Real-Life True Blood: Synthetic Blood Is Coming — And So Are a Host of Potential Complications

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Season 6 of HBO’s vampire drama True Blood premieres on Sunday night, presumably following up on last year’s cliffhanger where the factory that produces Tru-Blood — the bottled synthetic blood that allows vampires go “vegetarian” — was burned to the ground, destroying the product that made it possible for vampires to non-violently co-exist with people.

But out here in the real world, the future of synthetic blood is just beginning. After decades of global research, controversies, and failed approval petitions, the UK’s Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency finally gave researchers at the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine the go-ahead late last month to start developing synthetic blood with adult stem cells.

The license allows the researchers to use already-recognized stem cell technology to create a compound that would both eliminate the risk of infusion-transmitted infections and supplement (if not eventually take the place of) chronically limited blood banks worldwide. After years of partial synthetic successes at best, it will permit the first-ever human clinical trials of synthetic blood. Oh, also? The license permits blood manufacturing “on an industrial scale.” Cue the True Blood overture (albeit sans vampires).

And according to Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist at Boston University, the arrival of synthetic blood is also likely to come with some serious socioeconomic and ethical issues, including ones that have complicated many medical advances before it.

Benjamin is the author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, a new book that explores the social forces that inform and arise from scientific research, especially controversial medical practices like stem cell trials. Though her research focuses specifically on the politics of paying clinical egg donors in California, the patterns of structural inequality she outlines are in danger of repeating themselves in Scotland – and later, in the rest of the world. The two major quagmires, she told Wired, lie in how clinical trials for synthetic blood are conducted and in the potential patenting of the technology. (via Real-Life True Blood: Synthetic Blood Is Coming — And So Are a Host of Potential Complications | Underwire | Wired.com)

Perfect pitch may not be so ‘perfect’

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People classified with perfect pitch may not actually be as in tune with the notes they hear as they think.

Played a long piece of music, a study group failed to notice when scientists turned the tones ever so slightly flat. They then misidentified in-tune sounds as being sharp.

Researchers say it demonstrates the adaptability of the mind even for those skills thought to be fixed at birth. They have published the work in the journal Psychological Science.

Only around one in 10,000 people has the ability to correctly classify a note simply by hearing it. This phenomenon is called perfect, or absolute, pitch, and has been made famous by the well-known composers who are believed to have possessed such talents, such as Mozart and Beethoven.

Graduate student Stephen Hedger, from the University of Chicago, US, had perfect pitch identified by objective tests. He explained what it meant.

“I’m able to name any musical note in isolation without the aid of a reference note. Someone with perfect pitch would be able to tell you a car alarm is honking in F sharp, for example. Generally it enables people to identify notes across a wide variety of octaves.”

Mr Hedger was tricked by his colleague who secretly adjusted the pitch on an electronic keyboard as he was playing a tune. The notes were made flat by 33 cents - which is one-third of the distance between adjacent keys on a piano.

When the note was shifted back to its original correct key, it sounded drastically sharp to Hedger, who explained he found it “shocking” that he had not noticed the change.

A similar model was tested on 27 students with perfect pitch. They were played a piece of music for 45 minutes which was gradually changed over time to become flatter. (via BBC News - Perfect pitch may not be so ‘perfect’)

springwise:

Segway-style vehicle is ultra portable

We’ve already seen portable transport upgraded from fold-up bicycles to the suitcase-sized Moveomotorbike. Now the Hovertrax is a Segway-like electric gyroscopic vehicle that is hands-free and can fit in the user’s backpack. READ MORE…

joshbyard:

Spray-On Fabric: Instant Clothing That Can Be Taken Off, Even Washed

The company behind this technology is called Fabrican. Developed by clothing-designer-turned-chemist Dr. Manel Torres, who was originally looking for a faster way to produce clothes, the idea came to the self-proclaimed fashion doctor when he went to a friend’s wedding and saw someone getting sprayed by silly string…

That’s when Torres got his “aha” moment and decided to pursue an instant, nonstick fabric. The result was the creation of instant garments you can remove and even wash. 

(via Spray-On Clothing Opens Door For Next-Level Tech)

There isn’t a material much more effective for channeling and releasing extra moisture than human skin, but a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis are developing a material inspired by that gold standard. The waterproof fabric has channels that pull moisture away from where it shouldn’t be (presumably your skin) and drains it away on the outside – even when the channels are completely saturated already. This new type of moisture-wicking material could be the next big thing in workout gear. (via Water-Repellant Material Wicks Sweat Away Like Human Skin | Gadgets, Science & Technology)

A jewelry store is an archive of the Earth. Every gem fixed to every ring or necklace was forged deep inside our planet, according to its own recipe of elements, temperature and pressure.

But it has taken a while for geologists to decode the cookbook for gems. Jade, for example, puzzled geologists for decades. “For a long time people looked at this crazy rock, and it didn’t make any sense,” said George Harlow, a geologist at the American Museum of Natural History. But thanks to the research of Dr. Harlow and other geologists, jade now has a back story: It formed in dying oceans.

The discovery of gems like rubies and jade thus signifies more than just a new supply of bling in jewelry stores. It tells geologists some important things about the planet. If rocks contain jade, the scientists can be fairly sure those rocks are a vestige of an ocean buried underground. Rubies, on the other hand, appear in places where mountains formed from continental collisions, even if those mountains were eroded away millions of years ago. (via In Glittering Gems, Reading Earth’s Story - NYTimes.com)

neuromorphogenesis:

Study: Is Complex Problem Solving Distinct From IQ?

The idea that skills other than traditional IQ might matter more than testable intelligence in the real world of messy, ever-changing problems isn’t a new one. But what is new is the developing alternative of testing complex problem solving. An article just published in the journal Intelligence tries to pick apart the difference: instead of answering questions about trains leaving stations, vocabulary and block stacking patterns to measure IQ, the researchers propose “computer-based problem-solving scenarios called microworlds” to assess higher-order thinking skills. Designing these microworlds requires looking inside what makes higher-order thinking and, in fact, what goes on inside complex problem solving itself.

See, questions on IQ tests have answers: donkey and horse are to mule as lion and tiger are to liger. But in the real world, problems can consist of many, interconnected variables whose relationships are obscured and change over time, and goals can be unclear or even competing and contradictory – factors the authors of the Intelligence study cite as central to complex problem solving.

But pulling apart these ideas – traditional definitions of intelligence from complex problem solving – is tricky. As you’d expect, there’s significant overlap: people who are intelligent are generally good at CPS and vice a versa. But in what ways do these skills diverge? How is the intelligence measured by IQ and trained in school different from the skills of complex problem solving needed in the real world?

To answer that question researchers stuck 563 Luxembourgian high-schoolers in a genetics lab – or, at least in front of a free, downloadable microworld called Genetics Lab, which you should definitely check out if you have time. In GL, test-takers turn on and off “genes” and then click “next day” to discover how the combinations affect a fictional creature’s traits like IQ, Inventions and Ideas. It turns out to be a bit of a mish-mash and sorting out which genes create which abilities is a strange and complex soup.

Like many problems in the real world, GL not only requires manipulating information on the way to a goal, but sallying forth into the microworld to discover this information in the first place and using the information to create a mental model of how the system works. So Genetics Lab is scored three ways: Do students manipulate Genetics Lab in a way that creates unambiguous rules? Can they understand the relationships between genes and characteristics? And only finally, can they manipulate genes to get target characteristics?

Students were studious. Researchers researched. And then the researchers compared students’ three GL scores to their IQs, grades and whole bunch of other measures. What they found is cool, but only when you look at it with a bit of nuance. See, they found that Genetics Lab measures the same thing as the reasoning section of the standard IQ test. D’oh!

But, “Although they might not measure something different from reasoning scales, they measure it differently,” the authors write. And by measuring this reasoning or problem solving or whatever you want to call it differently, the researchers were able to see not only the endpoints but the waypoints that led there – they could measure problem solving process and not simply its product, and so answer not only the question of who is and is not good at reasoning/problem-solving, but what got them there.

Gathering information, making a mental model of how information drives results, and finally putting this model to work to get the results you want: that’s the process of complex problem solving. At this point, it ‘aint yet been pulled as a skill distinct from IQ-like reasoning. But a peek inside this process shows how results happen — and as a parent or teacher know this process may allow you to help your kids learn this complex and important skill.