm talking about researchers at the

University of Dundee in the UK. They used acoustic tractor beams to pull an object by firing sound waves at it. So what they did is they used this ultrasound device that was clinically approved for use in mri I guided focused ultrasound surgery, and the team was able to move surprising large objects will large in this sense, um or

in this application, of approximately one centimeter in size. And so the idea here is that in addition to just manipulating objects, you could also manipulate fluids and tissues inside the body, and you could deliver encapsulated drugs to the

exact location in the body that requires treatment. Yeah. So again, you know, we're in the early days of tractor beams, and and tractor beam is kind of, to a certain extent a catch off for a number of different techniques of pulling in something, uh without actually grabbing it with some sort of a grapple or a hook or what have you. Because there's also also been experiments where you're using the mass of an object in space to pull in a smaller body, uh in the same way that

any smaller massed object can potentially orbit around another. I'm just trying to imagine this technology fifty years from now on the black market you know, you just you're welcomed down the street and all of a sudden you're being pulled into some sort of direction that it sucks all the particles out of your body. Terrible particles, terrible. All right, we should take a quick break. When we get back, we're going to talk about how there's another breakthrough this

year and tinkering with the brain and memory again. All right, we're back. Um. You know, we love to talk about the brain and our manipulation of the brain and how as we learned to manipulate the brain. I mean, we're still learning how the brain works, and then trying to learn how the brain works. We're trying to learn how we work, how our experience, ourselves in the universe works.

And some memory comes up quite a bit. We've we've done whole episodes on the sciences memory, the fallibility of memory. You can't trust it. You change a memory every time you draw it out of your head. And uh, we inevitably come back to the the issue of what about what about bad memories? What about memories that are traumatic, even that that mess up our our our lives on a daily basis. Is there a way we can zap them? Is there a way we can deal with them. Can

we eternal sunshine them? Inevitably that the movie is referenced in any news article covering these breakthroughs. Yes, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind clinics popping up around the country right now. Uh No, but this is interesting Stanford psychiatrists and neuroscientists, Dr Carl That's Roth uses optogenetics. This is a technique that manipulates neuronal activity with beams of light.

Here we go again, with beams of light. He and his researchers show that they can manipulate specific memories in mice. They can delete existing memories, and they can implant false ones, and they went so far as to switch the emotional content of a mouse memory from good to bad and

vice versa. Yeah, it was important here to to break down is that we're talking about contextual information about an event where and what they happen, and that's recorded in the brains of a campus, whereas you also have the emotional component of the memory and that's stored separately in the amygdala. So you know, you have like one file saying, oh, yeah, we went to the beach and uh saw a shark in the water, that memory is is filed away. But

but then there's the emotional context. Did you see that shark in your feet were still you were in the water up to your ankles and it just freaked you out to an amazing degree. Or was it a moment of wonder where you're like, ah, there is a shark and I live in an amazing world and being alive is fantastic. The emotional coloring of that experience has a

huge effect on our lives. Yeah. I was just thinking about in terms of tattoos, like a sort of tattooed on your brain, and this this process, and this goes back to the symbolic thought too. That tattoo of what a shark is in your brain could be lightened a bit, right, or could be reduced. You could have a little bit of that tattoo thought removal. You could have the residue of what that symbol means, but maybe not fully. Um.

Obviously this isn't as simple. It's just zapping a memory and there there's a bunch of complexity involved in here. But it's one more uh research study that is showing us that memory manipulation is on the horizon. And here's just another way to get at it. And I wanted to mention that optogenetics are predicated on proteins called options, and these are found in human eyes, in microbes and other organisms. And when light shines on an option, it absorbs a photon and changes it. And that's how uh

Dr Dysrerov has really gone about this. And by the way, dest Wroth is huge in this field. He's done a ton of stuff in turn of um options and optic genetics. And he also created something called hydro gel. Oh, yes, hydrogel. This was This is another really cool study that came out this year which basically answers that question, Hey, if I had a dead rat um and I wanted to make that rat translucent, how would I go about that?

And uh and and that's what what we're talking about here, the ability to to take a a cadaver even and make it into this translucent, visible man, visible rat body, which of course has a tremendous importance when it comes

to studying anatomy, looking at the physiology of diseases, etcetera. Yeah, this, this substance they created, hydro gel, is similar to that used for contact lenses, and the method is called clarity, and the result is you get the see through brains and the innerds are revealed in a way that no current technologies cand We're talking about large structures like the hippocampus showing up with the clarity of organs and transparent fish.

That's pretty exciting. It's like putting a flashlight into the brain there, and you can even see neural circuits and individual cells. So yes, um, you know, you could dissect it. You can have ultra thin slices, examining each slide under a microscope and and this is what is traditionally done

heretofore um before this technique came along. But when you do that, you're you're you're changing that sample and you're effectively removing some clues that you might not otherwise see unless it were whole, a whole brain that you could

just see through. Indeed, I do have to say when I'm initially discovered the study, I was a little bit disappointed when I of course realized that the individual must be dead, because for a split second, I was imagining, like the new fashion trend would be to make yourself translucent, and I was, you know, French run white models walking around with translucent skin. It was, it was, it was a great like three seconds of my life. And then I realized that, well, this is actually a practical thing.

You never know again, hundred years from now we could have translucent engineered models possibility. Now, I wanted to mention that hundreds of papers have been published about not just the hyndrogail, but also the opto genetics, and according to Huge Escoff at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers are using and developing techniques to study brain wave sleep, memory, hunger, addiction, aggression, courtship, sensory modalities, and motor behavior. Of course this is in

mice and rats. But again, the extra appolation here is that we're getting a far better picture of the brain. Um and even three years ago, two years ago, you and I were talking about reverse engineering the brain and how difficult that is. But now there's more technologies online to actually do that in a more meaningful way. Indeed, now when it comes to changing the I keep getting hung up on just the idea of changing the emotional

context of a memory. Uh, Like, I can't help but imagine like a future scenario we're say it's say say Julie Douglas goes into her local doctor's office, and the doctor says, look, I can't do anything about that bad memory that you have about clowns that just set off this whole clown phobia for you. But I can change the context. But you might have to buy some grease pain, you might have to behavioral therapy. You might end up

in enrolling in clown colleging. I mean, I'm thinking probably not because because phobias are a little more more complicated than that. But imagine a world where you could you could simply change a life altering fear into a life altering enthusiasm for something uh with just with just a little uh neural tinkering. But see, I don't want clowns

to to be eradicated from my memory. I mean, that's part of the rich tapestry of narrative, right, Well, yeah, I mean that's that's kind of what you get into when you discuss any changing of the brain or or certainly with you know, talking about would you change something in the past. What you're what you're talking about when you're changing the memory of the something in the past, you're essentially changing the past is in terms of your your perception of it, So you kind of get into

the same time travel paradox uh situation. Well, if I remove that uh trauma from my history, am I the same person anymore? And is that good or bad? Yeah? And if I smoked from cannabis, how does that change the perception of all of it? Yeah, but that was kind of a really crappy way to try to transition and not into a section about cannabis. We're not going to do that, but just to mention that this this

might have been the year of cannabis. Oh yeah, I mean this was even the year that we actually had a single country fully legalized marijuana, that being Uruguay, UM and number of US states following along with parts of Europe moving in a similar direction. Yeah. So perhaps we will do an episode in the future here about cannabis and medical marijuana recreational And we've already touched on it a bit when we've talked about hacin genics and um how they made treat depression and and and help the

brain in certain ways. But it's a it's sort of a minefield this year, if you ask me, there's so many studies that have come out. Yeah, there's been a lot of studies. Some one in particular that came to mind was really more dealing with the with the adverse

effects from it. But even this study was only looking at it really from an addiction point of view, and and and not a medication point of view, and in terms of developing brains too, because we know that that this is not good to introduce substances that can alter brain structures in someone who is not fully developed as not just even a person, but their brain. So interesting stuff here and uh and if you doubt the reach of cannabis, then just consider I would say the reach

of reefer. That would have been the reach of refer the reach of reefer. Then know that the word of the year for I believe it was Oxford Dictionary O is vape? Oh yes, I mean the vape technology is very impressive in terms of marijana, but's certainly in terms of just um normal tobacco cigarettes as well. I've uh, there's several people in my life, um, including my mother

in law who has has transition from traditional cigarettes to vaping. Um. Um, you know, for health reasons, for personal life choice reasons, and uh that the technology is is fascinating. The whole growth industry is people, do you know, making their own technology and tinkering with it. It's uh, I mean, just from a purely technological standpoint, it's it's it's really fascinating stuff.

So well, you nineteen twenties people sitting around going, did you guys hear that pouka is the word of the year, trying to imagine that. Yeah, equivalent individual in our office who will remain nameless. I guess that has like a vape puuka. Yes he does, alright, So there you have it. Um, just till you know, a run through some of the the studies that caught our eyes this year. Again, that's

not an exhaustive list. Certainly there were other studies that that we got to kick out off, that we've blogged about, that we podcasted about, that we did videos on, and you'll find all of those. It's stuff to blow your mind dot com. And if you have some thoughts to share with us, we'd love to hear from you. You can send an email to you below the mind at house to works dot com. For more on this than thousands of other topics. Is that house touff works dot com