Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

A blood draw is one the most mundane clinical tests. It can also be a Rosetta stone for decoding genetic information and linking DNA typos to health and disease. This week, three studies in Nature focused on the watery component of blood—called plasma—as a translator between genes and bodily functions. Devoid of blood cells, plasma is yellowish in color and packs thousands of proteins that swirl through the bloodstream. Plasma proteins trigger a myriad of biological processes: they tweak immune responses, alter metabolism, and even spur—or hinder—new connections in the brain.

They’re also a bridge between our genetics and health.

Ever since first mapping the human genome, scientists have tried to link genetic typos to health and disease. It’s a tough problem. Some of our most troubling health concerns—cancer, heart and vascular disease, and dementia and other brain disorders—are influenced by multiple genes working in concert. Diet, exercise, and other lifestyle factors muddle gene-to-body connections. The new studies tapped into the UK Biobank, a comprehensive database containing plasma samples from over 500,000 people alongside their health and genetic data. The research found multiple protein “signatures” in plasma that mapped onto specific parts of the genetic code—for example, rare DNA letter edits that were previously hard to capture. Digging deeper, several plasma protein signatures reflected genetic changes that linked to fatty liver disease. Other associations between gene and plasma predicted blood type, gut health, and other physical traits.

More here.

Alissa Wilkinson in Vox:

The short film is a neglected form of American entertainment, prevalent — you can find them most anywhere, and pretty much every filmmaker has made a few — and yet barely watched or talked about. That’s strange, when you think about it. We talk about movies (by which we mean features), and we talk about TV. Paramount recently uploaded all of Mean Girls to TikTok, in 23 separate clips, and the platform’s subscriptions spiked. Short films, however, dwell in a liminal space between movies and TV, and they simply don’t get the same respect and interest. Even anthology shows like Black Mirror, which might be described as a collection of short films, are designed to generate meaning through their juxtaposition. I know the stand-alone short film is still a rarity on my entertainment menu, and I suspect I am not alone.

In a sense that may be because nobody really knows what a short film … is. According to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences — the group that gives out the Oscars, including three for short films (animated, live action, and documentary) — a short film runs a maximum of 40 minutes, including credits. That’s about the length of a network TV drama episode, once you strip out the commercials, but a short film nominee could be, in theory, the length of an Instagram Reel. A feature-length film, according to the Academy, is anything over 40 minutes. But that has little to do with the length attributed to most movies. (When was the last time you went to the theater for a movie that was, say, 61 minutes long?) It’s vanishingly rare for any feature film to be less than around 82 minutes.

More here.

Richard Hughes Gibson in The Hedgehog Review:

In 1946 a short-lived British literary journal named Gangrel—a Scots word meaning “tramp” or “vagrant”—announced an upcoming issue in which leading writers would address the theme of “Why I Write.” Multiple contributors then dropped out or changed topics, and even the pieces that came in were not entirely in line with the editors’ stated interest in writing as a “vocational task.” The issue would be Gangrel’s last. Yet one submission, George Orwell’s, would endure, giving the editors’ assigned title an unanticipated afterlife in numerous subsequent writers’ testimonies. (“Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell,” Joan Didion observes at the beginning of her 1976 essay, “Why I Write.”)

Orwell’s essay is so memorable because he did not do as he was asked.

More here.

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:

Imagine a nanocrystal so minuscule that it behaves like an atom. Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering a category of such minute marvels, now known as quantum dots, and for developing a precise method of synthesizing them. Quantum dots are already playing important roles in electronics and in biomedicine, such as in drug delivery, imaging and medical diagnoses, and have more promising applications in the future, the Nobel Committee for Chemistry said in its announcement of the prize.

Quantum dots, sometimes called artificial atoms, are precise nanocrystals made of silicon and other semiconductor materials that are just a few nanometers wide — small enough to exhibit quantum properties just as individual atoms do, although they are a hundred to a few thousand atoms in size.

More here.

Robert Mariani in The New Atlantis:

Dread gives way to the cold stab of terrible certainty as it hits you: they aren’t people. They’re bots. The Internet is all bots. Under your nose, the Internet of real people has gradually shifted into a digital world of shadow puppets. They look like people, they act like people, but there are no people left. Well, there’s you and maybe a few others, but you can’t tell the difference, because the bots wear a million masks. You might be alone, and have been for a while. It’s a horror worse than blindness: the certainty that your vision is clear but there is no genuine world to be seen.

This is the world of the Internet after about 2016 — at least according to the Dead Internet Theory, whose defining description appeared in an online forum in 2021. The theory suggests a conspiracy to gaslight the entire world by replacing the user-powered Internet with an empty, AI-powered one populated by bot impostors.

More here.

William Arkin in Newsweek:

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump‘s army of MAGA followers. The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations—even though the vast majority of its current “anti-government” investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.

“The FBI is in an almost impossible position,” says a current FBI official, who requested anonymity to discuss highly sensitive internal matters. The official said that the FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism and any repeat of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the Bureau must also preserve the Constitutional right of all Americans to campaign, speak freely and protest the government. By focusing on former president Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters, the official said, the Bureau runs the risk of provoking the very anti-government activists that the terrorism agencies hope to counter.

Avi Shafran in Tablet:

Maggie Doherty in The Yale Review:

NEARLY ALL REVOLUTIONS start with a meeting. When a group of female journalists gathered at Gloria Steinem’s uptown Manhattan apartment in the winter of 1971, they were facing a common problem: none of them could get “real sto­ries about women published.” The male editors of the major wom­en’s magazines—called the “seven sisters,” like the colleges—would not accept pitches that did anything other than advise readers to be better, happier, more productive housewives and mothers. General-interest publications, also edited by men, were no better: accord­ing to Steinem, her editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine rejected all her pitches for political stories, saying “something like, don’t think of you that way.’” Fed up and fired up, the journalists decided to start their own publication. But what kind of publica­tion would they create, and for what kind of reader? Steinem pro­posed a newsletter, the kind of low-budget, low-circulation flyer that many feminist groups in New York City favored. But the law­yer and activist Brenda Feigen suggested something different: “We should do a slick magazine,” something colorful and glossy that could be sold on newsstands nationwide.

Not everyone was keen on the idea. As Vivian Gornick recalled forty years later, “Radical feminists like me, Ellen Willis, and Jill Johnston…had a different kind of magazine in mind,” one that might argue against the institutions of marriage and motherhood. When it became clear that Steinem and others “wanted a glossy that would appeal to the women who read the Ladies’ Home Journal,” Gornick and her radical sisters bowed out. But others hoped that a glossy magazine might strengthen the feminist movement. Letty Cottin Pogrebin thought a slick magazine could be “a stealth strat­egy to ‘normalize’ or ‘mainstream’ our message.” As a riposte to The New York Times, which until 1986 refused to refer to a woman by anything other than “Mrs.” or “Miss,” they decided to call their magazine Ms.

More here.

Philip Ball in Nature:

The 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences — the ‘economics Nobel’ — has been awarded to economic historian Claudia Goldin at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”. Goldin’s work has helped to explain why women have been under-represented in the labour market for at least the past two centuries, and why even today they continue to earn less than men on average (by around 13%).

Although such inequalities are widely recognized, they present a puzzle for economic models because they represent not just a potential injustice, but also what economists call a market inefficiency. Women seem to be both under-utilized and under-incentivized in the labour force, even though those in high-income countries typically now have a higher educational level than do men. Goldin brought history to bear on this question through rigorous forensic analysis of how changes in women’s participation in the labour force have been influenced by social, political and technological change over the past two centuries. “The strength of her work comes from combining careful and innovative historical data with insights from economic theories of wage determination, employment, discrimination and the political economy,” says economist Claudia Olivetti at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

More here.

Moonlight

The seasons they are turning
And my sad heart is yearning
To hear again the songbird’s sweet melodious tone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

The dusky light the day is losing
Orchids, poppies, black eyed Susan
The earth and sky that melts with flesh and bone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

The air is thick and heavy
All along the levee
Where the geese into the countryside have flown
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

Well, I’m preaching peace and harmony
The blessings of tranquility
Yet I know when the time is right to strike
I take you ‘cross the river, dear
You’ve no need to linger here
I know the kinds of things you like

The clouds are turning crimson
The leaves fall from the limbs
The branches cast their shadows over stone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

The boulevards of cypress trees
The masquerade of birds and bees
The petals pink and white, the wind has blown
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

Now trailing moss in mystic glow
The purple blossom soft as snow
My tears keep flowing to the sea
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, it takes a thief to catch a thief
For whom does the bell toll for, love?
It tolls for you and me

Old pulse’s running through my palm
The sharp hills are rising from
Yellow fields with twisted oaks that grow
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

Bob Dylan
from Love and Theft
album, 2001

Geneva Abdul in The Guardian:

Jhumpa Lahiri, 56, is the author and translator of three story collections, including the Pulitzer prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies, and three novels, The Namesake, The Lowland and Whereabouts. Whereabouts was her first novel written in Italian (Dove mi trovo), which she then translated into English. Her work also includes a volume of essays, Translating Myself and Others.

Born in London to Indian immigrants and raised in the US, Lahiri speaks – as well as Bengali, English and Italian – “some French and Spanish and I am learning modern Greek. I also read Latin and ancient Greek.” She is the translator of three novels by the Italian writer Domenico Starnone, and is co-translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Latin to English – a text “sacred” to Lahiri, and a project she describes as the most meaningful of her life. Her latest collection, Roman Stories, is translated from the Italian Racconti romani by the author and Todd Portnowitz.

More here.

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the ability to illuminate reality on almost inconceivably brief timescales.

Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, the three physicists developed techniques for producing laser pulses lasting mere attoseconds — periods billions of billions of times briefer than a second. When viewed in such short flashes, the world slows down. The beat of a hummingbird’s wings becomes an eternity. Even the incessant buzzing of atoms becomes sluggish. On the attosecond timescale, physicists can directly detect the motion of electrons themselves as they flit around atoms, skipping from place to place.

More here.

David Introcaso & Eric Reinhart at Undark:

HEALTH CARE IN THE UNITED STATES — the largest industry in the world’s largest economy — is notoriously cost inefficient, consuming substantially more money per capita to deliver far inferior outcomes relative to peer nations. What is less widely recognized is that the health care industry is also remarkably energy inefficient. In an era of tightening connections between environmental destruction and disease, this widely neglected reality is a major cause behind many of the sicknesses our hospitals treat and the poor health outcomes they oversee.

The average energy intensity of U.S. hospitals is more than twice that of European hospitals, with no comparable quality advantage. In recent years, less than 2 percent of hospitals were certified as energy efficient by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, and only 0.6 percent, or 37 in total, have been certified for 2023. As a result, in 2018, the U.S. health care industry emitted approximately 610 million tons of greenhouse gases, or GHGs — the equivalent of burning 619 billion pounds of coal. This represented 8.5 percent of U.S. GHG emissions that year, and about 25 percent of global health care emissions.

If U.S. health care were its own country, it would rank 11th worldwide in GHG pollution.

More here.

Melvin Rogers in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Debates about the representation of African Americans circulated throughout the 1920s—what kinds of depictions should be encouraged, who should be responsible for them, and what role black artists had in responding to negative descriptions and uplifting the race. These themes served as the subject of W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1926 symposium, “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?” hosted in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Even a cursory glance at the responses to Du Bois’ question reveals that few believed African Americans were duty bound to direct their art to the cause of social justice. The unencumbered freedom of the artist, many argued, was far too important. As playwright and novelist Heyward DuBose argues, who himself was not an African American, black people must be “treated artistically. It destroys itself as soon as it is made a vehicle for propaganda. If it carries a moral or a lesson, they should be subordinated to the artistic aim.”

Du Bois’ essay “Criteria of Negro Art” is his answer to the symposium that he organized. But whereas most read this essay as the dividing line (and there is some truth in this) between Du Bois and many in the Harlem Renaissance, especially the writer and philosopher Alain Locke, the essay suggests closer proximity between these two figures. They each were seeking to avoid black artists needing to manage the unacceptable demands of what Langston Hughes called the “undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding” from black people and “unintentional bribes from whites.”

More here.

Olivia Waxman in Time Magazine:

As Jimmy Carter, America’s longest-living president, turns 99 on Oct. 1, his grandson shares what he believes is the secret to his grandfather’s long life: exercise. “If he got to a new city that he had never been to before, whether there was Secret Service or not, he would say, ‘Hey, is there a bike?’” Jason Carter, a lawyer and former Georgia state senator, told TIME in a video chat on Sept. 28. He says his grandfather would always make time to jog around places he visited, and when he couldn’t jog anymore as he got older, he switched to riding a bike. Jimmy Carter also used to play tennis every day. “Stay active,” Jason says.

Jason jokes that the one sport that the 39th U.S. President and Nobel Peace Prize winner didn’t excel at was fishing, recalling a time when they were fishing for grouper and his grandfather couldn’t catch any fish. He made his grandson switch sides with him on the boat to see if that would change his luck. But while Jason Carter attributes his grandfather’s longevity to an active lifestyle, he believes Jimmy Carter might have a different answer. Jason thinks that his grandfather would say that the secret to his long life is his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter. In 2015, the former President said, “The best thing I ever did was marry Rosalynn. That’s the pinnacle of my life.”

More here.

Will Sullivan in Smithsonian:

A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee met last week to discuss human trials of artificial wombs, which could one day be used to keep extremely premature, or preterm, infants alive. Artificial wombs have been tested with animals, but never in human clinical trials. The FDA has not approved the technology yet, but the advisory panel discussed the available science, as well as the clinical risks, benefits and ethical considerations of testing artificial wombs with humans.

“It’s a new treatment modality,” Matthew Kemp, an obstetrician at the National University of Singapore, tells Nature News’ Max Kozlov. “The bottom line is they’ve got to make a really strong case that it’s better and safer in the short and long term” compared to current treatments. In 2020, an estimated 13.4 million babies worldwide were born prematurely—or before 37 weeks of pregnancy—making up more than 10 percent of all births. Preterm birth is the leading cause of death for children under five years of age, according to the World Health Organization.

More here.

Pamela Paul in The New York Times:

One night in 1981, in the middle of bath time, Marty Gonzalez noticed a strange glow that seemed to emanate from inside one of the eyes of her 9-month-old daughter, Marissa. “It was really bizarre,” Gonzalez recalls. “It looked like a cat’s eye — like I could see all the way through.” Though Marissa’s pediatrician in Long Beach, Calif., assured Gonzalez it was nothing, she sought another opinion. While teaching her sixth-grade class, Gonzalez anxiously awaited news from her mother, who had taken Marissa to see a pediatric ophthalmologist. By lunchtime, with still no word from her mom, Gonzalez called the doctor directly. “I think it’s cancer,” the doctor told her.

Marissa, it turned out, had retinoblastoma, or Rb, a rare but aggressive cancer that almost exclusively affects children. Rb makes up only 3 percent of all pediatric cancer cases, which translates into about 300 children in the United States a year. Marissa had tumors in both eyes and needed immediate treatment: cryotherapy to freeze the malignancies and radiation to destroy them. Two days later, Marissa and her mother were on a flight across the country to see a specialist in retinoblastoma at Columbia University.

More here.

Autumn

Time now, Lord.  Summer was great,
but lay your shadow on the sundials,
free your winds over the open fields.

Bid the late fruit – Be Full. Give them
two more southerly days. Complete them,
make the wine heavy with last sweetness.

The one who has no house now, will
have no house. The one who is alone now,
will remain alone, lie awake, read,
write long letters, or wandering, blow
about the streets like the fallen leaves.

Poem, Herbsttag, by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation:  Nils Peterson