Thursday, October 29, 2020

Friday Thinking 30 Oct 2020

Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.

Many thanks to those who enjoy this.
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.

The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment - 
computational ecology - 
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence. 

To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.  

‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’

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


Content

Quotes:

The Regina Manifesto and the Origins of Canada’s Parliamentary Socialists

Yes, more and more young adults are living with their parents – but is that necessarily bad?

Quantum Tunnels Show How Particles Can Break the Speed of Light


Articles:

Activists Turn Facial Recognition Tools Against the Police

A Supercomputer Analyzed Covid-19 — and an Interesting New Theory Has Emerged

The Hidden Structure of the Universe

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA

Superwhite paint can cool buildings even in hot sunlight

Maps undergo major reshuffle

Probing fine-scale connections in the brain

Ultrafast camera films 3-D movies at 100 billion frames per second

New virtual reality software allows scientists to 'walk' inside cells

Synthetic DNA holds great promise for data storage

New evidence links gut bacteria alterations to autism

China Conducts Test Of Massive Suicide Drone Swarm Launched From A Box On A Truck




In 1932, a group of women and men representing workers, farmers, academics, and religious leaders met at the Royal Canadian Legion #1 in Calgary, Alberta — now Canada’s conservative epicenter — to discuss their common experiences of exploitation. Surrounded by symbols of Canadian (really British) patriotism — the Red Ensign and a portrait of the king — they debated strategies to create a nation that would make possible “a much richer individual life for every citizen.”

For those who did not believe in revolution, the solution was obvious: the formation of an electoral party to challenge the Liberals and Conservatives — “the instruments of capitalist interests” — for political power. A socialist government, they argued, was the only way to “put an end to this capitalist domination of our political life.” The following year — the worst of the Depression in Canada — they founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).

The Regina Manifesto and the Origins of Canada’s Parliamentary Socialists




Until the modern pension system arose about a century ago, aging parents were highly vulnerable and needed their adult children and daughters-in-law to care for them in their later years. This tradition persists in many countries, including the two most populous countries in the world, India and China.

Yes, more and more young adults are living with their parents – but is that necessarily bad?




The upshot is that until a particle strikes a detector, it’s everywhere and nowhere in particular. This makes it really hard to say how long the particle previously spent somewhere, such as inside a barrier. “You cannot say what time it spends there,” Litvinyuk said, “because it can be simultaneously two places at the same time.”

Objects have certain characteristics, like mass or location. But they don’t have an intrinsic “time” that we can measure directly. “I can ask you, ‘What is the position of the baseball?’ but it makes no sense to ask, ‘What is the time of the baseball?’” Steinberg said. “The time is not a property any particle possesses.” Instead, we track other changes in the world, such as ticks of clocks (which are ultimately changes in position), and call these increments of time.

Quantum Tunnels Show How Particles Can Break the Speed of Light




This is a good signal - of the evolving participatory panopticon and the philosophy of “who better to watch the watchers than the watched” - an ongoing dialectic of power and it’s democratization - for good and/or ill.

Activists Turn Facial Recognition Tools Against the Police

“We’re now approaching the technological threshold where the little guys can do it to the big guys,” one researcher said.
In early September, the City Council in Portland, Ore., met virtually to consider sweeping legislation outlawing the use of facial recognition technology. The bills would not only bar the police from using it to unmask protesters and individuals captured in surveillance imagery; they would also prevent companies and a variety of other organizations from using the software to identify an unknown person.

During the time for public comments, a local man, Christopher Howell, said he had concerns about a blanket ban. He gave a surprising reason.

“I am involved with developing facial recognition to in fact use on Portland police officers, since they are not identifying themselves to the public,” Mr. Howell said. Over the summer, with the city seized by demonstrations against police violence, leaders of the department had told uniformed officers that they could tape over their name. Mr. Howell wanted to know: Would his use of facial recognition technology become illegal?


This is about six weeks old - but is a fascinating signal of the power of big data, powerful computers, and AI to accelerate medical discovery - just at a time when the exploration space of complex systems is beginning to be perceived. 

A Supercomputer Analyzed Covid-19 — and an Interesting New Theory Has Emerged

A closer look at the Bradykinin hypothesis
Earlier this summer, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee set about crunching data on more than 40,000 genes from 17,000 genetic samples in an effort to better understand Covid-19. Summit is the second-fastest computer in the world, but the process — which involved analyzing 2.5 billion genetic combinations — still took more than a week.

When Summit was done, researchers analyzed the results. It was, in the words of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, lead researcher and chief scientist for computational systems biology at Oak Ridge, a “eureka moment.” The computer had revealed a new theory about how Covid-19 impacts the body: the bradykinin hypothesis. The hypothesis provides a model that explains many aspects of Covid-19, including some of its most bizarre symptoms. It also suggests 10-plus potential treatments, many of which are already FDA approved. Jacobson’s group published their results in a paper in the journal eLife in early July.


This is a worthwhile read and view (a wonderful interactive 3D illustration than can also be viewed in Virtual Reality) - it is the simplest clearest description of the fundamental particles - by grasping the description I also had my first intuition that string theory has deep roots in the Standard Model - through different metaphors and visuals. This is the first chapter in a series.

The Hidden Structure of the Universe

Our new series of articles explores the search for fundamental structure at the edge of science.
Chris Quigg, a particle physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has been thinking about how to visualize the Standard Model for decades, hoping that a more powerful visual representation would help familiarize people with the known particles of nature and prompt them to think about how these particles might fit into a larger, more complete theoretical framework. Quigg’s visual representation shows more of the Standard Model’s underlying order and structure. He calls his scheme the “double simplex” representation, because the left-handed and right-handed particles of nature each form a simplex — a generalization of a triangle. We have adopted Quigg’s scheme and made further modifications.

Let’s build up the double simplex from scratch.


This is a strong signal of the imminent phase transition if global energy geopolitics.

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA

The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries.
That is according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2020. The 464-page outlook, published today by the IEA, also outlines the “extraordinarily turbulent” impact of coronavirus and the “highly uncertain” future of global energy use over the next two decades.

Reflecting this uncertainty, this year’s version of the highly influential annual outlook offers four “pathways” to 2040, all of which see a major rise in renewables. The IEA’s main scenario has 43% more solar output by 2040 than it expected in 2018, partly due to detailed new analysis showing that solar power is 20-50% cheaper than thought.

Despite a more rapid rise for renewables and a “structural” decline for coal, the IEA says it is too soon to declare a peak in global oil use, unless there is stronger climate action. Similarly, it says demand for gas could rise 30% by 2040, unless the policy response to global warming steps up.


This is a nice small signal of incremental approaches to energy use reduction that can add up to significant offsets

Superwhite paint can cool buildings even in hot sunlight

A new superwhite paint is so reflective that it can cool a surface to below the surrounding air temperature, even under sunlight. It could help reduce the use of energy-intensive air conditioning in hot countries.
Xiulin Ruan at Purdue University and his colleagues developed a white paint that was so reflective and good at radiating heat that it cooled a surface to 1.7°C below the surrounding noon air temperature during tests in Indiana. Compared with existing, commercial heat-reflective paints that reflect about 80-90 per cent of solar energy, the new one managed 95.5 per cent.

Ruan says his team’s paint is thinner, cheaper and could be easily scaled up. The acrylic paint is made with calcium carbonate, and partly achieves its qualities by containing particles of many different sizes, which help to scatter different wavelengths in the solar spectrum. Ruan estimates a typical US home of 200 square metres would save about $50 per month on cooling costs, compared with using an existing heat-resistant paint.


This is a fascinating signal indicating how we can enable more knowledge to emerge for sharing all manner of big data generated by diverse communities and domains of knowledge - of course - the map is NOT the territory :)
one overarching question: “how to build a common foundation for an evolving standard, while providing a language that can inscribe these variables in its grammar?”

Maps undergo major reshuffle

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has adopted a new international standard, opening the way to a common format for cartographic description. The geographer Erwan Bocher and his colleague Olivier Ertz, who are behind this evolution, walk us through the ins and outs.

A map is an object that transcribes facts relating to a territory (topography, population, temperature, sea level, etc.), through a process of abstraction that transforms data from the real world into a series of symbols placed on a medium representing that territory.  We expect maps to be the most faithful possible representation of this information, enabling us – provided we know how to read them – to grasp the geographic organisation of a territory at a glance. However, when it comes to helping decision-making, a map also conveys messages. For instance, the appropriate use of colour makes it possible to represent the concentration of a pollutant in the air, so that areas where a certain threshold is exceeded are displayed clearly. 

Prior to the advent of the Internet, in the early 2000s, each community (geologists, climatologists, epidemiologists, etc.) had access solely to their own geographic information. The data was not pooled, and there was no real infrastructure or formats for sharing it. As a result, each group developed their own maps. However, new and widely-available information and communication technologies radically transformed the processing and rendering of geographic information, henceforth enabling broad data sharing within spatial data infrastructure (SDI). A vast undertaking to gather geographic information began, largely encouraged by the OGC.  

Mutualising and sharing resources is indeed extremely useful for generating knowledge. Whether for researchers or institutions, the ability to pool data emerged as one of the necessary conditions for improving territorial governance, as well as proof of the effectiveness and transparency of public action. 


A nice signal of the continuing progress in the ‘mapping’ of the human connectome
Even with about 1,000-fold fewer cells, the mouse brain poses a formidable challenge, says Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is one of the leaders of a global consortium that aims to reconstruct the neural wiring of a mouse brain over the next decade. “We’re dealing with a data set that will be on the scale of an exabyte.” 

With advances in microscopy and artificial intelligence (AI), and crowdsourced help from human gamers, researchers are beginning to map neural networks and their connections at ever-higher resolution and scale. 

Even among genetically identical animals, Zhen says, about 43% of connections were not the same.

Probing fine-scale connections in the brain

Artificial intelligence and improved microscopy make it feasible to map the nervous system at ever-higher resolution.
There are 70 million neurons in the mouse brain, and Moritz Helmstaedter wants to map them all. He was a medical student at Heidelberg University in Germany when psychiatrists there suggested that some aspects of the human psyche lack a biological explanation. “I was totally appalled,” recalls Helmstaedter, who is now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany.

Although the brain remains a mystery, Helmstaedter was convinced that what goes on there “must be a mechanistic phenomenon in the end, as complex as it may be”. He has dedicated the past two decades to working those mechanisms out — and he and other neuroscientists are finally starting to scratch the surface, one cubic micrometre at a time.

Starting in the 1970s, it took more than a decade to unravel the neural circuitry of the one-millimetre worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. Probing the relationship between genes and behaviour, biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, laboriously traced the fine branches and synaptic connections of each nerve cell, colour-coding them by hand on thousands of electron-micrograph prints. That wiring map — the first and only complete set of synaptic connections in an animal’s nervous system — was stored on a room-sized computer and published as the first full animal ‘connectome’ in a 340-page opus in 1986.

Tracing neural circuitry through the brain of a tiny worm requires thousands of 30–50-nanometre sections. “Even if you’re a god, you cannot cut 5,000 sections without messing anything up,” says Mei Zhen, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Now try doing that eight times. In an analysis described in a bioRxiv preprint in May, researchers led by Zhen, Lichtman and Harvard physicist Aravinthan Samuel reconstructed connectomes across eight developmental stages, to learn how the C. elegans wiring diagram changes as the worm matures from early larva to adult. 


This is an amazing signal of the future of science for actually seeing reality and generating data of what we can ‘see’ - and thus begin to understand in profoundly new ways.
the SP-CUP's combination of high-speed three-dimensional imagery and the use of polarization information makes it a powerful tool that may be applicable to a wide variety of scientific problems. In particular, he hopes that it will help researchers better understand the physics of sonoluminescence, a phenomenon in which sound waves create tiny bubbles in water or other liquids

Ultrafast camera films 3-D movies at 100 billion frames per second

In his quest to bring ever-faster cameras to the world, Caltech's Lihong Wang has developed technology that can reach blistering speeds of 70 trillion frames per second, fast enough to see light travel. Just like the camera in your cell phone, though, it can only produce flat images.

Now, Wang's lab has gone a step further to create a camera that not only records video at incredibly fast speeds but does so in three dimensions. Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering in the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, describes the device in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

The new camera, which uses the same underlying technology as Wang's other compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) cameras, is capable of taking up to 100 billion frames per second. That is fast enough to take 10 billion pictures, more images than the entire human population of the world, in the time it takes you to blink your eye.


Not only are we breaking unimaginable boundaries in what can be visually recorded - but also the boundaries of how we’ll be able to interact with the maps of reality.

New virtual reality software allows scientists to 'walk' inside cells

Virtual reality software which allows researchers to 'walk' inside and analyse individual cells could be used to understand fundamental problems in biology and develop new treatments for disease.
The software, called vLUME, was created by scientists at the University of Cambridge and 3D image analysis software company Lume VR Ltd. It allows super-resolution microscopy data to be visualised and analysed in virtual reality, and can be used to study everything from individual proteins to entire cells. Details are published in the journal Nature Methods.

Super-resolution microscopy, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014, makes it possible to obtain images at the nanoscale by using clever tricks of physics to get around the limits imposed by light diffraction. This has allowed researchers to observe molecular processes as they happen. However, a problem has been the lack of ways to visualise and analyse this data in three dimensions.

"Biology occurs in 3D, but up until now it has been difficult to interact with the data on a 2D computer screen in an intuitive and immersive way," said Dr Steven F. Lee from Cambridge's Department of Chemistry, who led the research. "It wasn't until we started seeing our data in virtual reality that everything clicked into place."


Another amazing domain where the maps (as memory) are definitely Not the territory - the domestication of DNA signaling DNA as a media for memory storage.

Synthetic DNA holds great promise for data storage

The European project OligoArchive is working on proof of concept for data storage on synthetic DNA. While this medium is in theory unrivalled in terms of information density and longevity, it still faces technical limits that need to be overcome.
Two septillion bytes by 2025: the advent of the Internet and of wireless networks has led to a massive accumulation of data. "If we were to store all of today's information on Blu-ray, we would need twenty-three piles of disks stretching to the moon," explains Marc Antonini, a research professor at the Computer Science, Signal Processing, and Systems laboratory (I3S) at Sophia Antipolis (southeastern France). A crisis is unfolding, forcing Internet giants to expand the number of data centres, which they build in cold areas due to the enormous cooling problems they generate.

 a single gramme of [DNA] can theoretically contain up to 455 exabytes of information, or 455 quintillion bytes. All of the world's data would thus fit in a shoe box.

The scientist and his team are working on OligoArchive, a three-year project financed to the tune of €3 million by the European Commission, and which brings together the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology (IPMC), I3S, the Eurecom Graduate School and Research Centre in Digital Sciences, Imperial College London (UK), and the Irish start-up HelixWorks Technologies Limited. Together they are seeking to develop proof of concept for each stage of DNA storage: synthesising and storing data, and retrieving it as efficiently as possible. The project's goal is to build a DNA disk: a fully functional end-to-end prototype demonstrating that DNA could one day replace current archival storage technologies on magnetic tape.


Another interesting signal that each individual is an ecology of selves - that constitute a self - and also the wellbeing of that self.
“One of the main pathological manifestations of ASD is the dysfunction in mitochondria, major targets of organic toxicants due to their lipophilic properties,” the researchers write in the study. “When the intestinal microbial detoxification is severely impaired in ASD, more toxicants of external and internal origins might enter circulation and injure the mitochondria of various tissues. Thus, our finding of impaired microbial detoxification helps explain why ASD children are so vulnerable to environmental toxins and suggests that impairment in microbial detoxification might be involved in the pathogenesis of ASD.”

New evidence links gut bacteria alterations to autism

A new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, is shedding light on the potential link between autism and gut microbiome impairments. The research reveals a mechanism by which altered gut bacteria populations can lead to abnormal microbial detoxification and mitochondrial dysfunction.

The connection between gut bacteria and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is arguably one of the most intriguing areas of microbiome research. Gastrointestinal problems are common in children with ASD and several recent, albeit small, studies have revealed behavioral and psychological symptoms of autism in children can be improved using fecal transplants from healthy subjects.

Five specific metabolic pathway deficiencies were detected in the research. These deficiencies were linked to detoxification processes triggered by certain enzymes produced by gut bacteria. The researchers hypothesize these microbiome detoxification deficiencies influence the pathogenesis of ASD.


For anyone who’s a science fiction fan and has read about AI, and smart drone swarms (for example ‘Kill Decision’ by Daniel Suarez) - this is a strong signal of the future of conflict - which is NOT about better airframes for human pilots - these swarms can be imagined for air, land, surface and subsurface environments. The short videos are well worth the watch.

China Conducts Test Of Massive Suicide Drone Swarm Launched From A Box On A Truck

China shows off its ability to rapidly launch 48 weaponized drones from the back of a truck, as well as from helicopters.
China recently conducted a test involving a swarm of loitering munitions, also often referred to as suicide drones, deployed from a box-like array of tubular launchers on a light tactical vehicle and from helicopters. This underscores how the drone swarm threat, broadly, is becoming ever-more real and will present increasingly serious challenges for military forces around the world in future conflicts.

The China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology (CAEIT) reportedly carried out the test in September. CAEIT is a subsidiary of the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), which carried out a record-breaking drone swarm experiment in June 2017, involving nearly 120 small fixed-wing unmanned aircraft. Four months later, CAEIT conducted its own larger experiment with 200 fixed-wing drones. Chinese companies have also demonstrated impressive swarms using quad-copter-type drones for large public displays.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Friday Thinking 23 Oct 2020

Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.

Many thanks to those who enjoy this.
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.

The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment - 
computational ecology - 
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence. 

To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.  

‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’

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


Content

Quotes:

The value of uncertainty

Thirty glorious years

Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias


Articles:

Opposition to a Universal Basic Income lies in how we think about the relationship between work and one's right to live.

Yes, more and more young adults are living with their parents – but is that necessarily bad?

Singapore Has An Innovative New Way To Design Its Buildings

Fresh Off Her Nobel Prize Win, Jennifer Doudna Predicts What’s Next for CRISPR

Fecal Transfer from Moms to Babies After C-Section: Trial Results

Sludge-powered bacteria generate more electricity, faster

World first study shows that some microorganisms can bend the rules of evolution

Stacking and twisting graphene unlocks a rare form of magnetism

If recycling plastics isn’t making sense, remake the plastics

How your browser can make your online life a little more private





even from a predictive processing perspective, staying locally within the bounds of the expected is only one part of a much more complex story. For those very same predictive brains were designed to drive mobile, inquisitive creatures like ourselves. Such creatures must productively surf the waves of their own uncertainty. To do so, they probe and sample the world in ways that aim to reveal just where the key uncertainties lie, so that by future actions they can resolve them and move on. They seek new information, and they engage in complex rituals such as art and science whose role (we’ll argue) is in part at least to safely reveal and stress-test their own deepest assumptions.

Creatures like us, it seems, have added some brand-new layers to our relationship with the space of our own predictions, errors and uncertainties, turning that space into a kind of concrete arena that affords deeper and more challenging explorations than those undertaken by most other living organisms. We have discovered ways of turning our own best models (including our self-model) into objects apt for explicit questioning.

The examined human life reflects, we suggest, a new kind of relationship with our own expectations and uncertainty. Yet it is one that we have somehow constructed within the inviolable bounds of a biologically bedrock drive to minimise long-term prediction error. How is this neat trick possible?

Unexpected uncertainty arises when – for example – an environmental change causes us to become uncertain about our own generative model. Volatility is subtly different: it names a situation in which the frequency of changes in the environmental contingencies are themselves rapidly changing. Volatility is thus the most potentially anxiety-provoking species of uncertainty. It is uncertainty about the space of uncertainty itself.

When confronted with unexpected uncertainty, our brain reacts by increasing its learning rate

The many ways that we can fall prey to our own predictive brains correspond to the various ways in which we can become trapped by our own estimations of the reliability of different predictions. 

The value of uncertainty




Perhaps the most extraordinary transformation took place in Japan. The rebuilding of the Japanese economy after the war, under the direct control of the occupying US forces, involved a dramatic redistribution of wealth and influence away from ruling elites, in particular landowners and the bureaucratic and military elites responsible for Japanese expansionism. The US occupiers, under the unlikely direction of General Douglas MacArthur, levied eye-watering taxes such as 70 per cent on the largest fortunes, and expropriated absentee landlords. The biggest family-owned industrial conglomerates were dismantled and senior management fired. Meanwhile, the war more or less wiped out wealth held in stocks and corporate shares. Labour reforms boosted union membership leading to higher wages and enhanced job security. The purpose behind these reforms was clear: to uproot the concentration of wealth and power around a reactionary elite…

Democratic capitalism redressed the balance between the brutal inequalities of early industrial capitalism and the need for social consent to secure political stability. It rested on three broad pillars: a redistributive welfare state that provided economic security while narrowing income gaps between rich and poor, corporatist dialogue between employers and the labour force, and highly regulated capital markets. Aspects of this form of capitalism sometimes existed in nondemocratic societies too. But as a basic set of socioeconomic institutions it was most associated with the democratic form of government in which competitive elections and representative political parties incorporated citizen demands into policymaking. 

The increased role for government in distributing the fruits of economic growth meant that inequality and poverty fell to unprecedented levels. Taxes became far more progressive. In the 1950s, top marginal rates of income tax exceeded 90 per cent in Italy, the UK and the US. Unemployment benefits, pensions and family allowances expanded to provide secure incomes to households all across the income distribution. By taxing the rich and transferring money to the poor and middle-income groups, welfare states substantially reduced material hardship and ensured economic gains reached the least fortunate. The government also became a major employer, offering well-paid jobs with good working conditions and pension rights in the public administration and services such as the police, healthcare and education. All these measures meant that growth in living standards was spread across income groups.

Thirty glorious years




The phrase comes from the English critic Raymond Williams. I think his point was that we have basic biological feelings just as animals, that are the same for all of us at all times, but in any given moment, for any individual, we interpret these basic animal feelings by way of language—we give the feelings names, and these come from a particular language and a culture too, and so they are different in different times and places and languages, and the differences can be seen later on as being quite significant. So each culture and moment has its own particular structure of feeling, based on their language and what’s happening in the world at that time.

 no one can predict the future that will really come to pass, so don’t even try to do that.  

Think of your postulated futures as hopes and fears, typically, with your hopes being utopian, your fears dystopian. Go ahead and imagine a lot of them, and see how you feel about them, and what you think is realistic in them, in terms of suggesting things you can do now to make a better future for yourself and everyone else.  


Don’t get too impressed by any one technology or ideology—we all suffer from a bit of monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain everything, but reality isn’t really like that, so you have to take a lot of factors into account, and realize they will mix in unexpected ways in your head as in the world.  

Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias






The Covid-Apocalypse has revealed a lot about many of the myths underlying the neoliberal economic paradigm - this is another strong signal about the inevitable requirement of - Universal Basic Income. The 7 min video is well worth the view.

Opposition to a Universal Basic Income lies in how we think about the relationship between work and one's right to live.

Study after study seems to show us that direct cash transfers do indeed work. The problem lies in convincing people that they are deserving of the money.
We’ve had numerous trials of direct cash transfers. At this point, we know that people constantly use the money for what they need. Even more so do we know that they benefit not only recipients but local communities as a whole.

Still, we face resistance in actually implementing them. That lies far more in existing stereotypical beliefs of how we perceive the relationship between work and life.


McLuhan noted that the message of the media is not its content - but its impact - this is a signal of the nature of the times - digital environment-in-austerity-economic-frameworks? Or a retrieval from the past

Yes, more and more young adults are living with their parents – but is that necessarily bad?

When the Pew Research Center recently reported that the proportion of 18-to-29-year-old Americans who live with their parents has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps you saw some of the breathless headlines hyping how it’s higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

From my perspective, the real story here is less alarming than you might think. And it’s actually quite a bit more interesting than the sound bite summary.

Yes, a lot of emerging adults are now living with their parents. But this is part of a larger, longer trend, with the percentage going up only modestly since COVID-19 hit. Furthermore, having grown kids still at home is not likely to do you, or them, any permanent harm. In fact, until very recently, it’s been the way adults have typically lived throughout history. Even now, it’s a common practice in most of the world.

Drawing on the federal government’s monthly Current Population Survey, the Pew Report showed that 52% of 18-to-29-year-olds are currently living with their parents, up from 47% in February. The increase was mostly among the younger emerging adults – ages 18 to 24 – and was primarily due to their coming home from colleges that shut down or to their having lost their jobs.


This must view 6 min video signals an emerging architectural and urban design paradigm.

Singapore Has An Innovative New Way To Design Its Buildings

Singapore has engaged a new approach to construction called biophilic design. It means architects embrace nature in their design, bringing nature into the city, replacing columns, walls and neon with trees, leaves and insects. Biophilic design turns cities into engines of environmental wellbeing with benefits not just for nature but the human beings that live there too.


This signals the ongoing progress in the domestication of DNA - and more.

Declared as one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century, CRISPR is faster, cheaper, and more accurate than previous gene-editing systems and has since become ubiquitous in labs around the world.

This is the thing about CRISPR: There’s so many different ways that it can be deployed.

Fresh Off Her Nobel Prize Win, Jennifer Doudna Predicts What’s Next for CRISPR

The new Nobel laureate chats with ‘Future Human’ about what her gene-editing companies are up to.
Doudna, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, share the award for the discovery of the gene-editing technology CRISPR. The two biochemists began collaborating in 2011 and just a year later published a groundbreaking paper on CRISPR, which has revolutionized our ability to edit genes.

Short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, CRISPR is actually a naturally occurring bacterial immune system. When viruses attack bacteria, bacteria in turn grab snippets of genetic material from their viral invaders and incorporate these bits into their own DNA. This helps bacteria recognize viruses later on and thwart future invaders. Bacteria do this by producing an RNA molecule that acts as a guide, which cuts up the viral genome.

diseases that are caused by single genes or genetic mutations. A great example, and we’ve already seen early results from one trial, is for sickle cell disease. But I think going forward, we’ll see opportunities to use CRISPR for other kinds of blood disorders, genetic diseases of the eye, and then, maybe in the longer term, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, which are also genetic diseases.

I think we’re going to see everything from high-throughput laboratory tests that require robotic equipment and experts to point-of-care tests that can be run in a research lab, a doctor’s office, or an emergency room. 

We’ve so much going on in the field. I think one interesting possibility is that we’ll see CRISPR being used not to edit genomes, or at least not to make permanent changes to genomes, but instead to regulate them, to control levels of human proteins that are produced from different genes. This is a newer way of using the CRISPR technology. I think it has a lot of potential to allow control of cells that doesn’t require actual permanent chemical changes being made to the DNA.

Agriculture is the other area where it’s going to be impactful. We’re already seeing a lot of use of CRISPR in making plants that have genetic changes that can enable things like better crop yield, resistance to drought, higher levels of nutritional value, things like that. I think that’s really exciting, and there’s clearly a lot more to be done there. That’s likely to be the area where we’ll see a broader impact in the near term.


The benefits of CRISPR will inevitably extend to the understanding of our microbial biomes. This is a good signal of how microbial transplants will likely be beneficial for treating and maybe curing illnesses and diseases.

Fecal Transfer from Moms to Babies After C-Section: Trial Results

Tiny doses of maternal poo mixed with breast milk and given to Cesarean-born infants makes their gut microbiota resemble those of babies born vaginally.
The composition of gut microbes in babies born via Cesarean section tends to differ from those in babies born vaginally, prompting speculation that this may have long-term health consequences. To enrich for beneficial bugs in babies’ bellies after C-section, researchers have performed mom-to-infant microbial transplants, described today (October 1) in Cell. In a clinical trial in which seven Cesarean-delivered babies were fed tiny amounts of their mothers’ fecal material, it was found that the babies’ guts became colonized with the sorts of bacteria normally present in infants delivered vaginally. While the procedure produced no ill effects in the infants, there are no data on whether it has any benefits to the baby, and experts warn it may be dangerous for mothers to attempt such a treatment themselves.

“This is a very well-balanced, important, and clinically relevant contribution to the field, with really nice, clear-cut conclusions,” says gut microbe researcher Tine Rask Licht of the Technical University of Denmark who was not involved in the research. “They have very nice data . . . [showing that] with fecal transfer they get a pattern of microbial development which is much more similar to that of children born vaginally.”

Epidemiological evidence indicates there may also be later life consequences to missing out on this bacterial baptism, as some call it. A recent study showed that Cesarean-born kids have a higher likelihood of developing immune disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and celiac disease. The growing prevalence of Cesarean deliveries makes these potential repercussions an increasing concern.


This is another weak signal about energy production, domesticating DNA and an emerging metabolic (circular) economy.

Sludge-powered bacteria generate more electricity, faster

Changing the surface chemistry of electrodes leads to the preferential growth of a novel electroactive bacterium that could support improved energy-neutral wastewater treatment.

To grow, electroactive bacteria break down organic compounds by transferring electrons to solid-state substrates outside their cells. Scientists have utilized this process to drive devices, such as microbial electrochemical systems, where the bacteria grow as a film on an electrode, breaking down the organic compounds in wastewater and transferring the resultant electrons to the electrode.

Scientists are now looking for ways to improve this process so it produces hydrogen gas at a negatively charged cathode electrode, which can then be converted to electricity to power wastewater treatment plants. This needs electroactive bacteria that efficiently transfer electrons to a positively charged anode electrode that do not use hydrogen for their growth.


This is a nice confirming signal of how horizontal gene transfer (hgt) - creates different rules regarding evolution - and help explain that the development of antibiotic resistance is more complex than the normal understanding of evolution would suggest.
"However, when scientists check environments without antibiotics, for example, forests or estuaries, antibiotic resistance genes can still be detected."
The researchers found that antibiotic resistance genes can spread into populations that are not experiencing selection with antibiotic, and that, even though these genes were at low levels, they prepared the population for future challenges with antibiotic.
"This could explain why antibiotic resistance evolves so quickly in hospitals," Dr. McDonald said.

World first study shows that some microorganisms can bend the rules of evolution

The dominant thinking in evolution focuses on inheritance between parent and offspring – or 'vertical gene transfer (VGT)'.

But now scientists are paying more attention to 'horizontal gene transfer (HGT)': the transmission of DNA other than from parent to offspring, as this transfer can tell us about the evolution of a number of other organisms such as bacteria. It can also help us to better understand antibiotic resistance.

In a world first, Monash University scientists have discovered that HGT can bend the rules of evolution.

The discovery is outlined in a study published today in PNAS, which was led by ARC Future Fellow Dr. Mike McDonald and Ph.D. candidate Laura Woods, both from the Monash University School of Biological Sciences.


This is a weak signal of emerging new forms of matter and electronics using graphene - discovered in the 21st Century.

Stacking and twisting graphene unlocks a rare form of magnetism

Since the discovery of graphene more than 15 years ago, researchers have been in a global race to unlock its unique properties. Not only is graphene—a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon arranged in a hexagonal lattice—the strongest, thinnest material known to man, it is also an excellent conductor of heat and electricity.

Now, a team of researchers at Columbia University and the University of Washington has discovered that a variety of exotic electronic states, including a rare form of magnetism, can arise in a three-layer graphene structure.

The findings appear in an article published Oct. 12 in Nature Physics.


Another weak signal of the inevitable need for a metabolic (upcycling) economy. It also signals that simply banning plastics doesn’t solve the problem of waste - it simply shifts it to something else.
Compared to traditional heating, the microwave heating released over 10 times as much hydrogen from the plastic, leaving very little other than pure carbon and some iron carbide behind. Better yet, the carbon was almost entirely in the form of carbon nanotubes, a product with significant value. 

If recycling plastics isn’t making sense, remake the plastics

New catalytic approaches convert plastic into liquid fuels, nanotubes.
A few years back, it looked like plastic recycling was set to become a key part of a sustainable future. Then, the price of fossil fuels plunged, making it cheaper to manufacture new plastics. Then China essentially stopped importing recycled plastics for use in manufacturing. With that, the bottom dropped out of plastic recycling, and the best thing you could say for most plastics is that they sequestered the carbon they were made of.

The absence of a market for recycled plastics, however, has also inspired researchers to look at other ways of using them. Two papers this week have looked into processes that enable "upcycling," or converting the plastics into materials that can be more valuable than the freshly made plastics themselves.


Here’s an account of different browsers in terms of the privacy they enable.

How your browser can make your online life a little more private

A new browser setting will do what Do Not Track didn’t, but you could switch to a more private browser right now.
Data privacy laws are still a work in progress, but one major improvement is coming: Global Privacy Control, which — assuming everything works out — will let you automatically opt out of having your data sold or shared at every website you visit. For now, it doesn’t do much, but it is available if you want to add it to your browser. If nothing else, the recent launch of the new specification is a great opportunity to check out your browser’s privacy options — and your browser options in general.

Trackers hidden on the vast majority of websites collect as much information about us as possible and try to link that data to our actions online as well as off, typically to send us targeted ads. The idea behind Global Privacy Control would be to place a setting on your browser that tells every site you visit that you don’t want your data to be sold or shared with anyone else, and websites would have to respect your wishes. While some browsers have built-in tools (or available extensions) meant to stop tracking in the first place, they aren’t always effective, and they can’t do anything once your data is collected. And while laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) give users the right to request that businesses not sell their data, those users have to make that request of every site they visit, a process that is too time-consuming for most people. With Global Privacy Control, that request would be automatic, relayed as soon as you visit the site, and, if you’re in a location where it’s legally required — like California — websites would have to abide by your request.

If a browser extension that tells websites your privacy preferences sounds familiar, that’s because something like this has been tried before. Do Not Track, introduced in 2010, was an attempt by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to institute a sort of digital equivalent to the Do Not Call list: a browser extension or setting that tells websites you visit that you don’t want to be tracked. The problem with Do Not Track was that websites weren’t legally required to comply with it, so very few of them did.