Isegoria

Rather than dulling or impairing cognition, THC appears to reverse the aging process and improve mental processes:

To test the hypothesis, mice were given a small daily dose of THC over the course of one month at the age of 2 months, 12 months and again at 18 months of age. It is important to understand that mice typically live until 2 years old. The dose was small enough to avoid any psychoactive effects.

Tests assessed the animals’ learning, memory, orientation and recognition skills. Interestingly, 18-month-old mice given THC demonstrated cognitive skills equal to 2-month-old controls, while the placebo group suffered cognitive deterioration associated with normal aging.

According to one of the authors, neurobiology professor Andreas Zimmer, University of Bonn, “The treatment completely reversed the loss of performance in the old animals. We repeated these experiments many times. It’s a very robust and profound effect.” Even more remarkable, gene activity and the molecular profile in the brain tissue was that of much younger animals. Specifically, neurons in the hippocampus grew more synaptic spines — points of contact necessary for communication between neurons.

I remember a short anecdote from By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, used to make the point that “Hungarians have consistently proved good at odd things”:

In the early 1950s the scientific advisory board of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission convened in Washington D.C. A first count of the members showed a minority absent, but still a quorum; another count enabled the chairman to ask his colleagues, in his faultless native Hungarian, “Shall we conduct this meeting in the mother tongue?” Agreed and done.

We aren’t so much wise, as the name Homo sapiens would suggest, but unusually forward-looking, Martin E.P. Seligman and John Tierney argue. We’re really Homo prospectus:

This link between memory and prospection has emerged in research showing that people with damage to the brain’s medial temporal lobe lose memories of past experiences as well as the ability to construct rich and detailed simulations of the future. Similarly, studies of children’s development show that they’re not able to imagine future scenes until they’ve gained the ability to recall personal experiences, typically somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5.

Perhaps the most remarkable evidence comes from recent brain imaging research. When recalling a past event, the hippocampus must combine three distinct pieces of information — what happened, when it happened and where it happened — that are each stored in a different part of the brain. Researchers have found that the same circuitry is activated when people imagine a novel scene. Once again, the hippocampus combines three kinds of records (what, when and where), but this time it scrambles the information to create something new.

Even when you’re relaxing, your brain is continually recombining information to imagine the future, a process that researchers were surprised to discover when they scanned the brains of people doing specific tasks like mental arithmetic. Whenever there was a break in the task, there were sudden shifts to activity in the brain’s “default” circuit, which is used to imagine the future or retouch the past.

This discovery explains what happens when your mind wanders during a task: It’s simulating future possibilities. That’s how you can respond so quickly to unexpected developments. What may feel like a primitive intuition, a gut feeling, is made possible by those previous simulations.

If I had to make up some ludicrous technobabble, it would be hard to beat quantum thermodynamics:

“If physical theories were people, thermodynamics would be the village witch,” the physicist Lídia del Rio and co-authors wrote last year in Journal of Physics A. “The other theories find her somewhat odd, somehow different in nature from the rest, yet everyone comes to her for advice, and no one dares to contradict her.”

Unlike, say, the Standard Model of particle physics, which tries to get at what exists, the laws of thermodynamics only say what can and can’t be done. But one of the strangest things about the theory is that these rules seem subjective. A gas made of particles that in aggregate all appear to be the same temperature — and therefore unable to do work — might, upon closer inspection, have microscopic temperature differences that could be exploited after all. As the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”

In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems.

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Over the past decade, Popescu and his Bristol colleagues, along with other groups, have argued that energy spreads to cold objects from hot ones because of the way information spreads between particles. According to quantum theory, the physical properties of particles are probabilistic; instead of being representable as 1 or 0, they can have some probability of being 1 and some probability of being 0 at the same time. When particles interact, they can also become entangled, joining together the probability distributions that describe both of their states. A central pillar of quantum theory is that the information — the probabilistic 1s and 0s representing particles’ states — is never lost. (The present state of the universe preserves all information about the past.)

Over time, however, as particles interact and become increasingly entangled, information about their individual states spreads and becomes shuffled and shared among more and more particles. Popescu and his colleagues believe that the arrow of increasing quantum entanglement underlies the expected rise in entropy — the thermodynamic arrow of time. A cup of coffee cools to room temperature, they explain, because as coffee molecules collide with air molecules, the information that encodes their energy leaks out and is shared by the surrounding air.

Understanding entropy as a subjective measure allows the universe as a whole to evolve without ever losing information. Even as parts of the universe, such as coffee, engines and people, experience rising entropy as their quantum information dilutes, the global entropy of the universe stays forever zero.

Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”

Keeping the body’s cells synced up matters for health:

In 2007, based on epidemiological studies, the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared shift work, which causes circadian disruption, a carcinogen. Other studies have elucidated a link between immune cell activity and glucocorticoids—which are secreted in circadian patterns and regulate peripheral clocks—as well as a role for chronic stress in perturbing daily cycles in gene expression, which can alter immune, endocrine, and other functions.

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Genes involved in cell division were among the earliest identified as being rhythmically expressed in both rodent models and human cells. In 1987, researchers studying ovarian cancers found that tumor cells synthesized DNA on a daily rhythm that typically peaked in the late morning hours, nearly 12 hours out of sync with nontumor cells. This led the team to suggest that timing chemotherapy doses that target cells actively replicating their DNA might improve the drugs’ effectiveness while reducing healthy-cell death.

Sure enough, over the past 30 years, experimental models and clinical trials have found that timing chemo regimens can significantly affect their toxicity and effectiveness. In animal studies of nearly 30 chemo drugs, tailoring dosing time to the medication’s mode of action has been found to decrease toxic side effects and increase effectiveness. In one study, rats that received the chemotherapy drug cisplatin at the time of day when their urinary output was highest (a correlate of other timed cycles in kidney metabolism) had fewer nephrotoxic effects, as measured in kidney function tests, than animals that received the doses at the time of minimum urinary output. In another study, oxaliplatin chemotherapy caused fewer intestinal lesions and less bone marrow suppression in mice when given at night, possibly because DNA synthesis in murine bone marrow is highest during the day.

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Clinical trials in 1985 found that antihistamines were most effective when taken at night or early in the morning. Subsequent studies established that inhaling corticosteroids at bedtime, or using delayed-release prednisone formulations that allocated the medication to the body pre-dawn, were most effective at combating allergy symptoms. Cardiovascular events were also recognized early on to cycle throughout the day, as doctors noticed that most patients admitted for heart attacks tended to experience their symptoms between 6:00 a.m. and noon.

Scientists have speculated for decades that a comet could be behind the sudden fall in temperature during a period known as the Younger Dryas:

But recently the theory appeared to have been debunked by new dating of meteor craters in North America where the comet is thought to have struck.

However, when engineers studied animal carvings made on a pillar – known as the vulture stone – at Gobekli Tepe they discovered that the creatures were actually astronomical symbols which represented constellations and the comet.

The idea had been originally put forward by author Graham Hancock in his book Magicians of the Gods.

Using a computer programme to show where the constellations would have appeared above Turkey thousands of years ago, they were able to pinpoint the comet strike to 10,950BC, the exact time the Younger Dryas begins according to ice core data from Greenland.

The Younger Dryas is viewed as a crucial period for humanity, as it roughly coincides with the emergence of agriculture and the first Neolithic civilisations.

Before the strike, vast areas of wild wheat and barley had allowed nomadic hunters in the Middle East to establish permanent base camps. But the difficult climate conditions following the impact forced communities to come together and work out new ways of maintaining the crops, through watering and selective breeding. Thus farming began, allowing the rise of the first towns.

Edinburgh researchers said the carvings appear to have remained important to the people of Gobekli Tepe for millennia, suggesting that the event and cold climate that followed likely had a very serious impact.

Graham Hancock appeared on Joe Rogan Experience #872 and #725.

While pop-culture geeks are saying, “May the Fourth be with you,” science geeks might celebrate Thomas Henry Huxley‘s birthday:

He became one of the great autodidacts of the nineteenth century. At first he read Thomas Carlyle, James Hutton’s Geology, and Hamilton’s Logic. In his teens he taught himself German, eventually becoming fluent and used by Charles Darwin as a translator of scientific material in German. He learned Latin, and enough Greek to read Aristotle in the original.

Later on, as a young adult, he made himself an expert, first on invertebrates, and later on vertebrates, all self-taught. He was skilled in drawing and did many of the illustrations for his publications on marine invertebrates. In his later debates and writing on science and religion his grasp of theology was better than most of his clerical opponents. Huxley, a boy who left school at ten, became one of the most knowledgeable men in Britain.

He’s known for being Darwin’s bulldog, for coining the term agnostic, and for being Aldous Huxley’s grandfather.