Lina Zeldovich in Nautilus:
Deep inside the tens of trillions of cells that comprise your body, the DNA replication machinery is constantly speeding along in many tissues. In the bone marrow alone, 500 million red and white blood cells are produced every minute. There’s about two meters of DNA in each cell, neatly woven inside the nucleus. To keep the blood cell supply steady, about a billion meters of DNA must be copied every minute. “You could wrap that around the Earth along the equator about 25 times,” Stillman says. It is inevitable that over the course of a person’s lifetime, this process will make mistakes—some harmless, but others leading to malignant mutations. So, understanding the cogs of this complex machinery may hold the key to combating many cancers.
Stillman and his team discovered that the replication process starts with a set of six specific proteins called Origin Recognition Complex, or ORC. The proteins bind to the DNA at specific locations and recruit more proteins to help, forming what’s called the pre-replicative complex. This pre-replicative complex “gives permission” to start DNA replication and many proteins begin copying the genetic material from their respective starting points. Once the job is finished, the pre-replicative complex is destroyed. Once the cell is ready to divide again, the complex is formed anew.
More here.
Jon Stewart has a dream where he walks out onto the brightly lit set of a new TV show. He has worked for years to build this show. It’s the answer to everything wrong with the news media.
For the first time, a Nobel Prize recognized the field of anthropology, the study of humanity. Svante Pääbo, a pioneer in the study of ancient DNA, or aDNA, was awarded the 2022 
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The public, it is assumed, knows little about science: they are ignorant not just of scientific facts but of scientific methodology, the distinctive way scientific research is conducted. Moreover, this ignorance is supposed to be the primary source of widespread anti-science attitudes, generating fear and suspicion of scientists, scientific innovations, and public policy that is said to “follow the science.” The consequences are on wide display, from opposition to genetically modified foods to the anti-vax movement.
For open-eared pop music fanatics of the seventies, Circle was a gateway album that revealed vistas. It spoke of a world beyond the sonic eruptions of rock-and-roll, yet one that could exist peaceably alongside it. The unassuming splendor of the music I heard that night in Central Park, particularly the marvelous flatpicking and straight-from-the-hills singing of Watson and the offhand brilliance of Scruggs’s banjo playing—indeed, the seemingly effortless, stirringly unselfconscious virtuosity of both men—brought to life the pleasures of a new idiom, one I still cherish. It was the joy already embedded in that momentous album come to life.
In 1938, Joseph Roth sat across the street watching the demolition of the Paris hotel he called home. He drank, he smoked and he wrote a short, sharp, lyrical piece describing how, ‘because the hotel is shattered and the years I lived in it have gone, it seems bigger’. On the last remaining wall he could still see the blue and gold wallpaper of what had been his room. After it had been torn down, he drank and joked with ‘the destroyers’, until the significance of the moment hit him: ‘You lose one home after another … terror flutters up, and it doesn’t even frighten me any more. And that’s the most desolate thing of all.’ This is pure Roth, nostalgia vying with irony, gallows humour saving him from despair. Writing was for him a form of survival: ‘I can only understand the world when I’m writing, and the moment I put down my pen, I’m lost.’
Suketu Mehta
For generations, scientists argued over whether there was truly an objective, predictable reality for even quantum particles, or whether quantum “weirdness” was inherent to physical systems. In the 1960s, John Stewart Bell developed an inequality describing the maximum possible statistical correlation between two entangled particles: Bell’s inequality. But certain experiments could violate Bell’s inequality, and these three pioneers — John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger — helped make quantum information systems a bona fide science.
Try to remember life as you lived it years ago, on a typical day in the fall. Back then, you cared deeply about certain things (a girlfriend? Depeche Mode?) but were oblivious of others (your political commitments? your children?). Certain key events—college? war? marriage? Alcoholics Anonymous?—hadn’t yet occurred. Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character?
In a surprise discovery, researchers found that cells from some types of cancers escaped destruction by the immune system by hiding inside other cancer cells.
Weiskrantz took a new approach with a human patient, known by the initials DB, who, after surgery to remove a growth affecting the visual cortex on the left side of his brain, was blind across the right-half field of vision. In the blind area, DB himself maintained that he had no visual awareness. Nonetheless, Weiskrantz asked him to guess the location and shape of an object that lay in this area. To everyone’s surprise, he consistently guessed correctly. To DB himself, his success in guessing seemed quite unreasonable. So far as he was concerned, he wasn’t the source of his perceptual judgments, his sight had nothing to do with him. Weiskrantz named this capacity ‘blindsight’: visual perception in the absence of any felt visual sensations.