Trevor Nace in Forbes:

Scientists have long known about the anomalous "warming hole" in the North Atlantic Ocean, an area immune to warming of Earth's oceans. This cool zone in the North Atlantic Ocean appears to be associated with a slowdown in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), one of the key drivers in global ocean circulation.

A recent study published in Nature outlines research by a team of Yale University and University of Southhampton scientists. The team found evidence that Arctic ice loss is potentially negatively impacting the planet's largest ocean circulation system. While scientists do have some analogs as to how this may impact the world, we will be largely in uncharted territory.

AMOC is one of the largest current systems in the Atlantic Ocean and the world. Generally speaking, it transports warm and salty water northward from the tropics to South and East of Greenland. This warm water cools to ambient water temperature then sinks as it is saltier and thus denser than the relatively more fresh surrounding water. The dense mass of water sinks to the base of the North Atlantic Ocean and is pushed south along the abyss of the Atlantic Ocean.

This process whereby water is transported into the Northern Atlantic Ocean acts to distribute ocean water globally. What's more important, and the basis for concern of many scientists is this mechanism is one of the most efficient ways Earth transports heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes. The warm water transported from the tropics to the North Atlantic releases heat to the atmosphere, playing a key role in warming of western Europe. You likely have heard of one of the more popular components of the AMOC, the Gulf Stream which brings warm tropical water to the western coasts of Europe.

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Seamus O'Mahony at the Dublin Review of Books:

Empathy is the latest target of this neo-phrenology. As well as the obligatory fMRI-based neuroanatomy, all contemporary meditations on empathy contain earnest accounts of mirror neurons, described as “the most hyped concept in neuroscience”. These cells were first described in the 1990s by the Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, who studied macaque monkeys. He found that some motor cells (involved in the control of movement) are activated by the sight of the same movement in others (humans and monkeys). Since then, outlandish claims have been made for these neurons, particularly by the Indian-American neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, who believes these mirror neurons are responsible for empathy, language, even civilisation. A sobering review of mirror neurones written by British neuroscientists JM. Kilner and RN Lemon, published in Current Biology in 2013, concluded that we can’t extrapolate findings from monkey studies to humans, and furthermore, we’re not absolutely sure that these cells exist in humans, and even if they do, we’re not sure what their function is. These doubts haven’t remotely impeded the establishment of the new popular science orthodoxy that mirror neurons are what make us human and empathetic. Neurobollocks has escaped from the laboratory and is now the rickety foundation for popular, and populist, books by writers such as Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell and many others. Writing in the New Statesman in 2012, Stephen Poole described this phenomenon as “an intellectual pestilence”, and observed how putting the prefix “neuro” to whatever you are talking about gives a pseudo-scientific respectability to all sorts of meretricious rubbish.

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James Hyde at the Brooklyn Rail:

In our culture we find “space” everywhere. It is prevalent as a type of background noise in our speech and writing. Space is taught in geometry, physics, architecture, and even in psychology, with terms like “personal space” and “psychological space.” The (often subliminal) purpose of adding space to terms that stand-alone is to make those terms more passive, and to give the term’s user distance from the subject. With the addition of “space” to “psychological,” consider that “psychology” suffices as a term on its own with no inherent need for the addition of space. Combining the terms adds the toughening effect of physics to the softer science of psychology. At the same time, adding space to the monolithic sounding "psychological" makes it warmer and fuzzier. Often the term space is used as an easygoing generality. For example, “narrow gap,” “narrow corridor,” or “narrow room” are all more specific than “narrow space.” With respect to storage, the term “storage space” does little more to describe the location than simply add a syllable. Other than “outer space” or “rental space,” the term is employed more often than necessary—more for effect (or affect) than for precision.

I have long held that artists can whip up a complaint for any occasion—it is perhaps the favorite sport of painters, and we gain mysterious comfort from it. Over the last decade I have become increasingly conscious of the vacuity of the term space.

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Sue Hubbard at Artlyst:

I first came across Rachel Whiteread’s work in the early 1990s. It was intelligent, quiet and thoughtful, at odds with the razzmatazz of many of her contemporaries, the other Young British Artists shocking their way into visibility. In contrast, she was casting the inside of wardrobes, dressing tables, and hot water bottles, that looked like the headless torsos of dead babies. Dreamy, ruminative and poetic her work explored how physical objects acted as Proustian catalysts to retrieve what is so often only half remembered, what lurks just below the plimsol line of consciousness. And then there was House, created in 1993 in a small park in the East End of London, which existed for a mere 80 days. A caste of the last surviving end-of-terrace that was about to be demolished, home of Sydney Gale a former docker, which was a direct connection to an older, disappearing way of life. Using the building as a mould, Whiteread imprinted fireplaces, cornices, and cupboards to create a stark mausoleum that ensnared the ghosts of its past inhabitants like flies trapped in amber. That year she was also the first woman to win the Turner Prize and a few years later made Embankment constructed of 14,000 polyethylene cases of cardboard boxes stacked, one on top of the other, that filled the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern and spoke, obliquely, of global warming. And then there was her controversial sculpture commissioned for the Holocaust Memorial 2000, in Vienna.

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Charles Kaiser in The Guardian:

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

What does it really cost to bring a drug to market? The question is central to the debate over rising health care costs and appropriate drug pricing. President Trump campaigned on promises to lower the costs of drugs. But numbers have been hard to come by. For years, the standard figure has been supplied by researchers at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development: $2.7 billion each, in 2017 dollars. Yet a new study looking at 10 cancer medications, among the most expensive of new drugs, has arrived at a much lower figure: a median cost of $757 million per drug. (Half cost less, and half more.) Following approval, the 10 drugs together brought in $67 billion, the researchers also concluded — a more than sevenfold return on investment. Nine out of 10 companies made money, but revenues varied enormously. One drug had not yet earned back its development costs. The study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, relied on company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission to determine research and development costs.

…One striking example was ibrutinib, made by Pharmacyclics. It was approved in 2013 for patients with certain blood cancers who did not respond to conventional therapy. Ibrutinib was the only drug out of four the company was developing to receive F.D.A. approval. The company’s research and development costs for their four drugs were $388 million, the company’s S.E.C. filings indicated. After it was approved, Janssen Biotech acquired the drug for $21 billion. “That is a 50-fold difference between revenue post-approval and cost to develop,” Dr. Prasad said.

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Peter Brannen in The Guardian:

Many of us share some dim apprehension that the world is flying out of control, that the centre cannot hold. Raging wildfires, once-in-1,000-years storms and lethal heatwaves have become fixtures of the evening news – and all this after the planet has warmed by less than 1C above preindustrial temperatures. But here’s where it gets really scary.

If humanity burns through all its fossil fuel reserves, there is the potential to warm the planet by as much as 18C and raise sea levels by hundreds of feet. This is a warming spike of an even greater magnitude than that so far measured for the end-Permian mass extinction. If the worst-case scenarios come to pass, today’s modestly menacing ocean-climate system will seem quaint. Even warming to one-fourth of that amount would create a planet that would have nothing to do with the one on which humans evolved or on which civilisation has been built. The last time it was 4C warmer there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 80 metres higher than it is today.

I met University of New Hampshire paleoclimatologist Matthew Huber at a diner near his campus in Durham, New Hampshire. Huber has spent a sizable portion of his research career studying the hothouse of the early mammals and he thinks that in the coming centuries we might be heading back to the Eocene climate of 50 million years ago, when there were Alaskan palm trees and alligators splashed in the Arctic Circle.

“The modern world will be much more of a killing field,” he said. “Habitat fragmentation today will make it much more difficult to migrate. But if we limit it below 10C of warming, at least you don’t have widespread heat death.”

In 2010, Huber and his co-author, Steven Sherwood, published one of the most ominous science papers in recent memory, An Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress.

“Lizards will be fine, birds will be fine,” Huber said, noting that life has thrived in hotter climates than even the most catastrophic projections for anthropogenic global warming. This is one reason to suspect that the collapse of civilisation might come long before we reach a proper biological mass extinction.

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Nagraj Adve in The Wire:

Experts have voiced their surprise that Hurricane Irma has surfaced so soon after Hurricane Harvey. In fact, Irma is being accompanied by Hurricanes Jose to its east and Katia to its west. Jose, itself close to Category 5, will be the second to hit the Caribbean islands in just a couple of days. It’s made some raise what is increasingly becoming an obvious question: to what extent does global warming have a role to play? To which I would add one voiced less frequently: why should those least responsible for global warming have to constantly face its effects? And what does it bode for the future?

Ocean water temperatures need to cross 26.5º C to depths of 50 metres for tropical cyclones to form. (It’s a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Other favourable conditions are needed, for instance the absence of winds at a higher level that can interfere with hurricane formation.) Over 60% of the extraordinary amount of heat energy trapped by greenhouse gases since 1971 – about 170,000 billion billion joules – has gone into the upper oceans, according to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. It’s a number so bewilderingly large that an easier way of conceptualising it is this: averaged out each year, it equals 40-times the entire annual energy consumption of the US. The consequently warmer upper ocean waters ensure that, when other conditions are right, there’s a greater chance of hurricanes forming and sustaining themselves for a longer duration. Or getting more intense. Or them forming one after the other, as has happened with Irma and Jose.

Another way global warming is implicated has to do with storm surges now pummelling Cuba, followed by the US over the weekend. Swirling hurricane winds pull in massive volumes of sea water. Out in the open sea, those waters are forced downwards into the ocean depths. But once the hurricane approaches land, the shallower seabed means the excess water pulled in by the hurricane has nowhere to go, so it just piles up and overwhelms the shore.

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Michael Grunwald in Politico:

The first Americans to spend much time in South Florida were the U.S. Army men who chased the Seminole Indians around the peninsula in the 1830s. And they hated it. Today, their letters read like Yelp reviews of an arsenic café, denouncing the region as a “hideous,” “loathsome,” “diabolical,” “God-abandoned” mosquito refuge.

“Florida is certainly the poorest country that ever two people quarreled for,” one Army surgeon wrote. “It was the most dreary and pandemonium-like region I ever visited, nothing but barren wastes.” An officer summarized it as “swampy, low, excessively hot, sickly and repulsive in all its features.” The future president Zachary Taylor, who commanded U.S. troops there for two years, groused that he wouldn’t trade a square foot of Michigan or Ohio for a square mile of Florida. The consensus among the soldiers was that the U.S. should just leave the area to the Indians and the mosquitoes; as one general put it, “I could not wish them all a worse place.” Or as one lieutenant complained: “Millions of money has been expended to gain this most barren, swampy, and good-for-nothing peninsula.”

Today, Florida’s southern thumb has been transformed into a subtropical paradise for millions of residents and tourists, a sprawling megalopolis dangling into the Gulf Stream that could sustain hundreds of billions of dollars in damage if Hurricane Irma makes a direct hit. So it’s easy to forget that South Florida was once America’s last frontier, generally dismissed as an uninhabitable and undesirable wasteland, almost completely unsettled well after the West was won. “How far, far out of the world it seems,” Iza Hardy wrote in an 1887 book called Oranges and Alligators: Sketches of South Florida. And Hardy ventured only as far south as Orlando, which is actually central Florida, nearly 250 miles north of Miami. Back then, only about 300 hardy pioneers lived in modern-day South Florida. Miami wasn’t even incorporated as a city until 1896. And even then an early visitor declared that if he owned Miami and hell, he would rent out Miami and live in hell.

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Julia Felsenthal in Vogue:

Enter the New York City art gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co. sometime between today and October 14, and you will encounter a world just as chaotic and dark and discombobulating as the one in which we live. That Chelsea space is where the Brooklyn artist Kara Walker—she of the massive and massively celebrated 2014 Domino Sugar factory installation—has mounted her latest work.

Walker’s subject matter is, and always has been, racism and misogyny and the way that America’s original sin of slavery continues to rot our country from the inside out. Her work, long before we elected a black president, long before we elected a white president single-mindedly intent on erasing the legacy of our black president, has served as an active, pointed rebuke to notions of a post-racial United States. First there were her silhouetted cutouts that packaged the nightmarish violence of everyday antebellum life in a jaunty, reductive, old-timey visual vernacular. That work, cunning and disturbing, won Walker a MacArthur “Genius” grant at the tender age of 27. Her installation several years ago at Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar factory, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, took things one step further. Her gigantic, glowing-white, Aunt Jemima-esque sugar sphinx, surrounded by shoe-polish brown sugar worker boys, relocated the slave trade to its natural terminus: a plant in the most metropolitan of northern cities, where supply met demand, where the fruits of slave labor were processed for the sweet-toothed (though not particularly sweet-hearted) American people.

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Matthew Schmalz in Salon:

Seeing the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, conservative Christian pastor John McTernan argued recently that “God is systematically destroying America” out of anger over “the homosexual agenda.” There were others who disagreed over the reasons for God’s anger, but not necessarily with the assumption that God can be wrathful. Ann Coulter, a conservative political commentator, for example, said jokingly that Houston’s election of a lesbian mayor was a more “credible” cause of the hurricane than global warming. And, from the other side of the political spectrum, a Tampa University professor tweeted that God had punished Texans for voting Republican. He subsequently expressed regret, but was fired. It is true that many religious traditions, including Judaism and Christianity, have seen natural disasters as divine punishment. But, as a scholar of religion, I would argue that things aren’t that simple.

…The question of God’s anger is intimately connected to the problem of human suffering. After all, how can a loving God cause indiscriminate human misery? We first need to look at how suffering is portrayed in the texts. For example, it is also in the Book of Isaiah that we find the story of the “Man of Sorrows” – a man who takes on the sufferings of others and is an image of piety. While the Bible does speak of humans suffering because of their sins, some of the most moving passages speak about how innocent people suffer as well. The Book of Job relates the story of a “blameless and upright man,” Job, whom Satan causes to experience all sorts of calamities. The suffering becomes so intense that Job wishes he had never been born. God then speaks from the heavens and explains to Job that God’s ways surpass human understanding. The Hebrew Bible recognizes that people suffer often through no fault of their own. Most famously, Psalm 42 is an extended lament about suffering that nonetheless concludes by praising God. The Hebrew Bible’s views on suffering cannot be encapsulated by a single message. Sometimes suffering is caused by God, sometimes by Satan and sometimes by other human beings. But sometimes the purpose behind suffering remains hidden.

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John Bew in New Statesman:

In the last two decades of the 19th century, a new word began to appear in the writings of biologists and zoologists across Europe, inspired by the work of Charles Darwin. “Degeneration” referred to a subset of the evolutionary story by which a species or subspecies began to lose ground in the evolutionary game. In his 1880 work Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, the zoologist E Ray Lankester described the phenomenon as “a loss of organisation making the descendant far simpler or lower in structure than its ancestor”. For social scientists and political commentators, the implications for societies and nations of such findings were arresting. In Britain, discussions about degeneration quickly became entangled with fears of national decline. The world’s greatest empire was losing ground in the race with its rivals but was also suffering the effects of chronic complaints in its collective health: the consequence of more than a century of explosive industrialisation and chaotic urbanisation. In 1888, the Lancet, the foremost journal of British medicine, announced that degeneration was “undoubtedly at work among town-bred populations”, due to “unwholesome occupations, improper [diet] and juvenile vice”. While the process could be reversible, it was no longer possible “to ignore the existence of widespread evils and serious dangers to the public health”.

The story of the British state’s approach to poverty and welfare is not one of simple progress towards more benevolence and enlightened policy, but it does have some crowning glories. The watershed moment remains the publication in 1942 of William Beveridge’s white paper Social Insurance and Allied Services, which declared war on the five “giant evils”: “want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness”. Surprisingly for a government publication, it sold half a million copies, and abbreviated versions were dropped behind enemy lines as a declaration of intent – a domestic version of the Atlantic Charter – indicating the type of nation that Britain aspired to be at the end of the war.

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Jordana Cepelewicz interviews Nigel Goldenfeld in Quanta:

Physics has an underlying conceptual framework, while biology does not. Are you trying to get at a universal theory of biology?

God, no. There’s no unified theory of biology. Evolution is the nearest thing you’re going to get to that. Biology is a product of evolution; there aren’t exceptions to the fact that life and its diversity came from evolution. You really have to understand evolution as a process to understand biology.

So how can collective effects in physics inform our understanding of evolution?

When you think about evolution, you typically tend to think about population genetics, the frequency of genes in a population. But if you look to the Last Universal Common Ancestor — the organism ancestral to all others, which we can trace through phylogenetics [the study of evolutionary relationships] — that’s not the beginning of life. There was definitely simpler life before that — life that didn’t even have genes, when there were no species. So we know that evolution is a much broader phenomenon than just population genetics.

The Last Universal Common Ancestor is dated to be about 3.8 billion years ago. The earth is 4.6 billion years old. Life went from zero to essentially the complexity of the modern cell in less than a billion years. In fact, probably a lot less: Since then, relatively little has happened in terms of the evolution of cellular architecture. So evolution was slow for the last 3.5 billion years, but very fast initially. Why did life evolve so fast?

[The late biophysicist] Carl Woese and I felt that it was because it evolved in a different way. The way life evolves in the present era is through vertical descent: You give your genes to your children, they give their genes to your grandchildren, and so on. Horizontal gene transfer gives genes to an organism that’s not related to you. It happens today in bacteria and other organisms, with genes that aren’t really so essential to the structure of the cell. Genes that give you resistance to antibiotics, for example — that’s why bacteria evolve defenses against drugs so quickly. But in the earlier phase of life, even the core machinery of the cell was transmitted horizontally. Life early on would have been a collective state, more of a community held together by gene exchange than simply the sum of a collection of individuals.

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Stefan Wagstyl in the FT:

Gelsenkirchen stands at one extreme of the German economic scale, far removed from the rich metropolises of Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich, and the hundreds of successful small industrial towns that form the country’s economic backbone.

As in many other poorer towns, the problems are not immediately obvious: with the help of central government funds, Gelsenkirchen has developed a modern pedestrianised shopping centre, a renowned concert hall and a world-class football stadium for Schalke 04, a leading Bundesliga side.

The residents walking about on a recent sunny day would not have looked out of place in a smart resort, in their designer T-shirts, jeans and trainers. As Annette Berg, the head of social services in the city, says: “Can you see poverty in Gelsenkirchen? No. Because [social security in Germany] isn’t so low that people look poor on the streets. They make sure their children dress well. But, without jobs, they cannot afford to do anything nice.”

Plenty of Doris’ neighbours in Gelsenkirchen are in the same rickety boat. Ravaged by the decline of coal, which once made it rich, the town ranks among Germany’s poorest. The unemployment rate last year was 14.7 per cent, the highest for any large town or city, and far above the 5.5 per cent national average. Household incomes are among the lowest, as are health standards, even among young children.

Such sentiments are now starting to drive political debate in Germany. Marcel Fratzscher, head of the DIW economic think-tank who has advised the SPD, says: “The economy is doing well. The big concern is about people who are being left behind.”

Ms Merkel’s conservative supporters have long disagreed: they have seen a need to assist particular disadvantaged groups, such as impoverished pensioners or the long-term unemployed, but no overall inequality problem.

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Episodes from the TV show Ethics Matters are online. "Dr. Dan Halliday talks with the philosophers, and helps place their ideas in a real world context. All episodes are 12 minutes long."

EPISODE 1 – CONSEQUENCES

Interviewees Peter Singer and Caroline West explore consequentialism and ask would you, could you, kill to save others?

EPISODE 2 – MY RIGHTS

Interviewees John Tasioulas, Christian Barry and Peter Singer unpack the rights of an individual and explore intended and unintended consequences.

EPISODE 3 – OUR SOCIETY

Interviewees Liz Anderson and John Thrasher examine how society should be organised and wrestle with conflicting libertarian and egalitarian points of view.

EPISODE 4 – FREE EXPRESSION

Interviewees Robert Simpson and Caroline West explore the nature of free speech and the role of censorship.

EPISODE 5 – SHAPING OUR BODIES

Interviewees Julian Savulescu and Serene Khader discuss the effect of social assumptions on how we view our bodies, and the science we use to change them. [and more]

More here. Here, you can find a discussion on Ethical Consumption with Christian Barry.