Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
archives and national libraries had experience saving books, newspapers and periodicals because print had been around so long. But the arrival of the internet – and how quickly it became a mass form of communication and expression – may have taken them by surprise. The attempts to archive the internet have, in many areas, been playing catch-up ever since. “The British Library had to have a copy of every local newspaper published,” she says. As the newspapers have gone from print to the Web, the archiving takes a different form. Are these websites as vital a resource as the papers which preceded them?
One major problem with trying to archive the internet is that it never sits still. Every minute – every second – more photos, blog posts, videos, news stories and comments are added to the pile. While digital storage has fallen drastically in price, archiving all this material still costs money. “Who’s going to pay for it?” asks Dame Wendy. “We produce so much more material than we used to.”
We consider the material we post on to social networks as something that will always be there, just a click of a keyboard away. But the recent loss of some 12 years of music and photos on the pioneering social site MySpace – once the most popular website in the US – shows that even material stored on the biggest of sites may not be safe.
Sometimes the sites that are lost echo even more seismic changes; the deaths and births of nations themselves. “It happened with Yugoslavia; .yu was the top-level domain for Yugoslavia, and that ended when it collapsed. There’s a researcher who is trying to rebuild what was there before the break-up,” she says.
“The political is so often tied into the technical.”
Why there’s so little left of the Early Internet
When the incoherent claps of a crowd suddenly become a pulse, as everyone starts clapping in unison, who decided? Not you; not anyone. Crickets sing in synchrony; metronomes placed side by side sway into lockstep; some fireflies blink together in the dark. All across the United States, the power grid operates at 60 hertz, its innumerable tributaries of alternating current synchronizing of their own accord. Indeed, we live because of synchronization. Neurons in our brains fire in synchronous patterns to operate our bodies and minds, and pacemaker cells in our hearts sync up to generate the beat.
Scientists Discover Exotic New Patterns of Synchronization
Seven years ago, Joe Corbo stared into the eye of a chicken and saw something astonishing. The color-sensitive cone cells that carpeted the retina (detached from the fowl, and mounted under a microscope) appeared as polka dots of five different colors and sizes. But Corbo observed that, unlike the randomly dispersed cones in human eyes, or the neat rows of cones in the eyes of many fish, the chicken’s cones had a haphazard and yet remarkably uniform distribution. The dots’ locations followed no discernible rule, and yet dots never appeared too close together or too far apart. Each of the five interspersed sets of cones, and all of them together, exhibited this same arresting mix of randomness and regularity. Corbo, who runs a biology lab at Washington University in St. Louis, was hooked.
“It’s extremely beautiful just to look at these patterns,” he said. “We were kind of captured by the beauty, and had, purely out of curiosity, the desire to understand the patterns better.” He and his collaborators also hoped to figure out the patterns’ function, and how they were generated. He didn’t know then that these same questions were being asked in numerous other contexts, or that he had found the first biological manifestation of a type of hidden order that has also turned up all over mathematics and physics.
Torquato had been studying this hidden order since the early 2000s, when he dubbed it “hyperuniformity.” (This term has largely won out over “superhomogeneity,” coined around the same time by Joel Lebowitz of Rutgers University.) Since then, it has turned up in a rapidly expanding family of systems. Beyond bird eyes, hyperuniformity is found in materials called quasicrystals, as well as in mathematical matrices full of random numbers, the large-scale structure of the universe, quantum ensembles, and soft-matter systems like emulsions and colloids.
A Bird’s-Eye View of Nature’s Hidden Order
As the author Douglas Adams said, “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Markets Are Eating The World
This is one of a number of weak signals of a possible reform of our political economies.
“I believe that all good things taken to an extreme can be self-destructive and that everything must evolve or die,” Dalio writes. “This is now true for capitalism.”
Billionaires can’t escape public scrutiny, so now they’re trying to shape it
Ray Dalio’s 7,500-word missive reflects a new reality for the world’s wealthiest people in 2019.
The world’s wealthiest people have been tripping over themselves to become the most convincing apologists for the system that propelled them into their well-appointed stratosphere.
The latest entrant is Ray Dalio, the hedge fund titan who has become the newest billionaire to offer a fleshed-out criticism of the capitalist economy he sees as unsustainable. Dalio’s comments in recent days reflect a new reality that is not lost on the world’s richest: They are subjects of scrutiny and suspicion, from both the left and the right.
Dalio’s criticism of the capitalist system is revealing in its effort to address the problem, even if not in detail. In a two-part, 7,500-word, 58-footnote LinkedIn post this weekend, Dalio calls for a series of policy changes he thinks will “reform” the system — beginning with his declaration of wealth inequality as a national emergency.
at a time when Democratic presidential candidates are struggling to answer whether they would even call themselves capitalists at all, his effort to try and sell his version of a middle ground for billionaire ethics makes strategic sense — even if this is all only for marketing purposes.
This is an important signal - of the current state of affairs and the speed of change and of the power of incumbents.
Here’s who owns everything in Big Media today
It probably won’t look like this for long.
The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies — studios — made stuff — TV shows and movies — and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers.
Now things are up for grabs: Netflix buys stuff from the studios, but it’s making its own stuff, too, and it’s selling it directly to consumers. That’s one of the reasons older media companies are trying to compete by consolidating. Disney, for example, recently completed its purchase of 21st Century Fox. Distributors like AT&T, which bought Time Warner last year, are becoming media companies, too.
Meanwhile, giant tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple that used to be on the sidelines are getting closer and closer to the action. Apple’s newest TV strategy positions the company as a TV guide, a TV storefront selling services like HBO, and a TV creator that employs the likes of Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Anniston to make exclusive shows for Apple users.
To help sort this all out, we’ve created a diagram that organizes distributors, content companies and internet video companies by market cap — the value investors assign to the companies — and their main lines of business.
Here’s what the Big Media universe currently looks like.
There is so much talk about social media platforms - however, our traditional platforms of print, radio and TV should be much more scrutinized and regulated in order to protect our democracies. This is a very long 3 part read - a history of the Murdoch empires, media personalities, politics and more - a MUST READ. Understanding the power emerging from monopolies enables us to understand the need for legislative protections.
IMPERIAL REACH
MURDOCH AND HIS CHILDREN HAVE TOPPLED GOVERNMENTS ON TWO CONTINENTS AND DESTABILIZED THE MOST IMPORTANT DEMOCRACY ON EARTH. WHAT DO THEY WANT?
Media power has historically accrued slowly, over the course of generations, which is one reason it tends to be concentrated in dynastic families. The Graham family owned The Washington Post for 80 years before selling it to Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. William R. Hearst III still presides over the Hearst Corporation, whose roots can be traced to his great-grandfather, the mining-baron-turned-United-States-senator George Hearst. The New York Times has been controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family for more than a century. The Murdoch empire is a relatively young one by comparison, but it would be hard to argue that there is a more powerful media family on earth.
The right-wing populist wave that looked like a fleeting cultural phenomenon a few years ago has turned into the defining political movement of the times, disrupting the world order of the last half-century. The Murdoch empire did not cause this wave. But more than any single media company, it enabled it, promoted it and profited from it. Across the English-speaking world, the family’s outlets have helped elevate marginal demagogues, mainstream ethnonationalism and politicize the very notion of truth. The results have been striking. It may not have been the family’s mission to destabilize democracies around the world, but that has been its most consequential legacy.
An important signal of the increasing competition to own the network platforms. This should worry us all - not universal connection - but private ownership of a global infrastructure.
Amazon plans to launch a massive constellation of more than 3,000 internet satellites
The company is joining firms like SpaceX and OneWeb, which all want to send huge numbers of satellites into low Earth orbit to connect underserved areas with broadband.
How it works: The plan, dubbed Project Kuiper, will send satellites up into orbit at three different altitudes. There will be 784 satellites at 367 miles (591 kilometers), 1,296 satellites at 379 miles, and 1,156 satellites at 391 miles, according to a filing with the International Telecommunications Union, which oversees global telecom satellite operations. Combined, these satellites will provide internet access to more than 95% of the global population, according to Amazon.
More details: A spokesperson said, “This is a long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet.” It’s not yet clear if Amazon will manufacture or buy its satellites, or when it will start to provide satellite broadband services. Before it does, it will need to obtain approval from the US Federal Communications Commission, and it will need to show how it plans to decommission its satellites and manage its role in the growing problem of space debris.
Not alone: Amazon is one of several companies planning to provide broadband in this way. SpaceX, OneWeb, and Facebook are all working on internet satellite projects.
This is an excellent if longish article signaling the emergence of the platform enabled forms of social currency. Worth the read for anyone interested in China’s Social Credit and other forms of platform ‘gamification’ of life. And of course all systems are vulnerable to ‘gaming’.
Quantifying Love
Reputational currency, like China's Social Credit Score, rebrands repression as rational nudging. And these algorithmic governance models are spreading.
Every society depends on free labor—work that is vital but which goes unpaid. Smart governments realize that they need to strike some balance between market activity and the free labor that supports families and communities. Policymakers promote business and growth, but they also realize that if every moment were commodified, the foundations of social reproduction would wither away. Index funds may prove a better investment than children. And if you don’t get credit for being civil, paying attention in class, or taking care of your aging parents, why would you?
Surveillance, software, and relatively simple artificial intelligence can supply a fearsomely panoptic dossier. But this monitoring alone does not address the concern of Chinese Communist Party authorities that cornerstones of their authority are eroding. Thus the SCS will also dent your score for posting “unreliable” information or engaging in nebulously defined negative interactions online. Conversely, the system will reward volunteer activity and “filial piety”—devotion to one’s parents, grandparents, and perhaps other relatives. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, scoring is “the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”
How can a government judge the relative value of working in the market versus visiting a lonely aunt? For the architects of the SCS, these spheres diverge: cash rules commerce, and a new currency will govern culture. That currency is reputation, a single score to express a person’s social value. As China’s SCS approaches its full implementation around 2020, the scoring of activities will spread, assigning points for a wider range of antisocial and social behaviors. Eventually China may make a Great Leap to Commensuration, in which every activity (or inactivity) is judged and converted to points, giving lived reality the feel of a never-ending video game.
But with no appeal mechanism—a basic aspect of due process in any scored society—the SCS’s relentless logic of commensuration threatens to supplant, rather than supplement, the authority of families, schools, and courts. The SCS could easily end up serving as a quant-driven power grab, enabling its authors to assert authority over vast swathes of social life in a way they could never achieve via legislation. Such quantitative governance of culture is a paradox: the very effort to articulate the precise value of manners and emotions threatens to unravel them entirely, as spontaneous affections and interactions are instrumentalized into points.
there is early anecdotal evidence that the SCS may be failing on its own terms. For example, a bank may submit false information to blackball its best customer, in order to keep that customer from seeking better terms at competing banks. To the extent that the system is a black box, there is no way for the victim to find out about the defamation.
A key signal of the reality of the ephemeral world we live in and depend on.
“The rollover is a serious issue,” says Christian Haberland, a seismologist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. “It means a big additional effort and work. In some cases, field equipment has to be replaced.”
GPS glitch threatens thousands of scientific instruments
A quirk in how Global Positioning System signals are time-stamped risks messing up devices’ data from 6 April.
Researchers worldwide are racing to get ahead of a bug in the US Global Positioning System (GPS) that could cause data loggers, including thousands of scientific instruments, to malfunction starting on 6 April. The glitch, known as the ‘week number rollover’, could trigger GPS receivers — which enable devices used throughout research to keep highly accurate time — to reset their clocks and spit out corrupted data.
Scientists in fields from seismology to particle physics are checking whether their instruments — which might be portable, or anchored in bedrock or polar ice — are susceptible. For those that are, researchers are updating them to pre-empt the issue, using instructions from manufacturers.
The issue affects many scientific instruments, such as seismometers, that depend on GPS receivers to time-stamp their data, as well as global arrays of instruments such as radio-telescope that use GPS time to stay in sync. They do this using time signals from GPS satellites’ ultra-precise atomic clocks.
Well I think this is a very weak signal for restaurants - but may be it’s stronger for our personal nutritionist.
Not only will each meal be hyper-personalized, it will also be constructed using non-traditional tools, including a CNC machine and 3D printer.
RESTAURANT ANALYZES YOUR BODILY FLUIDS TO MAKE ULTRA-NUTRITIOUS SUSHI
You’ll need more than a reservation to dine at Sushi Singularity — you’ll also need to be willing to share samples of your bodily fluids.
The futuristic restaurant, which is set to open in Tokyo in 2020, collects samples of reservation-holders’ saliva, feces, and urine two weeks prior to their visits. Then it analyzes the samples to determine each diner’s unique nutritional requirements, tailoring their meal to meet those needs.
“Hyper-personalisation will become common for future foods,” Open Meals, the design studio behind the restaurant, told Dezeen. “Based on DNA, urine, and intestinal tests, people will each have individual health IDs.”
This is a weak signal with great promise - for our aging population.
Blocking protein’s activity restores cognition in old mice
Brain cells called microglia serve as the brain’s garbage crew, scarfing up bits of cellular debris. But their underperformance in aging brains contributes to neurodegeneration. Now, a possible workaround?
By blocking a protein’s activity with antibodies, Stanford University School of Medicine investigators were able to improve cognitive behavior in aging mice.
A paper describing the finding was published online April 3 in Nature. Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, professor of neurology and neurological sciences, is the senior author. The lead author is MD-PhD student John Pluvinage.
I love this piece - signaling that chemical warfare, propaganda and fake news are primordial - even more ancient than lobsters.
A major crop pest can make tomato plants lie to their neighbors
Whiteflies use plants’ chemical eavesdropping powers to get an easier meal
Don’t blame the tomato. Tiny pests called silverleaf whiteflies can make a tomato plant spread deceptive scents that leave its neighbors vulnerable to attach.
Sap-sucking Bemisia tabaci, an invasive menace to a wide range of crops, are definitely insects. Yet when they attack a tomato plant, prompting a silent shriek of scents, the plant starts smelling as if bacteria or fungi have struck instead. Those phony odors prime neighboring tomato plants for an attack, but not from an insect, an international research team found.
Those plants prepare to mount a fast and strong resistance against an incoming pathogen. But that high alert suppresses the plants’ chemistry for resisting insects and “leaves them far more vulnerable to the whiteflies when they arrive,” says Xiao-Ping Yu, an entomologist at China Jiliang University in Hangzhou.
This is a very important signal of how far we’ve come in domesticating DNA - because it the horizon of what we don’t know keeps growing what was once junk is now becoming the wealth of capacity.
“We found hundreds of new players that can regulate response to therapy,”
Here are 5 RNAs that are stepping out of DNA’s shadow
These molecules play crucial roles in human health and disease
The sheer number and variety of noncoding RNAs, those that don’t ferry protein-building instructions, give some clues to their importance. So far, researchers have cataloged more than 25,000 genes with instructions for noncoding RNAs in the human genome, or genetic instruction book. That’s more than the estimated 21,000 or so genes that code for proteins.
Those protein-coding genes make up less than 2 percent of the DNA in the human genome. Most of the rest of the genome is copied into noncoding RNAs, and the vast majority of those haven’t been characterized yet, says Pier Paolo Pandolfi of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “We can’t keep studying just two volumes of the book of life. We really need to study them all.”
Scientists no longer see the RNAs that aren’t envoys between DNA and ribosomes as worthless junk. “I believe there are hundreds, if not thousands, of noncoding RNAs that have a function,” says Harvard University molecular biologist Jeannie Lee. She and other scientists are beginning to learn what these formerly ignored molecules do. It turns out that they are involved in every step of gene activity, from turning genes on and off to tweaking final protein products. Those revelations were unthinkable 20 years ago.
Here are five examples among the many noncoding RNAs that are now recognized as movers and shakers in the human body, for good and ill.
This is a VERY important signal - the emerging world of access over ownership requires significant new institutions and a human right of ACCESS.
What these companies are doing is actually revitalizing of an old form of rentier capitalism that we tend to associate with landlords and feudalism.
Landlord 2.0: Tech’s New Rentier Capitalism
By selling us hardware but retaining ownership of software and data, tech companies are treating users like digital tenants
When Tim Cook and his fellow executives hit the stage for Apple’s event on March 25, it was to announce a major strategic pivot. The company knows that its markets for iPhones, iPads, and Macs are stagnating, a trend unlikely to change anytime soon. That means Apple needs to sell its customers something else.
“Apple’s reinvention as a services company starts for real,” declared Bloomberg after Apple announced a series of new services that will demand subscriptions: Apple TV+ to stream movies and TV shows, Apple News+ to aggregate news publications, Apple Arcade to play games, and an Apple Card to pay for it all. With Apple’s gigantic, built-in user base, financial analysts estimate the company could reach 100 million subscriptions in just a few years, creating “a $7 billion to $10 billion annual revenue stream over time.”
Apple is doing more than just responding to competitive pressures — it is following the shift in how technology is being used to change notions of property ownership and profit accumulation. Facebook, Uber, and Netflix build platforms and provide services, inserting themselves into social relationships, economic transactions, and personal consumption. They mediate the everyday activities of our lives and collect valuable data about our behaviors and interests. And, crucially, they charge for access — not for ownership, which increasingly seems outdated.
Trying to grasp the hyperobject of the human species remains beyond our consciousness - however it helps when each of us can visualize the terran population. The images are worth the view.
The world’s 7.5 billion people, in one chart
Which countries do people live in, globally?
It’s a very simple question, but it’s also hard to get an accurate sense of the answer by browsing through a lengthy table of country-level population data.
That’s because there are close to 200 countries spread around the globe, with populations ranging from near 1.4 billion (China or India) to countries a mere 0.001% of that size. How is it possible to do the mental math in interpreting such a wide range of data points simultaneously?
Today’s data visualization comes to us from PopulationPyramid.net, a fantastic resource for data on global population numbers.
This is an interesting signal of phase transition in our past - as population size and density increased and new institutions arose. A possible question could be what new institution(s) will arise as the digital environment links all humans?
"It has been a debate for centuries why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals," says Seshat director and co-author Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Factors such as agriculture, warfare, or religion have been proposed as main driving forces.
"In almost every world region for which we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity." Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods who cared about human morality.
Complex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around
Big data analyses suggest that moralizing gods are rather the product than the drivers of social complexity
An international research team, including a member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, investigated the role of "big gods" in the rise of complex large-scale societies. Big gods are defined as moralizing deities who punish ethical transgressions. Contrary to prevailing theories, the team found that beliefs in big gods are a consequence, not a cause, of the evolution of complex societies. The results are published in the current issue of the journal Nature.
For their statistical analyses the researchers used the Seshat: Global History Databank, the most comprehensive, and constantly growing collection of historical and prehistorical data. Currently Seshat contains about 300,000 records on social complexity, religion, and other characteristics of 500 past societies, spanning 10,000 years of human history.
The multidisciplinary project integrates the expertise of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, social scientists as well as data scientists into a state-of-the-art, open-access database. Dozens of experts throughout the world helped to assemble detailed data on social complexity and religious beliefs and practices from hundreds of independent political units ("polities"), beginning with Neolithic Anatolians (today Turkey) in 9600 BCE.
This is an awesome signal of supplying rural and other distant locations - for example Canada’s northern populations. This could be a fundamental disruptor of supply webs.
Disposable delivery drones pass test with US Marines
The one-time use drones can carry more than 1,000 pounds of supplies.
The US military is testing delivery drones that can transport supplies over long distances and be thrown away after each use. Made of cheap plywood, the bigger version of the two gliders being tested can carry over 700 kilograms, or roughly 1800 pounds. As reported in IEE Spectrum, the scientists at Logistic Gliders, Inc. revealed that their gliders just successfully completed a series of tests with US Marines. If cleared for mass production, the LG-1K and its bigger counterpart, the LG-2K, could cost as little as a few hundred dollars each.
Using unmanned aircraft for delivery is an idea both the military and private sector have explored for years. Traditional aircraft guzzle fuel, cost money to purchase and maintain and require a human pilot. An unmanned aerial device doesn't require any of these things. Companies like Amazon flirted with the idea of using drones to speed up package delivery, but couldn't overcome logistical hurdles. While far away from being suitable for civilian use, these latest delivery gliders may be a step in the right direction.
The one caveat is that these gliders have to first be launched from a larger aircraft. The gliders can then fly, either on their own or through radio control, and then belly land or release a parachute. The gliders travel at a low altitude and don't need an airfield-like landing zone, which as a paper on them mentions, gives them a lot of flexibility. The unmanned aircraft can fly into urban environments, small clearings, or through forest and jungle canopies.
Here’s a wonderful 5 minute video exploring the frontiers of some fundamental advance in science.
Event Horizon Telescope Animated Movie
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is an international collaboration aiming to capture the first image of a black hole by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. This short animated movie explains some of the nuts and bolts behind this ambitious endeavour.
More interesting videos are here
Another important analysis signaling the transformation of global energy geopolitics.
The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be the Most Disruptive Yet
Building new solar, wind, and storage is about to be cheaper than operating existing coal and gas power plants. That will change everything.
When the history of how humanity turned the corner on climate change is written, we’ll look back and see that clean energy – specifically clean electricity from solar, wind, and storage, went through four distinct phases.
From the 1980s until roughly 2015, there was virtually no place on earth where new solar, wind, or energy storage was cheaper than generating electricity from coal or natural gas. This was the first phase of renewables, one where they scaled entirely because of government subsidies and mandates. And in this time, renewable growth was paltry. Solar reached 1% of global electricity. Wind reached perhaps 4%. The world spend hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing clean energy, and seemingly got nothing.
The policies of the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s finally drove down the cost of new solar and wind electricity by more than a factor of ten. That finally paid off around 2015, when, for the first time, building solar or wind power was, even without subsidies, sometimes cheaper than building new coal-or-gas fired electricity.
Now, after decades of subsidizing solar and wind, we’re on the verge of a new, radically different point in history – the point at which building new solar or wind power (or new energy storage systems, in some cases), is cheaper than the cost of continuing to operate existing coal- or gas-fueled power plants.
As the human environment become evermore imbued with electromagnetic fields we may find all manner consequences.
When an older person’s brain waves are in sync, memory is boosted
A brain stimulating technique could lead to noninvasive therapies for dementia
Nudging an older person’s brain waves into sync temporarily boosts her recall powers. After about a half hour of precisely calibrated stimulation, people were better able to mentally juggle images seen on a screen, researchers report April 8 in Nature Neuroscience.
The results are the latest example of technology that aims to improve thinking by reshaping brain waves, an approach that may ultimately lead to noninvasive therapies for disorders including dementia, schizophrenia and autism.
In the new study, researchers attempted to synchronize brain wave patterns of 42 people who were 60 to 76 years old. External electrodes on a head cap delivered an alternating electric current designed to coordinate brain waves in two parts of the brain: the left prefrontal cortex and the left temporal cortex, both thought to be involved in working memory.
After 25 minutes of stimulation, these older people could better remember whether an image on a screen was the same as a previous version, or slightly changed. Their performance on the task rivaled that of people in their 20s, report neuroscientists Robert Reinhart and John Nguyen, both of Boston University. When 18 younger people’s brain waves were thrown out of whack with the device, their working memory suffered, other experiments revealed.
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