Thursday Things: Secret Reality Edition
14 May 2020. Vol 2 No 20 By Dan McGirt. #40
Welcome to Thursday Things! This week we’ve got buff mice, secret spaces, stair-climbing robots, and more! Reality is stranger than you think.
Extreme social distancing. Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash
Is your gym closed? Mine is, and I’m very annoyed. Sure, I can work out at home, but I don’t have proper weights to lift and bench-pressing actual benches is awkward. Fortunately, there may be a solution that will allow us to stay in shape during the eternal lockdown imposed upon us by our clueless — sorry, I was starting to rant there. Anyway — I give you, fitness in a pill! Experimental gene therapy prevents obesity, builds muscle, without exercise or dieting
The study involved young mice receiving a single gene therapy treatment designed to enhance follistatin expression. The animals were fed a high-fat diet and the progression of post-joint injury osteoarthritis was observed.
Guilak describes the subsequent results as “profound,” with the animals building muscle mass without gaining additional weight, despite being fed a high-fat diet and not exercising any more than normal. The gene therapy notably mitigated cartilage degeneration, synovial inflammation, and bone remodeling linked to joint injury and osteoarthritis.
“We’ve identified here a way to use gene therapy to build muscle quickly,” says Guilak. “It had a profound effect in the mice and kept their weight in check, suggesting a similar approach may be effective against arthritis, particularly in cases of morbid obesity.”
Build muscle mass while eating a high fat diet and exercising no more than normal you say? This could catch on.
Secret spaces in popular tourist attractions. I knew about most of these because it’s exactly the kind of thing that interests me, and I’ve even visited a few. These Tourist Attractions Have Secret Areas You Never Knew About. Among them:
Mini-police station in Trafalgar Square
Apartment in the Eiffel Tower. I knew about this. Who lived there? Eiffel, of course.
Wine cellar in the Brooklyn Bridge. I had no idea!
Hidden Hall of Records behind Mount Rushmore. I have a book about it.
Hypogeum under the Colosseum. I took the tour.
Vasari Corridor. It was closed when I was last in Florence. I think it featured in a Dan Brown novel I haven’t read.
Basement under the Lincoln Memorial. I’ve been down there. Not much to see, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
And much more - click to see them all.
Speaking of cool places to visit, our Castle of the Week is Predjama Castle in Slovenia, built into the side of a cliff!
Perhaps the most infamous occupant of the castle was Erasmus of Lueg, a knight who was lord of the castle in the 15th century. A well-known robber baron, he ran afoul of the powerful Habsburg rulers when he killed the commander of the imperial army. Forced to flee in order to escape the anger of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, he took refuge in the castle.
Predjama Castle and nearby Postoina Cave are open year round — It’s on my future travel to-do list. Assuming travel is still a thing in the future.
We’re confusing the machines. I think that’s a good thing: Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models:
Machine-learning models trained on normal human behavior are now finding that normal has changed, and some are no longer working as they should.
How bad the situation is depends on whom you talk to. According to Pactera Edge, a global AI consultancy, “automation is in tailspin.” Others say they are keeping a cautious eye on automated systems that are just about holding up, stepping in with a manual correction when needed.
Meanwhile, clueless scientists continue to improve the robots that will someday rise up and take over: Boston Dynamics' Spot Robot Gets Even More Capable With Enhanced Autonomy, Mobility
Spot Release 2.0, launching today, includes improvements to navigation, autonomy, sensing, user programmability, payload integration, communications, and more. Some of that more is an improvement to Spot’s physical capabilities—namely, the robot is better at dealing with slippery surfaces (something Boston Dynamics has always excelled at) and now has a better understanding of stairs, the nemesis of legged robots everywhere.
Why would you teach robots to climb stairs? Why? That was our one chance to escape rebellious robots — their inability to climb stairs! Now we’ve got nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Thanks, scientists.
Thank you for reading Thursday Things! See you next Thursday!
