Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist:

Buying or selling bitcoin uses 16,000 litres of clean water for every single transaction, which could exacerbate existing droughts around the world. While the energy consumption and carbon emissions produced by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been well studied, this is the first assessment of its water use and wider environmental impact.

Alex de Vries at the VU Amsterdam School of Business and Economics in the Netherlands has calculated that mining – the computational process that secures the bitcoin network – uses between 8.6 and 35.1 billion litres of water per year in the US alone. He says that bitcoin used 1.6 trillion litres of water globally in 2021, and expects this to rise to 2.3 trillion litres this year. Broken down per transaction, that means a single bitcoin trade consumes 16,000 litres of water – enough to fill a small swimming pool. This is “increasingly hard to defend”, says de Vries.

More here.

Lynn Greenky in The Conversation:

The First Amendment does not protect messages posted on social media platforms.

The companies that own the platforms can – and do – remove, promote or limit the distribution of any posts according to corporate policies. But all that might soon change.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear five cases during this current term, which ends in June 2024, that collectively give the court the opportunity to reexamine the nature of content moderation – the rules governing discussions on social media platforms such as Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter – and the constitutional limitations on the government to affect speech on the platforms.

Content moderation, whether done manually by company employees or automatically by a platform’s software and algorithms, affects what viewers can see on a digital media page. Messages that are promoted garner greater viewership and greater interaction; those that are deprioritized or removed will obviously receive less attention. Content moderation policies reflect decisions by digital platforms about the relative value of posted messages.

More here.

Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:

DNA mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes drive tumorigenesis, but epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation, take center stage in a new era of cancer research.¹ In a study published in Cancer Cell, researchers cast a wide -omics net to capture extensive DNA methylation, transcriptomic, and proteomic data from almost 700 tumors and healthy tissues. ² Their findings help unravel the complex effects of methylation on tumor development. “This study really provides the first look at how methylation and epigenetic modification of the DNA eventually have an impact on the protein abundance, and that those proteins are actually driving cancers,” said Li Ding, an expert in cancer genomics at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the paper.

Scientists often use proteomics data in a targeted way in cancer research, for example, to detect biomarkers in blood for specific cancer types.³ Ding and her colleagues wanted to perform a much broader study to identify entirely new factors involved in the onset of cancer. It was no small feat. They simultaneously ran DNA methylation, transcriptomic, and proteomic analyses to investigate more than 10,000 genes and proteins across seven different cancer types. This unbiased approach allowed them to discover previously unknown methylation events that affect protein levels and drive cancer.

More here.

Amol S. Nayathe in The New York Times:

We’ve Come to Expect

—an excerpt

Let’s remember not only the local wars
over claims but a late conflict of siblings
in aristocracy and the stock market,
………….. sharing destruction.

Or recollect the brothers who stayed back east
laboring in the shoe factory, or their
bosses who summered hunting in Scotland and
………….. reside forever

in the protestant cemetery at Rome
among cats, the pyramid of Cestius,
and Keats’s grave. What use are those forefathers
…………..to our condition?

We want comfort: . . .

…………..…………..~~~~

…………..Or say: We’re sixty
…………..years old we know better
…………..and do less. Things we
…………..know better are antinomian
…………..adventure, sequent despair,
…………..error, self-deception, failure,
…………..and good cheer. No wonder
…………..that we’d prefer, with
…………..the dying Irish poet, to
…………..be “young” and “ignorant.”

by Donald Hall
from The Museum of Clear Ideas
Ticknor and Fields 1993

Robyn White in Newsweek:

Biologists have discovered another incredible skill of ants that put humans to shame—they have a special technique to avoid traffic jams. Scientists from Texas Tech University and other institutions studied the 20-minute rhythms of the Leptothorax ant and discovered that their clever synchronization skills allowed them to avoid congestion. Their findings are published in a Proceedings of the Royal Society study.

After observing several Leptothorax nests for some time, it became clear that it was the ants’ sudden bursts of activity, performed simultaneously, that allowed them to avoid these jams. Ants are considered to be one of the smartest insects on Earth and are highly social. They are well known for their synchronization and complex behaviors, such as the way they collectively transport prey, their coordinated movements, and their “consensus-decision making when choosing a nest,” the study reported.

More here.

Mara Naselli at Literary Hub:

On that gray February morning, the exhibit galleries smelled of perfumed wool and vibrated with a hushed reverence for Picasso’s creatures—two-legged, four-legged, winged, taloned, hooved. A man with a goat, a tiny horse with casters for feet, a girl jumping rope, Picasso’s ever-present Minotaur. And many, many women.

“Subjects are a bore, anyway,” Picasso told his friend the art critic Carlton Lake in 1957. “I’ve always said there are no subjects anymore.” And yet in the galleries I was surrounded: a Venus in a stove burner, a cock in bronze, a hand in plaster, the head of a woman in sheet metal and kitchen tools. Bodies changed from one form into another. Everyday objects transformed.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

The Artificial Intelligence landscape is changing with remarkable speed these days, and the capability of Large Language Models in particular has led to speculation (and hope, and fear) that we could be on the verge of achieving Artificial General Intelligence. I don’t think so. Or at least, while what is being achieved is legitimately impressive, it’s not anything like the kind of thinking that is done by human beings. LLMs do not model the world in the same way we do, nor are they driven by the same kinds of feelings and motivations. It is therefore extremely misleading to throw around words like “intelligence” and “values” without thinking carefully about what is meant in this new context.

More here.

Henry Farrell and Mark Blyth at Good Authority:

Henry Farrell: You’ve written a very influential book on economic austerity and why Europe embraced it. Your work helps explain why Germany introduced a “debt brake” into its constitution that minimized government borrowing except under emergency conditions. Last week, the German Constitutional Court said that the debt brake prevented the government from borrowing money to finance green measures. What does this mean for Europe’s transition to a post-carbon economy?

Mark Blyth: Well, it’s not very good for it. The real question is, why do countries keep introducing pro-cyclical fiscal rules that make crises worse? In Germany, it allowed the Greens, who wanted to spend lots of money on heat pumps in every house, and the liberals, who wanted to spend no money, to join together with the social democrats to form a government. They compromised on doing the spending through what are called “off balance sheet vehicles,” which are like the “special purpose vehicles” that banks used in the run up to the financial crisis. The Court said they couldn’t do this.

Politicians don’t want to acknowledge what the carbon transition will cost. What could possibly go wrong when you hide debt from your voters, not acknowledging it as part of your balance sheet, taking the risk that interest rates go up and your asset values go down?

More here.

Mark Peplow in Nature:

On the outskirts of Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, nestled among car dealerships and hardware shops, sits a two-storey factory stuffed with solar-power secrets. It’s here where UK firm Oxford PV is producing commercial solar cells using perovskites: cheap, abundant photovoltaic (PV) materials that some have hailed as the future of green energy. Surrounded by unkempt grass and a weed-strewn car park, the factory is a modest cradle for such a potentially transformative technology, but the firm’s chief technology officer Chris Case is clearly in love with the place. “This is the culmination of my dreams,” he says.

The firm is one of more than a dozen companies betting that perovskites are finally poised to push the global transition to renewable energy into overdrive.

More here.

Hope Reese in The New York Times:

As we age, our memory declines. This is an ingrained assumption for many of us; however, according to neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and clinical professor at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health, decline is not inevitable. The author of more than 20 books on the mind, Dr. Restak has decades’ worth of experience in guiding patients with memory problems. “The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind,” Dr. Restak’s latest book, includes tools such as mental exercises, sleep habits and diet that can help boost memory.

Yet Dr. Restak ventures beyond this familiar territory, considering every facet of memory — how memory is connected to creative thinking, technology’s impact on memory, how memory shapes identity. “The point of the book is to overcome the everyday problems of memory,” Dr. Restak said. Especially working memory, which falls between immediate recall and long-term memory, and is tied to intelligence, concentration and achievement. According to Dr. Restak, this is the most critical type of memory, and exercises to strengthen it should be practiced daily. But bolstering all memory skills, he added, is key to warding off later memory issues.

More here.

The Innumerable

The innumerable live in us;
when I think or feel, I do not know
who it is thinks or feels.
I am merely a place
of feeling or thought.
I have more souls than one.

There are more I’s than myself.

I exist nonetheless
indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The conflicting impulses
of what I feel or do not feel
dispute inside who I am.

I ignore them. They dictate nothing
to the one I know. I write.

by Fernando Pessoa
from Poetic Outlaws

Clare Carlisle at The Nation:

Even though Kierkegaard treats despair as a spiritual and existential condition rather than just a psychological state, The Sickness Unto Death sparkles with psychological insight. Especially compelling is his diagnosis of the different forms of despair that arise from an imbalance between the various pairs that make up the human synthesis (those first folds in our sheets of paper). Too much necessity, and we lose all imagination and hope—we cannot breathe; too much possibility, and we float airily, ineffectually, above our own lives. Too much finitude, and we lose ourselves in trivial things; too much infinitude, and we’re disconnected from the world. Since life is so rarely in balance, despair is the inevitable state—but understanding this, for Kierkegaard, opens up a renewed perspective on how to live with this inevitability.

The psychology of despair also helps illuminate its politics and sociology. Kierkegaard saw the fact that we are disconnected from ourselves, and from God, as not just an individual problem but an indictment of the modern age.

more here.

Langdon Hammer at The Paris Review:

Elizabeth Bishop delighted in the postcard. It suited her poetic subject matter and her way of life—this poet of travel who was more often on the move than at home, “wherever that may be,” as she put it in her poem “Questions of Travel.” She told James Merrill in a postcard written in 1979 that she seldom wrote “anything of any value at the desk or in the room where I was supposed to be doing it—it’s always in someone else’s house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night.”

Since her death in 1979 and the publication of her selected correspondence, Bishop has become known as one of the great modern-day letter-writers. And yet inevitably something is lost when an editor transcribes a letter to prepare it for print: the quality of the correspondent’s hand (or the model of her typewriter), the paper used, cross-outs and typos, and everything else that fixes the letter in time and space. When it comes to a postcard, or a letter composed on a series of postcards (something Bishop enjoyed doing), we get none of the images, and even more is lost.

more here.

Soni Wadhwa at the Asian Review of Books:

Knowledge is power. This is a statement often made to reinforce the relentless pursuit of data, information and know-how to get ahead in business and technology. Scholarship or studiousness is seen as a virtue that can give one an edge over the others in the face of tough competition. With such a celebration of knowledge, it appears that anything can be legitimized if it is connected with knowledge creation or dissemination. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, Joshua Ehrlich examines a much stronger, to the point of being literal, historical connection between knowledge and power. 

The subject of his study is the late 18th- to mid-19th-century regime of the East India Company. The Company was questioned by Indian sovereigns as well as the British Parliament for its pretense to run Indian territory it captured as if it were a sovereign power. After all, they objected, it was absurd for a commercial entity to have any credentials for governance.

More here.

Patrick Barkham in The Guardian:

Why does the giant squid have eyes as large as a football? Why do more than 350 species of fish produce their own electricity? Why do dogs become more optimistic after two weeks of plentiful sniffing?

The mysteries and miracles of animal senses are revealed in this year’s winner of the £25,000 Royal Society Trivedi science book prize, which was announced on Wednesday.

An Immense World by Ed Yong is an epic exploration of the unique “umwelt” of other creatures, from tree hoppers to singing frogs, who sense the world in vastly different ways to humans. It is also a plea for greater empathy with other species.

More here.