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Basel: The Birthplace of Hallucinogenic Science
What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.
Articles:
Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born
Is the pandemic finally the moment for a universal basic income?
Google Loon Is Now Beaming WiFi Down to Earth From Giant Balloons
U of T tests show Canadian-made mask deactivates 99% of SARS-CoV-2 virus
Connecting donated human lungs to pigs repaired damage to the organs, scientists report
Bacteria with a metal diet discovered in dirty glassware
KFC and russian 3D bioprinting firm to lab-produce the chicken 'meat of the future'
A new species of darkling beetle larvae that degrade plastic
Ex-Google robotics head unveils automated home assistant
How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)
Once Europe emerged from World War Two, Sandoz marketed their new compound to researchers worldwide under the brand name Delysid. And for more than two decades, LSD was revealed as something of a wonder drug to treat anxiety, depression and psychological trauma. Between 1943 and 1970, Oxford University Press estimated it generated almost 10,000 scientific publications, earning the tag of the most intensively researched pharmacological substance ever.
Basel: The Birthplace of Hallucinogenic Science
Mathematicians of the era sought a solid foundation for mathematics: a set of basic mathematical facts, or axioms, that was both consistent — never leading to contradictions — and complete, serving as the building blocks of all mathematical truths.
But Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems, published when he was just 25, crushed that dream. He proved that any set of axioms you could posit as a possible foundation for math will inevitably be incomplete; there will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms. He also showed that no candidate set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.
His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring.
Undecidable questions have even arisen in physics, suggesting that Gödelian incompleteness afflicts not just math, but — in some ill-understood way — reality.
How Gödel’s Proof Works
But a broader definition of individuality won’t just allow scientists to search for new kinds of life. They can also probe how different boundary conditions might affect an entity’s degree of individuality and its relationship to its surroundings. For instance, how “individual” is an ecosystem? What happens to that individuality if a species disappears or a crucial environmental factor changes? What happens if an organism’s boundary is drawn not around its skin but further out to include some of its environment, too? The answers could affect conservation efforts and our understanding of how much interdependence there is among organisms, species and their physical surroundings. And if researchers can gain a better understanding of the factors that have the greatest impact on a system’s individuality, they might learn more about evolutionary transitions like the emergence of multicellularity.
“I think that defining fundamental quantities helps us to suddenly start to see dynamics that we didn’t see before, and understand processes that we hadn’t thought of before,” Kempes said — in the same way that defining and understanding temperature allowed the formulation of new theories in physics.
What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.
But to unpack the economics of the Keynesian Revolution readers should pay close attention to chapter twelve of The General Theory (“The State of Long Term Expectation”) and Keynes’s 1937 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, “The General Theory of Employment,” his response to leading academic critics of the book. Especially in the latter it is unambiguously clear that Keynes’s breakthrough was founded on two fundamental departures from orthodoxy. First, an economy, once stuck in a rut, could remain in a rut. And second, actors in the economy made decisions in an environment characterized not by risk (where the underlying probabilities of future events are properly understood and generally shared), but uncertainty (a setting where the future is inherently unknowable).
“The orthodox theory assumes that we have a knowledge of the future of a kind quite different from that which we actually possess,” Keynes explained. “This hypothesis of a calculable future leads to a wrong interpretation of the principles of behavior . . . and to an underestimation of the concealed factors of utter doubt, precariousness, hope and fear.”
The Keynesian Revolution
So we found ourselves confronted by this weird situation where as taxpayers we’re pouring billions of pounds of life support into the economy, but a huge chunk of it is just being paid straight on to private landlords. If you think of the economy as a bucket, it’s like having a huge hole in the bottom of it. Or rather, the top.
So inevitably, millions of young people started asking the question that had been under our noses all along, which is, ‘wait, what work exactly is it that we’re paying Landlords to do?’
And basically the answer is: nothing. We’re paying them to… not evict us.
And that’s an extraordinary realisation isn’t it? That in a country that believes so strongly in fairness, and hard work, and enterprise, and innovation, and meritocracy, the single biggest cost burden on most households and most businesses is a kind of fee, paid by poor people to rich people, for no work. Just for having money in the first place.
And that fee has been going up and up.
“Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.”
….the point ... incredibly important, and timeless. It is one that had been made by Adam Smith and many others before him. That land value is not created by the owner. It is created by the taxpayer through our investment into infrastructure, and by the activity of the community, and our collective consent for development.
the good news is that pretty much every major economist and philosopher who has looked seriously at this question, from Marx to Milton Friedman, from Martin Luther King to Mariana Mazzucato from Adam Smith to Abraham Lincoln, from the the ancient Israelites to Elinor Ostrom, has always come back with the same basic principle: that Land is a natural commons — it belongs to everyone, and that land value (rents) should be recaptured by the community, who create the value in the first place.
A New Land Contract
This has been a weak signal for a long time - most people are still imbued with that prognostication of the population bomb of the 70s - the question is will we have enough STEM and Artists in the future. Perhaps increases in immigration will be vital to maintain optimal population size.
Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born
The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born which is set to have a "jaw-dropping" impact on societies, say researchers.
Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.
And 23 nations - including Spain and Japan - are expected to see their populations halve by 2100.
Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.
In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime.
Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 - and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.
Why are fertility rates falling?
It has nothing to do with sperm counts or the usual things that come to mind when discussing fertility.
Instead it is being driven by more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children.
The study projects:
The number of under-fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.
The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.
One more signal in the increasing number of voices calling for one of the most fundamental rethinking of our economic paradigm - one that may well be more appropriate for human well being and planetary flourishing.
Is the pandemic finally the moment for a universal basic income?
As unemployment remains high and the threat of automation looms over any recovery, UBI is getting another look as a potential key to ongoing economic stimulus.
When Andrew Yang dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary in February, he had no way of knowing that within weeks one of the central pillars of his failed campaign would move from the fringes of American political conversation to the very center of global policy debates. Citing looming labor market disruptions brought on by accelerating workplace automation, Yang ran on the idea of instituting a universal basic income (UBI), an idea that’s lived at the outskirts of American political thought—though never quite in the mainstream—for 250 years. Specifically, Yang proposed the U.S. government pay each of its adult citizens $1,000 per month (in lieu of some of the benefits the government currently offers) to alleviate poverty and gird all Americans for the day the robots come for their jobs, a notion dismissed by its many, many detractors as fantasy.
Five months on, with much of the global economy struggling to reopen and the Federal Reserve forecasting millions of jobs lost that will never return, Yang’s notion of a guaranteed income for all doesn’t feel nearly as fantastical. Since February, governments around the globe—including in the U.S.—have intervened in their citizens’ individual financial lives, distributing direct cash payments to backstop workers sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are considering keeping such direct assistance in place indefinitely, or at least until the economic shocks subside. In some countries, that could keep some kind of regularly distributed guaranteed income in place for years, even if governments choose to call it by another name.
This is a very important signal on at least a couple of dimensions - first the need to connect the rest of the world into the digital global environment and second - should we let this effort be a privateering enclosure of what should be public infrastructure? Internet has now been deemed a human right by the UN - do we want this human right to be mediated by for-profit private enterprises?
According to the Alliance for Affordable Internet, over half of the world’s population now has internet access—but a large percentage of that is low-quality, meaning they can’t use features like online learning, video streaming, and telehealth. A 2019 report by the organization found that only 28 percent of the African population has internet access through a computer, while 34 percent have access through a mobile phone.
Google Loon Is Now Beaming WiFi Down to Earth From Giant Balloons
Four years ago, three big tech companies had plans in the works to beam internet down to Earth from the sky, and each scenario sounded wilder than the next. SpaceX requested permission to launch 4,425 satellites into orbit to create a global internet hotspot. Facebook wanted to use solar-powered drones and laser-based tech to shoot wifi to antennas. And Google’s Loon was building giant balloons to house solar-powered electronics that would transmit connectivity down from the stratosphere.
As incredible as it all sounds, two of these schemes have started to come to fruition. Loon balloons made their (non-emergency) debut in Kenya this week, with 35 balloons transmitting a 4G signal to 31,000 square miles of central and western Kenya. And SpaceX is in the process of signing up beta testers for its internet-via-satellite, with over 500 satellites currently in orbit. Facebook, however, stopped work on its internet drones in mid-2018.
Here’s a quick refresher on how the Loon and SpaceX systems work.
This is a very hopeful signal of help in the near future and the emergence of a more powerful tool anywhere we need personal protective equipment.
U of T tests show Canadian-made mask deactivates 99% of SARS-CoV-2 virus
An antimicrobial coating developed by Quebec company I3 BioMedical Inc. can deactivate more than 99 per cent of SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – on the outer surface of medical masks, tests carried out by University of Toronto scientists have shown.
The scientists, led by Professor Scott Gray-Owen of the department of molecular genetics in the Faculty of Medicine, used the faculty’s high-tech containment level three (CL3) lab to test the efficacy of the TrioMed Active Mask’s antimicrobial coating.
They found that the novel coating deactivated more than 99 per cent of SARS-CoV-2 within minutes, a finding that could represent a huge boon for health-care workers who are at risk of being contaminated with the virus by touching or adjusting their face masks. Indeed, the coronavirus has been shown to be present and infectious on the outer layer of masks for up to seven days, according to a recent study published in The Lancet Microbe.
This is a fascinating signal of the emerging entanglement of life forms as we domesticate DNA.
In one case, that cross-species cross-circulation allowed a human lung that failed after its six hours of standard perfusion to heal enough to meet transplant requirements and theoretically help a lung patient, though no transplant was done.
“If there were a way to maintain organs in a healthy state outside the body for a day or several days, then many things would change in transplantation,” Bartlett said. “You could have perfect matching. You could treat organs injured outside the body until they’re working well. So that’s what Dr. Bacchetta and his crew are working on. And they’re doing a marvelous job.”
Connecting donated human lungs to pigs repaired damage to the organs, scientists report
For people who need a lung transplant, the wait is often prolonged by the frustrating fact that most donor organs have to be discarded: Only 20% of donated lungs meet medical criteria for transplantation, translating into far fewer organs than people on waiting lists. Now, a team of researchers has shown they might be able to salvage more of these lungs by borrowing a pig’s circulatory system.
Delicate lungs recovered from donors are typically connected to perfusion machines that keep oxygen and nutrients flowing to maintain viability, but that works for only about six hours, not long enough for often-injured lung tissue to recover before the organ fails.
Matthew Bacchetta of Vanderbilt University and Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic of Columbia University led a team that extended the current six-hour window for lungs outside the body to 24 hours. As they reported Monday in Nature Medicine, they did it by connecting each of five human lungs declined as too damaged for transplantation to a pig, sharing the animal’s liver, kidney, and other functions.
The project of domesticating DNA is accelerating our knowledge of life itself - living systems - live by metabolizing ‘things’ for energy and more - the challenge is to imagine life as relationships of metabolism rather than as a particular form of matter called ‘organic’.
"These are the first bacteria found to use manganese as their source of fuel," says Jared Leadbetter, professor of environmental microbiology at Caltech who, in collaboration with postdoctoral scholar Hang Yu, describes the findings in the July 16 issue of the journal Nature. "A wonderful aspect of microbes in nature is that they can metabolize seemingly unlikely materials, like metals, yielding energy useful to the cell."
Bacteria with a metal diet discovered in dirty glassware
Caltech microbiologists have discovered bacteria that feed on manganese and use the metal as their source of calories. Such microbes were predicted to exist over a century ago, but none had been found or described until now.
Manganese is one of the most abundant elements on the surface of the earth. Manganese oxides take the form of a dark, clumpy substance and are common in nature; they have been found in subsurface deposits and can also form in water-distribution systems.
"There is a whole set of environmental engineering literature on drinking-water-distribution systems getting clogged by manganese oxides," says Leadbetter. "But how and for what reason such material is generated there has remained an enigma. Clearly, many scientists have considered that bacteria using manganese for energy might be responsible, but evidence supporting this idea was not available until now."
I actually thought the first ‘killer app’ (pun gingy but intended) for 3D printed food was the ‘cultured hot dog’ (at least we would know exactly what was in it - as opposed to the current hot dog / processed meat food).
KFC and russian 3D bioprinting firm to lab-produce the chicken 'meat of the future'
as part of its vision for the ‘restaurant of the future’, fast food chain KFC is working alongside a russian 3D bioprinting firm to create chicken meat.
the idea of crafting the ‘meat of the future’ arose in response to the growing popularity of a healthy lifestyle and nutrition, the annual increase in demand for alternatives to traditional meat, and the need to develop more environmentally friendly methods of food production. the project aims to create the world’s first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets, which will be as close as possible in both taste and appearance to the original KFC product.
the project has been developed in cooperation with 3D bioprinting solutions, a company based in moscow. the firm is developing additive bioprinting technology using chicken cells and plant material, allowing it to reproduce the taste and texture of chicken meat almost without involving animals in the process. to achieve the signature taste of the nuggets, KFC will provide its partner with all of the necessary ingredients, such as breading and spices. according to the team, there are currently no other methods available that could allow the creation of such complex products from animal cells.
This is a very good signal of progress toward developing a metabolic economy.
"We have discovered a new insect species that lives in East Asia—including Korea—that can biodegrade plastic through the gut flora of its larvae. If we use the plastic-degrading bacterial strain isolated in this study and replicate the simple gut floral composition of P. davidis, there is the chance that we could completely biodegrade polystyrene, which has been difficult to completely decompose, to ultimately contribute to solving the plastic waste problem that we face."
A new species of darkling beetle larvae that degrade plastic
A joint research team consisting of Professor Hyung Joon Cha and a doctoral student Seongwook Woo of the Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH with Professor Intek Song of Andong National University has uncovered for the first time that the larvae of the beetle in the order Coleoptera (Plesiophthophthalmus davidis) can decompose polystyrene, a material that is otherwise difficult to decompose.
… the research team isolated and identified Serratia from the intestinal tract of P. davidis larvae. When polystyrene was fed to the larvae for two weeks, the proportion of Serratia in the gut flora increased by six fold, accounting for 33 percent of the overall gut flora. Moreover, it was found that the gut flora of this larvae consisted of a very simple group of bacterial species (less than six) unlike the gut flora of other conventional polystyrene-degrading insects.
I’m definitely ready for a home assistant that actually performs as well as the lovely 2 min video indicates. The key is how much would a unit have to cost to have one in almost every home (like a television).
Ex-Google robotics head unveils automated home assistant
The former head of Google's robotics division has unveiled a new robot named Stretch that he hopes will prove to be an economical and handy assistant around the home.
And it's no stretch to say that it could provide a blueprint for future efforts in practical, low-cost automated devices to assist with household chores.
Aaron Edsinger, along with partner Charlie Kemp of the Georgia Tech Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, say simplicity was key. They devised a lightweight machine consisting of a wheel base, a three-foot-high center pole and a telescoping touch-sensitive arm that, as its name suggests, stretches, and intelligently grabs and handles objects. It can carry items weighing up to three pounds.
"What sets this robot apart is its extraordinary reach, which is why we named it Stretch," said Edsinger. The arm, which moves easily along the center pole from top to bottom, can stretch out about 20 inches from its base.
Stretch's compact footprint enables it to easily maneuver around the home, particularly in tight spaces. It's ideally suited for simple tasks such as vacuuming, cleaning, storing objects or transporting items around a home or office space. It can place items on a bookcase shelf or remove clothes from a dryer.
This is a great account of the earth’s history of climate change - one that also makes clear how much humans have been contributing to the current changes in climate.
How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)
Earth’s climate has fluctuated through deep time, pushed by these 10 different causes. Here’s how each compares with modern climate change.
Earth has been a snowball and a hothouse at different times in its past. So if the climate changed before humans, how can we be sure we’re responsible for the dramatic warming that’s happening today?
In part it’s because we can clearly show the causal link between carbon dioxide emissions from human activity and the 1.28 degree Celsius (and rising) global temperature increase since preindustrial times. Carbon dioxide molecules absorb infrared radiation, so with more of them in the atmosphere, they trap more of the heat radiating off the planet’s surface below.
But paleoclimatologists have also made great strides in understanding the processes that drove climate change in Earth’s past. Here’s a primer on 10 ways climate varies naturally, and how each compares with what’s happening now.
