Nature hacking

Nature itself can teach us how to hack into nature, like bees, which Mark Mescher and Consuelo De Moraes of ETH in Zurich noted that they expertly nibble on leaves to “encourage” plants to bloom.

Interestingly, attempts to replicate these insect treatments with our methods have been unsuccessful, and scientists are now wondering if the secret to effective insect damage to leaves lies in the unique pattern they use, or perhaps in the introduction of some substances by the bees. On others biohacking fields however, we are doing better.

For example, engineers recently discovered how turn spinach into environmental sensory systemswhich can alert you to the presence of explosives. In 2016, chemical engineer Ming Hao Wong and his team at MIT transplanted carbon nanotubes into spinach leaves. Traces of explosiveswhich the plant absorbed through the air or groundwater, made nanotubes emit a fluorescent signal. To capture such a signal from the factory, a small infrared camera was pointed at the leaf and attached to a Raspberry Pi chip. When the camera detected a signal, it triggered an email alert. After developing nanosensors in spinach, Wong began to develop other applications for the technology, especially in agriculture to warn of drought or pests.

the phenomenon of bioluminescence, for example. in squid, jellyfish and other sea creatures. French designer Sandra Rey presents bioluminescence as a natural way of lighting, that is, the creation of "living" lanterns that emit light without electricity (2). Ray is the founder and CEO of Glowee, a bioluminescent lighting company. He predicts that one day they will be able to replace conventional electric street lighting.

2. Glowee Lighting Visualization

For the production of light, Glowee technicians involve bioluminescence gene obtained from Hawaiian cuttlefish into E. coli bacteria, and then they grow these bacteria. By programming the DNA, engineers can control the color of the light when it turns off and on, as well as many other modifications. These bacteria obviously need to be cared for and fed to stay alive and radiant, so the company is working to keep the light on longer. At the moment, says Rei at Wired, they have one system that's been running for six days. The current limited lifespan of the fixtures means they are mostly suitable for events or festivals at the moment.

Pets with electronic backpacks

You can watch insects and try to imitate them. You can also try to “hack” them and use them as… miniature drones. Bumblebees are equipped with "backpacks" with sensors, such as those used by farmers to monitor their fields (3). The problem with microdrones is power. There is no such problem with insects. They fly tirelessly. Engineers loaded their "baggage" with sensors, memory for data storage, receivers for location tracking and batteries for powering electronics (that is, much smaller capacity) - all weighing 102 milligrams. As the insects go about their daily activities, sensors measure temperature and humidity, and their position is tracked using a radio signal. After returning to the hive, data is downloaded and the battery is wirelessly charged. The team of scientists calls their technology Living IoT.

3. Live IoT, which is a bumblebee with an electronic system on its back

Zoologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. Martin Wikelski decided to test the popular belief that animals have an innate ability to sense impending disasters. Wikelski leads the international animal sensing project, ICARUS. The author of the design and research gained notoriety when he attached GPS beacons animals (4), both large and small, in order to study the influence of phenomena on their behavior. Scientists have shown, among other things, that an increased presence of white storks may be indicative of locust infestations, and the location and body temperature of mallard ducks may be indicative of the spread of avian influenza among humans.

4. Martin Wikelski and the transmitter stork

Now Wikelski is using goats to find out if there is something in the ancient theories that animals "know" about impending earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Immediately after the massive 2016 Norcia earthquake in Italy, Wikelski collared livestock near the epicenter to see if they behaved differently before the shocks. Each collar contained both GPS tracking devicelike an accelerometer.

He later explained that with such round-the-clock monitoring, it is possible to identify "normal" behavior and then look for abnormalities. Wikelski and his team noted that the animals increased their acceleration in the hours before the earthquake hit. He observed "warning periods" from 2 to 18 hours, depending on the distance from the epicenter. Wikelski applies for a patent for a disaster warning system based on the collective behavior of animals relative to a baseline.

Improve photosynthesis efficiency

The earth lives because it plants all over the world release oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesisand some of them become additional nutritious foods. However, photosynthesis is imperfect, despite many millions of years of evolution. Researchers at the University of Illinois have begun work on correcting the defects in photosynthesis, which they believe could increase crop yields by up to 40 percent.

They focused on a process called photorespirationwhich is not so much a part of photosynthesis as its consequence. Like many biological processes, photosynthesis does not always work perfectly. During photosynthesis, plants take in water and carbon dioxide and turn them into sugars (food) and oxygen. Plants do not need oxygen, so it is removed.

The researchers isolated an enzyme called ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO). This protein complex binds a carbon dioxide molecule to ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate (RuBisCO). Over the centuries, Earth's atmosphere has become more oxidized, meaning that RuBisCO has to deal with more oxygen molecules mixed with carbon dioxide. In one out of four cases, RuBisCO mistakenly captures an oxygen molecule, and this affects performance.

Due to the imperfection of this process, plants are left with toxic by-products such as glycolate and ammonia. The processing of these compounds (through photorespiration) requires energy, which is added to the losses resulting from the inefficiency of photosynthesis. The authors of the study note that rice, wheat and soybeans are deficient because of this, and RuBisCO becomes even less accurate as the temperature rises. This means that as global warming intensifies, there may be a reduction in food supplies.

This solution is part of a program called (RIPE) and involves introducing new genes that make photorespiration faster and more energy efficient. The team developed three alternative pathways using the new genetic sequences. These pathways have been optimized for 1700 different plant species. For two years, the scientists tested these sequences using modified tobacco. It is a common plant in science because its genome is exceptionally well understood. More efficient pathways for photorespiration allow plants to save a significant amount of energy that can be used for their growth. The next step is to introduce genes into food crops such as soybeans, beans, rice and tomatoes.

Artificial blood cells and gene clippings

Nature hacking this leads in the end to the man himself. Last year, Japanese scientists reported that they had developed an artificial blood that can be used on any patient, regardless of blood type, that has several real-life applications in trauma medicine. Recently, scientists have made an even bigger breakthrough by creating synthetic red blood cells (5). These artificial blood cells they not only show the properties of their natural counterparts, but also have advanced capabilities. A team from the University of New Mexico, Sandia National Laboratory, and South China Polytechnic University have created red blood cells that can not only carry oxygen to various parts of the body, but also deliver drugs, sense toxins, and perform other tasks. .

5. Synthetic blood cell

The process of creating artificial blood cells it was initiated by natural cells that were first coated with a thin layer of silica and then with layers of positive and negative polymers. The silica is then etched and finally the surface is covered with natural erythrocyte membranes. This has led to the creation of artificial erythrocytes having the size, shape, charge and surface proteins similar to real ones.

In addition, the researchers demonstrated the flexibility of newly formed blood cells by pushing them through tiny gaps in model capillaries. Finally, when tested in mice, no toxic side effects were found even after 48 hours of circulation. The tests loaded these cells with hemoglobin, anti-cancer drugs, toxicity sensors, or magnetic nanoparticles to show they could carry different types of charges. Artificial cells can also act as bait for pathogens.

Nature hacking this ultimately leads to the idea of ​​genetic correction, fixing and engineering humans, and the opening of brain interfaces for direct communication between brains.

Currently, there is a lot of anxiety and worry about the prospect of human genetic modification. Arguments in favor are also strong, such as that genetic manipulation techniques can help eliminate the disease. They can eliminate many forms of pain and anxiety. They can increase people's intelligence and longevity. Some people go so far as to say they can change the scale of human happiness and productivity by many orders of magnitude.

Genetic Engineeringif its expected consequences were taken seriously, it could be regarded as a historical event, equal to the Cambrian explosion, which changed the pace of evolution. When most people think of evolution, they think of biological evolution through natural selection, but as it turns out, other forms of it can be imagined.

Starting in the XNUMXs, people began to modify the DNA of plants and animals (see also: ), creation genetically modified foodsetc. Currently, half a million children are born every year with the help of IVF. Increasingly, these processes also include sequencing embryos to screen for diseases and determining the most viable embryo (a form of genetic engineering, albeit without actual active changes to the genome).

With the advent of CRISPR and similar technologies (6), we have seen a boom in research into making real changes to DNA. In 2018, He Jiankui created the first genetically modified children in China, for which he was sent to prison. This issue is currently the subject of fierce ethical debate. In 2017, the US National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine approved the concept of human genome editing, but only "after finding answers to questions of safety and performance" and "only in the case of serious diseases and under close supervision."

The point of view of "designer babies", that is, designing people by choosing the traits that a child should have to be born, causes controversy. This is undesirable as it is believed that only the wealthy and privileged will have access to such methods. Even if such a design is technically impossible for a long time, it will even be genetic manipulation regarding the deletion of genes for defects and diseases are not clearly evaluated. Again, as many fear, this will only be available to a select few.

However, this is not as simple a cut-out and inclusion of buttons as those who are familiar with CRISPR mainly from illustrations in the press imagine. Many human characteristics and susceptibility to disease are not controlled by one or two genes. Diseases range from having one gene, creating conditions for many thousands of risk options, increasing or decreasing susceptibility to environmental factors. However, while many diseases, such as depression and diabetes, are polygenic, even simply cutting out individual genes often helps. For example, Verve is developing a gene therapy that reduces the prevalence of cardiovascular disease, one of the leading causes of death worldwide. relatively small editions of the genome.

For complex tasks, and one of them polygenic basis of disease, the use of artificial intelligence has recently become a recipe. It's based on companies like the one that started offering parents a polygenic risk assessment. In addition, sequenced genomic datasets are getting larger and larger (some with over a million genomes sequenced), which will increase the accuracy of machine learning models over time.

brain network

In his book, Miguel Nicolelis, one of the pioneers of what is now known as “brain hacking,” called communication the future of humanity, the next stage in the evolution of our species. He conducted research in which he connected the brains of several rats using sophisticated implanted electrodes known as brain-brain interfaces.

Nicolelis and his colleagues described the achievement as the first "organic computer" with living brains linked together as if they were multiple microprocessors. The animals in this network have learned to synchronize the electrical activity of their nerve cells in the same way that they do in any individual brain. The networked brain has been tested for things like its ability to distinguish between two different patterns of electrical stimuli, and they usually outperform individual animals. If the interconnected brains of rats are "smarter" than those of any single animal, imagine the capabilities of a biological supercomputer interconnected by a human brain. Such a network could allow people to work across language barriers. Also, if the results of the rat study are correct, networking the human brain could improve performance, or so it seems.

There have been recent experiments, also mentioned in the pages of MT, which involved pooling the brain activity of a small network of people. Three people sitting in different rooms worked together to orient the block correctly so it could bridge the gap between other blocks in a Tetris-like video game. Two people who acted as "senders," with electroencephalographs (EEGs) on their heads that recorded the electrical activity of their brains, saw the gap and knew if the block needed to be rotated to fit. The third person, acting as the "receiver", did not know the correct solution and had to rely on instructions sent directly from the brains of the senders. A total of five groups of people were tested with this network, called "BrainNet" (7), and on average they achieved over 80% accuracy on the task.

7. Photo from the BrainNet experiment

To make things more difficult, the researchers sometimes added noise to the signal sent by one of the senders. Faced with conflicting or ambiguous directions, recipients quickly learned to identify and follow the sender's more precise instructions. The researchers note that this is the first report that many people's brains have been wired in a completely non-invasive way. They argue that the number of people whose brains can be networked is practically unlimited. They also suggest that information transmission using non-invasive methods can be improved by simultaneous brain activity imaging (fMRI), as this potentially increases the amount of information that a broadcaster can convey. However, fMRI is not an easy procedure, and it will complicate an already extremely difficult task. The researchers also speculate that the signal could be targeted to specific areas of the brain to trigger awareness of specific semantic content in the recipient's brain.

At the same time, tools for more invasive and possibly more efficient brain connectivity are rapidly evolving. Elon Mask recently announced the development of a BCI implant containing XNUMX electrodes to enable broad communication between computers and nerve cells in the brain. (DARPA) has developed an implantable neural interface capable of simultaneously firing a million nerve cells. Although these BCI modules were not specifically designed to interoperate brain-brainit is not difficult to imagine that they can be used for such purposes.

In addition to the above, there is another understanding of “biohacking”, which is fashionable especially in Silicon Valley and consists in various types of wellness procedures with sometimes dubious scientific foundations. Among them are various diets and exercise techniques, as well as incl. transfusion of young blood, as well as implantation of subcutaneous chips. In this case, the rich think of something like "hacking death" or old age. So far, there is no convincing evidence that the methods they use can significantly extend life, not to mention the immortality that some dream of.