Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:
In the more than six million years since people and chimpanzees split from their common ancestor, human brains have rapidly amassed tissue that helps decision-making and self-control. But the same regions are also the most at risk of deterioration during ageing, finds a study1 that compared images of chimp brains with scans of human brains.
Previous studies have shown that regions of the human brain that are the last to mature, such as parts of the frontal lobe, are the first to show signs of ageing2, a theory known as ‘last in, first out’. The latest study shows that some of those regions that mature later, and are most susceptible to ageing, also evolved most recently in humans.
The results tend to support the “important hypothesis that our cortical expansion came at the price of age-related decline”, says Rogier Mars, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK. The results were published in Science Advances on 28 August.
More here.
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The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who is celebrated in these two books published to accompany the exhibitions in Hamburg and Berlin marking the 250th anniversary of his birth, has fascinated me all my life. When I was at school, his mysterious and emotive paintings started to appear on the covers of the grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics series: Abbey in the Oakwood on the cover of Hermann Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund; Woman at a Window (the woman’s back turned, one shutter open to the spring morning and the riverbank) on that of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. Covers featuring Sea of Ice, with its unfathomable grey-blue sky, and the yearning, autumnal Moonwatchers soon followed. Every image was memorable; every one hinted at emotional and spiritual depths embodied in northern European landscapes and places.
When Raymond Thompson, Jr. started looking through the archives of the Hawks Nest tunnel, he was struck by how absent the five thousand plus men who worked the dig were. It was, rather, a celebration of the engineering feat and the important men involved. Thompson’s new book, “Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster ” (University Press of Kentucky, 2024,) is a photography collection that provides a necessary corrective while doing some heavy archival lifting.
Doubts about the accepted chronology of human events are much older than Illig, Velikovsky or Freud. Already by the end of the 17th century, the Jesuit scholars 
My mother began taking me to the movies when I was a little boy of three or four. She worked at factory and other menial jobs during the day, and when she came home I was the only company she had. Afterward, I’d go through the characters in my head and bring them to life, one by one, in our apartment. The movies were a place where my single mother could hide in the dark and not have to share her Sonny Boy with anyone else. That was her nickname for me. She had picked it up from the popular song by Al Jolson, which she often sang to me.
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“A work needs only to be interesting,” Judd continued. And Judd’s work is interesting, even more so in Marfa than, say, MoMA, where a metal box installed in a white cube gallery contained on a city block amidst a vast grid plan makes for a rectilinear set of Russian dolls. The lunar landscape of Far West Texas—the heat and harsh sun and stark outline of emptiness—instead gives these manufactured squares an exotic leg up. At times, Judd’s objects can appear aloof, indifferent. Untitled works give way to a sense of … untitlement. But the desert itself is a poetic reflection of Judd’s aesthetic convictions, where the dominance of negative space enunciates each specific form. This enunciation culminates with the artist’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982-1986, contained in two massive side-by-side artillery sheds at Chinati, a mile from the Block. One hundred pristine boxes—a fingerprint will permanently set in as little as 72 hours—line up on the floor like an army drill. Outwardly identical in size, each one embodies its own internal variations: a tilted top, a hollow center, solid as a rock. No two are the same.
Explaining to the uninitiated exactly who Vinay Gupta is, and what he does, isn’t easy.
When a protein folds, its string of amino acids wiggles and jiggles through countless conformations before it forms a fully folded, functional protein. This rapid and complex process is hard to visualize.
Consider that sandstone, which began, some two billion years ago, as quartz crystals buried deep inside mountains towering over what is now the Upper Midwest and southern Canada. Time took apart the mountains, and rain dissolved most of the minerals in them, but the quartz remained. It was later washed into Precambrian rivers and eventually carried to a beach, where its grains were worn smooth and spherical by the waves. That beach was tropical, partly because the contemporaneous climate was extremely warm, but also because Wisconsin, at the time, was near the equator. As the sea retreated and other rocks and minerals were deposited on top of the former strand, the grains of quartz hardened into sandstone, which was gradually sculpted by wind, water, and glacier until, aboveground, it formed the topography of Wisconsin as we know it today. Belowground, it formed an excellent aquifer, thanks to those spherical grains, which—“like marbles in a jar,” as Bjornerud puts it—leave plenty of room for storing water in between them.
I only write in Japanese, a language that is plural by nature. It’s a language that has embraced several languages in its making, so you may hear the Chinese of the Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing periods, or the languages of Okinawa, Ainu, or Korea resonating within it. Asia is a region with an extensive history of a totally different sort from the West. Like in Africa, I guess, we inherit a thick layer of profound time in our basal memory that shapes our physical and mental subconscious gestures, and we always have to remember that.
Broadly speaking, plankton fall into two big categories – the plant-like phytoplankton and the animal-like zooplankton – though quite a few species have characteristics of both. Cyanobacteria and other microbial, ocean-dwelling phytoplankton are Earth’s original photosynthesizers. About half of all photosynthesis on the planet today occurs within their cells.
We all know the trope: a machine grows so intelligent that its apparent consciousness becomes indistinguishable from our own, and then it surpasses us – and possibly even turns against us. As investment pours into efforts to make such technology – so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a reality, how scared of such scenarios should we be?