Savvy Interesting Science, 9/17/21: Thoughts that control devices, Walking with coffee, Cloned camels, Be happy, How we burn calories

I’ve been reading a lot about very cool and new technology throughout the fields of science and engineering and even the social sciences. I’ve been wondering when we will see some of these technologies pop up in our diabetes world. Who knows?

If you read something here and can envision an application for those of us living with Type 1 diabetes, I’d love to hear your suggestions and thoughts. Please share them in the comments below … and thanks for reading and stretching your imagination!

Mercedes’ New Tech Lets You Control Your Car With Your Mind by Ameya Paleja was published by InterestingEngineering.com, 6 September 2021. The new technology reads your brain waves with a wearable chip.

While scientists work on brain implants to reverse damage caused by disease, car manufacturer Mercedes Benz is working on a technology that will one day allow us to control cars with our thoughts. What’s more, you won’t need any implants but just a small device that will sit at the back of your head. A glimpse of this future will be showcased at the IAA Mobility 2021 in Munich, Germany.

While shouting instructions to the dashboard is becoming common, Mercedes Benz is planning a future where this won’t be necessary. Intuitively, the car will simply do what you are thinking of, all by reading your brain waves.

Can you just imagine thinking about what you want your pump to do … and it just does it?

Walking with coffee is a little-understood feat of physics was reported by the Arizona State University for Phys.org, 7 September 2021.

Walking with coffee is something most of us do every day without considering the balancing act it requires. In fact, there’s a lot of physics preventing the coffee from spilling over.

“While humans possess a natural, or gifted, ability to interact with complex objects, our understanding of those interactions—especially at a quantitative level, is next to zero,” said ASU Professor Ying-Cheng Lai, an Arizona State University electrical engineering professor. “We have no conscious ability to analyze the influences of external factors, like noise or climate, on our interactions.”

Yet, understanding these external factors is a fundamental issue in applied fields such as soft robotics. According to Lai, it is conceivable that, in the not-too-distant future, robots will be deployed in various applications of complex object handing or control which require the kind of coordination and movement control that humans do quite well.

Clone your camel: beauty pageants, races spur high demand was reported by Mohamad Ali Harissi for Phys.org, 12 September 2021.

Cloning is in high demand in the competitive world of camel beauty pageants, leaving scientists at a Dubai clinic working round the clock to produce carbon-copy beasts. Not every animal is blessed with sought-after drooping lips and a tall, elegant neck, but technology now allows wealthy clients to replace their most beautiful camel with one just like it.

At the Reproductive Biotechnology Center, with views of the UAE city’s towering skyscrapers, scientists pore over microscopes while dozens of cloned camels roam outside. “We have so much demand for cloning camels that we are not able to keep up,” the centre’s scientific director Nisar Wani told AFP.

I know … this is a tiny (a huge) and extreme stretch … but where could cloning be useful in diabetes research?

How to Be Happy was written by Tara Parker-Pope for the Well section of The New York Times, 15 November 2017. Yup, it was published almost 4 years ago … absolutely still as true today.

Behavioral scientists have spent a lot of time studying what makes us happy (and what doesn’t). We know happiness can predict health and longevity, and happiness scales can be used to measure social progress and the success of public policies. But happiness isn’t something that just happens to you. Everyone has the power to make small changes in our behavior, our surroundings and our relationships that can help set us on course for a happier life.

Some interesting topics to help you on your journey to HAPPY are: MIND (Happiness often comes from within. Learn how to tame negative thoughts and approach every day with optimism.) and HOME (Where you live — the country, the town, your neighborhood and your home — all have an effect on your overall happiness.)

Why did I include this? Because living with Type 1 diabetes isn’t easy … it can be challenging and scary … and it take a break. Some of this ideas might be very helpful … feel free to share these.

Read more: How to Be Happy

The New Science on How We Burn Calories was reported by Kim Tingley for The New York Times, 14 September 2021. Could that change our understanding about, for starters, chronic disease, aging and obesity?

It’s simple, we are often told: All you have to do to maintain a healthy weight is ensure that the number of calories you ingest stays the same as the number of calories you expend. If you take in more calories, or energy, than you use, you gain weight; if the output is greater than the input, you lose it. But while we’re often conscious of burning calories when we’re working out, 55 to 70 percent of what we eat and drink actually goes toward fueling all the invisible chemical reactions that take place in our body to keep us alive. “We think about metabolism as just being about exercise, but it’s so much more than that,” says Herman Pontzer, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. “It’s literally the running total of how busy your cells are throughout the day.” Figuring out your total energy expenditure tells you how many calories you need to stay alive. But it also tells you “how the body is functioning,” Pontzer says. “There is no more direct measure of that than energy expenditure.”

Last month, however, a paper published in Science by Pontzer and more than 80 co-authors revealed that much of what we thought we knew about metabolism was wrong.

Using previously collected data from more than 6,400 subjects who ranged in age from 8 days to 95 years, and adjusting for body size and the amount of fat and muscle present, they found that our metabolism generally goes through four distinct life phases.

- Newborns’ metabolism resembles that of adults.
- Then, when they are about a month old, their metabolic rate starts rapidly increasing, until between 9 and 15 months, it is more than 50 percent higher than an adult’s — the equivalent of a grown-up burning around 4,000 calories a day. (The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that, on average, adult women need between 1,600 and 2,400 calories a day and adult men between 2,000 and 3,000 calories.)
- At that point, between age 1 and 2, energy expenditure starts to decline and keeps falling until roughly age 20. From there, it holds steady for the next 40 years, even during pregnancy and menopause; you burn calories as efficiently at 55 as you do at 25.
- At around age 60, energy expenditure begins to drop again and continues to do so until the end of our lives. Men, the researchers observed, do not have innately faster metabolisms than women; rather, they tend to burn more calories per day for their size because they typically have a higher proportion of muscle, which uses more energy than fat does.

The study “addresses a really significant gap in our understanding of basic human physiology,” says Richard Bribiescas, a professor of anthropology at Yale University. “It’s really important not only for basic science but because metabolism — how we utilize energy in our body — is absolutely central to any understanding of disease or well-being.”