Fifth Avenue Forum

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/maga ... lypse.html

But extinction is not the only tragedy through which we’re living. What about the species that still exist, but as a shadow of what they once were? In “The Once and Future World,” the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: “In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship’s captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes.” There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that’s there now. “These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice,” MacKinnon writes. “We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory.”

Somehow, a man coughed up an intact blood clot shaped like a lung passage.
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Georg Wieselthaler, a transplant and pulmonary surgeon at the University of California at San Francisco, says the unnamed patient was initially admitted to the intensive-care unit with aggressive end-stage heart failure. Wieselthaler quickly connected the patient’s struggling heart to a pump designed to help maximize blood flow through the body. But this type of ventricular-assist device comes with its own risks. “You have high turbulence inside the pumps, and that can cause clots to form inside,” Wieselthalers says. “So with all these patients, you have to give them anticoagulants to make the blood thinner and prevent clots from forming.”

These anticoagulants themselves can lead to trouble. In a healthy person, oxygen-starved blood leaving the heart travels an intricate network of capillaries through the lungs for an oxygenating pit stop by the airways. Usually, if small fissures occur in this network, the body’s clotting agents show up to slap some circulatory duct tape on them until they heal. But for someone taking anticoagulants, the body can’t efficiently patch things up if any part of this tight blood-vessel network is breached, and things can spiral out of control.

In Wieselthaler’s case, blood eventually broke out of his patient’s pulmonary network into the lower right lung, heading directly for the bronchial tree. After days of coughing up much smaller clots, Wieselthaler’s patient bore down on a longer, deeper cough and, relieved, spit out a large, oddly shaped clot, folded in on itself. Once Wieselthaler and his team carefully unfurled the bundle and laid it out, they found that the architecture of the airways had been retained so perfectly that they were able to identify it as the right bronchial tree based solely on the number of branches and their alignment.

I'll be more interested when they can make it go the other way...

I'll be more interested when they can make it go the other way...

TWSS.

thats what they all said

Tellingly, AlphaZero won by thinking smarter, not faster; it examined only 60 thousand positions a second, compared to 60 million for Stockfish. It was wiser, knowing what to think about and what to ignore. By discovering the principles of chess on its own, AlphaZero developed a style of play that “reflects the truth” about the game rather than “the priorities and prejudices of programmers,” Mr. Kasparov wrote in a commentary accompanying the Science article.

The question now is whether machine learning can help humans discover similar truths about the things we really care about: the great unsolved problems of science and medicine, such as cancer and consciousness; the riddles of the immune system, the mysteries of the genome.