| Reality Games
“What is it like to be a bat?” wondered a philosopher a couple of decades
ago. We still don’t know the answer, but we can get an idea of what it’s like to
be a Pakistani or a Frenchman or a Tuvaluan, thanks to Real Lives 2004,
an interactive life simulation game based on the popular board game Life,
in which players choose among such options as either leaving school early or
going to college.
In the new game, players can choose their birthplace (and therefore a
nationality), or let the program assign it based on population and birth rate
statistics (every player has a 1-in-5.3 chance of being born in India, for
example). They are then confronted with realistic events and problems that
typically occur in the country of birth.
The simulation engine “accurately” presents the player with cultural,
political, and economic systems derived from statistical data from the United
Nations, World Health Organization, Amnesty International, encyclopedias, and
other sources, writes Ginny Gudmundsen in USA Today. “Statistics also
drive the presentation of personal attributes, health issues, family issues,
schooling, jobs, natural disasters, wars, and more.” It also introduces elements
such as sexually transmitted diseases, again based on the reality in the
player’s assigned or chosen birthplace. As players make decisions, the
simulation engine takes all those factors into account in determining the
outcome.
For example, in one of several games Gudmundsen describes, a player was
assigned the persona of a boy born into a poor family in China. In the course of
the game, he did not attend college or vocational school, became a mail clerk,
and faced choices about gambling and drinking. He survived famine and
earthquakes, contracted hepatitis, found romance but had no children, and died
at age 84 from cancer.
Reference: Gudmundsen, Jinny (2004). “Learn
about others’ lives with interactive role-playing.” USA Today, April 13.
Resurrection
Einstein proposed that every particle in the universe has a trajectory
through time. One mathematician has even produced a book, complete with
equations only an Einstein could read, that shows how at the biblical Day of
Judgment everyone who ever lived can be resurrected — reconstructed from their
particles — and judged.*
We have a way to go (we hope) to get to that point, but a start has been made
with the resurrection of voices from the past. Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory researchers have created digital copies of old records using a light
sensor, originally designed for particle experiments, to capture images of the
record’s groove. A computer then reconstructs the recording, filtering out any
background noise to produce a blemish-free digital version. “The researchers
have already created a copy of Marian Anderson’s 1947 rendition of ‘Nobody Knows
the Trouble I’ve Seen’, minus the scratches, pops and hisses,” writes Michael
Hopkins in Nature.
Not only is there no mechanical contact with the old discs, meaning they are
undamaged by the process, but damaged records — even ones broken into pieces —
may be salvaged by digital reassembly.
* The
Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the
Dead by Frank J. Tipler.
Reference: Hopkin, Michael (2004). “Old records saved by
particle physics: Scanner could help music archives preserve sounds of
yesteryear.” Nature, April 21.
Mind Control
The Irish outpost of MIT’s Media Lab has demonstrated a simple video game
called Mind Balance that is controlled by the player’s thought alone. The
player wears a wireless EEG headset with six nodes that picks up the player’s
brainwave patterns and transmits them to a signal-processor, which analyses the
patterns in real-time.
The game involves keeping an on-screen avatar balanced as he walked across a
tight-rope. The player essentially corrects an imbalance by looking to one side
of the screen or the other. Within a few years, more sophisticated games could
be played this way as the cost of the technology falls and its power increases.
The more immediate application will likely be in helping the disabled to
communicate and control devices via a computer.
Reference: Twist, Jo (2004). “Brain waves
control video game.” BBC News Online, March 24.
See also: “Brain-Computer
Interface,” “FDA Approval Sought
for Telerobotic Brain Implant Trial,” and “Thought-controlled
Prosthetics.”
Good News for Animals
Swedish researchers compared almost 3,000 research papers published in
biomedical journals in the past 30 years and found a 30 percent drop in the
number of studies using animals along with increasing use of alternative testing
methods, such as experiments on cultured cells.
The British government is to announce new measures on the welfare of animals
used in laboratories, based on severe criticism of some of the attitudes and
practices of the scientific community. Cambridge University dropped plans to
build a primate research lab after passionate public opposition.
A physiologist told the BBC that computer modeling was “one of the most
promising alternatives to animal research. . . . The theoretical tools,
mathematical ones in particular, have allowed us to integrate a vast amount of
biological data gathered in labs all over the world. And so much so that in
recent years models of the heart have gained predictive power,” he explained.
However, the use of genetically-modified animals “is expected to rise
significantly in the coming years as scientists probe the causes of disease
using information from the recently completed human, mouse and rat genomes,”
says the BBC.
Reference: Unknown (2004). “Animal tests
see steady decline: An analysis suggests science really is trying to reduce
animal experiments.” BBC News, April 23.
Effect of Acceleration of Innovations on Medical
Research, Policy, and Practice
Two recent studies of virtual colonoscopy only go to show that “not all
virtual colonoscopy procedures are equal,” and that the choice of “vastly
different” technologies and scanning methods makes a big difference in outcomes,
writes Tara Parker-Pope in the Wall Street Journal.
One study, published by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM),
found virtual colonoscopy to be as effective as traditional colonoscopy, whereas
the other, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association
(JAMA), found it vastly inferior.
The positive NEJM study used a new type of 3-D scanning technology. The
negative JAMA study used a “far out of date” 2-D scanner, radiologists told
Parker-Pope. In addition, the radiologists involved in the JAMA study “had
almost no training,” whereas the gastroenterologists in the control group who
performed the regular colonoscopies were highly skilled. One radiologist called
the JAMA study’s methodology “outrageous,” “very unfair,” and “fatally flawed.”
The JAMA study’s defenders claim that they used older technology because
that’s what mostly available.
Some see in the controversy a turf battle between gastroenterologists and
radiologists, since the former will lose business to the latter if virtual
colonoscopies take over.
Oh, yes . . . nearly forgot, the patient: Parker-Pope suggests that patients
should “ask a lot of questions,” and should choose, in order of preference, (1)
the 3-D procedure or (2) “the most up-to-date” 2-D procedure, provided that the
radiologist has reviewed at least 25 to 50 scans, of which some (un-stated)
number have been “verified by other experts.” The inference is that the patient
should put up with the discomforts of traditional colonoscopy, if neither of
these choices is available. Easy for a journalist — a professional
question-asker — to say. It seems to us to be unrealistic to expect patients to
ask sophisticated questions like this.
But that’s not our main point. Our main point is that the acceleration of
technological innovation in healthcare impacts, with increasing frequency and
force, the research foundation upon which healthcare policy and practice are
built. A policy or practice decision based upon the findings of either one of
the two studies would be flawed, and patients would be harmed. Researchers and
their policymaker/practitioner customers should be the ones asking a lot of
questions about the validity and reliability of the data and methodologies
underlying papers published in academic/professional journals.
Reference: Parker-Pope, Tara (2004). “Tale of Two
Studies: Cutting Through Confusion on Virtual Colonoscopies.” Wall Street
Journal, April 27.
Reference: Tanner, Lindsey (2004). “Virtual
Colonoscopy Method Questioned.” Associated Press via Yahoo News, April 14.
Armageddon
Bruce Sterling in Wired implicitly prophesies Armageddon from one or
some combination of five global trends, for which he cites evidence. The events
are:
- Global dimming: The sunlight reaching Earth’s surface is getting
feebler. A 1985 study at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology found that
solar radiation had declined a ten percent in 30 years. The finding was
confirmed in 2001.
- Unpredictable day length: In the 18th century it was suspected, and
in the 1930s conformed, that the Earth’s axial spin was slowing. But new
evidence indicates the planet’s spin has been speeding up since 1999, so days
are getting shorter.
- Interplanetary chaos: Recent findings suggest that the solar system
might be chaotically unstable, and a wobble of the Earth could cause a
gravitational tug on an asteroid, with dinosaurian implications.
- Killer supernovas: There is evidence that a supernova from a cluster
in our galaxy may have once “fried Earth’s atmosphere, destroying ozone, killing
sea life, and blasting the planet with cosmic rays.” The cluster is still there,
spawning supernovas.
- Planetary insolvency: Climate change is increasing insurance payouts
for natural disasters such that by 2050 payments will exceed the combined
current GNP of every nation on the planet, “no asteroid required.”
Reference: Sterling, Bruce (2004). “The Ends of the
Earth: 5 reasons why the planet is going to hell.” Wired, Issue 12.04,
April.
DIY Scientists
eBay is “the most potent force in do-it-yourself science education,” writes
Theodore Gray in Popular Science. Often for pennies on the dollar, you
can buy sophisticated scientific equipment and supplies from people who’ve
scoured public auctions of surplus supplies and equipment from universities,
government labs, and private companies. eBay’s policy against selling human
remains didn’t stop Gray from buying “an undeniably human femur with an attached
artificial knee joint,” and “Artificial body parts are quite readily available,
with several titanium hip joints being offered in the average month.”
Once, when cleaning out a liquid nitrogen Dewar flask bought on eBay, Gray
pulled out “a bunch of cell-culture vials filled with pink liquid (!) whose
labels indicated that they contained cloned cells of, well, something or other.”
It turned out not to be Ebola.
In short, apart from “Seriously illegal things like high explosives,
plutonium, etc.,” the tinkerer can find anything on what Gray calls “one of the
three fundamentally new forces of nature created by the Internet (Google and
Amazon being the other two).”
And techno-tinkering may be on the rise in unexpected places. Neighborhood
community clubs in Singapore have begun offering courses in robotics, says a
brief news item in Channel News Asia.
Reference: Gray, Theodore (2004). “I,
Scientist.” Popular Science, May.
Reference: Unknown (2004). “Nanotech: Self-Assembly
Sandia National Laboratories have developed a molecular robot that can walk
and pick up and deliver loads of cargo. The “motor protein” has two feet and a
prehensile tail. When activated by the addition of a chemical to the solution in
which it resides, the protein walks along strands of fiber one-fifth the width
of a human hair, writes Olga Kharif in Business Week, though she does not
say what happens next.
The main thrust of her article is that molecular self-assembly into
components — and ultimately into entire artifacts such as an automobile or a
human organ — is making progress and already used to make wrinkle-proof
fabrics, fragrances, silver polish, microelectronics, and anticorrosion
coatings. It is also “about to take off” in drug making, a member of the US
National Science & Technology Committee told her.
A quarter of some 2,000 nanotechnology projects funded by the National
Science Foundation involve self-assembly. Total federal nanotech funding will
approach US$1 billion next year, and drug and technology companies such as
Merck, Pfizer, 3M, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard are investing heavily in
self-assembly as well.
Among the benefits of self-assembly are that it creates less waste and makes
possible products that would be impossible using conventional manufacturing
methods. IBM could be selling self-assembled chips in five years, having already
demonstrated a self-assembled flash-memory chip made of molecules of conductive
plastic. The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is working
on a self-assembled sensor that could replace the current $1 million, days-long
method of checking a single radioactive waste container with one that costs
$10,000 and takes a few minutes.
Medicine will be a major beneficiary. A coating applied to titanium or
ceramic implants contains molecules that self-assemble into nanotubes onto which
bone cells will grow, resulting in a 60 percent longer implant lifespan. (It has
yet to be clinically tested). Researchers at Northwestern University have
designed artificial molecules that assemble into a spinal cord scaffold around
which spinal-cord tissue or bone tissue could regenerate. The University of
Rochester is working on molecules to self-assemble into drugs that bind to
disease-producing genes and block them from functioning. It could be on the
market within five years.
Last year, a New York University professor showed his students the “Top Ten”
list of challenges facing nanotechnology. A year later, he told Kharif, three of
them are already resolved.
Reference: Kharif, Olga (2004). “Getting
Molecules To Do The Work.” Business Week, May 3. |
