Editorial in Nature:

In January, French President Emmanuel Macron called the AstraZeneca–Oxford coronavirus vaccine “quasi-ineffective for people over 65”, on the day that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommended approving it. Kate Bingham, one of the architects of the UK vaccine-procurement programme, has since called the remarks “irresponsible”, because the vaccine has been recommended by regulators for use in people of all ages.

Although some 20 million doses of the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca, based in Cambridge, UK, and the University of Oxford, UK, have been administered across Europe, a political war of words has erupted over its safety and efficacy. Such interventions risk increasing vaccine hesitancy. Communication on vaccine safety and efficacy must always be handled with extreme care. Last week, more than 20 European countries paused the vaccine’s roll-out for a few days after a very few cases of blood clots were detected in people who had been vaccinated. These were 7 cases of clots in multiple blood vessels (disseminated intravascular coagulation) and 18 cases of clotting known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis. Among the people affected, nine deaths had been recorded.

More here.

Nate Sheff in Psyche:

Most of us think that knowledge starts with experience. You take yourself to know that you’re reading this article right now, and how do you know that? For starters, you might cite your visual experiences of looking at a screen, colourful experiences. And how do you get those? Well, sensory experiences come from our sensory organs and nervous system. From there, the mind might have to do some interpretative work to make sense of the sensory experiences, turning the lines and loops before you into letters, words and sentences. But you start from a kind of cognitive freebie: what’s ‘given’ to you in experience.

It’s a tantalising idea, and maybe it’s close to the truth. But if we’re not careful, we might run afoul of what the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89) called ‘the Myth of the Given’. While many philosophers consider Sellars’s attack on the Myth to be his legacy, it’s one of his least-understood ideas. That’s too bad, because once we set aside ‘epistemological shoptalk’ (one of my favourite Sellarsisms), the basic idea is simple – and far-reaching.

Let’s start with something easy. You probably know how to read tree rings, the circles-within-circles that appear in the cross-sections of trees. Tree rings form as a tree grows, making new layers of bark. Counting the rings helps you determine the tree’s age, since each ring correlates with one year of growth. Now imagine we’re looking at a recently felled oak, and we count 75 rings. It would be innocent for me to say to you: ‘Those 75 rings mean the tree was 75 years old.’ More metaphorically, the rings ‘tell us about’ the tree’s age.

In a stricter sense, though, the tree rings don’t really ‘say’ anything. The patterns in the tree can give useful information to anyone who can read them, but the rings themselves aren’t actually ‘about’ anything. Remember, a ring forms as a side-effect of trees doing what trees do. They don’t express information in the way that trails, maps or sentences do.

But why not?

More here.

Jon Butterworth in The Cosmic Shambles:

The experiment measures the decays of B-hadrons, particles containing bottom quarks. Quarks make up the protons and neutrons inside every atomic nucleus, but those are “up” and “down” quarks. The bottom quark is one of their cousins, and is much heavier.

This means B-hadrons need something like the collisions at the LHC to produce them (that’s the “b” in LHCb). It also means they are unstable, because the b-quark inside them will decay to less massive particles.

One type of particles that can be produced in these decays is a lepton. In this case, either an electron, or their heavier cousin, the muon. The Standard Model makes a very firm prediction that both these decays should be equally likely. The measurement shows that the decay to pairs of muons only happens about 85% as often as the decay to pairs of electrons.

Of course, the devil is in the uncertainties.

More here.  And more here in New Scientist.

Nathan Thrall in the New York Review of Books:

On the day before the accident, Milad Salama could hardly contain his excitement for the kindergarten class trip. “Baba,” he said, addressing his father, Abed, “I want to buy food for the picnic tomorrow.” Abed took his five-and-a-half-year-old son to a nearby convenience store, buying him a bottle of the Israeli orange drink Tapuzina, a tube of Pringles, and a chocolate Kinder Egg, his favorite dessert.

Early the next morning, Milad’s mother, Haifa, helped her fair-skinned, sandy-haired boy into his school uniform: gray pants, a white-collared shirt, and a gray sweater bearing the emblem of his private elementary school, Nour al-Houda, or “light of guidance.” Milad’s nine-year-old brother, Adam, old enough to walk to school on his own, had already left. Milad hurried to finish his breakfast, gathered his lunch and picnic treats, and rushed out to board the school bus. Abed was still in bed.

On most days, Abed worked for the Israeli phone and Internet service provider Bezeq. But that morning, he and his cousin had plans to go to Jericho.

More here.

The Children of the Poor

—excerpt

What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plenitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

by Gwendolyn Brooks
from Poets Choice
Time/Life Books, 1962

Algis Valiunas at The New Atlantis:

The presiding scientific genius of the Romantic age, when science had not yet been dispersed into specialties that rarely connect with one another, Alexander von Humboldt wanted to know everything, and came closer than any of his contemporaries to doing so. Except for Aristotle, no scientist before or since this German polymath can boast an intellect as universal in reach as his and as influential for the salient work of his time. His neglect today is unfortunate but instructive.

Humboldt (1769–1859) undertook to disseminate the knowledge he acquired as rapidly and widely as possible, and initiated a network of correspondents among the world’s principal scientific specialists. Thus, Humboldt’s prodigious achievement ironically made it impossible for his scientific descendants to have a career so wondrously varied as his. Taking the entirety of nature and culture as his province, through the gathering and arrangement of all the particulars that one extraordinary mind could hold, he sought “a scheme comprehending the whole material creation” — “perhaps too bold a plan.” So he declared in his 1845 summa, Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe.

more here.

Andrew McMillan at Literary Review:

Some of the rawest moments come in early letters to Mike Kitay, Gunn’s lifelong partner, whom he met in 1952 when they were both undergraduates at Cambridge and whom he followed to the USA when Kitay returned there in 1954, after which Gunn felt able to come out. ‘We can lead rich lives together if we allow each other to, my beloved,’ Gunn writes to him in 1961. ‘Oh baby, please settle for me. I’ll never be your ideal, but you’ll never find your ideal on earth.’ It’s a letter written over the course of a week, with headings marking out the different days; it ends, ‘I can’t go on like this much longer. Please, my darling Mike.’ Gunn was largely a writer of tight, syllabic poetry who aimed for a lack of ‘central personality’; the directness and freedom of expression in letters such as these offer us a side of him we rarely, if ever, have seen before. By contrast, a letter written a few months later to the Faber editor Charles Monteith sees Gunn retreating behind a mask of business, discussing what would become a well-known combined edition of his work and that of Ted Hughes, eventually published in 1962 (the footnote reveals, interestingly, that Larkin was also to be included in the project, but his publisher at the time, the Marvell Press, said no).

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_juoTTqxqM

Arik Kershenbaum in The New York Times:

Is anybody else out there? For as long as humans have recognized Earth as but one planet in a vast, orb-speckled universe, we have pondered the mystery of extraterrestrial life. After Nicolaus Copernicus introduced heliocentric theory to 16th century Europe, astronomers began to dream about “other worlds” — and populate them with imaginary creatures. Pioneering astronomers such as Johannes Kepler (father of planetary motion) and William Herschel (discoverer of Uranus) believed in the existence of alien life. Peering through his telescope, Herschel thought he spied towns and forests on the lunar surface. We’re still looking. In 2017, a mysterious object named “Oumuamua” was observed passing through our solar system and some astronomers have made the controversial suggestion that it may be a scout probe sent by an alien civilization. In February, the NASA Mars Perseverance Rover landed on the red planet to search for traces of ancient microbial life.

The search field is incomprehensibly large: Astronomers estimate that there are more than 100 billion planets in the Milky Way alone — plus exponentially more in the rest of the universe.

What might we find elsewhere?

One zoologist suggests some answers actually may be hiding in plain sight, right here at home. In a provocative new book, “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Arik Kershenbaum contends that life on Earth provides hints of what we might expect to find on other planets.

Kershenbaum, a scientist at the University of Cambridge, asserts that the “universal laws of biology” that govern life on Earth also apply to aliens. The most important is that species evolve by natural selection, the bedrock idea of evolutionary biology proposed by Charles Darwin. No matter how alien biochemistry might work and no matter how planetary environments might differ, Kershenbaum argues that some version of Darwinian selection would be at work — and would have channelled alien evolution to restricted menus of possibilities.

More here.

Katharine Sanderson in Nature:

Materials scientists aren’t the first people you’d think would be pulled into the fight against COVID-19. But that’s what happened to John Rogers. He leads a team at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, that develops soft, flexible, skin-like materials with health-monitoring applications. One device, designed to sit in the hollow at the base of the throat, is a wireless, Bluetooth-connected piece of polymer and circuitry that provides real-time monitoring of talking, breathing, heart rate and other vital signs, which could be used in individuals who have had a stroke and require speech therapy¹.

Physicians wanted to know whether the device could be customized to spot symptoms of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The short answer was ‘yes’. Some 400 of the devices are now being used in Chicago, Illinois, to help spot early signs of COVID-19 in front-line health workers, as well as for disease monitoring in patients. His team has further tweaked the design to assess how coughing rates change in people with COVID-19. “Several of us, designated as essential workers due to our COVID device work, have been in the lab on a daily basis throughout this period,” Rogers says. “I have not missed a day.” His team members also wear the devices in the lab, to monitor themselves for the onset of symptoms. “So far, nothing,” he says.

Rogers is one of the most prolific researchers of wearable skin-inspired electronics worldwide. This ‘e-skin’ technology has already made it into volunteers and clinics globally, helping to monitor vital signs in premature infants and hydration in athletes, for instance. Other e-skins are giving robots a lighter, human-like touch. But whether they are for people or robots, such devices represent a significant chemical and engineering challenge: electronic components are typically brittle and inflexible, and human skin is a malleable but difficult canvas.

More here.

Klaus Sieg in Reasons to be Cheerful:

At Vancouver’s University of British Columbia, the Brock Commons Tallwood House, sheathed in sleek blond wood, stands out among the neighboring gray concrete towers. This striking facade isn’t just an aesthetic choice. When it opened in 2017, the 18-story residence hall was the tallest building constructed of timber in the world. Erected from prefabricated components in just 70 days, it was faster and cheaper to build than a conventional building. What’s more, its material saved over 2,400 metric tons of carbon emissions.

Brock Commons defies a century of high-rise construction norms. Since the dawn of the skyscraper age, cement, concrete and steel have molded our vertical urban realms. But the environmental consequences of these materials has led some in the construction industry back to wood, a material that’s more sustainable and, with each technological leap, an increasingly viable option for large-scale projects.

Proponents of wood construction argue that it is carbon negative, in that it effectively takes CO2 captured by trees and locks it into the buildings it supports. But wood construction has its challenges. Only in the last few years has it begun to come into its own, shepherded by a wave of government incentives, pent-up demand and technological advancements.

More here.

Michael D. Gordin in the Boston Review:

This is the “demarcation problem,” as the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper famously called it. The solution is not at all obvious. You cannot just rely on those parts of science that are correct, since science is a work in progress. Much of what scientists claim is provisional, after all, and often turns out to be wrong. That does not mean those who were wrong were engaged in “pseudoscience,” or even that they were doing “bad science”—this is just how science operates. What makes a theory scientific is something other than the fact that it is right.

Of the answers that have been proposed, Popper’s own criterion—falsifiability—remains the most commonly invoked, despite serious criticism from both philosophers and scientists. These attacks fatally weakened Popper’s proposal, yet its persistence over a century of debates helps to illustrate the challenge of demarcation—a problem no less central today than it was when Popper broached it.

More here.

Jimmy Bangash in Queer Majority:

In Muslim communities, homosexuality is intrinsically linked to anxiety, intimidation, violence, and, in some cases, death. For many, it involves living a closeted existence for fear of being ostracised or disowned. Islamic theological teachings, disseminated by religious institutions and espoused by community leaders, range from preaching for our execution to advising us to live a life of celibacy. Yet voices on the left, historically a stronghold of LGBTI support, do not sufficiently decry the abysmal treatment of gay and bi people of Muslim heritage, nor do they adequately mobilize against this specific and brutal form of homophobia.

This piece will scrutinize homophobia in the Muslim community and explore the left’s reluctance to criticize it in a consistent and productive manner. It will not explore the growth of the LGBTI Muslim movement which champions equality and representation of LGBTI individuals; rather it will focus on the dominant, wider Muslim community’s response to homosexuality.

More here.

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker:

In 1947, Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, and Oskar Morgenstern drove from Princeton to Trenton in Morgenstern’s car. The three men, who’d fled Nazi Europe and become close friends at the Institute for Advanced Study, were on their way to a courthouse where Gödel, an Austrian exile, was scheduled to take the U.S.-citizenship exam, something his two friends had done already. Morgenstern had founded game theory, Einstein had founded the theory of relativity, and Gödel, the greatest logician since Aristotle, had revolutionized mathematics and philosophy with his incompleteness theorems. Morgenstern drove. Gödel sat in the back. Einstein, up front with Morgenstern, turned around and said, teasing, “Now, Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?” Gödel looked stricken.

To prepare for his citizenship test, knowing that he’d be asked questions about the U.S. Constitution, Gödel had dedicated himself to the study of American history and constitutional law. Time and again, he’d phoned Morgenstern with rising panic about the exam. (Gödel, a paranoid recluse who later died of starvation, used the telephone to speak with people even when they were in the same room.) Morgenstern reassured him that “at most they might ask what sort of government we have.” But Gödel only grew more upset. Eventually, as Morgenstern later recalled, “he rather excitedly told me that in looking at the Constitution, to his distress, he had found some inner contradictions and that he could show how in a perfectly legal manner it would be possible for somebody to become a dictator and set up a Fascist regime, never intended by those who drew up the Constitution.” He’d found a logical flaw. Morgenstern told Einstein about Gödel’s theory; both of them told Gödel not to bring it up during the exam. When they got to the courtroom, the three men sat before a judge, who asked Gödel about the Austrian government.

“That is very bad,” the judge replied. “This could not happen in this country.”

Morgenstern and Einstein must have exchanged anxious glances. Gödel could not be stopped.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I can prove it.”

“Oh, God, let’s not go into this,” the judge said, and ended the examination.

More here.

Arik Kershenbaum in Nautilus:

Natural selection seems, at first glance, to be so frustratingly inefficient. Generation after generation of baby gazelles are born, destined to be eaten by lions. Only by chance is one baby born with longer legs, able to run faster, and so escape being eaten. Of course, the very beauty of natural selection is that it doesn’t require any foresight; natural selection explains life in the universe precisely because there is no presumption of any prior knowledge. No Creator is necessary, because the evolutionary process is guaranteed to proceed even without any predefined rules. Life evolves—albeit slowly—without having to know where it’s going.

But what if it were all different? What would life look like if it did know where it was going?

The 1950s physicist Anatoly Dneprov wrote quirky and characteristically Soviet science fiction. His novel Crabs on the Island tells the story of two engineers conducting an experiment in cybernetics on a deserted island. A single self-replicating robot (a “crab”) is released, and forages for the raw materials to build other robots. Soon the island is overrun with baby robot crabs. But the crabs begin to mutate. Some are larger than others, and ruthlessly cannibalize the smaller robots for spare parts to build even larger robots. How would such an experiment end? Catastrophically, of course, as is consistent with the genre, with robot crabs spreading exponentially across the entire island.

Science fiction can be terribly pessimistic, but that pessimism is unfounded. Other factors are at play. Resources are limited. Eventually, even the crabs on the island run out of materials with which to make new robots. Admittedly, humans have caused tremendous damage to our own planet, but we’ve hardly destroyed the universe. In fact, there’s no indication in the night sky that any organism, biological or artificial, has spread its influence as far and wide as we might expect if they were growing exponentially like robot crabs.

More here.

Terence Diggory at Salmagundi:

An especially mysterious manifestation of the materiality of language in these poems is the projection of voice from, or into, the material world.  Repeatedly, at special moments, things speak:   “the hollyhocks spoke”; “Freezing rain with silver seems to be speaking”; “these colors speak”; “The sky speaks to me”; “The roofs speak”; “the room alive speaks when the corpse speaks…  and the earth speaks”; “the trees and grass are speaking”; “the old sun / is speaking.”  This eruption of voice from things—Gizzi calls it “thinging,”  in a pun on “singing”—seems to mark that recovery of the world that Gizzi associates with elegy in the second “Now It’s Dark” poem. However, in the volume Now It’s Dark,  that recovery is purchased at the price of another loss, that of “the speaking subject,” as it is called in psycholinguistic theory, or the one who says “I,” in the traditional view of lyric poetry.  Drawing on that theory, Language writers accused lyric poetry of escaping into an illusory interior world inhabited by an equally illusory “I.”

more here.