Alison Abbott in Nature:

Like many Alzheimer’s researchers, neurologist Randall Bateman is not prone to effusiveness, having endured disappointments in his field. But he and others have found one big reason to be excited lately. In just a few years, he predicts, there will be a simple blood test for your risk of Alzheimer’s. “Any family doctor will be able to do it.” Bateman, who is at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has been running clinical trials related to Alzheimer’s disease for nearly 20 years. “From all I’ve seen, this is a very likely scenario,” he says. “It’ll be just like going to get your blood cholesterol checked and then being given statins if levels are too high.”

This extraordinary turnaround in outlook for the disease that affects more than 55 million people worldwide comes down to two things — both of which were thought by many to be nigh on impossible just a decade ago. First, drugs that can slow the disease, if it is caught early enough, are now coming on the market. And second, scientists have developed relatively cheap and highly accurate blood-based biomarkers for Alzheimer’s.

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Elevation

Above the lakes, above the vales,
The mountains and the woods, the clouds, the seas,
Beyond the sun, beyond the ether,
Beyond the confines of the starry spheres,

My soul, you move with ease,
And like a strong swimmer in rapture in the wave
You wing your way blithely through boundless space
With virile joy unspeakable.

Fly far, far away from this baneful miasma
And purify yourself in the celestial air,
Drink the ethereal fire of those limpid regions
As you would the purest of heavenly nectars.

Beyond the vast sorrows and all the vexations
That weigh upon our lives and obscure our vision,
Happy is he who can with his vigorous wing
Soar up towards those fields luminous and serene,

He whose thoughts, like skylarks,
Toward the morning sky take flight
— Who hovers over life and understands with ease
The language of flowers and silent things!

by Charles Baudelaire
from The Flowers of Evil
Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954
Translated by William Aggeler

Stella Sanford at Aeon Magazine:

It was once common, in Western societies at least, to think of plants as the passive, inert background to animal life, or as mere animal fodder. Plants could be fascinating in their own right, of course, but they lacked much of what made animals and humans interesting, such as agency, intelligence, cognition, intention, consciousness, decision-making, self-identification, sociality and altruism. However, groundbreaking developments in the plant sciences since the end of the previous century have blown that view out of the water. We are just beginning to glimpse the extraordinary complexity and subtlety of plants’ relations with their environment, with each other and with other living beings. We owe these radical developments in our understanding of plants to one area of study in particular: the study of plant behaviour.

The idea of ‘plant behaviour’ may seem odd, given the association of the word ‘behaviour’ with animals, including humans. When we think of classic animal behaviours – dancing honeybees, dogs wagging their tails, primates grooming each other – we may wonder what there could possibly be in plant life corresponding to this.

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Nick Whitaker & J. Zachary Mazlish at Works in Progress:

Many entrepreneurs have tried to create prediction markets, contracts that trade on the outcome of future events. Luke Nosek, cofounder of PayPal, once worked on the problem. Sam Bankman-Fried, the jailed founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is supposed to have originally wanted to build a prediction markets platform. A number of venture capital–backed start-ups are currently building prediction markets, including Kalshi, a prediction market regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC); Manifold, a play money prediction market; and Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction market currently illegal in the US.

Many academics have advocated for the creation of prediction markets. Economics Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow argued for their deregulation in Science, alongside Cass Sunstein, the most cited legal scholar; Thomas Schelling, one of the foremost game theorists; and Philip Tetlock, who created superforecasting. Economist Bryan Caplan’s Substack is called Bet On It, alluding to the value of wagering on beliefs: bets are costly for people with wrong beliefs and profitable for people with accurate ones. This is the promise of prediction markets: they could use the wisdom of crowds and the price mechanism of markets to land on highly accurate probabilities.

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M.V. Ramana at Literary Hub:

As someone trained in physics, and as an academic paid to research, I have been drawn to studying one essential contributor to these crises: how energy and electricity are produced, especially those methods proposed to mitigate climate change. Prominent among these proposals is nuclear energy.

Although climate change scares me, I am even more scared of a future with more nuclear plants. Increasing how much energy is produced with nuclear reactors would greatly exacerbate the risk of severe accidents like the one at Chernobyl, expand how much of our environment is contaminated with radioactive wastes that remain hazardous for millennia, and last but not least, make catastrophic nuclear war more likely.

Some might argue that these risks are the price we must pay to counter the threat of climate change. I disagree, but even if one were to adopt this position, my research shows that nuclear energy is just not a feasible solution to climate change.

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Rahul Bhatia in The Guardian:

Running a finger over a row of books in a Delhi library one afternoon, I stopped at a title that promised danger. The stacks were abundant in books like RSS Misunderstood and Is RSS the Enemy?, which often turned out to be self-published polemics that were too long, however short they were. This one was different. On its front was the full title, In the Belly of the Beast: The Hindu Supremacist RSS and the BJP of India, An Insider’s View. I read the first page, and then the next, slowly, with rising giddiness. Not long after, I was beside a Sikh gentleman at his photocopying machine. What pages, he asked. Everything, I said.

In the long hour that followed, I wondered if the book’s presence on these shelves was an oversight. This was the closest that any writer had come to describing the organisation from within. That night I swallowed its contents whole, scanned a copy for myself to store in several places for safekeeping, and wrote to its author. We mailed, and then scheduled a video call, and then arranged to meet two months later, when he travelled to India from the US to alert people to the dangers of the RSS before the 2024 elections began.

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Daniel Pink in The Washington Post:

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Kayla Guo in Undark:

When Texas’ highest criminal court stopped Robert Roberson’s execution in 2016, it agreed with his lawyers that there was enough doubt over the cause of his daughter’s death to warrant a second look. Roberson, who was convicted in 2003 of killing his 2-year-old daughter Nikki, has maintained his innocence during more than 20 years on death row. To Roberson and his lawyers, the decision was exactly what a groundbreaking Texas statute, dubbed the “junk science law,” was meant to do: provide justice when the scientific evidence that led to a conviction has been discredited.

Now with a chance to exonerate Roberson, his lawyers got to work. They compiled a 302-page filing of new evidence that they said invalidated the finding that his daughter died from shaken baby syndrome. The filing summarized medical articles on how the consensus around shaken baby diagnoses had cracked, medical records that illustrated Nikki’s illness and medications in the days leading up to her death, and long-lost CAT scans that they said proved she did not die from being violently shaken. The state, meanwhile, submitted a 17-page filing that argued that the science around shaken baby diagnoses had not changed that much, and that the evidence that pointed to Roberson as his daughter’s killer remained “clear and convincing.”

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On the Subway for the First Time

Janique Vigier at Bookforum:

OPEN ANY BOOK BY CAROLINE BLACKWOOD and you will encounter the same woman. Articulate, adrift, callous, cosmically self-absorbed. She’s in the middle of her life, a retired actress or model, once striking and sought-after. Her misery has a predatory quality. Decisions made idly and capriciously she now clings to as essential facets of her “character.” She rebels continually against the restraints and privations she inflicts upon herself. She behaves as though she were onstage, thundering dramatic monologues of deceit and self-justification. What’s clearest is her anger: pure, whole, just beneath the surface, like a calcium deposit under the skin.

Blackwood’s women are loaded with rage. And why not? Their marriages are loveless, their husbands shirks, their children ingrates, their mothers domineering, their friends useless, their careers faded. But her anger transcends circumstance; it is existential, the kind breakdown can’t allay and catharsis can’t purge.

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Nick Ripatrazone at Literary Hub:

At the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, Jim Thorpe easily won the decathlon in the first modern version of the event. The grueling, ten-part feat was not the only addition to the burgeoning modern games. Other events that debuted at the 1912 Olympics included architecture, sculpture, painting, music… and literature.

Although often separated, athletes and artists are both performers; they create, and perhaps crave, spectacle. The ancient union between sport and the arts appealed to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the creator of the modern Olympics. In his official report on the 1896 games in Athens, de Coubertin parried away critics with a confident, and true, pronouncement: “I hereby assert once more my claims for being sole author of the whole project.”

His vision for the modern games was quite literary; in fact, de Coubertin created a monthly journal, La Revue Athlétique, “hoping to raise the interests in manly sports in France.”

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Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist:

Drivers on a busy US freeway have been controlled by an AI since March, as part of a study that has put a machine-learning system in charge of setting variable speed limits on the road. The impact on efficiency and driver safety is unclear, as researchers are still analysing the results.

Roads with variable speed limits, also known as smart motorways, are common in countries including the US, UK and Germany. Normally, rule-based systems monitor the number of vehicles on one of these roads and adjust speeds accordingly. One such road is a 27-kilometre section of the I-24 freeway near Nashville, Tennessee, which was experiencing a problem that besets many busy roads: when there are too many vehicles, phantom traffic jams appear when drivers brake, slowing vehicles to a crawl and risking crashes as fast-moving vehicles come up behind.

To address this, Daniel Work at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and his colleagues trained an AI on historical traffic data to monitor cameras and make decisions on speed limits, deploying it in the I-24 control room in February.

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Robert Muggah at Project Syndicate:

Transnational organized crime is a paradox: ubiquitous yet invisible. While criminal tactics evolve rapidly, government-led responses are often static. When criminal networks are squeezed in one jurisdiction, they rapidly balloon in another. Although the problem concerns everyone, it is often considered too sensitive to discuss at the national, much less the global, level. As a result, the international community – including the United Nations and its member states – lacks a coherent and coordinated strategy to address it.

That needs to change. Cross-border organized crime constitutes a major threat to peace, security, human rights, governance, the environment, and sustainable development. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, over 80% of the world’s population resides in countries with dangerously high levels of criminality. But, while there appears to be growing awareness of the problem, responses are still reactive, fragmented, and under-funded.

Transnational organized crime – from drug trafficking and people smuggling to the sale of counterfeit goods and cybercrime – reaches into most cities, neighborhoods, and homes. In the United States, over 90% of the $1 banknotes in circulation are tainted by residual traces of cocaine and other drugs.

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Mikkael Sekeres in The Washington Post:

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

The brain is like a medieval castle perched on a cliff, protected on all sides by high walls, making it nearly impenetrable. Its shield is the blood-brain barrier, a layer of tightly connected cells that only allows an extremely selective group of molecules to pass. The barrier keeps delicate brain cells safely away from harmful substances, but it also blocks therapeutic proteins—like, for example, those that grab onto and neutralize toxic clumps in Alzheimer’s disease. One way to smuggle proteins across? A cat parasite. A new study in Nature Microbiology tapped into the strange world of mind-bending parasites, specifically, Toxoplasma gondii. Perhaps best known for its ability to rid infected mice of their fear of cats, the parasite naturally travels from the gut to the brain—including ours—and releases proteins that tweak behavior.

The international team hijacked T. gondii’s natural, brain-targeting impulses to engineer two delivery systems, one for a single-shot therapeutic boost and another that lasts longer.

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Chase Padusniak at Commonweal:

Freud’s influence waned during the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of the so-called “Freud Wars,” during which critics like Frederick Crews took psychoanalysis to task for a lack of scientific support or clinical success. Crews tried to put a final nail in the coffin in 2017’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion. But, despite the criticism and the precipitous decline in Freudian analysts, Freud’s ideas never quite went away. In a review of Crews’s mammoth biography, George Prochnik offered an explanation. Ideas like repression, hidden parts of the self, and the half-scrutable language of dreams “in the forms they circulate among us, are indebted to Freud’s writings.” The name Freud might have become mud for a time, but his thought seems to keep speaking to us from below the surface, almost as if from our unconscious.

Is he poised to break through again? Some detect a “Freud resurgence” underway. Hannah Zeavin, founding editor of Parapraxis, a magazine devoted to psychoanalytic thought, remarks in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the old man’s back again, perhaps because of all the psychosocial trauma of recent years.

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