Rachel Gorman in The Scientist:

An insect lands on the open leaves of a Venus flytrap plant, drawn to an appealing scent. It noses around and accidentally brushes one of the trap’s trigger hairs. An action potential shoots across the leaf blade. The insect keeps moving and bends another trigger hair, propagating a second action potential; suddenly, the leaves snap shut, trapping the insect, enveloping it in digestive juices, and absorbing the bug’s rich nutrients. How these two light touches trigger abrupt shutting of the leaves has been hypothesized, but never proven. Now, in a new study published in Current Biology, a team of researchers knocked out two ion channels, making it harder to produce action potentials and proving the channels’ importance in leaf closing.¹ “The paper is a very big technical advance,” said plant biophysicist Rainer Hedrich at the University of Wurzburg who was not involved in the study. “It is possible to knock out genes in an excitable plant and test hypotheses.”

More here.

Julien Crockett in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

JULIEN CROCKETT: I want to start with a quote from the end of your book where you discuss the final stage of life—death—and what happens with the failures we accumulate along the way:

An odd party indeed, but when you think about it, a better arrangement is hard to imagine. For when we finally make it to the door, we know exactly what we leave behind—what we have been. We exit clean and unattached to anything, scar-covered and worn out, yet whole. With some luck, even cured.

“Cured” is an interesting word choice, implying that we are sick. What do you mean by “cured”?

COSTICA BRADATAN: Of course we are sick. For what is life, after all, if not a genetically transmitted disease? This is an old, indeed timeless, insight. When Socrates was about to die, he asked one of his disciples, Crito, to perform a sacrifice, on his behalf, to Asklepios, the god of healing. In ancient Greece, you did that whenever you recovered from an illness. As Socrates was about to be cured of the sickness that had been his life, he felt grateful and wanted to thank the god of healing. A bit earlier, and in another part of the world, the Buddha had suggested something similar when he said that “to live is to suffer.” Indeed, life is no ordinary sickness, but a highly addictive one: the more of it we have, the more we want, and the more entangled in it we become.

More here.

Steven French at IAI News:

Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is widely regarded as both his most accessible and most influential work, written under the shadow of fascist ideology looming over Europe. Based on lectures given in 1935 at Charles University and the German University in Prague, Husserl opens by addressing the ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ question that many in the audience must have been asking themselves:

‘I expect that at this place, dedicated as it is to the sciences, the very title of these lectures … will incite controversy.’

Husserl was alluding to the fact that the German University had been the academic home of such notable scientists as Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein and that science was then enjoying a period of obvious and wide-ranging success. How, then, could he talk of the sciences undergoing a ‘crisis’? Husserl makes it clear that he is not referring to the ‘victorious struggle against the ideal of classical physics’ as represented by the rise of the theory of relativity and quantum physics.

More here.

Jeffrey Flier in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Disputes arising from geopolitical crises occur in numerous social settings, but colleges are especially vulnerable. First, campuses by their nature are (or should be) spaces for robust debate on contested topics, strongly protected by free-speech norms. Second, students and faculty represent diverse nationalities, religions, cultures, and belief systems. Third, college leaders are expected by many to express opinions on political and social issues on behalf of the institution.

This last practice is complex, and increasingly contested. The central mission of colleges is to serve as communities for discovery, improvement, and the transmission of knowledge. By fulfilling these roles, they play a critical role in the evolution of the social and political values of the societies in which they exist. Faculty are the key producers of this work, coordinated by administrative leaders who organize and facilitate the many complex activities required to carry out the mission. The extent to which college leaders should, in addition to their administrative roles, express institutional positions on contestable social and political issues is a matter of legitimate dispute.

More here.

Philip Elliott in Time Magazine:

In her prime, there was no one—no man or woman, no one wearing Team Red or Blue, no one brandishing centrist or progressive labels—who could rival Dianne Feinstein. She knew what it was like to lose; even before arriving in Washington, she had two failed bids for San Francisco mayor and one for California governor under her belt, not to mention the trauma of finding her friends immediately after a former colleague assassinated them in San Francisco City Hall back in 1978, all of which informed her desire to make the wins she did notch count all the more.

And did she ever win.

Feinstein, the longest-serving woman in the Senate, died Friday at the age of 90 and as the Upper Chamber’s oldest member. No cause was announced, but her health in recent months generated plenty of chatter in Washington and beyond about just how long was long enough for a powerful lawmaker to hang around the Capitol.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

ChatGPT, the AI language model capable of mirroring human conversation, may be better than a doctor at following recognized treatment standards for clinical depression, and without any of the gender or social class biases sometimes seen in the primary care doctor-patient relationship, finds research published in the open access journal Family Medicine and Community Health. However, further research is needed into how well this technology might manage severe cases as well as potential risks and ethical issues arising from its use, say the researchers.

Depression is very common, and many of those affected turn first to their family (primary care) doctors for help. The recommended course of treatment should largely be guided by evidence-based clinical guidelines, which usually suggest a tiered approach to care, in line with the severity of the depression.

More here.

Lessons from Mahler

In Sage Hall 5 at Smith, spring 1980, our music theory professor
places the needle on the final band of the album of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder.
The voice of mezzosoprano Janet Baker emerges from the orchestra:

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen…
I am lost to the world…

She weaves her way among the delicately orchestrated lines, answers the English horn,
sings of how the world may think she is dead because she has set aside its tumult
to rest in a quiet place. In serenity:

Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied. 
I live alone in my heaven,
in my love, in my song.

As the English horn resolves a suspension at the final cadence, I look up from my score
to see our professor weeping.

Analysis of
chromatic chords failed that day.
Tears taught me Mahler.

by Joanne Cory
from the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center

From Medical News Today:

About 1 billion peopleTrusted Source around the world live with a mental health disorder. Examples of mental health disorders include depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A study published in September 2023 estimates that approximately half the world’s population can expect to develop one or more mental health disorders by age 75.

While there are treatment options like psychotherapy, medicationsTrusted Source, and lifestyle changesTrusted Source that can help lessen mental health disorder symptoms, these are not equally effective for everyone. For this reason, researchers have also been looking at alternative treatments that could help. One of these potential alternative treatments involved the use of psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin. Now, a study from the University of Southern Denmark has found that microdosing on — or taking very small doses of — psilocybin may have a beneficial effect on mental health disorders. The researchers conducted their study in rat models.

More here.

Max Kozlov in Nature:

Rich, high-fat foods such as ice cream are loved not only for their taste, but also for the physical sensations they produce in the mouth — their ‘mouthfeel’. Now scientists have identified a brain area that both responds to the smooth texture of fatty foods and uses that information to rate the morsel’s allure, guiding eating behaviour¹.

A tongue for texture

…To explore how food textures influence eating habits, Fabian Grabenhorst, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues set out to quantify the mouthfeel of fatty foods. The authors prepared several milkshakes with varying fat and sugar contents and placed a sample of each between two pig tongues procured from a local butcher. The researchers then slid the tongues across each other and measured the amount of friction between the two surfaces, providing a numerical index of each shake’s smoothness.

More here.

Leah Greenblatt in Esquire:

Even in the wilting heat of a late-stage New York summer, Adjei-Brenyah cuts a striking figure; a security guard pulls away from corralling unruly tweens just to compliment his hat, a trilby in rich forest green. The guard probably has no reason to know that this elegant, soft-spoken man who quite literally would not hurt a fly is the same one who’s published two of the most explosive and unlikely literary sensations of the past five years—the astonishing 2018 story collection Friday Black and his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, released in May and now short-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction. Both are brutal, maximalist, and often gorgeously profane missiles of dystopian satire: Joseph Heller meets Jordan Peele somewhere beyond Thunderdome. The Guardian called Chain-Gang “an exuberant circus of a novel,” while The New York Times sang that its fight scenes unfold “as if Joe Rogan had fallen into a trance and assumed the diction and rhythms of Toni Morrison.”

More here.

Sheon Han in Quanta:

Some scientific discoveries matter because they reveal something new — the double helical structure of DNA, for example, or the existence of black holes. However, some revelations are profound because they show that two old concepts, once thought distinct, are in fact the same. Take James Clerk Maxwell’s equations showing that electricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single phenomenon, or general relativity’s linking of gravity with a curved space-time.

The Curry-Howard correspondence does the same but on a larger scale, linking not just separate concepts within one field, but entire disciplines: computer science and mathematical logic. Also known as the Curry-Howard isomorphism (a term meaning there exists some kind of one-to-one correspondence between two things), it establishes a link between mathematical proofs and computer programs.

More here.

Ken Roth in Time:

Hamas’s random slaughter of Israeli civilians, its abduction of survivors as hostages, its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel’s cities are all war crimes – egregious violations of international humanitarian law, which is designed to spare civilians as much as possible the hazards of war. Using that legal framework is important because it also binds the Israeli military, which is the best way to ensure that the civilian toll in Gaza from Israel’s aerial bombardment and possible ground invasion does not quickly surmount the deaths at the hands of Hamas.

More here.

Stuart Mills in Singularity Hub:

AI is developing rapidly. ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing online service in history. Google and Microsoft are integrating generative AI into their products. And world leaders are excitedly embracing AI as a tool for economic growth. As we move beyond ChatGPT and Bard, we’re likely to see AI chatbots become less generic and more specialized. AIs are limited by the data they’re exposed to in order to make them better at what they do—in this case, mimicking human speech and providing users with useful answers. Training often casts the net wide, with AI systems absorbing thousands of books and web pages. But a more select, focused set of training data could make AI chatbots even more useful for people working in particular industries or living in certain areas.

An important factor in this evolution will be the growing costs of amassing training data for advanced large language models (LLMs), the type of AI that powers ChatGPT. Companies know data is valuable: Meta and Google make billions from selling advertisements targeted with user data. But the value of data is now changing. Meta and Google sell data “insights”; they invest in analytics to transform many data points into predictions about users.

More here.

Warren Cornwall in Anthropocene Magazine:

When Charles Darwin made the famous voyage that took him to the Galapagos, he marveled at the giant tortoises that lumbered across the islands. He tried to ride them. He ate their flesh. He followed the paths they created in their ponderous travels. And he mused at their differing shapes on different islands, insights that helped steer him toward his theory of evolution by natural selection.

“It is the circumstance, that several of the islands possess their own species of the tortoise, mocking-thrush, finches, and numerous plants, these species having the same general habits, occupying analogous situations, and obviously filling the same place in the natural economy of this archipelago, that strikes me with wonder,” Darwin wrote in his account of the trip, The Voyage of the Beagle.

What he didn’t fully appreciate—at least judging by his writings—is the critical role the enormous reptiles played in shaping the plant communities of these islands. But the return of thousands of giant tortoises to the Galapagos island of Española is giving scientists new insights into the transformative power these behemoths wield. It is the latest in a long list of scientific discoveries emerging from the tiny cluster of islands off the coast of Ecuador. And it holds out the potential for restoring island ecosystems in part by reviving reptile herbivores.

More here.

Adam Piore in Newsweek:

For years, Alzheimer’s conferences were like the obituary pages in the local newspaper: It’s where clinicians and researchers in the field went to find out the names of the latest promising drugs to die. Between 1998 and 2017 alone, 146 clinical trials of new Alzheimer’s drugs failed.

So when Randall Bateman showed up outside a restaurant in Bar Harbor, Maine, one evening in the fall of 2022 during an industry confab and announced to a couple of tables full of his colleagues drinking on the patio that he had something important to share with them, no one was prepared for what came next. Bateman, a neurologist and Alzheimer’s researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, told them he had just received a phone call from his contact at the drug company running the trials of lecanemab, an experimental drug designed to facilitate the removal of the toxic plaques in the brain associated with the disease. The results, set for public release the following morning, were in: In a study of 1,800 Alzheimer’s patients over 18 months, the treatment had reduced the rate of cognitive decline by close to 30 percent.

More here.

Footnotes

Where does history go
when it hasn’t been tended?
I say it grows wild amongst
the Periwinkle, the Turkey-foot fern
and my mind. There it is
right alongside my heavy heart
like that mass of stones left on a hill
the only remnants left of the Kingdom
speaking of mountain royalty,
King Robert and Queen Louella
leased for ten cents a day
by a Civil War widow, named Serpta.
Their rule over 200 acres
of chopping, hauling and toting.
I understand this urgency
the need of self-appointment.
I hear it in the restless wind on the ridge
or are those ancestral voices crying out
about the uneasy quilt stitch hearsay
of their lives being left to myth and lore?
Where does history go when it dies?
When corn cribs and makeshift houses
no longer riddle the mountain slopes
and forty years of hands culling
Comfrey into a healing balm
along with Gospel Songs cease.
This silent edge is where I live
filled with heartache remembering history
and where it goes without a foothold.

by Glenis Redmond
from My Laureates Lasso, 3/11/2009

Rashid Khalidi in The New York Times:

Israel has ordered more than a million people to leave northern Gaza, presumably to prepare for an imminent ground offensive. Its military strategists appear to be planning the depopulation and reoccupation of at least part of an area home to around 2.3 million people — nearly half of them children — and most of them descended from people driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. We must understand that these are human beings at grave risk, not just numbers.

Consider what some in the Israeli defense establishment have said. “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in,” a reservist major general, Giora Eiland, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper. “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” He added, “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”

More here.

The Park

In that oblivious, concentrated, fiercely fetal decontraction
. . . . peculiar to the lost,
a grimy derelict is flat out on a green bench by the sandbox,
. . . . gazing blankly at the children.
“Do you want to play with me?” a small boy asks another,
. . . . his fine head tilted deferentially,
but the other has a lovely fire truck so doesn’t have to answer
. . . . and emphatically he doesn’t,
he just grinds his toy, its wheels immobilized with grit, along
. . . . the low stone wall.
The first child sinks forlornly down and lays his palms against
. . . . the earth like Buddha.
The ankles of the derelict are scabbed and swollen, torn with
. . . . arching varicose and cankers.
Who will come to us now? Who will solace us? Who will
. . . . take us in their healing hands?

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994