Search Results for: cancer

Before we get started here today I thought I’d take a moment to point out how important communication is. The people who create The Flash comic book were so impressed by the success of the TV series that, as an homage, they changed the character’s costume to reflect the one on the show. Simultaneously, as it turns out, the creators of the TV show were so impressed with the direction the comic book was taking that they changed the costume of their character to match the comic book. Since both are well into production that state of affairs is going to remain for a bit. I’m sure that, sooner rather than later, someone will buy someone else a beer and they’ll pick one. But, for now, that’s kind of funny.

Since we’re on the subject of communication and since books provide an oasis in a desert of ignorance and conformity, let’s talk about a book you can drink.

No, I’m not drunk.

Thomas Mukoya has the story.

Teri Dankovich, from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, who has been leading the research on what she calls “the drinkable book” said in one trial, they tested a ditch contaminated with sewage that contained millions of bacteria. “Even with highly contaminated water sources like that one, we can achieve 99.9% purity with our silver-and copper-nanoparticle paper, bringing bacteria levels comparable to those of US drinking water,” she said.

Each page is embedded with silver and copper nano-particles. The pages contain instructions in English and the local language; water is poured and filtered through the pages themselves. One page can purify up to 100 liters (about 26 gallons) of water and one book can supply one person’s drinking water needs for about four years, the researchers said.

That is also good news for drought ravaged areas (HI CALIFORNIA!) and for areas where infrastructure is a rumor (HI MISSISSIPPI!). You may think I’m kidding but I’m not. There are growing sections of the United States which, for a variety of intertwined religious and political reasons, are drifting back into the Middle Ages. In Kentucky, for example, roads and access to medical care are so scant that supplies have to be regularly airlifted in to some villages or people will die.

Ironically, the reasons cited by the residents of these blighted areas for refusing to accept access to modern conveniences are EXACTLY the same as the ones spouted by ISIS and their ilk. Well, it’s ironic to us. I’m not sure they know what the word means.

And part of that growing ignorance is a return to hex signs and herbalists. Emma Smith, over at I Fucking Love Science, takes a look at the proven risks.

Many treatments for cancer and other diseases were originally derived from naturally-occurring substances. The chemotherapy drug Taxol, created from a compound found in yew leaves, is a prime example.

Conversely, some of the most poisonous substances in the world – ricin, cyanide, arsenic, hemlock, snake venoms and mercury to name but a few – are all entirely natural.

Furthermore, alternative ‘natural’ therapies are not guaranteed to be safe. Examples include a serious risk of cyanide poisoning from laetrile, permanent scarring or disfigurement from cancer salves, and bowel damage, blood salt imbalances or even life-threatening septicaemia caused by coffee enemas.

– A N D –

Cancer is a complex disease, and without access to detailed medical records – which are confidential – it is impossible to paint a fully accurate picture of an individual’s cancer journey and whether alternative therapies played any role in their recovery.

More worryingly, there are some cases where evidence points towards a murkier interpretation of ‘truth’ and fact.

For example, Australian blogger Belle Gibson built a large media profile and business around the story of having apparently ‘healed herself’ of a brain tumour through diet and lifestyle changes, but has now admitted that she never actually had cancer at all.

People pushing alternative therapies frequently wheel out stories from ‘survivors’ who are apparently alive due to their treatments, yet without providing solid evidence to prove it is true. This raises false hope and unrealistic expectations that there is a hidden miracle cure that can be unlocked for the right price, or by eating exactly the right foods.

Steve Jobs believed cancer could be cured using the methods above. Had he simply gotten traditional treatments the odds are greatly in favor of him still being alive. Instead he’s very dead and never going to get better.

This is not to say that all natural remedies are bad. They most certainly are not. This is to say they need to be rigorously tested before being foisted on the general public. One such wonderful example is a mixture of cow puke and garlic that can cure styes and severe skin infections.

Clare Wilson, over at New Scientist, fills us in.

The project was born when Freya Harrison, a microbiologist at the University of Nottingham, UK, got talking to Christina Lee, an Anglo-Saxon scholar. They decided to test a recipe from an Old English medical compendium called Bald’s Leechbook, housed in the British Library.

Some of the ingredients, such as copper from the brass vessel, kill bacteria grown in a dish – but it was unknown if they would work on a real infection or how they would combine.

Sourcing authentic ingredients was a major challenge, says Harrison. They had to hope for the best with the leeks and garlic because modern crop varieties are likely to be quite different to ancient ones – even those branded as heritage. For the wine they used an organic vintage from a historic English vineyard.

As “brass vessels” would be hard to sterilise – and expensive – they used glass bottles with squares of brass sheet immersed in the mixture. Bullocks gall was easy, though, as cow’s bile salts are sold as a supplement for people who have had their gall bladders removed.

After nine days of stewing, the potion had killed all the soil bacteria introduced by the leek and garlic. “It was self-sterilising,” says Harrison. “That was the first inkling that this crazy idea just might have some use.”

A side effect was that it made the lab smell of garlic. “It was not unpleasant,” says Harrison. “It’s all edible stuff. Everyone thought we were making lunch.”

The potion was tested on scraps of skin taken from mice infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This is an antibiotic-resistant version of the bacteria that causes styes, more commonly known as the hospital superbug MRSA. The potion killed 90 per cent of the bacteria. Vancomycin, the antibiotic generally used for MRSA, killed about the same proportion when it was added to the skin scraps.

You’ll note that she mentions “sourcing the ingredients.” That’s because foods that existed 100 or 200 years ago are now almost all gone forever. As Megan Kelly reported, a variety of economic and aesthetic reasons have led to the demise of thousands of fruits and vegetables.

Some were too big or small for commercial sale so farmers stopped growing them.

Still, back in May of this year, I wrote about a tree that can grow 40 or more types of fruit at once. And it can do so with just a single sapling from a forgotten plant. There are many people who keep one form or another on their home properties (actual heirloom fruits) and scientists have been hunting them down. It’s not Frankenfood, it’s organic splicing and it’s saving many fruits you otherwise would have never been allowed to taste.

And because it’s organic – really, all you need is a sharp knife, tape, access to a variety of saplings and a lot of patience – this technique can be used to diversify the fruit supply in blighted regions. Also, as a bonus, different fruits bloom at different times so the tree produces year round. Extra bonus? One tree uses far less water than an orchard and can still feed quite a few people.

Okay, I’m boring you. You need your share of excitement or you’ll wander off to the midget porn carnival on Vimeo. Okay, I understand.

So here’s an article from Caroline Reid about a robot drone that shoots trees into the ground.

BioCarbon Engineering, the brainchild of former NASA engineer Lauren Fletcher, has proposed a solution: Industrial reforestation with robot drones. Could reforestation get any more awesome?

The drones would plant an estimated 1 billion trees a year, saving people from having to do it by hand. This would make reforestation quicker and cheaper. However, Fletcher doesn’t say that this new method of reforestation is necessarily better than planting trees by hand, just cheaper. If put into full effect, the drone method of planting trees could cut the price of traditional practices down to 15% of the original cost.

The drones won’t indiscriminately fire seeds anywhere they happen to fly over. Instead, the machines will first gather terrain data and information on the local fauna, reporting back on the region’s “restoration potential.”

When the restoration potential is approved, and the region is ready to support new seeds, a planting route is mapped for the drones to follow. The drones then fire the ground with germinated seed pellets at a rate of 10 seeds per minute.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that deforestation is so bad on our planet that we need a method to plant a billion trees a year quickly. Another problem is that old growth trees, like Oak and Redwood, take too long to grow so they are being eliminated in favor of faster growing trees like birch and pine.

Another problem facing us, as noted above, is drought. One solution – that works but creates mountains fo dry salt which pollutes the ground – is desalination. Tony Perry, from the LA Times, says those worries may be a thing of the past.

Thousands of desalination and water recycling plants have been built around the world, with some of the biggest in the Middle East, North Africa and the Caribbean. The Carlsbad plant, set to begin operation by Thanksgiving, is making its debut just as drought has become a crisis across California and the West.

For Poseidon Water, the Boston company building the plant — and for the international desalination industry — it presents an opportunity to try to disprove the criticism that dogs such projects: that they are exorbitantly expensive, hog energy and damage the environment.

“Carlsbad is going to change the way we see water in California for decades,” said Peter MacLaggan, a Poseidon Water vice president. “It’s not a silver bullet to solve all our water problems, but it’s going to be another tool in the toolbox.”

Though it might be lost on some of this summer’s convention-goers, San Diego has a long history with desalination.

The region took it as a clarion call when, in 1961, President Kennedy declared: “If we could ever, competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from saltwater that would be in the long-range interests of humanity [and] really dwarf any other scientific accomplishments.”

The federal government built a plant for the Navy on Point Loma. (It was dismantled in 1964 and taken to the Guantanamo Bay naval base when Fidel Castro threatened to cut off its water supply. It operated well into the 1980s.)

General Atomics in La Jolla did pioneering work on developing the membrane technology that cleans salt and other impurities from seawater through a process called reverse osmosis. One of the pioneers, Don Bray, spun off his own company.

It was the beginning of making San Diego County what industry veteran Doug Eisberg calls “the Silicon Valley of desalination.” Dozens of companies employ 3,000 workers to provide the delicate, complex membranes needed for the world’s plants that specialize in desalination and water reuse.

Of course if the water’s too polluted in the first place none of this matters. Which is why Renee Lewis over at Al Jazeera is so excited to tell about a new way to clean up, literally, oceans’ worth of trash.

The world’s first system designed to rid the oceans of plastic pollution will be deployed near Japan in 2016, with the aim of eventually capturing half of the plastic found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a large concentration of marine debris located between Hawaii and California.

Boyan Slat, the 20-year-old Dutch CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, an organization dedicated to cleaning the world’s oceans, designed the system dubbed The Ocean Cleanup Array.

“I’ve always been interested in technology, and I was launching rockets at 12 years old,” Slat said. “Eventually I started studying aerospace engineering, but I dropped out to try to develop this ocean clean up idea.”

He said his inspiration for the organization came after a diving holiday in Greece where he realized he was coming across more plastic bags than fish.

“I wondered, ‘Why can’t we clean this up?’” Slat said.

Plastic debris, most of it in the form of tiny beads known as microplastics, can be found on up to 88 percent of the surface of all five oceans, according to a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Because of swirling ocean currents, known as gyres, this plastic pollution has become concentrated in certain areas.

In other cases, ocean currents send plastic pollution toward certain islands or coastal areas in greater concentration than others. One such area is the Japanese island of Tsushima.

“The reason we picked that location is because the current and wave conditions are very favorable for our tests, and there really is a lot of plastic,” Slat said. “The island where we performed the test sees 30,000 cubic meters of trash wash ashore per year.”

30,000 cubic meters is over 1,000,000 cubic feet. Or, to simplify, over 333,333 feet wide (i.e., 3,333 or so football fields) and the same amount long and high.

That’s a lot of fucking trash and that’s just one island. Where does all that shit come from? Cruise ships, airliners, and you.

All is not lost. 3D printers are being modified to use natural materials like dirt and trash to create modern living facilities. I mean the kind wherein you can have electric and plumbing, not just some glorified Adobe structure. Wind farms are moving to using turbine styled systems instead of blades so they take up less space, can create more power, and don’t kill birds. Several wind collectors also can collect water from the air and save it into cisterns which people can easily access. In impoverished parts of South America these are already in use. Maglev (Magnetic Levitation) trains and vehicles are now faster, safer, and cheaper to operate than the traditional rail system we have here. That means that commerce and travel are both cheaper in areas where infrastructure has been updated.

In other words it can be done, it can be beneficial and it doesn’t require hex signs.

If you want to help take a moment to talk quietly, and without recrimination, to those who eschew progress and explain to them that the world is progressing anyway. And it is doing so for the better. All of this means that people can be healthier, live longer and more productive lives and not be a drain on others. Those are all good things.

It all starts with roads and doctors but it does have to get started soon or this country will be no better than a third world country of 20 years ago. I specify since there are now countries in Africa and Asia that are surpassing us in many ways.

Sorry that I haven’t posted in a while. The WNC Super Computer took a giant crap two weeks ago and set off a chain of events that made me think I might be better off with a stone tablet. And there were other times that I worried that that solution was too high tech. Sadly, one cannot do proper web design or graphics or write blogs on such crude devices. So I have a new (slightly used) computer adorned with Hello Kitty stickers. Which is fine by me. I wanted a Hello Kitty band aid when I had my surgery 3 weeks ago. Instead I was given a flesh colored one, said color only applying to about 9% of the human race as far as I can tell, and sent merrily on my way. The good news is that after a decade of excruciating pain I can now amble about with the best of you and do so pain free. Sans Hello Kitty band aid, but I can live with that. During my down time I used my phone for research. I learned a lot doing that. For example, I can only have sixteen tabs open at one time. I also learned that I hate texting with a passion.

But above and beyond that I learned some stuff that I’m going to share with you here today. I’ll start with a simple one. According to Aamna Mohdin you and spiders, yes, you, have something very important in common. Your insulin and spider’s venom are pretty much the same thing.

Spider and centipede venom contain a terrifying cocktail of chemicals that are used to devour prey and defend themselves from predators. Some, like the funnel-web spider’s venom, are able to instantly paralyze its victims. Now, a new study has revealed the origin of their venom, and oddly enough, not only did this powerful weapon evolve from insulin-like hormones, but this evolution occurred in arachnids as well as centipedes.

Researchers first looked for similarities between the proteins in the venom and other molecules in hormones. After analyzing these protein sequences, researchers were unable to find any genetic similarities, but did discover that they had similar molecular shapes.

“If you take the sequence of the spider toxin and you do a BLAST search, the hormone is so different now that you don’t pull it out,” said study senior author Glenn King, from University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience, in a statement. “But when we did a structural search and it pulled up the hormone, that’s what really surprised us—the sequence didn’t tell us where the toxins evolved from, but the structure did pretty clearly.”

The venoms evolved from a hormone that once helped regulate sugar, similar to what insulin does for humans. Venoms aren’t all bad as they can provide researchers with the opportunity to study different chemicals, and these natural resources can be broken down. By getting a clearer picture of the origin and structure of these venoms, researchers hope to develop new pharmaceuticals and bioinsecticides by altering their chemical structure. Some of these products include analgesics and blood pressure drugs.

Other products, that use actual venom, include blood thinners that are far more reactive and controllable. While still in the early test stages these drugs could save the lives of millions of stroke victims.

Oh well, as long as we’re injecting you with lethal compounds, let’s have some fun and inject you with cancer.

As Gwennaëlle Monnot points out, it’s for your own good.

(B)acteria are not the only micro-organism we can use against cancer. Some viruses have oncolytic properties (where it specifically infects and kills cancer cells), and additionally they can be easily made from scratch in the laboratory, thus allowing for easy genetic modification.

Viruses are a highly evolved type of infectious agent. When they enter a cell, they inject their genetic information into it – or in the case of the herpes virus, blasting in its DNA. The cell then uses that genetic information like its own, and produces the viral proteins it encodes for. This leads to the cell unknowingly making more and more viral particles, until it bursts. The newly made viruses can then go and infect a neighbouring cell.

Fortunately, our cells have evolved to “sense” viral entry into their cytoplasm and to react by either blocking their production of proteins, or committing suicide. This is a tightly regulated function called “programmed cell death”, which prevents the further spread of the virus.

The interesting thing when it comes to cancer is that the malignant cells have lost, through many genetic mutations, the ability to protect themselves against viruses, as well as to undergo programmed cell death. Their inability to die when they should is actually at the core of their malignancy. So using viruses can be a way to specifically target tumour cells, while healthy cells remain unharmed.

In the recent phase III clinical trial, talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC) was used, which is a genetically modified herpes simplex virus (HSV). Normal HSV is highly evolved and has learned to hide from our cells’ viral sensors. But this therapeutic HSV has been genetically dulled to be efficiently controlled by healthy cells, but still able to infect tumour cells. Its ability to replicate, however, is not compromised – which means that a small dose of virus can keep infecting new targets until all tumours cells are gone. Moreover, it induces the expression of GM-CSF in the tumour cells, which is a factor that recruits immune cells to the tumour site. The effect of T-VEC is hence double: directly destroying the tumour cells, as well as attracting immune cells on site to finish up the job.

In comparison to the previous examples, this treatment was generally safer, with no treatment-related death, and few patients discontinuing therapy because of discomfort (4%). Moreover, the efficacy was unprecedented for this kind of therapy, as 16.3% of patients achieved remission for at least six months, compared to 2.1% receiving the control treatment. Interestingly, the benefits were even increased in the patients who had a milder severity of melanoma, as well as in the patients for whom it was the first line of treatment.

These data demonstrate the potential of microbial infection to enhance the immunotherapy of cancer, and pave the way for the development of new therapies in the field of oncology.

Any medical researcher will tell you that any time you can get the body to heal itself the better off you are. I have written before how there are now several lines of research following that train of thought. Some are further along than others but all look promising on their own and may, when used in conjunction, actually provide a cure.

What about in non-medical news? Anything cool happening there? Why yes, there is, if by “cool” you mean that you think watching animals starting to evolve in new and strange ways that could spell our extinction is cool.

Then, yeah. I’ve got some hellaciously cool shit for you.

Robert Evans & Fernando Ramirez happily inform us that suicidal squirrels are gleefully dismantling the U.S. power grid.

There is an army trying to take down the world’s power grid, right now, as we speak. They are dedicated, they are numerous, and they are willing to die. They’re also very small and furry.

They are squirrels.

They run up power lines, chew anything that looks like it carries more than 1,000 volts of electricity, and die. Other times, they acrobatically stretch to grab both the power line and the transformer to try their hand at being a conduit for high-voltage electricity flow, and die. It’s like there’s a specific bloodline of squirrels whose only purpose in the universe is to knock out the power while you’re right in the middle of a Supernatural marathon.

It isn’t a small problem, either. Squirrels cause thousands of blackouts every year. A company in Nebraska found that squirrels cause more power outages per year than lightning. In Austin, where squirrels cause 300 power outages a year, Austin Energy is spending more than $100,000 annually to install technology to protect their grid from squirrels (“technology” here meaning “giant hunks of squirrel-deflecting metal”), which seems like an unnecessary amount of money until you consider that the squirrels caused an estimated $2 million worth of damage to their grid in a single year. There have been terrorist cells that were less effective in disrupting government infrastructure.

It’s an adorable jihad against your ability to use Spotify.

When you multiply those amounts by the number of grid stations scattered across the country you end up looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in damage every year. So when your libertarian friend says “we don’t need no infrastructure” just have him/her grab their Hello Kitty assault rifle, park their happy ass down by the nearest power lines, and keep America safe.

One cute squirrel at a time.

I’m sure that will go well.

In other related news, while some were out denying evolution, monkeys started to evolve and develop the ability to use complex tools.

I mentioned this on my last radio show and received the following email from a nice man named Jason in Aurora.

“What the actual fuck was that? You can’t just say fucking chimps are learning to use tools. I saw Planet of the Apes you asshole, I know what that means.”

He’s right. Further elucidation is in order and Josh L. Davis is here to provide it.

In the region where the researchers were studying the chimps, local people harvest the palm wine by making wedge-shaped cuts into the tree’s trunk, allowing the sugary sap that seeps out to gather in large containers. The villagers then collect the fermented sweet liquid in the mornings and evenings, as the alcohol concentration rises too high if left any longer.

This gives the cheeky chimps plenty of time during the day to raid the bar. Despite being watched round the clock, the researchers found that the apes were exclusive day drinkers, sleeping off the buzz at night. Although we don’t know whether they experience the same savage hangovers as humans, it seems they may experience restlessness at night like us. The main boozer of the group, for example, is reported to have acted agitated whilst trying to catch some Z’s and would take an extra hour to settle down after the sun had set.

The team, a collaboration of researchers from different institutions, looked over observations of the community of chimps from the past 20 years. They found evidence of 51 wine-drinking events within the group of 26 apes. Whilst they can’t be certain that the chimps actually got drunk, they consumed enough alcohol to equate to around 8.5 UK units—equivalent to around 1 bottle of wine—and showed signs of drunken behavior.

They use leaves as scoops and sponges to get the hootch and use rude levers to keep the tree open so they can keep the alcohol flowing.

Chimps already create spears and clubs which they use for hunting. As one scientist noted, all they need to do is harness fire to take the next evolutionary leap.

We’ll get back to that in a moment.

Let’s now move on to a larger animal that seems to have developed a new form of refrigeration. Thanks to global warming, yes, it is so a thing, polar bears have fewer and fewer seals to hunt. So they’ve started killing dolphins that get caught up in the warmer currents and end up out of their comfort zone.

Since the bears literally have no idea where their next meal is coming from they’ve started to store food. Juts like you do after a visit to CostCo.

Janet Fang has the story.

In Raudfjorden on April 23, 2014, during an annual bear capture-recapture expedition, Norwegian Polar Institute’s Jon Aars and colleagues encountered a male polar bear with the carcass of a mostly intact white-beaked dolphin (Lagenorhynchus albirostris) on the sea ice about 5 meters from shore. It was only missing some of the fat layer on its dorsal side. Another dolphin – rather the spine, ribcage, and skull of a dolphin – was on land 50 meters south. Tracks in the snow indicated that the same polar bear fed on both.

About a meter away from the intact dolphin was a small hole covered with ice slush (pictured above). It appeared to be a breathing hole kept open by dolphins trapped in the ice. After all, the surrounding sea ice is 20 centimeters thick, and this was the only spot on the fjord without solid ice. White-beaked dolphins are frequent visitors to Norwegian High Arctic waters in the summer, but they don’t usually go so far north in early spring. That winter, however, the area was ice-free, and they were swimming in open ocean until strong northerly winds packed drift ice into the fjords from April 17 to 18, trapping the dolphins. They were likely killed when they surfaced for air.

No meat had been taken from the more-or-less intact dolphin yet, and when the team chanced upon him, the bear was in the process of covering it with snow. This probably keeps foxes, gulls, and other scavengers away, though caching is a rare behavior in polar bears. They typically digest the fat that they consume from carcasses within a day, so the time that they’d need to keep competitors away is brief.

“We think he caught the second dolphin because he could, and then had extra food later,” Aars tells New Scientist. The bear was temporarily immobilized, and based on his teeth, he’s 16 to 20 years old. And while his ribs were clearly showing, he did have a rather full belly.

The concept of storing food is one of the core foundations of developing a civilization. And since bears are, by nature, nasty killers, that might be worth paying attention to.

David Tormsen is doing just that. He took a look at ten post-human entities that could end our reign.

Cancer cure or no. I’ll share one of them here and strongly suggest that you click on his link to read the rest. It’s well researched and entirely fascinating.

Uplifted Animals
The idea of raising animal species to human intelligence is an old one that dates back to H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau. Cordwainer Smith imagined uplifted animals as an oppressed underclass fighting for their rights, while David Brin’s Uplift series presented a universe where almost all intelligent creatures owed their sapiency to patron species, with humanity exploring the universe with intelligent apes and dolphins at its side.

Some theorists, such as George Dvorsky, argue that we have a moral imperative to raise other species to our level of intelligence once we possess the technological means to do so. Dvorsky points to modern efforts to have great apes be granted the legal right of “personhood,” and he asserts that the natural next step would be to give non-human animals the cognitive faculties for self-determination and participation in a society of sentient creatures. The human monopoly on sentient thought gives us an unfair and unjust advantage over our animal neighbors, and if the means exist to allow non-humans like apes, dolphins, and elephants to achieve the cognitive means of political participation, it is our moral duty to extend it to them.

Others disagree. Alex Knapp believes that the costs in terms of animal life would be too high to justify it. In order to uplift a species, it would be necessary to make changes to the DNA on an embryonic level, leading to inevitable failed attempts before we got it right. Then there is the question of how to ensure that a successfully uplifted embryo would be gestated. Such experimentation would be morally wrong, with the potential for intelligent animals suffering physical abnormalities and early death due to human meddling. Even if successful, human beings would have no way to cope with the social and emotional needs a sapient chimpanzee, bonobo, or parrot would have. In other words, uplifted animals could be left emotionally traumatized due to ham-handed attempts by humans to raise them.

Some also worry that problematic aspects of certain species’ natures, such as chimpanzees’ violence and dolphins’ inclination for rape, would carry on into their intelligent forms. Some argue that intelligent self-awareness is an ecological niche that can only sustainably hold a single species, explaining why the Neanderthals and our other human cousins were wiped out and assimilated. Creating intelligent animals could create evolutionary competition for humanity by potentially traumatized creatures with mental processes and value systems that we may not even be able to comprehend.

As David noted, while cute as all get out, dolphins are big into rape. Also, let’s say that we did imbue them with total sentience, how would such creatures view the world around them. They would have none of the cultural step stones that we had. Moreover, in their point of view, we could easily be seen to be a threat and something that needs to be eliminated. Keep in mind that those cute as all get out fish can kill sharks three times their size.

And let’s not forget our simian cousins. As David correctly noted they can be just as violent as us. They have already developed the rudimentary tools required for killing; both food and each other. They have found out how to cultivate booze and their social structure is decidedly different from ours as it relies on polyamory.

What happens when they become aware and truly see us for the first time?

Or, better yet, just in case you don’t have enough nightmares already, what if it already has?

Bryan Nelson says that quantum physicists have come up with an interesting idea.

Every comic book fan knows about the theory of the multi-verse. The idea that there exists numerous, possibly infinite, versions of you. The nice thing is that science says that we can’t get from one to another.

Now science says, “not so fast there buckaroo.”

“The idea of parallel universes in quantum mechanics has been around since 1957,” explained Howard Wiseman, a physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and one of the physicists to come up with MIW. “In the well-known ‘Many-Worlds Interpretation’, each universe branches into a bunch of new universes every time a quantum measurement is made. All possibilities are therefore realised – in some universes the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed Earth. In others, Australia was colonised by the Portuguese.”

“But critics question the reality of these other universes, since they do not influence our universe at all,” he added. “On this score, our “Many Interacting Worlds” approach is completely different, as its name implies.”

Wiseman and colleagues have proposed that there exists “a universal force of repulsion between ‘nearby’ (i.e. similar) worlds, which tends to make them more dissimilar.” Quantum effects can be explained by factoring in this force, they propose.

Whether or not the math holds true will be the ultimate test for this theory. Does it or does it not properly predict quantum effects mathematically? But the theory is certain to provide plenty of fodder for the imagination.

For instance, when asked about whether their theory might entail the possibility that humans could someday interact with other worlds, Wiseman said: “It’s not part of our theory. But the idea of [human] interactions with other universes is no longer pure fantasy.”

What might your life look like if you made different choices? Maybe one day you’ll be able to look into one of these alternative worlds and find out.

And if there’s another you it could just as well be the pet of a simian who has a jihadist squirrel as a partner.

Sweet dreams.