From New Statesman:

Beatrice and Sidney Webb founded the New Statesman in a spirit of optimism. They were outraged by the plight of the poor and the way the unfettered market had created monstrous inequality at a time of great technological advance. (Does this sound familiar?) They wanted their new weekly review of politics and the arts to be a reforming journal as well as a vehicle for their ideas. They believed in the rational, scientific method and in the “world movement towards collectivism”. Theirs was a socialism of experts: technocratic, centralising, bureaucratic. Through their research – they co-founded the London School of Economics and William Beveridge worked for them as a young researcher – they helped to lay the foundations of the welfare state. Yet their socialism of experts was flawed and often wrongheaded and its worst excesses have been deeply sedimented in the Labour tradition of “the man in Whitehall knows best”: command and control, tax and transfer. The Webbs were fellow-travellers of the Soviet Union and they were imperialists. Statists rather than liberals, they were insufficiently interested in personal freedom. Very quickly, the journal they created broke free of their influence. In 1922, Sidney Webb resigned as NS chairman, unhappy that the “paper” was too free in its criticisms of the Labour Party. “A melancholy ending to our one journalistic adventure,” Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary.

Fifteen months after the first issue of the NS appeared, Europe was plunged into the imperial slaughter of the First World War. The twin evils of Stalinism and fascism and then the long cold war would follow. However, for the British, at least, the 20th century was broadly one of progress. In common with many countries, Britain incrementally became both a more liberal and a more equal society. Universal suffrage was introduced. The National Health Service was created and a universal welfare state was established. The UK surrendered its colonial possessions and Europe was transformed from a continent of war into one of peace. Capital punishment was abolished and homosexuality was decriminalised. Laws were passed against discrimination on the basis of race, sex or disability. Through decades of struggle, the left bent the arc of history towards justice.

More here.

From Nature:

Because all the workers in an ant colony look the same, tracking their movements and interactions by eye is fiendishly difficult. Instead, Danielle Mersch and her colleagues tagged every single worker in entire colonies and used a computer to track them, accumulating what they say is the largest-ever data set on ant interactions. The biologists, based at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, have found that the workers fall into three social groups that perform different roles: nursing the queen and young; cleaning the colony; and foraging for food. The different groups move around different parts of the nest, and the insects tend to graduate from one group to another as they age, the researchers write in a paper published today in Science¹.

The team reared six colonies of carpenter ants (Camponotus fellah) in the lab and tagged each worker with paper containing a unique barcode-like symbol. The colonies — each comprising more than 100 ants — lived in flat enclosures filmed by overhead cameras. A computer automatically recognized the tags and recorded each individual’s position twice per second (see video below). Over 41 days, the researchers collected more than 2.4 billion readings and documented 9.4 million interactions between the workers. The researchers found that around 40% of the workers were nurses, which almost always stayed with the queen and her brood. Another 30% were foragers, which gathered most of the colony’s food and were found near the entrance to the nest. The rest were cleaners, and these were more likely to visit the colony’s rubbish heaps. The workers move between jobs as they get older — nurses are generally younger than cleaners, which are younger than foragers. Honeybees go through similar transitions from young nurses to older foragers, but this study provides the clearest evidence yet that ants do the same.

More here.

Dwight Garner in the NYT:

On a recent Saturday morning in February, two dozen or so scent hounds streamed through the streets of St. Buryan, a small village in Cornwall, England. Behind them drifted a loose formation of men and women perched atop well-groomed horses and wearing boots, breeches and hunting coats. As the fox hunt clopped through town, John le Carré, the pre-eminent spy writer of the 20th century, sipped from a paper cup of warm whiskey punch, doled out by a local pub to riders and spectators.

At 81, he remains an enviable specimen of humanity: tall, patrician, cleanlimbed, ruddy-complected. His white hair is floppy and well cut, so much so that the actor Ralph Fiennes, who starred in the 2005 film version of le Carré’s novel “The Constant Gardener,” badgered him for the name of his barber.

Le Carré is not a hunter himself, but he nodded at the people he knew and mounted a casual and running defense of fox hunting, as if he were doing color commentary from the 18th hole at the Masters. It’s an ancient part of the rural culture, he said. It’s egalitarian in this area (some 300 miles west-southwest of London), not an upper-class diversion. It’s also largely futile: an actual fox is rarely cornered. When one is, a trained eagle owl is brought in to kill it.

As the final horse strode past, le Carré swallowed the dregs of his punch and crumpled his cup. His eyebrows, so thatchy and animated that they seem ready to leap off his forehead and start nibbling the shrubbery, rose as he turned toward me, his blue eyes alight, and happily declared, “At least they aren’t hunting that poor goddamn thing with drones.”

Also see Emma Hogan in More Intelligent Life:

KEY DECISION

To use the jargon of spycraft. Smiley’s people are lamplighters, scalphunters and talent-spotters. Secretaries are “mothers”; spies on your side are “part of the family”. To be blackmailed is to be “burned”, a style of spying is “handwriting” and a failed mission is “being sent home in your socks”. Like boarding school, the secret service runs on nicknames and catchphrases. Le Carré’s skill stops this being irritating, and lets us join the club.

Kenan Malik in Eurozine:

At the heart of the current debate about immigration are two issues: the first is about the facts, the second about the public perception of immigration.

The facts are relatively straightforward. Immigration is a good thing and the idea that immigrants come to Britain to live off benefits laughable. Immigrants put more money into the economy than they take out and have a negligible impact on jobs and wages. An independent report on the impact of immigration commissioned by the Home Office in 2003, looked at numerous international surveys and conducted its own study in Britain. “The perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, or that immigrants depress the wages of existing workers”, it concluded, “do not find confirmation in the analysis of the data laid out in this report”. More recent studies have suggested that immigration helps raise wages except at the bottom of the jobs ladder where it has a slight negative impact. That impact on low paid workers matters hugely, of course, but is arguably more an issue of labour organization than of immigration…

Whatever the truth about immigration, it is clear that there exists widespread popular hostility to immigrants. For some, often on the right, the hostility makes sense because, irrespective of its economic benefits, the social impact of immigration is destructive. For others, often on the left, such hostility exists because people are irrational and take little notice of facts and figures. Both arguments have little merit.

Rachel Dewoskin in Rumpus:

Rumpus: What about in terms of physical dislocation and geography? When you write about moving to the U.S. and assembling a street map in your mind, you say that borders are nonexistent in Sarajevo but in Chicago, they are designed to keep people safely apart. Is that a culture-shocked observation from when you were first here or an objective one about the nature of American cities in general?

Hemon: Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It’s partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation. Giving people cars? It’s all under the pretense of giving everyone a lot of space. So circulation in the city is discouraged, at least functionally; the subway is designed to take people downtown to work and then back home. Bus lines, too. And whenever they cut services, they cut out the poor neighborhoods, which reinforces segregation even if it’s not cynical. Sarajevo and European cities are not designed the way Chicago is, like a grid. They tend to go out of the city center concentrically. So there was the sense of physical displacement, yes, and I needed to contend with that. So I assembled my domain.

Rumpus: Within that domain, what about personal interiority and exteriority? Do you have to blur those borders to write stories?

Hemon: When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism. And every agency—political and therefore, by extensions, all other agencies—were collective. And also I was young and this is what young people do when they want to assert themselves on the world. So I was all about individualism. Conan the Barbarian was one of my favorite movies. But only when I got here did I realize that I had overrated that kind of individualism and Conan the Barbarian was a proto-fascist in more than one way. In Sarajevo I thought I was inventing myself from scratch, but only once I was devoid of the network of the people and practices that are part of living in a city like that did I realize how much of my interiority and selfhood was really dependent—operated and actualized itself—upon that network of exchanges with other people. It’s about physical space but also just spending a lot of time with friends and family in your daily life.

In the Economist blog Prospero:

Internet writing has been nothing short of a revolution for Chinese literature. It has allowed myriad voices to be heard. The digital landscape and technology have changed since the first wave of authors began to write; readers in China now access novels through smartphones and tablets rather than desktops. Yet the internet remains the “single root” in China today to kick-start a career as a wordsmith, says Jo Lusby, managing director of Penguin China, a publishing house. “There are no authors under the age of 35 who were not discovered on the internet,” she adds.

Online literature sites have blossomed in the last decade. They provide a rich, and grassroots, alternative to the staid state-run publishing houses. While all books published in the mainland are subject to scrutiny by cautious editors and zealous censors, online literature sites are watched less carefully. They still operate behind the “great firewall”, China’s internet-filtering system which blocks sensitive words or topics, but the sheer volume of works produced, combined with the lack of editorial oversight, creates an important loophole.

On sites such as Rongshuxia visitors pay per instalment to read works. Authors, often posting and writing simultaneously, can gauge reader feedback and shift plots as they go. Innovative editors from China's burgeoning private publishing industry trawl through them to find the next big thing.

It all began with the “classroom martyrdom” of one Félix-Frédéric Hébert (1832–1917), a physics teacher at the lycée in Rennes. Possessed of a large stomach, short legs and an air of bluff pomposity, Hébert was ragged mercilessly by his pupils. “What made him unique and inspired a plethora of ingenious inventions aimed at stirring him up”, recalled one, “was that we could look forward to beautiful tears, noble sobs and ceremonious supplications.” Two brothers, Charles and Henri Morin, began writing and illustrating a series of satirical sketches recounting the exploits of the ridiculous Père Hébert, and these stories were added to by other boys. The “Hébert cycle” consists of long poems, plays, mock newspapers and fantasy adventures, many exhibiting a protosurreal wit: “Appearance of P. H. – He was born complete with bowler hat, woollen cloak and check trousers. On top of his head is a single, extendible ear, usually covered by his hat; both his arms are on the same side (likewise his eyes) and, unlike humans, whose feet are situated next to each other, he has one behind the other, so that when he falls over he is unable to pick himself up without assistance and remains prostrated, shouting until someone helps him up.” When the fifteen-year-old Alfred Jarry arrived at the lycée in 1888 he was swiftly initiated into the cult of Père Hébert.

more from Ian Pindar at the TLS here.

Even among Stevens’ various practices, the structure of “The Motive for Metaphor” is peculiar. The first stanza coincides with two simple, parallel sentences. A third sentence is stretched out over the remainder of the poem, not because the syntax becomes complex—it doesn’t—but because one phrase is instructed to produce another by association, and that one to bring forward yet another by a similar device. The practice is common in Stevens, where a particular clause tends not to reach conclusion but to keep the discourse going by stirring a further association, an echo or a repetition—“Disguised pronunciamento, summary, / Autumn’s compendium . . .” His sentences tend not to be decisive, he is reluctant to concede that a poem has to end. We sometimes wonder is he a man without will—does he take pleasure in withholding himself, as if keeping a secret? If we go from reading Frost, say, who is always willful, to Stevens, who seems to write poems by letting phrases write themselves, we recall that in “The Creations of Sound” he said that “there are words / Better without an author, without a poet, /Or having a separate author, a different poet, / An accretion from ourselves, intelligent / Beyond intelligence, an artificial man / At a distance, a secondary expositor . . . .”[18] In “The Motive for Metaphor” the repetition of “the obscure moon” is labored, the momentum has to be started up again, until the appositive colon after “changes” is reached and the long sentence continues, specifying the nature of the desire. Even when Stevens designates something, the thing he designates is rarely allowed to speak for itself or to bring the sentence to an end; he must apply his commodious adjectives to every noun. It would be fair to say of Stevens’ poems what Hazlitt said of Wordsworth’s The Excursion, that “an intense intellectual egotism swallows up everything”…

more from Denis Donoghue at the Hudson Review here.

The Stedelijk is still the most chaste of the world’s white-walled modern museums, even with its obligatory representations of frolicsome Pop, rugged postminimalist, and miscellaneous contemporary art. Intentionally or not, the new bathtub entrance hall’s suggestion of hygiene resonates. Finely proportioned, evenly lit rooms anticipate hushed contemplation of things that are hard put to merit it. Austere abstraction fares well. Big canvases by Barnett Newman, inflected only with the vertical divisions (not quite lines and not quite shapes) that he termed “zips,” look more brilliantly cogent at the Stedelijk than in any other setting, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Much of the rest of the work—most tellingly, the work since Andy Warhol—feels impatient with the sacred aura of the place. Physical imperfections glare. The collaged and slathered surfaces and vernacular objects (an umbrella, a mirror) in Robert Rauschenberg’s huge early “combine” painting “Charlene” (1954) come across now as less daring than decrepit. To the extent that the Stedelijk institutionalized the faith of modernism, it has come to incite heretical doubt. That being so—and not neglecting such glories as a room of seminal paintings by Willem de Kooning—it functions as a jittery barometer of present discontents.

more from Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker here.

I'm Working on the World
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From The Telegraph:

From Kurzweil:

UC Berkeley researchers have uncovered exactly how acute stress — short-lived, not chronic — primes the brain for improved performance. In studies on rats, Daniela Kaufer, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley and post-doctoral fellow Elizabeth Kirby they found that significant but brief stressful events caused stem cells in rat brains to proliferate into new nerve cells that, when mature two weeks later, improved the rats’ mental performance. “I think intermittent stressful events are probably what keeps the brain more alert, and you perform better when you are alert,” said Kaufer. Kaufer is especially interested in how both acute and chronic stress affect memory, and since the brain’s hippocampus is critical to memory, she and her colleagues focused on the effects of stress on neural stem cells in the hippocampus of the adult rat brain. Neural stem cells are a sort of generic or progenitor brain cell that, depending on chemical triggers, can mature into neurons, astrocytes or other cells in the brain.

…What exactly is “good” stress?

Kaufer noted that exposure to acute, intense stress can sometimes be harmful, leading, for example, to post-traumatic stress disorder. Further research could help to identify the factors that determine whether a response to stress is good or bad. “I think the ultimate message is an optimistic one,” she concluded. “Stress can be something that makes you better, but it is a question of how much, how long and how you interpret or perceive it.”

More here.

Adam Kirsch in Tablet:

It’s not often that the subject of the weekly Daf Yomireading makes headlines in the blogosphere. But last week, the web—especially its Jewish corners—was buzzing over a bizarre photograph of an Orthodox Jewish man on an airplane, completely wrapped in a plastic bag. Many commenters on the photo assumed this had something to do with sexual purity or avoiding women, but in fact, as knowledgeable readers pointed out, it actually involved another taboo entirely.

The man must have been a Kohen, a member of the priestly class, and Kohanim are prohibited from coming into contact with corpses. Passing over a cemetery—even, in this case, at 30,000 feet—qualifies as such a contact. By wrapping himself in plastic, the man in question must have been guarding himself against that kind of impurity or tumah. Since most Orthodox Jews, even Kohanim, do not regularly fly in plastic, it’s clear that the man in the photo was adopting a minority position about what’s required to avoid contamination. (I’d be glad to hear from knowledgeable commenters about the law on this issue.)

As it turned out, just this question—how a Kohen can travel through a cemetery—was addressed in the Talmud last week, in Eruvin 30b. The issue arose in connection with the tractate’s ongoing discussion of eruvei techumin, the extension of Shabbat boundaries. As I wrote in my last column, the techum or boundary for walking on Shabbat is 2,000 amot, around 2/3 of a mile. But the place from which this circumference is measured can be shifted, by establishing a Shabbat residence at a different location from the one you actually occupy. To do this, you must deposit food at the spot of your Shabbat residence; and the third chapter of Eruvin has been dedicated to the technicalities of this process.

Artemy Troitsky, Peter Pomerantsev and Oliver Carroll in Berfrois:

Russia’s 1968?

Oliver Carroll: From Voina to Bykov, Pussy Riot to Moscow hipsterism, culture seems to be playing a very political game in Russia. How can we explain this? Is this something that Russia has seen before? Are we witnessing this Russia’s ‘1968’ moment? And if so, is accompanied by the same kind of generational and political splits that we saw in Europe’s rebellion? Or is it something completely different?

Artemy: If this really is a cultural revolution, then I’m afraid it happening on a very small scale. Compared to the first decade of the 21st century, which was absolutely lethargic and comatose, Russia’s cultural life and political community has started to show some life. But compared to the kind of cultural euphoria Russia experienced in other times — during the so-calledshestidesiatniki movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, or in late 80s during Perestroika and Glasnost — it’s on a much smaller scale.

The saddest thing of all is that today’s cultural developments are much more elitist, touching a much finer layer of Russian people than either of the earlier cultural thaws (ottepel). The cultural movement back then was simply massive, supported and followed by millions of so-called ordinary Russians. What is happening right now is more a minority movement, largely ignored by the majority of the Russian population. And there is also a strong counter-reaction too. Sure, Glasnost had some some reactionary things like Nina Andreeva writing her letter in Sovetskaia Rossiia, or the Stalinist writers who urged people not to give up on their principals. But they were the tiny minority. Right now it’s us that feel as if we are pushed in the corner.

First, Reinhart and Rogoff respond via email (over at Slate):

2012 JEP paper largely anticipates and addresses any concerns about aggregation (the main bone of conention here), The JEP paper not only provides individual country averages (as we already featured in Table 1 of the 2010 AER paper) but it goes further and provide episode by episode averages. Not surprisingly, the results are broadly similar to our original 2010 AER table 1 averages and to the median results that also figure prominently. It is hard to see how one can interpret these tables and individual country results as showing that public debt overhang over 90% is clearly benign.

The JEP paper with Vincent Reinhart looks at all public debt overhang episodes for advanced countries in our database, dating back to 1800. The overall average result shows that public debt overhang episodes (over 90% GDP for five years or more) are associated with 1.2% lower growth as compared to growth when debt is under 90%. (We also include in our tables the small number of shorter episodes.) Note that because the historical public debt overhang episodes last an average of over 20 years, the cumulative effects of small growth differences are potentially quite large. It is utterly misleading to speak of a 1% growth differential that lasts 10-25 years as small.

Second, Paul Krugman responds (also here):

I was going to post something sort of kind of defending Reinhart-Rogoff in the wake of the new revelations — not their results, which I never believed, nor their failure to carefully test their results for robustness, but rather their motives. But their response to the new critique is really, really bad.

What Herndon et al did was find that the R-R results on the relationship between debt and growth were partly the result of a coding error, partly the result of some very odd choices about which data to exclude and how to weight the data that remained. The effect of fixing these lapses was to raise the estimated mean growth of highly indebted countries by more than 2 percentage points.

So how do R-R respond?

First, they argue that another measure — median growth — isn’t that different from the Herndon et al results. But that is, first of all, an apples-and-oranges comparison — the fact is that when you compare the results head to head, R-R looks very off. Something went very wrong, and pointing to your other results isn’t a good defense.

Tyler Cowen's take:

2. …as Ray Lopez mentions, including in the data the postwar bouncebacks of some Anglo countries (NZ, Australia, and Canada), as recommended by the critics, is not obviously going to improve the quality of the answer. For instance the Kiwis have postwar growth rates of 7.7, 11.9, -9.9, and 10.8 percent, across the late 1940s. Are those numbers — which were combined with high postwar levels of debt — relevant to current fiscal policy issues? I say no, while admitting this may lead us to throw out other data points as well. I don’t know what is the non-cherry-pick answer here or if there even is one.

3. It is perhaps unfortunate in this age of the internet that rebuttals must be presented so quickly, but so be it. It will be interesting to hear from R&R.

4. Not too long ago I reread R&R to ascertain whether they actually present the 90% level as an emergency cliff of sorts. I concluded they did not, although there were some sentences that a reader could take out of context toward confirming such an interpretation.

To trace the path of the centroid is to skim a great narrative spanning 220 years. That narrative is the nation’s history of growth, with each point along the way emerging as a sort of chapter: the rise of industrialism in the Northeast, the expansion of the western frontier, the waves of European, Latin American, and Asian immigration, the post–World War II population boom. In its migration, only twice has the center of population come to rest in an actual population center: Baltimore, Maryland (population center, 1800), and Covington, Kentucky (population center, 1880, and hometown of a fourth-grade-dropout named Haven Gillespie, who penned numerous classic American songs including “Drifting and Dreaming” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”). Over the years, the centroid has been found in places like Clarksburg, West Virginia, population center of 1840, where today the FBI operates its National Instant Criminal Background Check System to screen purchasers of firearms. Its path also passes through Portsmouth, Ohio, childhood home of Roy Rogers, which held the distinction in 1870. Portsmouth lost its NFL team to Detroit in 1933, its steel mills in the 1980s, and more than half its population of forty thousand between 1950 and 2000. And let us not forget Olney, Illinois, which held the honor in 1950.

more from Jeremy Miller at Orion Magazine here.

“I saw a Man before me unawares: / The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.” This was not the Lake District, but in this busy market I thought of William Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence.” Facing these tiny barrels of leeches and their keeper, all I could think of was the Romantic’s leech gatherer. Several hundred leeches writhed. They gathered like a black belt round the middle of each container, near the water’s surface. A few ambitious leeches left the waistband, inching their way toward the lid; a few fell from those curving heights to the bottom of the barrels. “Prof. Dr. Sülük,” it said at the top of every placard, and beneath those bold headings were lists of ailments of almost every sort: from migraines to fungus, eczema, rheumatism, and even cellulite. The leeches, then, were medicinal.

more from Casey N. Cep at Paris Review here.

The Master is needed especially in situations of deep crisis. The function of a Master is to enact an authentic division – a division between those who want to drag on within the old parameters and those who are aware of the necessary change. Such a division, not the opportunistic compromises, is the only path to true unity. Let us take an example which surely is not problematic: France in 1940. Even Jacques Duclos, the second man of the French Communist Party, admitted in a private conversation that if, at that point in time, free elections were to be held in France, Marshal Petain would have won with 90 per cent of the vote. When de Gaulle, in his historic act, refused to acknowledge the capitulation to Germans and continued to resist, he claimed that it was only he, not the Vichy regime, who speaks on behalf of the true France (on behalf of true France as such, not only on behalf of the “majority of the French”!). What he was saying was deeply true even if it was “democratically” not only without legitimacy, but clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. Margaret Thatcher, the lady who was not for turning, was such a Master, sticking to her decision which was at first perceived as crazy, gradually elevating her singular madness into an accepted norm.

more from Slavoj Zizek at The New Statesman here.

From The New Yorker:

There once were two planets, new to the and inexperienced in life. Like fraternal twins, they were born at the same time, about four and a half billion years ago, and took roughly the same shape. Both were blistered with volcanoes and etched with watercourses; both circled the same yellow dwarf star—close enough to be warmed by it, but not so close as to be blasted to a cinder. Had an alien astronomer swivelled his telescope toward them in those days, he might have found them equally promising—nurseries in the making. They were large enough to hold their gases close, swaddling themselves in atmosphere; small enough to stay solid, never swelling into gaseous giants. They were “Goldilocks planets,” our own astronomers would say: just right for life. The rest is prehistory. On Earth, the volcanoes filled the air with water vapor and carbon dioxide. The surface cooled, a crust formed, and oceans condensed upon it. In hot springs and undersea vents, simple carbon compounds bubbled up to form amino acids and peptides. The first bacteria moved through the ooze; then came blue-green algae, spreading across the planet like a watery carpet, drinking in sunlight and exhaling oxygen, giving breath to everything that came after. Geologists call this the Great Oxygenation Event—the most momentous change in the planet’s history. It seems inevitable now: life’s triumphant march toward complexity, toward us. But like most creation stories this one is also a cautionary tale. It has both a Heaven and a Hell.

In 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli drew the first detailed map of Mars, he imagined the planet as an earthly paradise. He labelled one region Eden, another Elysium, others, on later maps, Arcadia and Utopia. Peering through his telescope on the roof of the Palazzo di Brera, in Milan, Schiaparelli had seen what looked like oceans, continents, and water channels swim into view. “The planet is not a desert of arid rocks,” he wrote. “It lives.” And his successors often took him at his word: the sharper their telescopes, the blurrier their vision. They saw mountains of ice and rivers of snowmelt, William Sheehan writes in his 1996 book, “The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery.” They saw fertile oases and a moss-green equator. They saw an irrigation system so linear and “trigonometric,” as the astronomer Percival Lowell put it, that it could only be the work of a highly intelligent race. Some even saw a Hebrew word for Almighty—Shajdai—spelled out on the planet’s surface. “True, the magnitude of the work of cutting the canals into the shape of the name of God is at first thought appalling,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted in 1895. “But there are terrestrial works which to us today seem no less impossible.”

More here.

From Kurzweil AI:

Bioengineered rat kidneys developed by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators successfully produced urine both in a laboratory apparatus and after being transplanted into living animals. The approach used in this study to engineer donor organs, based on a technology that Ott discovered as a research fellow at the University of Minnesota, involves stripping the living cells from a donor organ with a detergent solution and then repopulating the collagen scaffold that remains with the appropriate cell type — in this instance human endothelial cells to replace the lining of the vascular system and kidney cells from newborn rats.

The research team first decellularized rat kidneys to confirm that the organ’s complex structures would be preserved. They also showed the technique worked on a larger scale by stripping cells from pig and human kidneys. Making sure the appropriate cells were seeded into the correct portions of the collagen scaffold required delivering vascular cells through the renal artery and kidney cells through the ureter. Precisely adjusting the pressures of the solutions enabled the cells to be dispersed throughout the whole organs, which were then cultured in a bioreactor for up to 12 days. The researchers first tested the repopulated organs in a device that passed blood through its vascular system and drained off any urine, which revealed evidence of limited filtering of blood, molecular activity and urine production. Bioengineered kidneys transplanted into living rats from which one kidney had been removed began producing urine as soon as the blood supply was restored, with no evidence of bleeding or clot formation.

More here.