SynapticNulship

A cilium is a subunit of a cell that sticks out like a hair.  They are quite common in animals—a human has cilia on almost every cell, and cilium failures can result in various diseases.

cilia on a protozoan

Cilia can act as sensors, for instance responding to light or chemicals or temperature.  Some cilia can also wave around in patterns of synchronized movement.  This movement causes locomotion, either of nearby stuff (such as cells in human lungs raking mucus), or of the parent body itself (as in the case of certain microscopic organisms).

cilia in a lung

Writer Sally Pobojewski describes cilia’s usefulness:

Thanks to cilia, you can see the words on this page, smell fresh coffee brewing in the morning and hear birds chirping outside the window. Cilia regulate the growth of kidney cells and control how an embryo develops. They sweep particles and mucus out of the respiratory tract, nudge eggs down fallopian tubes, and help neurons in the brain grow new connections.

Of course, nature also has arrays of cilium-like structures at scales larger than single cells, for instance hair and the various slender protuberances in flowers.

stapelia glanduliflora flower

Artificial Cilia

A recent report describes a new type of material with cilia-like protuberances that was developed by Fang Liu, Dhanya Ramachandran, and Marek W. Urban at the University of Southern Mississippi.  The artificial cilia on this copolymer film can change shape and color in response to various electromagnetic, chemical, and thermal stimuli.  This material, especially if it advances, could be used for new types of sensors and actuators.

artificial cilia on colloidal copolymer films

Artificial cilia are also potentially useful at a macro scale, for instance Super Cilia Skin designed by Hayes Raffle, Mitchell Joachim, and James Tichenor.  Super Cilia Skin is a haptic membrane for human-computer interaction.

super cilia

A human can move the cilia with their hand, which could be an interesting tactile experience in itself when combined with a computer system.  Each cilium can move on its own as well for feedback to the user, either by feel or as a visual display.  Although the killer app for Super Cilia Skin has not surfaced yet, it also has potential as an exotic energy harnessing material for building exteriors.

Another artificial cilia example is designer Giles Miller’s Miranda Surface Tiles.  These silicon tiles have thousands of plastic hairs and could at the very least be used as interactive decorations.

plastic hairs of the miranda surface

person drawing with their hand on a miranda surface

There are some provocative fictional uses of cilia-like structures, for instance in James Cameron’s movie Avatar the lifeforms of Pandora have wiggling fibers called queues (or tswin in the Na’vi language).  When two queues are connected, they establish a neural bond (tsaheylu) between the two organisms.

Creating a neural connection (Tsahaylu)

Perhaps soon we will be making artificial cilia that can enable interfaces as good as in nature and as informationally complex as in Avatar.

(Also published on h+ magazine.)

Image Credits:

1. The Journal of Cell Biology
2. Louisa Howard via Wikipedia
3. Martin Heigan
4. Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
5. Hayes Raffle
6. Giles Miller
7. Ibid.
8. Avatar Wiki

“We’re all alone, no chaperone”
—Cole Porter

Despite his resemblance to Santa Claus, Daniel Dennett wants to disillusion the believers.  If we’re all adults, why can’t we reveal the truth that God(s), like Santa, are childish fantasies?

Earlier tonight I attended Dennett’s talk “What should replace religion?” at Tufts University, which was kindly hosted by the Tufts’ Freethought Society as part of their Freethought Week.

Atheist groups will have to compete with religion in the realm of social activities such as church services.  People won’t leave churches if they don’t have something else to give them the excitement, the music, the ecstasy, the group affiliation, the team building, the moral community, etc. that churches provide.  Many churches already contain atheists who go for all the other stuff besides the doctrine.  In fact, some of the preachers themselves do not believe the doctrine.

Daniel Dennett @ Tufts, 11 Oct 2010

I won’t go over the entire talk, but I’d like to talk about the truth segment.  Dennett pointed out the various citizen science (although he didn’t use the term citizen science) projects going on, in which random people voluntarily collect or analyze data, such as for bird watching and galaxy classification and report that to central repositories.  But certain other data collection activities have gone down—the mundane types of things such as goings-on in a town.  Town newspapers are dying, and nobody is there to take notes in local affairs (such as education, politics, etc.).  And this lost data might be important, because it is oversight.

The Internet has democratized evidence gathering while also promoting the abuse of misinformation.  So, Dennett proposes, some organizations could start projects as preservers of truth—or perhaps a church replacement could convert lovers of God into lovers of truth.  But it wouldn’t be unconditional love of truth.  The privacy of your own thoughts, for instance, may contain truthful information, but it doesn’t necessarily have to become public.  A scientific (in a broad sense of the word) organization that loves truth would compete with religion’s typically “imperfect” handling of truth.

A serious project of truth preservation could become a sort of Super Snopes.  Snopes is the famous website which debunks and/or proves true various urban legends and the like.  When you get one of those emails such as certain bananas will eat your flesh, check it out on Snopes first before continuing the hoax chain.  Dennett doesn’t define Super Snopes in detail, just that this is a kind of project that would be like Snopes or Wikipedia on an even more massive scale.  And there could be similar or overlapping projects that operate on local scales—perhaps reinstating the town/neighborhood oversight that is now missing.

Of course, something this vague has a chance of happening in the future.  But how it happens could be, as usual, an imperfect evolution from what we have now.  Hopefully secular groups, as Dennett makes the call for, will try to architect and create these projects as soon as possible.

I speculate that the projects that end up working in the future as far as truth preservation will make use of software agents (autonomous programs).  For instance, if people are not interested in taking notes on every little issue in your town/city, especially the mundane ones, then a computer can do that.

Of course, one person’s boring task is another’s hobby.  Some people enjoy collecting the data that they contribute to a central database.  But some will be able to use software agents to act as their minions—the citizen truth gatherer becomes a node, in which they are a small local central repository, which then sends data to the next biggest node, and so on.

The truth needs to be available to people whenever they want.  So the other major part of the technical aspect will be the interfaces and filters that allow humans to digest information, and to choose what streams to digest.  Of course, various web technologies have been increasing this capability (of filtering and choosing streams) for the entire life of the Internet.

Here is my question: could a (or perhaps several) Super Snopes ever evolve beyond truth preservation into actual civilization preservation, for instance like Asimov’s fictional Foundations?

(Cross-posted with Science 2.0.)