Footage from the Mariana Trench. 10,792 meters (36,000 feet) below the Ocean surface.
The Effects of Alcohol: How Bad Are They?
Learn what alcohol does to your body, the tools to get through hangovers, and how to identify your propensity for alcoholism.
Notes from The Huberman Lab Podcast episode #86: What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health.
Low Amount of Alcohol?
12–24 drinks per week, on average, or more causes neurodegeneration (a slow and progressive loss of neuronal cells in specified regions of the brain).
The “On average” is important. It means that if you have1–2 drinks a day, or 3 each day of the weekend, you’ll have the negative effects either way.
Study: Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes Results: People who drank 1–2 drinks on average per day (which is considered “low amounts”) experienced a thinning of the neocortex.
Alcohol Metabolism
Alcohol is water soluble and fat-soluble.
In other words, it can pass through all the cells and tissues of the body.
This is what explains its damaging effects.
When you ingest ethanol (alcohol), which is a toxic substance, the body has to convert it.
How?
NAD converts ethanol into acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is poison to the body, it kills cells.
Then, the body converts acetaldehyde into acetate, which is something that the body can use as fuel.
If the body can’t do this conversion fast enough, acetaldehyde will build up in the body and cause a lot more damage.
This conversion happens in the liver. This process is metabolically costly. And there’s no real nutritive value in the calories. That’s why alcohol is “empty calories”.
Alcohol Effects
The acetaldehyde is what leads to the effect of being drunk, which is a poison-induced disruption.
Regular drinkers, when they drink, feel very energized and feel very good.
Occasional drinkers have a briefer period of feeling good.
So, what happens when we drink alcohol?
Some amounts of acetaldehyde and acetate cross the blood-brain barrier, so they pass into the brain.
Disruption in top-down inhibition
There’s a suppression in the activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (the area that is involved in thinking, planning, and suppression of impulsive behavior).
Alcohol suppresses the neural networks that are involved in memory formation and storage.
There are also long-term neural circuit changes…
The more often people drink, there are changes in the circuits that underlie habitual and impulsive behavior in ways that make those people more impulsive outside the times in which they are drinking. And when they drink, impulsive behavior is even stronger.
This aspect is fortunately reversible.
If there’s a period of abstinence these neural circuits can return to normal, except in cases where the amount of alcohol was massive and was ingested throughout a huge number of years.
Food and Alcoholic Absorption
If you eat something prior to or while drinking alcohol, it will slow the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream, particularly if it includes all major macronutrients (carbs, fats, and protein).
If you are already drunk and eat something, it won’t diminish your drunkenness.
Serotonin
Alcohol disrupts the mood circuits, by first making them hyperactive.
Then serotonin levels drop (that’s why people feel less good, and go for another drink).
But as people drink more and more, there’s a depression of alertness and arousal. That’s why people pass out, get sleepy, etc.
Chronic drinkers (and people with a genetic predisposition for alcoholism), as they ingest more and more, they feel great.
Propensity for Alcoholism
Factors that might explain the propensity for alcoholism:
- Energy: If you see someone who is energized by alcohol all night drink after drink, that’s someone who is more likely to have problems with alcoholism.
- Blackouts: if you are someone who suffers blackouts, then the likelihood of having problems with alcohol increases.
- Age: People who start drinking at younger ages, are more predisposed to developing alcohol dependence, regardless of family history.
Alcohol and Stress
Alcohol changes the relationship between the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and the adrenals → The HPA axis.
People who drink regularly have elevated baseline levels of cortisol (not just when drinking, but always).
As a consequence, these people have more anxiety and stress.
Gut-Liver-Brain Axis
People who ingest alcohol are inducing a disruption in the gut microbiome, which is extremely important for overall health. Alcohol kills the healthy gut microbiota.
Pro-inflammatory effect: Alcohol also induces a release of inflammatory cytokines.
The lining of the gut is disrupted, so you can develop a leaky gut (bad bacteria can pass into the bloodstream).
The disruption of the gut microbiome and the inflammatory features of alcohol impairs the neural circuits that control the regulation of alcohol intake, which in consequence causes more drinking.
How to replenish the gut microbiota?
Two-Four servings of fermented foods per day.
Hangover
Sleep after alcohol is not as good, so even if you think you are “sleeping like a baby”, the architecture of sleep is disrupted. The sleep is not high quality.
Tool: get those gut microbiota healthy again, as alcohol killed many of those healthy bacteria.
Headaches: occur due to vasoconstriction.
Tool: Deliberate cold exposure: increasing levels of epinephrine helps with alcohol clearance.
However, be careful:
Alcohols lower core body temperature. If you do cold exposure with alcohol in your system, there’s the possibility of experiencing hypothermia, because alcohol disrupts how your body regulates temperature.
Tool: Ingest Electrolytes
Alcohol is a diuretic. It causes dehydration.
Make sure you ingest enough electrolytes (sodium, potassium, and magnesium) to replenish the proper levels, and drink two glasses of water for every alcoholic drink.
Types of Alcohol That Induce The Worse Hangover. List, in order:
- Brandy
- Wine
- Rum
- Vodka
- Beer
It’s not true that sugary drinks induce a deeper hangover.
Alcohol Tolerance
Tolerance refers to the reduced effects of alcohol with repeated exposure.
When you start drinking, there’s an increase in dopaminergic and serotonergic transmission.
After that, there is a long and slow reduction in dopamine and serotonin.
As you have more tolerance, you get less of the “good” stuff and more of the bad stuff.
If you abstain from drinking, these systems can reset.
Resveratrol
Resveratrol can be very good for your health and increase longevity.
Wine has resveratrol. However, the amount of red wine that you’d need to drink to get the resveratrol needed is too high, so it is detrimental.
Alcohol and Cancer
Alcohol changes gene expression, which therefore causes cancer, particularly breast cancer.
Alcohol accelerates the proliferation of the wrong types of cells.
Breast cancer in women: there’s a 4–13% increase in the risk of breast cancer for every 10grams of alcohol consumed. 1 glass of wine is around 10grams.
Mitigating cancer risk:
- Folate and vitamin B12: decrease the risk of cancer, but it does not offset it.
Alcohol and Pregnancy
You should never drink alcohol when pregnant. That’s it.
Fetal alcohol syndrome is a condition in a child that results from alcohol exposure during the mother’s pregnancy. Consequences include: Diminished brain, organ, and limb development.
Alcohol and Hormones
Alcohol increases the conversion of testosterone into estrogen.
Source: Medium (Juan Pablo Aranovich). Image: Krisanapong Detraphiphat/Getty.
For decades, a textbook process known as “Ostwald ripening,” named for the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, has guided the design of new materials including nanoparticles—tiny materials so small they are invisible to the naked eye.
According to this theory, small particles dissolve and redeposit onto the surface of large particles, and the large particles continue to grow until all of the small particles have dissolved.
But now, new video footage captured by Berkeley Lab scientists reveals that nanoparticle growth is directed not by difference in size, but by defects.
The scientists recently reported their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
The Extraordinary Spiral in LL Pegasi : What created the strange spiral structure on the upper left? No one is sure, although it is likely related to a star in a binary star system entering the planetary nebula phase, when its outer atmosphere is ejected. The huge spiral spans about a third of a light year across and, winding four or five complete turns, has a regularity that is without precedent. Given the expansion rate of the spiral gas, a new layer must appear about every 800 years, a close match to the time it takes for the two stars to orbit each other. The star system that created it is most commonly known as LL Pegasi, but also AFGL 3068 and IRAS 23166+1655. The featured image was taken in near-infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope. Why the spiral glows is itself a mystery, with a leading hypothesis being illumination by light reflected from nearby stars. via NASA
Mosquito Monitoring
As the global temperatures rise, wildfires and extreme weather are not our only concerns. It’s predicted, for example, that mosquitoes and the diseases they carry will expand their geographical range to more temperate zones and higher altitudes. Not all species of mosquito carry human pathogens, but it would be helpful to know the whereabouts of the ones that do. Such surveillance on a global scale is a seemingly Herculean task, but it’s precisely the aim of the Global Mosquito Observation Dashboard. The good news is anyone with a smartphone can help. The initiative is citizen-scientist oriented, the idea being that people take photos of adult or larval mosquitoes (examples of the latter shown above) and submit them via mosquito-tracking apps associated with the scheme. Researchers can then identify the species and their locations (from the photos’ geotags) and get a heads-up as to where life-saving mosquito-control efforts should be focused.
Written by Ruth Williams
- Image from the University of South Florida
- Research by Ryan M. Carney et al, Department of Integrative Biology, University of South Florida (USF), FL, USA
- Image copyright held by the original authors
- Research published in Insects, July 2022
🐟Here’s a ferocious fossil fish for #FossilFriday: Xiphactinus audax. It lived during the Late Cretaceous some 85 million years ago. Xiphactinus and its relatives were large predators with strong jaws and many teeth.
🌊It swam in the great inland sea that covered most of North America at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. Pictured is a skeleton cast that’s suspended from the ceiling of the Museum’s Hall of Vertebrate Origins—and a fossil specimen of this fish is on display in a case beneath it. The Museum is open daily from 10 am–5:30 pm. Plan your trip!
Photo: E. Louis/© AMNH
#AnimalFacts #fish #dyk #fossils #AncientAnimals #Cretaceous #amnh #museums #AncientOcean (at American Museum of Natural History) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiAWWpJgu-Q/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Are DNA scientists inadvertently manipulating their own data? New research questions results of a common tool used by DNA scientists, with potentially massive implications.
After reading into this story, I think that it's worth saying that the situation is a bit more complicated than it has been portrayed, or as the headline suggests. A human being, Jason M. Allen, used an AI program called Midjourney to create a work of visual art to his specifications, a process that he says took him over eighty hours. He entered the finished result into a contest and won first place.
I'm not an expert on art, but like many people I have a very strong relationship with it. Much of my thinking on art has been influenced by the common mythology around art and its role in modern society, a mythology which expresses the values we place on art. As I value art, I can't help having opinions on this - but since I'm not a visual artist, I'm not qualified to speak to the way this will impact those people economically. I am not optimistic on that front, but I won't get into it too much.
I think creative people of all types are right to be apprehensive about AI, because it seems that there is no reason, in principle, to suppose that it won't upend their livelihood in some way. Jason Allen says he was an active participant and creative controller of the process that resulted in his winning artwork, but as the technology improves it will be used to generate content in an increasingly automated way. I say "content" because what we're talking about is a kind of capitalist production of art-as-commodity.
If an AI program can generate an image that can win an art prize, then it can compose and record a number one pop song, write a best-selling novel, or direct an award-winning film. And I believe that when these things happen, the public will mostly accept it, because as odd as it sounds, it's not that different from what we've been trained to accept as culture. Pop music, popular books, and popular films have all been created in assembly-line fashion for over a hundred years, in a corporate structure aimed at maximizing returns from a market. Most people don't care that much about the ghostwriter of a bestseller, or the technical crew named in the end credits of a blockbuster. When AI gifts us with a bop, most people will shrug their shoulders, say "it's a bop," and dance.
A lot of people believe, intuitively, that making art should be difficult. AI makes art a lot easier, but in that sense, so does modern industrially produced paint, which comes in a variety of colors that Michelangelo could only dream of. We lionize the Renaissance masters because of what they achieved with simpler tools, though I haven't heard many people suggest that painters today limit themselves to whatever colors and techniques were available in 15th century Italy. Still, there's an inherent tension between possible through innovation, and what is thereby lost.
Like most things, issues like this make me think of Star Trek. Specifically, I think of Data from The Next Generation. Data is an android character with markedly android mannerisms, and is a futuristic depiction of what can only be called AI, who nonetheless is presented to the audience as a person with an interior life that is equally valid to a human being's. When Starfleet Command wants to compulsorily reassign and disassemble him, the show explicitly compares this to human slavery. We are meant to evaluate Data's character as we would a human crew member, and not as we would a typical piece of the show's futuristic technology.
Data wants to be seen as human, and he does human things like making art. He is shown to practice several creative arts throughout the show's run, including poetry, comedy, music, acting, and painting. He studies these arts, and attempts to replicate them, struggling along the way to find his own creative voice. His early attempts often seem to bear out the claim that, not being human, he cannot produce anything that is both original and genuinely moving. As time passes, however, this is no longer clearly the case. Attentive viewers will note that Data grows into an artist who does create with an original voice, even if that voice is characteristically like an android - in other words, characteristically like Data.
Optimistically, we may be looking at a future where an AI personality not unlike Data will create works of art that will move us all. But it is important to remember that Data is not just an AI, he is a person - and not simply because he is portrayed by a human actor. We as viewers can accept Data's legitimacy as an artist because the show takes pains to reinforce his legitimacy as a person. But Midjourney is not a person. It lacks anything like the interiority that defines Data as a person in our eyes. Midjourney is not learning how to paint so that it can become a real boy.
What Jason Allen did probably qualifies as art, and Midjourney can probably be seen as analogous to a brush or any traditional artist's tool. A tool like this could, conceivably, help artists achieve breakthroughs of the same magnitude as the discovery of perspective, or the conceptual leaps of modernism. But put that tool into the hands of people who aren't artists - say, the hands of a CEO who wants to cut costs on the latest product of the content assembly line - and I'm afraid I have to say that the result will only cheapen the art. It could be visually indistinguishable from the most beautiful human artwork I have ever seen, and it won't be worth remembering. It will have value only as a commodity.
When I think of some of my favorite works of art, music, or writing, I reflect on how what makes them my favorite is not simply that I appreciate the shape of a line, the resonance of a harmony, or the word order of a sentence. What makes the experience of engaging with these things meaningful to me is not just that they exist, but that they represent the attempt of a real human being, just like me, to communicate with other human beings just like me. What use is art without artistry?
The joy that makes art worthwhile, even art that was produced for commercial purpose, is the knowledge that it wasn't just produced for commercial purposes. It's not enough that the thing was made because the maker believed some one would buy it, but that they felt in their own soul that they could reach that person in a way that had nothing to do with money. If I can't believe that about an artwork, then I can't care about it the same way as the works I truly love. It has to be more than something to consume, at the cheapest prices available.
I don't think it can be denied that AI will change our relationship with media, or challenge some core assumptions we have about creativity. The real question is, what are human beings (and the truly sentient AI of the future) going to do about "art?"
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Energetic Materials Center and Purdue University Materials Engineering Department have used simulations performed on the LLNL supercomputer Quartz to uncover a general mechanism that accelerates chemistry in detonating explosives critical to managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Their research is featured in the July 15 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
Insensitive high explosives based on TATB (1,3,5-triamino-2,4,6-trinitrobenzene) offer enhanced safety properties over more conventional explosives, but physical explanations for these safety characteristics are not clear. Explosive initiation is understood to arise from hotspots that are formed when a shockwave interacts with microstructural defects such as pores. Ultrafast compression of pores leads to an intense localized spike in temperature, which accelerates chemical reactions needed to initiate burning and ultimately detonation. Engineering models for insensitive high explosives—used to assess safety and performance—are based on the hotspot concept but have difficulty in describing a wide range of conditions, indicating missing physics in those models.
physicsJ: Voyager 1 approaching Jupiter in 1979, recorded over 25 days. The planet rotates in under 10 hours, so they observed 60 rotations! To make this video they picked only frames which had the Great Red Spot in the same position, allowing us to see Jupiter’s screaming storms and winds.
l NASA Voyager 1 l 1979 l via physicsJ
A High Cliff on Comet Churyumov Gerasimenko : This high cliff occurs not on a planet, not on a moon, but on a comet. It was discovered to be part of the dark nucleus of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (CG) by Rosetta, a robotic spacecraft launched by ESA that rendezvoused with the Sun-orbiting comet in 2014. The ragged cliff, as featured here, was imaged by Rosetta in 2014. Although towering about one kilometer high, the low surface gravity of Comet CG would likely make it an accessible climb – and even a jump from the cliff survivable. At the foot of the cliff is relatively smooth terrain dotted with boulders as large as 20 meters across. Data from Rosetta indicates that the ice in Comet CG has a significantly different deuterium fraction – and hence likely a different origin – than the water in Earth’s oceans. Rosetta ended its mission with a controlled impact onto Comet CG in 2016. Comet CG has just completed another close approach to Earth and remains visible through a small telescope. via NASA
Well, *this* certainly explains a lot…
