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Why Is Glass Rigid? Signs of Its Secret Structure Emerge
Emotions should be in the heart of complex political debates
Articles:
Pandemic speeds largest test yet of universal basic income
The COVID-19 crisis is a chance to do capitalism differently
Oregon to officially vote on legalizing psychedelic psilocybin therapy
Discovery of 'thought worms' opens window to the mind
Pulling carbon from the sky is necessary but not sufficient
Space to grow, or grow in space—how vertical farms could be ready to take-off
Scientists make precise gene edits to mitochondrial DNA for first time
Boosting a liver protein may mimic the brain benefits of exercise
Detection of electrical signaling between tomato plants raises interesting questions
Researchers find link between rape and long-term breathing problems
Liquid Air Batteries. Literally energy from thin air. Seriously. Literally!
German court rules Tesla's 'Autopilot' is false advertising
Increased correlation length is a hallmark of phase transitions, in which particles transition from a disordered to an ordered arrangement or vice versa. It happens, for instance, when atoms in a block of iron collectively align so that the block becomes magnetized. As the block approaches this transition, each atom influences atoms farther and farther away in the block.
Why Is Glass Rigid? Signs of Its Secret Structure Emerge
One standard response is simply to go with available scientific evidence and to just listen to the experts. That’s what I call the technocratic approach – quantitative information is the guiding light, and anxieties or concerns of the public are dismissed as irrelevant. At the other end of the spectrum is what I call the populist approach, where the will of the public is taken as the ultimate verdict on policy. Even though the public might be emotional – and hence supposedly irrational – public opinion should still be the guide, either for democratic objectives or for pragmatic, instrumental ones.
…. both approaches are misguided for the same reason: they don’t take emotions and underlying values seriously. Obviously, it’s crucial to uncover the relevant scientific facts to make important decisions about, say, risky technologies and pandemics. But such decisions aren’t just a matter of gathering scientific information and listening to experts, as important as that is. Scientific information is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. We also have to take into account societal and ethical considerations, and that requires explicit ethical reflection, which in turn requires attention for emotions.
Many researchers from psychology and philosophy, such as Nico Frijda, Antonio Damasio and Martha Nussbaum, have shown that our emotions help us with so-called ‘practical rationality’ – that is, making decisions in complex real-life situations. In my own work, I argue that emotions are important for having moral insights. Emotions are not by definition at odds with rationality, but can be an important source of moral reflection. They point to what matters to us morally. Emotions can draw attention to important ethical considerations that frequently get overlooked in quantitative, science-based approaches to risk.
Of course, emotions can also be misguided, but the same holds for all sources of insight. Emotions need to be critically assessed based on scientific information and rational analysis, as well as by emotional reflection and deliberation.
Emotionally charged human capacities such as imagination can play an important role in developing and thinking about future scenarios. The prospect of catastrophic climate change requires us to envisage different ways of life, and different scenarios for how to run a more sustainable economy, with more durable energy sources and lower consumption. Artists, filmmakers and writers can play an important role in making these scenarios vivid. Art appeals to the imagination; it can make abstract problems more concrete, and so facilitate ethical deliberation on the implications of such future scenarios.
Emotions should be in the heart of complex political debates
Here is one more important signal of the emergence of a new economic paradigm and social platform for flourishing in the 21st century. In the times of Covid - we’ve redefined what work is essential - and it’s not in the executive suite.
“If there’s ever an opportunity to try to push for some sort of income floor that can be paid out in cash to people, this is the time to do it,” says Damon Jones, an economist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.
Pandemic speeds largest test yet of universal basic income
Economists welcome the chance to see whether giving people cash to spend however they choose improves livelihoods.
Spain’s government has started what might just be remembered as the world’s biggest economics experiment. On 15 June, spurred by the coronavirus crisis and its economic fallout, it launched a website offering monthly payments of up to €1,015 (US$1,145) to the nation’s poorest families.
The programme, which will support 850,000 households, is the largest test yet of an idea called universal basic income (UBI) — in which people are given a cash payment each month to spend however they choose. It has been oft-discussed but never satisfactorily tested, and economists around the world are watching closely to see what the impact of the scheme on livelihoods will be.
The move comes at a time of unprecedented economic turmoil brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Spain was one of the hardest-hit countries in the early days of the pandemic. The nationwide lockdown curbed the spread of the virus, but came at a staggering financial price. Millions of people lost their jobs as the economy shrank rapidly, putting many of the most vulnerable citizens at risk.
As the saying goes - never let a serious crisis go to waste - Covid-19 has revealed the power of the sovereign nations to shape the political economy - in fact it is revealing that markets (where ever real markets exist) are a commons that must be governed by governments and nations. Along with Modern Monetary Theory - this economist argues for a profound re-thinking of the role of government in co-creating our economies.
The COVID-19 crisis is a chance to do capitalism differently
In the face of three simultaneous crises -- health, the economy and climate -- do we have a chance to do capitalism differently? Economist Mariana Mazzucato explains why we shouldn't try to go back to normal after the pandemic but should instead rethink how governments work together with businesses to solve big problems. Learn more about how governments can play a dynamic, proactive role in shaping markets and sparking innovation -- instead of just responding to broken systems. (This virtual conversation, hosted by TED Global curator Bruno Giussani, was recorded June 22, 2020.)
This is an interesting signal - of the emergence of plant medicines as important therapeutic tools - perhaps better than the current pharmacopeia of patented profit makers.
“We are thrilled that Oregon voters have come together to tackle mental health and depression by qualifying this ballot measure for the November election,” says Tom Eckert, co-chief petitioner on the initiative. “Oregonians deserve access to psilocybin therapy as a treatment option – and now we officially have a chance to win it.”
Oregon to officially vote on legalizing psychedelic psilocybin therapy
The state of Oregon will officially vote on legalizing psilocybin psychotherapy in the upcoming November election, after well over 150,000 signatures were collected to secure the landmark ballot measure. The initiative focuses on licensed and regulated psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in clinical environments.
After more than a year of work, and significant pandemic disruptions, the Oregon Psilocybin Society has successfully collected the signatures necessary for IP-34, an initiative legalizing psilocybin psychotherapy, to be on the statewide ballot in the November 2020 election.
IP-34 is solely focused on legalizing psilocybin within a clinical and therapeutic context. Unlike other, more broad, calls for legalization or decriminalization, this ballot measure does not allow for recreational uses of psilocybin, or home cultivation. Instead, it lays out a two-year timeline for the planning and development of licensing and regulatory processes for establishing clinical spaces to administer psilocybin psychotherapy.
Any one who has engaged in even an attempt to meditate is immediately confronted with what has been called the ‘monkey mind’ as awareness dawns of just how difficult it is to train attention. This is an fascinating signal of science progress in the nature of the mind.
Discovery of 'thought worms' opens window to the mind
Queen's University researchers uncover brain-based marker of new thoughts and discover we have more than 6,000 thoughts each day.
Researchers at Queen's University have established a method that, for the first time, can detect indirectly when one thought ends and another begins. Dr. Jordan Poppenk (Psychology) and his master's student, Julie Tseng, devised a way to isolate "thought worms," consisting of consecutive moments when a person is focused on the same idea. This research was recently published in Nature Communications.
"What we call thought worms are adjacent points in a simplified representation of activity patterns in the brain. The brain occupies a different point in this 'state space' at every moment. When a person moves onto a new thought, they create a new thought worm that we can detect with our methods," explains Dr. Poppenk, who is the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience. "We also noticed that thought worms emerge right as new events do when people are watching movies. Drilling into this helped us validate the idea that the appearance of a new thought worm corresponds to a thought transition."
"Thought transitions have been elusive throughout the history of research on thought, which has often relied on volunteers describing their own thoughts, a method that can be notoriously unreliable," Dr. Poppenk adds. "Being able to measure the onset of new thoughts gives us a way to peek into the 'black box' of the resting mind—to explore the timing and pace of thoughts when a person is just daydreaming about dinner and otherwise keeping to themselves."
This is a good signal of the emergence of a range of ‘carbon capture’ methods - that will have to accompany all other carbon reduction initiatives.
preliminary results suggest the theory is holding up. The application of 20 tonnes of basalt dust to a half-hectare UK plot boosted CO2 removal by 40% compared with that seen on an untreated plot, and by 15% in another trial, which spread dust over oil-palm plantations in Malaysia. The early results also indicate that adding basalt boosted yields in these and other crops.
Pulling carbon from the sky is necessary but not sufficient
Carbon dioxide removal is becoming a serious proposition. But it is not a substitute for aggressive action to cut emissions.
Could spreading basalt dust on farmers’ fields help to remove atmospheric carbon? A large multidisciplinary team of scientists is confident it could, and that doing so could boost crop yields and soil health at the same time.
In this issue, David Beerling, a biogeochemist at the University of Sheffield, UK, and his colleagues explore a strategy to enhance rock weathering (D. J. Beerling et al. Nature 583, 242–248; 2020).
This is a continuously occurring natural phenomenon in which carbon dioxide and water react with silicate rocks on Earth’s surface. In the process, atmospheric CO2 is converted into stable bicarbonates that dissolve and then flow into rivers and oceans. The idea of scaling up this process to remove carbon has been considered for some three decades. The team’s results provide the most detailed analysis yet of the technical and economic potential of this approach — and some of the probable challenges, including gaining public acceptance.
The researchers modelled what would happen to atmospheric carbon if basalt dust was added to agricultural lands in the world’s biggest economies, including Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia and the United States. According to their calculations, doing so would remove between 0.5 billion and 2 billion tonnes of CO2 from the air each year. The upper limit is more than 5 times the annual emissions of the United Kingdom, and akin to offsetting emissions from around 500 coal-fired power plants.
A good signal of the emergence of new agricultural paradigm - rather than the 100 kilometer diet - think about the 10 mile diet.
Vertical farming is a type of indoor agriculture where crops are cultivated in stacked systems with water, lighting and nutrient sources carefully controlled.
It is part of a rapidly growing sector supported by artificial intelligence in which machines are taught to manage day to day horticultural tasks. The industry is set to grow annually by 21% by 2025 according to one commercial forecast (Grand View Research, 2019).
Space to grow, or grow in space—how vertical farms could be ready to take-off
Vertical farms with their soil-free, computer-controlled environments may sound like sci-fi. But there is a growing environmental and economic case for them, according to new research laying out radical ways of putting food on our plates.
The interdisciplinary study combining biology and engineering sets down steps towards accelerating the growth of this branch of precision agriculture, including the use of aeroponics which uses nutrient-enriched aerosols in place of soil.
Carried out by the John Innes Centre, the University of Bristol and the aeroponic technology provider LettUs Grow, the study identifies future research areas needed to accelerate the sustainable growth of vertical farming using aeroponic systems.
Dr. Antony Dodd, a group leader at the John Innes Centre and senior author of the study, says: "By bringing fundamental biological insights into the context of the physics of growing plants in an aerosol, we can help the vertical farming business become more productive more quickly, while producing healthier food with less environmental impact."
Another signal of the progress towards the domestication of DNA - and the metabolic factories we call living systems.
Scientists make precise gene edits to mitochondrial DNA for first time
Weird enzyme enables researchers to study — and potentially treat — deadly diseases.
A peculiar bacterial enzyme has allowed researchers to achieve what even the popular CRISPR–Cas9 genome-editing system couldn’t manage: targeted changes to the genomes of mitochondria, cells’ crucial energy-producing structures.
The technique — which builds on a super-precise version of gene editing called base editing — could allow researchers to develop new ways to study, and perhaps even treat, diseases caused by mutations in the mitochondrial genome. Such disorders are most often passed down maternally, and impair the cell’s ability to generate energy. Although there are only a small number of genes in the mitochondrial genome compared with the nuclear genome, these mutations can particularly harm the nervous system and muscles, including the heart, and can be fatal to people who inherit them.
But it has been difficult to study such disorders, because scientists lacked a way to make animal models with the same changes to the mitochondrial genome. The latest technique marks the first time that researchers have made such targeted changes, and could allow researchers to do this. “It’s a very exciting development,” says Carlos Moraes, a mitochondrial geneticist at the University of Miami in Florida. “The ability to modify mitochondrial DNA would allow us to ask questions that, before, we could not.” The work was published on 8 July in Nature.
This is a weak signal of a healthier longer lived life - through of the domestication of DNA and so much more.
Boosting a liver protein may mimic the brain benefits of exercise
Liver-made proteins that circulate in the blood improved memories, a mouse study suggests
A chemical signal from the liver, triggered by exercise, helps elderly mice keep their brains sharp, suggests a study published in the July 10 Science. Understanding this liver-to-brain signal may help scientists develop a drug that benefits the brain the way exercise does.
Lots of studies have shown that exercise helps the brain, buffering the memory declines that come with old age, for instance. Scientists have long sought an “exercise pill” that could be useful for elderly people too frail to work out or for whom exercise is otherwise risky. “Can we somehow get people who can’t exercise to have the same benefits?” asks Saul Villeda, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.
The researchers closely studied one of these liver proteins produced in response to exercise, called GPLD1. GPLD1 is an enzyme, a type of molecular scissors. It snips other proteins off the outsides of cells, releasing those proteins to go do other jobs. Targeting these biological jobs with a molecule that behaves like GPLD1 might be a way to mimic the brain benefits of exercise, the researchers suspect.
Old mice that were genetically engineered to make more GPLD1 in their livers performed better on the memory tasks than other old sedentary mice, the researchers found. The genetically engineered sedentary mice did about as well in the pool of water as the mice that exercised. “Getting the liver to produce this one enzyme can actually recapitulate all these beneficial effects we see in the brain with exercise,” Villeda says.
Just how complex are ecological links, connections and media of communication? This is a good signal related to how information may just be a defining and ubiquitous feature of life.
Detection of electrical signaling between tomato plants raises interesting questions
The soil beneath our feet is alive with electrical signals being sent from one plant to another, according to research in which a University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering participated.
UAH's Dr. Yuri Shtessel and Dr. Alexander Volkov, a professor of biochemistry at Oakwood University, coauthored a paper that used physical experiments and mathematical modeling to study transmission of electrical signals between tomato plants.
when the plants are living in common soil, experiments conducted by Dr. Volkov found that the ground impedance is not very large and they can communicate by passing electrical signals to each other through the Mycorrhizal network in the soil.
This is a very disturbing but important signal - for many reasons - demonstrating the entanglement of human ailments with the human condition and most disturbing the still widespread incidence of sexual and violent abuse.
Researchers find link between rape and long-term breathing problems
Rape and sexual trauma may have long-lasting consequences for physical health as well as mental health, University of Otago researchers have found.
The team of researchers, led by respiratory specialist Professor Bob Hancox and sexual health specialist Dr. Jane Morgan from Waikato DHB, found a history of rape is associated with "dysfunctional breathing" in both women and men, and with late-onset asthma diagnosis in women.
"Dysfunctional breathing," which is also known as hyperventilation syndrome, involves breathing too deeply or too rapidly. People can present with chest pain and a tingling sensation in the fingertips and around the mouth and it may accompany a panic attack.
While previous studies have found that a history of adverse events and psychological trauma, including sexual trauma, are associated with self-reported asthma, links with other respiratory problems have not been examined. Professor Hancox explains the team set out to assess whether the experience of being raped—an extreme form of psychological trauma—was associated with dysfunctional breathing among participants in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study.
This world-renowned study is a longitudinal investigation of health and behaviour in a group of 1037 people born in Dunedin in 1972 or 1973 and followed regularly throughout their lives.
Nearly 20 percent of women and 4 percent of men in the study reported being raped at some stage throughout their life. Both men and women who had reported being raped were more likely to have dysfunctional breathing at 38 years of age.
This 13 minute video provides a great comprehensive description of a renewable energy storage system.
Liquid Air Batteries. Literally energy from thin air. Seriously. Literally!
Energy storage from thin air sounds a bit too good to be true, but the beauty of this potentially transformational technology is the simplicity of a design that utilises tried and tested components that have been reimagined and re-engineered to perform a vital function for electricity grids, now and in the future.
Here is a good signal that we are still some distance away from self-driving vehicles.
German court rules Tesla's 'Autopilot' is false advertising
A German court ruled Tuesday that specific terms used by Tesla for its electric cars' assistance features are false advertising, including the vehicles' "Autopilot" feature.
Judges at the higher state court in Munich found use of the term "Autopilot" as well offering as the option to buy a Model 3 vehicle with "full potential for autonomous driving" were "misleading business acts".
"Use of the relevant terms creates an expectation... that does not correspond to the actual facts," the court said in a statement.
Tesla's "Autopilot" does not enable a trip without any human intervention at all, the judges found.
Neither would such a technology be legal under present German law, they added.
