Thursday, December 26, 2019

Friday Thinking 27 Dec 2019

Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.)  that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.

Many thanks to those who enjoy this.

In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.

Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How  
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st  Century

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9



Content
Quotes:


Articles:




In a Puzzling Puzzle:
1. The pieces are not supplied; some of them have to be found, others invented.
2. These pieces usually appear obscure, not clean-cut—more like fragments.
3. These fragments rarely connect neatly.
4. With no box in sight, the fragments have to create the picture.


Our profound puzzle Pat solutions can no more resolve puzzling puzzles than can Monopoly develop entrepreneurs or chess train guerrilla fighters.


at the root of our most foreboding problems—climate change, income disparities, declining democracy, nuclear weapons in the hands of loose cannons—lies the imbalance that plagues our societies. Narrow economic forces, manifested in rampant individualism and unrestrained globalization, have been overwhelming our collective and communal needs. This is our profound puzzle, for which pat solutions, such as fixing capitalism, will not work.

Making Progress on our Puzzle



numerous studies over the past few decades have reached what seems a counterintuitive conclusion: that all psychotherapies have roughly equal effects. This is known as the ‘dodo bird verdict’ – named after a character in Alice in Wonderland (1865) who declares after a running contest: ‘Everybody has won and all must have prizes.’ That no single form of therapy has proved superior to others might come as a surprise to readers, but it’s mightily familiar to researchers in the field. ‘There is so much data for this conclusion that if it were not so threatening to specific theories it would long ago have been accepted as one of psychology’s major findings,’ writes Arthur Bohart, professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and author of several books on psychotherapy.


the deeper reason why no single psychotherapy seems to provide unique advantages over any other is that they all work because of shared elements. Chief among these is the therapeutic relationship, connected to positive outcomes by a wealth of evidence. The emotional bond and the collaboration between client and therapist – called the alliance – have emerged as a strong predictor of improvement, even in therapies that don’t emphasise relational factors. Until recently, most studies of this alliance could show only that it correlates with better mental health in clients, but advances in research methods now find evidence for a causal link, suggesting that the therapy relationship might indeed be healing. Similarly, research into the traits of effective therapists has revealed that their greater experience with or a stricter adherence to a specific approach do not lead to improved outcomes whereas empathy, warmth, hopefulness and emotional expressiveness do.

Cradled by therapy



“The world was genetically complex 50,000 to 100,000 years ago,” says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Wood suspects that three or four closely related Homo species, including Denisovans, interbred during that time.

Mysterious Denisovans emerged from the shadows in 2019




The direct descendants of the first Melanesian Homo sapiens, Papuans have conserved in their cells, more so than any other humans on the planet, the traces of mankind’s first journey to the edge of the world. Once they arrived at the end of their odyssey, these early Melanesians, with only a few exceptions, never left their remote land. Over the centuries, while other Sapiens in Asia and Europe were intermixing, blurring the traces of their migrations, the genome of the first Papuans, which is the same as that of the first Australian Aborigines, has remained essentially intact. With a unique genetic heritage incorporating 2 to 4% Neanderthal and 4 to 6% Denisovan genes, the Papuans are nothing less than the living record of our origins.

The Papuans, the Living Record of our Origins



Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. “The future is already here,” he has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.”


“It isn’t an intellectual process, and it’s not prescient—it’s about what I can bring myself to believe.”


In writing “The Peripheral,” he’d been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called “the jackpot.” A character describes the jackpot as “multicausal”—“more a climate than an event.” The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry about—rising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so on—happen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to “androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit” that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. It’s a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.


For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no futures because our present is too volatile. . . . We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.


In a hyperconnected world, patterns can repeat in different idioms. The same ripples flow across Asia and Europe, art and technology, war and television. 

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real



I generally don’t post much about current politics - although I do follow them. This is a great signal about the use of frames, narratives and metaphors through an analysis of Trump by George Lakoff - a must read cognitive scientist.

Trump has turned words into weapons and he’s winning the linguistic war

Language works by activating brain structures called “frame-circuits” used to understand experience. They get stronger when we hear the activating language. Enough repetition can make them permanent, changing how we view the world.
Even negating a frame-circuit activates and strengthens it, as when Nixon said “I am not a crook” and people thought of him as a crook.


Scientists, marketers, advertisers and salespeople understand these principles. So do Russian and Islamic State hackers. But most reporters and editors clearly don’t. So the press is at a disadvantage when dealing with a super salesman with an instinctive ability to manipulate thought by 1) framing first, 2) repeating often and 3) leading others to repeat his words by getting people to attack him within his own frame.


Language can shape the way we think. Trump knows this. Here are some of his favorite manipulation techniques.

This is a good summary of the accelerating advances in science and technology. Worth the read.

The scientific events that shaped the decade

The 2010s have seen breakthroughs in frontiers from gene editing to gravitational waves. The coming one must focus on climate change.
Scientific and technological innovation has always created social and economic transformation. But the past decade showed, as few others have, the speed and scale at which such change can happen. If it continues at the present rate, the shape of the next ten years — from information technologies to applied bioscience, energy and environment — looks ever more contingent on the discoveries made in that time.


In the 2010s, artificial intelligence (AI) finally began to reveal its remarkable power and disruptive potential. Driven mainly by the advent of deep learning — the use of neural networks to spot patterns in complex data – AI flexed its muscles by achieving reliable language translation, besting expert human players at poker, video games and the board game Go, and beginning to demonstrate its use in self-driving cars 


Few fields are untouched by the machine-learning revolution, from materials science to drug exploration; quantum physics to medicine. Moreover, it now cannot be doubted that many jobs currently performed by humans could be done more cheaply and efficiently by machines — and the transition might well come sooner than we expect.

This is a concise summary of that past year’s advances in Math.

The Year in Math and Computer Science

Mathematicians and computer scientists made big progress in number theory, graph theory, machine learning and quantum computing, even as they reexamined our fundamental understanding of mathematics and neural networks.
For mathematicians and computer scientists, this was often a year of double takes and closer looks. Some reexamined foundational principles, while others found shockingly simple proofs, new techniques or unexpected insights in long-standing problems. Some of these advances have broad applications in physics and other scientific disciplines. Others are purely for the sake of gaining new knowledge (or just having fun), with little to no known practical use at this time.


Quanta covered the decade-long effort to rid mathematics of the rigid equal sign and replace it with the more flexible concept of “equivalence.” We also wrote about emerging ideas for a general theory of neural networks, which could give computer scientists a coveted theoretical basis to understand why deep learning algorithms have been so wildly successful.


Meanwhile, ordinary mathematical objects like matrices and networks yielded unexpected new insights in short, elegant proofs, and decades-old problems in number theory suddenly gave way to new solutions. Mathematicians also learned more about how regularity and order arise from chaotic systems, random numbers and other seemingly messy arenas. And, like a steady drumbeat, machine learning continued to grow more powerful, altering the approach and scope of scientific research, while quantum computers (probably) hit a critical milestone.

This is a great summary of some of the progress toward domestication of DNA.
CRISPR/Cas9 is a bacterial defense system against viruses that scientists have repurposed to make precise changes to DNA in the cells of humans and other animals. A “guide RNA” tows the DNA-cutting enzyme Cas9 to specific genes, where it slices through the DNA. In three clinical trials now under way in the United States, and one just completed, those cuts are disabling genes or snipping out problem bits of DNA.

The first U.S. trials in people put CRISPR to the test in 2019

These studies are a first step toward fulfilling the gene editor’s medical promise
When it was unveiled in 2012, people had great hopes that the gene editor CRISPR/Cas9 could treat or even cure hundreds to thousands of genetic diseases. This year, researchers in the United States began testing the gene editor in people, a crucial first step in determining whether the technology can fulfill its medical promise.


These first clinical trials are testing CRISPR/Cas9’s safety and efficacy against cancer, blood disorders and one form of inherited blindness in people who already have the disease. Many more such trials are expected to begin soon. Unlike the editing of human embryos that stirred up controversy in 2018, the genetic changes introduced in these trials would not be inherited by future generations.


CRISPR’s rise as a potential medical tool happened in remarkably short time, says Janelle Waack, an intellectual property attorney at the law firm Bass, Berry & Sims in Washington, D.C. She has been tracking the dramatic growth of CRISPR patent filings, including for health care, medical research, agriculture and chemical processing. “People are investing in the technology and think it has great commercial value,” she says.

This is a fascinating signal of an emerging understanding of how mechanical-physical actions within and between cells complement chemical actions - and also progress the domestication of DNA
Originally considered a novelty, technologists rushed to make increasingly complex shapes, such as smiley faces, snowflakes, a tiny world map, and more recently, the world’s smallest playable tic-tac-toe set. It wasn’t just fun. Along the way, scientists uncovered sophisticated principles and engineering techniques to shape DNA strands into their desired structures, forming a blueprint of DNA engineering.
As costs keep dropping, the authors believe we’ll witness even more creative and sophisticated DNA nanomachines.

DNA Nanomachines Are Opening Medicine to the World of Physics

When I imagine the inner workings of a robot, I think hard, cold mechanics running on physics: shafts, wheels, gears. Human bodies, in contrast, are more of a contained molecular soup operating on the principles of biochemistry.


Yet similar to robots, our cells are also attuned to mechanical forces—just at a much smaller scale. Tiny pushes and pulls, for example, can urge stem cells to continue dividing, or nudge them into maturity to replace broken tissues. Chemistry isn’t king when it comes to governing our bodies; physical forces are similarly powerful. The problem is how to tap into them.


In a new perspectives article in Science, Dr. Khalid Salaita and graduate student Aaron Blanchard from Emory University in Atlanta point to DNA as the solution. The team painted a futuristic picture of DNA mechanotechnology, in which we use DNA machines to control our biology. Rather than a toxic chemotherapy drip, for example, a cancer patient may one day be injected with DNA nanodevices that help their immune cells better grab onto—and snuff out—cancerous ones.


“For a long time,” said Salaita, “scientists have been good at making micro devices, hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. It’s been more challenging to make functional nano devices, thousands of times smaller than that. But using DNA as the component parts is making it possible to build extremely elaborate nano devices because the DNA parts self-assemble.”


Just as the steam engine propelled civilization through the first industrial revolution, DNA devices may fundamentally change medicine, biological research, and the development of biomaterials, further merging man and machine.

This probably shouldn’t surprise anyone - but IKEA is transforming itself from a technology company into a technology company. :)

IKEA 2.0

The Swedish furniture giant has conquered living rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms — but can it hang on to the future of the home?
At first, Ikea treated smart home stuff like a hobby — testing the waters with furniture that could wirelessly charge your phone before building an ecosystem of speakers, lights, and blinds with bare-bones functionality. Those successes prompted a decision this summer to promote Home Smart to the same importance as Living Room, Bedroom, and all of the other Ikea businesses that have come to define the company.


Early reviews of the company’s Home Smart ecosystem mirror the typical Ikea experience: great price, questionable quality. It’s an inauspicious start for a company that tried and failed to take on the tech world before. Ikea now faces the challenge of teaming up with Google, Amazon, Apple, and other tech giants while also battling them for primacy in the home.


Ikea believes its advantage in the smart home stems from what at first looks like its greatest disadvantage: Ikea is not a tech company. As a furniture maker, Ikea has a thorough understanding of life at home and a unique ability to marry technology with ordinary furniture. Ikea’s unimaginable scale matches up well with Big Tech. And historically speaking, it’s been a formidable and ruthless competitor in every segment it focuses on. Ikea is now focused on the smart home.


The digital transformation of Ikea could improve the lives of billions. At stake is the democratization of the smart home — intelligent homes that improve the daily lives of everyone, not just the resident geeks who can already afford them.

This is not Iron Man yet - but it signals the emergence of new forms of augmenting human effort. The GIFs and 2 min video provide good visuals.

Sarcos Demonstrates Powered Exosuit That Gives Workers Super Strength

It won't make you look like Iron Man but the Guardian XO allows you to lift 200 pounds without breaking a sweat
One year ago, for IEEE Spectrum’s special report on the Top Tech for 2019, Sarcos Robotics promised that by the end of the year they’d be ready to ship a powered exoskeleton that would be the future of industrial work. And late last month, Sarcos invited us to Salt Lake City, Utah, to see what that future looks like.


Sarcos has been developing powered exoskeletons and the robotic technologies that make them possible for decades, and the lobby of the company’s headquarters is a resting place for concepts and prototype hardware that’s been abandoned along the way. But now, Sarcos is ready to unveil the prototype of the Guardian XO, a strength-multiplying exoskeleton that’s about to begin shipping.


The Sarcos Guardian XO is a 24-degrees-of-freedom full-body robotic exoskeleton. While wearing it, a human can lift  200 pounds (90 kilograms) while feeling like they’re lifting just 10 lbs (4.5 kg). The Guardian XO is fully electrical and untethered with a runtime of 2 hours, and hot-swappable battery packs can keep it going for a full work day. It takes seconds to put on and take off, and Sarcos says new users can be trained to use the system in minutes. One Guardian XO costs $100,000 per year to rent, and the company will be shipping its first batch of alpha units to customers (including both heavy industry and the U.S. military) in January.

Here is an important signal that fundamental science has so much more to reveal.

Discovering a new fundamental underwater force

A team of mathematicians from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Brown University has discovered a new phenomenon that generates a fluidic force capable of moving and binding particles immersed in density-layered fluids. The breakthrough offers an alternative to previously held assumptions about how particles accumulate in lakes and oceans and could lead to applications in locating biological hotspots, cleaning up the environment and even in sorting and packing.


How matter settles and aggregates under gravitation in fluid systems, such as lakes and oceans, is a broad and important area of scientific study, one that greatly impacts humanity and the planet. Consider "marine snow," the shower of organic matter constantly falling from upper waters to the deep ocean. Not only is nutrient-rich marine snow essential to the global food chain, but its accumulations in the briny deep represent the Earth's largest carbon sink and one of the least-understood components of the planet's carbon cycle.


Ocean particle accumulation has long been understood as the result of chance collisions and adhesion. But an entirely different and unexpected phenomenon is at work in the water column, according to a paper published Dec. 20 in Nature Communications by a team led by professors Richard McLaughlin and Roberto Camassa of the Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences, along with their UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student Robert Hunt and Dan Harris of the School of Engineering at Brown University.


In the paper, the researchers demonstrate that particles suspended in fluids of different densities, such as seawater of varying layers of salinity, exhibit two previously undiscovered behaviors. First, the particles self-assemble without electrostatic or magnetic attraction or, in the case of micro-organisms, without propulsion devices such as beating flagella or cilia. Second, they clump together without any need for adhesive or other bonding forces. The larger the cluster, the stronger the attractive force.

A great signal for all those of us who LOVE hot sauce and hot peppers.
An interesting fact is that protection from mortality risk was independent of the type of diet people followed. In other words, someone can follow the healthy Mediterranean diet, someone else can eat less healthily, but for all of them, chili pepper has a protective effect.

Consumption of chili pepper cuts down the risk of death from a heart or cerebral attack

Chili pepper is a common ingredient in Italians kitchens, and over the centuries, it has been praised for its supposed therapeutic virtues. Now, an Italian study shows that people who consume it on a regular basis have an all-cause mortality risk 23 percent lower than those who do not consume it. The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), was conducted by the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention of I.R.C.C.S. Neuromed in Pozzilli, Italy, in collaboration with the Department of Oncology and Molecular Medicine of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome, the University of Insubria in Varese and the Mediterranean Cardiocentro in Naples.


The study examined 22,811 citizens of the Molise region in Italy participating in the Moli-sani study. Following their health status for an average period of about eight years and comparing it with their eating habits, Neuromed researchers observed that in people regularly consuming chili pepper (four times a week or more), the risk of dying of a heart attack was cut by 40 percent. Risk reduction for cerebrovascular mortality was more than halved.

Thursday, December 19, 2019

Friday Thinking 20 Dec 2019

Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.)  that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.

Many thanks to those who enjoy this.

In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.

Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How  
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st  Century

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9


Content
Quotes:

Articles:



At first glance, neoclassical economics’ conflation of land with a broad notion of capital does seem to follow a certain logic. It is clear that both can be thought of as commodities: both can be bought and sold in a mature capitalist market. A firm can have a portfolio of assets that includes land (or property) and shares in a company (the equivalent of owning capital ‘stock’) and swap one for another using established market prices. Both land and capital goods can also be seen as store of value (consider the phrase ‘safe as houses’) and to some extent a source of liquidity, particularly given innovations in finance that have allowed people to engage in home equity withdrawal.

In reality, however, land and capital are fundamentally distinctive phenomena. Land is permanent, cannot be produced or reproduced, cannot be ‘used up’ and does not depreciate. None of these features apply to capital. Capital goods are produced by humans, depreciate over time due to physical wear and tear and innovations in technology (think of computers or mobile phones) and they can be replicated. In any set of national accounts, you will find a sizeable negative number detailing physical capital stock ‘depreciation’: net not gross capital investment is the preferred variable used in calculating a nations’s output. When it comes to land, net and gross values are equal.

The argument made by Bates Clark and his followers was that by removing the complexities of dynamics, the true or pure functioning of the economy will be more clearly revealed. As a result, microeconomic theory generally deals with relations of coexistence or ‘comparative statics’ (how are labour and capital combined in a single point in time to create outputs) rather than dynamic relations. This has led to a neglect of the continued creation and destruction of capital and the continued existence and non-depreciation of land.

Today’s economics textbooks – in particular microeconomics – slavishly follow the tenets of marginal productivity theory. ‘Income’ is understood narrowly as a reward for one’s contribution to production whilst wealth is understood as ‘savings’ due to one’s productive investment effort, not as unearned windfalls from being the owner of land or other naturally scarce sources of value. In many advanced economies land values – and capital gains made from increasing property prices – are not properly measured and tracked over time.

this huge growth in wealth relative to the rest of the economy originates not from the saving of income derived from people’s contribution to production (activity that would have created jobs and raised incomes), but rather from windfalls resulting from exclusive control of a scarce natural resource: land.

How Land Disappeared from Economic Theory




Numerous research topics are ripe for more study by theorists and empiricists. Within the following long list of topics (still a partial one) there are low-hanging fruits and more challenging problems that may require interdisciplinary reach and which tenured academics are in a particularly privileged position to take on: whistleblower policies, the impact of consumers, employees, and politicians on corporate actions, accounting rules for derivatives, the effectiveness of boards, audits and auditors regulation, the design of bankruptcy laws, money laundering, corporate fraud, the organization and pricing of deposit insurance, debt subsidies, the role of financial literacy and ideology in policy discussions, the structure and governance of regulatory agencies and central banks, lobbying of multinational corporations, the governance of international bodies such as Financial Stability Board, Basel Committee, and IMF, and the political economy of corporate enforcement.

The key takeaways if research is claimed to be relevant for the real world are: 
- Just because a model claims to “explain” something in the real world does not give it logical or actual validity. Even if we may never have the data to be able to reject a model, there are ways to apply casual empiricism (“if this model was true, we would observe x and we don’t”), and we must be especially careful if a model contradicts other plausible explanations for what we see. (Consider: “cigarette smoking improves people’s health” as an “explanation” of why people smoke.)
- Just because a model can be “calibrated” does not give it logical or actual validity. 

Applying inadequate economic models to policy in the real world is akin to building bridges using flawed engineering models. Serious harm may follow. 

There is No Economics without Politics




The United States begins as an enlightenment project of creating law and legal institutions on a plan grounded in theory. When the French took up a similar project of constitutional creation a few years later, the UK’s conservative Member of Parliament Edmund Burke responded that law is not like that: it is system, not project; it grows immanently, it is not made.

The Burkean response came to the US at the end of the 19th century. By then, the dominant picture of American constitutionalism is that of system, not project. The real constitution is not the founders’ written text, but ‘unwritten’ practices that develop according to immanent principles of order. Those principles are no one’s project. They emerge naturally and spontaneously, the thinking then went, wherever the Anglo-American race has the freedom to develop through the pursuit of its own ideals and interests.

By the end of the century, constitutionalism, Christianity and civilisation coincide in the legal imaginary as the telos of history, that is, of the system realising itself. The task of jurisprudence, accordingly, is to discover those principles that structure a free society, not to create them. The role of legislation or of a written constitution, on the systemic view, is no more than that of removing pathologies that block the free actions of citizens. Projects of law, in other words, are now only remedial, just like a doctor’s interventions are designed to address pathologies that keep the body from realising its immanent principles of order – which we describe as ‘health’. Out of this systemic imagination comes a convergence of constitutionalism with laissez-faire capitalism.

Project and system




The post-industrial, creative and entrepreneurial society is emerging. Entrepreneurs are like artists and artists are like entrepreneurs. They both “turn nothings into somethings”. Artists give a form to ideas that for some other people might be nothing more than vague thoughts or passing emotions. Art is the most efficient way of creating novel associations, enriching connections and new, sometimes radical, openings. Art creates suggestions for fresh ways of defining the world we live in.

 It is a world where you don’t work for a company, but you may work with a company. Incentive systems are also changing. The tokenized financial systems of the future are going to recognize and reward the creative majority and not mainly the executive minority.

Creativity is a social and political tool. As it is about expressing ourselves, it gives a voice and a form to democracy. As it is a platform of ideas, it is an agent of change. As it raises new questions, it is about the very thing that makes us human — imagination

What comes to entrepreneurship and creativity, failure is part of the very fabric of building something new. This essentially makes the whole concept of failure meaningless. But there may of course be a personal feeling of failure, which is often an unavoidable part of the creative process. Monet and Cezanne did not cease to paint when they were publicly rejected. They continued. Not because they were insensitive, but because they were so committed to their art. They had courage.

Fostering creativity is a genuine goal for absolutely all in the post-industrial society. A creative economy needs individuals with the courage and capacity to think, learn and live imaginatively. We need people who can conceive ideas and who can realize them.

Esko Kilpi - Art, entrepreneurship and the future of work





This is an amazing signal on par with social physics and machine learning to reveal previously unseeable patterns in data. When we can see data in new ways and reveal patterns - we can think new things.
Because pose-tracking software has simplified data collection, “now we can think about other problems,” said Benjamin de Bivort, a behavioral biologist at Harvard University. Starting with: How do we define the building blocks of behavior, and how do we interpret them?
“Their algorithms can pull out behaviors that we don’t have words for,” Whitlock said.

To Decode the Brain, Scientists Automate the Study of Behavior

Machine learning and deep neural networks can capture and analyze the “language” of animal behavior in ways that go beyond what’s humanly possible.
A key advantage of these methods is that they can pick up on patterns that humans can’t see. In a paper published last month in Nature Neuroscience, Calhoun, with the Princeton neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Jonathan Pillow, built a machine learning model that used behavioral observations alone to identify three internal states underlying the courtship behavior of fruit flies. By manipulating the flies’ brain activity, the researchers were then able to pinpoint a set of neurons that controlled those states.

The work on motion tracking and behavioral analysis that made these findings possible represents a technological revolution in the study of behavior. It also indicates that this success is just one of many to come. Scientists are now applying these methods to tackle questions in neuroscience, genetics, evolution and medicine that seemed unsolvable until now.


There are innumerable ways to store energy and more are emerging as we embrace a green economy.

Mix Mountains and Gravity for Long-Term Energy Storage

A team of European engineers says its mountain energy storage system for small grids would be inexpensive and environmentally-friendly
The intermittent nature of energy sources such as solar and wind has made it difficult to incorporate them into grids, which require a steady power supply. To provide uninterrupted power, grid operators must store extra energy harnessed when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, so that power can be distributed when there’s no sun or wind.

“One of the big challenges of making 100 percent renewable energy a reality is long-term storage,” says Julian Hunt, an engineering scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

Lithium-ion batteries currently dominate the energy storage market, but these are better suited for short-term storage, says Hunt, because the charge they hold dissipates over time. To store sufficient energy for months or years would require many batteries, which is too expensive to be a feasible option.

Hunt and his collaborators have devised a novel system to complement lithium-ion battery use for energy storage over the long run: Mountain Gravity Energy Storage, or MGES for short. Similar to hydroelectric power, MGES involves storing material at elevation to produce gravitational energy. The energy is recovered when the stored material falls and turns turbines to generate electricity. The group describes its system in a paper published 6 November in Energy.


This is another good signal of the progress being made regarding antibiotic resistance. The growing body of proteomics is arm in arm with our domestication of DNA

Researchers identify 'Achilles' heel' of drug-resistant superbug

"We know that bacteria have innate stress response systems, but we do not understand fully how these responses are triggered to cause antibiotic resistance," said Ayesha Khan, a doctoral student in the Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Program at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the study's lead author.

The research, published in the December issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, revealed that a protein called LiaX is released by bacteria into the environment to sense the presence of antibiotics, causing restructuring of the bacterial cell that prevents the drug from destroying it. VRE is on the Centers for Disease Control's latest threat report and is most commonly associated with health care settings. It can lead to serious complications, causing nearly 5,400 deaths in 2017 in the U.S.

"We have uncovered the 'Achilles' heel' of an important hospital-associated and multidrug-resistant pathogen," said senior author Cesar Arias, MD, Ph.D., a professor at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth and Herbert L. and Margaret W. DuPont Chair in Infectious Diseases. "By identifying the main mediator of the response against antibiotics and the first line of defense of our immune system, this will open major therapeutic and diagnostic research avenues against these organisms which are associated with disease in critically ill patients."


One more signal of alternative ways to deal with the evolving challenges of antibiotic resistance.

Scientists discover a novel method to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Over the years, bacteria have evolved so many clever ways of protecting themselves against antibiotics that now the World Health Organization (WHO) fears that we may soon slip back into a situation similar to the pre-antibiotic era. The death toll caused by antimicrobial resistance is estimated to rise to 10 million deaths annually by 2050 with India carrying one of the largest burdens of drug-resistant pathogens worldwide. To compound this problem, the global antibiotic pipeline to develop next-generation antibiotics is precariously thin.

In the context of this alarming public health threat, scientists from the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem) and Unilever joined forces to develop innovative strategies to deal with antimicrobial resistance. Together, the team probed the cellular mechanisms that regulate the release of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are natural antibiotics produced by skin cells to fight off bacteria. AMPs target and kill bacteria in such variable ways that few bacteria ever develop resistance to them, thus making AMPs uniquely suited to treating antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. The scientists' work led to the discovery of a new signalling pathway in skin cells that controls the long-term release of AMPs from these cells. By tweaking this pathway, researchers can induce AMP release from skin cells without any exposure to bacteria! This has tremendous potential in preventing and treating infections for post-surgery wounds, and for diabetic patients and those with weakened immune systems.

Apart from their role as natural antibiotics, AMPs are also known to be involved in wound healing in the skin. This fact spurred Dr. Amitabha Majumdar (Unilever R&D) to hypothesise that the same machinery used to release AMPs during wound healing could be harnessed to control AMP release from skin cells for treating or preventing infections. To test this, Dr. Majumdar contacted Dr. Colin Jamora of the Joint IFOM-inStem Research Laboratory at inStem's Centre for Inflammation and Tissue Homeostasis (CITH) - a group that works extensively on the mechanisms of wound healing in the skin.


Here’s a weak signal - but also perhaps inevitable in the pursuit of Star Trek like medical technology.

DARPA Seeks Pathogen Detectors That Use CRISPR to Run 1,000 Tests at Once

DARPA is asking researchers to use gene-editing technologies for portable diagnostics that produce results in 15 minutes
The U.S. Department of Defense has put out a call to researchers to develop devices that detect pathogenic threats by performing up to 1,000 diagnostic tests in fewer than 15 minutes.

The devices ideally would determine the presence of a pathogen, and useful details about it, such as whether it’s a drug resistant variety, the severity of the infection, and any co-infections.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which makes investments in breakthrough technologies on the military’s behalf, will oversee the initiative. 

Scientists have endeavored to make this sort of diagnose-anything, “Star Trek”-inspired device previously, without a lot of success. But DARPA is betting that new technology that leverages gene-editing techniques can achieve this goal.


While a lot of signal hunting focuses on existing/emerging technology trends - it is equally important to be open to breakthroughs in fundamental science. Sometimes these two ‘hunting grounds’ are entangled.
"The ability to create and control high-performance quantum bits in commercial electronics was a surprise," said lead investigator David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at UChicago and a pioneer in quantum technology. "These discoveries have changed the way we think about developing quantum technologies—perhaps we can find a way to use today's electronics to build quantum devices."

In surprise breakthrough, scientists create quantum states in everyday electronics

After decades of miniaturization, the electronic components we've relied on for computers and modern technologies are now starting to reach fundamental limits. Faced with this challenge, engineers and scientists around the world are turning toward a radically new paradigm: quantum information technologies.

In two papers published in Science and Science Advances, Awschalom's group demonstrated they could electrically control quantum states embedded in silicon carbide. The breakthrough could offer a means to more easily design and build quantum electronics—in contrast to using exotic materials scientists usually need to use for quantum experiments, such as superconducting metals, levitated atoms or diamonds.

These quantum states in silicon carbide have the added benefit of emitting single particles of light with a wavelength near the telecommunications band. "This makes them well suited to long-distance transmission through the same fiber-optic network that already transports 90 percent of all international data worldwide," said Awschalom, senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange.


A wonderful signal of the advance of our understanding of the living world, biology and the biosphere. Quantum science is everywhere.
"The persistence of quantum wavelike behavior in biomolecular systems opens up a new paradigm for explaining some of the fundamental processes in biology,"

Surfing on quantum waves: Protein folding revisited

Two physicists from the University of Luxembourg have now unambiguously shown that quantum-mechanical wavelike interactions are indeed crucial even at the scale of natural biological processes.

Quantum wavelike behaviour plays a key role in modern science and technology, with applications of quantum mechanics ranging from lasers and high-speed fiber communications, to quantum computers and photosynthesis in plants. A natural question is whether quantum wave phenomena could also be relevant for structure formation and dynamical processes in biological systems in living cells. This question has not been addressed convincingly up to now due to the lack of efficient quantum methods that are applicable to systems as large as whole proteins under physiological conditions (i.e. solvated in water and at room temperature).

Now writing in Science Advances, Prof. Alexandre Tkatchenko and doctoral researcher Martin Stöhr from the Department of Physics and Materials Science at the University of Luxembourg have investigated the folding process of proteins in water using a fully quantum-mechanical treatment for the first time. Protein folding is the physical process by which a chain of amino acids acquires its native biologically functional structure due to interactions between amino acids and the influence of surrounding water. A key novel finding of the present study is that the interaction between the protein and the surrounding water has to be described by quantum-mechanical wavelike behavior, which also turns out to be critical in the dynamics of the protein folding process.


This is an important signal of emerging new construction methods and the advance of 3D-printing technologies.

Dubai is now home to world's largest 3D-printed building

A Boston-based technology company has completed what it says is the largest 3D-printed building in the world in 21 days.
3D printing equipment manufacturer Apis Cor recently built a two-story administrative office building for a Dubai government agency using one mobile printer. Standing at 31 feet tall with an area of 6,889 square feet, the building's walls were printed while the insulation, roof, foundation and windows were installed using traditional building methods, Apis Cor CEO Nikita Cheniuntai told Construction Dive.

The walls were printed on-site by moving the car-sized printer around the construction site via crane. The cost of the project, a research and development initiative, was not released.

Printing of buildings is feasible in all types of climates, he said, as long as the project team can create the right blend of materials and the mixing equipment can work properly. Possible applications of the Apis Cor technology include residential, commercial and industrial construction, he said.

Apis Cor, which has been mainly 3D printing houses, plans to offer its technology in the U.S. next year, once it clears building code regulations. In 2017, the company printed a 400-square-foot demonstration house in 24 hours for about $10,000.


This is an important signal of tectonic-like change - the implications of a shifting magnetic north and an eventual shifting of north-south are more than significant.
The north magnetic pole has traveled 1,400 miles since it was first discovered—and has changed speed, as well. As recently as 2000, the speed was clocked at 10 km/year. The latest readings show it moving at a brisk 50 km/year.

Updated World Magnetic Model shows magnetic north pole continuing to push toward Siberia

The team of researchers that maintain the World Magnetic Model (WMM) has updated it and released it a year ahead of schedule due to the speed with which the pole is moving. The newly updated model shows the magnetic north pole moving away from Canada and toward Siberia.

The magnetic north pole is the point on the Earth that compasses designate as true north. It is the result of geological processes deep within the planet—molten iron flow creates a magnetic field with poles near the geographic North and South Poles. But unlike the geographic poles, the magnetic poles can move—and the magnetic north pole has been moving faster in recent years, which made necessary the early update of the WMM.