Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:

Moss is an often-overlooked, ancient plant that is far from insignificant. Among the first to colonize land, mosses greened the planet and transformed Earth’s climate, providing an oxygen-rich atmosphere that allowed animals to evolve.¹ These hardy pioneers can even filter and clean the polluted air of cities.^2,3

Where others see a natural air purifier, Ralf Reski, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Freiburg, saw untapped potential in moss. In addition to the range of valuable compounds they produce naturally, Reski believed it made an ideal culture system to grow recombinant human proteins at scale. Reski first worked on moss as an undergraduate, studying their genetics. He immediately fell in love with the tiny plants, so much so that he asked his supervisor if he could continue working on them for a PhD project. From those early days, his peers quickly dismissed the notion, pointing out that mosses didn’t have to do anything with biotechnology. “You will never become a professor in Germany unless you work with real plants. Nobody is interested in mosses,” Reski recalled the caution from senior professors.

But he persisted.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Olga Litvak at The Hedgehog Review:

From the Christian perspective, the hyphen is a sign of Jewish translatability; but the same sign, read, we might say, from right to left, also points to a more confrontational reality, that of Jewish resistance to being translated (elevated) into a (higher) Christian register. The Jewish insistence on reading “the Bible” in Hebrew every week, in synagogue, to congregations whose first language was (and is) probably not the language of the patriarchs but the language of their non-Jewish neighbors, is a performance of otherness. We can see what is at stake in this attachment to the original when we appreciate the difference between reading Hebrew texts in Greek—from right to left—and reading the Bible as a Greek text, from left to right. From the perspective of the former, the Alexandrian translation of ’almah as parthenos provides a Jewish textual source for the Christian myth of the virgin birth. From the perspective of the latter, the same translation turns the Tanakh (a set of texts) into the Bible (a book).

Christian readers who read ’almah as parthenos locate in this translation a proof text for the argument that the Bible constitutes a single narrative with a sad Jewish beginning and a happy Christian ending, a form imitated by countless European and American novels and turned into a near-universal cultural staple by Hollywood; Jewish film moguls propagated it among the gentiles no less zealously than the early Christians who were, of course, all Jews.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Harmony Holiday at Bookforum:

Fish Tales, released this spring in a new edition and still pioneering decades after its first run, slices into the flesh of the novel of ideas with events and characters who loom so large they leave no room for indulgent ideological abstractions; they are busy being sluts and disasters at the exact moment you might expect more recognizable or coherent archetypes to buckle begrudgingly into the routines of adult life and surrender to them for the sake of reputation, supposed stability, or ego. Transgressive to the point of exhilarating, Nettie Jones’s prose avoids etiquette or the impulse to virtue signal: this perspective of a girl molested by her schoolteacher, whose life subsequently becomes so centered on male approval she pretends she’s sexually liberated instead of a victim of circumstance and tragic hero, makes no excuses for the procession of orgies and nervous breakdowns that becomes the novel’s plot. Hedonism grows banal as we’re trapped in bed with the protagonist, her demons, and the doom disguised as suitors, flatterers, and one husband, Woody, who after a brief attempt at real union becomes Lewis’s overseer and benefactor, allowing her to hire prostitutes or travel to New York to meet with lovers while he takes his own new girlfriend. All the while he sustains Lewis, “his favorite woman,” with an allowance and a roof over her head.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Brooks Riley in Art at First Sight:

In the recent K-Drama Our Unwritten Seoul, a simple wooden chair emerges as the iconic stand-in (or sit-in) for a young farmer’s late grandfather, whose favorite chair it had once been. Broken and mended multiple times, patched together with tape, glue, and hastily hammered braces, the chair, on its last legs, gets tossed out by an over-zealous new employee. The young farmer is devastated.

Beyond the obvious metaphor hovering over this minor incident (Age and infirmity are not to be mistaken for worthlessness), the tale rings a bell. How many of us remember a favorite chair, where daydreams were forged, books were read, naps were taken, and the universe doom-scrolled on an app? Or an empty chair at the table as someone’s ghostly absence?

Chairs are fundamental accessories in our lives–dependable, discreet, dotted about our personal periphery like silent sentries—there but not there, part of the family, but also not.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Webb Wright in Quanta:

To generate images, diffusion models use a process known as denoising. They convert an image into digital noise (an incoherent collection of pixels), then reassemble it. It’s like repeatedly putting a painting through a shredder until all you have left is a pile of fine dust, then patching the pieces back together. For years, researchers have wondered: If the models are just reassembling, then how does novelty come into the picture? It’s like reassembling your shredded painting into a completely new work of art.

Now two physicists have made a startling claim: It’s the technical imperfections in the denoising process itself that leads to the creativity of diffusion models. In a paper(opens a new tab) that will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning 2025, the duo developed a mathematical model of trained diffusion models to show that their so-called creativity is in fact a deterministic process — a direct, inevitable consequence of their architecture.

By illuminating the black box of diffusion models, the new research could have big implications for future AI research — and perhaps even for our understanding of human creativity.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Amanda Coakley in The Guardian:

The trouble started with a dead cat. For years, the people of Seibersdorf had lived amicably alongside their most famous resident, more or less. True, there had been an incident when a neighbour complained about the smell of her horses. And yes, there had been rumblings about her lack of community spirit, that she was great at giving orders for neighbourhood events but never pitched in to fry a schnitzel or hang bunting. But for the most part, they got along.

Karin Kneissl was a blow-in from Vienna, an hour north. She had lived in Seibersdorf for more than two decades, moving into a rickety old apartment before buying a house near the central square. She had arrived as a junior diplomat, then became a freelance journalist and later began lecturing on international relations at some of Austria’s most prestigious institutions. For a brief period, she also sat on the town’s parish council.

Then, in 2017, Kneissl became Austria’s foreign minister. It was a sudden appointment and it surprised everyone in town. But when the residents stopped to think about it, it made a certain amount of sense. Kneissl was a true eccentric, the kind of person who was always doing and saying unexpected things. You never quite knew where she would go next, so why not the Austrian foreign ministry?

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Bob Holmes in Knowable Magazine:

After a train carrying chemicals derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023, residents were exposed to carcinogens such as vinyl chloride, acrolein and dioxin. Since tumors are typically slow to develop, it could take decades to know what that did to the locals’ cancer risk, but there may be a quicker route to an answer: The residents’ dogs were also exposed, and dogs develop cancer more quickly.

Studying dogs and their cancers turns out to be an excellent way to learn more about cancer in people. And it’s not just that dogs and owners share exposures to many of the same environmental carcinogens. Researchers are also learning that cancers develop along remarkably similar pathways in the two species.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Vast swathes of the human genome remain a mystery to science. A new AI from Google DeepMind is helping researchers understand how these stretches of DNA impact the activity of other genes. While the Human Genome Project produced a complete map of our DNA, we still know surprisingly little about what most of it does. Roughly 2 percent of the human genome encodes specific proteins, but the purpose of the other 98 percent is much less clear.

Historically, scientists called this part of the genome “junk DNA.” But there’s growing recognition these so-called “non-coding” regions play a critical role in regulating the expression of genes elsewhere in the genome. Teasing out these interactions is a complicated business. But now a new Google DeepMind model called AlphaGenome can take long stretches of DNA and make predictions about how different genetic variants will affect gene expression, as well as a host of other important properties. “We have, for the first time, created a single model that unifies many different challenges that come with understanding the genome,” Pushmeet Kohli, a vice president for research at DeepMind, told MIT Technology Review.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Elizabeth Kostina at Aeon Magazine:

By 1997, Moscow’s skyline was transformed when a vast golden dome, long absent, rose once again over the city. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had returned. The dome-topped structure now standing along the Moskva River is a near-exact replica of the original 19th-century cathedral built to commemorate Russia’s victory over Napoleon in 1812. The cathedral was destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1931, then in 1958 it was replaced with a massive outdoor swimming pool, reusing the abandoned foundation of the Palace of the Soviets. My mother swam in this pool as a child in the early 1980s, basking in its steaming waters while snow fell around her and passersby. The absence of the cathedral above her was a testament to the Soviet state’s ‘ideological triumph’ over the past. Decades later, however, the pool was drained, the land consecrated once more, and the cathedral rebuilt, signalling changing times and ideologies. Today, walking past the cathedral, you’d be hard-pressed to find any mention of its former life as a swimming pool. Yet, as the Russian proverb goes, cвято место пусто не бывает – a sacred space is never empty.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Stephanie Bastek and Jonathan Gould at The American Scholar:

On June 5, 1975, on the seedy stage of CBGB on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a band named Talking Heads took the stage for the first time. Unlike the Ramones, for whom they were opening, they weren’t sporting black leather jackets or edgy haircuts. David Byrne and Chris Frantz had met at art school a few years before, and the bassist, Tina Weymouth, had only learned to play her instrument six months prior. But within a few weeks, Talking Heads would be plastered on the cover of The Village Voice, well on their way to utterly transforming the downtown New York music scene. After Jerry Harrison joined Talking Heads in 1977, the band would go on to radically alter rock music’s relationship to avant-garde art and performance. In his new book, Burning Down the House, Jonathan Gould tells the story of how Talking Heads experimented their way to a singular musical style over the course of eight studio albums and one incredible concert film, Stop Making Sense, and he discusses their enduring influence despite having disbanded more than 30 years ago.

podcast here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Justin Jouvenal in The Washington Post:

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Even Though

A = pi r squared

even if a body
continues to fall
32 feet per second per second

which I hope

it will continue to do
nevertheless
after careful calculation

and by the grace of algebra

I am persuaded that
if truth is a number
not only is it never

in the back of the book

but it never comes out even
ends in a fraction
cannot be rounded off.

Approximation
was the first art.
It is the only science.

by John Stone
from In All This Rain
Louisiana State University Press, 1980

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Sam Dresser at Psyche:

I was intrigued to read about a proposed ‘unified framework’ for capturing how people see relationships. Researchers asked people from 19 world regions to rate the features of various types of relationships, ranging from siblings to leader and follower to fans of opposing sports teams. They found that relationships could be described in terms of five main dimensions:

• • Formality: roughly, how formal and public a relationship is vs informal and private;
  • Activeness: how close and involved vs distant;
  • Valence: how friendly vs hostile;
  • Exchange: how much it involves trading concrete resources like money vs intangible things like affection; and
  • Equality: how equal each person’s power is in the relationship.

While the researchers say this model is ‘far from conclusive’, it does give scientists – and the rest of us – a new lens for considering our relationships and what they mean to us.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.