Leah Crane in New Scientist:

The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe – protons, neutrons and electrons – unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space.

You have probably heard about the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to permeate the universe, the effects of which we can see through its gravitational pull. But our models of the universe also say there should be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have observed so far.

Two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas.

“The missing baryon problem is solved,” says Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, leader of one of the groups. The other team was led by Anna de Graaff at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before.

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Larry Siems in The Guardian:

There were 20 cells inside the prison, each a stand-alone concrete box. In 16, prisoners were shackled to a metal ring in the wall. In four, designed for sleep deprivation, they stood chained by the wrists to an overhead bar. Those in the regular cells had a plastic bucket; those in sleep deprivation wore diapers. When diapers weren’t available, guards crafted substitutes with duct tape, or prisoners were chained naked in their cells. The cellblock was unheated, pitch black day and night, with music blaring around the clock.

“The atmosphere was very good,” John “Bruce” Jessen told a CIA investigator in January 2003, two months after he interrogated a prisoner named Gul Rahman in the facility. “Nasty, but safe.”

Jessen, one of the two contract psychologists who designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques”, spent 10 days in the secret prison near Kabul, Afghanistan, in November 2002. Five days after he left, Rahman, naked from the waist down and shackled to the cold concrete floor, was discovered dead in his cell from hypothermia.

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Jerry Lembcke at Public Books:

In their May 29 New York Times op-ed advertisement for the series, Burns and Novick give a lofty rationale for their film. Succumbing to another cliché, they claim it is about healing. But the discourse of healing misleads as much as it informs, presupposing a prewar America that was a seamless unity, where everyone got along. As sociologist Keith Beattie showed in his 1998 book The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War, that America was mythical. The real one was already torn by racism and McCarthyism, and frayed by modern technology. Domestic class conflict and racial and gender anxieties, too, continued right through the war, as the historian Milton Bates pointed out in his 1996 book The Wars We Took to Vietnam.

That fractured America was complicit in its going to war, not simply a passive victim of it. Burns and Novick intentionally exclude scholars like Beattie and Bates, however. “No historians or other expert talking heads” mar their film, they told the Times’s reviewer Jennifer Schuessler. “Instead,” Schuessler reports matter-of-factly, their “79 onscreen interviews give the ground-up view of the war from the mostly ordinary people who lived through it.”

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Leon Ross in The Guardian:

Jane Harris’s first two historical novels showcased the voices of unsung, socially disadvantaged characters: a young Irish immigrant in The Observations, an elderly Victorian spinster in Gillespie and I. Harris is an empathetic and intelligent writer, with an instinct for the delicate alchemy that produces page-turners. In her third novel, based on a true story, Harris takes us to 1765 and the voice of Lucien, a “mulatto” slave who is “thirteen or fourteen or thereabouts”, and has been brought over to Martinique from his native Grenada. Lucien works tending livestock on a plantation run by French friars. His only family is older brother Emile, who works “a long day hike away”. Lucien is a vivid character from the first page: when called from the cows to his master’s side, he responds to the slack-jawed messenger with the delicious scorn of youth (“he had froth at the corner of his mouth from which signs I deem him to be of no startling intelligence”), while exhibiting a soft centre in regard to the animals (“She had the fluffiest, most velvety ears of any cow you did see”).

The summons is important: Father Cleophas wants the brothers to undertake a highly suspect mission. They must return to Grenada and smuggle back 42 slaves, former property of the friars, but claimed by English invaders when they took over that island two years ago. Celeste, Emile’s former sweetheart, is among them. Cleophas says the endeavour is blessed by the English governor of Grenada, but also warns that the plantation overseers strongly contest their claim. Harris’s decision to cast this as an adventure story – tremulous tone and all – seems intended to express the joie de vivre of our young protagonist. Her gentle beginning barely nods to slavery’s barbarity. What with the humorous references to the eccentric “dummie” of a ship’s captain, Bianco, who swigs rum as he whisks them across the sea, and with Lucien’s hero-worship of Emile and Emile’s longing for Celeste, readers may feel as if they’re on a jolly themselves. By the time they reach Grenada, and begin to convince their old friends to return with them, I wanted to scribble a huge note in the margin as a reminder that slaves have been sent to gather other slaves, and that the 289-kilometre trip from Grenada back to Martinique would be a journey into more slavery.

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Stefan Auer at Eurozine:

Whatever else it signifies, Brexit marks a serious setback to the ideal of borderless Europe, praised by EU enthusiasts as ‘a conscious and successful attempt to go beyond the nation state’. According to Robert Cooper, for example, European integration was meant to have given rise to ‘a new form of statehood’, heralding the emergence of a better, postmodern state system in which states ‘are less absolute in their sovereignty and independence than before’. In such a world, borders turn from nouns to verbs; they are seen as social constructs that are fluid, ever changing and contested. Thus, scholars working in critical border studies have advocated ‘a move towards a more sociological treatment of borders as a set of contingent practices throughout societies’ and prefer talking about ‘bordering practices’ rather than borders. The very existence of the EU, on this account, has challenged old certainties about ‘ fixed and unquestioned political boundaries between states’.

Indeed, from its early beginnings the project of European unity was about challenging borders. That is surely the practical meaning of the ideal of an ‘ever closer union’ spelled out in the Treaty of Rome of 1957. More recently, from the Schengen Treaty (signed in 1985, implemented in 1995) that sought to cement the ideal of freedom of movement for European citizens by abolishing internal borders between EC/EU member states, to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that further enhanced this project by creating conditions for a monetary union, Europe appeared to be moving towards this ideal. Up to mid 2015, the EU’s internal borders continued to lose importance, yet its external boundaries remained largely impenetrable.

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Ethan Iverson at The New Yorker:

At the beginning, Thelonious Monk was a shadowy figure known only to fellow-innovators. To help generate publicity, the Blue Note label dubbed him “the high priest” for his first records, as a bandleader, in the late nineteen-forties. After Monk spent a few more years in penniless obscurity, suddenly, most of New York City went to the Five Spot, where he was in residence for multiple months in 1957. From there he became a household name and one of the biggest draws on the European circuit. In 1964, he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and was profiled by Lewis Lapham, in the Saturday Evening Post, although most of the mainstream press during Monk’s lifetime made unhappy allusions to craziness, infantilism, and negroid primitivism. Eventually, the record companies decided that he wasn’t a religious icon (“the high priest”) but a warrior instead, and his last significant major-label release, “Underground,” depicted him on the cover with guns, grenades, and a captured Nazi.

During Monk’s ascendency, his style was so different from that of any other bebop or modern-jazz pianist. It was stubborn, incantatory, utterly African. Occasionally, when his left hand opened up and gave an accurate quotation of glorious Harlem stride, it became downright anachronistic. Some of the cognoscenti were bewildered, at least at first.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

An analysis of more than 1,000 mouse models of cancer has challenged their ability to predict patients’ response to therapy. The study, published today in Nature Genetics¹, catalogues the genetic changes that occur in human tumours after they have been grafted into mouse hosts. Such models, called patient-derived xenografts (PDXs), are used in basic research and as ‘avatars’ for individual patients. Researchers use these avatar mice to test a bevy of chemotherapies against a person's tumour, in the hope of tailoring a treatment plan for the patient's specific cancer. But fresh data from geneticists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggest that transplanting human cancer cells into a mouse alters the cells' evolution, reshaping the tumour's genome in ways that could affect responses to chemotherapy.

“The assumption is that what grows out in the PDX is reflective of the bulk of the tumour in the patient,” says cancer geneticist Todd Golub, a lead author on the study. “But there’s quite dramatic resculpting of the tumour genome.” No animal model is perfect, and researchers have long acknowledged that PDXs have their limitations. To avoid an immune assault on the foreign tumour, for example, PDXs are typically grafted into mice that lack a functioning immune system. This compromises scientists' ability to study how immune cells interact with the tumour — an area of increasing interest given the success of cancer therapies that unleash the immune system. PDXs can also take months to generate, making them too slow to serve as avatars for those patients who need to make immediate decisions about their therapy.

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Robert B Talisse in Aeon:

The term democracy is used today to denote everything that is wholesome in the social world. Yet there is such a thing as too much democracy. By this I do not mean that democracy needs to be tempered by some autocratic or elitist political ideal. Rather, I mean that we must reserve space in our shared social lives for that which is not political at all. Even in a democracy, politics must be kept in its place.

Keeping democracy in its place is not easy. The very idea of collective self-government tempts us into thinking that citizens must be perpetually fixated on the task of ruling themselves. Accordingly, a central message of most democratic theory has been that our social lives as such should be driven by democratic aims and projects. And this theoretical message has clearly worked its way into practice. Democratic politics has thoroughly infiltrated our social lives. Our daily interactions, from coffee shops and street corners to comment threads and blog posts, are increasingly structured by our political allegiances, and those allegiances ever more frequently supply the content of our casual conversations.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the United States today, your choices about mundane matters – where to buy groceries, what television shows to watch, the sports teams you follow, how to get to work, where you go on vacation, how you spend Sunday mornings – are all deeply tied to your political profile.

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Nick Holdstock at 3:AM Magazine:

Reading the short, melancholy Katalin Street made me remember the time when machine-gun wielding Yugoslav soldiers removed me from a train in the middle of the night. It also made me recall being robbed by two men in the shadows of Tahrir Square in Cairo, how close they held a knife to my face as I lay trembling on the ground. I wouldn’t say these were defining moments in my life, but they certainly cast a long shadow. I cannot walk down any street at night without being startled by the sound of footsteps approaching behind me, not even the quiet, familiar dead end street I live on. The persistence of trauma is the dominant theme of Katalin Street, Magda Szabó’s 1969 novel, now available in a new translation by Len Rix. It shows the way in which the lives of the inhabitants of three adjacent Budapest households in the 1930s and 1940s are badly warped by the death of one of the children during the Second World War, so much so that many of them seem to “die long before their real death”.

Though Szabó, who died in 2007, had a long, distinguished career in Hungary, her work only began to reach a wide readership in English after Rix’s translation of her novel, The Door, appeared in 2005. The Door is a confessional story about a painful, yet intensely close relationship between a writer and Emerence, the elderly woman who works as her cleaner. At times the novel verges on the supernatural: Emerence seems able to control the writer’s dog even when she is absent.

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David Biale at Literary Review:

Only a quotation, taken pretty much at random, can capture the charming but equally irritating quality of the second volume of Simon Schama’s highly personal and idiosyncratic history of the Jews:

There was a time when Jewish catering opened doors. Every Friday afternoon, following Muslim prayers but before the Jewish Sabbath, a caravan of confections from the villa of the Great Jew in Pera was delivered to Topkapi Palace. Seated upon silk cushions, the yellow-haired sultan, Selim II, awaited with keen anticipation the delicacies brought to him on Chinese porcelain: pigeon dainties baked in rose water and sugar, goose livers chopped with Corinth raisins and the spices which were, after all, the Jew’s to command; also some items preserved in the kitchen of culinary nostalgia, from the ancient Turkic days of tents and flocks and racing ponies; the sour yogurts and yufka, the unleavened bread that was wrapped around a pilaf. In the new style there was an array of zeytinyagli dishes, named for the olive oil (another Jewish import trade) in which they were cooked and served cold – a corrective, the physicians said, to the black bile that would come on the humid summers.

This passage is vintage Schama: lush in evocative detail, a veritable word picture, but also self-indulgently overwritten. The passage goes on for another page and a half before we learn the identity of this Jewish confectioner, Don Joseph Nasi, a refugee from the Iberian Peninsula, who became one of the richest and most powerful men (and certainly the richest and most powerful Jew) in the Ottoman Empire.

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Paul Lewis at The Guardian:

Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.

Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

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Ed Yong in The Huffington Post:

Heather Murphy in The New York Times:

by Jalees Rehman

A friend who was invited to serve as a visiting professor at a German university recently contacted me and asked whether staying in Germany would be safe for him and his family. His concern was prompted by the September 2017 election of the federal German parliament in which the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, translated as "Alternative for Germany") party received approximately 13% of the popular vote. AfD had campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim platform, and has been referred to by various media outlets as a nationalist, racist, far-right populist, right wing extremist or even Neo-Nazi party. For the first time in history since World War 2, a far-right or nationalist party would be sitting in the federal German parliament by crossing the 5% minimum threshold designed to keep out fringe political movements. Even though all other political parties had categorically ruled out forming a government coalition with the AfD, thus relegating it to an opposition role in parliament with only a limited role in policy-making, my friend was concerned that its success could be indicative of rising neo-Nazism and hatred towards immigrants or Muslims. As a Muslim and visibly South Asian, he and his family could be prime targets for right-wing hatred.

I was flabbergasted by his concern. What surprised me most was that someone living in the US would be worried about safety and racial prejudice in Germany. Violent crime rates in major German cities are much lower than those of their US counterparts. While it is true that AfD garnered 13% of the popular vote in Germany, the US president who also ran on a similar populist, nationalist and anti-immigrant platform (with promises of building walls and enacting Muslim bans) received 46% of the popular vote! Many of the views of the AfD – for example the claims that traditional Islam is not compatible with Western European culture and the constitution, that immigrants and refugees represent a major threat to the economy and safety or that multiculturalism and progressive-liberal views have betrayed the ideals of the country's heritage – are increasingly becoming mainstream views of the ruling Republican party in the US. White supremacists, supporters of confederate ideology and neo-Nazis now feel emboldened to hold rallies in the US, knowing that they might only receive lukewarm or relativistic criticism from the US government whereas such acts would be unequivocally condemned by the German government. Racial or religious prejudices held by members of the government and the ruling party can lead to severe institutional reprisals against individuals. When these views are held by a minority party, there is much less danger of immediate institutionalized discrimination and persecution by the government or law enforcement.

So why is it that the 13% vote for AfD is causing such concern, both in Germany and outside of Germany?

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by Jonathan Kujawa

This summer Kevin Knudson and Evelyn Lamb started a podcast called "My Favorite Theorem". In it, they interview a mathematician and get them to geek out about their favorite mathematical result. Like "The Best Thing I Ever Ate" on the Food Network, but with less butter and more math.

This month here at 3QD I thought I'd share my favorite theorem. There are lots of amazing math results I get to work with every day in my teaching and research, but there is one which warms my heart above all others: the Intermediate Value Theorem (IVT) from calculus. As we'll see, it's easy to grasp, has remarkable and surprising implications even in the real world, and foreshadows some really cool results from elsewhere in math.

The IVT tells us about continuous functions. A function, you'll recall, is a rule which takes in one (or more) input numbers and spits out one (or more) output numbers. A first example is f(x)=x²+1. It takes in a single number and squares it and then adds 1. The result is the output. If you plug in 2 you get out 5, and if you plug in 4 you get out 17. If you plot all the pairs of inputs and outputs as x's and y's, you get the graph of your function.

Functions are ubiquitous. Every time you have a cause and an effect, there is a function in the background. The input could be the pressure exerted on a car's gas pedal, the output the velocity of the car. The input could be the income a person earned, the output the tax they owe. The input could be the surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico along the path of a hurricane, the output the severity of the hurricane. The input could be the ambient temperature, the output the growth rate of a colony of bacteria. The list goes on and on.

A continuous function is a function in which the outputs are close together whenever the inputs are sufficiently close together. Said differently, there are no sudden jumps, breaks, or dramatic changes in outputs as you change from one input to another. Many, many, many functions in real life are continuous. If you press down slightly on a gas pedal, the car doesn't jump into warp speed, it slowly accelerates. If you slowly travel across the Gulf, the surface temperature also slowly changes. Same with the population of a bacteria if you slowly vary the temperature.

Of course, not everything varies in a continuous way. Taxes are usually done in whole dollars (at least in the US) and there are various tax brackets and other rules which come into play. You could earn a penny more and suddenly owe an entire dollar more in tax. The prices of stocks on Wall Street are even more dramatically non-continuous. If bad news about a company is announced, a stock can drop by a huge amount from one moment to the next. Even in the natural world you can have non-continuous phenomena at the extremes. A sudden phase change in a material as it is slowly warmed, or crossing the event horizon of a black hole.

But almost every function you see in everyday life is continuous. Even though it is so simple as to be ridiculous, the IVT tells us remarkable things about continuous functions.

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by Daniel Ranard

Last week's Nobel prize in physics was awarded for the observation of gravitational waves, the famous ripples in spacetime. You can read about these waves first predicted by Einstein, but I want to talk about a more basic idea: that of spacetime itself. Why do physicists insist on "spacetime"—why can't we content ourselves with just space and time?

Many thinkers before Einstein pondered the connection between time and space. Medieval timeline makers must have understood the analogy between points and lengths of space, on the one hand, and instants and durations of time, on the other. It's an analogy rendered physical by the timeline itself. Still earlier, sundials mapped temporal durations to spatial intervals. In Edgar Allen Poe's book-length "Eureka: A Prose Poem," he concludes that "Space and Duration are one." But contrary to Poe, modern physicists do not contend space and time have an identical character. Indeed, the differences would appear obvious: for instance, we always move forward in time, while in space we may remain still.

Though spatial and temporal directions may differ, Einstein and his contemporaries realized they must be considered together, part of a geometrical whole. In one limited sense, space and time had already been considered together for centuries. A graphical timeline emphasizes time as a dimension; if you add a dimension of space to your timeline, you create the spacetime arena. More quantitatively, if you make a graph of an object's position over time, then the background of the graph – the two-dimensional plane, with axes of both space and time – suggests a notion of spacetime. Such graphs predate even Descartes, who's most often credited with the invention of Cartesian coordinates; Oresme and others drew similar figures long before.

Modern illustrations of spacetime take the same form: the Cartesian plane, with axes of time and space. But the modern marriage of space and time entails far more than just a nailing together of the axes. Though many thinkers drew time and space together, it was the insights of Einstein in 1905 that bound them inextricably. In fact, it was Einstein's old teacher, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who most clearly cast Einstein's results in the language of spacetime.

Minkowski began his 1908 lecture Space and Time by declaring that "Henceforth, space for itself, and time for itself shall completely reduce to a mere shadow, and only some sort of union of the two shall preserve independence." What could that mean? We often label the three axes of space as x,y,z, measuring width, height, and depth, while t labels time. The four dimensions of x, y, z, and t together constitute spacetime. Why put them together? That is, why does their union constitute a four-dimensional arena whose components demand joint consideration?

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by Claire Chambers

On 19 October I am presenting at a York Explore Library event entitled Refugees, Asylum and Women's Human Trafficking in Fiction. While preparing for the talk I was reminded that in November 2013, three women aged between 30 and 69 were rescued from a house in Lambeth in south London where they had lived as modern-day slaves since 1983. The youngest woman had been born into slavery. All of them were brainwashed by, and under the control of, the girl's father Aravindan Balakrishnan, an Indian from Singapore, who had founded the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought in Brixton during the 1970s. This left-wing organization quickly became a quasi-religious cult. Its leader and figurehead Balakrishnan forbade his women members to leave the premises on their own, submitting several of them to grave physical and sexual abuse.

As I understand it, in their forthcoming book Child Migration, law experts Kathryn Cronin and Jemma Dally will challenge the current global legislation around refugees. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees led to authorities in countries across the world working to deny refugees entry, because once displaced people come under their jurisdiction they become their responsibility. Essentially, this means that the entry system is closed to anyone who is poor. If a refugee can afford convincing forged papers, she can get on a plane. If not, she can only turn to the criminal network of smugglers and agents. The Convention has spawned an irregular type of travel almost completely dominated by a criminal network: an alternative economy of forgers, lorry drivers, agents, an elaborate infrastructure and various specialisms. As authorities get wind of one trafficking route, it alters its course, in a game of cat and mouse. Also commonplace is the enormous amount of debt bondage that exists within this system.

Cronin and Dally show that more children than ever before are refugees. These minors find themselves detained at various points along their journey, and are compelled to engage in exploitative labour relations as their families back home run out of the money intended to help them move inexorably towards Europe. Yet lawyers merely interrogate the child migrant's age and the reasons for his asylum claim — a test which he is set up to fail. Rarely is the child asked about his background and his leave-taking from his family, which is an enormously significant and gut-wrenching moment. Few child migrants have any knowledge of their destination or the army of officials they will meet there, instead being told vaguely that they're going somewhere safe.

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