I tried to train my color vision. Here’s what happened.

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Sequencer

When I gamified my color blindness, I stumbled into the limits and latitudes of neuroplasticity.

One afternoon during my PhD, I took a break from lab work to snack on a banana. I grabbed a seat in the office, slid off my headphones, and peeled open my treat. Just as I bit in, I noticed a labmate staring at me.

“Max,” she told me, holding back some laughter. “That banana is a 4.”

I instantly knew what she meant because I’d made this mistake before. The banana was days from being ripe, and I had misjudged the color. A laughably green banana.

Even before I knew that I had mild deuteranomaly (so-called red-green colorblindness), I struggled with cryptic color schemes on spreadsheets and graphs. Whether in spite or because of this, color theory fascinated me. I had neurological, practical, and philosophical questions. Why do we call the retina’s longest wavelength cone “red” when it actually best absorbs yellow-green light? Why does mixing paint obey different rules than mixing light? If I could see through your eyes, would your mental images match mine — does your blue match my blue? And I had questions that blended all three, like what the hell is brown???

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The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology

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QUANTA MAGAZINE

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter long, transport your half-gram body through looming landscapes full of giant animals and plants. In other ways, your world is expansive, even grand. Your five eyes see colors and patterns that humans can’t, and your multisensory antennae detect odors from distant flowers.

For years, biologists have wondered whether bees have another grand sense that we lack. The static electricity they accumulate by flying — similar to the charge generated when you shuffle across carpet in thick socks — could be potent enough for them to sense and influence surrounding objects through the air.

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With ‘Digital Twins,’ The Doctor Will See You Now

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Quanta Magazine

By creating a digital twin of your circulatory system, Amanda Randles wants to bring unprecedented precision to medical forecasts.

Amanda Randles wants to copy your body. If the computer scientist had her way, she’d have enough data — and processing power — to effectively clone you on her computer, run the clock forward, and see what your coronary arteries or red blood cells might do in a week. Fully personalized medical simulations, or “digital twins,” are still beyond our abilities, but Randles has pioneered computer models of blood flow over long durations that are already helping doctors noninvasively diagnose and treat diseases.

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The drugs of the future are in the animals of the past

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SEQUENCER

The genomes of extinct creatures like mammoths and giant sloths code for natural antibiotics we’ve never seen. So, now what?

César de la Fuente’s lab has a knack for finding antibiotics in usual places. He doesn’t trudge through swamps or remote forests like a pharmacological Indiana Jones. His lab instead combs through genetic data collected from creatures across all time.  

In just the last few years, they’ve documented unreported antimicrobial compounds hidden in the genomes of Neanderthals, the world’s microbes, and within ourselves. Now, their latest feat carries the torch thanks to a brand new machine learning algorithm they call APEX: antibiotic peptide de-extinction. 

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A scientific case for an Earth alive

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Sequencer

“Becoming Earth” author Ferris Jabr on his new book and how life emerged as an extension of the planet’s surface.

Ferris Jabr’s sense of the world changed when he learned about rain in the Amazon. It’s no surprise that rain and the world’s most voluminous river feeds the world’s largest tropical rainforest. But Jabr, a science journalist, was struck by how this sorta … missed the point.

It’s backwards. Rather than a jungle springing up in a wet climate, the Amazon generates the rain itself. This is so-called “evapotranspiration” where trees and plants silently pump excess water into the atmosphere — up to 20 billion tons per day. But Jabr’s real surprise came in learning that even evapotranspiration wasn’t the whole story. All the Amazon’s lifeforms were involved.

“The pollen, the fungi, the microbes, all these tiny particles, and gasses and volatile compounds,” contribute to the conditions for rain, Jabr said. “That sparked this curiosity in me: how else is life dramatically changing its environment?”

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An emotional public hearing on MDMA: ‘Today you will vote on whether my friends live or die’

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Sequencer

The FDA may approve psychedelic-assisted therapy for PTSD, but at a recent public hearing it was the therapy — not the drug — that burned in the hot seat.

Yesterday, June 4th, an advisory committee convened to discuss whether to recommend that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve MDMA psychedelic-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when the agency renders a decision this summer. The drug application’s sponsor, Lykos Therapeutics, a biopharma company focusing on mental health treatments, had led two Phase 3 clinical trials combining MDMA with a therapy philosophy allegedly rooted in controversial New Age ideas. The advisory committee invited members of the public to speak. More than 30 individuals shared their testimony in favor or against approval. 

Rather than a straightforward, dusty bureaucratic session, the hearing was eye-opening, puzzling, fascinating, and profoundly sad. 

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