Hello all – 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
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
It’s the year 2038. The word “flavor” has fallen into disuse. Sugar is the new cigarettes, and we have managed to replace salt with healthy plants.
We live in a society in which we eat fruit grown using genetics. We drink synthetic wine, scramble eggs that do not come from chickens, grill meat that was not taken from animals, and roast fish that never saw the sea.
Traditional farmers were left with no choice but to reinvent themselves, although very few had the capacity to adapt to the new kind of agriculture. Most of them were eliminated by robots. Vegetables like cauliflower, cabbage, and broccoli had seen soaring prices due to a lack of workers available to harvest them. The robots cut cost by 40%.
Agriculture is now mostly in the hands of the young generation, 70% of whom are college graduates and refer to themselves as “urban farmer-scientists.” They grow all kinds of plants in containers placed throughout cities, using efficient hydroponic setups and the latest technology to narrow the gap between citizens and their food. Farms are now located in cities and can be readily visited, but they now resemble an Apple Store more than a traditional farmstead.
In addition to this technology, the fields that remained for cultivation became sites for regenerative agricultural practices, a series of steps beyond what is required to obtain an organic label and which could contribute to combat climate change by locking carbon into the ground.
It’s the year 2038–here’s how we’ll eat 20 years in the future
All in all, we are still not at a place where digital platforms, of their own, can credibly provide an alternative to jobs.
Recent research found that people are looking to find work on platforms to diversify their income stream, provide a backup in case they lose their main job, make money from a passion, learn a new skill and explore new career and business opportunities.
These workers are “part-time” self-employed and still a minority in the labour market.
I think the future of work is not about creating jobs or matching supply and demand through online platforms. It’s about creating the right infrastructure for people to find multiple and better alternatives than a traditional employment and a policy environment that promotes a wide variety of work arrangements as a way to increase labour market participation and inclusion.
We have struggled to increase employment in recent years. Online talent platforms show real promise for injecting more transparency and dynamism into job markets. As people come to connect with work opportunities more efficiently, even larger economic ripple effects could be created in the years ahead. To capture these benefits, regulatory frameworks, corporate practices, and individual mindsets will have to change, along with technology.
With the right investments, a thoughtful approach, and continued innovation from the public and private sector, the world could move closer to the goal of a labor market that works.
How the Platform Economy Gives Superpowers to Freelancers
Financial and technical debt are now largely well-known concepts, and they play an enormously importantly role in organizations. But a third kind of debt exists — potentially more pernicious than either of its cousins — and anyone hoping to build a sustaining organization in the 21st century needs to understand it.
Last year, startup guru Steve Blank published, “Organizational Debt is like Technical Debt but worse.” In it, he introduced the concept of Organizational Debt. He defined it as “all the people/culture compromises made to ‘just get it done’ in the early stages of a startup.” The piece was shared thousands of times and sparked lots of conversation in the startup community. It seemed that the concept had struck a chord.
In spite of that success, the piece was too narrow in its focus. Organizational Debt is so much bigger than just a startup phenomenon. In fact, I believe the concept of Organizational Debt will turn out to be one of the most important concepts in the future of work. With that in mind, here’s an expanded definition to stir the pot.
Organizational Debt: The interest companies pay when their structure and policies stay fixed and/or accumulate as the world changes.
For example, a company’s travel budget may balloon one year, only to be restricted by a travel policy the next — a well intentioned control designed to reduce expense. If that policy starts costing more than it’s saving (e.g. by reducing commercial success due to a lack of facetime, frustrating top talent, etc.), it becomes an unacknowledged debt. The “interest” comes in the form of reduced speed, capacity, engagement, flexibility, and innovation that ultimately undermine the macro objectives of the firm: to survive, thrive, and achieve its purpose.
How To Eliminate Organizational Debt
This is a must read article by Bruno Latour - proposing the evolution of our concept of Gaia - of the earth as a self-regulating living system. This is highly relevant if we want to use the future in a way that can enable a flourishing world.
Gaia 2.0
According to Lovelock and Margulis's Gaia hypothesis, living things are part of a planetary-scale self-regulating system that has maintained habitable conditions for the past 3.5 billion years. Gaia has operated without foresight or planning on the part of organisms, but the evolution of humans and their technology are changing that. Earth has now entered a new epoch called the Anthropocene, and humans are beginning to become aware of the global consequences of their actions. As a result, deliberate self-regulation—from personal action to global geoengineering schemes—is either happening or imminently possible. Making such conscious choices to operate within Gaia constitutes a fundamental new state of Gaia, which we call Gaia 2.0. By emphasizing the agency of life-forms and their ability to set goals, Gaia 2.0 may be an effective framework for fostering global sustainability.
At first sight, the potential for a successful Gaia 2.0 does not seem promising. Despite large-scale mobilization of scientists, activists, and citizens, large parts of the human population are indifferent to the Anthropocene, and many deny anthropogenic climate change. In addition, there is no proof that consciousness in this context is anything but the belated and retrospective realization that mistakes had been made and might be partially redressed. Indeed, the first formulation of the Gaia hypothesis is almost exactly contemporary with what is now seen as the start of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, the examples of social Darwinism, sociobiology, and dialectical materialism suggest that drawing political lessons from nature is problematic.
Nevertheless, it is important to have a second look at the connection between the original Gaia concept and a possible Gaia 2.0, because the original Gaia has many traits that were not detectable in earlier notions of nature associated with the development of Western civilization. Before the Anthropocene, Western societies saw themselves as the only conscious agents in a passive material environment. Today, they must cope with the brutal reactions of living organisms that are continually reshaping their surroundings, creating in part their own conditions for survival. Gaia thus establishes a new continuity between humans and nonhumans that was not visible before—a relation between free agents. This understanding offers the potential to learn from features of Gaia to create a Gaia 2.0. We focus here on three of these features: autotrophy, networks, and heterarchy.
This is a nice summary of citizen science with a list of projects where would-be citizen-scientist can participate
“I think it’s extremely important that we have citizen science,” says Harvard geneticist George Church, who is director of the Personal Genome Project, one of the first serious genetics-related citizen science projects.
The Non-Scientist’s Guide to Contributing to Science
You don’t have to work in a lab to do real science. “Citizen science” offers everyone an opportunity to contribute — and technology has made it easier than ever.
In the burgeoning world of citizen science, anyone can be a scientist, or at least make a cameo in an experiment. Loosely defined as public participation in science, often through data collection, citizen science has existed in a variety of fields for decades (in some cases, centuries), including astronomy, with amateur astronomers collecting observations and taking photos, and ornithology, with amateur birders contributing data on breeding and migration. Now, citizen science is being integrated into the world of biology and medicine. The trend, which began less than a decade ago, is driven partly by the broader crowd-source phenomenon, cloud technology, and the rise of biopunks (or biohackers) who are creating their own studies to disrupt the industry. In a social media world where sharing TMI is the norm, it’s no longer a stretch to share your DNA for genome sequencing, your brainpower for dementia research or, well, your fecal matter, for gut research.
This is a 'weak' signal - but a signal nonetheless - of the possibilities in the 21st century - substantiating light - and transforming science back into practical alchemy building matter from vast reservoirs of light.
Scientists discover how to turn light into matter after 80-year quest
Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago.
In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial's Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934.
Breit and Wheeler suggested that it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing together only two particles of light (photons), to create an electron and a positron – the simplest method of turning light into matter ever predicted. The calculation was found to be theoretically sound but Breit and Wheeler said that they never expected anybody to physically demonstrate their prediction. It has never been observed in the laboratory and past experiments to test it have required the addition of massive high-energy particles.
The new research, published in Nature Photonics, shows for the first time how Breit and Wheeler's theory could be proven in practice. This 'photon-photon collider', which would convert light directly into matter using technology that is already available, would be a new type of high-energy physics experiment. This experiment would recreate a process that was important in the first 100 seconds of the universe and that is also seen in gamma ray bursts, which are the biggest explosions in the universe and one of physics' greatest unsolved mysteries.
Talking about new forms of matter - this is a great signal promising the capacity of superconductors to be cheaper and more widespread.
A new hydrogen-rich compound may be a record-breaking superconductor
Material appears to transmit electricity without resistance at a relatively high temperature
Superconductors are heating up, and a world record-holder may have just been dethroned.
Two studies report evidence of superconductivity — the transmission of electricity without resistance — at temperatures higher than seen before. The effect appears in compounds of lanthanum and hydrogen squeezed to extremely high pressures.
All known superconductors must be chilled to function, which makes them difficult to use in real-world applications. If scientists found a superconductor that worked at room temperature, the material could be integrated into electronic devices and transmission wires, potentially saving vast amounts of energy currently lost to electrical resistance. So scientists are constantly on the lookout for higher-temperature superconductors. The current record-holder, hydrogen sulfide, which also must be compressed, works below 203 kelvins, or about −70° Celsius (SN: 12/26/15, p. 25).
The new evidence for superconductivity is based on a dramatic drop in the resistance of the lanthanum-hydrogen compounds when cooled below a certain temperature. One team of physicists found that their compound’s resistance plummeted at a temperature of 260 kelvins (−13° C), the temperature of a very cold winter day. The purported superconductivity occurred when the material had been crushed with almost 2 million times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere by squeezing it between two diamonds. Some samples even showed signs of superconductivity at higher temperatures, up to 280 kelvins (about 7° C), physicist Russell Hemley of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and colleagues report in a study posted online August 23 at arXiv.org. Hemley first reported signs of the compound’s superconductivity in May in Madrid at a symposium on superconductivity and pressure.
While this innovation isn’t quite ready for prime time - we could see it in all urban environment in the next few decades. This is worth the view.
O-Wind Turbine captures energy even in the middle of dense cities
An omnidirectional wind turbine that works in the middle of big cities, which could "take urban energy harvesting to another level", is the UK's James Dyson Award winner for 2018.
Designed by Lancaster University students Nicolas Orellana and Yaseen Noorani, the O-Wind Turbine is made for high-density urban environments, instead of the open fields where turbines are typically placed.
This is because the architecture of tall buildings throws wind flow into chaos, making conventional turbines, which are only able to capture wind travelling in one direction, close to pointless.
In contrast, the O-Wind Turbine captures wind from all directions, and is designed to attach to balconies or the sides of buildings, where speeds are high.
The progression of renewable energies is and will continue to change energy geopolitics and will inevitably be part of our geoforming management efforts.
Solar and wind farms could change our weather
Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy is an important and necessary step towards averting climate change. However, in our efforts to go green, we also need to be mindful of other consequences, both intended and unintended – and that includes how a mass deployment of renewable technology might affect its surrounding climate.
What if the Sahara desert was turned into a giant solar and wind farm, for instance? This is the topic of new research published in Science by Yan Li and colleagues. They found that all those hypothetical wind turbines and solar panels would make their immediate surroundings both warmer and rainier, and could turn parts of the Sahara green for the first time in at least 4,500 years.
The scientists behind the research looked at the maximum amount of solar and wind energy that could be generated in the Sahara desert and the transition region to its south, the Sahel. The two regions were picked as they are relatively plausible sites for such an enormous roll-out of renewable energy, being fairly near to substantial demand from Europe and the Middle East, while having limited other demands on the land. Both have substantial potential resources of wind and solar energy. Li and colleagues also suggest that The Sahel, in particular, could also benefit from economic development and more energy for desalination, providing water for cities and agriculture.
Another signal of the inevitable transformation of energy geopolitics.
Decentralized Microgridding Can Provide 90% of a Neighborhood's Energy Needs, Study Finds
"The new approach could even pave the way for 100 percent self-sufficiency in power, heat, and water."
A new report funded by the Dutch government finds that microgrid technologies could make a local “techno-economy” 90 percent self-sufficient, through the decentralised sharing of energy at the local level between multiple households.
The new approach could even pave the way for “100 percent self-sufficiency in power, heat, and water, and 50 percent self-sufficiency in food production”, according to the report’s author, energy systems engineer Florijn de Graaf.
If optimized properly, microgrids could play a pivotal role in supporting efforts to transition to renewable energy systems and meet climate targets, finds the report published by Netherlands-based energy systems company Metabolic. The report was funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency.
Under the Paris Agreement, the Dutch government has pledged to drop its carbon dioxide emissions by 80-95 percent by 2050.
This is a good signal of practical and conceptual progress being made for the transformation our transportation paradigm.
Self-Driving Cars Won't Need Accurate Digital Maps, MIT Experts Say
A rough map of all the world's roads can fit on a flash drive—and it's all that self-driving cars will need
“Maps for even a small city tend to be gigabytes; to scale to the whole country, you’d need incredibly high-speed connections and massive servers,” says Teddy Ort, a graduate student in robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “But for our approach, a global map could fit on a flash drive.”
Reason: The system doesn’t need accurate measurements to the curb, the lane markings, and roadside features like sidewalks, trees, and buildings. Instead, it merely consults a very minimalist map, then uses its sensors to see its way to a point up ahead, a “waypoint” that the system chooses for being in the general direction of the ultimate goal. That is, the system does pretty much what a human driver would do when feeling his way forward in an unfamiliar place.
The future of healthcare will likely be radically different - with a significant emphasis on real-time monitoring to guide us toward wellness and preventative interventions. In the mid 2000s I saw a very plausible shift towards not simply having a family doctor - but having a family health service that can contact us to indicate early signs of possible illness or to suggest paths to sustaining or improving wellness. This is a good signal toward that orientation.
Soon your doctor will be able to wirelessly track your health—even through walls
MIT professor Dina Katabi is building a gadget that can sit in one spot and track everything from breathing to walking, no wearables required.
Imagine a box, similar to a Wi-Fi router, that sits in your home and tracks all kinds of physiological signals as you move from room to room: breathing, heart rate, sleep, gait, and more.
Dina Katabi, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, built this box in her lab. And in the not-so-distant future, she believes, it will be able to replace the array of expensive, bulky, uncomfortable gear we currently need to get clinical data about the body.
Speaking at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, Katabi said the box she’s been building for the last several years takes advantage of the fact that every time we move—even if it’s just a teeny, tiny bit, such as when we breathe—we change the electromagnetic field surrounding us.
It seems that the more we know - the more entangled living systems are. This is a good signal of the emerging paradigm of ecological entanglement. As we domesticate DNA this entanglement is revealed.
bacteria of the genus Methylobacterium. These microbes, found in all plants, are known as methylotrophs because they eat methane gas, which plants release as their cells grow. In return for methane, M-trophs, as NewLeaf calls them, offer plants diverse benefits. Some deliver molecules that encourage plants to grow; others make seeds germinate earlier and more consistently, or protect against problem fungi.
And while scientists are well aware that diverse microbial communities cooperate to affect plant health, most companies are working with one kind of microbe at a time. Indigo isn’t yet sure how to approach entire microbiomes, Goldman says, but “we certainly are thinking hard about it.”
How plant microbes could feed the world and save endangered species
Digging into the plant microbiome could help future farmers and conservationists
Certain microbial plant partners are well-known, and there are scores of microbial products already on the market. Gardeners, for instance, can spike their watering pails with microbes to encourage flowering and boost plant immunity. But “we know very little about how the products out there actually do work,” says Jeff Dangl, a geneticist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “None of those garden supply store products have proven useful at large scale.”
Big farms can use microbial treatments. The main one applied broadly in large-scale agriculture helps roots collect nitrogen, Dangl says, which plants use to produce chlorophyll for photosynthesis.
Farmers may soon have many more microbial helpers to choose from. Scientists studying plant microbiomes have described numerous unfamiliar plant partners in recent decades. Those researchers say they’ve only scratched the surface of possibilities. Many start-up companies are researching and releasing novel microbial treatments. “The last five years have seen an explosion in this,” says Dangl, who cofounded AgBiome, which soon plans to market a bacterial treatment that combats fungal diseases. Agricultural giants like Bayer AG, which recently bought Monsanto, are also investing hundreds of millions of dollars in potential microbial treatments for plants.
The hope is that microbes can provide the next great revolution in agriculture — a revolution that’s sorely needed. With the human population predicted to skyrocket from today’s 7.6 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, our need for plant-based food, fibers and animal feed is expected to double.
This is an important signal toward understanding the capacity for ecology to transform itself through evolving metabolism.
French scientists studying the North Atlantic Garbage Patch found a high concentration of microbes capable of digesting plastics for energy, and Pedrotti’s research confirms the presence of such microbes. That means garbage patch dwellers could potentially be harnessed to degrade at least some floating detritus.
In the Mediterranean, we also found that the keystone species of bacteria on the plastic specialized in degrading hydrocarbons. Plastic is a polymer, composed of a chain of monomers. What these bacteria do is use the carbon in the monomers [for energy] — this is the way that they reproduce.
In general, the functions of microbial communities [on plastic] will be nitrogen fixation, gene transfer and degrading plastic. In our results, the bacteria attached to plastic are the ones that are able to degrade hydrocarbons.
On Waste Plastics at Sea, She Finds Unique Microbial Multitudes
Maria-Luiza Pedrotti is illuminating the unseen worlds of plastic-eating bacteria that teem in massive ocean garbage patches.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, several hundred miles from Hawaii, is a swirling cauldron of waste plastic that’s been growing steadily since the mid-1980s. Dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it’s an ugly testament to the scale of disposable culture — but it’s also an active breeding ground for new varieties of single-celled life.
Along with colleagues on board the research schooner Tara, the oceanographer Maria-Luiza Pedrotti of France’s National Center for Scientific Research(CNRS) is stalking the mysterious inhabitants of what she calls the “plastisphere.” Her goal is to understand what kinds of microbes populate this newly evolved ecosystem and what biological tasks they perform. Beyond that, she wants to learn how they affect the broader ocean food web and — by extension — human health.
Pedrotti’s investigation of Great Pacific Garbage Patch microbes is ongoing, but her earlier study of garbage patches in the Mediterranean and elsewhere has already revealed certain distinct qualities of microbes that thrive on waste plastic. The plastic fragments that make up the patches’ confetti-like slurry, Pedrotti says, harbor large quantities of bacteria from the genus Vibrio, which includes human pathogens like cholera. Studies elsewhere have suggested other dangers brewing within the plastisphere. Earlier this year, researchers at Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries and elsewhere reported that bacteria living on microplastics have very high rates of gene exchange, perhaps due to the generous surface area the plastics give microbes to grow on. That rapid gene exchange facilitates the spread of antibiotic resistance, which could eventually affect land-dwellers like us.
The fascinating results of our understanding of life’s creatures continues to reveal deep surprises as we expand our capacity to analyze DNA.
The Hong Kong variety was missing 4 percent of its distant cousin’s genes and had its own share of genes unique to itself. Overall, the Hong Kong placozoan genome was about as different from that of T. adhaerens as human DNA is from mouse DNA. “It was really striking,” Eitel said. “They look the same, and we look completely different from mice.”
By comparing the Placozoa variation with the average genetic differences between groups in other phyla, the German team concluded that the Hong Kong Placozoa qualified as not only a new species, but also a new genus. It might even have qualified as a new family or order in other areas of the animal tree, but to err on the conservative side, the team based their standard of genus variation on jellyfish, a genetically diverse phylum with relatively tidy divisions between levels
World’s Simplest Animal Reveals Hidden Diversity
But after spending four years painstakingly reconstructing the blob’s genome, Eitel might know more about the organism than anyone else on the planet. In particular, he has looked closely enough at its genetic code to learn what visual inspections failed to reveal. The variety of creature that biologists have long called T. adhaerens is really at least two, and perhaps as many as a dozen, anatomically identical but genetically distinct “cryptic species” of animals. The discovery sets a precedent for taxonomy, the science of naming organisms, as the first time a new animal genus has been defined not by appearance, but by pure genetics.
The modern taxonomic system, little changed since Carl Linnaeus laid it out in the 1750s, attempts to chop the sprawling tree of life into seven tidy levels that grant every species a unique label. The two-part scientific name (such as Homo sapiens) represents the tail end of a branching path through this tree, starting from the thickest limbs, the kingdoms, and ending at the finest twigs, the genus (Homo) and then the species (sapiens). The path tells you everything there is to know about the organism’s relationship to other groups of creatures, at least in theory.
We now know that some bacteria actually live on electricity, some bacteria communicate via electronic signalling (among other means), we know plants can hear, sense, taste and see. This is another signal of the richness of how living systems communicate.
The sensors also allow scientists to pick up phenomena such as bioluminescence — the production of light by an organism — and identify the animals giving off the light show.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen bioluminescence in the dark and said, 'hey, that was cool, but I have no idea what it is',” says Brennan Phillips, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island in Narragansett.
Roughly three-quarters of marine organisms, excluding microscopic species and those that live on the sea floor, produce light. But researchers are only beginning to learn how the creatures use this ability to communicate, to attract mates or prey, or to defend themselves, says Haddock.
The hidden lives of deep-sea creatures caught on camera
Super-sensitive devices capture bioluminescent displays and other behaviours long shrouded in darkness.
Advances in video cameras and low-light sensors are revealing animal behaviours in the deep sea that researchers have never recorded before.
The behaviours include a worm-like predator shooting off rings of blue light, and an animal anchored to the sea floor sending flashes of light dancing along its body, creating the illusion of a tiny creature swimming upwards.
Steven Haddock, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California, will showcase videos of these phenomena and more for the first time on 13 September at the Deep Sea Biology Symposium in Monterey. He is one of a handful of researchers around the world who are using extremely high-resolution cameras and ultra-sensitive sensors to capture unprecedented footage of marine organisms in the wild.
“We can see natural behaviour in a way that we’ve never been able to before,” says Haddock.
The domain of methods that living systems use to communicate continues to expand.
"We know there's this systemic signaling system, and if you wound in one place the rest of the plant triggers its defense responses," says Gilroy. "But we didn't know what was behind this system."
"We do know that if you wound a leaf, you get an electrical charge, and you get a propagation that moves across the plant," Gilroy adds. What triggered that electric charge, and how it moved throughout the plant, were unknown.
Ubiquitous in cells, calcium often acts as a signal about a changing environment. And because calcium carries a charge, it can also produce an electrical signal. But calcium is ephemeral, spiking and dipping in concentration quickly. The researchers needed a way to see the calcium in real time.
Blazes of light reveal how plants signal danger long distances
In one video, you can see a hungry caterpillar, first working around a leaf's edges, approaching the base of the leaf and, with one last bite, severing it from the rest of the plant. Within seconds, a blaze of fluorescent light washes over the other leaves, a signal that they should prepare for future attacks by the caterpillar or its kin.
That fluorescent light tracks calcium as it zips across the plant's tissues, providing an electrical and chemical signal of a threat. In more than a dozen videos like this, University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Botany Simon Gilroy and his lab reveal how glutamate—an abundant neurotransmitter in animals—activates this wave of calcium when the plant is wounded. The videos provide the best look yet at the communication systems within plants that are normally hidden from view.
The research is published Sept. 14 in the journal Science. Masatsugu Toyota led the work as a postdoctoral researcher in Gilroy's lab. Gilroy and Toyota, now at Saitama University in Japan, collaborated with researchers from the Japan Science and Technology Agency, Michigan State University and the University of Missouri.
Another great signal for the looming problem of antibiotic resistance.
A new antibiotic uses sneaky tactics to kill drug-resistant superbugs
The drug will need to go through more testing before it’s used in humans
Drug-resistant bacteria have a new challenger.
A new molecule can kill deadly strains of common bacteria, such as Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumonia, that are resistant to most existing antibiotics. The drug works differently from currently available antibiotics, potentially making it harder for bacteria to develop resistance, researchers report September 12 in Nature.
In tests in cultured cells and mice, the molecule killed off a variety of common gram-negative bacteria that cause infections in humans, including E. coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and was also effective against gram-positive bacteria. Gram-negative bacteria, so called because of how they appear when stained for viewing under a microscope, are notoriously difficult to attack with antibiotics because of the microbes’ hard-to-penetrate cell membrane. The drug also destroyed bacterial strains that are resistant to multiple kinds of antibiotics.
The molecule will need to go through additional testing and tweaking before it can be used in humans, Smith says. And it’s not a permanent solution to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. Eventually, if molecules of this type are widely used as antibiotics, bacteria will evolve resistance, as they always do. But for now, it’s a step ahead.
Fake news everywhere - perhaps the original fake news source is advertising and marketing. The digital environment provides a new platform for pernicious marketing.
BRANDS ARE PAYING INFLUENCERS $75K+ TO TRASH THEIR COMPETITORS
Inside the drama that’s taking the beauty influencer industry by storm.
Over the last three years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has cracked down on Instagram influencers, forcing users to disclose sponcon and brand partnerships with a simple hashtag (#ad or #paid are preferred) or built-in branded partner ID tools. Business is booming regardless, with even teens getting a piece of that that sweet sweet sponcon cash. However as the industry matures and companies grow more dependent on the insidious form of advertising, it seems like the real money, and shenanigans, might not be in glowing reviews, but brutal takedowns.
An Instagram post by Kevin James Bennett, an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist and cosmetics developer set the beauty influencer community aflame on Tuesday. In it, Bennett describes the “mob-like behavior” of high-profile beauty influencers and the management teams he was in touch with to reviews for beauty products he was releasing under his own name. Bennett claims the influencers offered to trash a competing product in comparison to Bennett’s products in exchange for $75,000 to $85,000. Bennett also called out the all-too-common practice of skirting disclosure requirements and urged the FTC to start issuing fines:
As platform colonize the capacity for costless coordination with privateering business models - we must all pay due diligence about the ‘costs’ we pay to the conveniences we choose to embrace. The 3 min video outlines the procedure.
The Most Powerful Single Click in Your Facebook Privacy Settings
Getting a new job, recovering from an abusive relationship, engaging in new kinds of activism, moving to a different country—these are all examples of reasons one might decide to start using Facebook in a more private way. While it is relatively straightforward to change your social media use moving forward, it can be more complicated to adjust all the posts, photos, and videos you may have accumulated on your profile in the past. Individually changing the privacy settings for everything you have posted in the past can be impractical, particularly for very active users or those who have been using Facebook for a long time.
The good news is that Facebook offers a one-click privacy setting to retroactively change all your past posts to be visible to your friends only. With this tool, content on your timeline that you’ve shared to be visible to Friends of Friends or Public will change to be visible by Friends only. And the change will be “sticky”—it cannot be reversed in one click, and would be very difficult to accidentally undo.
Watch this video for a step-by-step tutorial to change this setting and make your posts more private.
And one more suggestion to help with our sense of not being interfered with.
If you haven’t already switched to Firefox, do it now
Firefox has announced plans to block all third-party trackers. Why haven’t you switched yet?
This week, Mozilla announced that its browser Firefox will start blocking all cross-site third-party trackers–the cookies hiding in the background that follow your clicks across the web, reporting your activity to advertisers as you move between websites.
Including these settings, by default, is the best way to protect users from inadvertently giving third parties data about users’ behavior. Just as people tend not to read long privacy policies, they also shouldn’t be expected to change the settings to disable third-party trackers on every single site they visit. As Mozilla’s head of product strategy Nick Nguyen writes on the Mozilla blog, “In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go.” Trackers instituted by the site you’re visiting will remain in place.
Trackers don’t just track you–they also slow download times for websites. Mozilla cites a study by the ad-blocker Ghostery, which found that 55% of the time required to load a website is spent loading third-party trackers. Without these trackers, sites will load faster, making the overall user experience better. Mozilla will be testing how much blocking trackers impact load times in September–if its approach to blocking trackers does reduce load times, it will roll out the same technology to the regular Firefox browser later this year. If you’re interested in trying it out now, you can download Firefox Nightly to see how the features work.
