Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - work is just beginning.
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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Quotes:
Articles:
as yet there is no way to experimentally distinguish between these widely varying interpretations. Which one you choose is mainly a matter of philosophical temperament. As the American theorist Christopher Fuchs puts it, on one side there are the psi-ontologists who want the wave function to describe the objective world ‘out there’. On the other side, there are the psi-epistemologists who see the wave function as a description of our knowledge and its limits. Right now, there is almost no way to settle the dispute scientifically (although a standard form of hidden variables does seem to have been ruled out).
Each interpretation of quantum mechanics has its own philosophical and scientific advantages, but they all come with their own price. One way or another, they force adherents to take a giant step away from the kind of ‘naive realism’, the vision of little bits of deterministic matter, that was possible with the Newtonian world view; switching to a quantum ‘fields’ view doesn’t solve the problem. It was easy to think that the mathematical objects involved with Newtonian mechanics referred to real things out there in some intuitive way. But those ascribing to psi-ontology – sometimes called wave function realism – must now navigate a labyrinth of challenges in holding their views.
There is a big price to pay for the psi-epistemologist positions too. Physics from this perspective is no longer a description of the world in-and-of itself. Instead, it’s a description of the rules for our interaction with the world. As the American theorist Joseph Eberly says: ‘It’s not the electron’s wave function, it’s your wave function.’
Minding matter
Few will deny 2017 was a rough year. But believe it or not, we’re still living in the best time ever to be alive, and the world as a whole is better off than it has been at any other time in human history.
People are living longer. They’re living healthier, more educated, and freer from religious and political constraints.
But perhaps most crucially, the percentage of humans living in extreme poverty—defined by the World Bank as subsisting on less than $1.90 per day—has plummeted in the past 30 years.
In 1990 the UN set a goal to cut the world’s poverty rate in half by 2015, and we reached it five years early, in 2010; over a billion people escaped extreme poverty in just 20 years. That’s a remarkable and unprecedented shift.
But more than ten percent of the world’s population is still extremely poor. How do we get that down to zero? And is it even possible to do so? Examining the factors that helped cut poverty in the past few decades, signs point to more development roadblocks than superhighways in the years to come.
The drop in poverty from the 1980s to present was driven by just two countries: China and India. The statistics for China are especially mind-blowing: In 1981, a staggering 88 percent of Chinese were extremely poor, but by 2013 that figure had dropped, incredibly, to just 2 percent. India’s figures, though not as drastic, are still impressive: In about the same period of time, the poor population declined from 54 to 21 percent.
World Poverty Has Plummeted—But Will It Ever Disappear?
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney sees “fundamental problems” with the idea of a digital currency issued by a central bank that could be used by the general public.
With no need for a central intermediary to facilitate and track transactions, consumers holding central bank-issued cryptocurrency could open accounts at any bank, including the central bank.
“You (could) create a situation where you can have an instantaneous (bank) run. So as soon as there were any concern, people can switch in their account at the Bank of England,” Carney said.
That could also cause the BoE to accumulate huge volumes of deposits that it would need to invest into different assets.
“There are many talents of the Bank of England, but I think credit allocation across the entire economy would not be a good idea,” he said. “So there are some fundamental problems if you push the retail design all the way down, unless you restrict the amount that people have.”
BoE's Carney sees problems with central-bank issued cryptocurrencies
I’m not absolutely certain of my facts,’ wrote P G Wodehouse in his story ‘Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest’ (1925), ‘but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare … who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.’
It certainly seems to be the case in science that, just before a field is completely disrupted by a major discovery, someone has to make a statement that sums up the field’s complacency for future historians. For years in the future, people can look at it and think, they had no idea what was about to hit them (and sometimes the lead pipe is used more than once).
In 1894, this task fell to the American physicist Albert Michelson, later Nobel laureate, when he announced that ‘it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established, and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles’. A few years later, those principles were hit by the discovery that, at the subatomic scale at least, nature moves in sudden quantum leaps and jumps.
A century on, at the 2003 Presidential Address of the American Economic Association, the job fell to the Nobel laureate, economist Robert E Lucas Jr, who told his audience: ‘My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: its central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.’ A few years later, that conclusion was shattered by the discovery that the economy had suddenly leaped off a cliff.
Money and brains are both quantum phenomena – so it's not surprising that economics is overdue for a quantum revolution. …. ‘If we don’t embrace new methods of modelling the economy, we will be as blind to the next crisis as we were to the last one.’
Economics is quantum
We live in increasingly divided societies, in which the social contracts that bind us are fraying. One driver is globalisation, which has intensified competitive pressures. Another is technology, which has increased the returns to highly skilled labour, and exacerbated inequality.
Technology has also transformed our awareness of what else is happening around the world. It has changed the way we communicate and organize, often in ways that divide. As a result, social sustainability - society’s internal cohesion and ability to hold together over time - is in jeopardy.
How do we overcome these divisions? Part of the answer lies in rethinking the systems that bind society together and that look after those adversely affected by structural changes. Societies have always had mechanisms for looking after the young and the old, for spreading income over the life cycle, and for looking after those who have fallen on hard times, with some combination of support from family, community organisations, the market and the state.
A leading economist has a plan to heal our fractured societies
This is hugely exciting suggesting profound new implications in our understanding of biology and the progress toward domestication of DNA - this is a MUST READ. The implication are far beyond just ‘healing’.
One of the most surprising and important things coming out of our work has been that if you manage the bioelectric circuits appropriately, you can have [body] shape outcomes that are completely different from the standard default of that species without touching the genome. It turns out the genome encodes the hardware. But once you have that hardware, the software that runs on it, which is all the electrical signals that cells send to each other, is really pretty malleable. Thus the relationship between the genome and the anatomy is not quite what people thought it was, and there’s a lot of opportunity to make changes despite a normal genome.
Research suggests bioelectricity is how cells and tissues make large-scale decisions, so it’s a very tractable control point. It’s not the only control point, but it appears to have lots of advantages, and I think that’s because evolution discovered very early on that electrical networks are a really good way to perform computation. It’s not a coincidence that our brains use electrical networks and our computers use electrical networks.
There’s Healing Power in the Secret Electrical Language of Our Cells
Why can we heal a wound, but not grow back a severed limb? Michael Levin thinks the key lies in the secret electrical language our cells use to talk to one another, and he thinks we’re not far from cracking the code.
Levin, the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, has carried out some hair-raising experiments, getting worms to grow back with two heads and frogs to grow extra limbs. While most would assume this took some outlandish genetic engineering, Levin instead manipulates the bioelectric signals that help dictate an animal’s body plan.
The hope is that if we can learn to understand and control these signals we may eventually be able to help humans regenerate damaged limbs and organs, repair birth defects, or even reprogram cancer. I caught up with Levin to see how progress is going.
There are many labs studying the molecular mechanisms of how cells and tissues operate. But what we’re interested in is not only those mechanisms, but also the information content and the algorithms cells and tissues are using. We are in an emerging field called primitive cognition, which is the question of how systems that are not necessarily brains—so everything from plants to single-cell organisms to tissues—process information.
In addition to the common biochemical and molecular aspects everybody studies, we’ve been developing a brand new understanding of cell communication that takes place electrically. It turns out that all cells, not just neurons, communicate electrically. We were the first to develop molecular tools to really listen in on all the electrical conversations cells and tissues were having with each other and to develop strategies to alter those conversations. So we can control not only individual cell behavior, but more importantly, we control large-scale body pattern formation and regeneration by altering the electrical communication among cells.
For anyone interested in fundamental science and implications - this 17 min video is a very clear presentation of quantum sciences in relation to the social sciences - it introduces the framework of panpsychism.
Especially important in this presentation is the question of how quantum probability theory provides a much improved match to recent findings in decision theory - based on work such as Kahneman and Tversky.
Lecture: Quantum Mind and Social Science | Alexander Wendt
Professor Alexander Wendt (Ohio State University) presents the argument behind his latest book 'Quantum Mind and Social Sciences' and discusses the idea of humans as walking quantum wave functions.
In an age where the challenge is to ‘re-imagine everything’ - facing climate change could actually help us in this effort. Climate change can be grasped as a fundamental motivation to redesign our societies, our infrastructures, our political-economies.
China Shows How Climate Change And Global Poverty Can Only Be Solved Together
China has achieved a feat unparalleled in modern history: In 30 years, the nation has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty; developed extensive infrastructure, commerce, and industry; and entered the ranks of middle-income countries. China now has the second-largest economy in the world, and it is on track to surpass the United States around 2030. Due to the recency and magnitude of China’s success, China has become the model that other nations look to when making their own development plans.
While it is entirely appropriate that leaders of developing countries seek to raise their citizens’ standard of living and develop their economies, they must avoid emulating China in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change and local pollution. Like the West before it, China built its development on the back of dirty energy: petroleum burned by vehicles and coal burned in power plants and industrial facilities.
China may have had little choice in how to power its growth, as clean energy options – such as solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars – were less technologically mature and considerably more expensive than they are today.
In recent years, China has come to recognize the severity of the problems caused by fossil fuel-based development, and the government has begun taking dramatic and praiseworthy steps to curb pollution while using clean energy to power economic growth. China has cancelled more than 100 planned and under-construction coal plants, has temporarily shut down tens of thousands of factories as part of a new effort to rigorously enforce environmental laws, and has pledged to invest nearly $400 billion in clean energy by 2020 – creating up 10 to million green jobs in the process.
Design is everywhere - and bad design is not only irksome - but a terrible source of waste, frustration, pain that incurs significant human, material and energy costs. All designers should have their emails available to hear the trail of complaints bad design incurs. Design crime against humanity.
The examples in this article are worth the view.
The conventional wisdom is that design costs more and is only a luxury. Yet people from all walks of life deserve good design. The power of design to dignify will never be fully explored until average people have some sense that they deserve better.
Good Design Is a Public Good
In an excerpt from his book Design for Good, John Cary considers the achievements and future of the social-impact design movement.
If you asked 100 random people or even 100 designers, “What is design?” you would get approximately that many different answers. In the most positive sense, this explains the pervasiveness of designers working in and touching every imaginable aspect of our lives. Beyond built structures, the products we rely on day in and day out, the services we use as members of society, are all designed.
We designers have long stumbled over how to capture this reality—that design is so pervasive and people have so many perceptions of it (if it is even in their consciousness). This has especially been the case for those of us who are trying to expand design’s reach beyond its traditional, elite client base. In the past few decades we’ve struggled with nomenclature: What to call this growing field of practice that focuses on engaging entirely new communities and populations?
From Atlanta to Angdong, China, and from Dallas to Dhaka, some of the best of this new body of work is not just beautifully designed and constructed but also painstakingly documented by world-class photographers and filmmakers once reserved for only the most elite of projects. This imagery and storytelling has been essential in elevating design for the public good to its rightful place alongside other forms of design, again without the need for special categories or commendations.
Here’s one of the many predictive pieces for the next year. This one focuses on FinTech - technology forming the new scaffolding and platform for financial industries and our economy. Fundamentally the trajectory of FinTech will be helping to meet the challenge of accounting for many new forms of Value creation - The Question is “How do we Value Our Values?”
The FinTech outlook for 2018
There are four big things for 2018 from a FinTech viewpoint that are obvious to me, however, which are:
- Getting down to business with Artificial Intelligence (AI): several of the large banks like JPMorgan and UBS were doing interesting things with AI in 2017, but I think this will be a lot more pervasive and recognised across all banks in 2018. This is primarily for compliance and risk, as AI can develop and apply complex rules across all business processes in real-time, and when most banks have 1 in 3 staff checking compliance, it makes absolute sense to replace them with learning software.
- Rationalising and cleansing core data structures: many banks have built their core operations on fragmented systems aligned to products. This has distributed customer data across multiple platforms, and banks recognise that they cannot use AI effectively on data spread across the business. As a result, many will develop strategies for building an Enterprise Data Architecture in 2018 which rationalises and cleanses their fragmented data stores.
- Continuing the digital drive: many banks are waking up to more and more challenges in digitalising their operations, and this will be even more pressured in 2018 thanks to the arrival of Open APIs under the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) and Open Banking in the UK in January. The open sourcing of financial services has been bubbling for a decade, and now that regulations are forcing this onto the large institutions, 2018 will be a big year for doing digital properly and becoming an Open Bank.
- Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) continues to rise: during the last couple of years, we have seen manyproof of concept and trials of DLT, but 2018 sees it become mainstream as various institutions go live with real-world applications. The Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) is one of the first, but there are others. Watch this space carefully in 2018 as things are changing fast.
Despite the many years of hype and anticipation - the project of Augmented Reality (AR) continues development and is nearing maturity in a way that will change how we work, play, live. Here’s one glimpse into one of the many efforts to make progress. The images are worth the view.
'magic leap one, creator edition' AR goggles could be the next internet
if the internet is a virtual, infinite universe, than the ‘magic leap one creator edition’ may be the first step in exponentially multiplying the size of that universe by colliding it with the physical world. ‘were adding another dimension to computing. where digital respects the physical,’ says magic leap’s website.
but what is it exactly? it’s digital lightfield technology, environmental mapping and tracking technology all in one nice package, the ‘lightwear’ headset; it’s the ‘lightpack,’ a small, wearable pouch, the ‘engine that drives’ its high-powered graphics. it’s a headset with a little computer and of course, something to control it all. based on the previous names — lightpack, lightwear — one might guess the controller would be dubbed the ‘light remote,’ or perhaps, the ’lightstick.’ no. the gesture-friendly tool that may soon navigate you through infinite new realities is simply named, ‘control.’
the ‘magic leap one, creator edition’ will be released in 2018, as will more leaps and bounds, but surely before then, if not already, some will go to the magic leap website; some will explore the colorful possibilities of augmentation. some may nod in agreement or roll eyes in skepticism, but regardless of opinion, some may stumble upon something odd within the ‘stories’ heading of their website: a virtual cat wearing a gigantically-gaudy, minority-report-esque headset. these viewers would be looking at the first prototype of the magic leap one, made just three years ago. the full story behind this ugly prototype’s short journey to beautiful fruition is unknown to this writer — unfortunate, the story seems like a magic one.
Design of the future is holds many surprises - this article is a great example of new and old thinking about rail transportation - for people and goods. The 4 minute video really should be seen - and provides a very clear explanation.
MEET THE 89-YEAR-OLD REINVENTING THE TRAIN IN HIS BACKYARD
ON A CLEAR, sunny day at a vineyard in the Northern California town of Ukiah, a most unusual train chugs through a field of barely budding syrah grapes. Well, it doesn't chug so much as whoosh, because this train—actually, a one-sixth scale train—doesn't rely upon a diesel engine or electricity to get around. It uses vacuum power and heavy duty magnets.
The 89-year-old man who built it believes it could change how the world moves.
That man is Max Schlienger, an accomplished engineer who owns the vineyard and leads his family-run company, Flight Rail Corp. Its sole product, the Vectorr system, uses a propulsion method like no other: Between the rails lies a PVC pipe, 12 inches in diameter, connected to a pump that can draw all of the air out of the pipe or fill it. Within the pipe you'll find something Schlienger calls a thrust carriage, which is connected to the train with powerful magnets. This carriage is about the size and shape of a large watermelon and moves back and forth through the pipe under vacuum power, bringing the train with it.
This weird but clever product works something like the vaunted hyperloop, but rather than shooting a pod full of people through a tube it shoots a carriage through a tube. And, like the people behind hyperloop, Schlienger remains convinced that it represents the future of transportation. "We’ll get someone, somewhere, to say we want to do it,” Schlienger says. “And we’ll put all our energy into it.”
There is a concept of ‘Total Work’ the process where humans are transformed in Workers as their primary mode of being - while more and more aspects of life are also transformed in work.
Japan is facing a 'death by overwork' problem — here's what it's all about
Japan's work culture is so intense, people in the 1970s invented a word that translates to "death by overwork."
"Karoshi," as it's known, involves employees committing suicide or suffering from heart failure and stroke because of long work hours.
The Japanese federal government has taken steps to reduce karoshi cases, but experts fear the measures don't go far enough.
A 2016 report examining karoshi cases and their cause of death found that more than 20% of people in a survey of 10,000 Japanese workers said they worked at least 80 hours of overtime a month.
In the US, 16.4% of people work an average of 49 hours or longer each week. In Japan, more than 20% do, according to the report. Half of all respondents said they don't take paid vacations.
This is a great signal of an emerging precision approach to agriculture.
These drones can plant 100,000 trees a day
It’s simple maths. We are chopping down about 15 billion trees a year and planting about 9 billion. So there’s a net loss of 6 billion trees a year.
Hand planting trees is slow and expensive. To keep pace with the tractors and bulldozers clearing vast areas of land, we need an industrial-scale solution.
For example, a drone that can plant up to 100,000 trees a day.
BioCarbon Engineering, a UK-based company backed by drone manufacturer Parrot, has come up with a method of planting trees quickly and cheaply. Not only that, trees can also be planted in areas that are difficult to access or otherwise unviable.
First a drone scans the topography to create a 3D map. Then the most efficient planting pattern for that area is calculated using algorithms.
A drone loaded with germinated seeds fires pods into the ground at a rate of one per second, or about 100,000 a day. Scale this up and 60 drone teams could plant 1 billion trees a year.
A two minute video.
Inside Alibaba's smart warehouse staffed by robots
Take a look inside Alibaba's smart warehouse where robots do 70% of the work.
They can carry up to 500 kilograms above them around the warehouse floor.
They have special sensors to avoid colliding into each other and they can be summoned using wifi.
When they run out of battery, they can take themselves to a charging station. A five minute charge can power them for 4/5 hours.
This may appear in a dentist office near you in the next decade. There is a 2 min video.
Some brave soul volunteered for a completely robotic dental surgery
The robot implanted 3D-printed teeth into a woman without help from dentists.
A robot just implanted two 3D-printed teeth into a woman's mouth all on its own. The procedure took place recently in China and the researchers who developed it hope it can help the country's dentist shortage problem, reports the South China Morning Post.
Prior to the surgery, the robot was oriented to the patient's head and mouth and researchers then programmed the device with all of the necessary information for it to complete the procedure. That included the angles and depth required for accurate placement of the implants. After testing the programmed movements, the operation was carried out. It took about an hour and though medical staff were present during the procedure, none of them assisted the robot while it worked. Afterwards, the staff determined that the robot had implanted the teeth with high precision.
Due to a dentist shortage, South China Morning Post reports that while around 400 million people need dental implants in the country, only about one million are done each year. Further, when people turn to less qualified individuals in order to get needed dental work done, they often end up with additional problems. Robots stand to increase service rates and complete operations with fewer errors.
The domestication of DNA is only at the threshold of real possibilities. This is a nice summary of emerging approaches and has a 2 min video.
CRISPR ISN’T ENOUGH ANY MORE. GET READY FOR GENE EDITING 2.0
IN FEWER THAN five years, the gene-editing technology known as Crispr has revolutionized the face and pace of modern biology. Since its ability to find, remove, and replace genetic material was first reported in 2012, scientists have published more than 5,000 papers mentioning Crispr. Biomedical researchers are embracing it to create better models of disease. And countless companies have spun up to commercialize new drugs, therapies, foods, chemicals, and materials based on the technology.
Usually, when we’ve referred to Crispr, we’ve really meant Crispr/Cas9—a riboprotein complex composed of a short strand of RNA and an efficient DNA-cutting enzyme. It did for biology and medicine what the Model T did for manufacturing and transportation; democratizing access to a revolutionary technology and disrupting the status quo in the process. Crispr has already been used to treat cancer in humans, and it could be in clinical trials to cure genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia as soon as next year.
Crispr Classic will continue to be a workhorse for science in 2018 and beyond. But this year, newer, flashier gene editing tools began rolling off the production line, promising to outshine their first-generation cousin. So if you were just getting your head around Crispr, buckle up. Because gene-editing 2.0 is here.
….One approach is to mutate the Cas9 enzyme so it can still bind to DNA, but its scissors don’t work. Then other proteins—like ones that activate gene expression—can be combined with the crippled Cas9, letting them toggle genes on and off (sometimes with light or chemical signals) without altering the DNA sequence.
Medical advances based on new forms of Analysis Intelligence (AI) (yes that’s my own term).
“It was unrealistic to apply machine learning to many areas of biology before,” says Philip Nelson, a director of engineering at Google Research in Mountain View, California. “Now you can — but even more exciting, machines can now see things that humans might not have seen before.”
“What you’re seeing now is an unprecedented shift in how well machine learning can accomplish biological tasks that have to do with imaging,” says Anne Carpenter, director of the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2015, her interdisciplinary team began to process cell images using convolutional neural networks; now, Carpenter says, the networks process about 15% of image data at her centre. She predicts that the approach will become the centre’s main mode of processing in a few years.
Deep learning sharpens views of cells and genes
Neural networks are making biological images easier to process.
Eyes are said to be the window to the soul — but researchers at Google see them as indicators of a person’s health. The technology giant is using deep learning to predict a person’s blood pressure, age and smoking status by analysing a photograph of their retina. Google’s computers glean clues from the arrangement of blood vessels — and a preliminary study suggests that the machines can use this information to predict whether someone is at risk of an impending heart attack.
The research relied on a convolutional neural network, a type of deep-learning algorithm that is transforming how biologists analyse images. Scientists are using the approach to find mutations in genomes and predict variations in the layout of single cells. Google’s method, described in a preprint in August (R. Poplin et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.09843; 2017), is part of a wave of new deep-learning applications that are making image processing easier and more versatile — and could even identify overlooked biological phenomena.
This is an interesting development that could enable more effective sterilization of public space.
Could ultraviolet lamps slow the spread of flu?
Hospitals and laboratories often use ultraviolet (UV) light to kill microbes, but the practice has one major drawback: It can harm humans. So UV lights only do their killing in places such as empty operating rooms and under unoccupied lab hoods. Now, researchers have discovered that people might be safe around a shorter wavelength of microbe-slaying UV light, theoretically turning it into a new tool that could slow the spread of disease in schools, crowded airplanes, food processing plants, and even operating rooms and labs.
UV lights disinfect by disrupting the molecular bonds that hold together microbial genetic material or proteins. The most commonly used lights have a wavelength of 254 nanometers (nm), which has a relatively short UV wavelength—the so-called “C” category—but can penetrate the skin and eyes, leading to cancers and cataracts. So for the past 4 years, a group led by physicist David Brenner at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City has tested shorter wavelengths, known as “far UVC light” that can’t penetrate the outer layers of the eyes or skin. The researchers found that far UVC eliminated bacteria on surfaces and did not harm lab mice.
This is a 4 min video - that’s interesting. It provides a glimpse of the emergence of the ‘new mainframe’ - the quantum computer.
The Sounds of IBM: IBM Q
Welcome to the first IBM Q computation center, where the commercial quantum systems used by the IBM Q Network live. IBM Q Network collaborators will work with IBM scientists and engineers to explore potential applications for quantum systems. Grab your headphones and listen to the first IBM Q computation center in an immersive 360 sound experience.
Fiber is now known to be more than an ‘Intestinal Broom’ keeping ‘things moving’ - it is itself a food for our microbial ecology which in turn produces both essential needs for health, reduces general inflammation, and keeps our immune system robust.
Fiber Is Good for You. Now Scientists May Know Why.
A diet of fiber-rich foods, such as fruits and vegetables, reduces the risk of developing diabetes, heart disease and arthritis. Indeed, the evidence for fiber’s benefits extends beyond any particular ailment: Eating more fiber seems to lower people’s mortality rate, whatever the cause.
That’s why experts are always saying how good dietary fiber is for us. But while the benefits are clear, it’s not so clear why fiber is so great. “It’s an easy question to ask and a hard one to really answer,” said Fredrik Bäckhed, a biologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
He and other scientists are running experiments that are yielding some important new clues about fiber’s role in human health. Their research indicates that fiber doesn’t deliver many of its benefits directly to our bodies.
Instead, the fiber we eat feeds billions of bacteria in our guts. Keeping them happy means our intestines and immune systems remain in good working order.
But the gut’s microbes do more than just make energy. They also send messages.
Intestinal cells rely on chemical signals from the bacteria to work properly, Dr. Gewirtz said. The cells respond to the signals by multiplying and making a healthy supply of mucus. They also release bacteria-killing molecules
By generating these responses, gut bacteria help maintain a peaceful coexistence with the immune system. They rest atop the gut’s mucus layer at a safe distance from the intestinal wall. Any bacteria that wind up too close get wiped out by antimicrobial poisons.
This may be of interest to any active social media users.
GOBO - Take control of your social feed.
Gobo is a social media aggregator with filters you control. You can use Gobo to control what’s edited out of your feed, or configure it to include news and points of view from outside your usual orbit. Gobo aims to be completely transparent, showing you why each post was included in your feed and inviting you to explore what was filtered out by your current filter settings. Learn more and try it out here
To use Gobo, you link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to Gobo and choose a set of news publications that most closely resembles the news you follow online. Gobo retrieves recent posts from these social networks and lets you decide which ones you want to see. Want more posts from women? Adjust aslider to set the gender balance of your feed… or just click on the “mute all men” button and listen to the folks who often get shouted down in online dialogs. Want to broaden the perspectives in your feed? Move the politics slider from “my perspective” to “lots of perspectives” and Gobo introduces news stories from sources you might not otherwise find.
I suffer from excessive Bibliophilia - a disease involving accumulating books beyond my capacity to read them all - my eyes are bigger than my mind (or maybe it’s vice versa). This article and the images make me feel better about this terrible condition.
10 FAMOUS BOOK HOARDERS
I have a hard time getting rid of books, and if you’re reading this space, you probably do too. As Summer Brennan put it, “what kind of degenerate only wants to own 30 books (or fewer) at a time on purpose?” Not anyone I know. But apparently, you only have to own one thousand books to qualify as a book hoarder. Which seems a bit low, to be honest—unless we’re talking about one thousand books in a New York City one-bedroom, in which case, sure.
In general, I’m interested in other people’s book collections. How many books, which ones, how are they kept, where are they kept? So, one rainy afternoon, I started poking around the book collections of famous people, to see which ones happened to be (technical or actual) book hoarders. Some of the results surprised me—though I admit I already knew about Karl Lagerfeld.
N.B. that of course this list is in no way scientific or exhaustive—no doubt there are scores of famous people out there with large libraries (disposable income and lots of space tend to make that possible), but either the actual numbers have never been documented, or I simply couldn’t (or didn’t) dig them up. Notables with high figures who didn’t make the top ten include Marilyn Monroe (400 books), George Washington (1,200 books), Charles Darwin (1,480 books), Oprah (1,500 books), Frederick Douglass (2,000-odd books), and David Markson (2,500 books). If you have any further intel on this score, please add on to the list in the comments as you see fit.
