We Have Concerns

A reminder of something rad coming up and a scheduling update.

Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics. He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016. “I just look at the weather,” said Mr. Hagerman, 53, who lives alone on a pig farm in southeastern Ohio. Jeff and Anthony berate this selfish stranger.

"What if we told you we could back up your mind?" That's the business pitch of Nectome, a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. The catch? They have to kill you first. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere. Jeff and Anthony accuse each other of already having undergone the procedure.

A new study from NASA has found that astronaut Scott Kelly's genes are no longer identical to those of his identical twin after spending a year in space. Preliminary results from NASA's Twins Study found that seven percent of Kelly's genes no longer match those of his twin, Mark. Scott Kelly spent one year aboard the International Space Station during the study, while his brother remained on Earth. Jeff and Anthony discuss how this story might have been mutated.

IN THE LAST 20 years, genealogy websites have attracted more than 15 million customers by promising insights into your past. It’s deeply personal, affecting stuff. But when your family tree contains thousands, millions, even tens of millions of people, it’s no longer a personal history. It’s human history. Recently, scientists from the New York Genome Center, Columbia, MIT, and Harvard scraped crowdsourced public records into family trees the size of small nations. Their analysis, which was published today in Science, includes the single largest known family tree, containing 13 million people. Your cousins Jeff and Anthony discuss this story.

Most of us know it - that weird, sudden feeling of experiencing something not for the first time. It's called déjà vu - French for "already seen" - and it's an uncanny feeling. But according to new research, that's all it is. Just a feeling. The most accepted explanation is that it has to do with memory. Much like a word can be on the tip of your tongue, a memory could be on the tip of your mind - there, but not quite accessible. Jeff and Anthony think they might have done this story before.

A dog searching for a lost child is typically given an item of clothing to smell. But what does that scent “look” like? To find out, scientists tested 48 dogs, half of which had special police or rescue training. Jeff and Anthony discuss whether or not this study stinks.

Humans assign value to brands. Brands represent wealth, strength, and yes, sex. We are our brands. And for some rhesus macaques in a lab, one brand, Adidas, represents monkey genitalia. The researchers paired dominant male faces, subordinate male faces, and female hindquarters with some brand logos, then paired scrambled images with other brand logos. “We know how social rewards can be processed differently compared to primary rewards like food or water,” the study’s first author M. Yavuz Acikalin in the Stanford Graduate School of Business told Gizmodo. “Essentially, what this is looking at, ‘is can monkeys also associate the rewards with arbitrary stimuli, and create associations more directly though conditioning.’” Jeff and Anthony discuss monkeys and business.

It's pretty extraordinary for people in their 80s and 90s to keep the same sharp memory as someone several decades younger, and now scientists are peeking into the brains of these "superagers" to uncover their secret. The work is the flip side of the disappointing hunt for new drugs to fight or prevent Alzheimer's disease. Parts of the brain shrink with age, one of the reasons why most people experience a gradual slowing of at least some types of memory late in life, even if they avoid diseases like Alzheimer's. But it turns out that superagers' brains aren't shrinking nearly as fast as their peers'. And autopsies of the first superagers to die during the study show they harbour a lot more of a special kind of nerve cell in a deep brain region that's important for attention. Jeff and Anthony remember to try and stay on topic.

If you ever fell into a black hole, your body would most likely be ripped into shreds and become 'spaghettified' - At least that's the theory put forward by most physicists today. But a new study is challenging that claim by suggesting there may be some black holes that you could survive - although doing so may put you into a strange reality. These black holes would destroy your past life and trap you in a parallel universe with an infinite number of possible futures. Jeff and Anthony weigh their options.

In a triumph of data collection and analysis, a team of researchers based at Oxford University has built the tools necessary to calculate how far any dot on a map is from a city — or anything else. The research allows us to pin down a question that has long evaded serious answers: Where is the middle of nowhere? The Washington Post processed every pixel and every populated place in the contiguous United States to find the one that best represents the “middle of nowhere.” Of all towns with more than 1,000 residents, Glasgow, home to 3,363 people in the rolling prairie of northeastern Montana, is farthest — about 4.5 hours in any direction — from any metropolitan area of more than 75,000 people. Jeff and Anthony consider the simple life.

When Josiah Zayner watched a biotech CEO drop his pants at a biohacking conference and inject himself with an untested herpes treatment, he realized things had gone off the rails. Zayner is no stranger to stunts in biohacking—loosely defined as experiments, often on the self, that take place outside of traditional lab spaces. Most notoriously, he injected his arm with DNA encoding for CRISPR that could theoretically enhance his muscles—in between taking swigs of Scotch at a live-streamed event. So when Zayner saw Ascendance Biomedical’s CEO injecting himself on a live-stream earlier this month, you might say there was an uneasy flicker of recognition. Jeff and Anthony discuss the body mods they're most excited for.

Elizabeth Swaney is a 33-year-old skier from Oakland, California who competed in the 2018 Winter Olympics for Hungary. She is not a good skiier. Swaney, who said her grandparents came from Hungary, earned her Olympic berth more from attending World Cup events than actually competing. Women’s pipe skiing World Cups rarely see more than 30 competitors, so it’s not hard to meet the Olympic requirement for a top-30 finish. Jeff and Anthony go back and forth on this one.

Biomedicine just took another leap forward. University of Colorado Boulder scientists created so-called electronic skin—e-skin for short. The e-skin is a thin, semi-transparent material that can act like your skin through measuring temperature, pressure, humidity and air flow. The new material, which was detailed in a study published Friday in Science Advances, could make better prosthetics, improve the safety of robots in the future and aid development of other biomedical devices. Jeff and Anthony feel this story out.

After about a week of eye irritation, which she thought might be caused by a stray eyelash, Beckley took a close look in the mirror and found the real culprit. What she pulled out was a wriggling, translucent worm, about a half-inch long. And it wasn't the only one in her eye. The worms in Beckley's eye were from the species Thelazia gulosa, which had not been known to infect humans. Jeff and Anthony are left squirming.