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:
After switching fields in her 30s, she eventually began exploring the mystery of creativity through the lens of brain imaging. “Although neither a Freudian nor a psychoanalyst, I knew enough about human mental activity to quickly perceive what a foolish ‘control task’ rest was,” she would later write. “Most investigators made the convenient assumption that the brain would be blank or neutral during ‘rest.’ From introspection I knew that my own brain is often at its most active when I stretch out on a bed or sofa and close my eyes.”
Andreasen’s study, the results of which were eventually published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 1995, included a subtle dig at the way the existing community had demoted this state to a baseline control: She called this mode the REST state, for Random Episodic Silent Thought. The surge of activity that the PET scans revealed was not a confound, Andreasen argued. It was a clue. In our resting states, we do not rest. Left to its own devices, the human brain resorts to one of its most emblematic tricks, maybe one that helped make us human in the first place.
It time-travels.
When she interviewed the subjects afterward, they described their mental activity during the REST state as a kind of effortless shifting back and forth in time. “They think freely about a variety of things,” Andreasen wrote, “especially events of the past few days or future activities of the current or next several days.” Perhaps most intriguing, Andreasen noted that most of the REST activity took place in what are called the association cortices of the brain, the regions of the brain that are most pronounced in Homo sapiens compared with other primates and that are often the last to become fully operational as the human brain develops through adolescence and early adulthood. “Apparently, when the brain/mind thinks in a free and unencumbered fashion,” she wrote, “it uses its most human and complex parts.”
A growing number of scholars, drawn from a wide swath of disciplines — neuroscience, philosophy, computer science — now argue that this aptitude for cognitive time travel, revealed by the discovery of the default network, may be the defining property of human intelligence. “What best distinguishes our species,” Seligman wrote in a Times Op-Ed with John Tierney, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.” He went on: “A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise.”
The invention of storytelling itself can be seen as a kind of augmentation of the default network’s gift for time travel. Stories do not just allow us to conjure imaginary worlds; they also free us from being mired in linear time. Analepsis and prolepsis — flashbacks and flash-forwards — constitute some of the oldest literary devices in the canon, deployed in ancient narratives like the “Odyssey” and the “Arabian Nights.”
Humans are remarkably adept at building imagined futures for a few competing timelines simultaneously: the one in which you take the new job, the one in which you turn it down. But our minds run up against a computational ceiling when they need to track dozens or hundreds of future trajectories.
THE HUMAN BRAIN IS A TIME TRAVELER
Although Athena’s sway has held for twenty-four centuries, the electric age demands a new image. Rational detachment and abstraction have lost their appeal and their cogency. No longer is the city - or any mere place - “where the action is.” In the age of the Internet, the center is no-where and now-here, everywhere at once. Everywhere is both center and periphery, placeless and boundless. We live “in the broadest way imarginable.” What kind of patroness would suit this virtual world of the net and the web?
Eric McLuhan - Electric Language: Understanding the Present
So far, researchers have found that passenger pigeons originated over 12 million years ago, and were exceptionally evolved to live in dense flocks. These new insights, combined with a study of forest ecology, clearly show that these birds were key engineers of forest dynamics.
This central role suggests that passenger pigeons are far more than an extinction sob-story poster child. “Bringing back the passenger pigeon will restore the dynamic forest regeneration cycles that dozens of presently declining plant and animal species need to thrive,” said Novak.
“Passenger pigeon isn’t simply a model species; it quite possibly is the most important species for the future of conserving eastern America’s woodland biodiversity,”
De-Extinction Is Now a Thing—Starting With Passenger Pigeons
"Because solar and wind power are now cheaper to produce than energy from fossil fuels, the only obstacle that remains to the mass adoption of renewable power is the amount of money utilities need to spend to store the energy those systems produce."
Considering the worrying over climate change, he added, an attempt to find a solution "that can make renewables even more compelling and cost-effective isn't just a good business—it's a global priority."
Brick by brick, a solution seeking to topple energy storage roadblock
The social democratic consensus was based on implicit rules. When productivity rose, so did wages. When profits rose, so did wages. When employment rose, so did wages. Today, productivity and employment are rising, but wages remain stagnant or falling.
One factor depressing wages has been the growth of the global labor force, which has expanded by two billion during the past three decades, many of whom have a living standard that is a tiny fraction of what OECD workers were obtaining. Downward pressure on real wages will continue, especially as productivity can rise faster in emerging market economies and the technological revolution makes relocation of production and employment so much easier. Meanwhile, the rentiers will be protected. Antitrust legislation will not be strengthened to cut monopolistic rent-seeking, since governments will continue to protect national corporate champions.
Without transformative changes, those relying on labor will continue to lose; no amount of tinkering will do. Average real wages in OECD countries will stagnate, and social income inequalities will grow. Progressives must stop deluding themselves. Unless globalization goes into reverse, which is unlikely, trying to remedy inequality by forcing up wages, however desirable, will not do much. Raising wages substantially would merely accelerate the displacement of labor by automation.
… Unlike the proletariat, which sought labor security, the Progressives in the precariat want a future based on existential security, with a high priority placed on ecology—environmental protection, the “landscape,” and the commons.
… The precariat is a transformative class partly because, as it is not habituated to stable labor, it is less likely than the proletariat to suffer from false consciousness, a belief that the answer to insecurity is more labor, more jobs.
Being in a job is to be in a position of subordination, answering to a boss. That is not a natural human condition nor an emancipatory one. In the nineteenth century, being “in employment” was a badge of shame, often referring to a woman reduced to being a domestic servant. In the early years of the United States, wage laborers were denied the vote on the grounds that they could not be independent if they were not property owners.
A transformative politics should promote work that is not resource-depleting and encourage leisure in the ancient Greek sense of schole, the pursuit of knowledge and meaning, rather than endless consumption. That points to the need to reconceptualize work, to develop a new politics of time, and to decommodify education so that it revives its original purpose of preparing young adults for citizenship. Most fundamentally, such a politics must promote a new income distribution system because the reimagining of work depends on it.
Basic security is a human need and a natural public good, since, unlike a typical commodity, one person’s having it does not deprive others of it. Indeed, if others have security too, that should increase everyone’s security, making it a superior public good.
A Must Read
The Precariat: Today's Transformative Class?
This is an amazing signal of the shift toward the digital environment - a series of photographs that are worth the view.
The Ubiquity of Smartphones, as Captured by Photographers
According to reports issued by several market-research firms, including Forrester Research, the total number of smartphone users worldwide will reach 3 billion this year—40 percent of the human population. For many, these versatile handheld devices have become indispensable tools, providing connections to loved ones, entertainment, business applications, shopping opportunities, windows into the greater world of social media, news, history, education, and more. And of course, they can always be put to use for a quick selfie. With so many devices in so many hands now, the visual landscape has changed greatly, making it a rare event to find oneself in a group of people anywhere in the world and not see at least one of them using a phone. Collected here: a look at that smartphone landscape, and some of the stories of the phones’ owners.
This is not new but seems to continue to be unaddressed by current forms of employment.
90% of Americans would take a pay cut for a more meaningful job
Harvard Business Review recently published a report showing how Americans prioritize meaning in the workplace.
The report reveals how Americans increasingly regard meaningfulness as a critical component of jobs.
Employees who find their jobs meaningful seem to work harder and stay with organizations longer, the survey shows.
The authors list several ways employers can cultivate meaning in the workplace.
Surveying 2,285 American professionals across 26 industries and a variety of pay levels, the report showed:
- More than 9 out of 10 employees were willing to trade a percentage of their lifetime earnings for greater meaning at work.
- Only 1 in 20 respondents said their job provided the most meaningful work they could imagine having.
- On average, the respondents said their jobs were about half as meaningful as they could be.
- People in service-oriented professions, such as medicine, education and social work, reported higher levels of workplace meaning than did administrative support and transportation workers.
The World Economic Forum presents these signals as top risks for business - see the article for the whole list.
These are the top risks for doing business around the world
Unemployment and underemployment represent the biggest risk for doing business around the world. That is the view of more than 12,000 business people across 140 economies, according to findings that we publish today in the first edition of a new Regional Risks for Doing Business report.
The second biggest risk is “failure of national governance”. These findings should ring alarm bells. At a time when the world is often distracted by the latest twists and turns of accelerating news cycles, they provide cautionary evidence of weaknesses in the foundations of our political and economic systems.
This is perhaps a weak signal - but could be very important - signalling a change of economic paradigm from unmitigated free market capitalism toward a new appreciation of the role of public resources, commons, and public infrastructure - and perhaps anticipating the need for a more appropriate economic paradigm for the anti-rival nature of informational and knowledge aspects. This is consistent with other forms of ‘common goods’ like universal health care, free quality public education, access to the Internet as a human right and more.
the mere threat of water privatization now sparks community resistance around the world. A 2017 study by the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute identified 835 municipalizations and re-municipalizations involving some 1,600 cities in 45 countries. These developments were most prevalent in the energy and water sectors, but have also occurred in transportation, education, housing and healthcare. “These (re)municipalizations generally succeeded in bringing down costs and tariffs, improving conditions for workers and boosting service quality, while ensuring greater transparency and accountability,”
Baltimore Joins Global Movement, Becoming the First Major U.S. City to Ban Water Privatization
The global movement to stop privatization deals and expand public ownership just scored a huge victory in Baltimore, as residents voted overwhelmingly to ban putting their water in private hands.
On November 6, Baltimore became the first major city in the United States whose residents voted to ban water privatization. Nearly 77 percent of voters cast ballots in favor of Question E, which declared the “inalienability” of the water and sewer systems and exempted them from any city charter provisions related to franchising or operational rights.
This vote resulted from an ongoing struggle waged by Baltimore community activists, unions and civic leaders demanding affordable access to water for low-income residents. That struggle emerged in response to concern the city could sell off the community’s water infrastructure to for-profit investors.
The vote is also part of an emerging worldwide movement to fight back against privatization and to municipalize or re-municipalize (put under public control) local enterprises and services. Between 2007 and 2014, the number of privately owned water systems in the United States fell by 7 percent.
Most people after understanding the benefits of energy, roads, water, education, health insurance, etc as public goods and infrastructure - of course don’t want these to be privateered. This signals the real possibility to do the same with our Internet and digital infrastructure as well as our distributed urban renewable energy infrastructure.
Across rural America, it’s not uncommon for people to own their energy sources. Over 42 million people throughout 47 states get their energy from electric cooperatives–nonprofits collectively owned and governed by the same people who purchase energy from them. In the U.S., there are around 900 such cooperatives, which first appeared in the 1930s to help people living in far-flung, rural regions gain access to affordable, reliable energy when private utilities were hesitant to expand there, fearing inadequate returns on investment. Through collective ownership and governance of the electric cooperatives, members work to ensure that energy prices remain affordable to people, and that demand across the cooperative’s network is met. For people living in urban areas, it’s a different story. There, energy is most often delivered through monopolistic regional utilities, which are interested in delivering high returns to shareholders, and, lacking competition, have no reason to keep prices affordable.
This co-op solar project will be owned by the community members it benefits
On top of the redeveloped Brooklyn Army Terminal, a solar array will bring collectively owned clean energy to a historically underinvested neighborhood.
In the U.S., households that have to devote between 6% to 11% of their annual income to electric bills are considered energy-cost burdened. Their energy costs are high enough to sometimes force them to make trade-offs on food or other necessities to pay their bills. People who are energy-cost burdened are disproportionately people of color living at or below the poverty line. In New York City, for instance, people living below the poverty line of $31,756 have to devote nearly 10% of their income to energy costs.
In Sunset Park, a waterfront neighborhood in central Brooklyn, nearly 30% of residents live below the poverty line. The neighborhood has dealt with a history of environmental burdens, particularly due to an expressway that runs above one of its main streets. For residents, high energy costs compound the air quality concerns produced by passing traffic and the presence of three nearby fossil fuel plants. A new initiative, though, is working to bring renewable energy to the neighborhood–and following a cooperative ownership model that’s helped stabilize energy prices in rural America.
Here’s a signal of a potential new way to deliver universal Internet and other forms of monitoring.
"Aurora was founded by the idea that technology and innovation can provide powerful solutions to tough problems that affect all of humankind. Odysseus was an idea born out of Daedalus that is now a real solution to advancing the important research around climate change and other atmospheric chemistry problems,"
"Odysseus offers persistence like no other solar aircraft of its kind, which is why it is such a capable and necessary platform for researchers. Odysseus will indeed change the world."
Boeing's Solar Autonomous Aircraft Can Fly Forever and It's Due in 2019
Built with advanced solar cells and lightweight material, the novel high-altitude pseudo-satellite called Odysseus can effectively fly indefinitely powered only by clean energy.
Boeing's Aurora Flight Services announced today the introduction of their high-altitude pseudo-satellite called Odysseus, a vessel it says is the world's most capable solar-powered autonomous aircraft. And the claims are no joke!
The ship is an ultra-long endurance high-altitude platform featuring a combination of advanced solar cells and lightweight materials that allow it to effectively fly indefinitely powered only by the sun. If that's not impressive enough, Odysseus boasts the biggest payload capacity available in persistent solar aviation today.
More signals on the transformation of energy geopolitics
New year, same story: Cost of wind and solar fall below cost of coal and gas
The direction of the cost of storage is less clear and depends on metals prices.
The bottom line? The cost of coal-fired electricity per megawatt-hour hasn't budged a bit from 2017, while wind and solar costs per MWh are still falling. That spells bad news for an American coal revival, especially in places where the cost of building brand-new renewable installations is cheaper than the cost of operating existing coal and gas plants—a situation that Lazard says is happening with increasing frequency (PDF).
Lazard surveys energy buildouts that occurred in the previous year and divides the estimated cost of building and operating the plant, including fuel cost estimates, by the amount of energy a particular plant is expected to produce in its lifetime. This is useful because a nuclear power plant might cost billions to build, but it would have a vastly longer life and higher output than, say, a field of solar panels. By breaking costs down on a per-megawatt-hour basis, it becomes easier to compare sources of electricity.
And one more signal related to the change in energy geopolitics - a key question is how fast will electric displace combustion for trucks, planes and ships?.
Oil use for cars peaks in the mid-2020s, but petrochemicals, trucks, planes and ships still keep overall oil demand on a rising trend. Improvements in fuel efficiency in the conventional car fleet avoid three-times more in potential demand than the 3 million barrels per day (mb/d) displaced by 300 million electric cars on the road in 2040.
Oil Demand for Cars Is Already Falling
Electric vehicles are displacing hundreds of thousands of barrels a day, exceeding expectations.
The International Energy Agency published its World Energy Outlook this week, its annual effort at revising assessments of future demand for and supply of fuels and electricity. There’s a familiar theme within it: The IEA expects more renewable-energy use in the future than it did in last year’s outlook, which was more than it forecast in the 2016 outlook. There’s also something noteworthy on transportation: The IEA is calling the top on oil demand from cars.
Still far from prime time - this is another important signal about energy geopolitics.
China's 'artificial sun' reaches 100 million degrees Celsius marking milestone for nuclear fusion
Chinese nuclear scientists have reached an important milestone in the global quest to harness energy from nuclear fusion, a process that occurs naturally in the sun.
The team of scientists from China's Institute of Plasma Physics announced this week that plasma in their Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) — dubbed the "artificial sun" — reached a whopping 100 million degrees Celsius, temperature required to maintain a fusion reaction that produces more power than it takes to run.
To put that in perspective, the temperature at the core of the sun is said to be about 15 million degrees Celsius, making the plasma in China's "artificial sun" more than six times hotter than the original.
This is a signal related to sensing - and ultimately the digital environment of sensors.
LASERS SNIFF OUT TOXINS IN LESS THAN HALF A SECOND
The laser-based method could be a security device in airports or monitor for pollutants and toxins in the environment. The findings build upon a method researchers developed last year that detects gases in about four or five minutes.
The current device, which researchers describe in a paper in Nature Photonics, uses three lasers to shorten the detection time significantly.
“The big advantage is that you can do this detection with a much simpler, much more compact, much more robust device, and at the same time, you can do this detection much faster and with much less acquisition time,” says lead author Steven Cundiff, professor of physics at the University of Michigan.
“This is critical for making the device practical. If you’re monitoring the environment, you need to do it reasonably quickly because of fluctuations in the environment. You don’t want to wait five minutes to figure out if something has a toxin in it,” Cundiff says.
With the domestication of DNA comes a new paradigm from simply preserving the diversity of the past to enabling a platform for generating new forms of biodiversity.
The dawn of a new era for genebanks
Mission accomplished: Molecular characterization of an entire genebank collection
Biodiversity goes beyond species diversity. Another important aspect of biodiversity is genetic variation within species. A notable example is the immense variety of cultivars and landraces of crop plants and their wild progenitors. An international research consortium led by the of the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK Gatersleben) and supported by the iDiv research centre has now characterised at the molecular level a world collection comprising seed samples from a total of more than 22,000 barley varieties. In a study published in the journal Nature Genetics, the scientists usher in a new era for gene banks that transform from museums of past crop diversity into bio-digital resource centres.
Genebanks store samples of cultivars, landraces and wild relatives of crop plants from all over the world to safeguard our agricultural heritage and exploit it for future crop improvement. The German federal ex situ gene bank at IPK in Gatersleben hosts one of the world's most comprehensive collections of cultivated plants, including 22,000 barley seed samples. Under the leadership of the IPK Gatersleben, researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI, German Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants) in Quedlinburg and the University of Göttingen collaborated with colleagues from Japan, China, and Switzerland. This international cooperation revealed how well the IPK collection represents global barley diversity. A single plant was genotyped for each of more than 22,000 seed samples, enabling the scientists to identify duplicate samples within the collection. Opening up new ways for genetically informed quality management, this comprehensive dataset also guides the effective use of the collection in research and breeding by pinpointing lines for further in-depth characterization.
The domestication of DNA - this is a significant signal suggesting both the transformation of biological sciences into potentially computational capabilities.
"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."
Programming language for novel biological circuits
MIT biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells.
Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it.
Voigt and colleagues at Boston University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have used this language, which they describe in the April 1 issue of Science, to build circuits that can detect up to three inputs and respond in different ways. Future applications for this kind of programming include designing bacterial cells that can produce a cancer drug when they detect a tumor, or creating yeast cells that can halt their own fermentation process if too many toxic byproducts build up.
The researchers plan to make the user design interface available on the Web.
A fascinating signal related to the domestication of DNA and the understanding of allergic and immune system problems.
Stem Cells Remember Tissues’ Past Injuries
The stem cells that help our tissues recover from injuries have traditionally been considered developmental “blank slates.” Recent work suggests instead that they may in some way store memories of past assaults so that they can promote more effective healing in the future.
Stem cells, famous for replenishing the body’s stockpile of other cell types throughout life, may have an additional, unforeseen ability to cache memories of past wounds and inflammation. New studies in the skin, gut and airways suggest that stem cells, often in partnership with the immune system, can use these memories to improve the responses of tissues to later injuries and pathogenic assaults.
In August, a Nature paper by Boston-area researchers offered fresh evidence for a kind of memory in stem cells, and some of the first for the phenomenon in humans. The team, led by the single-cell sequencing pioneer Alex Shalek and the immunologist José Ordovas-Montañes, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the immunologist Nora Barrett at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, had set out to understand why some people suffer from debilitating chronic allergies to airborne dust, pollen and other substances. Most people experience at most a passing bout of cold-like symptoms from these irritants, but about 12 percent of the population has a severe reaction that persists all year and results in uncomfortable polyps or growths.
They removed cells from the airways of allergy patients, grew them in culture for about five weeks, and then profiled their gene activity. They found that the genes involved in allergic inflammation were still active, even though the allergic threat of dust and pollen was long gone. In addition, the researchers described many of the cells as “stuck” in a less-than-fully-mature state.
More signals arise concerning the emergence of new defences for antibacterial challenges.
"This is an unprecedented mechanism of action for an antibiotic and immediately suggests ways to develop new molecules as antibiotics targeting dangerous pathogens," explains Robinson. "This finding shows us a way to develop substances that specifically inhibit protein-protein interactions in bacterial cells."
Insect antibiotic provides new way to eliminate bacteria
An antibiotic called thanatin attacks the way the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria is built. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now found that this happens through a previously unknown mechanism. Thanatin, produced naturally by the spined soldier bug, can therefore be used to develop new classes of antibiotics.
An interdisciplinary team of chemists and biologists from UZH and ETH Zurich have now uncovered how thanatin – an antibiotic produced naturally by the spined soldier bug Podisus maculiventris – targets Gram-negative bacteria. The insect's antibiotic prevents the outer membrane of the bacteria from forming – an unprecedented mechanism in an antibiotic. All Gram-negative bacteria have a double cell membrane, with the outer membrane taking on an important defensive function and helping the bacteria to block the entry of potentially toxic molecules into the cell. The outside of this membrane is made up of a protective layer of complex fat-like substances called lipopolysaccharides (LPS), without which the bacteria could not survive.
New methods of medical intervention seem to be emerging at an accelerating pace.
Star Trek-like Tech Seals Wounds with a Laser
In early tests, this laser-activated silk and gold material held wounds together better than stitches or glue
On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Riker had an impressive ability to receive head wounds. Luckily for him, Dr. Crusher could whip out the “dermal regenerator,” a handheld sci-fi tool that healed skin wounds with a colorful laser.
Luckily for us, Kaushal Rege and colleagues at Arizona State University are developing essentially the same thing. Well, close enough. In a new paper out from the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the engineers successfully repaired animal wounds with a silk and gold nanomaterial activated by a laser. … the seal proved to be roughly seven times stronger than traditional sutures.
To use a laser to seal skin, one must focus the heat of the light using some sort of photoconverter. Rege’s lab opted for gold nanorods and embedded them in a silk protein matrix purified from silkworm cocoons. A silk protein called fibroin binds to collagen, the structural protein that holds together human skin cells. When near-infrared light hits the gold nanorods, they produce heat and activate the silk and skin to create bonds, forming a sturdy seal.
The near-infrared laser operates at a wavelength of about 800 nanometers, which is powerful enough to heat the gold without damaging the skin.
The engineers created two disc-shaped sealants: one for wet environments that does not dissolve in water and one for dry environments that does. The first was used to repair samples of pig intestine. When the team pumped colored liquid through pieces of repaired intestine, the laser-activated sealant was seven times better than traditional sutures or glue at preventing liquid from escaping. In fact, the laser-repaired intestines performed just as well as normal, undamaged intestines, according to Ghosh.
A fascinating signal of the emerging capacity to domesticate new forms of life to produce energy, new capabilities and perhaps new ways to manufacture.
Bacteria Ride Bionic Mushrooms to Generate Electricity
Bacterial nanobionics offers applications from sensors to smart materials
What do you get when you combine the high-tech world’s “wonder material”—graphene—with a lowly fungus? A bionic mushroom, of course.
Researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology have reported in the journal Nano Letters the seamless merging of cyanobacterial cells and graphene nanoribbons on the cap of a mushroom. The resulting combination represents a three-dimensional interface between the microbiological kingdom (cyanobacteria and mushroom) and smart electronic nanomaterial (graphene nanoribbons).
The researchers believe that this approach—which they refer to as bacterial nanobionics—can spur the development of next-generation "designer bio-hybrid" functional architectures for applications ranging from sensors to “smart” hydrogel materials.
To develop their bionic mushroom, the Stevens researchers first looked for a way to lengthen the lifespan of the cyanobacteria. While cyanobacteria has an amazing ability to produce electricity, it also has a notoriously short life cycle severely limiting its usefulness. By putting the cyanobacteria on the cap of a mushroom, the researchers extended the life cycle of the cyanobacteria to several days.
Next, they developed a way to harvest the electricity cyanobacteria produce by printing electronic ink containing graphene nanoribbons onto the mushroom cap.
This is a very interesting signal that may have significant implications on other aspects of how we inherit qualities.
Lifespan Less Heritable than Previously Thought
Some of the longevity that appears to run in families can instead be attributed to people choosing life partners with similar characteristics.
Estimates predict that somewhere between 15 percent and 30 percent of the variability in human lifespan is due to genetics. But in a study published in Genetics today (November 6), researchers have shown that those are likely overestimates and that assortative mating—that is, people choosing partners with traits that resemble their own—can account for most of what looks like heritability.
“What [the authors] did that no one else has done is try to really evaluate this idea of assortative mating” and its contribution to lifespan, says Braxton Mitchell, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland who did not participate in the study. “The novel part of this was how they were able to put together this massive dataset of 400 million records . . . and are coming up with some very interesting analyses and hypotheses. It really reminds us how much we can do with these bigger and bigger datasets that come available.”
A signal of complexity - the inability to predict the future because of inevitable surprises.
Massive impact crater beneath Greenland could explain Ice Age climate swing
The serendipitous discovery may just be the best evidence yet of a meteorite causing the mysterious, 1,000-year period known as Younger Dryas.
Most of Earth’s surface has been plotted, mapped and measured. And along the way, scientists have turned up a plethora of craters big and small. But there was always one major crater missing.
12,800 years ago, during the Pleistocene, Earth was warming up from its last Ice Age. Temperatures slowly rose while glaciers retreated, that is, until something major happened that triggered a cold snap big enough to leave its mark on the geologic record. Over the course of just decades – the blink of an eye in geological timescales – the planet cooled somewhere between 3 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 6 degrees Celsius). The resulting period is known as the Younger Dryas, a mysterious 1000-year blip in history.
This is an important signal - the transformation of patriarchy into a 21st century redefinition of the binary aspects of sex, the biocultural spectrum of gender and emerging new sociocultural forms of social structures.
"Ambitious women are scary. In this fast-paced business world, female leaders need to make sure they're not perceived as pushy, aggressive, or competent," the book's promotional materials explains. Chapters include "How to be harassed without hurting his career" and "How to bring your true self to work and then hide it completely." Each chapter ends with a list of "inaction items."
Behind the humor there is, of course, a serious message.
A former Google employee has written a hilarious survival guide for women: how to succeed 'without hurting men's feelings'
Former Google employee turned comic Sarah Cooper has help for women in tech with a new book called "How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings."
The book is, of course, a satirical look a corporate life for women. And it's hilarious.
Still, the author tells Business Insider, it was inspired by true stories from her own Google career, as well as her friends and co-workers.
Wow - I love spicy-hot food - I’ve grown my own Carolina Reapers - but this…..
So if you wanted to treat knee pain, you could directly inject RTX into the knee tissue. You’d anesthetize the patient first, of course, since the resulting pain would be intense. But after a few hours, that pain wears off, and you end up with a knee that’s desensitized to pain.
Researchers have already done this with dogs. “It is profoundly effective there, and lasts much, much longer than I might have expected, maybe a median of 5 months before the owners of the dogs asked for reinjection,” says Michael Iadarola, who’s studying RTX at the National Institutes of Health. “The animals went from basically limping to running around.” One dog even went 18 months before its owners noticed the pain had returned.
THIS CHEMICAL IS SO HOT IT DESTROYS NERVE ENDINGS—IN A GOOD WAY
IN MOROCCO THERE grows a cactus-like plant that’s so hot, I have to insist that the next few sentences aren’t hyperbole. On the Scoville Scale of hotness, its active ingredient, resiniferatoxin, clocks in at 16 billion units. That’s 10,000 times hotter than the Carolina reaper, the world’s hottest pepper, and 45,000 times hotter than the hottest of habaneros, and 4.5 million times hotter than a piddling little jalapeno. Euphorbia resinifera, aka the resin spurge, is not to be eaten. Just to be safe, you probably shouldn’t even look at it.
But while that toxicity will lay up any mammal dumb enough to chew on the resin spurge, resiniferatoxin has also emerged as a promising painkiller. Inject RTX, as it’s known, into an aching joint, and it’ll actually destroy the nerve endings that signal pain. Which means medicine could soon get a new tool to help free us from the grasp of opioids.
The human body is loaded with different kinds of sensory neurons. Some flavors respond to light touch, others signal joint position, yet others respond only to stimuli like tissue injury and burns. RTX isn’t going to destroy the endings of all these neurons willy-nilly. Instead, it binds to a major molecule in specifically pain-sensing nerve endings, called TRPV1 (pronounced TRIP-vee one).
This TRPV1 receptor normally responds to temperature. But it also responds to a family of molecules called pungents, which includes capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot pepper. “So when you put hot pepper on your tongue and it feels like it's burning, it's not because your tongue is on fire,” says Tony Yaksh, an anesthesiologist and pharmacologist at UC San Diego who’s studied RTX. “It's simply activating the same sensory axons that would have been activated if your tongue had been on fire.”
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