Friday Thinking

the banality of evil can perhaps best be defined as unfettered self-interest. Banal because everyone has self-interest, and because American culture expects and even celebrates its most gratuitous pursuits and expressions. Evil because, when unchecked, self-interest leads not only to intolerable disparities in wealth and power, but eventually the erosion of democratic norms.

American culture has historically found ways to limit individual self-interest. Particularly during times of calamity and instability, it has created expectations of sacrifice for the common good that pressure political leaders to limit their excesses.

For example, during and after the American Revolution, the concept of republican virtue advanced the notion of self-sacrifice to safeguard and develop the fragile new nation and its untested, grandiose, halting experiment in democratic self-rule. Military service in local and state militias was the core of national defense and a standard obligation of male citizens. Elites eligible for political service (most commoners initially could not vote, much less hold office) were expected to sacrifice their personal self interest, forgoing their business and commercial pursuits to temporarily serve the public interest before returning to private life.

The point is not that everyone lived up to these expectation. Many did not. Rather, it’s that the expectations existed, and they helped temper runaway self-interest. Overt selfishness at the expense of a then narrowly-defined polity was hardly eliminated, but it was discouraged, criticized, and sometimes even censured.

….During the 1930s, the shared misery of economic calamity thwarted self-interest as opportunities for individual advancement dried up like never before. For many, mere economic survival was the pressing concern. And the depression transitioned almost seamlessly into the shared sacrifices required for victory in World War II.

After sixteen years of profound struggle and ultimate success, the Great Depression/WWII generations emerged deeply patriotic and with a strong sense of limited self-interest. Paramount was protecting the nation and government that had aided them in times of misery and beaten back fascism.

The Banality Of Trump

today, authoritarianism works differently: it keeps a veneer of democracy, allowing (and then rigging) elections; it keeps a pocket of opposition; it may not use much physical violence, opting for threat and legal harassment, as Viktor Orbán does in Hungary. I call this “new authoritarianism,” others call it “electoral authoritarianism,” or, Orbán’s own self-serving term, “illiberal democracy.” We are still searching for a language to describe what is unfolding.

Histories of Violence: America Is Not a Fascist State — It’s an Authoritarian One

He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.

– From Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez

Coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688, ‘nostalgia’ referred to a medical condition – homesickness – characterised by an incapacitating longing for one’s motherland. Hofer favoured the term because it combined two essential features of the illness: the desire to return home (nostos) and the pain (algos) of being unable to do so. Nostalgia’s symptomatology was imprecise – it included rumination, melancholia, insomnia, anxiety and lack of appetite – and was thought to affect primarily soldiers and sailors. Physicians also disagreed about its cause. Hofer thought that nostalgia was caused by nerve vibrations where traces of ideas of the motherland ‘still cling’, whereas others, noticing that it was found predominantly among Swiss soldiers fighting at lower altitudes, proposed instead that nostalgia was caused by changes in atmospheric pressure, or eardrum damage from the clanging of Swiss cowbells. Once nostalgia was identified among soldiers from various nationalities, the idea that it was geographically specific was abandoned.

Indeed, feeling nostalgic for a time one didn’t actually live through appears to be a common phenomenon if all the chatrooms, Facebook pages and websites dedicated to it are anything to go by. In fact, a new word has been coined to capture this precise variant of nostalgia – anemoia, defined by the Urban Dictionary and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as ‘nostalgia for a time you’ve never known’.

How can we make sense of the fact that people feel nostalgia not only for past experiences but also for generic time periods? My suggestion, inspired by recent evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is that the variety of nostalgia’s objects is explained by the fact that its cognitive component is not an autobiographical memory, but a mental simulation – an imagination, if you will – of which episodic recollections are a sub-class. To support this claim, I need first to discuss some developments in the science of memory and imagination.

Nostalgia reimagined

This is a great read discussing Covid-19 as the world’s first complexity crisis (I’m not sure that is true - but it is the first global complexity crisis of the 21st Century). The authors are from the Santa Fe Institute.

A city of a million will double the number of COVID cases in half the time as a city of 10,000.

Cities are machines we evolved to accelerate socio-biological interactions. The larger the city, the more the average individual interacts with other people in a multiplicative positive feedback process. It has recently been observed that high-density urban settings are associated with the super-linear scaling of a large number of biological and social variables. This means that a doubling in city size leads to more than twofold increase in these variables which include economic productivity, rates of innovation, crime, and disease.

A key insight from complexity science is that complex systems function by the continuous tradeoff between robustness and evolvability.

Robustness describes the ability of a system to withstand a critical perturbation without a significant loss of function.

Evolvability describes a mechanism that allows for the efficient exploration of adjacent novelties, whereby small changes to a mechanism or structure can engender new functions.

The Damage We’re Not Attending To

Scientists who study complex systems offer solutions to the pandemic.

The damage we are not attending to is the deeper nature of the crisis—the collapse of multiple coupled complex systems.

Societies the world over are experiencing what might be called the first complexity crisis in history. We should not have been surprised that a random mutation of a virus in a far-off city in China could lead in just a few short months to the crash of financial markets worldwide, the end of football in Spain, a shortage of flour in the United Kingdom, the bankruptcy of Hertz and Niemann-Marcus in the United States, the collapse of travel, and to so much more.

As scientists who study complex systems, we conceive of a complexity crisis as a twofold event. First, it is the failure of multiple coupled systems—our physical bodies, cities, societies, economies, and ecosystems. Second, it involves solutions, such as social distancing, that involve unavoidable tradeoffs, some of which amplify the primary failures. In other words, the way we respond to failing systems can accelerate their decline.

We and our colleagues in the Santa Fe Institute Transmission Project believe there are some non-obvious insights and solutions to this crisis that can be gleaned from studying complex systems and their universal properties. One useful way to think about a complexity crisis is in terms of the strategic tradeoffs that need to be managed and the complex mechanisms that these tradeoffs involve. These mechanisms include ideas of contagion, epidemic cycles, super-spreading events, critical phenomena, scaling, and path dependence.

2020 - will undoubtedly be seen in history as a massive turning point in the human project of the 21st century (perhaps more transformative as the two world wars and depression of the 20th century) - This is an important signal of how little we know about the change agent that is Covid-19

“There is evidence now that the virus can directly attack heart muscle cells, and there’s also evidence that the cytokine storm that the virus triggers in the body not only damages the lungs, but can damage the heart,” says Swartzberg, who did not work on either of these new studies. “We don’t know what the long-term effects of that may be, but it could be that we will have a population of people who survive COVID-19 only to go on and have chronic cardiac problems.”

Study detects heart damage in majority of recovered COVID-19 patients

A pair of newly published studies in the journal JAMA Cardiology highlight the potential for long-term heart complications in recovered COVID-19 patients. The research suggests the virus can directly damage cardiovascular muscles with ongoing inflammation detectable months after recovery, even in patients originally suffering a mild form of the disease.

While much attention has been focused on the volume of deaths caused by COVID-19, now that we are six months into this global pandemic researchers are beginning to see signs of chronic health problems in recovered patients. Only now are clinicians starting to get a glimpse at the potential persistent health consequences of this new virus, and two new studies offer insights into the cardiovascular impact of COVID-19.

Back in March it was quickly apparent that patients with underlying cardiovascular disease were more likely to suffer a fatal outcome from COVID-19. However, it was unclear whether the virus was directly damaging myocardial cells, or whether there was longer-term cardiovascular damage following recovery.

The migration of the ARPANet to TCP/IP was officially completed on January 1, 1983, when the new protocols were permanently activated. Most of the world couldn’t imagine what that would mean even 10 years later with the invention of HTTP and the web - and the rise of a connected world.

This is a signal of one dimension of the next stage of the digital environment.

Quantum loop: US unveils blueprint for 'virtually unhackable' internet

US officials and scientists have begun laying the groundwork for a more secure "virtually unhackable" internet based on quantum computing technology.

At a presentation Thursday, Department of Energy (DOE) officials issued a report that lays out a blueprint strategy for the development of a national quantum internet, using laws of quantum mechanics to transmit information more securely than on existing networks.

The agency is working with universities and industry researchers on the engineering for the initiative with the aim of creating a prototype within a decade.

In February, scientists from DOE's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago created a 52-mile (83-kilometer) "quantum loop" in the Chicago suburbs, establishing one of the longest land-based quantum networks in the nation.

The aim is to create a parallel, more secure network based on quantum "entanglement," or the transmission of sub-atomic particles.

This is also a very fascinating signal of not just the devices and energy-use - but also of a way of life with precise data about our behavior - the are many assumption being made - but it is worth the time to let yourself imagine what this could enable - good-bad-indifferent

"Imagine firefighters in the field fighting a brush fire near Los Angeles," she says. "If they were equipped with a device like this, we could tell very easily what each firefighter is doing and if they're moving. We could do so far better than we can with external cameras, which might be limited by smoke or the terrain."

Next generation of wearable devices will stay charged longer and track movements better

What if your belt did more than hold up your pants? What if it also listened to your FitBit, smart glasses, and smart jewelry to better recognize what activities you were engaged in while using far less power than anything currently on the market?

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering demonstrated how magnetic induction might one day power the next generation of wearable devices.

In the near future, wearable devices will be doing a lot more than counting our steps. They'll be used in conjunction with other wearables to monitor the vitals of hospital patients or track the location of firefighters and first responders, among other applications.

The problem, however, is power and cost. No one wants to charge their smart watch, glasses, wristband or anklet every time they walk out the door,

This system can monitor daily activities, encourage the user to perform specific actions, or help physical therapists in tracking their patients' progress. According to Golestani, the applications go far beyond hospitals and wearables for every-day health, too; they include surveillance and disaster response.

This is a very strong signal of the emerging interface with our digital environment and more.

Yet despite its new tricks, GPT-3 is still prone to spewing hateful sexist and racist language. Fine-tuning the model helped limit this kind of output in GPT-2.

GPT-3’s human-like output and striking versatility are the results of excellent engineering, not genuine smarts. For one thing, the AI still makes ridiculous howlers that reveal a total lack of common sense. But even its successes have a lack of depth to them, reading more like cut-and-paste jobs than original compositions.

OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless

The AI is the largest language model ever created and can generate amazing human-like text on demand but won't bring us closer to true intelligence.

“Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few days to OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI.

OpenAI first described GPT-3 in a research paper published in May. But last week it began drip-feeding the software to selected people who requested access to a private beta. For now, OpenAI wants outside developers to help it explore what GPT-3 can do, but it plans to turn the tool into a commercial product later this year, offering businesses a paid-for subscription to the AI via the cloud.

GPT-3 is the most powerful language model ever. Its predecessor, GPT-2, released last year, was already able to spit out convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening sentence. But GPT-3 is a big leap forward. The model has 175 billion parameters (the values that a neural network tries to optimize during training), compared with GPT-2’s already vast 1.5 billion. And with language models, size really does matter.

This is a nice account signaling the state of robotics today.

Five incredibly talented robots

Highly flexible, environmentally friendly, with the agility of a human hand or the ability to interact in groups... Portraits of five incredibly talented robots that could soon make a debut in the fields of health, industry, and underwater exploration.

This is a good signal of surveillance and responses emerging from the digital environment.

Many of these anti-drone measures are expensive and complicated. Some are illegal. The most affordable – and legal – way to avoid drone technology is hiding.

How to hide from a drone – the subtle art of ‘ghosting’ in the age of surveillance

Drones of all sizes are being used by environmental advocates to monitor deforestation, by conservationists to track poachers, and by journalists and activists to document large protests. As a political sociologist who studies social movements and drones, I document a wide range of nonviolent and pro-social drone uses in my new book, “The Good Drone.” I show that these efforts have the potential to democratize surveillance.

But when the Department of Homeland Security redirects large, fixed-wing drones from the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor protests, and when towns experiment with using drones to test people for fevers, it’s time to think about how many eyes are in the sky and how to avoid unwanted aerial surveillance. One way that’s within reach of nearly everyone is learning how to simply disappear from view.

This is a very strong signal of the transformation of our energy geopolitics. A longish read signaling change in crime but also change in agricultural practice.

"It's just how opium poppy is farmed now," Mr Brittan tells me. "They drill down 100m (325ft) or so to the ground water, put in an electric pump and wire it up to a few panels and bingo, the water starts flowing."

Take-up of this new technology was very rapid.

Buying diesel to power their ground water pumps used to be the farmers' biggest expense.

"And it isn't just the cost," Dr Mansfield continues. "The diesel in these remote areas is heavily adulterated so pumps and generators keep breaking down. That's a huge problem for farmers."

What does this tell us about solar power?

That is simple.

The story of the revolution in Afghan heroin production shows us just how transformative solar power can be.

Don't imagine this is some kind of benign "green" technology.

Solar is getting so cheap that it is capable of changing the way we do things in fundamental ways and with consequences that can affect the entire world.

What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power

If you have ever doubted whether solar power can be a transformative technology, read on.

This is a story about how it has proved its worth in the toughest environment possible.

The market I'm talking about is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet.

There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change - or any other ethical consideration, for that matter.

This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit.

It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin.

Another good signal of the progress being made in transforming energy geopolitics.

Iter: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase.

After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot "plasma" required for fusion power.

The £18.2bn (€20bn; $23.5bn) facility has been under construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France.

Advocates say fusion could be a source of clean, unlimited power that would help tackle the climate crisis.

Iter is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. All members share in the cost of construction.

Current nuclear energy relies on fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones.

Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one.

This is a fantastic signal of the next level of research into human wellness and biological complexity.

"This immense catalog is a landmark in microbiome research, and will be an invaluable resource for scientists to start studying and hopefully understanding the role of each bacterial species in the human gut ecosystem,"

Unparalleled inventory of the human gut ecosystem

An international team of scientists has collated all known bacterial genomes from the human gut microbiome into a single large database, allowing researchers to explore the links between bacterial genes and proteins, and their effects on human health.

This project was led by EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and included collaborators from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Trento, the Gladstone Institutes, and the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. Their work has been published in Nature Biotechnology.

The scientists have now compiled 200,000 genomes and 170 million protein sequences from more than 4,600 bacterial species in the human gut. Their new databases, the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Genome collection and the Unified Gastrointestinal Protein catalog, reveal the tremendous diversity in our guts and pave the way for further microbiome research.

The project revealed that more than 70% of the detected bacterial species had never been cultured in the lab—their activity in the body remains unknown.

All the data collected in the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Genome collection and the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Protein catalog are freely available in MGnify, an EMBL-EBI online resource that allows scientists to analyze their microbial genomic data and make comparisons with existing datasets.

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Friday Thinking 24 July 2020

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.

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:

Basel: The Birthplace of Hallucinogenic Science

How Gödel’s Proof Works

What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.

The Keynesian Revolution

A New Land Contract

Articles:

Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born

Is the pandemic finally the moment for a universal basic income?

Google Loon Is Now Beaming WiFi Down to Earth From Giant Balloons

U of T tests show Canadian-made mask deactivates 99% of SARS-CoV-2 virus

Connecting donated human lungs to pigs repaired damage to the organs, scientists report

Bacteria with a metal diet discovered in dirty glassware

KFC and russian 3D bioprinting firm to lab-produce the chicken 'meat of the future'

A new species of darkling beetle larvae that degrade plastic

Ex-Google robotics head unveils automated home assistant

How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)

Once Europe emerged from World War Two, Sandoz marketed their new compound to researchers worldwide under the brand name Delysid. And for more than two decades, LSD was revealed as something of a wonder drug to treat anxiety, depression and psychological trauma. Between 1943 and 1970, Oxford University Press estimated it generated almost 10,000 scientific publications, earning the tag of the most intensively researched pharmacological substance ever.

Basel: The Birthplace of Hallucinogenic Science

Mathematicians of the era sought a solid foundation for mathematics: a set of basic mathematical facts, or axioms, that was both consistent — never leading to contradictions — and complete, serving as the building blocks of all mathematical truths.

But Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems, published when he was just 25, crushed that dream. He proved that any set of axioms you could posit as a possible foundation for math will inevitably be incomplete; there will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms. He also showed that no candidate set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.

His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring.

Undecidable questions have even arisen in physics, suggesting that Gödelian incompleteness afflicts not just math, but — in some ill-understood way — reality.

How Gödel’s Proof Works

But a broader definition of individuality won’t just allow scientists to search for new kinds of life. They can also probe how different boundary conditions might affect an entity’s degree of individuality and its relationship to its surroundings. For instance, how “individual” is an ecosystem? What happens to that individuality if a species disappears or a crucial environmental factor changes? What happens if an organism’s boundary is drawn not around its skin but further out to include some of its environment, too? The answers could affect conservation efforts and our understanding of how much interdependence there is among organisms, species and their physical surroundings. And if researchers can gain a better understanding of the factors that have the greatest impact on a system’s individuality, they might learn more about evolutionary transitions like the emergence of multicellularity.

“I think that defining fundamental quantities helps us to suddenly start to see dynamics that we didn’t see before, and understand processes that we hadn’t thought of before,” Kempes said — in the same way that defining and understanding temperature allowed the formulation of new theories in physics.

What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.

But to unpack the economics of the Keynesian Revolution readers should pay close attention to chapter twelve of The General Theory (“The State of Long Term Expectation”) and Keynes’s 1937 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, “The General Theory of Employment,” his response to leading academic critics of the book. Especially in the latter it is unambiguously clear that Keynes’s breakthrough was founded on two fundamental departures from orthodoxy. First, an economy, once stuck in a rut, could remain in a rut. And second, actors in the economy made decisions in an environment characterized not by risk (where the underlying probabilities of future events are properly understood and generally shared), but uncertainty (a setting where the future is inherently unknowable).

“The orthodox theory assumes that we have a knowledge of the future of a kind quite different from that which we actually possess,” Keynes explained. “This hypothesis of a calculable future leads to a wrong interpretation of the principles of behavior . . . and to an underestimation of the concealed factors of utter doubt, precariousness, hope and fear.”

The Keynesian Revolution

So we found ourselves confronted by this weird situation where as taxpayers we’re pouring billions of pounds of life support into the economy, but a huge chunk of it is just being paid straight on to private landlords. If you think of the economy as a bucket, it’s like having a huge hole in the bottom of it. Or rather, the top.

So inevitably, millions of young people started asking the question that had been under our noses all along, which is, ‘wait, what work exactly is it that we’re paying Landlords to do?’

And basically the answer is: nothing. We’re paying them to… not evict us.

And that’s an extraordinary realisation isn’t it? That in a country that believes so strongly in fairness, and hard work, and enterprise, and innovation, and meritocracy, the single biggest cost burden on most households and most businesses is a kind of fee, paid by poor people to rich people, for no work. Just for having money in the first place.

And that fee has been going up and up.

“Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.”

….the point ... incredibly important, and timeless. It is one that had been made by Adam Smith and many others before him. That land value is not created by the owner. It is created by the taxpayer through our investment into infrastructure, and by the activity of the community, and our collective consent for development.

the good news is that pretty much every major economist and philosopher who has looked seriously at this question, from Marx to Milton Friedman, from Martin Luther King to Mariana Mazzucato from Adam Smith to Abraham Lincoln, from the the ancient Israelites to Elinor Ostrom, has always come back with the same basic principle: that Land is a natural commons — it belongs to everyone, and that land value (rents) should be recaptured by the community, who create the value in the first place.

A New Land Contract

This has been a weak signal for a long time - most people are still imbued with that prognostication of the population bomb of the 70s - the question is will we have enough STEM and Artists in the future. Perhaps increases in immigration will be vital to maintain optimal population size.

Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born

The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born which is set to have a "jaw-dropping" impact on societies, say researchers.

Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.

And 23 nations - including Spain and Japan - are expected to see their populations halve by 2100.

Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.

In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime.

Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 - and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.

Why are fertility rates falling?

It has nothing to do with sperm counts or the usual things that come to mind when discussing fertility.

Instead it is being driven by more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children.

The study projects:

The number of under-fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.

The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.

One more signal in the increasing number of voices calling for one of the most fundamental rethinking of our economic paradigm - one that may well be more appropriate for human well being and planetary flourishing.

Is the pandemic finally the moment for a universal basic income?

As unemployment remains high and the threat of automation looms over any recovery, UBI is getting another look as a potential key to ongoing economic stimulus.

When Andrew Yang dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary in February, he had no way of knowing that within weeks one of the central pillars of his failed campaign would move from the fringes of American political conversation to the very center of global policy debates. Citing looming labor market disruptions brought on by accelerating workplace automation, Yang ran on the idea of instituting a universal basic income (UBI), an idea that’s lived at the outskirts of American political thought—though never quite in the mainstream—for 250 years. Specifically, Yang proposed the U.S. government pay each of its adult citizens $1,000 per month (in lieu of some of the benefits the government currently offers) to alleviate poverty and gird all Americans for the day the robots come for their jobs, a notion dismissed by its many, many detractors as fantasy.

Five months on, with much of the global economy struggling to reopen and the Federal Reserve forecasting millions of jobs lost that will never return, Yang’s notion of a guaranteed income for all doesn’t feel nearly as fantastical. Since February, governments around the globe—including in the U.S.—have intervened in their citizens’ individual financial lives, distributing direct cash payments to backstop workers sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are considering keeping such direct assistance in place indefinitely, or at least until the economic shocks subside. In some countries, that could keep some kind of regularly distributed guaranteed income in place for years, even if governments choose to call it by another name.

This is a very important signal on at least a couple of dimensions - first the need to connect the rest of the world into the digital global environment and second - should we let this effort be a privateering enclosure of what should be public infrastructure? Internet has now been deemed a human right by the UN - do we want this human right to be mediated by for-profit private enterprises?

According to the Alliance for Affordable Internet, over half of the world’s population now has internet access—but a large percentage of that is low-quality, meaning they can’t use features like online learning, video streaming, and telehealth. A 2019 report by the organization found that only 28 percent of the African population has internet access through a computer, while 34 percent have access through a mobile phone.

Google Loon Is Now Beaming WiFi Down to Earth From Giant Balloons

Four years ago, three big tech companies had plans in the works to beam internet down to Earth from the sky, and each scenario sounded wilder than the next. SpaceX requested permission to launch 4,425 satellites into orbit to create a global internet hotspot. Facebook wanted to use solar-powered drones and laser-based tech to shoot wifi to antennas. And Google’s Loon was building giant balloons to house solar-powered electronics that would transmit connectivity down from the stratosphere.

As incredible as it all sounds, two of these schemes have started to come to fruition. Loon balloons made their (non-emergency) debut in Kenya this week, with 35 balloons transmitting a 4G signal to 31,000 square miles of central and western Kenya. And SpaceX is in the process of signing up beta testers for its internet-via-satellite, with over 500 satellites currently in orbit. Facebook, however, stopped work on its internet drones in mid-2018.

Here’s a quick refresher on how the Loon and SpaceX systems work.

This is a very hopeful signal of help in the near future and the emergence of a more powerful tool anywhere we need personal protective equipment.

U of T tests show Canadian-made mask deactivates 99% of SARS-CoV-2 virus

An antimicrobial coating developed by Quebec company I3 BioMedical Inc. can deactivate more than 99 per cent of SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – on the outer surface of medical masks, tests carried out by University of Toronto scientists have shown.

The scientists, led by Professor Scott Gray-Owen of the department of molecular genetics in the Faculty of Medicine, used the faculty’s high-tech containment level three (CL3) lab to test the efficacy of the TrioMed Active Mask’s antimicrobial coating.

They found that the novel coating deactivated more than 99 per cent of SARS-CoV-2 within minutes, a finding that could represent a huge boon for health-care workers who are at risk of being contaminated with the virus by touching or adjusting their face masks. Indeed, the coronavirus has been shown to be present and infectious on the outer layer of masks for up to seven days, according to a recent study published in The Lancet Microbe.

This is a fascinating signal of the emerging entanglement of life forms as we domesticate DNA.

In one case, that cross-species cross-circulation allowed a human lung that failed after its six hours of standard perfusion to heal enough to meet transplant requirements and theoretically help a lung patient, though no transplant was done.

“If there were a way to maintain organs in a healthy state outside the body for a day or several days, then many things would change in transplantation,” Bartlett said. “You could have perfect matching. You could treat organs injured outside the body until they’re working well. So that’s what Dr. Bacchetta and his crew are working on. And they’re doing a marvelous job.”

Connecting donated human lungs to pigs repaired damage to the organs, scientists report

For people who need a lung transplant, the wait is often prolonged by the frustrating fact that most donor organs have to be discarded: Only 20% of donated lungs meet medical criteria for transplantation, translating into far fewer organs than people on waiting lists. Now, a team of researchers has shown they might be able to salvage more of these lungs by borrowing a pig’s circulatory system.

Delicate lungs recovered from donors are typically connected to perfusion machines that keep oxygen and nutrients flowing to maintain viability, but that works for only about six hours, not long enough for often-injured lung tissue to recover before the organ fails.

Matthew Bacchetta of Vanderbilt University and Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic of Columbia University led a team that extended the current six-hour window for lungs outside the body to 24 hours. As they reported Monday in Nature Medicine, they did it by connecting each of five human lungs declined as too damaged for transplantation to a pig, sharing the animal’s liver, kidney, and other functions.

The project of domesticating DNA is accelerating our knowledge of life itself - living systems - live by metabolizing ‘things’ for energy and more - the challenge is to imagine life as relationships of metabolism rather than as a particular form of matter called ‘organic’.

"These are the first bacteria found to use manganese as their source of fuel," says Jared Leadbetter, professor of environmental microbiology at Caltech who, in collaboration with postdoctoral scholar Hang Yu, describes the findings in the July 16 issue of the journal Nature. "A wonderful aspect of microbes in nature is that they can metabolize seemingly unlikely materials, like metals, yielding energy useful to the cell."

Bacteria with a metal diet discovered in dirty glassware

Caltech microbiologists have discovered bacteria that feed on manganese and use the metal as their source of calories. Such microbes were predicted to exist over a century ago, but none had been found or described until now.

Manganese is one of the most abundant elements on the surface of the earth. Manganese oxides take the form of a dark, clumpy substance and are common in nature; they have been found in subsurface deposits and can also form in water-distribution systems.

"There is a whole set of environmental engineering literature on drinking-water-distribution systems getting clogged by manganese oxides," says Leadbetter. "But how and for what reason such material is generated there has remained an enigma. Clearly, many scientists have considered that bacteria using manganese for energy might be responsible, but evidence supporting this idea was not available until now."

I actually thought the first ‘killer app’ (pun gingy but intended) for 3D printed food was the ‘cultured hot dog’ (at least we would know exactly what was in it - as opposed to the current hot dog / processed meat food).

KFC and russian 3D bioprinting firm to lab-produce the chicken 'meat of the future'

as part of its vision for the ‘restaurant of the future’, fast food chain KFC is working alongside a russian 3D bioprinting firm to create chicken meat.

the idea of crafting the ‘meat of the future’ arose in response to the growing popularity of a healthy lifestyle and nutrition, the annual increase in demand for alternatives to traditional meat, and the need to develop more environmentally friendly methods of food production. the project aims to create the world’s first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets, which will be as close as possible in both taste and appearance to the original KFC product.

the project has been developed in cooperation with 3D bioprinting solutions, a company based in moscow. the firm is developing additive bioprinting technology using chicken cells and plant material, allowing it to reproduce the taste and texture of chicken meat almost without involving animals in the process. to achieve the signature taste of the nuggets, KFC will provide its partner with all of the necessary ingredients, such as breading and spices. according to the team, there are currently no other methods available that could allow the creation of such complex products from animal cells.

This is a very good signal of progress toward developing a metabolic economy.

"We have discovered a new insect species that lives in East Asia—including Korea—that can biodegrade plastic through the gut flora of its larvae. If we use the plastic-degrading bacterial strain isolated in this study and replicate the simple gut floral composition of P. davidis, there is the chance that we could completely biodegrade polystyrene, which has been difficult to completely decompose, to ultimately contribute to solving the plastic waste problem that we face."

A new species of darkling beetle larvae that degrade plastic

A joint research team consisting of Professor Hyung Joon Cha and a doctoral student Seongwook Woo of the Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH with Professor Intek Song of Andong National University has uncovered for the first time that the larvae of the beetle in the order Coleoptera (Plesiophthophthalmus davidis) can decompose polystyrene, a material that is otherwise difficult to decompose.

… the research team isolated and identified Serratia from the intestinal tract of P. davidis larvae. When polystyrene was fed to the larvae for two weeks, the proportion of Serratia in the gut flora increased by six fold, accounting for 33 percent of the overall gut flora. Moreover, it was found that the gut flora of this larvae consisted of a very simple group of bacterial species (less than six) unlike the gut flora of other conventional polystyrene-degrading insects.

I’m definitely ready for a home assistant that actually performs as well as the lovely 2 min video indicates. The key is how much would a unit have to cost to have one in almost every home (like a television).

Ex-Google robotics head unveils automated home assistant

The former head of Google's robotics division has unveiled a new robot named Stretch that he hopes will prove to be an economical and handy assistant around the home.

And it's no stretch to say that it could provide a blueprint for future efforts in practical, low-cost automated devices to assist with household chores.

Aaron Edsinger, along with partner Charlie Kemp of the Georgia Tech Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, say simplicity was key. They devised a lightweight machine consisting of a wheel base, a three-foot-high center pole and a telescoping touch-sensitive arm that, as its name suggests, stretches, and intelligently grabs and handles objects. It can carry items weighing up to three pounds.

"What sets this robot apart is its extraordinary reach, which is why we named it Stretch," said Edsinger. The arm, which moves easily along the center pole from top to bottom, can stretch out about 20 inches from its base.

Stretch's compact footprint enables it to easily maneuver around the home, particularly in tight spaces. It's ideally suited for simple tasks such as vacuuming, cleaning, storing objects or transporting items around a home or office space. It can place items on a bookcase shelf or remove clothes from a dryer.

This is a great account of the earth’s history of climate change - one that also makes clear how much humans have been contributing to the current changes in climate.

How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)

Earth’s climate has fluctuated through deep time, pushed by these 10 different causes. Here’s how each compares with modern climate change.

Earth has been a snowball and a hothouse at different times in its past. So if the climate changed before humans, how can we be sure we’re responsible for the dramatic warming that’s happening today?

In part it’s because we can clearly show the causal link between carbon dioxide emissions from human activity and the 1.28 degree Celsius (and rising) global temperature increase since preindustrial times. Carbon dioxide molecules absorb infrared radiation, so with more of them in the atmosphere, they trap more of the heat radiating off the planet’s surface below.

But paleoclimatologists have also made great strides in understanding the processes that drove climate change in Earth’s past. Here’s a primer on 10 ways climate varies naturally, and how each compares with what’s happening now.