Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 8, 2019

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Authored by @remlaps

IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Driverless cars may be a mixed-blessing for older people; Statins may impair cognitive ability; The relationship between microbiomes and recovering from fear; and a Steem essay on a new chip design with silicon-based artificial neurons...


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  1. Video Friday: This Robot Refuses to Fall Down Even if You Hit, Shove It - After missing last week, presumably due to the Thanksgiving holiday, IEEE Spectrum is back with their weekly selection of awesome robot videos. This week's selection has a few potential gifts, and it includes: A promotional video for the skydio2 drone; A promo video for the Sphero RVR robotic vehicle; NimbRo-OP2, a humanoid robot with an impressive ability to regain its balance after being pushed, bumped, and shoved; Electroskin muscles that can fold up, fit in your pocket and crawl on a table by simulating artificial muscles; ABB Robots that decorate Christmas trees and interact with visitors at Bloomingdales in New York City; soft elastic origami robots that are inspired by the pelican eel; and more...

    Here is NimbRo


  • Stop Saying Driverless Cars Will Help Old People - In the long run, it is reasonably expected that autonomous vehicles will improve life for the elderly, especially by providing reliable low-cost transportation in areas with restricted public transportation. But there is going to be a transition period, and this article argues that the transition period may not be friendly to older people. The most common type of accidents for older people are caused by, "inadequate surveillance", where people didn't look for a hazard, or looked but didn't see one. Until self-driving cars are fully autonomous, this sort of accident will be exacerbated by the extra time that it takes an older person to wrest control away from the car, which creates a new type of risk. Additionally, it makes the point that people who are hyping the benefits of self-driving cars are doing so without actually studying the interactions between older people and autonomous vehicles. There have been almost no studies of older people and autonomous transportation technology. h/t Communications of the ACM

  • The Effect of HMG-CoA Reductase Inhibitors on Cognition in Patients With Alzheimer's Dementia: A Prospective Withdrawal and Rechallenge Pilot Study - This article is paywalled, so I could only see the Abstract. Noting that statins provide cardio-vascular benefits, but their effect on cognition is poorly understood, Kalpana Padala and colleagues studied the effect of discontinuing and then reactivating statins on participants with Alzheimer's disease, in six week intervals. The researchers say they observed an improvement in cognition when the medications were discontinued, and a corresponding decrease when they were "rechallenged". h/t Daniel Lemire

  • How Microbiomes Affect Fear | Quanta Magazine - An October study in Nature by Coco Chu and 4+lines-worth of colleagues examined the effects on behavior of diminished microbiomes in mice. The researchers identified, "differences in cell wiring, brain activity and gene expression", and also "pinpointed a brief window after birth when restoring the microbiome could still prevent the adult behavioral deficits", and finally, they also identified four specific compounds that track with the behavior changes. The researchers compared three groups of mice: one that was raised in isolation with no microbiome; one group that had its microbiome reduced through the use of antibiotics; and a third group with a normal microbiome. All three groups learned to fear a tone that was followed by an electric shock, but only the control group learned not to fear the sound after the shock was discontinued. In addition to the behavioral differences, physical differences were also observed within the brain-structures of the mice. The scientists were also able to identify four compounds that were in the "blood serum, cerebrospinal fluid and stool of the mice with with impaired microbiomes", but the exact mechanism remains unknown. Future work may look into identifying particular bacteria, identifying biomarkers that indicate susceptibility to disorders like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and developing therapeutics. In mice, interventions that lead to a healthy microbiome early in life led to healthy adults, so interventions targeting the microbiome in humans may be most effective in infancy and childhood.

  • STEEM Artificial Neurons Could Be The Breakthrough For Treating Chronic Illnesses - In this post, @kralizec brings our attention to the creation of silicon-based artificial neurons on a chip, which was published in Nature on December 3. Because the chip uses about one billionth of the energy of a normal processor, it may be useful for implantable medical devices, and it could be a break through, the post says, for treatment of "many chronic diseases such as heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers or Parkinsons." The paper was previously covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 5, 2019 (A 10% beneficiary setting has been assigned to this post for @kralizec.)


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