Recent comments in /f/science

muscletrain t1_jadoaqg wrote

Reply to comment by RamboGoesMeow in An anti-seizure medication shows promise in reducing the likelihood of heavy drinking, desire to drink, and positive alcohol expectancies, according to new research by chrisdh79

This drug sounds nasty, have you looked into Baclofen ? An alcoholic doctor wrote a book on it and how it stopped his drinking. It's a strong GABA-B drug. I have first hand experience with it helping me kick a heavy GHB addiction that would have hospitalized most people.

Highly highly underrated for alcohol/GHB/dealing with any severe GABA-B issues

3

Dr_seven t1_jadny3h wrote

Reply to comment by chrisdh79 in Scientists unveil plan to create biocomputers powered by human brain cells | Scientists unveil a path to drive computing forward: organoid intelligence, where lab-grown brain organoids act as biological hardware by chrisdh79

>“Brains also have an amazing capacity to store information, estimated at 2,500TB,” Hartung added. “We’re reaching the physical limits of silicon computers because we cannot pack more transistors into a tiny chip. But the brain is wired completely differently. It has about 100bn neurons linked through over 10^15 connection points. It’s an enormous power difference compared to our current technology.”

This part in particular made me squint a little bit.

For starters, we don't fully grasp how memory works in the brain, but we know it isn't like mechanical/electrical memory, with physical bits that flip. It seems to be tied to the combinations of neurons that fire, of which there are essentially infinite permutations, leading to the sky-high calculations of how much "data" the brain can hold....but it doesn't hold data like that, at least not for most humans.

The complexity of this renders it impractical to easily model on anything less than the largest supercomputers, and even then, we aren't actually modeling brain activity in the sense that we know why Pattern X leads to "recalling what that stroganoff tasted like on April 7, 2004".

The reason this is important is because it means that, while we may be able to stimulate neurons in a lab in a way that makes them useful for data storage, it isn't necessarily the same way that human brains store information- indeed, human memory would be a horrible baseline for a computer, considering the brain's preference towards confabulation of details at the time of recall that are not consistent with the reality. Most people's memories of most things are inaccurate, but close enough to work out alright. That's the exact sort of thing you don't want from a computer's memory.

This is compelling stuff, but we have a long way to go before we even understand what we are dealing with in practical terms.

14

SerialStateLineXer t1_jadlscb wrote

Reply to comment by Suthek in Researchers have developed a new device that can detect and analyse cancer cells from blood samples, enabling doctors to avoid invasive biopsy surgeries, and to monitor treatment progress by giuliomagnifico

Cells produce molecules which circulate in the blood, so you don't have to wait for circulating cancer cells. The tricky part is finding molecular signatures that identify cancer with high sensitivity and specificity.

For example, elevated prostate-specific antigen is a sign of something wonky going on in the prostate, which may be cancer, but also may not.

Edit: See responses. This comment isn't relevant to this particular device, which actually looks for cancer cells in the blood.

31

odd84 t1_jadjjhn wrote

Reply to comment by OpenToCommunicate in Researchers have developed a new device that can detect and analyse cancer cells from blood samples, enabling doctors to avoid invasive biopsy surgeries, and to monitor treatment progress by giuliomagnifico

Its usage like this dates back to early bulletin board systems, MUDs (text-only MMOs), and AOL chat rooms. It's a convention from those on the internet in the 1970s-1990s. You'd use it to separate actions from dialogue when chatting or roleplaying.

8