by Matt Rozsa | Dec 18, 2024 | Salon.com
A long trip to space is about to get even longer. NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were originally supposed to spend only about a week aboard the International Space Station, but due to issues with their spaceship, have remained stuck for months. Originally slated to return in February, the two astronauts are now going to remain onboard on the ISS until “no earlier” than late March 2025, according to a recent report.
Williams and Wilmore blasted off in June for a trip that was supposed to end eight days after they landed. When Boeing’s starliner capsule began experiencing technical problems, however, NASA sent it back empty in September so it could be repaired. The deadline has been pushed back to late March to permit more time for “complete processing” of the new SpaceX spacecraft that will be used to retrieve the stranded Americans.
“Fabrication, assembly, testing and final integration of a new spacecraft is a painstaking endeavor that requires great attention to detail,” Steve Stich, the manager at NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in a statement. “We appreciate the hard work by the SpaceX team to expand the Dragon fleet in support of our missions and the flexibility of the station program and expedition crews as we work together to complete the new capsule’s readiness for flight.”
The astronauts will be rescued by a team known as Crew-10, which includes NASA astronauts commander Anne McClain, and pilot Nichole Ayers; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency mission specialist Takuya Onishi,; and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. They are currently training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Originally from Salon.com
by Matt Rozsa | Dec 18, 2024 | Salon.com
There’s a lot of stuff in space that we know is there but we can’t see very well or at all. Some of this stuff is known as mysterious dark matter, others are things like dark comets, which as their name suggests, are far more difficult to see from Earth than something like Tsuchinshan-Atlas. Dark comets range in size from a few feet to several hundred yards, are often composed of rare minerals and tend to spin so fast they are hard to detect.
Despite these obstacles, however, scientists publishing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say they have discovered more dark comets in our solar system than previously thought. In fact, thanks to their research, the number has now doubled.
Though not technically a dark comet, the 2017 interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua moved in a manner so similar to a dark comet that astronomers used it to guide their current research. The first actual dark comet was reported less than two years ago, followed shortly thereafter by the discovery of six more. The new paper adds an additional seven dark comets to the list, including bigger ones that inhabit the outer solar system and littler ones that remain in the inner solar system.
“The study demonstrates that there are more dark comets in the Solar System than we knew of before,” Darryl Seligman, lead author of the study and an astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University, told Salon. “Moreover, these new results show that there appears to be two different types of dark comets within the solar system. More data and analysis will be required to quantify the differences between these two nominal ‘families’ of dark comets.”
To do this, Seligman and the team of researchers working with him plan on using data from operating facilities around the world, particularly the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which was funded by the National Science Foundation.
“Dark comets are a new potential source for having delivered the materials to Earth that were necessary for the development of life,” Seligman said. “The more we can learn about them, the better we can understand their role in our planet’s origin.”
Originally from Salon.com
by Matt Rozsa | Dec 17, 2024 | Salon.com
Researchers have long wished to understand the connection between sleep and memory, especially how the brain encodes long-term memories during slow-wave sleep (while discarding others), or the deep sleep that occurs during the initial hours of one’s rest. Recent research sheds fascinating new light on the issue, but to understand how this works, scientists had to literally take brain samples from living people. The results could help us develop technologies that could one day improve our ability to form deep, long memories.
The 45 patients who donated their brains to science had to undergo neurosurgery for preexisting conditions (33 for drug-resistant epilepsy and 12 for brain tumors) and gave prior written consent. Franz Xaver Mittermaier, the first author of a study in the journal Nature Communications that examined those brain samples, told Salon that the patients’ participation was crucial to the scientists’ success.
“The reason why we were able to address these questions for the first time at a mechanistic level, is because we received very rare alive brain tissue samples from patients who underwent surgery for drug-resistant epilepsy or brain tumors,” Mittermaier said, adding that they strictly adhered to ethical requirements and are “deeply thankful” to the patients for making their sacrifice.
Prior to this research, scientists already understood that each night, memories transfer from short-term storage in the hippocampus to long-term storage in the neocortex during slow-wave sleep. Thanks to electroencephalography, researchers can even link slow-wave sleep to a process of synchronous changes in electrical voltages in thousands of neurons, known as up and down states.
“We, for the first time, show that these up and down states affect how human brain cells communicate with each other,” Mittermaier said. In addition to learning more about the strength of the connections between neurons, or synapses, they also broke down the cellular mechanisms behind how synapses perform these basic functions. “The results that our experiments generated are crucial because they deepen our understanding of how the brain achieves long-term memory storage and form the basis that will allow us to understand what goes wrong in disorders where memory is impaired.”
He also stressed the indispensable contributions of the patients. By giving tissues that would otherwise have been discarded — 38 samples from the temporal cortex, five from the frontal cortex and two from the parietal association cortices — they provided the doctors with an invaluable tool. The professionals had to work quickly too, as they had less than thirty minutes to deliver the tissues from the operating room to the laboratory.
“After neurosurgical resection, tissue samples were immediately submerged in a sterile bottle containing ice-cold, carbogen-gassed (95/5% O2/CO2) sucrose-containing artificial cerebrospinal fluid,” the study authors write. “The bottle was sealed gas-tight and placed in a styrofoam box with ice for transport to the laboratory.”
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That was the only way to study the brain tissue samples while they were technically still alive. One major drawback to the study is a lack of control subjects. But all of the patients had legitimate reasons for wanting a part of their brain removed: they were sick. “While disease effects cannot be ruled out entirely, neurosurgical resections ultimately represent the only opportunity to investigate human synapses,” the authors explain in their paper.
If you want to improve your own sleep health, you don’t need an Apple Watch or other tech to monitor your sleep, according to Mittermaier. While smartwatches can help optimize one’s sleep hygiene and are therefore “probably useful,” he argues there are much simpler ways to improve one’s sleep health.
“Having a regular sleep time, planning for seven to eight hours of sleep, and trying to get rid of any source of sensory interference that disturbs your sleep will already be very effective,” Mittermaier said. There is no straightforward answer to the correct amount of deep sleep — including phrases known as NREM stage 3 sleep and slow-wave sleep — because the quality as well as quantity of sleep is important.
“It is not just the duration of deep sleep stages but also an intact structure of our sleep,” Mittermaier said. “A ballpark number would be that 10% to 25% of the entire seven to eight hours of sleep should be in NREM sleep 3. During childhood and adolescence, it should be more (20 to 40%).”
Mittermaier hopes that ordinary people will realize, as a result of their study, that sleep is important to their overall health. Even though we live in a culture that values hustling over rest, sleep is not merely a period of inactivity. The body undergoes complex processes of self-repair that are crucial to a person’s optimal performance in all areas of their life.
“Sleep is a fascinating phenomenon,” Mittermaier said. “It is highly conserved across species — believe it or not, but even fruit flies sleep.”
Humans spend between one-quarter and one-third of their lives asleep, and they suffer serious health problems when it is interrupted, disturbed or otherwise lacking.
“Depriving humans of sleep leads to all sorts of problems and can cause serious harm,” Mittermaier said. “To me, it felt like a great privilege being put in a position where I get to study this fascinating topic.”
Originally from Salon.com
by Matt Rozsa | Dec 16, 2024 | Salon.com
Humans have yearned for immortality for as long as we‘ve understood our fragile permanence. But while dodging the Grim Reaper was once relegated to the realm of religious myth, now technology is attempting to find the cure for death. Most popular is the idea of cryopreservation — that is, any process which preserves biological tissues by storing them at extremely cold temperatures — which can be traced back to a 1931 science fiction novel, “The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones. The first in a series of adventure tales about the titular Professor Jameson, the story includes a detailed description of the professor freezing his brain and sending it into space, where it is eventually revived and installed into a mechanical body.
Jones’ ideas were so provocative, they inspired American academic Robert Ettinger to write a 1962 non-fiction book, “The Prospect of Immortality.” In 1976, Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute, a nonprofit that freezes both humans and pets in the hope of someday reviving them, and the cryopreservation movement was born.
Dr. Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston hopes to pick up the movement where Jones left off, albeit with the significant twist that his version does not require freezing. A research fellow at Melbourne’s Monash University, Zeleznikow-Johnston wrote the new book, “The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death,” which makes the case that cryopreservation is possible and should be more widely available. Rejecting the popular notion that death endows life with meaning as “palliative philosophy,” Zeleznikow-Johnston’s book instead argues a human’s connectome — a high-resolution map of all their brain connections — could be theoretically recorded perfectly before they die.
Once that happens, that same internal brain activity could be recreated through high-powered computers, while a new brain is grown in a vat via stem cells or some combination of the two. As such, Zeleznikow-Johnston is proposing a spiritual descendant to the cryonics movement (which he dismisses as “unscientific” and “unsubstantiated”), one where the focus is not on preserving tissues but on the “data,” so to speak, of our distinct connectomes.
“Within this science fiction is a kernel of truth: with sufficient understanding of how the brain enables a person to be who they are, it might be possible to place a dying individual in a state from which they could one day be revived,” Zeleznikow-Johnston writes in his book. From there he explores how the current state of neuroscientific recording and tissue preservation is such that, while his dream is currently not possible, technologies like chemical vitrification (a process for hardening the outer eggs of embryos, similar to how glass is hardened) enable us to preserve a person’s brain well enough that the connectome could be preserved.
Salon reached out to both Zeleznikow-Johnston and to a group of scientists and philosophers who, though unable to read his just released book , were made familiar with its basic premise. One of them — Dr. Jason D. Shepherd, an associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah School of Medicine — was skeptical that it is feasible to recreate an individual’s unique connectome.
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“Even if you could download the information that a brain holds, the trillions of synaptic connections unique to each brain … Those synapses are constantly changing,” Shepherd said. “Downloading would only catch a snapshot in time.” He also argued that too many scientists take for granted that consciousness can exist without a body, which Shepherd doubts.
“We neuroscientists have long ignored the brain-body axis but recently we have discovered that there is constant cellular and molecular communication between the body and the brain that ultimately contributes to our sense of self,” Shepherd explained.
In response to these arguments, Zeleznikow-Johnston told Salon that “an actively conscious individual, like you or I right now, has constantly changing dynamic properties of their synapses, where the neurons are electrically active and there is ion flow going from one neuron into another, chemical transmission, all sorts of changing dynamic properties.”
Yet even though this is the case, “we have very strong evidence that the static structure of the neurons is enough to hold onto someone’s memories and personality and that sort of stuff,” Zeleznikow-Johnston said. “And we know that not in a weird science fiction, speculative way, because we have good data already to suggest that that’s the case.”
For example, Zeleznikow-Johnston pointed out that hospitals already widely use deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, or induced hypothermia. By cooling patients down to roughly 18º C (64º F), doctors can stop heart and brain activity to provide surgeons with a 45 to 60 minute operating window. The patients who are revived from this process keep their long-term memories, although they lose some working memories.
To David Skrbina, a philosopher and author of the books “Panpsychism in the West” and “The Metaphysics of Technology,” there is a much deeper flaw in Zeleznikow-Johnston’s hypothesis: It misunderstands the very nature of consciousness.
“Is my connection pattern equal to ‘me?’” Skrbina asked. “And if it continues to interact with the world, to change and to learn, is that ‘me’ that is changing?” Skrbina compared Zeleznikow-Johnston’s theoretical scenario as analogous to someone creating a clone with their exact memories.
“He would surely walk and talk like me!” Skrbina said. “He might even be able to fool family and friends. But still, there would be ‘me’ and ‘him.’ It’s still two beings, two conscious entities, not one.”
Luke Roelofs, a philosopher of mind at NYU’s Centre for Mind, Brain and Consciousness, also argued that the ideas in Zeleznikow-Johnston’s book are too cavalier in defining consciousness.
“It’s a generic term for a certain property we all share — I’m conscious, you’re conscious, and maybe years in the future a preserved brain, or an AI system, or a digital upload, will be conscious,” Roelofs said. “But people also use it as a catch-all, but talking about ‘my consciousness’ and ‘your consciousness’ as two distinct things. Thinking about immortality, the question is whether the consciousness that might be created in my cryogenically preserved brain in the future would be my consciousness, or a new consciousness that merely resembled mine.”
To Skrbina, the solution to these intractable problems defining consciousness is through a philosophical concept known as panpsychism. Panpsychists believe that all forms of matter, however small, contain elements of consciousness, and that life as many define it is simply made up of extremely complex forms of consciousness created via organic chemistry. Of course, because consciousness is perceived by panpsychists to be universal, the term “consciousness” itself becomes somewhat misleading.
“As a panpsychist, I prefer not to use that term, which, in addition to being vague, is also quite anthropocentric,” Skrbina said. “I prefer more generic descriptions of mentality: experientiality, subjectivity, intentionality and qualitative feeling. We have a hard time extending consciousness to other beings, especially to the ‘lower’ animals (whatever those might be), plants or inorganic things. But it seems easier to talk about experientiality or subjectivity, or even will, in all things.”
Addressing the philosophers’ observations about consciousness, Zeleznikow-Johnston acknowledged that there is “not a good consensus on how consciousness comes about or even often exactly how to go about defining consciousness. But the most common working definition used by neuroscientists and philosophers is that for something to be conscious means that it feels like something to be that thing.”
However, Zeleznikow-Johnston disagrees with that definition because he feels it is a “first person subjective definition” of consciousness, rather than one sufficiently detached to be ascertainable by a theoretical third party. Instead, he subscribes to a different philosophical school.
“One very common theory amongst philosophers and neuroscientists is functionalism, the idea that all that really matters is the function, not whether something is made of biology or silicon or anything else,” Zeleznikow-Johnston said. “A mind upload would probably be conscious in the same way that a natural biological human is.” For similar reasons, Zeleznikow-Johnston rejects panpsychism.
“I’m not the most sympathetic to panpsychism in its broadest sense of even electrons having some simple level of consciousness because of the combination problem, which is how electrons, molecules, atoms and small things — with their little proto-consciousness or small elements — come together to produce a unified consciousness in a larger entity,” Zeleznikow-Johnston said. “If all of the bits in my head have their own unique little bits of consciousness, it’s unclear how they combine into my unified sense of conscious experience.”
Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosopher and associate professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, argued that all of the parties in this conversation need to distinguish between what they mean by consciousness and self. At the same time, they need to understand that at least some of these debates may be more intellectual than practical in their consequences.
“Most philosophical theories of consciousness hold that our consciousness correlates with the brain (they just disagree about how and why), such that if it were possible to revive a cryopreserved brain then consciousness would come back,” Mørch said, including panpsychism. “If a cryopreserved brain is revived, and put back into more or less the exact same physical state as before preservation, it seems natural given panpsychism that the consciousness of its particles or other constituents would ‘recombine’ such that more or less the exact same kind of complex consciousness would return.”
Regardless of whether his ideas are technically possible, Zeleznikow-Johnston believes they are exciting because at the very least they strive toward the desirable end of prolonging and enriching human life. A recent study in Frontiers in Medical Technology explored several potential strategies for preserving structural information in the brain after death, including traditional cryopreservation.
“We believe contemporary structural brain preservation methods have a non-negligible chance of allowing successful restoration in the future and that this deserves serious research efforts by the scientific community,” the authors wrote. “Research in this area will potentially have spillover benefits to other fields, including improvements in methods to study brain disorders and neural ischemia, improvements in techniques for organ banking, and enabling human space exploration.”
When asked about the possibility that eliminating death will render life less important, Zeleznikow-Johnston strenuously disagrees.
“Why do we get the 80 years that we currently have, as opposed to the one year that a mouse gets, or the 200 to 250 years that a whale or tortoise gets?” Zeleznikow-Johnston asked. “If our lives are given meaning by 80 years, would they be more meaningful if we live 60 years or substantially less meaningful if we lived 150 years? It seems kind of arbitrary once you start looking at the evolutionary biology of why we live the lives we do, that that should be the limit that we should be accepting.”
Originally from Salon.com
by Matt Rozsa | Dec 13, 2024 | Salon.com
Aaron Siri, the lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — President-elect Donald Trump’s presumptive nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services — petitioned the federal government on Friday to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.
Siri, a prominent conspiracy theorist like Kennedy, has already filed a petition to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines, including those that protect against hepatitis B and COVID-19. His latest filing was to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Like Kennedy, Siri is critical of vaccines, and through Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit with which both men are affiliated , each person has repeatedly made the false claim that vaccines are dangerous or cause autism.
“I love Aaron Siri,” Kennedy said in a clip played on a recent episode of a podcast hosted by Informed Consent Action Network founder Del Bigtree. “There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.”
The war against polio vaccines specifically has already taken a human toll. In 2022, a team of federal scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated a string of polio cases in Rockland County, NY, in which an epidemic hit a large Hasidic Jewish community where anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are particularly popular.
Dr. Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine in 1955 to international acclaim, announcing he would also make it free. Speaking with Salon last year, Dr. Peter Salk said his father would be “really puzzled” by the emergence and spread of anti-vaccine ideology. “His whole commitment was protecting the population from infectious diseases,” Salk said.
Originally from Salon.com
