Weizi Li in The Conversation:

Robotic vehicles can optimize the flow of traffic in cities even when mixed in with vehicles driven by humans, thereby improving traffic efficiency, safety and energy consumption, my colleagues and I found.

Robot vehicles are no longer a sci-fi concept: Cities around the world have been testing autonomous robotaxis since 2016. With the increasing presence of robot vehicles in traffic and the foreseeable long period of transitioning from mixed traffic to fully autonomous traffic, my team and I wondered whether robot vehicles and their interactions with human-driven vehicles can alleviate today’s notorious traffic problems.

I am a computer scientist who studies artificial intelligence for transportation and smart cities. My colleagues and I hypothesized that as the number of robot vehicles in traffic increases, we can harness AI to develop algorithms to control the complex mixed traffic system. These algorithms would not only enable all vehicles to travel smoothly from point A to point B but, more importantly, optimize overall traffic by allowing robot vehicles to affect vehicles driven by people.

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Charles T. Rubin in The New Atlantis:

One of the core assumptions of modern liberalism is that if you can solve the problem of material scarcity, you can go a long way to solving the problem of free and peaceful coexistence among equals. Modern technology has been essential to that dynamic from the start, a key driver of “development” and the success of democratic regimes. The West, and large parts of the rest of the world, are what they are today in great measure due to this project.

However, on this basis it is hard to understand why in the West, the first home of modern liberalism, we are also seeing, seemingly increasingly, the rise of illiberal ideologies, political parties, and politicians. Where Marxism and socialism promised to achieve liberal goals better than liberalism could, illiberal politics are based on the premise that the liberal understanding of human beings was mistaken from the start. Liberalism, it is said, puts too much emphasis on our material existence, for example, or is mistaken to give such central roles to human autonomy and equality. Despite technology’s crucial role in the success of liberalism, it now seems to be contributing more to illiberalism.

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Pam Belluck in The New York Times:

A newly developed blood test for Alzheimer’s has diagnosed the disease as accurately as methods that are far more expensive or invasive, scientists reported on Tuesday, a significant step toward a longtime goal for patients, doctors and dementia researchers. The test has the potential to make diagnosis simpler, more affordable and widely available.

The test determined whether people with dementia had Alzheimer’s instead of another condition. And it identified signs of the degenerative, deadly disease 20 years before memory and thinking problems were expected in people with a genetic mutation that causes Alzheimer’s, according to research published in JAMA and presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. Such a test could be available for clinical use in as little as two to three years, the researchers and other experts estimated, providing a readily accessible way to diagnose whether people with cognitive issues were experiencing Alzheimer’s, rather than another type of dementia that might require different treatment or have a different prognosis. A blood test like this might also eventually be used to predict whether someone with no symptoms would develop Alzheimer’s.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

If you hear the word Ozempic, weight loss immediately comes to mind. The drug—part of a family of treatments called GLP-1 agonists—took the medical world (and internet) by storm for helping people manage diabetes, lower the risk of heart disease, and rapidly lose weight. The drugs may also protect the brain against dementia. In a clinical trial including over 200 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease, a daily injection of a GLP-1 drug for one year slowed cognitive decline. When challenged with a battery of tests assessing memory, language skills, and decision-making, participants who took the drug remained sharper for longer than those who took a placebo—an injection that looked the same but wasn’t functional. The results are the latest from the Evaluating Liraglutide in Alzheimer’s Disease (ELAD) study led by Dr. Paul Edison at Imperial College London. Launched in 2014, the study was based on years of research in mice showing liraglutide—a GLP-1 drug already approved for weight loss and diabetes management in the United States—also protects the brain.

In Alzheimer’s disease, neurons die off and the brain gradually loses volume. In the trial, Liraglutide slowed the process down, resulting in roughly 50 percent less volume lost in several areas of the brain related to memory compared to a placebo. “We are in an era of unprecedented promise, with new treatments in various stages of development that slow or may possibly prevent cognitive decline due to Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Maria C. Carrillo, Alzheimer’s Association chief science officer and medical affairs lead, in a press release. “This research provides hope that more options for changing the course of the disease are on the horizon.”

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White Man Says to Me, Save

White man says to me,
save.
I save, String, Bricks, Trees.
Horses, Leather. Nobody wants
what I save. So I go into the
desert, rolling my ball of string
which is four feet in diameter.
Two white men come. They look at
the bricks. Trees. Horses.
Leather. String, Where’d you
steal them things they ask.
they don’t listen. they take
the string from me and they
twist it into a rope. Now they
put the rope around my neck.
They hang me from one of the
trees I saved.

by Fred Red Cloud

From American Indian Prose and Poetry
—After the White Man Came
Capricorn Books, 1974

Dan Falk at Undark:

There’s no question that we love to talk — but how did it happen? Yes, humpback whales sing, vervet monkeys use alarm calls, and bees convey information about food sources through dance, but only humans have full-blown language. Steven Mithen, a professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading, would seem to be well positioned to find the answer. His new book, “The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved,” is hardly the first to explore the issue — but it is perhaps the most thorough to date. Drawing on the latest findings from an array of fields, including linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, and genetics, Mithen guides the reader through some 1.6 million years of hominin evolution, from language’s earliest stirrings to the rich communication system it became for Homo sapiens.

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Richard Van Noorden in Nature:

How many clinical-trial studies in medical journals are fake or fatally flawed? In October 2020, John Carlisle reported a startling estimate¹.

Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England’s National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials. He is also an editor at the journal Anaesthesia, and in 2017, he decided to scour all the manuscripts he handled that reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) — the gold standard of medical research. Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies¹.

For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data.

Carlisle called these ‘zombie’ trials because they had the semblance of real research, but closer scrutiny showed they were actually hollow shells, masquerading as reliable information. Even he was surprised by their prevalence. “I anticipated maybe one in ten,” he says.

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Cat Orman and Jason Lu at Noahpinion:

Last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would ground over 70% of America’s industrial drone fleet. The Countering CCP Drones Act seeks to ban DJI, a Chinese unicorn and the world’s largest commercial drone manufacturer, from supplying its drones in the United States. So why has the bill sent drone pilots into a panic? Here is the unfortunate truth: there is no real alternative to DJI.

Like much of our electronics, the majority of drones deployed in the United States are made in China. It’s a bigger hole in our industrial base than you might think. Drones operate behind the scenes of every American industry — they inspect our civil infrastructure and electric grid, shoot movies, conduct land surveys, detect diseases in crops, prospect for minerals, locate gas leaks, and create 3D models. If you get mugged in one of over 1,500 American police precincts (including Santa Monica, where I live), the first responder on the scene might be a drone. But — as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated — even commercial-grade drones will play an increasingly important role in national security. To protect our critical industries and field an effective fighting force, the United States must develop a competitive drone industry, then get DJI out of our airspace.

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Elizabeth Yuko in Reader’s Digest: 

Fact: The Windy City nickname has nothing to do with Chicago’s weather

If you live in Chicago, you might already know this random fact, but we’re betting most other people don’t. Chicago’s nickname was coined by 19th-century journalists who were referring to the fact that its residents were “windbags” and “full of hot air.”

Fact: The longest English word is 189,819 letters long

We won’t spell it out here, but the full name for the protein nicknamed titin would take three and a half hours to say out loud. While this is, by far, the longest word in English, the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary has 45 letters, and the longest made-up word has just 28. Just a few more interesting facts for your next cocktail party!

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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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