Blue Light Blues

Removing blue light exposure before bed is casually mentioned in conversation about improving sleep. But what does the science say? A meta-analysis reviews the question and looks for consistencies between studies. What did they find? First a small mechanistic explanation of the proposed reason why blue light is bad.

Blue light filters block 450–480 nm light. Retinal ganglion cells are highly sensitive to this wavelength, showing peak activation after exposure. This in turn suppresses melatonin secretion and increases neurocognitive alertness. Electronic personal devices with such a wavelength seem to increase the time it takes to fall asleep, and reduces subjective and objective sleep quality. …

Learning

Learning and addiction are highly related. If organisms cannot form causal connections between drugs and their source, they cannot form behavior to increase the benefits of the drug. Therefore, examining both learning and addiction in model organisms is in order to solve addiction. Fruit flies, drosophila, can actually tell us much about both phenotypes.

Invertebrates have a stigma surrounding them, that they are incapable of doing the things that “higher” organisms do. One of the things that belongs to “higher” organisms is learning. It is very human-centric to think that a biological adaption to the universal law of change — learning — is something only humans posses. …

Pick Your Poison

When people use drugs to cope, we typically look down on them. But at the end of the day we have to realize competing values. When a person with ADHD takes Adderall, most people don’t take any issue with this, as it’s a medication. The clinical efficacy of Adderall seems positive. For one, Adderall increases attention span, which is highly associated with wellbeing and academic performance — I’m not concerned about Adderall specifically, just drugs that increase wellbeing and functionality in society. No one prefers to be more unclear in thought, and Adderall remedies this. Prescription drugs have little stigma attached to them, but un-prescribed drugs besides alcohol have negative associations. But the fact is that people use alcohol to increase wellbeing at the cost of health. …

Perspective Piece

King Solomon’s Ring

Konrad Lorenz was the modern founder of ethology. Ethology is the study of animal behavior, namely the study of animals in their natural habitat — where animals behave as they evolved to. Lorenz was an eclectic keeper of animals — passersby’s of his Austrian house have bore witness to him squatting in his yard and quacking, with a slew of ducklings in tow — trying to get them to follow. …

A Rugged Economy

The 19th-century naturalist, poet, essayist, abolitionist, and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau has taken criticism of late. However, most of his work, and especially that in his famous book Walden, stands independent of that criticism. We must hold off the charges that he is hypocritical, and examine his claims about the nature of the world and judge them independently.

Walden is a collection of stories of Thoreau’s time spent on Walden pond, a pond in Massachusetts that is not so remote from Concord. He built a cabin nearby in which he spent a couple years “living simply”. Walden asks the question that crosses every philosopher’s mind: what are the bare necessities of a good life? …

“Three Generations of Imbeciles is Enough”

Humans will never stop clutching at tools that help us explain the world and improve our lot. The cost of genome editing very shortly will become so cheap that the extent to which we edit the genome will be determined not by cost, but by our own indecision in what is good to change. …

What’s It Like to Be a Neuron?

There is a experiential difference between the sense of touching your own cheek and the slow and soft caress of a lover which sets off a wildfire of neuronal activity despite being almost the same physical inputs.

Being able to define what the self is is not just a philosophical problem, but it is also a scientific one. Phenomenology, broadly speaking, is a description of what it’s like to have an interior conscious experience or a sense of self. …

New Developments

The killing of Breonna Taylor reveals a severe problem with drug policing in America, but evidence revealed and stated in a press conference by Attorney General Daniel Cameron supports that the LNPD did not serve the warrant they acquired as a no-knock warrant, and that the use of force by the police was warranted, although one officer may be convicted for endangering the tenants of an adjacent apartment. As it stands legally, It does not appear the officers who served the warrant are culpable for murder.

Something many people are conflating in this shooting is the morally questionable legal precedence for drug policing, and the guiltiness of the officers. Any questions as to the validity of the warrant does not pertain to the guilt of the officers, because no officers involved in the shooting took part in the acquisition of it. Unless the evidence used to acquire the warrant was forged, the blame for the poor evidence passing muster for a warrant would fall solely on the judge who issued it. The nature of the issuing of the warrant, and the fact that it was served at night is the most concerning thing about this case. …