Notes by user David Schneider (Stanford) for Hallmarks of Biological Failure
Post-meeting Reflection
1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:
- Presentation highlights
- Open questions that came up
- How your perspective changed
- Impact on your own work
- e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group
Some ideas I had in response to talks and conversations:
Morgan said something about organisms continuing to age post death. There might be work to support this in Drosophila and demonstrate that it is under evolutionary pressure. Dan Hultmark made an argument that the fly's immune system wasn't good at fighting pathogens, rather it just prevented the fly from turning into compost before death as it defended against the microbes that decompose the dead fly.
Daniel mentioned "The secret lives of trees". Sometimes it it useful to look at fiction that explores these ideas to see what could happen if you don't worry about having to do the experiment. If that sounds interesting there are a couple of novels worth reading. Powers wrote "The overstory" that deals with plant interactions with other plants and humans in which the plants are the main characters. Likewise, "Semiosis" imagines humans colonizing a planet where the plants are far more intelligent than the humans and manipulate the people.
I finally got an explanation as to why I haven't been able to see critical transitions in my data. It looks like my trajectories are too dynamic and multidimensional for this to work, which is good to know because it was going to be very difficult to gather data and the necessary rate.
Someday I would like to see a method of showing how a network can evolve over time. I'm not sure of how to do except by showing a movie. It would help me understand how the connections in a network change with age.
I'm wondering about social interactions beyond loneliness that could affect aging. Are there social behaviors, that are the equivalent of monkeys grooming each other that humans perform that can increase resilience?
Reference material notes
Some examples:
- Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
- Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
- This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
- Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).
Reference Materials
