Kate Adamala in Nature:
Biology is undergoing a transformation. After centuries of studying life as it evolves naturally, researchers are now using a combination of computation and genome engineering to intervene, generating new proteins and even whole bacteria from scratch. The use of artificial-intelligence tools to design biological components, an approach known as generative biology, is set to turbocharge this area of research. Just last year, scientists used AI-assisted design to produce artificial genes that can be expressed in mammalian cells and, for the first time, an AI program was used to create an entirely synthetic virus.
This approach is much more than just a series of technical feats. It could transform how life on Earth develops, as biochemist Adrian Woolfson describes in his latest book. On the Future of Species provides a sweeping account of the history and science behind this transformational technology, from the first gene-sequencing efforts to the rise of AI-powered techniques.
More here.
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Almost a century on, and with pithiatism relegated to the nosological archive, the case of Trénel and Lacan’s ‘strange patient’ remains interesting for several reasons. Firstly, their diagnosis is very much situated in a peculiar French psychiatric milieu, where broader questions about the nature of hysteria converge less on sexual repression and free association, and more on the French state and institutionalised psychiatry. (If Lacan would later become famous for his theatricality, it might in fact be traceable to this psychiatric milieu rather than psychoanalysis.) Secondly, the abasiac woman’s status as a fixture of the Parisian psychiatric scene – her constant appeals to doctors and the medical gaze’s equally intense fixation on her – could be seen to express the rhythms of her symptoms. Her relationship to the medical establishment takes the form of a game of proximity, repeated approaches and pullings away. In consulting numerous doctors, she would, as Lacan and Trénel aptly put it, attach the ‘utmost importance to every step she took’. Thirdly, there is a social and historical poignancy to the case. In Lacan’s early work as a psychiatrist, he wondered if symptoms were not themselves expressions of, or responses to, particular historical moments and contradictions. The final form her gait took – walking backwards on tiptoes while rotating regularly – could be read as a silent assessment of the impact the War had had not just on her, but on everyone: it was no longer possible to walk straight-forwardly into the future, now that it was wholly uncertain. One could only fix one’s eyes on the past, advance away from it carefully so as not to disturb it, and introduce one’s own regularities into a landscape bereft of clear, collective markers.
To truly feel the force of America’s cultural attraction you have to be born outside of it. The natives see the cracks up close and learn to take the whole thing for granted. Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, none of my friends had to be convinced of America’s appeal. Its jeans-clad, Ray-Ban-wearing, moon-dancing cultural exports were the opposite of propaganda. They were the natural overflow of a society so confident in its own desirability that it never had to make a case for itself.
I spoke with several people like Marisa — people whose love lives were disordered, even dangerous, until they began identifying as love addicts.
The term “identity politics” was first popularized by the 1977 
“Is this boring?” 
The depiction of ordinary places, and of the changing seasons and skies which shadow or illuminate them, is at the core of Susan Owens’s comprehensive and touching Constable’s Year. Near the beginning she quotes from one of Constable’s letters, proof that everything he saw and painted was based on his native Stour valley in Suffolk, and the intensity of observation developed there in boyhood:
A parasitic species of ant from Japan is the first ever found to have done away with both males and female workers – instead, every individual is a queen that tries to take over the nests of other species.