[…] Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created “mini-brains“ consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports. The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity.

[…]

To teach the mini-brains the game, the team created a simplified version of “Pong” with no opponent. A signal is sent to either the right or left of the array to indicate where the ball is, and the neurons from the brain cells send signals back to move the paddle.

“We often refer to them as living in the Matrix,” Kagan told the magazine, in a horrifyingly reference to the 1999 movie in which humans are enslaved by AI overlords in an all-encompassing simulation. “When they are in the game, they believe they are the paddle.”

Well, that’s a scary enough concept to cause some existential panic for anyone.

Faster Than AI

Kagan said that while the mini-brains can’t play the game as well as a human, they do learn faster than some AIs.

“The amazon aspect is how quickly it learns, in five minutes, in real time,” he told New Scientist. “That’s really an amazing thing that biology can do.”

While this is certainly some amazing Twitch fodder, the team at Cortical Labs hope to use their findings to develop sophisticated technology using “live biological neurons integrated with traditional silicon computing,” according to the outfit’s website.

[…]

Source: Researchers Teach Human Brain Cells in a Dish to Play “Pong”

New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming.

The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, a period of cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. This cold spell, whose precise timeline scholars debate, but which seems to have set in around 600 years ago, was responsible for crop failures, famines and pandemics throughout Europe, resulting in misery and death for millions. To date, the mechanisms that led to this harsh climate state have remained inconclusive. However, a new paper published recently in Science Advances gives an up-to-date picture of the events that brought about the Little Ice Age. Surprisingly, the cooling appears to have been triggered by an unusually warm episode.

When lead author Francois Lapointe, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in geosciences at UMass Amherst and Raymond Bradley, distinguished professor in geosciences at UMass Amherst began carefully examining their 3,000-year reconstruction of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, results of which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, they noticed something surprising: a sudden change from very warm conditions in the late 1300s to unprecedented cold conditions in the early 1400s, only 20 years later.

Using many detailed marine records, Lapointe and Bradley discovered that there was an abnormally strong northward transfer of warm water in the late 1300s which peaked around 1380. As a result, the waters south of Greenland and the Nordic Seas became much warmer than usual. “No one has recognized this before,” notes Lapointe.

Normally, there is always a transfer of warm water from the tropics to the arctic. It’s a well-known process called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is like a planetary conveyor belt. Typically, warm water from the tropics flows north along the coast of Northern Europe, and when it reaches higher latitudes and meets colder arctic waters, it loses heat and becomes denser, causing the water to sink at the bottom of the ocean. This deep-water formation then flows south along the coast of North America and continues on to circulate around the world.

But in the late 1300s, AMOC strengthened significantly, which meant that far more warm water than usual was moving north, which in turn cause rapid arctic ice loss. Over the course of a few decades in the late 1300s and 1400s, vast amounts of ice were flushed out into the North Atlantic, which not only cooled the North Atlantic waters, but also diluted their saltiness, ultimately causing AMOC to collapse. It is this collapse that then triggered a substantial cooling.

Fast-forward to our own time: between the 1960s and 1980s, we have also seen a rapid strengthening of AMOC, which has been linked with persistently high pressure in the atmosphere over Greenland. Lapointe and Bradley think the same atmospheric situation occurred just prior to the Little Ice Age—but what could have set off that persistent high-pressure event in the 1380s?

The answer, Lapointe discovered, is to be found in trees. Once the researchers compared their findings to a new record of solar activity revealed by radiocarbon isotopes preserved in tree rings, they discovered that unusually high solar activity was recorded in the late 1300s. Such solar activity tends to lead to high atmospheric pressure over Greenland.

At the same time, fewer volcanic eruptions were happening on earth, which means that there was less ash in the air. A “cleaner” atmosphere meant that the planet was more responsive to changes in solar output. “Hence the effect of high solar activity on the atmospheric circulation in the North-Atlantic was particularly strong,” said Lapointe.

Lapointe and Bradley have been wondering whether such an abrupt cooling event could happen again in our age of global climate change. They note that there is now much less arctic sea ice due to global warming, so an event like that in the early 1400s, involving sea ice transport, is unlikely. “However, we do have to keep an eye on the build-up of freshwater in the Beaufort Sea (north of Alaska) which has increased by 40% in the past two decades. Its export to the subpolar North Atlantic could have a strong impact on oceanic circulation”, said Lapointe. “Also, persistent periods of high pressure over Greenland in summer have been much more frequent over the past decade and are linked with record-breaking ice melt. Climate models do not capture these events reliably and so we may be underestimating future ice loss from the ice sheet, with more freshwater entering the North Atlantic, potentially leading to a weakening or collapse of the AMOC.” The authors conclude that there is an urgent need to address these uncertainties.

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The Coastal Northeastern US is a global warming hotspot

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More information: Francois Lapointe, Little Ice Age abruptly triggered by intrusion of Atlantic waters into the Nordic Seas, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi8230. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi8230

Journal information: Science Advances , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Source: Winter is coming: Researchers uncover the surprising cause of the Little Ice Age

[…] It’s estimated that a quarter of the world’s population is affected by the condition known as presbyopia, which is one of the many unfortunate side effects of aging that typically starts affecting people in their 40s. The condition limits a person’s ability to focus on nearby objects, such as small print

[…]

he use of eye drops once every morning.

The active ingredient in Vuity is pilocarpine, which is often used to treat dry mouth because it stimulates the production of saliva, but it also causes the eye to reduce the size of the pupil’s opening. Like reducing the size of the aperture on a camera, this increases the eye’s depth of field, resulting in more of what’s seen being in focus, including close-up objects.

In human studies where a total of 750 participants aged 40-55 diagnosed with presbyopia were either given Vuity or a placebo, those using the Vuity eye drops gained the ability to read three or more additional lines of text on an optometrist’s reading chart (where each subsequent line contains smaller and smaller samples of text) and maintain those improvements after 30 days of use without affecting distance vision. However, Vuity was found to be considerably less helpful for patients over 65, who would need to rely on more traditional approaches to correcting vision issues.

The studies were conducted three hours after doses were administered, and it takes about that long for the full effect of Vuity to kick in, but the effect typically lasts for about a full day, which means the eye drops really only need to be applied once every morning. A reduction in pupil size does mean less light is entering the eye and hitting the retina, but it shouldn’t have an effect on users’ vision, given the eye’s impressive ability to adapt to changing lighting conditions.

[…]

Source: The FDA Just Approved Eye Drops to Correct Aging Vision