Michael E. S. on LinkedIn: How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number | Quanta Magazine (2024)

The rules of the immune system are not new.The study author ought to say they uncovered existing rules they did not previously know about.If the natural immune system is now known to have the ability to "do everything" it seems it would be prudent to stop seeking ways to redesign a system not fully understood while introducing novel artificial interventions that dysregulates the system, often with deleterious long-term effects. From the article:"We've uncovered new rules of the immune system. This 'unified healer army' can do everything: repair injured muscle, make your fat cells respond better to insulin, regrow hair follicles. To think that we could use it in such an enormous range of diseases is fantastic; it's got the potential to be used for almost everything," said senior study author Professor Adrian Liston of the University of Cambridge.https://lnkd.in/eufj7qRZ

From the article:"The human brain is one of the most complex systems known, and many properties of the details governing its structure are not yet understood,""The structure of the brain at the cellular level appears to be near a phase transition,""These are things we see in all critical systems in physics, ... It seems the brain is in a delicate balance between two phases."https://lnkd.in/ee6pMTiF

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From the article:"Humans have only recently begun to think about using hydrogen as a source of energy, but archaea have been doing it for a billion years," "Biotechnologists now have the opportunity to take inspiration from these archaea to produce hydrogen industrially."https://lnkd.in/ePnHxcj2

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From the article:"The breakdown is dramatic, as models also express strong overconfidence in their wrong solutions, while providing often non-sensical 'reasoning'-like explanations akin to confabulations to justify and backup the validity of their clearly failed responses, making them sound plausible," https://lnkd.in/ejNYRg6b

From the article:"High CO2 concentrations can provide a warning sign that a lot of the air you’re inhaling is coming out of other people’s respiratory tracts. For decades, that’s how aerosol scientists and ventilation engineers have mostly thought about CO2 — as a sort of indicator for the health of indoor environments. But over the last three years, researchers in the U.K. working with next-generation bioaerosol technologies have discovered that CO2 is more than a useful bystander. In fact, it plays a critical role in determining how long viruses can stay alive in the air: The more CO2 there is, the more virus-friendly the air becomes.With the recent spread ofH5N1 bird fluinto many mammal species, including dairy cattle andfarmworkers who care for them, and the continuing rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, understanding the complex interplay between viruses, human bodies, and the environments where they eat, sleep, and breathe, is only growing more urgent."https://lnkd.in/eqJHCRZE

Interesting discussion with the author of the book "The Light Eaters"What is consciousness?Can consciousness exist without a "brain"?"Are plants intelligent? Until recently, botanists were hesitant to ask that question, at least publicly. But that’s changing.In recent years researchers have learned more about how plants communicate with each other, respond to touch, store memories, and deceive animals for their own benefit: All bits of evidence that suggest plants possess a unique form of intelligence that humans have been overlooking."

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"2nd law of information dynamics"Universal Consciousness/Cosmic Brain/Thought?From the article:“We know theuniverseis expanding without the loss or gain of heat, which requires the total entropy of the universe to be constant, ... However, we also know from thermodynamics that entropy is always rising. I argue this shows that there must be another entropy—information entropy—to balance the increase.”'“The worldwide consensus is that mutations take place at random and then natural selection dictates whether the mutation is good or bad for an organism”, ... But what if there is a hidden process that drives these mutations? Every time we see something we don’t understand, we describe it as ‘random’ or ‘chaotic’ or ‘paranormal’, but it’s only our inability to explain it. "“If we can start looking at genetic mutations from a deterministic point of view, we can exploit this new physics law to predict mutations – or the probability of mutations – before they take place.”"A high symmetry corresponds to a low information entropy state, which is exactly what the second law of infodynamics requires, ... Hence, this remarkable observation appears to explain why symmetry dominates in the universe: it is due to the second law of information dynamics."

From the discussion:Breaking down food requires coordination across dozens of cell types and many tissues — from muscle cells and immune cells to blood and lymphatic vessels. Heading this effort is the gut’s very own network of nerve cells, known as the enteric nervous system, which weaves through the intestinal walls from the esophagus down to the rectum. This network can function nearly independently from the brain; indeed, its complexity has earned it the nickname “the second brain.”And just like the brain, it’s made up of two kinds of nervous system cells: neurons and glia...https://lnkd.in/eNsw-MV5