Some life forms #Naturephotography (some in #infrared)

Our work on the progression of Barrett’s esophagus into adenocarcinoma was published in Developmental Cell. Our findings suggest the need for treatment paradigms that go beyond targeting cancerous cells to incorporate stromal reprogramming.

As you know I'm obsessed with power laws in biology, which is a biological consequence of fundamental principles, like energy conservation from the first law of thermodynamics. Geoffrey West showed how highly optimized biological networks—think blood vessels or respiratory systems—lead to allometric scaling. Specifically, the energy production per unit of body mass (mass-specific metabolic rate) scales as body mass (M) to the power of -0.25. This is part of what's known as Kleiber's law (or as we've dubbed it in our research, the Kleiber-West law), where whole-body basal metabolic rate scales as M^{0.75}. It's why elephants burn energy more efficiently per gram than mice, but mice live fast and die young. What's interesting, is that this same scaling pops up in something as everyday as sleep. Across mammals, daily sleep duration follows a similar power law: it decreases with body size as roughly M^{-0.25}. Smaller animals like shrews might snooze 15+ hours a day, while giants like whales get by on just a few. This is a clue that sleep is deeply tied to metabolism. Nervous systems are energy hogs, guzzling up to 20% of our body's oxygen despite making up only 2% of our mass. In smaller creatures, those fractal-like distribution networks deliver more oxygen per cell, letting their brains run "hotter" with faster firing rates and higher energy demands. But this revved-up metabolism exhausts resources quicker, creating energy deficits that sleep likely evolved to fix. Essentially, tinier mammals burn through their neural fuel faster and need more downtime to replenish. In this view, sleep isn't just rest—it's an ancient fix for the energy trade-offs imposed by Kleiber-West scaling, ensuring that high-metabolism critters don't fry their circuits. Sure, sleep does fancy stuff today. In humans and other mammals, it consolidates memories by pruning unnecessary synapses during REM phases and clears brain toxins via the glymphatic system, which ramps up during non-REM sleep to flush out waste like beta-amyloid. The relation of sleep and metabolism may have evidence from evolutionary history. The emergence of anaerobic metabolism could be tied the Great oxygenation event, 2B years ago. The next oxidation event (Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event , 750M years ago) set the stage for Cambrian explosion leading to emergence of neural systems across species. And we had never had enough oxygen ever since. The link to a great Nature paper by @RafSarnataro et al, and some practical implication of that study are in the next comment. As usual, please like and repost - this is cool science (thank you @Alexey_Kadet for bringing this up) 1/2

Finally published: “Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures” ... Looking for ways to better understand different neuroscientific perspectives and enable productive collaborations

I don't know who needs to hear this, but here goes. I apologize to all those who have sent me your life's work and didn't get a reply. Believe me, I know what it's like to dedicate oneself to a set of ideas, and pour all of one's blood, sweat, and tears into it. I know all about having an unconventional story to tell and finding it hard to get traction from the mainstream. I know the feeling when the idea GRABS you and demands you push it forward. But I get 500-700 new emails per day. I can barely get to the ones from my post-docs, students, collaborators, program officers, journal editors, and colleagues - people I have commitments to and promises to keep. There's a lot going on and the research and biomed roadmap are my main responsibilities. I simply do not get to see most of what I am sent by people with their favorite Theory Of Everything or brilliant idea (~20-30 of those per day); same with Tweets or replies - total chance if I see it or not. If you didn't get a reply, I almost certainly didn't have time to see it. It's no reflection on the quality of the work. Actually I'm sure that among the thousands of these are probably some real gems. But I do not have the time to sort those out. And many are outside my expertise anyway - from exorcisms to quantum theory, most have nothing to do with me or my knowledge base anyway. Oh and there's also the fact that I'm not allowed (for legal reasons) to look at anything unsolicited that isn't public information (e.g., a document and not a link to a preprint like OSF Preprints hosts). But regardless, to look at your big idea, I'd have to drop one of mine or my post-docs'. It's just simple math of 24 hours in a day. I'm sorry; I wish everyone had the opportunity to get qualified eyeballs on the product of their hard work. Oh and this is a fun pattern, it goes in stages... Stage 1 is a nice initial email - "I like your work, look at this, it's important". Stage 2 is still nice - "I'm sure you're busy, but this one really is good, not like the others, you have to make time to see this." Stage 3 is getting irritated: "You think you're too big to talk to me? What gives you the right to ignore this?". Stage 4 is cursing and various insults and profanity, mixed in with offers to collaborate (those are my favorite). Stage 5 is full-out threats (not all of them get to stage 5, but enough). So for those who stopped at stage 1 or 2, thank you for being rational, I appreciate it. For those that didn't, maybe I'll connect you to each other and you can thrash it out without my involvement... Also, if you're at stage 4-5, keep it up - your emails are saved for a book I'll publish someday - no commentary needed from me, just email after email, they speak for themselves. I envision huge sales for this one - it's some wild, wild stuff. Maybe I'll get an artist to illustrate them.

#NaturePhotography

A little #NaturePhotography More from this set are at

@OpenAI, which policy is violated by my request for a Voyager plaque targeting Earthly unconventional intelligences (not SETI, but SUTI, from ) instead of extraterrestrial alien life?!

Being a scientist is still the best job in the world. The constant frustrations, all the crap that goes with trying to keep the lab alive and move things forward - it all resets and washes away in those occasional moments when we catch a glimpse of nature revealing something remarkable and not seen before. This has been a good week - I saw a few completely amazing, wild new things; it will be a total slog to get them polished and out, but it doesn't matter because they've been seen and a new piece of the roadmap is revealed. Just feeling immensely grateful for the opportunity, and mentally sending a message back in time to childhood me (and anyone else who dreams of this now).

#AIForGood attendees: thanks for the great questions about xenobots! Some of you asked about the demo. If you missed it, it's here: .