From Quanta Magazine:

By genetically instructing cells to perform tasks that they wouldn’t in nature, synthetic biologists can learn deep secrets about how life works. Steven Strogatz discusses the potential of this young field with researcher Michael Elowitz.

What is synthetic biology and what are scientists trying to do with it? Simply put, we could say that synthetic biology is a fusion of biology, especially molecular biology, and engineering. The distinctive thing about it is that it treats cells as programmable devices. It’s a kind of tinker toy approach that builds circuits, but not out of wires and switches like we’re used to, but rather out of biological components, like proteins and genes. Programming cells in this way isn’t really all that different from programming computers, except that the programming language isn’t Python, or C++. It’s the language of biology, the language of DNA, with the goal of making proteins that will interact with each other in some clever ways.

The potential medical applications of synthetic biology are huge. But also, the approach holds promise for illuminating how life works at the deepest level. It’s one thing to strip cells apart to see how they work. That’s the classic approach to molecular biology. But it’s another thing to tinker with cells to try to get them to perform new tricks, which is something that my guest, Michael Elowitz, does. For example, a while back, he engineered cells to blink on and off like Christmas lights.

More here.

Jonathan Owen at The Current:

The 1960s saw a remarkable cinematic renaissance in what was then called Czechoslovakia, and Ester Krumbachová was its renaissance woman. Combining the talents of costume, set, and prop designer, screenwriter, and director, Krumbachová contributed to many of the greatest films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, including Daisies (1966), A Report on the Party and Guests (1966), Witchhammer (1970), and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). Though these films have long been celebrated for their anarchic imagination and bold political critiques, the woman who perhaps most fully embodied their inventive spirit and sharp moral viewpoint remains all too little appreciated.

Krumbachová has been feted as the “queen of Czech film design” and “the muse of the Czechoslovak New Wave.”

more here.

Kate Mossman at The New Statesman:

Twenty-five years on from the YBA movement, Lucas is still admired for her lightness of touch. She used sex to draw people in to her work, she recently said – to keep art open to “plebs like myself”. She was funny, but she was funny because she was clever: much of her work was barely “made”, just a couple of objects, perfectly arranged. Has she never wanted assistants, like Hirst, to help her churn out more bunnies? “If I can’t be bothered to make ’em, I wouldn’t want someone else to make ’em,” she says. “And I don’t know where I’m going with it until I’ve done it, so it’s not like I can tell someone else how to do it.” Unlike her former friend Tracey Emin, she does not try to draw.

Lucas, now 60, talks soft and fast in a velveteen smokers’ tone that, in ten years, will be as deep as Dot Cotton’s. She refers to herself as more or less an alcoholic.

more here.

Elaine Szewczyk at The Millions:

Kazuo Ishiguro has had a busy few months. The acclaimed novelist has been attending film festivals and walking red carpets to promote the film Living, for which he wrote the screenplay. Living—a remake of the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa, which was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan IIyich—is set in 1950s London and stars Bill Nighy as Rodney Williams, a senior bureaucrat in the Public Works department who is dying of cancer. The film has been an awards season darling, and this January Ishiguro was nominated for an Academy Award, his first, for best adapted screenplay.

No stranger to big awards, Ishiguro has won the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2019 received a knighthood for his contribution to literature.

More here.

Huw Price and Ken Wharton in The Conversation:

In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the universe works.

Many look at those experiments and conclude that they challenge “locality” — the intuition that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact. And indeed, a mysterious connection between distant particles would be one way to explain these experimental results.

Others instead think the experiments challenge “realism” — the intuition that there’s an objective state of affairs underlying our experience. After all, the experiments are only difficult to explain if our measurements are thought to correspond to something real. Either way, many physicists agree about what’s been called “the death by experiment” of local realism.

But what if both of these intuitions can be saved, at the expense of a third? A growing group of experts think that we should abandon instead the assumption that present actions can’t affect past events. Called “retrocausality”, this option claims to rescue both locality and realism.

More here.

Hugo Mercier in Persuasion:

After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election there was widespread suspicion that the results had been influenced by a Russian operation. The Internet Research Agency, a “troll factory” operating out of St Petersburg, was creating accounts posing as U.S. citizens or news agencies, posting thousands upon thousands of messages, the majority in support of Trump, and many fake. Could the Russians have pulled off something as big as swaying a U.S. election?

The answer has recently been confirmed: No. In January this year, a study by Gregory Eady, Tom Paskhalis, and their colleagues found that the majority (70%) of this Russian propaganda was consumed by only 1% of Twitter users, people who were already staunch Republicans and thus already overwhelmingly likely to vote for Trump. As a result, the fake news shared by the trolls merely preached to the choir. It doesn’t seem to have changed anyone’s mind.

More here.

More here.

Derek Lowe in Chemistry World:

DeepMind’s AlphaFold team has been having quite a run of success in predicting protein structures. This has long been considered one of the truly difficult problems in computational biology, and AlphaFold has made extraordinary progress over the last year or two. This has culminated in the recent release of predicted structures for the great majority of the human proteome, which is the sort of thing that, ten years ago, would have sounded like the opening of a science fiction story.

I have no desire to take anything away from this success. It really is impressive. But some of the headlines have betrayed real misunderstandings about what’s been accomplished. First off, as I wrote here earlier this year, we have not made sudden huge leaps in understanding why proteins fold like they do. The AlphaFold people have made great progress in recognising different known protein folding motifs and assembling them into structures that are very often correct. Forming these coils, loops, and sheets is what proteins generally do, but ‘why?’ doesn’t enter into it. If we’d waited for an answer at that level, we’d be waiting for many more years.

More here.

Bird Psalm

The Swallow said,
He comes like me,
Longed for; unexpectedly.

The superficial eye
Will pass him by,
Said the Wren.

The best singer ever heard.
No one will take much notice,
Said the Blackbird.

The Owl said,
He is who, who is he
Who enters the heart as soft
As my soundless wings, as me.

by U.A. Fanthorp
from The National Poetry Library

Dominic Preziosi at Commonweal:

“Good morning, my soul-licious listeners” is how Felix Hernandez recently greeted his Saturday-morning audience, the many thousands who tune in for his long-running Rhythm Revue show, which airs and streams on WBGO, Newark’s public-radio outlet. I’ve counted myself among them since early 1995, when my boss on the copy desk of the magazine I worked at informed me of the show’s existence. Nearing what then seemed to me the wise old age of forty, he possessed an edgy wit and encyclopedic knowledge of mid-century American jazz and soul, his headlines sometimes containing sly references to Charlie Parker or Wilson Pickett. On Mondays he would grill me about what I’d heard on Rhythm Revue that weekend, and, clearly more important, what I’d liked. Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day” or Al Green’s “I Can’t Get Next to You”? Aretha Franklin’s “Think” or Little Sister’s “You’re the One”? Pickett’s version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” or The Supremes’—and why? It was like a test I had to pass to gain his trust, which I think I did, eventually. When I told him a few months later that I’d received the special three-CD Rhythm Revue compilation for giving money during WBGO’s spring pledge drive, he reacted as if I’d been saved from perdition.

more here.

Dominic Green at Literary Review:

The accelerated uptake of Surrealism in America followed the accelerated intake of Surrealist artists. By 1941, the arrival in New York City of émigrés like André Masson, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and the ‘Pope of Surrealism’ himself, André Breton, was precipitating what Darwent calls ‘one of the greatest cultural exchanges in modern history’. The full story is in Martica Sawin’s Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Darwent’s book examines an often-overlooked channel of transmission, Atelier 17, and its founder, the English printer, painter and teacher Stanley William Hayter.

Born in 1901, Hayter went to Paris in 1926 and set up the first Atelier 17 there the following year. He worked with Picasso, Miró and Kandinsky on their printmaking. He also developed, Darwent writes, ‘the quixotic idea’ of reviving the burin, an ‘engraving tool with a mushroom-like handle at one end and a sword-sharp edge at the other’ once used by Dürer and Doré.

more here.

Sander Pleij in the European Review of Books:

The opening scene of Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man riffs on Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). Kafka’s first sentence:

So Gregor Samsa awakes in the morning, from troubled dreams, and finds himself transformed into a gigantic vermin. Hamid’s first sentence:

Hamid’s fairylike tale of a lover whose skin suddenly turns brown reminded me of another transformed lover, from a satire, written by an author who called himself Mynona. Der operierte Goy (The Operated Goy) was published exactly one hundred years before The Last White Man. The God of numbers is with us.

More here.

Stephan J. Guyenet at Works in Progress:

Heart attacks can be prevented with cholesterol and blood pressure drugs, bacterial infections can be eliminated with antibiotics, and even HIV is now treatable with antiviral drugs. But obesity remains a remarkably stubborn condition.

Losing weight is hard, with or without the help of a doctor. Two-thirds of American adults with obesity try to lose weight each year using every diet imaginable, yet the adult obesity rate remains at 43%. Even intensive diet and lifestyle interventions have historically struggled to exceed a sustained 5% loss of body weight, and most weight loss drugs are no more effective. Compounding the problem, primary care doctors often can’t deliver the best diet and lifestyle tools that are available. “I spent my career trying to get primary care providers to deliver effective weight loss interventions in their office,” says Donna Ryan, professor emerita at the Pennington Biomedical Institute and president of the World Obesity Federation. “It’s hopeless.”

Doctors understand the profound impact obesity has on their patients, and the remarkable benefits of even modest weight loss, but have historically been unable to do much about it.

That is changing.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

The average online debate about AI pits someone who thinks the risk is zero, versus someone who thinks it’s any other number. I agree these are the most important debates to have for now.

But within the community of concerned people, numbers vary all over the place:

• • Scott Aaronson says says 2%
  • Will MacAskill says 3%
  • The median machine learning researcher on Katja Grace’s survey says 5 – 10%
  • Paul Christiano says 10 – 20%
  • The average person working in AI alignment thinks about 30%
  • Top competitive forecaster Eli Lifland says 35%
  • Holden Karnofsky, on a somewhat related question, gives 50%
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to think >90%
  • As written this makes it look like everyone except Eliezer is <=50%, which isn’t true; I’m just having trouble thinking of other doomers who are both famous enough that you would have heard of them, and have publicly given a specific number.

I go back and forth more than I can really justify, but if you force me to give an estimate it’s probably around 33%; I think it’s very plausible that we die, but more likely that we survive (at least for a little while). Here’s my argument, and some reasons other people are more pessimistic.

More here.

Dean DeBiase in Forbes:

Do you want to live a better, healthier and longer life? Me too.

Lets go back to 1937, when Albert Szent-Györgyi won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ascorbic acid—vitamin C—that enables the body to efficiently use carbohydrates, fats, and protein (I use it a lot during cold and flu season, you?). It was a massively consequential discovery, as it not only saved and extended countless lives, but it also contributed to the foundations of modern nutrition. Szent-Györgyi, himself, was blessed with a long life; he died in 1986 at the age of 93. But he might just as well be known for what he said on his 90th birthday: “I wish I could be 75 again!”

No doubt, that comment elicits more than a few eyerolls today. Especially since the CDC has recently downgraded American life expectancy to just 77 years. But could 75 someday be the new 40—an age by which, like Szent-Györgyi, we’re only hitting our stride? Well, if the burgeoning activity of the life extension industry is any indication, we may actually be on the cusp of making it so—and enjoying life to the fullest right up to the extended end. Which brings us to the morbid thought of mortality—that end state most of us seek to delay, if not dodge.

It may strike many as common sense that most causes of death are what we have come to understand as “age-related”: The longer we live, the more likely we are to develop, for example, heart disease, cancer, or Alzheimer’s. Therefore, a reasonable thing one can do to prevent the development of age-related diseases, is to, well, not age. It turns out that’s actually not as flippant as it sounds. So, is that possible and how do we get there?

More here.

Dylan Scott in Vox:

Three years since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, the syndrome known as “long Covid” remains one of its chief mysteries.

Those mysteries include what the syndrome even is. The long-term fatigue and brain fog some people report after recovering from an acute infection are the symptoms most commonly associated with long Covid, but more than 200 distinct symptoms have been reported. The novel coronavirus may also change people’s cardiovascular systems permanently in ways that could lead to long-term health problems, even strokes and heart attacks. Is it all long Covid? There are other elusive questions: How frequently do people get long Covid? Who is at the highest risk of developing it? And what is causing these long-term symptoms in the first place? The remaining uncertainties can mask the scientific progress of the past few years. Scientists have a better idea of how long Covid works, and why it might cause a wide array of seemingly unconnected symptoms.

But — and this is more important than it might seem — we know what we don’t know. We have a stronger sense of what the most important unanswered questions are and where there is genuine debate among even the experts about this bedeviling condition.

More here.