What I'm Reading (Feb. 27)

Metaphors bridge us from the known to the less known. Some metaphors are more like highways than bridges, as in this piece by Austin Kleon on soup. 

“Here’s the writer Charlie Fletcher:

Terry Pratchett once told me that the deal is that everything anyone’s ever written is thrown into a big gumbo pot: everyone who writes picks different chunks out of the big pot and recombines them into their own gumbo, which in turn gets thrown back into the bigger pot. There are only two crimes – pretending the pot doesn’t exist, or claiming you own it.

You take things you like out of the pot, recombine them into your own stew, and then you pour it back into the pot.”

From Austin Kleon’s great subStack, 3 lessons in the soup

Before we join Elon on his trip to Mars, there are a few practicalities to consider. Forget about the timeframe, although that drives all our other concerns. Consider this. 

“Everybody poops, including astronauts. In fact, the first picture Neil Armstrong ever snapped from the surface of the moon shows a jettisoned waste bag that may well contain poop. The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites, which are still sitting there to this day: a celestial reminder that wherever humans go, we bring our shit with us.

These Apollo jettison bags, sometimes shorthanded as the “poo bags,” have been the subject of much interest and speculation since they were deposited on the moon more than 50 years ago. … The bags also raise questions about our cultural heritage and environmental impact on the lunar environment, while underscoring the intractable problem of managing and disposing of off-Earth biological waste.”

From Wired, Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business

The tech bros lead the way in trying to defy gravity, not so much gravity as biology, in their quest to be immortal. Understanding what it means to age and how that occurs is primarily researched as a biological concern. But what if physics, rather than biology, is the primary factor contributing to aging in the body's cells? What if this is about entropy and aging, a natural process rooted in nanoscale thermal physics?

“Four years ago, I published a book called Life’s Ratchet, which explains how molecular machines create order in our cells. My main concern was how life avoids a descent into chaos. … Thermal motion may seem beneficial in the short run, animating our molecular machines, but could it be detrimental in the long run? After all, in the absence of external energy input, random thermal motion tends to destroy order.”

From Nautil.us, Physics Makes Aging Inevitable, Not Biology

My colleague, Dr. Henry Miller, has an outstanding track record for identifying new and vital technologies. He was the FDA push behind human insulin. He has also been writing of late of a new blood substitute. He is not alone in that communication. 

“Between 1873 and 1880, the daring idea of transfusing milk into the body as a substitute for blood was being tested across the United States. …

At the time, severe bleeding was often a death sentence. Blood transfusion was practiced, but it was something of a crapshoot. Medical science was still 3 decades removed from discovering blood types. Patients who received mismatched blood suffered discolored urine, itching, and a sometimes-fatal complication: hemolytic shock, wherein their own immune systems attacked the transfused cells. Doctors in the U.S. were looking for something less risky to stabilize a hemorrhaging patient. In 1875, he [Theodore Gaillard Thomas] injected 175 milliliters of cow’s milk into a woman suffering from severe uterine bleeding after an operation to remove her cancerous ovaries.”

It was not milk! Today, we use salt solutions to increase volume, but that does not provide blood’s capacity to transport oxygen. From the journal Science, a look at the new blood substitutes,  There Will Be Blood