Fiona MacDonald in Science Alert:

Scientists at Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) in the US have designed a 6.6-metre-wide fusion reactor that they say could provide electricity to around 100,000 people. Even better, it could be up and running within 10 years, according to their calculations.

For decades, scientists have been trying to find a way to harness nuclear fusion – the reaction that powers stars – because of its ability to produce almost-unlimited energy supplies using little more than seawater, and without emitting greenhouse gasses. But despite many promising designs, finding a way to contain and commercialise the reaction on Earth has proven far more challenging than imagined. In fact it's a long-running joke among scientists that practical nuclear fusion power plants are just 30 years away – and always will be.

But not only does the new MIT design promise to be cheaper and smaller than current reactors, it also provides hope that commercial nuclear fusion reactors could become a reality in our lifetime, with the team explaining that similar devices in size and complexity have taken just five years to build.

“Fusion energy is certain to be the most important source of electricity on Earth in the 22nd century, but we need it much sooner than that to avoid catastrophic global warming,” David Kingham, a UK-based nuclear fusion expert who wasn't involved in the research, told David L. Chandler from the MIT news office. “This paper shows a good way to make quicker progress.”

To explain it very simply, nuclear fusion relies on fusing hydrogen atoms together at super-high temperatures to release enormous amounts of energy. This is different to the nuclear fission used in nuclear power plants, which is where scientists split atoms to generate electricity – a process that's less stable and also produces large amounts of nuclear waste.

So why aren't we already using nuclear fusion to generate ridiculous amounts of clean energy?

More here.

Anna Katharina Schaffner at The Times Literary Supplement:

We are, it seems, pre-determined to love the taste of all things sweet. Evolutionary biologists argue that survival once depended on our ability to take in quickly high amounts of nutritional energy, a major source of such energy being found in carbohydrates, which include sugar. As frugivores, we generally prefer our fruit as ripe as possible, its degree of edibility being signalled by sweetness, too. While sweetness signals calories, bitterness in contrast may indicate the presence of toxins. It appears that our predilection for sweetness is, like the incest taboo, a cross-cultural phenomenon, and that it is ubiquitous and, in all likelihood, innate: the facial expressions of new-borns, for example, display unambiguous pleasure when sugar is placed on their tongues. We appear, moreover, to have raided beehives for millennia: there is evidence in Mesolithic cave paintings that feeding on honey has always been part of our primate nature. We share our love of sweetness with most other mammals, the sole exception being felines.

Psychoanalysts would mobilize a different model to explain our affection for candies, cakes and chocolates, pointing to the sweetness of mother’s milk, and to the fact that, colic notwithstanding, this earliest of our encounters with nourishment tends to be firmly aligned with comfort and pleasure. Another core function of the consumption of sweets is thus also to provide solace, by transporting us back into the domain of the oral stage where the sensory responses of the mouth and taste buds reigned supreme. As Proust has shown, madeleines and their equivalents can also be the vehicles of memory, taking us back to childhood.

more here.

Avies Platt at The London Review of Books:

It is impossible, at this space of time, to record all that he said, but his voice, his gesture, his appearance and some of his very words, are indelibly printed on my memory. Looking back, I think now as I thought then, that his greatness lay in his simplicity, that direct simplicity only possessed by the truly great. And this simplicity shone out now in two special ways – in his quietness and dignity. I might even say beauty, in that noisy, ugly room, and in his direct sincerity of speech with me, who was, after all, an unknown stranger. And I was a woman. Do not mistake me; this is no self-deprecation! The point is, and to me it is vital, that I am acutely aware that there are many men with alleged claims to greatness, sex equality creeds, and intimate friendships with women, who, nevertheless, cannot, in their inner being, accept women as fellow humans, and are therefore, in my eyes, completely damned. Some, of course, are better than their creed: what Yeats’s creed was, whether he ever formulated one, I do not know. I do know that he accepted me now as one with himself. Obviously, I am not speaking of personal achievement but of human existence. From the sex point of view, or from any other, as I saw him, there was no trace of patronage in him. Fame had left him unspoilt.

more here.

Andrew Cole at Artforum:

Amid all the excitement about object-oriented philosophy, no one has paused to work out how talk about these new terms for relation is supposed to improve radically on the concept of “relation” in the history of philosophy. The problem is that the original sins of “relation” are not rendered entirely clear in Harman’s and his followers’ writing, apart from glib remarks about poststructuralist relationality, systems theory, and human observation. There’s really no need to overturn the concept of relation in the cursory manner of the object-oriented ontologists, because there’s already plenty in the history of philosophy since Aristotle to instruct us that relation is not always human or correlational, reciprocal, or even fixed or permanent, or anything more than a “moment” of relating that’s always vanishing by dint of becoming and decay. That’s why philosophers in the late Middle Ages commonly distinguished between relationes reales, relations among all entities apart from human perception, and relationes rationis, those relations we’ve reasoned out in our inspection of the world. Kant, for his part, knew that relation is not only aesthetic (what Aristotle derided as the “said-of” of relation; i.e., that relation is what we make of it). Rather, he understood that the problem of relation is exactly the same as the problem of the thing-in-itself: There are relations in the noumenal world, but we cannot think them directly because we have access only to phenomenal relations, the imperfect representations of noumenal relations. The human version of relation, in other words, isn’t the same as noumenal relation, and isn’t the only kind of relation. This idea is all over Kant’s lectures in metaphysics, which none of the object-oriented ontologists seem to know.

more here.

From Kurzweil AI:

Stanford School of Medicine scientists have mapped the 3D atomic structure of a two-part protein complex that controls the release of signaling chemicals, called neurotransmitters, from brain cells in less than one-thousandth of a second. The experiments were reported today (August 17) in the journal Nature. Performed at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the experiments were built on decades of previous research at Stanford University, Stanford School of Medicine, and SLAC. “This is a very important, exciting advance that may open up possibilities for targeting new drugs to control neurotransmitter release,” said Axel Brunger, the study’s principal investigator — a professor at Stanford School of Medicine and SLAC and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Many mental disorders, including depression, schizophrenia and anxiety, affect neurotransmitter systems.” The two protein parts are known as neuronal SNAREs and synaptotagmin-1. “Both parts of this protein complex are essential,” Brunger said, “but until now it was unclear how its two pieces fit and work together.” Earlier X-ray studies, including experiments at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) nearly two decades ago, shed light on the structure of the SNARE complex, a helical protein bundle found in yeasts and mammals. SNAREs play a key role in the brain’s chemical signaling by joining, or “fusing,” little packets of neurotransmitters to the outer edges of neurons, where they are released and then dock with chemical receptors in another neuron to trigger a response.

Explains rapid triggering of brain signaling

In this latest research, the scientists found that when the SNAREs and synaptotagmin-1 join up, they act as an amplifier for a slight increase in calcium concentration, triggering a gunshot-like release of neurotransmitters from one neuron to another. They also learned that the proteins join together before they arrive at a neuron’s membrane, which helps to explain how they trigger brain signaling so rapidly. The team speculates that several of the joined protein complexes may group together and simultaneously interact with the same vesicle to efficiently trigger neurotransmitter release, an exciting area for further studies.

More here.

Raza Rumi in The Friday Times:

As the world moves into a maddening phase of Islam versus the West, Pakistani academic Sadia Abbas presents a layered narrative in her book, At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (Fordham University Press, New York), on the contours of a new, imagined view of “Islam”. In great detail and with crafted nuance, she analyses the complexities of the postcolonial condition of Muslim societies and Muslims, and the myriad modes and facets of anticolonial ambitions. Abbas’s study is unique because it delves into the intricate relationships between Islam, empire and culture, and weaves the story of the current crises that inform the lives of Muslims and their societies, through a literary lens. This study, in effect, presents an alternative discourse to the debates that surround depictions of both “Islamic terror” and “Islamophobia”. At Freedom’s Limit suggests that the complex histories of identity and struggle at the global level are vital to understanding the “new Islam” that has emerged since the early 1990s.

This new representation of “Islam” started to take shape in the late 1980s when Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, invoked violent passions among some Muslims and thereby delineated a marker – between the “civilised” and the “violent”. This was also when the Berlin Wall was demolished (1989) and the first Iraq war (1991) was waged to “liberate” Kuwait. However, these brewing forms found a new shape and discourse after the events of 11 September 2001 when this imaginary notion of Islam found a whole new meaning and “changed” the world. According to Abbas, the key elements of this new conception of Islam comprise debates around the veiled or “pious” Muslim woman, the militant and the Muslim “injured” by “free speech” in the West. A central argument she presents is that “freedom”, as used in mainstream parlance – and particularly in popular culture – is one that is imagined as modern and Western, thereby reverting to a peculiar imposition of “Enlightenment”. Abbas unpacks a plethora of such Eurocentric terms and critiques their application as expressions of imperial discourse creation. For instance, the “pious Muslim” outraged at the West and injured by its “values” may, in effect, be wishing for enslavement and is, therefore, envisioned as freedom’s “other”. ? Taking this critique of the contemporary view of “Islam” in anthropological terms, Abbas undertakes a sweeping overview of cultural production, employing references from television, cinema and novels. Interestingly, the book ends up showing how the most nuanced contestations of Islam today are contained in the works of Muslim intellectuals and artists.

More here.

The Miner

I dig, I dig beneath the ground.
I dig boulders that shimmer like snake skin.
I dig beneath Ostrava above.

My lamp is blown out, and my hair has fallen
sweaty and matted across my forehead.
Bitterness wells up in my eyes.
The veins in my skull fill with smoke,
and from under my fingernails red blood flows.
I dig, I dig beneath the ground.

Hefting a massive hammer in the pits,
I dig at Salmovec.
I dig at Rychvald and at Petřvald.

While my wife, at Godula, freezes and whimpers
hungry whelps weep in her lap,
and I dig, I dig beneath the ground.

Sparks shoot from the tunnel and my eyes,
as I dig at Dombrová, and at Orlová,
at Poremba and beneath Lazy.

Above me, overhead, the rumble of hooves,
the count riding through the village. His dainty lady,
rosy cheeked and smiling, urges the horses on.

I dig, I wield the pickaxe.
My ashen wife begs at the castle
wanting bread as her own breast is dry of milk.

Such a kind-hearted master,
with a castle made of yellow stone, while
under lock and key Ostravice groans and breaks.
Before the gate two black curs growl.

Why did she go to beg and scrounge at the castle?
Does rye grow in the manor fields for miners' mouths?
I dig at Hrušov and at Michálkovice.

What of my sons, what of my daughters,
when they pull me dead from the pit?
My sons will go on digging and digging,
digging at Karviná, and my daughters—
what fate awaits the daughters of miners?

What if one day I flung this accursed lamp into the pit,
straightened up my crooked neck?
Made a fist of my left hand and strode intently.
Traced an arc from the ground to the sky,
my hammer raised and my eyes a-flash.
There, beneath the sun of god.
.

by Petr Bezruč
from Silesian Songs
translated from the Czech by Jacob A. Bennett

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

It’s early July, and the Greek painter Apostolos Georgiou is wondering where else in Europe he might be able to live. Galleries can barely survive in Athens, he says, and the collectors have disappeared or are only buying abroad. The long-delayed project for a permanent museum of contemporary art in Athens seems more chimerical than ever. So where to go: Germany? Italy? England? “London is too expensive,” he figures, but then asks, “Would I be able to find an affordable place an hour’s journey outside the city?” It depends, I reply. Most areas near the city are stockbroker territory; he’d need to settle beyond the commuter zones in one of those shabby, forlorn seaside towns like Margate, Ramsgate, or Whitstable, if they’re still affordable.

I’m ostensibly visiting Apostolos to choose some of his works for a group show I’m organizing for a London gallery this fall. In fact, we could have made the arrangements by e-mail, but I had a further reason for coming: I wanted to understand how and why one continues to make art in a crisis—how one endeavors to create something, like poetry, that “makes nothing happen” while being (to borrow a few more of Auden’s words) “punished under a foreign code of conscience.”

more here.

James Panero at The New Criterion:

What’s a museum? This is the question I asked in these pages some years ago, and one that museums now seem compelled to answer with ever more emphatic declarations. It is said that museums have gone from “being about something” to “being for somebody,” racing to shed their old skins and remaking themselves in our image. So all museums must now become revisions, articulated interventions and reinterpretations of their former selves and their place in the cultural world—a compulsion now embraced by the new Whitney.

We have heard the modern museum referred to as a “white box.” Here is the museum as sky-box, an institution built as much to be looked out of as looked in to, a place where see-and-be-seen has moved from the periphery to the main event. The difference between these two experiences, between the outside looking in and the inside looking out, defines the design. Indeed, the dichotomy reflects, reverses, and luxuriates in a quality of outsiderness that has always pervaded this particular institution.

The new Whitney Museum, designed by Renzo Piano and Renzo Piano Building Workshop, along with Cooper Robertson, at a cost of $422 million, opened to much fanfare on May 1.

more here.

Nathan Knapp at The Millions:

At the time of Roethke’s death in 1963 from a heart attack in a swimming pool on Bainbridge Island, which lies directly across Puget Sound from Seattle, he was regarded as one the preeminent living American poets, rivaled only in his generation by Robert Lowell. If you take a look at his place on the shelf of any large university library, you’ll find a hefty swath of scholarship on him dating from the late-’50s well into the early-’70s. In the early-’80s, though, scholarly work on Roethke dried up. Though his poetry was much lauded during the final decade of his life — he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for The Waking, and received both the Bollingen and the National Book Award for 1959’s Words for the Wind — he regarded himself principally as a failure. In comparison to other of his contemporaries whose places in literary history have for the most part solidified, Elizabeth Bishop being but one example, his star has fallen. This despite winning another National Book Award posthumously for The Far Field, released two years after his death, despite nearly winning another for his Collected Poems the next year, and though his work was a tremendous influence on both Sylvia Plath and, as poet August Kleinzahler pointed out recently in the London Review of Books, John Berryman. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1976, at what was probably the peak of Roethke’s posthumous fame, the poet James Dickey referred to him as “the greatest American poet,” even going so far as to say Walt Whitman was “no competition” for him. Yet in the years since, Roethke’s work has rusted into oblivion, largely unread and unremarked-upon.

more here.

Jacob Rosenberg in McSweeney's:

Damn. That was a really good point. When I started this discussion, which quickly turned into an argument that I keep demanding be called a “discussion,” I had no idea that you felt so passionately or had such a well-reasoned stance. Not only have you been calm throughout this ordeal, but you have skillfully dealt with my flailing attempts to “win” by concocting straw men of your points. You also seem to be putting forth a genuine effort to understand my position while explaining yours. And, can I just say (well, not so much say but rather think to myself as you make another well-reasoned point), that you are doing an excellent job. It’s been, maybe, 15 minutes that we’ve been talk-yelling, with you mainly talking and me mainly yelling, and not only do I agree with you, but I’ve come to the conclusion I have sounded like an idiot for years about this subject.

Upon realizing that I am totally wrong and you are totally right, I guess I only have one option: double the fuck down.

More here.

Alexandra Harris in TLS:

John who? Craske’s obscurity is part of the subject of this book, but surely his name will be remembered now that his paintings and astonishing embroideries are available to us in the abundant reproductions that fill these pages, and now that Julia Blackburn has empathetically filled out a possible life story from the sparse but striking threads of evidence that remain. Craske was a Norfolk fisherman too ill to fish. As a young man he worked with his brothers, crabbing and longshore cod fishing, until 1905 when he started a fish shop in Dereham. When the war came, his efforts to enlist were rejected on unknown medical grounds – until he at last received a commission in 1917, promptly suffered what his wife Laura called “a relapse”, fell into a “stuporous state”, and was sent to Norwich Asylum rather than to the war. The remaining twenty-six years of his life might have been spent in one asylum or another, had it not been for the determination of Laura, who found a small house where they could live on almost nothing, with daylight coming into the cramped room where Craske lay month after month in bed.

In that bed he became an artist. In the periods of lucidity between “stupors” (“have I been away again?”, he would ask), he carved and painted model boats, made oil paintings of tossed vessels at sea, and, from 1929, made some of the most ambitious embroideries of the twentieth century. In his “Panorama of the Norfolk Coast”, a rainbow arcs over the muds flats where channels of water glint between moored boats, and a pink haul is unloaded from a vessel named in tiny stitches THE PRAWN. There is a stiff breeze blowing. We gauge the precise speed and motion of the breakers in the distance; a waiting fisherman, bundled up in waterproofs, sits with his back to the sea in the little sheltering alcove of an upturned boat. Every detail is honoured, and there is pleasure, too, in the abstract design of it.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi, Quirin Schiermeier & Richard Hodson in Nature:

Fewer than four months before politicians gather in Paris to try to hammer out an international climate agreement, Islamic scholars have underscored the urgency of halting climate change. The Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, drawn up by a group of academics, Muslim scholars and international environment policy experts, was announced this week at a symposium on Islam and climate change in Istanbul. It calls on the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world to phase out greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels and switch instead to energy from renewable sources. Unlike Catholicism, for example, there is no central religious authority in Islam, but the declaration suggests Muslims have a religious duty to tackle climate change. Nature explains the intent of the declaration and what it might achieve.

What does the statement say?

In a nutshell, it says that climate change resulting from fossil-fuel burning must urgently be halted, lest ecosystems and human civilization undergo severe disruptions. “This current rate of climate change cannot be sustained, and the earth’s fine equilibrium (mīzān) may soon be lost,” it reads. “Excessive pollution from fossil fuels threatens to destroy the gifts bestowed on us by God, whom we know as Allah — gifts such as a functioning climate, healthy air to breathe, regular seasons, and living oceans.” Citing a 2014 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it warns that components of Earth's system are at risk of experiencing abrupt and irreversible change.

More here.

The Fall of Rome
.

The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast

by. W.H. Auden
from The Collected Poems
Farber & Farber, 1976

Jermey N. A. Matthews in Physics Today:

Now 91 years old, mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson continues to churn out fresh opinions and original ideas. He is well known for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics and random matrix theory, among other things. However, he also expresses broad views and visions in book reviews and essays, including on topics as varied as space exploration, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons.

Two collections of Dyson’s writings were released earlier this year, within a month of each other: Dreams of Earth and Sky (New York Review of Books, 2015) and Birds and Frogs: Selected Papers, 1990–2014 (World Scientific, 2015). “One of the joys of both books is the pleasure of getting to know Dyson better,” writes theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek in his review for this month’s issue of Physics Today. Dreams of Earth and Sky, geared for the general reader, is a selection of Dyson’s reviews for the New York Review of Books. The second offering, Birds and Frogs “is more varied and on the whole more technical,” writes Wilczek.

Physics Today caught up with Dyson recently to talk about his new books and about his views on current issues.

PT: What prompted you to assemble these two collections around the same time? And what's new or different about them?

DYSON: The simultaneous publication of the two books was unexpected and unplanned.Dreams of Earth and Sky is a collection of book reviews published by the New York Review of Books. It is a sequel to The Scientist as Rebel (New York Review Collections, 2006). Birds and Frogs is a collection of writings—everything except for book reviews—published by World Scientific. It is a sequel to an earlier volume of selected papers published by the American Mathematical Society.

PT: The reviewer highlights your appreciation for the virtues of blunders and of wrong theories. At what point in your career did you begin developing these appreciations?

DYSON: I did not think much about blunders and wrong theories until I read the books by Mario Livio (Brilliant Blunders, Simon & Schuster, 2013) and Margaret Wertheim (Physics on the Fringe, Walker Books, 2011) and wrote reviews of them. Writing reviews gives me a chance to think new thoughts and express new opinions. Sometimes the opinions are sincere and sometimes not. Reviews are intended to entertain as well as educate.

More here.

Mark Edmundson at The Chronicle Review:

Maybe we are best off without ideals. Perhaps there can be something bleakly noble in affirming ourselves as fundamentally Darwinian creatures who live to sustain our existences with as little pain and as much pleasure as possible. But is that all there is to life? The question of the great states of being, self and soul, is in danger of dropping off the map of human inquiry. In its place there opens up an expanse of mere existence based on desire, without hope, fullness, or ultimate meaning. We can do better.

Critics have often identified Western culture as a culture of the image. We live, it’s been said, in a culture of simulation. But simulation of what?

Popular culture (as adored now by the elite as it is by the general populace) simulates soul. An enormous, complex, and stunning technological force, which might be used to feed the world or to rid it of disease, is instead devoted to entertainment — to delivering experiences that fabricate states of soul. These fabrications testify to both our fear of soul states — they are ways of holding dangerous ideals at arm’s length — and our hunger for ideals. They mean and have meant too much. We cannot quite let them go.

more here.

Chris Sims in Comics Alliance:

When you look back at pop culture, you can occasionally follow the threads back to these points that change everything. They’re the projects that paved the way for so much that came after, the ones that introduced their audiences to a strange new way of thinking that eventually becomes the new standard, these massive influences that vast sections of the things we love almost certainly wouldn’t exist without. And for my generation, Gary Larson’s The Far Side is one of those points.

Through a daily strip that ran for fifteen years in over 1,900 newspapers — and got dropped from a handful for being too weird in the process — Larson introduced an entire generation to the surreal, random, and occasionally very dark humor that would become part of the language that we all speak. And today, August 14, as Larson celebrates his birthday, it’s a pretty great time to look back on his work.

More here.

Jerry Kaplan in the New York Times:

Last month over a thousand scientists and tech-world luminaries, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak, released an open letter calling for a global ban on offensive “autonomous” weapons like drones, which can identify and attack targets without having to rely on a human to make a decision.

The letter, which warned that such weapons could set off a destabilizing global arms race, taps into a growing fear among experts and the public that artificial intelligence could easily slip out of humanity’s control — much of the subsequent coverage online was illustrated with screen shots from the “Terminator” films.

The specter of autonomous weapons may evoke images of killer robots, but most applications are likely to be decidedly more pedestrian. Indeed, while there are certainly risks involved, the potential benefits of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — to soldiers, civilians and global stability — are also significant.

The authors of the letter liken A.I.-based weapons to chemical and biological munitions, space-based nuclear missiles and blinding lasers. But this comparison doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.

More here.