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Erin Douglas in The Christian Science Monitor:

In “Super Natural,” award-winning science writer Alex Riley casts his inquisitive, generous gaze upon the extremists. No, not the far right or the far left; these are the far-deep, far-up, and far-flung life-forms that inhabit Earth’s less move-in-ready biomes. From snailfish and wood frogs to painted turtles and tardigrades, these remarkable creatures display a knack for thriving – or at least carrying on – in a niche of their own. Mr. Riley chatted via video with Monitor contributor Erin Douglass about the marvels and possibilities of such lives on the edge. The interview has been edited and condensed.

You describe finding solace in nature as a boy growing up in the 1990s. Do you have an early memory that stands out?

I grew up in North Yorkshire, so northern England. It was very rural, very picturesque, but very lonely as well. You had to find your own interests.

More here.

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Claire Evans in Quanta Magazine:

In 1983, the octogenarian geneticist Barbara McClintock stood at the lectern of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She was famously publicity averse — nearly a hermit — but it’s customary for people to speak when they’re awarded a Nobel Prize, so she delivered a halting account of the experiments that had led to her discovery, in the early 1950s, of how DNA sequences can relocate across the genome. Near the end of the speech, blinking through wire-framed glasses, she changed the subject, asking: “What does a cell know of itself?”

McClintock had a reputation for eccentricity. Still, her question seemed more likely to come from a philosopher than a plant geneticist. She went on to describe lab experiments in which she had seen plant cells respond in a “thoughtful manner.” Faced with unexpected stress, they seemed to adjust in ways that were “beyond our present ability to fathom.” What does a cell know of itself? It would be the work of future biologists, she said, to find out.

Forty years later, McClintock’s question hasn’t lost its potency.

More here.

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From Time Magazine:

The next time you get a blood test, X-ray, mammogram, or colonoscopy, there’s a good chance an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm will first interpret the results even before your doctor has seen it.

Over the course of just a few years, AI has spread rapidly into hospitals and clinics around the world. More than 1,000 health-related AI tools have been authorized for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and more than 2 in 3 physicians say they use AI to some degree, according to a recent survey by the American Medical Association. The potential is extraordinary. AI—particularly in the form of AI agents that can reason, adapt, and act on their own—can lighten doctors’ workloads by drafting patient notes and chart summaries, support precision medicine through more targeted therapies, and flag subtle abnormalities in scans and slides that a human eye might miss. It can speed discovery of drugs and drug targets through new processes, such as AI-driven protein structure prediction and design that led to last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. AI can give patients faster, more personalized support by scheduling appointments, answering questions, and flagging side effects. It can help match candidates to clinical trials and monitor health data in real time, alerting clinicians and patients early to prevent complications and improve outcomes.

More here.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Getting along in society requires that we mostly adhere to certainly shared norms and customs. Often it’s not enough that we all know what the rules are, but also that everyone else knows the rules, and that they know that we know the rules, and so on. Philosophers and game theorists refer to this as common knowledge. In Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…, he explores how common knowledge (or its absence) explains money, power, and a wide variety of subtextual human interactions.

More here.

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Gavriel Kleinwaks & Karam Elabd at Works in Progress:

After epidemiologists linked typhoid outbreaks to water cleanliness, cities began building large-scale sand filtration systems in the 1890s, and in 1908, Jersey City pioneered the first continuous chlorination of a public water supply. By the 1920s, typhoid deaths had fallen by two-thirds, and waterborne diseases were in retreat across the country.

While typhoid and other waterborne diseases triggered vast engineering and regulatory responses, the equivalent airborne threats have not. Tuberculosis alone kills more than a million people every year around the world, yet the air in schools, clinics, and public buildings remains largely unfiltered and unmonitored. Covid-19, which killed over seven million people, demonstrated how rapidly airborne pathogens can spread in poorly ventilated spaces.

Just as filtration and chlorination made drinking water safe at scale, we now have the tools to do the same for indoor air: ventilation, high-quality filters, and germicidal light.

More here.

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Paul Collier at Project Syndicate:

The world needs a new economics for neglected places – for those who have fallen behind others in the same country, whether it be a rich one or a poor one. The place in question might be a community, a town, or a region: Muslims in France, Rotherham in Northern England, or Colombia’s Atlantic-Caribbean coastal region.

In my last book, Left Behind, I show why such places, once hit by an adverse shock, spiral down unless the shock is mitigated by supportive and timely finance guided by local contextual knowledge. Those in the United Kingdom may recognize this as a critique of the highly centralized, short-horizon, economic micromanagement exemplified by the Treasury; but the consequences should serve as a warning to other countries, too. Through detailed analyses of instances of renewal, I hope to show how both local leadership and bottom-up social movements can be effective in transforming broken places.

The problem, contrary to what Milton Friedman argued (and what the UK’s Treasury assumes), is that financial markets reallocate capital from shock-hit places to those that are unaffected. The smartest money flees from adversity toward success, and it is soon followed by other investors.

More here.

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Paul Leslie at Salmagundi:

This past summer, I was surprised to encounter a face I knew in two most unexpected places. The first was in a photo montage accompanying an article written by Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo in the wake of J.D. Vance becoming the Vice Presidential nominee, entitled “A Journey Through the Authoritarian Right.” Arranged in the collage among images of a ripped man with lasers shooting from his eyes, of anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin, and of Peter Thiel rubbing Benjamins between his thumb and forefinger, was my former professor and friend from Stanford University, René Girard. I was in France at the time; mere hours after reading Kovensky’s piece, I saw through the window of a taxi René’s face again—this time in the form of a larger-than-life decal on a light rail car in Avignon, where as it happens he is one of a dozen local heroes permanently celebrated on the new transit system. What do the medieval, culturally-rich, Provençal city of Avignon and the American authoritarian right have in common? Both claim a bond with this influential philosopher and member of L’Académie Française, who died in 2015. Only one of the claims is legitimate. The misappropriation of Girard’s ideas by the American right is not just a matter of academic concern; it has significant implications for our political discourse and society.

more here.

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Sophie McBain in The Guardian:

Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a “modern-day romance that wasn’t necessarily romantic”, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart – class, race, nationality, family history – as those that bind us. Writing the book itself took almost two decades.

One problem with devoting so many years to one book is that people worry for your welfare, Desai says with a laugh. “People begin to wonder what’s wrong. Are you really working on something?” One neighbour – who observed how Desai would rise early each morning to write, eat her breakfast and lunch at her desk, take a short break to do her food shop or housework and then write until as late as she could manage in the evenings – attempted an intervention. “You need to come out of your house,” he told her. “You will go crazy writing a book! This is no way to live!” Her 90-year-old uncle observed, with affection, that she was starting to look “like a kind of derelict”, which she acknowledges was true. “It was becoming absurd!” And yet Desai says she loved living this way, in complete service to her writing.

More here.

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Anirban Mukhopadhyay in The Scientist:

Pregnancy has long been framed as an evolutionary tug-of-war. The fetus presses for resources, while the mother mounts defenses to limit invasive placentation. A new study in PNAS challenges that view, reframing placental implantation as “coopetition,” a game-theory term for simultaneous competition and cooperation in the hope of mutually beneficial results.¹ The shift could explain why some pregnancies succeed or fail, offering clues to disorders like preeclampsia.

“It started out as a random observation—when we grew maternal cells together with fetal cells, the maternal cells seemed to partially lose their pregnancy-prepared state,” said Yale University evolutionary biologist Günter Wagner, the co-corresponding author of the study. His collaborator Kshitiz at the University of Connecticut added, “The fetal trophoblasts had reversed the changes acquired by maternal cells in anticipation of pregnancy.”

More here.

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Via Dolorosa

The sun has barely roused itself when I hear screams
over the coffee pot, but a glance out the window
thaws my dread. Just three teens raging
at the warm horizon. I know that cry—the one
my sisters and I hurled at the field in fledgling
heartbreak, our young throats yelled raw.

Yes, these girls threading through cotton
are mourning boys whose names they’ll forget
in a few harvests. Do they know to watch out
for mice and snakes? No—they imagine
out here’s a life without danger.
They imagine they race to mystery.

But it’s all science, really, learning how
the earth yields and heals itself. We step in
where we can with sweat, lost sleep, bruised thumbs.
But I’ll let them think it’s magic, that thorns
in their sweaters could somehow mend sorrow.
Sometimes I let myself believe the same.

By Whitney Rio-Ross
From EcoTheo Review

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Mina Tavakoli at n+1:

At the blow of a whistle, each dog, one at a time, was let out onto the grounds and on its doggy way, snuffling the grooves and crevices of the obstacle course in the hunt for a swab doused in an herbal essential oil. The dogs moved evenly, steady as magnetic north, until they appealed to their handlers with glances that functioned like code. This dogsperanto—a language of punctuation marks, canine body cues in expressions of “?” or “!”—met human encouragement in a surrealist covenant between trainer and trainee. Woof begat nod, nod begat pursuit. The lagotto came to a halt at a traffic cone.

“Yes, folks, now what you’re looking at is called ‘fringing.’ Fringing is when a dog is noticing a smell a little too early,” the announcer announced.

I knelt to knead a spaniel at my ankles. The spaniel—a dog with a ramen-noodley curl pattern, a nice hamster warmth, and a tiny heart about two inches deep inside her, which at this second was appreciably whizzing—let out something like a cough.

more here.

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Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

This book is a trip. Among other things, it copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité has ingested. They include psilocybin, LSD, cannabis; quetiapine and Xanax (for anxiety); venlafaxine, Prozac, Lexapro and tricyclics (antidepressants); caffeine (“I have drunk coffee every single day without fail since September 13, 1990”); and, at least for him, the always disappointing alcohol.

The really trippy thing, though, is not so much Justin Smith-Ruiu’s descriptions of his drug experiences, but the fact that they’re written by a tough-minded analytic philosopher, one as familiar with AJ Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge as Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-inspired The Doors of Perception. Moreover, they’re presented with the aim of melting the minds of his philosophical peers and the rest of us by suggesting that psychedelics dissolve our selves and make us part of cosmic consciousness, thereby rendering us free in the way the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined it (paraphrased by Smith-Ruiu as “an agreeable acquiescence in the way one’s own body is moving in the necessary order of things”).

The melting metaphor is apt, since the primal scene of early modern western philosophy came when the 17th-century French thinker René Descartes melted a piece of wax.

More here.

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James Woodford at New Scientist:

Between 17 January 2023 and 19 August 2024, María Branyas Morera, of Spain, was officially the world’s oldest person, until she died aged 117 years and 168 days. To uncover the secrets of her extraordinary longevity, a team of researchers has done a deep dive into her genetics, microbiome and lifestyle.

When Morera was 116 years old, the team collected samples of her blood, saliva and stool, to analyse her genetics. “She had an exceptional genome enriched in variants in genes that are associated with enhanced lifespan in other species, such as dogs, worms and flies,” says team member Manel Esteller at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain.

Morera, who showed no sign of dementia, also had many gene variants that keep blood lipid levels low, protecting the heart and cognition, says Esteller. “At the same time, she was devoid of gene variants associated with the risk of pathologies such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and metabolic disorders.”

More here.

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From the website of AI Red Lines:

AI holds immense potential to advance human wellbeing, yet its current trajectory presents unprecedented dangers. AI could soon far surpass human capabilities and escalate risks such as engineered pandemics, widespread disinformation, large-scale manipulation of individuals including children, national and international security concerns, mass unemployment, and systematic human rights violations.

Some advanced AI systems have already exhibited deceptive and harmful behavior, and yet these systems are being given more autonomy to take actions and make decisions in the world. Left unchecked, many experts, including those at the forefront of development, warn that it will become increasingly difficult to exert meaningful human control in the coming years.

Governments must act decisively before the window for meaningful intervention closes. An international agreement on clear and verifiable red lines is necessary for preventing universally unacceptable risks.

More here.  Also see this for what kinds of red lines are needed.

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