http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin

The central nervous system is in an ever-adjusting balance between inhibition and excitation. Ambien, like alcohol or an anesthetic, triggers the brain’s main inhibitory system, which depends on binding between gaba—gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter—and gaba receptors on the surface of billions of neurons. gaba receptors can be found throughout the brain, and when they’re activated the brain slows. Ambien encourages the process by sticking to the receptors, holding open the door to the neurotransmitter. Suvorexant, which Merck describes as “rationally designed”—rather than stumbled upon, like most drugs—influences a more precise set of neurotransmitters and receptors. Orexin neurotransmitters, first identified fifteen years ago, promote wakefulness. When suvorexant is in the brain, orexin is less likely to reach orexin receptors. Instead of promoting general, stupefying brain inactivity, suvorexant aims at standing in the way of a keep-awake signal. This difference may or may not come to mean a lot to insomniacs, but Merck’s marketing is likely to encourage the perception that suvorexant ends the dance by turning off the music, whereas a drug like Ambien knocks the dancer senseless.

via Ian Parker: The Search for a Blockbuster Insomnia Drug : The New Yorker.

[Intriguing, although the author has too little technical knowledge (or is too overawed by Wolfram) to ask the tough questions. -egg

In 1988 [Wolfram] released the first version of Mathematica, a platform for technical computation, and in 2009, he released the Wolfram Alpha search engine, a computational knowledge engine. His new project, he says, is a perfect marriage.“Mathematica is this perfect precise computation engine, and WolframAlpha is general information about the world,” Wolfram told me. “Now we can combine the two.”The combination is just part of the picture. Included in the new project is natural language programming — not that a program can be created exclusively with natural language, but that a developer can use some natural language. Also included is a new definition of literally anything in your application — from code to images to results to inputs — as being usable and malleable as a symbolic expression. There’s a whole new level of automation and a completely divergent approach to building a programming language, away from the small, agile core with functionality pushed out to libraries and modules and toward a massive holistic thing which treats data and code as one. And there’s a whole new focus on computation that knows more about the world than the programmer ever could.

via Sentient code: An inside look at Stephen Wolframs utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm | VentureBeat | Dev | by John Koetsier.

[“To my knowledge this is the first example, in any animal, of epigenetic transmission of a simple memory for a specific perceptual stimulus. The broader implications for the neuroscience of memory and to evolutionary biology in general could be paradigm shifting and unprecedented.”]

Brian Dias, a postdoctoral fellow in Kerry Ressler’s lab at Emory University, had reported that mice inherit specific smell memories from their fathers — even when the offspring have never experienced that smell before, and even when they’ve never met their father. What’s more, their children are born with the same specific memory.

This was a big, surprising claim, causing many genetics experts to do a double-take, as I discovered from a subsequent flurry of Tweets. “Crazy Lamarkian shit,” quipped Laura Hercher, referring to Lamarckian inheritance, the largely discredited theory that says an organism can pass down learned behaviors or traits to its offspring. “My instinct is deep skepticism, but will have to wait for paper to come out,” wrote Kevin Mitchell. “If true, would be revolutionary.”

The paper is out today in Nature Neuroscience, showing what I reported before as well as the beginnings of an epigenetic explanation. (Epigenetics usually refers to chemical changes that affect gene expression without altering the DNA code).

via Mice Inherit Specific Memories, Because Epigenetics? – Phenomena: Only Human.

Fatimah Ayed Hamed al Hajuri al Johaini, 72 or 73 years old, was a fire healer. She burned people for their own good. She had been doing this all day in a desert operating room that consisted of a dusty rug and a hearth. In the coals of the hearth she heated iron nails to orange hotness. These implements she pressed into twitching flesh at secret locations on her patients’ bodies. Nerves and veins taught by her father, by his father before him, and so on, going back thousands of years. “I’ve been doing this for 40 years. People keep coming. There is only me left do this. I am about to die. Thanks be to God. But I will cure whatever I can cure.”

via Fire Cure – Out Of Eden Walk.

[I like the idea of generative game/installation music as my next career. -egg]

We can often seem deaf to game audio in the same way we’re blind to animation. Maybe it’s because the best examples of both are so natural and chameleonic that they blend into a game’s broader objectives. Maybe it has to be Halo ostentatious or Amon Tobin trendy just to prick up our ears; or make the screen flash pretty colours. Or maybe Brian Eno has to be involved, as we’ll come to in a minute.Yet Weir’s work is fascinating, and goes some way beyond the more conventional fields of ‘horizontal re-sequencing’ shuffling pre-recorded segments of music and ‘vertical re-orchestration’ more complex dynamic mixes. It blurs the line not just between games and the real world – much of his work at sound design agency Earcom is generative soundscapes for shops, banks and hotels – but between melodies and chaos. What’s more, it invites games to become more than the linear B-movies imported from outgoing consoles, delivering something worthy of its ambition. He is currently an audio director at Microsoft.

via The Suite Science: Paul Weir Talks Generative Music | Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

#algopop — Much of Paul Weir’s work at sound design agency…
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I am on a journey. I am in pursuit of an idea, a story, a chimera, perhaps a folly. I am chasing ghosts. Starting in humanity’s birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the ancestors who first discovered the Earth at least 60,000 years ago. This remains by far our greatest voyage. Not because it delivered us the planet. No. But because the early Homo sapiens who first roamed beyond the mother continent—these pioneer nomads numbered, in total, as few as a couple of hundred people—also bequeathed us the subtlest qualities we now associate with being fully human: complex language, abstract thinking, a compulsion to make art, a genius for technological innovation, and the continuum of today’s many races. We know so little about them. They straddled the strait called Bab el Mandeb—the “gate of grief” that cleaves Africa from Arabia—and then exploded, in just 2,500 generations, a geological heartbeat, to the remotest habitable fringe of the globe.

Millennia behind, I follow.

Using fossil evidence and the burgeoning science of “genography”—a field that sifts the DNA of living populations for mutations useful in tracking ancient diasporas—I will walk north from Africa into the Middle East. From there my antique route leads eastward across the vast gravel plains of Asia to China, then north again into the mint blue shadows of Siberia. From Russia I will hop a ship to Alaska and inch down the western coast of the New World to wind-smeared Tierra del Fuego, our species’ last new continental horizon. I will walk 21,000 miles.

via To Walk the World.

22 Dreamy Art Installations You Want To Live In.

I first noticed the Render Ghosts on the hoardings surrounding a new development near Finsbury Square. On the balconies of some vast, virtual tower, two pixelated figures looked out over a darkened London, a perfect red-pink gradient sunset behind them. He had short dark hair and stubble, wore a black jacket and blue jeans. She had a cropped red bob, white jacket, and a purple knee-length skirt. I didn’t know who they were, but I started seeing them everywhere.

The Render Ghosts are the people who live inside our imaginations, in the liminal space between the present and the future, the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital. A world of architecture, urbanism and the city before it is completed – which is also never. They inhabit a space which exists only in the virtual spaces of 3D computer rendering software, projected onto billboards, left to rot and torn down when the actual future arrives; never quite as glossy or as perfect as our renderings of it would like it to be, or have prepared us for.

There are thousands of them, millions. I have seen them walking down the imagined high streets of Glasgow and West London, shopping at Lara, Cap, and M&H. They sit out and dine, or wander through the European-style piazzas of new commercial developments, which we know will turn out to be empty and wind-swept squares, patrolled by private security guards. They flit through new subway stations and airports, stroll in leafy parks; their children play among physically-impossible fountains and bright, toxic plants. Most of all, they like to stand on balconies, those too-narrow balconies which real urban-dwellers fill with bikes and rusted BBQs, but where the Render Ghosts dance and chatter, sip from tall flutes of champagne, admire sunsets and city views, live, love, and wait. They are waiting for their own end.

via Electronic Voice Phenomena | The Render Ghosts – James Bridle.