Sara Reardon in Science:
The small plastic chip etched with channels is a synthetic human organ—and one vision of future drug safety testing. Inside, layers of human liver, epithelial, and immune cells line the tiny conduits, which feed them with bloodlike fluid and remove waste. The chip, made by the Boston-based biotech company Emulate Inc., could one day help researchers and pharmaceutical companies screen out candidate drugs that cause a condition known as drug-induced liver injury (DILI)—one of several types of liver toxicity that together scuttle 22% of all clinical trials.
DILI often doesn’t show up when drugs are tested in animals. But in a recent study, Emulate’s chip was 87% accurate in identifying compounds known to cause DILI—and 100% accurate in flagging those that don’t. The chip is now undergoing further testing as part of a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pilot program to evaluate alternatives to animal testing. If it performs well, drug developers will be able to use data it generates to show a new drug is likely safe before they apply to begin human trials.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
We’ve all heard (some among us have preached) well-meaning sermons about the importance of amplifying marginalized voices in literary spaces. Yet despite good intentions—e.g., tropes of the “perceptive outsider” or “staunch individualist”—there remains a dearth of more fully rendered neurodiverse characters. One of our finest contemporary writers, Gary Shteyngart, is here to remedy that problem. Meet Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, the plucky, if often melancholy, 10-year-old protagonist of Shteyngart’s enchanting new novel, Vera, or Faith. An academic overachiever obsessed with language and a future career as “a woman in STEM,” Vera feels alienated from her classmates at her Manhattan magnet elementary. She struggles to calm her “monkey brain” and control her toe-walking and arm flaps, signature behaviors of mild autism, or what we used to categorize as Asperger’s syndrome. Shteyngart portrays these with compassion; his focus is on the potential of the “outsider” as a gifted truth-teller. Far from a subject of pity, Vera is a wise and feeling guide—like a 10-year-old Virgil, shepherding us through the novel’s netherworld of tormented souls while contending with her own angsts.
Ecologist Mark Vellend’s thesis is that to understand the world, “physics and evolution are the only two things you need”. 
Because of climate, the North farmed crops like wheat and barley that required very little work, and that work was easy to automate. This tended to make farmers independent, incentivize industrialization for the machinery, and push settlers west very fast, as they weren’t as limited by labor needs.
Kaputt
Historians of science have a guilty secret: we don’t particularly enjoy writing about those deemed singular geniuses. The public – or at least publishers – want stories of revolutionaries who stood entirely apart from their peers and predecessors, or, failing that, to see them ‘exposed’ as plagiarists (ideally stealing the work of the oppressed). But science rarely works in such simplistic ways. A century of historical scholarship has shown that the figure of the lone genius is largely mythical.
For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the evolution of complex organisms, including 
Made at the high point of Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock, Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” was a poke in the eye of abstract expressionism. Not only was it blatantly mimetic, but it was being blatantly mimetic with a mundane commercial product found in every supermarket and corner grocery store in America. When people think of repetition in painting, they probably think first of these iconic soup cans.
Automating routine tasks expands possibilities. Before automatic differentiation, deep learning practitioners derived and implemented gradients by hand for each model family, a laborious and error-prone process. When Theano and its successors automated this mathematical labor, they transformed neural networks from a specialized practice into a broadly accessible discipline. This unlock, combined with massive datasets and GPU computing, catalyzed the deep learning revolution.
Following the 2008 financial collapse, US capitalism changed forever. While the banks were bailed out, more and more workers with secure, high-quality employment found themselves among the “untouchables” scrounging for a living in short-term, low-paid, dead-end jobs. Whereas Reagan and the Bushes won elections because secure proletarians voted for them and untouchables were too disheartened to vote at all, Trump won by rallying the untouchables, who now included a growing number of hitherto secure proletarians.
What transpired next was a kind of Dionysian rural festival where performers hung carcasses and living bodies, animal and human, losing themselves in pouring, smearing, splashing—actions Nitsch had developed for years. Mythical figures became crucial scaffolds alongside Christian elements like garments, foot-washing, a grail, and the cross. Odysseus and Parsifal recurred as structural motifs that framed the choreography, scent, sound, and sacrificial acts: Odysseus as an emblem of the wandering heroic subject who must cross the threshold into chaos, the way the performers descend into a forest of flesh. Performers took their time carrying wooden structures for which human and animal bodies were used as embellishment. Huge white cloths were stretched, spattered with bright-red animal blood next to lilies, slaughtered flesh, and the symbolically crucified, tied-up human body.
“Raised in Britain as a post-Christian secular humanist and trained in Asia as a Tibetan and Zen Buddhist monk,” Stephen Batchelor writes at the end of his book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us, “I find that I can no longer identify exclusively with either a Western or an Eastern tradition.” Decades of dwelling in these traditions—each with its own intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical riches—have left him strangely homeless. Far from making him unhappy, though, this state of existential homelessness has given Batchelor access to what he sees as a higher life. For, while “unsettling and disorienting” at times, such “spaces of uncertainty seem far richer in creative possibilities, more open to leading a life of wonder, imagination, and action.”