Category: ideas

To assess our health, we weigh ourselves, measure our blood pressure, and check our cholesterol. But one scientist is trying to figure out the connection between our well-being and something much more difficult to quantify: wisdom.

One of the prototypes, called Project Scene Stitch, illustrates how an algorithm could be used to replace ugly buildings in the foreground of a photo—a user would enter some key words, and the algorithm would find another image that would fit naturally into the space the user wanted to fill.

“It’s a big question, when the word ‘real’ makes sense. An interesting possibility is that the whole distinction between real and unreal is misguided.”

Taste buds are actually a collection of roughly 50 to 100 cells that come in three varieties, (each responsible for detecting different tastes—salty, sweet, bitter, umami, and sour) and have a lifespan of only about 10 days. “Taste buds turnover very quickly, you will get a whole new set of taste buds in probably four weeks, all the way through your life,” Dando says. Fueling that turnover are stem cells, which sit at the base of taste buds and continuously churn out new cells. “You can imagine it’s a balance of new cells being born and old cells being broken down and dying,” he says. “What we saw is both sides of that balance being tipped.” In the obese mice, apoptosis increased in the taste buds, and the number of cells responsible for producing taste bud cells declined.

Franklin Webster “proposed one of the most grandiose schemes that has ever been seriously suggested. His intention was to transform Washington, D.C., into a capital of such beauty and cultural advantage that never again would an American be tempted to go abroad for artistic or intellectual reasons.”

The world’s optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today, he argues, and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change. Ehrlich also says an unprecedented redistribution of wealth is needed to end the over-consumption of resources, but “the rich who now run the global system – that hold the annual ‘world destroyer’ meetings in Davos – are unlikely to let it happen”.

All of the brain’s place cells together represent the entirety of an animal’s environment, and whichever place cell is active indicates its current location. In other words, the hippocampus is like a GPS. It tells you where you are on a map and that map remains the same whether you are hungry and looking for food or sleepy and looking for a bed.

Heck, it’s even hard to critique science and scientific studies without looking like someone possessed by a perfection genie. “Sometimes, though, this is the only way to effect change. It will look a bit obsessive, because it takes a lot of effort to pursue this sort of case. … Once you start on a project, you have to keep going on it. This is characteristic of science in general: You work on a project that you feel has some importance and some interest to you, and then you pursue it in depth.”

This sounds like a slice of arts funding paradise: “Particularly targeted at those who do not already have access to public funding and people on lower incomes, the Culture Seeds grants could go towards hiring a venue space or funding artists to lead workshops. Recipients of the grants will be supported with further funding applications by the mayor’s volunteering and social action team and will be given access to resources, surgeries and networks.”