This is classic Quanta Magazine sensationalism. Here's what the study actually said:
As cells in epithelial tissue get crowded, their membranes start to allow more sodium ions to enter, which makes the cell more electrically positive (depolarization). The cells try to counter this, but cells with insufficient stored energy (ATP) will struggle to do so, and will lose water through their membranes, causing them to shrink, which causes them to signal their neighbors to extrude them.
So there's no "group decisions" being made, no "coordination" between cells using "bioelectricity". Yes, all cells rely on electrical potentials across their membranes for normal functioning, potentials that they have to maintain. That's all the involvement of electricity here.
And the only "decision-making" happening here is within a single cell, but of course cells don't "make decisions', cells are little machines, and part of the mechanism for epithelial cells -- a mechanism that works in part using chemistry and electricity -- includes the cell signaling that it needs to be extruded in certain circumstances, like shrinkage.
How about a chemical causing a flagellum motor to change direction, would you consider that making a decision?
and what if there is indirection, IE light triggers some sensor molecule that then triggers the flagellum motor.
I guess it all comes down to your definition of decision. The most amazing is mitosis, it sure looks like a massive amount of coordination is required.
> I don’t believe genetics ever claimed to provide a theory of why eyes grow where eyes grow.
That’s the whole point of developmental biology, to show how features of the human body form and develop based on gene expression, the timing of which during embryonic and fetal development itself is dictated by your genes.
If not your genes, what else would determine why you have eyes in about the same place in your head as every other human?
> The cells in your eyes have exactly the same DNA as the cells in your big toe, so developmental morphology cannot be explained with DNA alone.
Sure it can, because while every cell has essentially the same DNA, the expression of genes differs between cells, which is what causes cells to differentiate. And this differentiation also controls development; look up the Hox genes as an example.
He's changed wild-type planarians to grow the heads of other species. It reverts after a few weeks, because the system has error-correcting mechanisms, but the DNA of these worms is unchanged.
He once compared tinkering with DNA as pulling out a soldering iron to fix a software bug.
In the case of morphology, DNA may not be the best level of abstraction. It's certainly possible, just as one can use chemistry for social problems, but for some problems, affecting cell-to-cell communication may be a more direct path.
> If not your genes, what else would determine why you have eyes in about the same place in your head as every other human?
Theoretically, it could be second or much higher order effects that result from genes. It could be a combination of complex factors - the environment in the womb, nutrition, behavior by the mother, etc. - that eventually trace back to DNA.
Also, is it literally true that DNA is the only thing that's consistent (in these respects) between all generations of Homo sapiens?
Your last paragraph is their point: genes are regulated to produce that effect. The genes themselves aren’t doing it, but eg diffusion of chemical signals to inactivate genes.
Morphology is determined by the combination of genes, chemical signals, original cell machinery, and apparently electrical signals. But we never believed that genes determined morphology alone, eg, we know that chemical signals can cause anomalies.
> Morphology is determined by the combination of genes, chemical signals, original cell machinery, and apparently electrical signals. But we never believed that genes determined morphology alone, eg, we know that chemical signals can cause anomalies.
For the consistent parts - eyes may be different colors but are overwhelmingly consistent - what else could be the ultimate cause but DNA? For example, if those chemical signals, cell machinary, and electrical signals produce the same results billions of times over 200,000 years, then they must function the same overall. How does that happen if the chemical signals, cell machinary, and electrical signals aren't determined, even if indirectly, by DNA?
Your eyes would be misplaced if the process from cell clump to mat to tubule failed due to chemical signaling failure, but the whole embryo tends to be spontaneously aborted when gestation fails so catastrophically.
And despite genitalia being roughly one of two forms and similarly positioned, chemical signals can disrupt their formation.
> How does that happen if the chemical signals, cell machinary, and electrical signals aren't determined, even if indirectly, by DNA?
They don’t produce the same results with perfect accuracy — 75% of pregnancies are spontaneously aborted, at least in part due to developmental failures.
But the problem with this argument is simple: you have a human cell everywhere you have human DNA, so those correlations with DNA are also correlations with cellular machinery and with particular chemical signals from the mother. There was no point in those 200,000 years where DNA operated independently of those other mechanisms — we can only say the system as a whole reliably creates those features.
Interesting points, especially about the challenge of correlation. I guess we could remove DNA and see what happens ...
Somehow the machinary is passed down: Do we know of another mechanism besides DNA that is self-perpetuating? Is there any living creature without it? Prokaryotes (bacteria) even have DNA.
Or is there a way to do it without self-perpetuating mechanisms? Is that logically possible? Some machinary might be perpetuated by other machinary, e.g. the chemical might recreate the electrical, meaning it's not self-perpetuating. But that's not different than DNA: DNA itself isn't the machinary, but its self-perpetuation is what recreates other parts.
I suppose some parts of the environment are consistent, such as sunlight, air, water, and heat, but the environmental stimuli must trigger something that is already there.
> I guess we could remove DNA and see what happens ...
If I have a stool with three legs, and remove one leg causing it to fall, can I conclude that removed leg is what made it stand?
You’re making the same mistake as before in reverse: DNA would do nothing without a host cell or chemical signals, either.
> Somehow the machinary is passed down: Do we know of another mechanism besides DNA that is self-perpetuating?
The system as a whole is self-perpetuating, but DNA is not self-perpetuating: without a host cell and without ambient chemical signals, it cannot propagate. That’s in contrast to ribozymes which can be self-catalyzing RNA, ie, truly self-propagating chemicals.
In the RNA world hypothesis, such self-catalyzation was the origin of life; and by the time DNA evolved, it did so within a running biological system and as merely one component of cellular replication.
As a whole the system of chemical signals, DNA, and cellular machinery propagates; but just like our stool example, removing any of the factors causes that to fail.
The DNA removal comment was as joke; sorry if that wasn't clear.
No system is self-perpetuating, per the Second Law; all need other inputs. What makes the machinary yield the ~same results ~every time is DNA.
> In the RNA world hypothesis, such self-catalyzation was the origin of life; and by the time DNA evolved, it did so within a running biological system and as merely one component of cellular replication.
Is there evidence of that? Afaik the earliest evidence is prokaryotes ~~3.5 billion years ago, and prokaryotes generally have DNA.
> That "why" is almost missing from the public conversation. People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren't.
But then he never answers that fundamental question, and jumps straight to the hardware and power and cost? What problems are orbital data centers trying to solve? What optimizations are they intended to deliver? Are these optimizations beneficial to everyone who uses a data centers, or just operators or users of orbiting satellite constellations?
> But the knock-on effects are why this keeps pulling at people. If you can industrialize power and operations in orbit at meaningful scale, you're not just running GPUs. You're building a new kind of infrastructure that makes it easier for humans to keep spreading out. Compute is just one of the first excuses to pay for the scaffolding.
This seems to be the closest we get to a “Why”, but it doesn’t make much sense. A constellation of 40,000 satellites with GPUs “infrastructure that makes it easier for humans to keep spreading out”? How?
> The target I care about is simple: can you make space-based, commodity compute cost-competitive with the cheapest terrestrial alternative? That's the whole claim. … Can you deliver useful watts and reject the waste heat at a price that beats a boring Crusoe-style tilt-wall datacenter tied into a 200–500 MW substation?
Isn’t the answer clearly “No”? The default settings of his model — which I assume he considers optimal — tell us that power for orbital data enters will cost 3.5X terrestrial ones. And that only SpaceX has the vertical integration to do even attempt to do this. So again, where is the competitive advantage?
Also, I don’t understand why he’s including satellite construction and launch costs for a 40,000 satellite constellations in his analysis, if he’s assuming SpaceX as he claims. Wouldn’t SpaceX simply implement these compute capabilities in the next gen of Starlink, so which would reduce costs significantly.
> It might not be rational. But it might be physically possible.
But isn’t that precisely what everyone has been saying? I don’t think the question has been whether orbital data centers are possible, it’s been whether they are rational. And that centers foremost h the unanswered question, Why is this a good idea?
> But then he never answers that fundamental question
The fundamental question is “is it economically viable”, and the answer from his model is “not really”
> A constellation of 40,000 satellites with GPUs “infrastructure that makes it easier for humans to keep spreading out”?
I think he’s claiming industrializing larger and more economical power generation in space, as well as the means to put it up there, would make it easier to transition to a theoretical space economy
> But isn’t that precisely what everyone has been saying?
From the article, he claims that people handwave the economics, so at least the people he has interacted with haven’t been saying that.
> Someone with a subscription logs into the site, then archives it.
That’s not the case. I don’t have a NYT subscription, I just Googled for an old obscure article from 1989 on pork bellies I thought would be unlikely for archive.today to have cached, and sure enough when I asked to retrieve that article, it didn’t have it and began the caching process. A few minutes later, it came up with the webpage, which if you visit on archive.is, you can see it was first cached just a few minutes ago.
My assumption has been that the NYT is letting them around the paywall, much like the unrelated Wayback Machine. How else could this be working? Only way I could think it could work is that either they have access to a NYT account and are caching using that — something I suspect the NYT would notice and shutdown — or there is a documented hole in the paywall they are exploiting (but not the Wayback Machine, since the caching process shows they are pulling direct from the NYT).
> So can someone who owns a modern car please help me understand why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off?
That’s not what is going on here. These cars are not being intentionally shut down remotely. Instead, a software update for some computerized components of the car was pushed down to the cars and installed with the owners permissions, but that update apparently has severe bugs that should have been caught by QA.
This is a distinction without a difference. Intentional or not, these vehicles were disabled remotely.
Even if the owner gave permission to install the update, I would strongly wager that they did not give concurrent permission for the update to change the behavior of the vehicle.
Of course, I sincerely doubt the EULA offers any way to separate those permissions; you are all in, or you are all out. Assuming that you even have an option to opt out.
And that’s exactly why these cars can never be trusted under any circumstances, ever.
Yeah, I just searched for “driver_register”, a call that would show upin a large number of Linux drivers in the open source Linux kernel, not to mention other public-facing repos, and it only returned two results, neither from the mainline Linux kernel repo.
It sounds like most commenters here have never had a rosin tater. When I was kid, a very popular, upscale restaurant called Planters Back Porch in seafood mecca Murrells Inlet, SC specialized in rosin taters. They were very good, enough for there to always be long lines to get in.
In case it’s not clear from the description, after removing the potato from the rosin, and wrapping in paper, the thin layer of remaining rosin quickly solidifies into a hard shell, so you can then cut through it to get access to the flesh of the potato without accidentally eating rosin.
Yes. This comments section is peak HN. A lot of speculation by people with absolutely zero experience or data.
The article is admittedly tare on the _differences in outcome_, over and against more conventional methods, which I think drives a lot of the speculation here, but approached with curiosity, this becomes, "hmm, I wonder what, if any, the benefits might be?" instead of, "you could definitely replicate this with canola and also btw I solder with rosin"
it sounds like the authors are suggesting that additional energy usage caused by stress can, in isolation from other causes, be a mechanism for disease. But that doesn’t make much sense:
- our metabolisms are adaptable, so why wouldn’t this increase in energy use simply be offset by an increase in energy production? It can’t be that people who are stressed in general aren’t getting enough energy, because that would correlate stress with weight loss, but I would argue that there are plenty of overweight people with stress.
- if the argument is that an increased metabolism by itself is the culprit, then why wouldn’t people with higher metabolisms in general — like anyone who exercises regularly, but certainly athletes — not also experience more disease? If your answer is “that’s different for some reason”, then that means that increased energy usage and metabolism is not by itself the cause, which suggests it may not be the cause at all.
Furthermore, even granting the supposition that stress requires increased energy usage, their abstract doesn’t make much sense:
- “Living organisms have a limited capacity to consume energy.” Okay, so that means that no matter how stressed we get, there’s a cap to the energy we can use. But how is that relevant, since it also applies to exercise or other energy utilization by the body? Why does a limited capacity to consume energy only apply to stress?
- “Overconsumption of energy by [stress handling] brain-body processes leads to … excess energy expenditure above the organism’s optimum”. Thats basically a tautology, but more importantly, it doesn’t tell us that energy consumption above “optimal” — which seems extremely vague — is a bad thing.
- “In turn, [excess energy consumption above the optimal] accelerates physiological decline in cells, laboratory animals, and humans, and may drive biological aging”. So that “may” is a pretty good reason to dismiss this, since again why wouldn’t this lead to increased disease among athletes or anyone with higher metabolism?
- “Mechanistically, the energetic restriction of growth, maintenance and repair processes leads to the progressive wear-and-tear of molecular and organ systems” Maybe, but why are they energetically restricted if metabolism has increased to provide more energy? And again, why don’t we then see increased disease and aging in anyone who exercises regularly, since that exercise not only uses energy that restricts growth, maintenance and repair, but exercise causes more need for repair.
I think the core problem is that it’s all going to boil down to how you define “optimum”, which the authors conveniently don’t. The authors are going to be left with defining “optimum” as meaning “that energy usage which does not cause disease”. But that’s no different than simply claiming “stress causes disease”, so this model describes nothing, since it tells us nothing about how to identify non-optimum energy usage or how non-optimum energy usage causes disease.
Humans have a massive capacity to vary energy use. Highly trained endurance athletes like professional road cyclists and triathletes can average 3x or more the typical daily energy expenditure of a non-athlete on a long term basis. The idea that psychological stress can overwhelm the body's ability to produce energy does not seem credible to me.
Those people have trained very deliberately over years to reach that level of performance, on top of an innate genetic disposition.
Undoubtedly, in absolute terms they have a higher capacity to withstand the negative physical effects of psychosocial stress as described in the paper, precisely because of these physiological adaptations.
If regular people trained themselves to deal with stress then they would have a higher capacity too.
The paper is referring to the maximum capacity of a particular organism at a particular moment in time. It doesn't assert that the capacity is uniform across a species or doesn't change over time.
>Okay, so that means that no matter how stressed we get, there’s a cap to the energy we can use. But how is that relevant, since it also applies to exercise or other energy utilization by the body? Why does a limited capacity to consume energy only apply to stress?
It doesn't. That limited capacity to consume energy applies to exercise, brain activity, thermogenesis, digestion, and every other biological process as well. It is a fundamental aspect of cellular biology and a major focus in the field of exercise physiology.
Fitness training is the very slow and deliberate process of pushing these limits tiny percentages higher.
I suggest you build some practical and theoretical knowledge of the field before dismissing the paper.
I absolutely don't doubt you but can you provide some accessible education resources or some sports science/biochemistry papers for the claim around "That limited capacity to consume energy applies to exercise, brain activity, thermogenesis, digestion, and every other biological process as well. It is a fundamental aspect of cellular biology and a major focus in the field of exercise physiology." ?
What energy are we talking about here exactly? ATP?
Yes. Metabolism is rate limited by countless chemical reactions. Energy sources need to be broken down and moved around the body. Waste products need to be removed. Mitochondria only work at a certain rate. You can increase the number of mitochondria but that hits a practical ceiling as well.
You can start with the Wikipedia article for Metabolism or search for "metabolic scope" and "metabolic efficiency".
Ok, I understand some of this. I know that often the structure of proteins (especially e.g. with ATP Synthase) helps drive and time limits energy production or energy signalling. Just like how the plugging/unplugging of sodium channels naturally creates equal windows for sodium to enter Neurons during action potentials, the natural duration of ATP synthase and other processes establishes a sort of time unit, wherever the ATP is.
Please can you expand a little more. I am a novice so I'm sure there must be something here I have missed, and would love to know what that is:
What I am a little confused about is that the consumption of energy is not done at the same time as consumption, unless I am wrong?
For example when muscles are used or repair during hysteresis, the mitochondria produced the ATP used in that reaction long before the event.
I suppose you can argue any energy consumption via chronic stress effects that. However, because it is local, distributed and there are a few forms of stored energy in essence and uses of it (e.g. mitosis/DNA nucleotide production), it's not like having one singular energy total that goes down, is it?
It's feasible that each area of the body can upscale production and produce their different kinds of energy/energy store more efficiently over time, since most of the time the body is not producing ATP at peak rate. Is the argument that doing that would wear out parts of the cells we have faster or something, due to the chronic stress, compared to what they typically see?
I struggle to buy this argument because we know that heavily overweight people consume much more calories (and thus more ATP Synthase etc) for their number of cells but they don't necessarily die much younger until you reach severe levels of being obese.
A lot of people don’t remember that Intel was a huge early ARM licensee. If you were building a smart mobile device 25 years ago, you were probably seriously considering the Intel StongARM SoC. They then followed up on this with the more advanced ARM XScale family of SoCs, which you’d likely use if wanted to build a ARM battery-powered smart device in the early 2000s. Background per Wikipedia:
> The StrongARM is a family of computer microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and manufactured in the late 1990s which implemented the ARM v4 instruction set architecture. It was later acquired by Intel in 1997 from DEC's own Digital Semiconductor division as part of a settlement of a lawsuit between the two companies over patent infringement. Intel then continued to manufacture it before replacing it with the StrongARM-derived ARM-based follow-up architecture called XScale in the early 2000s.
However, after developing and manufacturing these for nine years, Intel exited this business by selling their ARM unit to Marvell. Intel was developing its own “low power” x86 chip, the Atom, and decided to put all its mobile eggs in that basket, which unfortunately was never as low power as comparable ARM designs. I suspect Intel also saw that the number of licensees in the ARM market was growing and competition along with it, their value-add wasn’t that great, and their margins were necessarily smaller due to the ARM licensing fees.
I remember they, at some point, sold their perpetual license (was it with the Marvel deal?). Before that, IIRC, they didn’t need to pay volume-based licensing to make their ARM variants.
The oroduct description in the FAQ is entirely based on what it doesn’t or can’t do, but doesn’t say anything about what it will be able to do, except run an off-the-shelf window manager on an off-the-shelf OS. Are any apps going to be available, And how do customers install third-party apps without the dreaded Cloud?
They are aiming this at someone with:
> a high discretionary budget for personal electronics and willingness to pay a premium for novel ideas.
But what are those novel ideas that would justify the “quite high” price?
And if I wanted a BSD-based desktop computer with “No AI. No Cloud. No Distractions”, I would just buy a Mac Mini, not log into an Apple ID, disable Siri, out it into Do Not Disturb. And Mac OS has never been a “walled garden”. So from a customer’s perspective, why wouldn’t this be an easier, cheaper, and superior solution?
As cells in epithelial tissue get crowded, their membranes start to allow more sodium ions to enter, which makes the cell more electrically positive (depolarization). The cells try to counter this, but cells with insufficient stored energy (ATP) will struggle to do so, and will lose water through their membranes, causing them to shrink, which causes them to signal their neighbors to extrude them.
So there's no "group decisions" being made, no "coordination" between cells using "bioelectricity". Yes, all cells rely on electrical potentials across their membranes for normal functioning, potentials that they have to maintain. That's all the involvement of electricity here.
And the only "decision-making" happening here is within a single cell, but of course cells don't "make decisions', cells are little machines, and part of the mechanism for epithelial cells -- a mechanism that works in part using chemistry and electricity -- includes the cell signaling that it needs to be extruded in certain circumstances, like shrinkage.
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