Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and 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.
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment -
computational ecology -
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence.
To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.
‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
The story of how web browsers changed us forever
The Big Tech firms are dividing the world between them
We need a full investigation into Siri's secret surveillance campaign
Placebos prove powerful even when people know they're taking one
‘AeroNabs’ Promise Powerful, Inhalable Protection Against COVID-19
Team develops peptide that makes drug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again
Gene manipulation using algae could grow more crops with less water
Extra DNA May Make Unlikely Hybrid Fish Possible
Android is now the world’s largest earthquake detection network
Highly efficient process makes seawater drinkable in 30 minutes
Seven top oil firms downgrade assets by $87bn in nine months
Our everyday experience tells us that space has three dimensions. Front/back, left/right, up/down. In physics, we describe time as a fourth dimension, and wrap the whole thing up as spacetime – a kind of bendy 4D cosmic grid. The malleability of spacetime, a basic tenet of Albert Einstein’s relativity, allows that grid to warp and stretch in response to the motion and mass of everything in it. It’s why space can expand and distort the passage of time, and why time moves more slowly if you’re in a fast rocket or hanging out near a black hole.
However, physicists have been wondering for years whether the three dimensions of space we experience might be only part of the picture. If there are more spatial dimensions, extending out in new directions we can’t perceive, that could help to explain some puzzling aspects of theoretical physics and the behaviour of gravity. Add an extra dimension of space to the Universe, and you find that gravity can ‘leak’ out into it, making the force seem weaker than it really is, and potentially explaining why its strength is so minuscule compared with the forces governing particle physics.
Big space
The city is a lie that we tell ourselves. The crux of this lie is that we can separate human life from the environment, using concrete, glass, steel, maps, planning and infrastructure to forge a space apart. Disease, dirt, wild animals, wilderness, farmland and countryside are all imagined to be essentially outside, forbidden and excluded. This idea is maintained through the hiding of infrastructure, the zoning of space, the burying of rivers, the visualisation of new urban possibilities, even the stories we tell about cities. Whenever the outside pierces the city, the lie is exposed. When we see the environment reassert itself, the scales fall from our eyes.
Of course, cities are physically identifiable sites that are often clearly separated from the space around them. They might be surrounded by walls that define their limits, or green belts in which building is prohibited or heavily controlled. Even when large suburban districts surround the city, these often have separate governance systems. Nonetheless, all cities depend on a much wider territory beyond these boundary markers. Some or all of the following need to be brought in from outside to support an urban centre: food, water, building materials (wood, stone etc), workers, traders and their goods, raw production materials (wool, cotton etc), energy (in the form of material to be consumed, such as oil or coal, or on cables connected to a production centre such as a power plant or wind farm). This is the case irrespective of whether the city concerned has a clear physical edge or not.
The city is a lie
One day, Internet Explorer was nearly the only game in town, powering 96% of website visits at its peak in 2002. Then, quickly it turned into the app you only used to download Firefox or Chrome, or so the joke went. And then Internet Explorer died and turned into Chrome.
Empires rise then quickly fall in tech. One year, the web was merely a vision “about anything being potentially connected with anything,” as inventor Tim Berners-Lee put it before releasing the web in late 1990. 5 years later, Microsoft would bundle its Internet Explorer web browser with Windows—something the U.S. Department of Justice called anti-competitive in 1998.
From creating an industry to lawsuits over monopolizing said industry in under a decade may be a record. But that’s the web. Everything moves faster online, from the dot-com boom and bust to today’s smartphone-powered world.
It’s almost hard to remember a world without browser, and tabs, and bookmarks.
The story of how web browsers changed us forever
In his concluding chapter, Ball draws an apt comparison between the system of technology and the system of finance. Both are cloaked in complex obscurity, some of it deliberately, performatively dull, the kind of technical bafflegab one deploys if one hopes to commit great crimes and make them seem respectable by dismissing one’s critics as unqualified to venture an opinion. What’s more, finance and tech are largely inseparable, with the same shot-callers running both industries, and responding to the same imperatives.
Today, we are faced with a crisis of both finance and tech, thanks to the crisis in public health. Every chapter in this book — from the material on surveillance to that on global, networked soft power — has real bearing on the pandemic world. As economies implode, taking down those few remaining smaller firms with ties to places and people, we are experiencing a quiet wave of consolidations, in which the free-floating Big Tech firms (flush with tax-free, offshore cash) ‘rescue’ these smaller companies and absorb them, barrelling towards a future in which the world can be divided among them like the Great Powers whose peaceful status quo shattered with the Great War.
The Big Tech firms are dividing the world between them
Now Apple has done something: After Epic Games announced on April 13 that it was encouraging Fortnite players to bypass Apple’s in-house payment system — an intentional violation of Apple’s app policies — Apple removed Fortnite from its App Store, claiming that Epic wanted “a special arrangement” that other developers don’t get.
What that means: If you’ve already downloaded Fortnite to your iPhone or iPad, you can still use it. But the move does mean that Epic won’t be able to update the app — something that it did regularly to fix bugs and introduce new features. So if the situation doesn’t change, Epic will eventually have to abandon Fortnite’s Apple users.
And now Epic, in response to Apple’s response, says it is filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple in US District Court. It is also telling its Apple users they won’t be able to play future versions of its game: “Because Apple has BLOCKED your ability to update, when Fortnite Chapter 2 - Season 4 releases you will NOT be able to play the new Season on iOS.”
This is a hugely important signal for providing transparent accountability to citizens of the Internet.
We need a full investigation into Siri's secret surveillance campaign
The public deserves to know the extent to which Apple employees have been listening to our private conversations and intimate moments
No one wants their most private activities secretly monitored. That’s why wiretapping is strictly regulated in the US and most of the world. Federal law makes it a crime for the government to surveil communications without a court-ordered warrant. This is not the issue here. Nor is this a case involving one-party consent. Who authorized the makers of Apple’s Siri and their vendors to listen to private conversations in my home? Not me. So why should Apple be allowed to do this? This is what we must find out.
Every tech company with voice-activated computer assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Assistant promises to protect privacy. But an ongoing privacy scandal involving Apple’s Siri personal assistant raises fundamental questions about whether these promises can be believed – and cries out for aggressive investigation by regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.
The gold standard in bio-social sciences is aimed at controlling for the effect of the placebo - but we should not dismiss this power when it comes to leveraging all we can to help people find successful health outcomes. However, we should be equally concerned with the corresponding power of the No-cebo (this [sugar] pill will treat your condition but may have xxx side effects …. )
"Placebos are all about 'mind over matter," said Jason Moser, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at MSU. "Nondeceptive placebos were born so that you could possibly use them in routine practice. So rather than prescribing a host of medications to help a patient, you could give them a placebo, tell them it can help them and chances are—if they believe it can, then it will."
Placebos prove powerful even when people know they're taking one
How much of a treatment is mind over matter? It is well documented that people often feel better after taking a treatment without active ingredients simply because they believe it's real—known as the placebo effect.
A team of researchers from Michigan State University, University of Michigan and Dartmouth College is the first to demonstrate that placebos reduce brain markers of emotional distress even when people know they are taking one.
Now, evidence shows that even if people are aware that their treatment is not "real"—known as nondeceptive placebos—believing that it can heal can lead to changes in how the brain reacts to emotional information.
"Just think: What if someone took a side-effect free sugar pill twice a day after going through a short convincing video on the power of placebos and experienced reduced stress as a result?" said Darwin Guevarra, MSU postdoctoral fellow and the study's lead author. "These results raise that possibility."
The new findings, published in the most recent edition of the journal Nature Communications, tested how effective nondeceptive placebos—or, when a person knows they are receiving a placebo—are for reducing emotional brain activity.
This is a fascinating signal - of a possible ‘prophylactic’ against Covid-19 but also of a whole new approach to addressing virus infections.
‘AeroNabs’ Promise Powerful, Inhalable Protection Against COVID-19
Led by UCSF graduate student Michael Schoof, a team of researchers engineered a completely synthetic, production-ready molecule that straitjackets the crucial SARS-CoV-2 machinery that allows the virus to infect our cells. As reported in a new paper, now available on the preprint server bioRxiv, experiments using live virus show that the molecule is among the most potent SARS-CoV-2 antivirals yet discovered.
In an aerosol formulation they tested, dubbed “AeroNabs” by the researchers, these molecules could be self-administered with a nasal spray or inhaler. Used once a day, AeroNabs could provide powerful, reliable protection against SARS-CoV-2 until a vaccine becomes available. The research team is in active discussions with commercial partners to ramp up manufacturing and clinical testing of AeroNabs. If these tests are successful, the scientists aim to make AeroNabs widely available as an inexpensive, over-the-counter medication to prevent and treat COVID-19.
“Far more effective than wearable forms of personal protective equipment, we think of AeroNabs as a molecular form of PPE that could serve as an important stopgap until vaccines provide a more permanent solution to COVID-19,” said AeroNabs co-inventor Peter Walter, PhD, professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. For those who cannot access or don’t respond to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, Walter added, AeroNabs could be a more permanent line of defense against COVID-19.
“We assembled an incredible group of talented biochemists, cell biologists, virologists and structural biologists to get the project from start to finish in only a few months,” said Schoof, a member of the Walter lab and an AeroNabs co-inventor.
Here is another good signal related to growing antibiotic resistance.
Team develops peptide that makes drug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again
Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a synthetic peptide that can make multidrug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again when used together with traditional antibiotics, offering hope for the prospect of a combination treatment strategy to tackle certain antibiotic-tolerant infections.
On its own, the synthetic antimicrobial peptide can also kill bacteria that have grown resistant to antibiotics.
The NTU Singapore team, led by Associate Professor Kimberly Kline and Professor Mary Chan, developed an antimicrobial peptide known as CSM5-K5 comprising repeated units of chitosan, a sugar found in crustacean shells that bears structural resemblance to the bacterial cell wall, and repeated units of the amino acid lysine.
The scientists believe that chitosan's structural similarity to the bacterial cell wall helps the peptide interact with and embed itself in it, causing defects in the wall and membrane that eventually kill the bacteria.
The team tested the peptide on biofilms, which are slimy coats of bacteria that can cling onto surfaces such as living tissues or medical devices in hospitals, and which are difficult for traditional antibiotics to penetrate.
In both preformed biofilms in the lab and biofilms formed on wounds in mice, the NTU-developed peptide killed at least 90 percent of the bacteria strains in four to five hours.
One more signal in the progress of domesticating DNA - this time related to increasing the capacity of photosynthesis to enhance the growth and yield of plants - although the test plant in this case is tobacco - it could be applied to all many of useful plants.
Having proved the concept in tobacco plants, the scientists, at the University of Essex in Colchester in the UK, hope to further refine the technique and adapt it to crops, targeting soybeans, cowpea and rice. The development could help to ease some of the pressures the world is facing, in the climate crisis and the need to grow food more efficiently.
Gene manipulation using algae could grow more crops with less water
Enhanced photosynthesis holds promise of higher yields in a drought-afflicted future
Tobacco plants have been modified with a protein found in algae to improve their photosynthesis and increase growth, while using less water, in a new advance that could point the way to higher-yielding crops in a drought-afflicted future.
The technique focuses on photosynthesis, the complex process by which plants are able to use sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce nutrients that fuel their growth. Enhancing photosynthesis would produce huge benefits to agricultural productivity, but the complexities of the process have stymied many past attempts to harness it.
In research published in the journal Nature Plants, scientists used genetic manipulation processes to increase an enzyme that already exists within the tobacco plant, introduce a new enzyme from cyanobacteria, and to introduce a protein from algae.
When the plants were modified in this way, their ability to convert light energy efficiently into chemical energy increased significantly. To the surprise of the researchers, the transgenic plants also needed much less water to produce the higher yields.
The way-finding that is mapping the process and progress toward domesticating DNA - has many surprises and serendipities. This sort of signals a capacity to use ‘natural’ combinatorial approaches to enaction new life forms - but the acceleration of our understanding of DNA - proteomics - and more - promises affordances for living systems beyond what we can imagine. This is a very worthy read-think.
“It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.” Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those two ruminants split only a few dozen million years ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 million years ago. For those fish to breed is more like “if a human came out of a platypus egg,”
“We never wanted to play around with hybridization,” said Mozsár. “It was just a negative control, which found, somehow, a way to live.”
Extra DNA May Make Unlikely Hybrid Fish Possible
The unintentional creation of “sturddlefish” hybrids may illuminate the genomic mechanisms that govern whether species can interbreed.
Their mothers were Russian sturgeons — large carnivores with creamy bellies, short, rounded snouts, and green, dragonlike scales. Their fathers were American paddlefish — smooth-skinned filter feeders with sensitive, elongated snouts. “Sturddlefish,” as these hybrids have been nicknamed since researchers in Hungary recently announced their creation, go shockingly far beyond classic crossbreeds like mules and ligers, whose parent species sit close together on the tree of life. Sturddlefish result from the merger of different taxonomic families.
Hybrids are often shrugged off as freaky living violations of the rules that keep species distinct. But scientific interest in them has grown with mounting evidence that in nature hybrids can be important both in the emergence of new species and in the conservation of species on the brink of extinction.
Because the new sturddlefish are so radical, they are shaking up scientists’ understanding of what kinds of hybrids may be possible and which species might be most prone to interbreeding successfully. Studies of the new fish could also be poised to provide deep insights into how genomes work more generally.
This is an interesting signal - of how masses of devices can be harnessed with sensors to providing warnings
Android is now the world’s largest earthquake detection network
Google leverages the massive scale of Android to do phone-based earthquake tracking.
What if you didn't need to install the app? What if earthquake detection was just built in to the operating system? That's the question Google is going to answer, with today's announcement of the "Android Earthquake Alerts System." Google is going to build what it calls "the world’s largest earthquake detection network" by rolling earthquake detection out to nearly every Google Play Android phone.
This is a good signal of progress in developing unique material/matter for unique purposes - but also it signals emerging viable solutions to eradicating water scarcity.
Highly efficient process makes seawater drinkable in 30 minutes
Access to clean, safe drinking water is a necessity that’s worryingly not being met in many parts of the world. A new study has used a material called a metal-organic framework (MOF) to filter pollutants out of seawater, generating large amounts of fresh water per day while using much less energy than other methods.
In this case, the team developed a new type of MOF dubbed PSP-MIL-53, and put it to work trapping salt and impurities in brackish water and seawater. When the material is placed in the water, it selectively pulls ions out of the liquid and holds them on its surface. Within 30 minutes, the MOF was able to reduce the total dissolved solids (TDS) in the water from 2,233 parts per million (ppm) to under 500 ppm. That’s well below the threshold of 600 ppm that the World Health Organization recommends for safe drinking water.
The world’s largest listed oil companies have wiped almost $90bn from the value of their oil and gas assets in the last nine months as the coronavirus pandemic accelerates a global shift away from fossil fuels.
In the last three financial quarters, seven of the largest oil firms have slashed their forecasts for future oil market prices, triggering a wave of downgrades to the value of their oil and gas projects totalling $87bn.
Analysis by the climate finance thinktank Carbon Tracker shows that in the last three month alone, companies including Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total, Chevron, Repsol, Eni and Equinor have reported downgrades on the value of their assets totalling almost $55bn.
