Adam Frank in Aeon:

Suddenly, everyone is talking about aliens. After decades on the cultural margins, the question of life in the Universe beyond Earth is having its day in the sun. The next big multibillion-dollar space telescope (the successor to the James Webb) will be tuned to search for signatures of alien life on alien planets and NASA has a robust, well-funded programme in astrobiology. Meanwhile, from breathless newspaper articles about unexplained navy pilot sightings to United States congressional testimony with wild claims of government programmes hiding crashed saucers, UFOs and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) seem to be making their own journey from the fringes.

What are we to make of these twin movements, the scientific search for life on one hand, and the endlessly murky waters of UFO/UAP claims on the other? Looking at history shows that these two very different approaches to the question of extraterrestrial life are, in fact, linked, but not in a good way.

More here.

Mo Husseini writes:

I wanted to share a (not exhaustive) list of 50 useful and indisputable facts on the Palestinian / Israeli conflict.

FACT No. 1.

Some Jews are shitty and awful people.

FACT No. 2.

Some Muslims are shitty and awful people.

FACT No. 3.

Some Christians are shitty and awful people.

FACT No. 4.

Some Arabs are shitty and awful people.

FACT No. 5.

Some Americans are shitty and awful people.

More here.

Bill Driscoll in witf:

Chip Walter’s new book is titled “Immortality Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions and the Quest to Live Forever.” It’s about the money, and the research, that’s seeking a way to extend human life indefinitely. Sounds like science fiction, but Walter thinks breakthroughs are just around the corner. “I think it’s going to begin to happen in the next five years,” said the Pittsburgh-based science writer in a recent interview.

As the term “renegade science” suggests, efforts to “cure death,” as Walters puts it, remain something of a fringe enterprise. But given that the likes of Google and Apple are backing work by scientific visionaries, Walter is convinced they won’t be for long. And his 300-page book doesn’t seem to be dwelling on the fringes: Walter is a former CNN bureau chief with other respected science books to his credit, and “Immortality, Inc.,” published by National Geographic, is getting respectful reviews from the likes of Publishers’ Weekly.

The project started several years ago, when Walter recalls magazines running cover stories on research that had the much more modest goal of helping people live to 120 or so. At the time, he didn’t find the prospects for such lab work especially bright. That changed in 2013, when he learned that Google and Apple were getting into the game. “And you went, ‘OK, now it’s serious,’” he said. “That was to me a huge turning point because there was some serious credibility behind that. It wasn’t just snake oil.”

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

Stem-cell researcher Carolina Florian didn’t trust what she was seeing. Her elderly laboratory mice were starting to look younger. They were more sprightly and their coats were sleeker. Yet all she had done was to briefly treat them — many weeks earlier — with a drug that corrected the organization of proteins inside a type of stem cell. When technicians who were replicating her experiment in two other labs found the same thing, she started to feel more confident that the treatment was somehow rejuvenating the animals. In two papers, in 2020 and 2022, her team described how the approach extends the lifespan of mice and keeps them fit into old age^1,2.

The target of Florian’s elixir is the immune system. The stem cells she treated are called haematopoietic, or blood, stem cells (HS cells), which give rise to all immune cells. As blood circulates, the mix of cells pervades every organ, affecting all bodily functions. But the molecular composition of the HS cells changes with age, and this distorts the balance of immune cells that they produce. “Fixing the drift in them that occurs with time seems to fix a lot of the problems of ageing — not only in the immune system but also in the rest of the body,” says Florian, who is now at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. In March³, another team showed that restoring the balance between two key types of immune cell gives old mice more youthful immune systems, improving the animals’ ability to respond to vaccines and to stave off viral infections.

More here.

Aesthetically, Amy is trapped in the mall-fashion amber of Long Island—where Conte, who is now based in Los Angeles, grew up—between the years 1986 and 1991: the ideal primal-scene milieu for an artist born in the late ’70s. Amy’s clothes, seemingly plucked off the rack from a Merry-Go-Round, call to mind the looks once offered by teen-favorite brands Generra, IOU, or B.U.M. Equipment. She also possesses a thick mane of hair, which is frequently teased into the fully dressed styles of her fulsome era.

more here.

Antony Spawforth at Literary Review:

Religion reinforced Ptolemaic queenship. The influential Egyptian priesthood and the Ptolemaic court were politically co-dependent. In discussing this relationship, the author makes skilful use of the art and hieroglyphs found in Egypt’s temples. These showcased favourably the role of the Ptolemaic queen, hedging it with a prestigious divinity. How much this ‘propaganda’ rubbed off on ordinary Egyptians is debatable. Llewellyn-Jones also highlights the colonialist and racist character of the Graeco-Macedonian occupation of Egypt and describes the so-called Great Revolt of around 199 BC. Setting southern Egypt alight, it was put down by Alexandria only after a real show of force. 

By the time he gets to her, in chapter fifteen, Llewellyn-Jones has established that the famous Cleopatra, the seventh of that name, certainly had family history on her side – not all of it edifying – in gauging how to play the part of Ptolemaic queen regnant.

more here.

Older Love

His wife has asthma
so he only smokes outdoors
or late at night with head
and shoulders well into
the fireplace, the mesquite and oak
heat bright against his face.
Does it replace the heat
that has wandered from love
back into the natural world?
But then the shadow passion casts
is much longer than passion,
stretching with effort from year to year.
Outside tonight hard wind and sleet
from three bald mountains,
and on the hearth before his face
the ashes we’ll all become,
soft as the back of a woman’s knee.

by Jim Harrison
from Poetic Outlaws

Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian:

To answer the question of what we’re losing, think about what nightlife has given us. It was always a haven for outsiders trying to find, establish or shape their own communities. It brings people together and remains an insistently communal experience in an increasingly individualistic and closed-off late capitalist society. Gigs and clubs require us to be together – as friends, but also with those we don’t know. Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, an academic who researches dance-music scenes, calls this “stranger-intimacy”.

Nights out are not always utopian, of course. Hedonism can lead to trouble of the negative kind, but it can also lead to trouble that changes the world. After dark, revelations and revolutions happen. Marginalised communities have found freedom in nightlife, and gone on to push that freedom into the daylight. People who were at the Stonewall riots say that their protest emerged from an insistence on the right to dance freely.

More here.

Thomas Zurbuchen in Quanta:

Our sun is the best-observed star in the entire universe.

We see its light every day. For centuries, scientists have tracked the dark spots dappling its radiant face, while in recent decades, telescopes in space and on Earth have scrutinized sunbeams in wavelengths spanning the electromagnetic spectrum. Experiments have also sniffed the sun’s atmosphere, captured puffs of the solar wind, collected solar neutrinos and high-energy particles, and mapped our star’s magnetic field — or tried to, since we have yet to really observe the polar regions that are key to learning about the sun’s inner magnetic structure.

For all that scrutiny, however, one crucial question remained embarrassingly unsolved. At its surface, the sun is a toasty 6,000 degrees Celsius. But the outer layers of its atmosphere, called the corona, can be a blistering — and perplexing — 1 million degrees hotter.

More here.

Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

I was meeting my mother at the museum. My mother is both a great lover of art and completely unpretentious about it. Often, she simply stands in front of objects of art and smiles. We found ourselves in an exhibit entitled Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting. We were both suddenly astonished. I don’t know why exactly. I do know why un-exactly. The paintings are extraordinary. But what does that mean? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Indian Court paintings. I’ve seen a few here and there, including some in India. But I don’t know how to look at them. I don’t know the history or the context or the way that these paintings fit into a narrative. I don’t know the codes. So I just looked, without context, without codes.

More here.

Sudeep Dasgupta in the European Review of Books:

Palestine, before it named something else, named a region. The region emerged during Ottoman rule, between 1518 and 1920. It was called Filastin in Arabic, the language of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who lived in this region. The word « Palestinians » could apply to all of them. It could refer to « Palestinians » beyond Palestine, too, as when Immanuel Kant, for example, referred to European Jews in 1798 as « Palestinians living among us » in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. This is one of many things we’ve forgotten to remember.

Jews in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, identified as Ottoman citizens, and, in the Empire’s Arab-speaking regions, as Arab. « Arab » could encompass Muslims, Christians, Druzes, Alevis and Jews. Another thing we’ve forgotten to remember is an intimate relationality — Muslims, Jews, Christians and others — forged within the Ottoman project by those in Palestine and beyond, long before our time. As the Ottoman Empire fractured in the early twentieth century and collapsed after World War I, the term « Arab » would acquire an increasingly political or nationalist edge.

More here.

Tasneem Zehra Husain in New Humanist:

If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – but what happens when we want to know what our calculations mean? Well, that is when we revert to our own native tongue: metaphor.

Why metaphor? Because that is how we think, how learn, how we parse the world. Metaphor comes from the Greek metaphora, a “transfer”; literally a “carrying over”. The very act of understanding (from the Old English: to stand in the midst of) implies the existence of a “between”, a bridge between new and known. In effect, a metaphor. How could it be otherwise? How else can we assimilate a new piece of knowledge, other than by linking it to something we already know? In doing so, we weave a web. When we wonder what something means, what we’re really asking is: what will it impact? If I pull on this thread here, where will my web tighten, where might it unravel?

When we can’t find a suitable metaphor to describe our scientific reality, we run into problems. Take, for instance, quantum mechanics. Most of the devices we use every day are built upon eerily accurate calculations made using quantum theory. Operationally, the theory is wildly successful, yet no one can make complete sense of it. Even scientists who wield the equations with ease don’t claim to truly understand quantum theory; we still don’t have a metaphor that works.

More here.

Gayathri Vaidyanathan in Nature:

An orangutan in Sumatra surprised scientists when he was seen treating an open wound on his cheek with a poultice made from a medicinal plant. It’s the first scientific record of a wild animal healing a wound using a plant with known medicinal properties. The findings were published this week in Scientific Reports¹. “It shows that orangutans and humans share knowledge. Since they live in the same habitat, I would say that’s quite obvious, but still intriguing to realize,” says Caroline Schuppli, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, and a co-author of the study.

In 2009, Schuppli’s team was observing Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) in the Gunung Leuser National Park in South Aceh, Indonesia, when a young male moved into the forest. He did not have a mature male’s big cheek pads, called flanges, and was probably around 20 years old, Schuppli says. He was named Rakus, or ‘greedy’ in Indonesian, after he ate all the flowers off a gardenia bush in one sitting. In 2021, Rakus underwent a growth spurt and became a mature flanged male. The researchers observed Rakus fighting with other flanged males to establish dominance and, in June 2022, a field assistant noted an open wound on his face, possibly made by the canines of another male, Schuppli says.

More here.

How Insignificant We Are

Before I was six years old,
my grandparents and my mother
had taught me that

if all the green things that grow
were taken from the earth,
there could be no life.

If all the four-legged creatures
were taken from the earth,
there could be no life.

If all the winged creatures
were taken from the earth,
there could be no life.

If all our relatives who crawl and swim
and live within the earth
were taken away,
there could be no life.

But if all the human beings
were taken away,
life on earth would flourish.

That is how insignificant we are.”

By Russell Means,
Oglala Lakota Nation
(November 10, 1939 – October 22, 2012).

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, is as fragrantly replete as a long border at its peak. The word that comes to mind is spumy: a blossomy, brimful excess that’s almost too much at times. Here are hundreds of plants, exquisitely described; here is colour, energy and expertise. In a way, it’s akin to a garden itself; a place, almost a park, in which the reader never quite knows what’s around the next corner. But while this is invigorating – my imagination whirred across the verdant expanses of its pages like some crazy, old-fashioned lawnmower – it’s also tiring. Dizzy on its pollen, I often had to put it down. I began to think of the chapter breaks as conveniently placed benches on which I might for a while sit quietly, temporarily unassailed by endless common names, ongoing worries about honey fungus, and long disquisitions on privilege and exclusion.

Laing does two things at once. First and foremost, this book is a memoir, in which she describes her restoration of the garden attached to the house in Suffolk to which she moved in 2020, as Covid-19 raged on and so many of us sought respite in our backyards, balconies and window boxes (in the course of 2020, more than 3 million people in Britain began to garden for the first time, nearly half of them under 45).

more here.