Despite an ancient warning from the Buddha, we still like to pretend that we're one self—a unified biological animal that persists through time. Sure, we know that our biological processes are dictated by circadian rhythms. What we overlook is that we're really the sum of billions of different components, and some of those "parts" have their own clocks.

The Buddha might not have had a microscope, but his keen insight into human psychology translates well to biology. That's the word from a new study, published in Science Advances, that found the bacterium Bacillus subtilis is run by its own circadian rhythms.

Also known as "grass bacillus," B. subtilis thrives in the gastrointestinal tracts of humans as well as grass-feeding ruminants. You can easily and cheaply purchase bottles of this bacterium as a probiotic due to its supposed immune system-boosting properties. The strain is found in soil, though you probably want to secure it by other means, making it a favorite of supplement companies. The European Food Safety Authority rates it as "Qualified Presumption of Safety."

For this study, the European research team chose B. subtilis thanks to previous observations that, like humans, it seems to follow a 24-hour circadian clock. It also responds to red and blue lights (again, like humans), causing the researchers to believe that it entrains to environmental conditions. The team discovered this by enzymatically inducing bioluminescence in order to stare into this mysterious world.

Lead author, Professor Martha Merrow from Munich's Ludwig Maximilans University, says

"We've found for the first time that non-photosynthetic bacteria can tell the time. They adapt their molecular workings to the time of day by reading the cycles in the light or in the temperature environment."

Zeitgebers are cues (such as temperature fluctuations) that allow biological organisms to synchronize with their environment. In humans, it's what makes us sleepy as the sun sets and raises cortisol levels in our blood a few hours before sunrise. This bacterium appears to maintain a similar clock. Rather than only responding to light and dark, B. subtilis takes cues from temperature drops, hinting at a circadian rhythm.

Although bacteria comprise 15 percent of all living matter, the team notes that circadian clocks have not been identified in nonphotosynthetic bacteria—until now. They note that bacterium such as Rhodospirillum rubrum displays rhythmic processes such as enzymatic activity yet has no apparent circadian clock.

Co-author Dr. Antony Dodd, a researcher in the UK's John Innes Centre, notes:

"Our study opens doors to investigate circadian rhythms across bacteria. Now that we have established that bacteria can tell the time we need to find out the processes that cause these rhythms to occur and understand why having a rhythm provides bacteria with an advantage."

Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

In February 1959, a group of nine hikers crossed through Russia's Ural Mountains as part of a skiing expedition. The experienced trekkers, all employed at the Ural Polytechnical Institute, were led by Igor Dyatlov. On the evening of February 1, all nine appear to have fled their tents into the Arctic temperatures, for which they were unprepared. None survived.

Six of the members died of hypothermia; three suffered from physical trauma. Some members were missing body parts—a tongue here, a few eyes there, a pair of eyebrows for good measure. According to reports, no hiker appears to have struggled or panicked. They were likely too quickly overtaken by the hostile environment in Western Russia.

All the members were young, mostly in their early twenties; one member, Semyon Zolotaryov, was 38. Good health didn't matter. Given the uncertain circumstances—what made them flee into the bitter cold?—the incident known as Dyatlov Pass has long been the type of Area 51-conspiracy theory that some people love to speculate about. A vicious animal attack? Infrasound-induced panic? Was the Soviet military involved? Maybe it was the katabatic winds that did them in. Local tribesmen might not have liked the intrusion.

Or perhaps it was aliens. Or a Yeti. Have we talked about Yeti aliens yet?

These theories and more have been floated for decades.

Finally, a new study, published in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment, has put the case to rest: it was a slab avalanche.

This theory isn't exactly new either. Researchers have long been skeptical about the avalanche notion, however, due to the grade of the hill. Slab avalanches don't need a steep slope to get started. Crown or flank fractures can quickly release as little as a few centimeters of earth (or snow) sliding down a hill (or mountain).

As researchers Johan Gaume (Switzerland's WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF) and Alexander Puzrin (Switzerland's Institute for Geotechnical Engineering) write, it was "a combination of irregular topography, a cut made in the slope to install the tent and the subsequent deposition of snow induced by strong katabatic winds contributed after a suitable time to the slab release, which caused severe non-fatal injuries, in agreement with the autopsy results."

Conspiracy theories abound when evidence is lacking. Twenty-six days after the incident, a team showed up to investigate. They didn't find any obvious sounds of an avalanche; the slope angle was below 30 degrees, ruling out (to them) the possibility of a landslide. Plus, the head injuries suffered were not typical of avalanche victims. Inject doubt and crazy theories will flourish.

Add to this Russian leadership's longstanding battle with (or against) the truth. In 2015 the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation decided to reopen this case. Four years later the agency concluded it was indeed a snow avalanche—an assertion immediately challenged within the Russian Federation. The oppositional agency eventually agreed as well. The problem was neither really provided conclusive scientific evidence.

Gaume and Puzrin went to work. They provided four critical factors that confirmed the avalanche:

• The location of the tent under a shoulder in a locally steeper slope to protect them from the wind
• A buried weak snow layer parallel to the locally steeper terrain, which resulted in an upward-thinning snow slab
• The cut in the snow slab made by the group to install the tent
• Strong katabatic winds that led to progressive snow accumulation due to the local topography (shoulder above the tent) causing a delayed failure

Case closed? It appears so, though don't expect conspiracy theories to abate. Good research takes time—sometimes generations. We're constantly learning about our environment and then applying those lessons to the past. While we can't expect every skeptic to accept the findings, from the looks of this study, a 62-year-old case is now closed.

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This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

Not only do most people get their news from social media, a majority of users never make it past the headline. The infinite scroll means that once a headline is consumed and a judgment is rendered, chances of returning to the story are low. The memory of the news is quickly filed. Once solidified, changing your mind is nearly impossible.

We all know the dangers of news-by-tweet. On Facebook you might see a headline and lede, arming you with one additional sentence of information. Still, it's not enough, especially given the complexity of politics. Add misinformation and disinformation into the mix and the results are intellectually and socially toxic.

Yet that's the environment we live in. Share an article from a fact-checking website like Snopes and you're guaranteed to hear about a past incident involving the founders or the notion that Politifact is biased. The Washington Post tracked over 30,500 lies or misleading claims by Donald Trump in four years; his followers never blinked.

Rarely are debates argued on the merits of content. Emotionality rules on social media. If the site is not agreeing with the narrative you've already told yourself, it must be wrong.

Does that make the very concept of fact-checking impossible? A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, argues against that idea—with caveats, of course. As MIT professor and co-author David Rand says, "We found that whether a false claim was corrected before people read it, while they read it, or after they read it influenced the effectiveness of the correction."

Neil deGrasse Tyson: How science literacy can save us from the internet | Big Think

For the study, 2,683 people viewed 18 true and 18 debunked news headlines. Three groups saw the words "true" or "false" written before, during, or after the headlines, while a control group saw no tags. They then rated the accuracy of each headline. A week later everyone returned and again rated headline accuracy, only this time no one received "true" or "false" prompts.

As with everything in life, the researchers discovered that timing matters. And it really matters, given that 44 percent of Americans visited "untrustworthy websites" leading up to the 2016 presidential election—certainly enough of an impact to sway an electorate.

When volunteers were shown the label immediately before the headline, inaccuracies were reduced by 5.7 percent; while reading the headline, 8.6 percent; and after the headline, 25.3 percent. Rand notes his shock at discovering this sequence.

"Going into the project, I had anticipated it would work best to give the correction beforehand, so that people already knew to disbelieve the false claim when they came into contact with it. To my surprise, we actually found the opposite. Debunking the claim after they were exposed to it was the most effective."

While there's no silver bullet for battling misinformation, the researchers speculate that allowing people to form an opinion and then providing feedback might help the information "stick." Prebunking headlines might seem like the best strategy, though it actually has an opposite effect: readers gloss over the headline knowing it to be false. When later asked to judge, they didn't properly categorize the news as they weren't actually paying attention.

By contrast, showing the tags directly after reading the headline seems to "boost long-term retention" of truthfulness. One interesting phenomenon: the sense of surprise after a low-confidence guess turns out true reinforces the stickiness of the information. Learning the truth after an initial judgment seems to be the best course of action.

How this could be implemented in the age of infinite scrolling remains to be seen. But it does run counter to current practices by Facebook and Twitter, which mark false stories with a warning before you're allowed to view them. While this seems to be the right way to go, recall human nature: we love forbidden fruit. Tell us "this is wrong" and watch the results.

In fact, you don't need to—the MIT researchers did it for us. We know we need new models of news gathering and consumption. This study could provide at least one mechanism for achieving such a model.

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This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

In her 2017 book, "What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear," NYU associate professor of medicine Danielle Offri offers startling data on communication problems between doctors and patients. For example, the total amount of time that patients get to discuss their problems? Ninety-two seconds. Patients often get interrupted within seconds of speaking, which results in non-compliance rates of up to 75 percent. Doctors shake their head in disbelief that their patients don't follow directions, yet patients rarely feel heard—an essential component of healing, as Offri writes.

One positive trend over recent years—especially since the pandemic began—is the increasing number of medical professionals using social media as an educational tool. Some take time to regularly reply to questions; others offer videos, livestreams, and studies. While nothing beats in-person conversations, watching fruitful interactions with doctors and researchers during a time when so much negativity has been pushed forward on social networks has proven valuable.

The list below is not entirely comprised of health professionals, though every person listed uses their platform as a force for good, be it by calling out abuses of power or offering science-backed tips on remaining healthy during lockdowns. The Internet isn't always the right place to source information, yet that also depends on who's providing it. These eight individuals are doing their best to make social media a place for growth, both for individuals and as a society. While platforms can often feel like a one-way bullhorn, they invite you to join a bigger conversation.

Imran Ahmed

When the Washington Post recently revealed that over $850,000 in PPP loans were doled out to anti-vax groups by the Trump Administration, the paper had the U.K.'s Center for Countering Digital Hate to thank. The organization's founder, Imran Ahmed, was appointed to the Steering Committee of the U.K. Government's Commission on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force in 2020. Early last summer, Ahmed released a report that found social media platforms earned nearly $1 billion from anti-vax groups in a year's time—and he thinks they were lowballing that sum, as he told Big Think. In an era of disinformation gone wild, Ahmed believes the most powerful tool we currently have at our disposal is deplatforming. His organization is working hard at exposing players worthy of such attention.

Danielle Belardo

There's a wave of doctors using social media to both educate the public and demystify the scientific process. Cardiologist Danielle Belardo is one of the best, using her popular Instagram feed to present science-based evidence for nutrition, vaccines, and more. The director of cardiology and co-director of research and education at IOPBM in Newport Beach, Belardo's social media presence focuses both on combating pseudoscience as well as providing excellent nutrition advice, recipes, and tips for good heart health—and, on occasion, epic California sunsets.

Aaron Horschig

Dr. Aaron Horschig's runs one of Instagram's best fitness handles, Squat University. A former Olympic athlete and coach, Horschig discusses technique, form, and recovery in the wide world of weightlifting, from novice to elite levels. Though you might catch a strongman squatting 600+ pounds on his feed, one of the most refreshing aspects of Horschig's messages is the simplicity of his advice: work on form, not personal records; don't fall for marketing hype, but stick to the basics: hydration, sleep, and good nutrition; and you're never too young or old to lift weights. His new book, "Rebuilding Milo," further cements his role as one of the nation's top physical therapists and performance coaches. Bonus: his excellent blog offers deeper insights and science-backed research, such as why the popular RICE protocol should be abandoned.

Anna Merlan

Heather Cox Richardson

Boston College's history professor Heather Cox Richardson's daily Substack posts are one of the best additions to your inbox imaginable. The author of a number of books, most recently "How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America," Richardson gives you a rundown of the top stories in the news alongside insights into the historical processes that created the conditions for our current predicament. If you want to grapple with our present moment in a holistic fashion, subscribe to "Letters from an American." You won't be disappointed.

Kevin Roose

One of the most enlightening Twitter feeds of 2020 was Facebook's Top 10, which tracks the 10 highest-performing links on the social network. Spearhead by NY Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, the feed makes you reconsider the term "mainstream media." If information is judged by eyeballs—and many eyeballs continue to source news on Facebook—then Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and various Trump groups are the most mainstream outlets around, as they regularly outperform the NY Times, NPR, CNN, and MSNBC. Roose's work covering QAnon and disinformation has also been invaluable, offering a framework for understanding the dangers of cult indoctrination.

Conspirituality 17: Interview with Jared Yates Sexton

Jared Yates Sexton

Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" offered an honest look at America's shameful historical record. It took 40 years for another book to penetrate a nation's conscience. When political analyst and associate professor Jared Yates Sexton published "American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People," we finally had another opportunity to reflect—and, hopefully, progress. Sexton wants to dismantle the romanticized myth of American exceptionalism and replace it with something more valuable, as he told Big Think last year: "Once we disabuse ourselves of the myth of American exceptionalism, and we start looking at American history and say it's really problematic and inspirational at other times, it allows us to build something new."

Dan Wilson

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

All animals adapt to their environment. Even humans, self-isolating animals that we are, are shaped by our surroundings. Every one of us is interdependent with the environment that we inhabit—it shapes us as much as we shape it.

While the Buddhist notion of interdependence dates back roughly 2,500 years, we didn't understand how profoundly the environment affects biology until Charles Darwin. Now one of his theories, long known as the "wind hypothesis," has been shown to be true. It only took 165 years to verify his observations.

To be fair, the wind isn't the only reason increasing numbers of insects no longer grow wings. But as a new study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows, the wind is a major factor in this evolutionary decision.

Not that the world is about to be overrun with unwinged critters. Roughly 95 percent of the world's insect population can fly. After boating around coastal Morocco, Darwin noticed something odd on the island of Madeira: many local beetles (his personal passion) were wingless. He suggested flying beetles would have been blown off the island given the strong winds. He then speculated that apterous (un-winged) beetles were better suited for the environment.

The theory commenced with a bit of a bet between Darwin and his friend, geographical botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, as explained by lead researcher, Rachel Leihy, a Ph.D. candidate at Monash University's School of Biological Sciences:

"He and the famous botanist Joseph Hooker had a substantial argument about why this happens. Darwin's position was deceptively simple. If you fly, you get blown out to sea. Those left on land to produce the next generation are those most reluctant to fly, and eventually evolution does the rest. Voilà."

Monash researchers looked at three decades of data on various insect species living in Antarctica and 28 Southern Ocean islands—including Svalbard, Jan Mayen, Ellef Ringnes, Bathurst, and St. Matthew—and discovered a trend: wind (as well as low air pressure and freezing temperatures) made flight nearly impossible to resident insects. They simply didn't have the energetic resources needed to take to the sky. Better to crawl around and scavenge.

Darwin wasn't completely right. He thought the evolutionary adaptations were due purely to wind throwing insects off the island. But nutrition matters too. Flight consumes a ton of energy. The windier it is, the harder insects have to work. Battling a gale requires an inordinate amount of calories. As the team writes,

"Strong winds can also inhibit normal insect flight activity, thereby increasing the energetic costs of flying or maintaining flight structures. This energy trade-off is more complex than Darwin's single-step displacement mechanism because it requires genetic linkage between traits associated with flight ability, flight propensity, and fecundity or survival."

Still, you have to hand it to the man. During a time when most humans assumed animals were all the result of metaphysical tinkering, Darwin gazed out into nature and connected the dots. His mind has inspired over a century-and-a-half of scientific progress as we continue to build on—and, as this study shows, prove—his theories.

Darwin knew that every animal is the product of its environment, and therefore must respect both its boons and its boundaries. Talk about a lesson we need today. Environments are known to become very hostile to foreign invaders when pushed too hard. Right now, we're courting disaster. Hopefully, we won't wait for evolution to ground our ambitions.

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

You probably know the feeling: a rush of heat that assaults your entire body; your fingertips and forehead suffering fiery consequences of conflict; restrictions around your chest and throat; quickened breath, as if your lungs can no longer draw in the required oxygen; ears on alert, biding time for a break in your opponent's rhetoric to let loose the torrent of thoughts crowding your brain.

Of course, not everyone is an opponent. You likely know the opposite as well: the cool excitement of agreeableness, when the words in your head are returned to you from another being as in a mirror; unconscious head shaking as your sense of righteousness is validated; the warm exuberance of easy dialogue with a fellow tribe member.

In a digital age in which physical contact seems foreign and long past, we might have forgotten what it's like to agree—or debate—with someone in person. Pandemics are temporary, while societies are—well, nothing is forever, but we've outlived diseases before. According to new research from Yale University, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, disagreeing with someone takes up a lot of brain real estate, while finding a compatriot is a much less cognitively taxing endeavor.

For this study, researchers gathered 38 adults to ask their feelings on contentious topics like same-sex marriage and cannabis legalization. They then matched each volunteer with people who either agreed or disagreed. Every subject had their brain scanned with functional near-infrared spectroscopy during these face-to-face discussions, during which time they were given a total of 90 seconds to discuss a topic in 15-second increments.

There are two kinds of identity politics. One is good. The other, very bad. | Jonathan Haidt

Unsurprisingly, harmonious synchronization of brain states occurred when volunteers agreed, similar to group flow—the coordination of brain waves that hip-hop and jazz musicians (among others) experience when performing together. Coordination exceeds the social, into the neurological. As the team writes, "talking during agreement was characterized by increased activity in a social and attention network including right supramarginal gyrus, bilateral frontal eye-fields, and left frontopolar regions."

This contrasts with argumentative behavior, in which "the frontoparietal system including bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left supramarginal gyrus, angular gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus showed increased activity while talking during disagreement."

Senior author Joy Hirsch notes that our brain is essentially a social processing network. The evolutionary success of humans is thanks to our ability to coordinate. Dissonance is exhausting. Overall, she says, "it just takes a lot more brain real estate to disagree than to agree," comparing arguments to a symphony orchestra playing different music.

As the team notes, language, visual, and social systems are all dynamically intertwined inside of our brain. For most of history, yelling at one another in comment sections was impossible. Arguments had to occur the old-fashioned way: while staring at the source of your discontent.

Leading us to an interesting question: do the same brain regions fire when you're screaming with your fingers on your Facebook feed? Given the lack of visual feedback from the person on the other side of the argument, likely not—as it is unlikely that many people would argue in the same manner when face-to-face with a person on the other side of a debate. We are generally more civil in real life than on a screen.

The researchers point out that seeing faces causes complex neurological reactions that must be interpreted in real-time. For example, gazing into someone's eyes requires higher-order processing that must be dealt with during the moment. Your brain coordinates to make sense of the words being spoken and pantomimes being witnessed. This combination of verbal and visual processes are "generally associated with high-level cognitive and linguistic functions."

While arguing is more exhausting, it also sharpens your senses—when a person is present, at least. Debating is a healthy function of society. Arguments force you to consider other viewpoints and potentially come to different conclusions. As with physical exercise, which makes you stronger even though it's energetically taxing, disagreement propels societies forward.

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

If ever there were a reason to wear masks, the insurrection at the Capitol last week would have been it. But many of those present believed the anti-mask rhetoric being used as a distraction from the nation's skyrocketing death rate. In fact, the day might even prove to have been a superspreader event, with at least two congresspeople becoming infected after the siege.

Those involved in the attempted coup d'état were not concerned about a virus. Nor, apparently, were they worried about shielding themselves from the tens of thousands of hours of recorded video taken by thousands of phones. In a strange merging of social media and dark web chat rooms come to life, separating actual insurrectionists from revolutionary tourists could prove to be a cumbersome vocation. One thing is certain: identifying them is not difficult.

Instagram-worthy sieges bring us to a longstanding existential question: should law enforcement be allowed to use AI and cell phone data to prosecute offenders?

Of the many security failures that day, one stood out: the small number of arrests for a breach of outsized magnitude. As the nation ogled at an unemployed actor turned conspiracy shaman behind the speaker's chair in real-time, scenes of horrendous violence took hours, even days, to be released. In a game of seemingly futile catch-up, federal agencies opened tip lines to identify the insurrectionists that should have easily been in their grasp.

But the public responded.

Brad Templeton: Today's Surveillance Society is Beyond Orwellian

There's the ex-wife of a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel whose neck gaiter was pulled down; the patriotic cohort of Internet detectives crowd-sourcing information for the FBI; the director of the infamous pseudoscience film, "Plandemic," praising the "patriots" that breached the building moments after he left the siege himself; and that unemployed actor who regularly attended QAnon events leaving the most public trail imaginable, and who is currently in custody facing serious charges.

Fish in barrels, all of them. What of the remaining thousands?

This privacy discussion is not new. Arthur Holland Michel, founder and co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, warned Big Think in 2019 about the dangers of surveillance technology—specifically, in this case, a camera known as Gorgon Stare.

"Say there is a big public protest. With this camera, you can follow thousands of protesters back to their homes. Now you have a list of the home addresses of all the people involved in a political movement. If on their way home you witness them committing some crime—breaking a traffic regulation or frequenting a location that is known to be involved in the drug trade—you can use that surveillance data against them to essentially shut them up. That's why we have laws that prevent the use of surveillance technologies because it is human instinct to abuse them. That's why we need controls."

Late last year, University of Miami students pushed back against school administrators using facial recognition software for potentially insidious means—a protest not limited to that campus. Can you place students refusing to attend classes during a pandemic with armed insurrectionists attempting to change the results of a democratic election? Not even close. More to the point, however, we should leave political leanings out of the equation when deciding who we think should be monitored.

Shortly after the siege, the New Yorker's Ronan Farrow helped reveal the identity of the aforementioned lieutenant colonel while conservatives claim the riots were actually antifa—a conspiracy theory that's been peddled before. Politics simply can't be avoided in this age. Still, Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, doesn't believe the insurrection attempt justifies an uptick in facial recognition technology.

"We don't need a cutting-edge surveillance dragnet to find the perpetrators of this attack: They tracked themselves. They livestreamed their felonies from the halls of Congress, recording each crime in full HD. We don't need facial recognition, geofences, and cell tower data to find those responsible, we need police officers willing to do their job."

The New Orleans City Council recently banned similar surveillance technologies due to fears that it would unfairly target minorities. San Francisco was the first city to outright ban facial recognition nearly two years ago. Cahn's point is that the FBI shouldn't be using AI to cover for the government's failure to protect the Capitol. Besides, the insurrectionists outed themselves on their own social media feeds.

When Pandora's box cracks open, it's hard to push the monster back in. Naomi Klein detailed the corporate takeover of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in "The Shock Doctrine." Real estate brokers, charter school companies, and government agencies didn't cause the flood, but they certainly profited from it. The fear is that companies like Clearview AI, which saw a 26 percent spike in usage of its facial recognition service following the attack, will be incentivized, as will police departments to use such technology for any means they choose.

Cahn comes to a similar conclusion: don't expose American citizens to the "anti-democratic technology" known as facial recognition. New Yorkers had to endure subway backpack checks for nearly a decade after 9/11; this slope is even slipperier.

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

Magician and renowned skeptic James Randi passed away in October. In 1996, he famously offered $1,000 to anyone that could prove they had paranormal abilities. Over time, the prize money grew to $1,000,000. Even with that kind of money on the table, no entrant ever made it past the preliminary tests. A public list of the thousands of contestants lives on his foundation's site.

Numerous paranormal powers were claimed by entrants: dowsing circles, energy healing, spirit reading, and communion with the dead. The latter has been stated as fact as long as we have written records; ouija boards are still popular among certain sects. As with Randi's challenge, scientific studies have investigated whether mediums can truly communicate with the dead.

A recent study by researchers in Petumula and La Jolla assessed whether mediums could tell what had caused a person's death. The short of it: a control group of non-psychics performed better than self-professed mediums.

William James believed mediumship worthy of scientific investigation. Botanist JB Rhine devoted his career to parapsychology, the branch of psychology he founded. While he claimed extrasensory powers to be scientifically valid, his results were never replicated and his methods were questionable. Numerous psychics, clairvoyants, and channelers continue to claim to hold paranormal powers today.

The research team behind this study, led by brain researcher Arnaud Delorme, has previously analyzed brain activity, skin conductance, respiration, heart rate, and peripheral blood flow of self-professed mediums. During one 2013 study, four mediums produced results above chance. Seeking a neural correlate to psychic powers, they write,

"One medium showed a decrease in EEG frontal midline theta waves during accurate responses, suggesting a possible decrease in executive functions associated with successful responses. A limitation of that experiment was its low statistical power due to the relatively small number of participants and number of trials."

How to Squash a Paranormal Claim | Big Think

A follow-up study was conducted in 2018. The researchers wanted to know if mediums could identify whether a person was alive or dead based on photographs. After looking over 404 photographs, five of a dozen mediums performed better than chance. As there was no control group, however, the team had to keep testing.

For this study, a dozen professional mediums and a dozen volunteers were recruited. Every photograph was of a deceased individual. This time the task was to identify whether the person died of a heart attack, a car accident, or from being shot. Each image was cropped in such a manner so that you couldn't easily recognize the cause of death. While giving answers, every volunteer was scanned for changes in neural blood flow and heart rate. The results surprised the team:

"Overall, participants were able to detect the cause of death of deceased individuals at statistically robust above-chance levels. Contrary to our expectations that mediums would perform better than controls, the controls performed significantly better than the mediums."

While there were different neural responses between controls and self-professed mediums, they didn't correlate to correct answers. Even from beyond the grave, James Randi is still waiting—though it appears no one will be able to verify his impatience.

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

As two COVID-19 vaccines roll out in America, Pew Research reported a rare glimmer of hope in the ongoing saga of vaccine disinformation: the number of citizens willing to get a vaccine increased to 60 percent. The trend is moving in the right direction, course-correcting anti-vaccination rhetoric that led to the first increase in measles cases (and the highest number of measles deaths) in the modern era.

While we have fabricated research by disbarred doctor Andrew Wakefield to thank for this trend, anti-vaccination efforts are tethered to the first vaccinations. As with seemingly every topic, vaccines are a wedge issue, with a fervent cohort of anti-vaxxers going so far as to be "single-issue voters."

Jonathan Berman, an assistant professor in the Department of Basic Sciences at NYITCOM-Arkansas, grew tired of seeing all of the "dunking on anti-vaxxers." As with many science advocates, he grew skeptical of the anti-vaxx movement while studying for his degree in the aughts. Though he agreed with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, he recognized them as bullies. Berman wanted to grapple with the underlying reasons for opposing vaccination rather than just write them off.

Those reasons, which comprise a chapter of his recent book, "Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement" (MIT Press), include issues of social class, race, individual liberties, individual and collective rights, distrust of authority, and changing ideas about health and medicine. Instead of exhibiting knee-jerk reactions, he wants to offer compassion and empathy while expressing critical thinking when analyzing the science of vaccines. As Berman recently explained of anti-vaxxers,

"They're making a risk evaluation just like we're making a risk evaluation. They're doing it in a less reasonable and healthy way and arriving at the wrong decision. That doesn't mean that we have to call them stupid or act like they're foolish. It means we can have a conversation with them. Hopefully, that's a more productive way to go about it."

Conspirituality 31 interview: Jonathan Berman

As he wrote the book before the pandemic hit, Berman is a bit dismayed (though not surprised) by the growth of the anti-vaccine movement. He noticed a convergence point this year: anti-mask and anti-lockdown proponents (as well as QAnon devotees) learned a set of tactics from the longstanding anti-vax movement, while anti-vaxxers took the energy of "personal liberty" and "bodily sovereignty" being expressed by those groups.

There have been a number of anti-vax leaders whose star has risen this year: Mikki Willis has surged since the release of his Plandemic film; Del Bigtree, whose show "The Highwire" is in large part funded by hedge fund managers, is growing more influential; and gynecologist Christiane Northrup, who has used her social media platforms to promote QAnon-related and anti-vax sentiments, is also seeing a rise in followers. As Berman writes, celebrities are not the best sources of information, and their intentions might not be as benevolent as they seem.

"There's a degree of grift in what they're doing. They're collecting donations from their audience of anti-vaccine people they've built up."

Science sometimes suffers from lack of celebrity. Paul A. Offit will never be Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye. While a select few science educators break through, vaccination advocates are unlikely to achieve that level of star power. Berman, one of the founders of the "March for Science" movement—a rare mainstream moment of science advocacy in the Trump era—knows the difficulty of spreading the gospel of sound scientific methods.

Navigating the tricky terrain of vaccines is difficult. Thankfully, Berman's excellent book offers hope. Twenty-two concise chapters pack a lot of punch: the history of both vaccines and the anti-vax movement; dangerous ploys by grifters; the science of vaccines; and a chapter on vaccine ingredients, like adjuvants.

While Berman is pro-vaccine, he believes Pfizer and Moderna deserve scrutiny. Commentary from outside organizations and researchers should be offered. That said, while pharmaceutical companies certainly have a track record of corporate greed, vaccines only account for 2 percent of profits—hardly cash cows like painkillers and antidepressants.

Berman laughs off the occasional criticism that he's a paid shill. "I'm still on the negative on the book—just because of caffeine purchases while I was writing it."

Disinformation abounds in the modern era. Posts about the dangers of thimerasol and aluminum persist even though neither are in the Pfizer vaccine. Berman advocates for pushing back against misinformation with better data.

"The coronavirus vaccine—these are very simple formulations. There's salt, RNA, and a lipid to help the RNA cross cell membranes. If someone says there's aluminum in that, you can say, 'not in this one.' And if someone says there's mercury in that, you can say, 'not in this one.'"

He knows the challenges that lie ahead. Still, as Pew shows, more Americans understand the role that vaccines play in reaching a post-pandemic world. Berman concludes our talk on what you might say is a hopeful note.

"We're not going to get everyone on board. We just need to get enough people on board."

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

Humans love puzzles. Thanks to an evolutionary skillset that lets us piece together fragments of information necessary for survival, we've turned biological instinct into a love for games. Sometimes our affection manifests in Candy Crush; other times, in solving uncrackable ciphers.

Numerous unbreakable codes persist. The CIA awaits the brave thinker that will crack the fourth code in its Kryptos monument. The Beale ciphers may or may not reveal $60 million in hidden treasure. Composer Edward Elgar continues to laugh from beyond the grave.

Few codes stand the test of time, however. It took nearly 600 years for researchers to realize the Voynich manuscript was effectively a rip-off copy of Women's Health. The MIT time-lock puzzle was only 20 years old, yet it still took a nifty programmer three years to crack it. And then there's the Zodiac Killer.

How I cracked the Zodiac Killer's cipher

Zodiac Killer

After the Zodiac Killer's first cryptogram was quickly solved in 1969, he followed up with a 340-character puzzle that has baffled cryptographers ever since. Three men worked tirelessly on the letter and finally revealed the encoded message:

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASN'T ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH

While the San Francisco branch of the FBI has acknowledged the puzzle has been solved, they're not providing any more comments considering the case remains open.

Poe's Challenge

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug" was based on a cipher mystery, as Poe himself was fascinated with puzzles. In 1840, he offered a free subscription to Graham's Magazine to anyone who could stump him. He claims to have solved a hundred entries, ending the contest by publishing a challenging code written by W.B. Tyler—who many at the time suspected was a pseudonym.

It wasn't until 2000 that a software engineer decoded the message, which opened up, "It was early spring, warm and sultry glowed the afternoon. The very breezes seemed to share the delicious languor of universal nature..."

Given the numerous typesetting mistakes, recent researchers aren't convinced that Poe actually wrote it. The author will likely remain a mystery, but the code itself is in the books.

Copiale cipher

An entire team spanning two countries was needed to crack the 260-year-old mystery of the Copiale cipher. Unlike a few lines of prose, this 75,000-character manuscript filled 105 pages written by a group of ophthalmologists. The book was encrypted in German and relied on a complex substitution code that used symbols and letters for spaces as well as text.

Dating from the second half of the eighteenth century, the first 16 pages discuss a masonic initiation ceremony by the Oculists. The strange ritual involves initiates "reading" a blank piece of paper before being given a pair of glasses—those wily eye doctors. After their eyes are washed, the referees then pluck a single eyebrow of each recruit.

Better than college hazing, though still an odd text to keep so secretive. Then again, maybe that was the point.

The Zimmerman Telegram

Not all codes are so playful, or strange. Some are insidious. Such is the case with the Zimmerman Telegram, a note sent from Germany to Mexico in 1917. Intended for the German ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, the Germans were preparing America's southern neighbors for battle—in the name of Germany. In exchange for weapons and funding, the Mexicans would reclaim Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas upon victory.

The cipher was cracked about a month after interception by Britain's "Room 40." The text read, in part,

"We make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you."

Tensions between the US and Germany were already high; this message pushed America over the edge. A month later, President Wilson overruled his intention of remaining neutral and entered World War I on the side of the Allies.

The Enigma Code

One of the most famous cracks in history is certainly the Engima Code. If the Zimmerman Telegram helped us get into World War I, the second chapter only ended in our favor thanks to Alan Turing's unforgettable machine.

The Germans were utilizing an enciphering machine to pass messages to its Axis partners. Perhaps learning from past mistakes, they changed the entire cipher system on a daily basis.

Turing responded with his own machinery: the Bombe, Lorenz, and Universal Turing Machine. Thanks to his inventions, alongside tireless efforts by British cryptologists, the Allied forces exploited procedural flaws and operator mistakes by the Germans. The Enigma Code was cracked, saving countless Allied lives and helping turn the tide of the war.

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This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

The world is not in want of diet advice. Paleo living, vegan lifestyles, eating for your blood type, seasonal and regional eating, low sugar, Mediterannean ingredients, low fat, high fat—numerous bestsellers thrive in every category imaginable. The perpetual challenge is sourcing credible information amidst endless literature of hype.

Humans also gravitate towards diets that confirm our biases, making sound nutrition advice even more challenging. Coffee is good for us? Wonderful! Unless you gave up coffee for some strange reason; then you question the study's premise. Eat all the cheese and drink all the wine you want? I knew it! Well, maybe not "all," but according to research from Iowa State University, a bit of funk and fermentation might be the key to slowing cognitive decline.

Move over, Greece. The French were right all along.

For this study, published in Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, food science and human nutrition assistant professor, Auriel Willette, and neuroscience Ph.D. candidate, Brandon Klinedinst, analyzed data from 1,787 adults through the UK Biobank. This UK-based organization contains in-depth genetic and health information from a half-million British residents. Willette and Klinedinst focused on adults aged 46 to 77.

The team found that diet earlier in life affects your risk of cognitive decline later on. While added salt might put you at greater risk for diseases of dementia, the following finding is certain to make some of us cheer.

"Observations further suggest in risk status-dependent manners that adding cheese and red wine to the diet daily, and lamb on a weekly basis, may also improve long-term cognitive outcomes."

Between 2006-10, participants in the UK Biobank research filled out a Fluid Intelligence Test, followed by recurring assessments in 2012-13 and 2015-16. These analyses helped researchers understand each volunteer's ability to "think on the fly." They also filled out information regarding food and alcohol consumption.

As Willette and Klinedinst write, dietary modifications such as the Mediterranean-Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension Intervention for Neurodegenerative 70 Delay (MIND) diet are proving to help slow cognitive decline. Such lifestyle changes later in life are important. The researchers wanted to know if youthful diets influence your risk of diseases like Alzheimer's before modifications are made.

They found that cheese was particularly helpful in protecting against age-related cognitive problems; daily consumption of alcohol, especially red wine, improves cognitive function; eating lamb (but not other red meat) on a weekly basis appears to be helpful; excess salt promotes cognitive decline over time.

While they were unable to pinpoint exact reasons for this protective effect, they cite calcium, vitamin B12, gut-friendly bacteria, and lactopeptides in cheese as potential candidates. A moderate serving of red wine has long been touted as healthy; interestingly, volunteers with a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's appear to benefit most. They also note other research finding that regular beer intake increases the risk of dementia. Not all alcohol is created equally.

Willette notes that cheese and wine are not only protective against cognitive decline but are also stress relievers in a world living through a pandemic. That said, he knows this is an observational study—randomized clinical trials are needed to provide substantial proof. As with any diet, genetic factors play a role. You should know personal risk factors before making drastic changes to your diet.

As Klinedinst concludes,

"Depending on the genetic factors you carry, some individuals seem to be more protected from the effects of Alzheimers, while other seem to be at greater risk. That said, I believe the right food choices can prevent the disease and cognitive decline altogether. Perhaps the silver bullet we're looking for is upgrading how we eat. Knowing what that entails contributes to a better understanding of Alzheimer's and putting this disease in a reverse trajectory."

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

Out-of-body experiences recur throughout spiritual literature. Thought to signify a spiritual "essence" co-existing alongside biology, OBEs began to be viewed in a different light when they were replicated in a laboratory in 2007. University College London researchers induced OBEs in volunteers through the use of head-mounted video displays. Other means for inducing OBEs include electrical and magnetic stimulation of the brain.

If a well-placed magnet causes you to "leave" your body, what else is possible with a little transcranial stimulation?

This question is of growing concern as wearable scanners become increasingly common. Last week, Columbia University neuroscience professor Rafael Yuste advocated for the United Nations to adopt "neuro-rights" into its Universal Declaration of Human Rights thanks to a burgeoning industry promising to alter—some would say manipulate—consciousness.

As Yuste phrased it during an online conference,

"If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people. This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully."

Neurotechnology is a growing field that includes a range of technologies that influence higher brain activities. Therapeutics designed to repair and improve brain function are included in this discipline—interventions for sleep problems, overstimulation, motor coordination, epilepsy, even depression.

So are more insidious intentions, however. You can imagine such devices in the hands of a cult leader, for example. Or perhaps a political leader steeling up their base. If the human imagination can create an idea, it can be transformed into reality, and not all humans are benevolent.

Rafael Yuste - a neuroscientist exploring the ethics of neural identity

The ethical question is not new. For example, the debate over embryonic stem cells raged for years. Promises of trait enhancement concerned people who thought scientists would play the role of a god. While that debate has mostly died down, the use of neurotechnology by militaries and tech companies—particularly concerning privacy—will be contentious for decades.

Cognitive liberty is a term assigned to those who believe every individual must be allowed to maintain their own agency. An extension of the concept of freedom of thought, cognitive liberty is defined as "the right of each individual to think independently and autonomously, to use the full power of his or her mind, and to engage in multiple modes of thought," as written by neuroethicist Dr. Wrye Sententia and legal theorist Richard Glen Boire.

The challenges to cognitive liberty include privacy, which they argue must encompass the domain of inner thought; autonomy, so that thought processes remain the province of the individual; and choice, provided that the individual is not harming others.

Yuste believes the U.N.'s declaration, which was created in the wake of World War II in 1948, needs immediate revision. Deep brain stimulation is already an FDA-approved procedure. Whereas social media creates its own addiction and mental health problems, a sense of agency still exists. When tech has the capability to get "under the skull and get at our neurons," as Johns Hopkins professor of neurology and neuroscience, John Krakauer, says, a sense of urgency exists.

For Yuste it's completely a matter of agency—and liberty.

"This is the first time in history that humans can have access to the contents of people's minds. We have to think very carefully about how we are going to bring this into society."

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a vortex of trash located between America's West Coast and Japan. In fact, it's not only one patch—there's a western patch closer to Japan and an eastern patch bobbing around southern California. While the surface debris is bad enough, it turns out that 70 percent of the garbage sinks to the ocean's bottom.

Waterways are not the only places we dump trash. While environmentalists finally forced change on Staten Island's Fresh Kills Landfill, the world's largest garbage dump was the subject of notoriety for being visible from space. Speaking of space, humans have also left plenty of trash floating in the ether. As of 2019, an estimated 129 million pieces of space debris orbit our atmosphere.

While most of the debris is tiny, roughly 34,000 objects measure over 10 centimeters in length. This includes dead spacecraft like the U.S. ship Vanguard I which first launched in 1958, and a camera lost by American astronaut Ed White on the first-ever space-walk. While most debris will incinerate upon entering Earth's atmosphere, many problems exist due to all that trash, such as interfering with newer missions.

"Out of sight, out of mind" is not an appropriate mantra if we want to continue space exploration. Last week, the European Space Agency (ESA) took the proactive step of finalizing a contract to begin space clean-up. Beginning in 2025, the ClearSpace-1 mission will remove a washing machine-sized piece of junk—a payload adapter—with a four-armed claw spacecraft. After plucking it from space, the claw will force it downward until incinerated.

Over 23,000 objects have been discarded in 5,500 launches over the last 60 years. Space junk can float around for thousands of years. This is not a benign occurrence. In 2009, a communications satellite collided with a dead Russian military satellite, resulting in thousands of pieces of new debris.

Cleaning up small junk is quite difficult—there's nothing akin to a pool skimmer in space yet—so ClearSpace, the company behind this project, will begin by grabbing a 112-kilogram payload adapter that was originally launched in 2013. The team is using a claw due to its mechanical flexibility; they tried a net as well, but given that you have to get it right on the first attempt, they wanted a bit of breathing room.

ClearSpace-1: Earth’s First Space Debris Removal Mission

The ESA signed a $105 million contract with ClearSpace for this project. ClearSpace CEO Luc Piguet says there's a lot of work in outer space:

"The way space has been used until now has led to a situation where over 5,000 satellites and out-of-control rocket stages are in orbit compared to only 2,700 working satellites. In-orbit services are not only a natural part of future space operations, they will also ensure the development of a thriving space economy."

ClearSpace isn't the only company leaving Earth's atmosphere. In October, the Japanese company, Astroscale, announced that it raised $191 million to clean up space debris. This is part of a broader movement by the U.K. Space Agency, which has awarded seven companies with £1m to clean up space. Graham Turnock, chief executive of the agency, says space will become an economic powerhouse in the coming years.

"People probably do not realise just how cluttered space is. You would never let a car drive down a motorway full of broken glass and wreckages, and yet this is what satellites and the space station have to navigate every day in their orbital lanes… This funding will help us grasp this opportunity and in doing so create sought after expertise and new high skill jobs across the country."

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

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The image of a mouse running aimlessly in a wheel is a common motif in scientific studies. Put the same wheel in nature and a feral mouse will still hop in and spin it around, just as any cardio junkie will jump on a treadmill.

Humans have invented a number of triggers to help them get to the gym to jump on that treadmill (or run in nature). Put your running shoes next to your bed so you see them upon waking up. Glue a toned athlete on your vision board. Set a mileage goal in Strava and remember you're being tracked by peers.

Mice have triggers for exercise, too, and this one might teach us a bit about our own fitness inspiration: scent.

How do we smell? - Rose Eveleth

Many animals utilize olfaction to navigate their terrain. Comparatively, humans have a pretty weak sense of smell. For this study, the researchers looked at the vomeronasal organ (VNO), a feature of a number of amphibians and mammals, and its influence on volunteer wheel running (VMR) in mice.

"Although the role of the vomeronasal chemosensory receptors in VWR activity remains to be determined, the current results suggest that these vomeronasal chemosensory receptors are important quantitative trait loci for voluntary exercise in mice. We propose that olfaction may play an important role in motivation for voluntary exercise in mammals."

The team chose fanatical runners that are more intrinsically motivated to get on the wheel than their peers. (The lab that produced this study even has a High Runner Mice website.) Apparently, these mice have strong vomeronasal sensory receptor neurons, which pick up the scent of pheromones (among others) as a form of motivation.

A link between these neurons and sexual behavior already exists; this study appears to expand the olfactory sense to another physical activity. The chemosensory signals received by VNO activation sets off a chain reaction in their nervous system. Just like humans can't help but dance to a good beat, mice crave the rush of running when the right scent hits them.

Could this apply to humans as well?

Christopher Bergland thinks so. The elite athlete knows all about treadmills. He holds the world record for the longest treadmill run over a 24-hour period. In a recent column, he claims that scents have been motivating him to exercise for decades.

"Even as a middle-aged person with a middle-of-the-road libido, smells from my adolescence—such as classic Coppertone sunscreen mixed with a spritz of vintage Polo Green cologne—still give me a "Vroom!" feeling that gets my juices going. The same smells that I used to run five back-to-back marathons through Death Valley in near 130º heat and to break a Guinness World Record by running 153.76 miles on a treadmill decades ago, still motivate me to go for daily jogs at a 'conversational pace.'"

He still uses smells to inspire his workout regimen. In his 2007 book, "The Athlete's Way," Bergland discusses aromatherapy as a performance enhancement and motivational tool. This makes sense: we might have devolved in our olfactory senses a bit, but smells still heavily influence our world. Flavor, for example, is just as much about smell as taste.

"Acquiring information related to scent through the back of the mouth is called retronasal olfaction—via the nostrils it is called orthonasal olfaction. Both methods influence flavor; aromas such as vanilla, for example, can cause something perceived as sweet to taste sweeter. Once an odor is experienced along with a flavor, the two become associated; thus, smell influences taste and taste influences smell."

We're certainly motivated to eat thanks to the scent of our favorite foods. The idea that smell would get us out of bed and onto a bike is not far-fetched, whether we realize it or not.

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

One of the bright spots of 2020 has been the collaborative effort of scientists in their search for a COVID-19 vaccine. Never before have researchers and institutions focused their efforts on a single disease to this degree. Of course, trials are often sponsored by competing companies, increasing the rush for an effective vaccine—a fact coming to the surface in the recent AstraZeneca trials.

After potential successes by Moderna and Pfizer, AstraZeneca announced it reached an average efficacy of 70 percent during its partnership with the University of Oxford. Though not quite the 95 percent efficacy reported by the aforementioned companies, the AstraZeneca vaccine had a few factors in its favor: one dosing scheme achieved 90 percent efficacy; the low cost: $3 per dose compared to $20; this vaccine only needs to be refrigerated, not frozen (causing issues with distribution and storage) as required by other candidates.

Then AstraZeneca admitted a mistake: the dosage data were off. While results ranged from 62 to 90 percent efficacy (averaging out at 70), a manufacturing error meant the pharmaceutical giant only filled half the intended dose for one of the trials. Instead of abandoning the study, researchers redefined the parameters: a number of volunteers received a half-dose during the first round, followed by a full dose a month later. Interestingly, that dosage protocol performed best, leaving researchers flummoxed.

The trials were plagued with issues, including the fact that no one over age 55 was tested. As seniors are the most vulnerable population, this seems to be a grave oversight. We shouldn't be surprised that a half-dose proved efficacious, however. Paracelsus preached the relevance of dosage some 500 years ago. Medical advancements often result thanks to the unexpected.

AstraZeneca Vaccine Trial Likely Needs a Restart: Johns Hopkins

Science has always been and will continue to be complicated. In regards to the pandemic, more surprises await, like the fact that PFAS could negatively impact the efficacy of any COVID-19 vaccine. This is of particular importance to Americans, as this acid is used in many common products in this country.

There's little comfort that an adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health says we "have to cross our fingers and hope for the best" in regards to the possibility that the chemicals in non-stick pans and waterproof clothing might thwart our chance of successful vaccination. Discovering this possibility isn't a conspiracy; it's indicative of science working as intended, even if we don't like the results.

Chemistry matters; so does patience. Weill Cornell Medicine vaccine researcher John Moore phrased it best when calling AstraZeneca's head-scratching announcement "the worst aspect of science by press release." In the rush to deliver good news during a challenging year, we overlook the fact that science is a slow process governed by consensus. Rushing out half-baked data does no one any good.

AstraZeneca's rush to break news is especially perilous given the growing influence of vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaxxers. Misinformation is like a dry forest floor after a hot summer. Vaccine science needs to be evidence-based. Fear-mongering thrives when the focus is a headline instead of clinical efficacy.

As Jonathan Berman writes in his recent book, "Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement,"

"Vaccination occupies a unique space as one of the most effective technologies ever developed to fight disease, as well as the only technology to ever eliminate a disease entirely. Vaccination conveys both individual and collective benefits, and carries very modest individual and collective risks."

Perhaps because this is the first global pandemic in generations we've forgotten how deadly diseases can be. In the 18th century, more humans died from communicable diseases than today's biggest killers, like heart disease and cancer; roughly 300 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century. COVID-19 isn't nearly as deadly, yet that doesn't dampen the real problems we face around vaccine disinformation.

In some ways, even the botched press release isn't new. Conceptually, vaccines are thousands of years old. Louis Pasteur, building on Edward Jenner's work on cowpox, was as much publicist as scientist when his anthrax trial helped usher in the modern age of medicine. He made sure to invite plenty of journalists to observe his trial, which is how word of this medical advancement spread widely.

Expediency often sacrifices integrity. Fortunately, Pasteur's scientific literacy was as dependable as his love of fawning writers. As Victorian-era statistician Francis Galton presciently commented, "In science credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs."

We have to wield the power responsibly. Vaccine development by press release does not serve anyone. There are too many variables in medicine and humans are impatient animals. Good science relies on the input of many researchers and tens of thousands of volunteers.

That great strides have been made in the development of a COVID-19 vaccine should comfort us—a little—but also serve as a reminder that little arrives as quickly as we desire. That's just not how science works.

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Derek Beres

We've all seen the movies: a mad genius creates breakthrough artificial intelligence only to have it turn on them—and humanity. Midway through the film, the robots are taking over. By the end, humans have won, though barely. Like Godzilla, AI is never really gone. The monster that is our darkest shadow always lurks, ready to lurch back into action.

Fantasy aside, AI is a real problem. As Richard Clarke and R.P. Eddy write in their 2017 book, "Warnings," 47 percent of all U.S. jobs could be put out of commission in 20 years—and that was predicted by Oxford researchers in 2013. A McKinsey study from the same year predicts AI will "depose 140 million full-time knowledge workers worldwide."

Large-scale unemployment is dangerous, especially in terms of governmental action. The current administration has basically ignored AI, while the incoming administration does have a research platform. How that factors into job loss remains to be seen. Clarke and Eddy point to various responses to the Great Depression:

"In 1932, the U.S. responded with the New Deal. Western Europe responded with Fascism and the imminent rise of Nazism, Russia deepened into Stalinism and five-year plans."

There's also the question of efficacy. How do we really know when AI is working as planned? Statistics rely on two main confidence intervals: 95 percent and 99 percent. While the latter seems to inspire confidence from large data sets, do you want, for example, an AI medical intervention to have a 1 percent chance of failure?

Alexander Amini, a PhD student in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and first author of a new paper on neural networks, says we shouldn't have to take that risk.

"One thing that has eluded researchers is the ability of these models to know and tell us when they might be wrong. We really care about that 1 percent of the time, and how we can detect those situations reliably and efficiently."

Deep learning neural networks are being used in autonomous driving and medical diagnoses, among many other fields. A 1 percent risk in an AI that filters social media feeds might not seem like much of a gamble, but when it comes to drug design or medical image analysis, such a risk could result in tragedy.

On the road, 1 percent could be the difference between stopping at an intersection or rushing through just as another car runs a stop sign. Amini and colleagues wanted to produce a model that could better detect patterns in giant data sets. They named their solution "deep evidential regression."

Sorting through billions of parameters is no easy task. Amini's model utilizes uncertainly analysis—learning how much error exists within a model and supplying missing data. This approach in deep learning isn't novel, though it often takes a lot of time and memory. Deep evidential regression estimates uncertainty after only one run of the neural network. According to the team, they can assess uncertainty in both input data and the final decision, after which they can either address the neural network or recognize noise in the input data.

In real-world terms, this is the difference between trusting an initial medical diagnosis or seeking a second opinion. By arming AI with a built-in detection system for uncertainty, a new level of honesty with data is reached—in this model, with pixels. During a test run, the neural network was given novel images; it was able to detect changes imperceptible to the human eye. Ramini believes this technology can also be used to pinpoint deepfakes, a serious problem we must begin to grapple with.

Any field that uses machine learning will have to factor in uncertainty awareness, be it medicine, cars, or otherwise. As Amini says,

"Any user of the method, whether it's a doctor or a person in the passenger seat of a vehicle, needs to be aware of any risk or uncertainty associated with that decision."

We might not have to worry about alien robots turning on us (yet), but we should be concerned with that new feature we just downloaded into our electric car. There will be many other issues to face with the emergence of AI in our world—and workforce. The safer we can make the transition, the better.

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

Author:Derek Beres - Source: Big Think

After a 20-year ban on clinical psychedelics research, the U.S. government approved trials on DMT in 1990. At first, Rick Strassman, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, only wanted to study the physiological strain of injecting DMT: heart rate, blood pressure, and so on. Given that psychedelics had been contentiously demonized for a generation, he wondered if physical consequences were as dangerous as advertised.

LSD had been administered tens of thousands of times in the 1950s and early 1960s. Did it really fry your brain like eggs, as the Reagans so confidently declared?

Over the next five years, Strassman administered 400 doses of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) to over 50 volunteers. It turned out that DMT, the fast-acting psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca—the "soul vine" persists for hours only when blended with MAOIs to slow the breakdown of enzymes in your gut—has few negative effects. A longtime Zen Buddhist practitioner, Strassman noticed something else going on when over half of participants reported having profound religious experiences.

They were dying before dying.

Well, some of them were being visited by alien creatures, a phenomenon MAPS founder Rick Doblin possibly attributes to the "setting" part of "set and setting": tripping out in a sterile hospital room surrounded by clinicians in white lab coats certainly felt foreign, perhaps otherworldly. Other volunteers saw a beautiful light at the end of a tunnel and returned—a sensation noted in the ayahuasca literature for as long as we have records.

DMT is chemically related to serotonin and melatonin. The latter hormone is produced by the pineal gland, which is symbolically called the "third eye"—Descartes famously called it the "seat of the soul." Since every mammal that's been tested (including humans) produce endogenous DMT, could our third eye possibly release this structural analog of tryptamine at death? Is it a coincidence that the pineal gland, according to Strassman, appears in fetuses at 49 days, the exact duration of the "passage" of souls described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Strassman admits this is speculation. The anecdotes are irrefutable, however. His clinical work led to Charles Grob's government-approved research on ayahuasca and MDMA in the 1990s, which opened the door to Johns Hopkins researchers studying psilocybin to treat the existential dread hospice patients encounter, which opened the floodgates to the psychedelic revolution occurring today.

Brian Muraresku explains the potential role of psychedelics in Christianity

Muraresku has been getting a lot of press since the book's publication, in part boosted by his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast. The classicist speculates that the Christian Eucharist is rooted in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which may have involved the ceremonial ingestion of wine spiked with psychedelic ingredients. The idea of a psychedelic Christianity is not new, but Muraresku brings a detailed level of scholarship and compassion to the topic.

As he told me in a recent interview, the "immortality key" is not psychedelics, but the concept of dying before dying. He opens his book with a Greek inscription: "If you die before you die / You won't die when you die." Muraresku, a devout Catholic raised in the Jesuit tradition, kicks off the discussion with an atheist from the Johns Hopkins trial. Despite her lack of faith, she felt an "overwhelming, all-encompassing love" that helped her deal with the inevitable consequences of mixed-cell ovarian cancer—really, the inevitable consequences of being an animal bound to die.

The Hopkins study went mainstream when Michael Pollan wrote about it in the New Yorker. The results were stunning: 70 percent of participants felt a single dose of psilocybin produced the most meaningful (or among the top five) experience of their lives. Interestingly, the same result occurred after the famous Marsh Chapel experiment, when Timothy Leary and friends dosed Harvard Divinity School grad students with psilocybin; a quarter-century later, all but one rated the event in their top five.

Not only do you die before you die while under the influence of psychedelics, but you also gain a new perspective on life. The ego death that occurs during the ritual changes their orientation about existence. And what good is a religious experience if it can't be applied to living?

As Muraresku told me,

"[Psychedelics] is one tool in the Spiritual Toolkit. What I mean by 'the key' is in Greek, which is preserved at St. Paul's monastery: if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. That's the actual key. It's not psychedelics, it's not drugs; it's this concept of navigating the liminal space between what you and I are doing right now, and dreaming and death. In that state, the mystics and sages tell us, is the potential to grasp a very different view of reality."

Western religious leaders, especially those in Christianity and Islam, treat their prophets as standalone figures. The best you can hope for is being granted access to some special place after you die. Gnostics and Sufis—sects within those faiths that attempt to replicate their prophet's mysticism—are considered outcasts by mainstream religious figures. In some circumstances, they're outlawed, threatened, or even killed for their supposed heresy.

Sufis might spin for hours in ecstatic rapture to reach this mystical state, but as Muraresku's extensive research shows, psychedelics also tap into this "secret" knowledge that he believes to be at the heart of Christian—and if we extrapolate, religious—tradition. And to him, this is the essence of the religion, not a byproduct of the real faith.

"I didn't write this book to be anti-organized religion. In some cases, it's the exact opposite. In the intro, I mentioned Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who is a hero of mine. He talks about the tension between mystics and the dogma and doctrine of organized faith. I don't think you can have one without the other. The balance, as Brother David says, is to rediscover that original visionary power and live in it as a lived experience. This is what Joseph Campbell says of religion being a lived experience. We're talking about emotional potential. That's how the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz defines religion: these powerful, pervasive, long-lasting moods and motivations. That only happens when you're talking about something that gets inside of people's bones. That's what the mystical experience is; it's how these religions are born. Brother David says it's virtually impossible to start a religion without mystical experience, like Moses in the burning bush, Paul on the road to Damascus, or Peter, in Acts, caught up in a trance."

Campbell's conversation with Bill Moyers in "The Power of Myth" nicely ties together this idea:

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

The mythologist also advocated for a reformation of religion every generation so that the faith speaks to the times. This is effectively what Muraresku advocates for in "The Immortality Key": an honest conversation regarding the historical circumstances that birthed the world's most-followed religion in the hopes of applying the foundational lessons to our current reality. If that means a psychedelic ritual that shows you how to die before you die so that you may better know how to live, then it's time to rethink the role of the sacrament.

Mysticism is a universal phenomenon. The "eternal return" Mircea Eliade wrote about has been experienced throughout history in disparate regions of the world. As Strassman's and Griffiths's work shows, we retain the capability of dying before dying. In fact, current research on psilocybin, LSD, iboga, DMT, and ayahuasca show that these substances are helping people gain a perspective of their lives, be it in depression treatment, addiction recovery, or easing the pain of hospice care. A little mysticism goes a long way.

Let's move beyond this notion that mysticism only applies to a chosen few. In fact, let's reconsider the role of consciousness in general. Every religion has its own take on what happens after we die. Yet we have tools at our disposal to show us how to exist now: a living religion that speaks to the entire planet.

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

Author:Derek Beres - Source: Big Think