Imagine injecting microscopic robots into a patient that then can be guided to a specific location in the body where they deliver drugs or stem cells for therapy. This technology is actually not far off. Researchers have been developing multiple types of tiny medical robots, and some have been used successfully in animals.

The simplest form of such microbots is a tiny sphere that contains magnetic nanoparticles and has a nanoscale structured surface. The surface allow for stem cells to bind so that they can be delivered to the desired location. The movement of the microbots is controlled by an external magnetic field acting on the nanoparticles. Essentially they are a delivery system, and when their task is done they are biodegradable so they break down and are eliminated by the usual mechanisms. Microbots can also be designed to be infused with drugs to deliver to their target.

There are numerous applications for this technology. One obvious one is the targeting of tumors. Effective anti-cancer treatments are often limited by their toxicity, but if they can be delivered directly to a tumor then they are both more effective and less toxic to healthy tissue. Stem cells can also be delivered, and they can also be engineered to kill cancer cells. They could also be engineered to produce hormones or chemical, or they could support other cells or even take up function themselves.

Other microbots can be self-propelled, including:  “tailor-made motile bacteria and tiny bubble-propelled microengines to hybrid spermbots.” Another approach combines algae cells and nanoparticle to produce a microbot that can swim around specific organs, such as the lungs. This was tested in pneumonia in mice, and the microbots were able to swim around and kill the infecting bacteria.

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Humanity has an uncanny ability to turn any new potential boon into con. The promise of stem cell technology quickly spawned fraudulent stem-cell clinics to exploit the desperate. There is snake oil based on lasers, holograms, and radio waves. Any new tech or scientific discovery becomes a marketing scam, going back to electromagnetism and continuing today with “nanotechnology”. There is some indication that artificial intelligence (AI) will be no exception.

I am a big fan of AI technology, and clearly it has reached a turning point where the potential applications are exploding. The basic algorithms haven’t changed, but with faster computers, an internet full of training data, and AI scientists finding more ways to cleverly leverage the technology, we are seeing more and more amazing applications, from self-driving cars to AI art programs. AI is likely to be increasingly embedded in everything we do.

But with great potential comes great hype. Also, for many people, AI is a black box of science and technology they don’t understand. It may as well be magic. And that is a recipe for exploitation. A recent BBC article, for example, highlights to risks of relying on AI in evaluating job applicants. It’s a great example of what is likely to become a far larger problem.

I think the core issue is that for many people, those for whom AI is mostly a black box, there is the risk of attributing false authority to AI and treating it like a magic wand. Companies can therefore offer AI services that are essentially pure pseudoscience, but since it involves AI, people will buy it. In the case of hiring practices, AI is being applied to inherently bogus analysis, which doesn’t change the nature of the analysis, it just gives it a patina of impeachable technology, which makes it more dangerous.

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Science is fun, interesting, and empowering, but it is also hard, especially at advanced levels. Even at a basic level, science forces you to think clearly, precisely, logically, and objectively. It therefore challenges our preconceptions, our biases, our hopes and desires and replaces these things with indifferent reality. Science becomes progressively tricky the more advanced it becomes, requiring an increasing fund of knowledge and mastery over subtle concepts and technical skills in order to be able to take the next step. At the cutting edge of science, nothing short of years of dedicated study is necessary to engage meaningfully with the enterprise of advancing human scientific knowledge. You also have to be able to engage productively with a community of scientists, all picking apart each other’s work.

It’s for these reasons that there is a lot of bad science out there. There are also those who prioritize things other than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, such as money, fame, or advancing an ideology. Many people mean well, but simply get the science wrong. Even successful scientists can make egregious errors, stubbornly stick to false ideas, or let their own ideology get in the way. So what is the average science enthusiast to do? Unless you have a fairly high level of scientific expertise in general and also in a specific field, you cannot hope to engage with the cutting edge of that field. To some extent, you have to trust the experts, but what if the experts disagree, or some of them are just wrong?

There is no easy answer to this, but there are skills and methods other than actual expertise in a specific field that can help a layperson have a pretty good idea which experts to listen to. This requires some scientific literacy, especially about how proper science operates. It also requires a certain amount of critical thinking skills – knowing something about logic, self-deception, and the nature of evidence. Further, we can learn to recognize the different types of pseudoscience and pseudoscientific behaviors, which can act as reliable red-flags to help spot fake science. Recently promoters of the Electric Universe have appeared in the comments to this blog, and this is a good opportunity to review these red flags.

The idea of the electric universe (EU) is that electromagnetism actually does most of the large-scale heavy lifting when it comes to the structure of the cosmos, displacing gravity as the main long-distance force. There are different flavors of EU, with some doing away with gravity completely, and others allowing for some gravity (to help explain phenomena EU can’t) but still relegate it to a minor role. One major example is that EU proponents believe stars are fueled by electromagnetism, and not by gravity-induced fusion. Here are two great videos that give a concise summary of the history of EU belief and why it is complete and utter nonsense. But I will review the major problems with EU and use them as examples of crank pseudoscience.

Crank pseudoscience is a flavor of pseudoscience that operates at a technically sophisticated level, but is missing some of the key elements of actual science that doom proponents to absurdity. But it also contains many of the generic features of pseudoscience. Let’s review, starting with features more typical of crank pseudoscience.

Does not engage meaningfully with the scientific community.

Science is a collaborative effort, especially at the advanced cutting edge level. This is because it is so difficult at this level, you need the self-corrective process of peer-review, rejection of error, criticism of wrong ideas, challenges for evidence and by alternative theories, etc. Without this self-corrective process, fringe groups or individuals tend to drift off from reality into a fantasy land of their own creation, although gilded with the superficial trappings of science. EU proponent Montgomery Childs exemplifies this in an interview (in the second video above) when he tries lamely to justify not bothering to publish any of his findings in scientific journals. Actual experts in plasma physics and cosmology therefore just ignore his fringe work – unless they have data to look at, they don’t have much of a choice. This is a core feature of crank pseudoscience – cranks tend to toil alone or in small fringe echochambers and not engage with proper experts.

Work outside their actual area of expertise (if they have one).

Often we see scientists or engineering getting into crank science when they venture beyond their specific area of expertise. Sometimes this is just hubris – in fact we joke about the Nobel Prize effect, where some Nobel Prize winners go on to support pseudoscience later in their career. There is also an aging-scientist effect where researchers toward the end of their career start looking at their legacy, or lack of one, and want to make a big splash somewhere. Some choose a small fringe pond where their credentials make them a big fish, and start promoting nonsense. The problem, of course, if that being an expert in one area does not equip you to contradict actual experts in a separate field. Electrical engineers are not cosmologists or physicists. It is therefore helpful to see what the most appropriate experts say about a theory, not just anyone with letters after their name. Actual experts reject the EU as completely nonsense (with good reason), and its proponents are all in unrelated fields.

Make grandiose claims while minimizing actual scientific knowledge.

The EU claims to overhaul much of science, which is itself a red flag. It is hard to prove that established science is all wrong, and it’s getting harder as science advances and the foundational concepts of science are increasingly supported by evidence and derivative theories. What cranks often do is grossly exaggerate what is currently unknown in a scientific field, or the meaning of anomalies, and they downplay what is known with confidence. This often become simply lying, making boldly false claims about the state of the science. EU proponents, for example, ignore or deny the evidence for the Big Bang, black holes, stellar fusion, and gravity. The claim that they have overturned pretty much all of astrophysics, stellar astronomy, General Relativity, and more – all on the flimsiest of pretexts. In other words, they reject theories supported by a mountain of evidence, and replace them with theories that have (at best) an ant hill.

They don’t actually explain 0r predict anything.

Another core feature of science is that it makes testable predictions. What this means is that there has to be some way to determine if one theory is more correct than another, because they make different predictions about what we will observe in the universe or the result of experiments. Scientific theories also should have explanatory power (it can explain what we see) – but this is actually necessary but insufficient feature of science. Astrology has explanatory power – if you are willing to just make up BS explanations for stuff. It’s easy, and pattern-seeking humans are good at, finding explanations of stuff. The problem with EU is that it really does neither – predict or explain. In fact, shifting from current cosmological theories to EU would be a massive step backwards. EU cannot explain a ton of established phenomena that are well explained by current theories, such as the evidence for black holes or dark matter, the lifecycle of stars, the existence of neutrinos from stellar fusion, and many more. There are also fundamental problems with EU, such as the known behavior of electromagnetism and charged particles. What EU proponents do, rather, is simply hunt for patterns, and then make very superficial connections between some aspect of EU theory and some astronomical phenomenon.

This is what triggered some of the comments – the regular rings of dust found around WR140, caused by the periodicity of the wind-binary star system. EU proponents said – look, concentric rings. We see those in the plasma dohickey thing. They then count that as a “prediction” when it was actually just retrofitting, and not very well. They falsely call the rings “perfect” when it is the very imperfections in the rings that can be accounted for by the astronomical explanation.

Portray the scientific community as a conspiracy of the small-minded.

If you have a nonsensical fringe theory and don’t publish your findings (except in fringe journals created for that purpose), it’s likely that the broader scientific community with ignore or reject your claims. They should – you have not earned their assent by demonstrating your claims with objective and publicly available evidence. When that happens, cranks universally claim they are the victim of a conspiracy. They don’t self-correct, address legitimate criticisms, recognize the shortcomings of their theories, do better experiments or, in short, engage in legitimate science. They cry foul. They say something to the effect that “mainstream” science is all a conspiracy, and scientist are simply too dumb or too scared to recognize their towering genius. This is the point that self-comparisons to Galileo or Einstein are typically brought out.

EU proponents do this in spades. There is a large, vibrant, world-wide community of astrophysicists, all at different parts of their career, in different countries and institutions, just trying to figure out how the universe works and hopefully make a name for themselves doing so. Yet a few fringe scientists, without the proper expertise, allege they have proven all of them hopelessly wrong, because they are all biased or don’t know what they are doing. And they are stubbornly not convinced by silly superficial evidence its proponents won’t bother to publish. Imagine!

This is definitely the neuroscience news of the week. It shows how you can take an incremental scientific advance and hype it into a “new science” and a breakthrough and the media will generally just eat it up. Did scientists teach a clump of brain cells to play the video-game pong? Well, yes and no. The actual science here is fascinating and very interesting, but I fear it is generally getting lost in the hype.

This is what the researchers actually did – they cultured mouse or human neurons derived from stem cells onto a multi-electrode array (MEA). The MEA can both read and stimulate the neurons. Neurons spontaneously network together, so that’s what these neurons did.  They then stimulated the two-dimensional network of neurons either on the left or the right and at different frequencies, and recorded the network’s response. If the network responded in a way the scientists deemed correct, then they were “rewarded” with a predictable further stimulation. If their response was deemed incorrect, they were “punished” with random stimulation. Over time the network learned to produce the desired response, and its learning accelerated. Further, human neurons learned faster than mouse neurons.

Why did this happen? That is what researchers are trying to figure out, but the authors speculate that predictable stimulation allows the neurons to make more stable connections, while random stimulation is disruptive. Therefore predictable feedback tends to reinforce whatever network pattern results in predictable feedback. In this way the network is behaving like a simple AI algorithm.

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One day it may turn out that a potential sign of alien technology (technosignature) turns out to be just that. That is the best hope of finding evidence for life outside our solar system in my lifetime. But that day has not yet arrived, and another potential candidate (although this one was pretty weak) has found a natural explanation.

Of course no one knows, because we only have one example of life and a technological civilization, but if I had to guess I would say the universe is teeming with life. We’ve now confirmed what scientists long suspected, that our solar system is not unique or rare. Most stars have lots of planets around them, including rocky worlds within their habitable zone. Also, life seems to have arisen very quickly on Earth, as soon as the conditions were compatible with organic life. We may also find that life once existed on Mars, and may still exist in one or more ocean world, like Europa. Discovering even microbial life that originated independently from life on Earth would be huge – it would give us a second data point. It would confirm that life is likely everywhere it can form.

The probability, and therefore density, of technological civilizations is another matter entirely. It took the Earth about 4 billion years of tinkering with life before a technological species arose, and it happened (so far) only once. We have also not been around for very long, and there are many plausible scenarios by which our geological presence on this planet may be relatively brief. The famous Drake Equation mathematically frames the question, but that does not help us fill in all the variables. We simply don’t know. It is possible we are the only current technological species in the galaxy, or there may be hundreds, or even thousands. It also possible that ancient technological species, now long dead, have left behind evidence of their existence – their radio signals still streaming through space, or massive megastructures that reengineered entire stellar systems.

The reason I think finding such evidence is our best hope of detecting non-Sol life is that astronomers can search vast parts of the universe, and frequently detect even extremely rare situations and events. We have increasingly powerful and sophisticated instruments, like the James Webb telescope, that will help us find such things, if they are out there. Webb recently helped astronomers resolve an anomalous finding, although this one has a natural explanation (as all anomalies have gone before it, so far).

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This is one of those complex questions that comes up frequently when talking about related issues, and it’s always challenging to give a short answer. Often there are unknown or speculative elements to the analysis, which make it difficult to have an objective or definitive answer. What I would like to do here is mostly frame the relevant considerations and give my current understanding of the evidence, with possible caveats. Obviously this is going to be a quick overview of a lot of complexity – I see it more as a starting point than a firm conclusion.

There are really four questions hiding in this one question about meat consumption, and I will address each separately. These are: health effects, environmental effects, ethical considerations, and local considerations such as cultural tradition.

Starting with the last item first, this can actually be the trickiest to answer. What should be our attitude toward populations with a deep cultural history that includes things like hunting whales or polar bears, using endangered animals parts for folk remedies, or destructive farming practices. Animal rights organizations try to walk a fine line:

“For those of us who are not members of those communities, it is not our role to decry traditional practices that have important cultural, nutritional, and other necessary value, particularly when they are used respectfully and humanely.”

But what about when their practices are not humane? And what is considered respectful? Often such considerations are tainted by a “noble savage” myth that such peoples always live in harmony with nature, but human populations throughout history have generally been disruptive to their environments. There is no perfect answer here. Those from developed nations do have little moral standing to lecture native populations about nature management. Often we are essentially asking them to change their practices to help solve a problem we created. But then again, should we allow whale species to be hunted to extinction because we feel guilty? It’s a no-win scenario. We just have to take a balanced approach that thoughtfully considers many factors, and searches for acceptable alternatives.

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I still find it amazing that we can look at an astronomical object light years away and determine its chemical composition in detail. This is referred to as spectral analysis – looking at either absorption or emission lines in the wavelengths of light. Isaac Newton was the first to demonstrate that white light from the sun is actually composed of the full spectrum of visible light, which can be separated by passing through a prism which bends light of different colors to different degrees, causing it to spread out into the familiar rainbow pattern. However, Newton was not the first to discover this effect, but prior to his experiments it was believed the prisms colored the light. Newton demonstrated that the colors were already there.

In 1802, William Hyde Wollaston improved on the prism design to produce more detailed spectra. He discovered black bands of missing wavelengths in the light. These are absorption lines – chemicals will absorb specific wavelengths of light depending on their chemical structure (corresponding to the orbits of electrons which absorb the energy of light to jump to a higher energy orbit), with the pattern of absorption lines being a signature of the specific chemical. There are also emission lines in which specific wavelengths of light are created depending on the source of the light. Therefore we can tell the chemical composition of a star by looking at its emission lines, and we can also tell its temperature as different elements and chemical have peak emissions at different temperatures. When starlight passes through a gas cloud and material in the cloud will absorb specific frequencies of light, telling us what it is made of.

Therefore, if an exoplanet with an atmosphere is discovered through the transit method (it causes the light of its star to dim when it blocks a small amount of it as it passes in front), then we may be able to detect some of the light from that star as it passes through the atmosphere of the planet. This requires high resolution imaging, but within our current capabilities for some exoplanets (and now extended with the James Webb Space Telescope). With spectral analysis we get information about the composition and temperature of the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Astronomers are most interested in using this method to look for signs of life (so-called biosignatures). What would a sign of life in a planet’s atmosphere be?

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At this point there is little question that a giant asteroid, 10 kilometers across, impacted the Earth about 66 million years ago. Evidence for this impact began with an iridium layer discovered at the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, boundary. Something deposited an unusually high level of iridium in a brief event all around the world. Later the likely crater resulting from this impact was found in Chicxulub, Mexico. Multiple other discoveries have supported this conclusion, including the fact that this impact was the likely cause of the dinosaur extinction. There was also massive volcanic activity at that time, and dinosaur populations may have been in decline, but that was likely a side show. The main event was the impact.

Such an impact would have released a tremendous amount of energy (10^23 joules), equivalent to a 100 million megaton bomb. There were multiple effects of that impact. One is that a lot of Earth crust material would have been melted and thrown up into the atmosphere, but at less than escape velocity so ultimately raining back down to Earth. Some of these molten droplets cooled into glass spherules as they fell, raining tiny glass beads onto the Earth – creating another geological marker for the impact.

The asteroid impact was essentially in the Gulf of Mexico, causing a massive tsunami that swept over North America. My favorite geological find resulting from this is at the Tanis site in Hell’s Creek. The massive tsunami washed lots of fish and other sea life across the continent, and deposited them in a valley, creating a large jumble of fossils all deposited at once. Scientists know they are from the day of the impact because the fish have glass spherules stuck in their gills – they breathed them in while still alive.

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This is definitely a “you got chocolate in my peanut butter” type of advance, because it combines two emerging technologies to create a potential significant advance. I have been writing about brain-machine interface (or brain-computer interface, BCI) for years. My take is that the important proof of concepts have already been established, and now all we need is steady incremental advances in the technology. Well – here is one of those advances.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a computer chip for BCI, called a microelectrode array (MEA), using advanced 3D printing technology. The MEA looks like a regular computer chip, except that it has thin pins that are electrodes which can read electrical signals from brain tissue. MEAs are inserted into the brain with the pins stuck into brain tissue. They are thin enough to cause minimal damage. The MEA can then read the brain activity where it is placed, either for diagnostic purposes or to allow for control of a computer that is connected to the chip (yes, you need wired coming out of the skull). You can also stimulate the brain through the electrodes. MEAs are mostly used for research in animals and humans. They can generally be left in the brain for about one year.

One MEA in common use is called the Utah array, because it was developed at the University of Utah, which was patented in 1993. So these have been in use for decades. How much of an advance is the new MEA design? There are several advantage, which mostly stem from the fact that these MEAs can be printed using an advanced 3D printing technology called Aerosol Jet 3D Printing. This allows for the printing at the nano-scale using a variety of materials, included those needed to make MEAs. Using this technology provides three advantages.

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Recently scientists have published the complete pangenome of the domesticated silkworm (Bombyx mori). I thought this was intriguing for several reasons. First, I don’t think I have discussed previously here what a pangenome is. Second, I never thought about the fact that the silkworm is technically a domesticated animal. And third, silk is an important material that has been the focus of much scientific research, so of course I was interested in how this latest research might affect that.

A pangenome (I have seen “pan-genome”, “pangenome”, and “pan genome” – I’m just going to go with pangenome) is the complete genetic profile of a species (or more broadly, a clade) including all variants. So a pangenome of Homo sapiens would include a map of every gene that exists in people, not just a genome of one person.  This provides a more complete picture of the genetics of that species than a single genome would. A pangenome can also provide information useful for determining the evolutionary relationships among varieties of a clade. It can also be useful to track specific genes and the traits that they control.

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