More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 12 - March 25, 2018
as e.e. cummings once said, “Listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.”
Becker claimed, everything we consider “culture” is nothing more than an elaborate defense mechanism against the awful knowledge of our own mortality. A great many researchers now agree.
because technology is actually another form of life — a living, natural system with ancient origins and deep desires. And while Kelly has a point, I also think
When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the
promise of an easier tomorrow. It’s the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?
“It’s where I learned that people aren’t disabled,” he says. “Technology is disabled.”
may turn out to be a little like the guy who invented television. When they asked him what he thought television would be used for, the only thing he could think of was education. Now all we have to watch is crap.”
The subset who had near-death experiences reported more self-awareness, more social awareness, and deeper religious feelings than the others. Van
Matched against a control group, they scored much higher on life-attitude tests, significantly lower on fear-of-death tests, gave more money to charity, and took fewer medications. There’s no other way to look at the data. These people were just transformed by the experience.”
Normal people enter REM at 90 minutes. Depressed people enter at 60 minutes or sooner. It works the same in the other direction. Happy people go into REM around 100 minutes. Britton found that the vast majority of her near-death group entered REM sleep at 110 minutes — a rating that is nearly off-the-charts for overall life-satisfaction and a neurophysiological correlate that supports the anecdotal evidence that these
cliometrics, sometimes called economic history, which is the application of rigorous statistical analysis to the
relationship between economics, physiology, and longevity, which is when the theory of evolution came into the picture.
“Over the past 300 years,” he says, “humans have increased their average body size by over 50 percent, average longevity by more than 100 percent, and greatly improved the robustness and capacity of vital organ systems.”
The realization that evolution’s search engine proceeds blindly, thus gradually,
came from Darwin. Before
“In the past hundred years,” says Fogel, “humans have gained an unprecedented degree of control over their environment, a degree of control so great that it sets them apart not only from all other species, but from all previous
Alligators are the keystone predator in the Everglades — meaning it is their health that determines the health of the entire ecosystem. The goal tonight is just simple science.
summarized by former Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert: “I don’t understand why the Church is suddenly all ‘ground control to Cardinal Tom.’ ” Brother Guy told Colbert that the Vatican supported astronomy because “It’s a good way to know there’s more important
What’s more, these chemicals give us deep insight into philosophical questions of enormous importance — how the brain constructs reality; the relationship between mind, brain, and body; and the neurobiological correlates for belief, meaning, and transformative experience. To put this differently, psychedelics are among our oldest disruptive technologies — literally pre-dating our species — yet their potency and potential, then as now, remains as mind-bending as ever.
“Risk is an essential element in adventure programming . . . To shelter youth from reality, with all its dangers and uncertainties, is to deny them real life.” And she practices what she preaches.
He isolated a cell that gave rise to all varieties of blood cells, a precursor cell capable of radical transformation, or, technically, a
hemotopietic stem cell.
Unlike specialized cells, which can only become one thing — a liver, say, or a nose — stem cells can turn into any other kind of cell. From a morphological
would be able to use chemotherapy to wipe out cancer cells and then transplant in new stem cells that would be completely
While opponents have been trying to oust Roe v. Wade for thirty years, one of the main reasons it’s held fast is the idea that a human embryo does not have the same rights as a human being.
Yet, during the normal process of in vitro fertilization, embryos are destroyed by the boatload. Current techniques cull twenty or so embryos for every one that’s implanted. The remainder are frozen for short-term
come at this from the other direction, the current medical definition of death is the cessation of brain function. This means that the opposite of death — the beginning of life — must be the emergence of brain function. Scientists believe
The old charter granted legal protection to adults and fetuses. The new version protects embryos as well. Next, while
work involves trying to decode how proteins, lipids, and organelles move through the neurons and brain cells, which is information that could help us cure Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease. But to get this information, he needs stem cells.
the biotech industry is absolutely critical to California’s survival.
therapeutic cloning (which produces stem cells) with reproductive cloning (which produces carbon-copy humans). This is also where Leon Kass comes into the story.
In the 1970s, the most powerful supercomputer in the world was a Cray. It required a small room to hold and cost roughly $8 million. Today, the iPhone that sits in your pocket is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful than a Cray. This is exponential growth at work.
Over the past few decades, scientists have come to see that the four letters of the genetic alphabet — A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), and T (thymine) — can be transformed into the ones and zeroes of binary code, allowing for the easy, electronic manipulation of DNA.
for example, Jay Keasling, a biochemical engineer at Berkeley, stitched together ten synthetic genes from three different organisms to create a novel yeast that can manufacture artemisinic acid, the precursor to the antimalarial drug artemisinin, natural supplies of which are extremely low. The work would have been next to impossible without synthetic biology.
