Ingrid Wickelgren in Quanta:
DNA is often compared to a written language. The metaphor leaps out: Like letters of the alphabet, molecules (the nucleotide bases A, T, C and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) are arranged into sequences — words, paragraphs, chapters, perhaps — in every organism, from bacteria to humans. Like a language, they encode information. But humans can’t easily read or interpret these instructions for life. We cannot, at a glance, tell the difference between a DNA sequence that functions in an organism and a random string of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s.
“It’s really hard for humans to understand biological sequence,” said the computer scientist Brian Hie(opens a new tab), who heads the Laboratory of Evolutionary Design at Stanford University, based at the nonprofit Arc Institute(opens a new tab). This was the impetus behind his new invention, named Evo: a genomic large language model (LLM), which he describes as ChatGPT for DNA.
ChatGPT was trained on large volumes of written English text, from which the algorithm learned patterns that let it read and write original sentences. Similarly, Evo was trained(opens a new tab) on large volumes of DNA — 300 billion base pairs from 2.7 million bacterial, archaeal and viral genomes — to glean functional information from stretches of DNA that a user inputs as prompts.
More here.
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Over time, as knowledgeable elders pass away, the original rationale for a taboo might be entirely forgotten. In such cases, the origins of a rule might be recoverable only through inference or imaginative reconstruction. Similarly, many widely recognised superstitions, such as those involving black cats, have historical roots that are scarcely remembered today. In medieval Europe, black cats were associated with witches and seen as omens of evil. Today, the belief that crossing a black cat’s path brings bad luck persists as a cultural remnant, entirely disconnected from its original association with witch trials.
By the turn of the 21st century, however, a renegade group of plant physiologists had had enough. They argued that it was past time to bring existing theories of plant behavior into line with the avalanche of new observations enabled by late 20th-century advances in molecular biology, genomics, ecology and neurophysiology. Perhaps they weren’t reading anyone’s mind, but it sure started to look like plants had (some version of) their own.
According to legend, the ancient Greek poet Philoxenus wished for a throat as long as that of a crane so he could protract the time he spent swallowing. Another formulation of this desire, writes literary critic and historian of ancient Greek literature Pauline LeVen, comes from the third-century BCE poet Machon, who claimed Philoxenus wished “
During the high point of Hollywood’s studio era, when motion pictures made their storied transition from silents to talkies, no studio was more glamorous, more lavish, more star-studded than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (“more stars than there are in heaven” was its apt motto). It boasted such directorial luminaries as King Vidor, Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Ernst Lubitsch; its contract writers included Lenore Coffee, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, and Anita Loos; and its roster of A-listers was seemingly endless—Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Fred Astaire were among its brightest talents.
In the summer of 2023, Oxfam launched an initiative called 
Not since the muzak corporation
A pair of landmark studies, 
Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, none but the most stubborn could deny that the leading cultural institutions in the United States remained under the dominance of the self-styled progressive left. Circa 2019, prominent progressive scholars such as Corey Robin could be found imploring their peers to wake up and to take stock of just how much ground the left had gained. At the same time, astute readers of online discourse were warning of subterranean rumblings from the manosphere — which in fact began much earlier and for some years seemed to be contained within the same virtual space as what was then a gestating proto-wokeism. I can remember as early as 2014 or so, the most perspicacious of my friends telling me I should really be paying attention to Gamergate if I wanted to understand the future of US politics. I did check in briefly, saw that it was all just a bunch of kids fighting over kids’ stuff, and checked right back out again.
Like every episode of “Saturday Night Live” since 1975, Sunday’s three-hour anniversary special was a confusing, celebrity-packed, occasionally funny grab-bag. And we have some thoughts.
U.S. Steel mines iron ore in Minnesota and sends it across Lake Superior on freighters a thousand feet long. At Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, the ships enter the Soo Locks, which provide passage to the lower Great Lakes. Five hundred billion dollars’ worth of ore (and ninety-five per cent of the United States’ supply) annually moves through the locks, which have been managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since 1881. The Minnesota ships travel the long, dangling length of Lake Michigan and dock at its southern tip: Gary, Indiana.