Thursday Things: Sixth Issue
18 September 2019. Vol 1 No 6. By Dan McGirt. #6
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Photo by Dave Francis on Unsplash
Squirrels have a lot of nervous energy. They’re anxious. Jumpy. And why not? Dogs love to chase them. Cats love to stalk and kill them. Probably other things want to eat them. The world can be a dangerous place if you’re a squirrel, so how do you stay alert for danger while also seeking delicious acorns? Simple - you outsource danger-spotting to the birds. A new study reveals that squirrels listen to nearby birds’ conversations to make sure there is no threat close by. When the birds are chirping happily, the squirrel relaxes. When the birds sound alarmed by a predator, the squirrel reacts. Of course, this is placing a lot of trust in the same birds the squirrel robs every time he raids the bird feeder…
We could have had cell phones forty years sooner. I knew there had been some regulatory and bureaucratic delays in the 1970s and 1980s that slowed the adoption of cell phone technology, but I did not know that the basic idea of cell phones was first introduced in the 1940s. It seems mobile phones threatened the business models of companies that had the clout to prevent the FCC from giving its approval (and allocating spectrum for mobile networks) for decades. Now, maybe we’d all be better off if mobile phones were still a wacky idea on some whiteboard at Bell Labs. I sometimes think so. On the other hand, you wonder what other awesome new technologies are being kept in the deep freeze right now because they would upset the apple carts of certain companies who like things just fine as they are? (*cough* flying cars *cough*)
Speaking of government conspiracies, the U.S. Navy has confirmed that three online videos purportedly showing UFOs are genuine, and should never have been released to the public. That is, the Navy confirms the provenance of the videos and that they have not identified the flying objects depicted. The Navy is not saying that they’re alien spacecraft. (Which they totally are, right?) Thing I learned: the new term for such bogies is “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”. Much less catchy than UFO.
CRISPR’d Stem Cells Could Provide Enduring Therapy for Muscular Dystrophy A new study at the University of Missouri (MU) School of Medicine shows that employing CRISPR to edit mutations in muscle stem cells may provide the means for lifelong correction of the genetic mutation responsible for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rare but devastating genetic disorder that causes muscle loss and physical impairments.
This is amazing. It is still in the “we’re testing this in mice” phase, but if this technique proves out, that is a potential cure for the most common fatal genetic disorder to affect children around the world. I see more and more stories like this, about potential breakthroughs in treating diseases made possible by CRISPR technology. I love that the headline on the first article I linked has turned CRISPR into a verb. It’s how I like my bacon — and how I like to see new treatments and cures served up.
Can you tell I used to write speeches for the head of a biotechnology trade group? One thing I loved about that job was that I got to tell stories about these kinds of astonishing treatments and cures for diseases that had, until now, in all of human history, no effective treatment. Most often, the treatment was, as in the last item about DMD, “coming soon (maybe)”. But just in the few years since I left that gig it seems that more and more often, the treatment isn’t coming soon, it is here now, helping real people in the real world. Faster, please!
Meanwhile, fast food “scientists” are working hard to find new ways for us to shorten our lives: KFC is serving fried chicken sandwiched between two glazed doughnuts at dozens of locations.
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