Jenna Ahart in Nature:

A gel-based artificial tongue can determine the spiciness of a wide range of foods, from the forgiving bell pepper to the more formidable ‘facing heaven’ chili of Sichuan cuisine. The device, as the researchers report¹ in ACS Sensors, might be the secret to determining the heat levels of spicy foods without risking any human taste buds. The artificial tongue itself is not a new feat. Scientists have created similar devices that can use electronic sensors to detect sweet, sour, spicy and umami tastes. But the authors of the new paper wanted to focus on spiciness in particular and to measure spice levels as precisely as possible, which is especially important for quality control in food, says co-author Jing Hu, a chemical engineer at the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai.

The team’s solution was “inspired by the spicy-neutralizing effect of milk”, they write in the paper. Milk “proteins that affect our perception of spiciness” relieve the burn of a spicy dish, explains Carolyn Ross, a food scientist at Washington State University in Pullman.

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Kermit Pattison in The Harvard Gazette:

A few weeks after their arrival at the College, 15 first-year students settled into chairs for an unusual class — one with no answers.

The brainchild of Dean of Science Jeff Lichtman, “Genuinely Hard Problems in Science” explores mysteries of the natural world that have stubbornly resisted the best efforts to crack them. How did life emerge from non-biological matter? How did single cells evolve into complex life? What mechanisms drive the aging process — and can they be reversed? What is the relationship between brain anatomy and mental illness?

In this class, there is no assumption that scientific authorities are right. Rather than training conformists who follow their elders down well-worn routes — and possibly to dead ends — the instructors want out-of-the-box thinkers who can blaze new pathways.

“What we’re trying to do,” explained Lichtman, “is transform science, 15 students at a time.”

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Tristan Moyle at Aeon Magazine:

In contemporary parlance, the most common framework that ancient moral philosophy operated within is known as ethical partialism. For the ethical partialist, our relationships determine the reasons we have to act (or refrain from acting). That is why the question ‘Who belongs?’ is so important: the answer informs us about the ethical relationships in which we are implicated and by which we are obligated.

This ancient way of thinking about ethical matters is comprehensively rejected by dominant forms of modern moral philosophy. Whether deontological or consequentialist, the underlying ethical framework is impartialist. For the impartialist, factoring in personal relationships when deciding what to do is to introduce prejudice, parochialism and bias into one’s moral thinking. The question ‘Who belongs?’ is rejected as a legitimate starting point. For the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, the essential question is rather ‘Can they suffer?’ Whether I have a relationship to the being is morally irrelevant. Objectivity in one’s moral thinking requires strict neutrality. That is what justice is thought to demand.

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McNeil Taylor at Cabinet Magazine:

The Greek island of Syros is mentioned in The Odyssey: the titular hero’s swineherd, Eumaeus, tells us that his home island is “not so packed with people, still a good place, though, fine for sheep and cattle, rich in wine and wheat.”¹ Approaching Syros’s harbor city of Ermoupolis today, however, travelers weaned on these Arcadian visions will instead be confronted by the fruits of nineteenth-century industry. When Gérard de Nerval landed in Ermoupolis in 1842, the new city, draped over two vertiginous hills, began to melt in the hallucinatory swirl of Parisian flânerie: the view suggested first a sugared loaf of bread, then a Babylonian city, and finally the floating citadel of Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels (1726).² Surreal, exotic, futuristic, Ermoupolis was far from what he had been led to expect from the birthplace of Western civilization.

Nerval’s fanciful vision nonetheless attests to the seismic upheavals of the modern nation-state that were still tremoring in the 1840s: only twenty years earlier, a large influx of Greek Orthodox refugees from Chios, fleeing massacre by the Turks, had arrived on the island. It was one of many instances of diaspora, population exchange, and exile that would define the traumatic course of Greek history up until our present day.

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Paul Lay interviews Dan Wang on how China engineered its way to global power status, in Engelsberg Ideas:

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Jeet Heer in The Nation:

The prospect of chaos and war excited Jeffrey Epstein. The late New York financier and child abuser kept a keen eye on news about foreign conflicts that could be exploited for commercial gain. On February 21, 2014, Epstein sent an e-mail to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, with whom he would partner the following year as investors in a security tech firm Reporty Homeland Security (later renamed Carbyne). Epstein wrote, “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak tried to tamp down his friend’s enthusiasm, noting, “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow.”

This exchange, which was reported by Drop Site News, gets at the heart of one of the more hidden aspects of the Epstein scandal. Epstein’s name is inextricably linked with sexual predation, as it should be. But it should just as readily be linked to global militarism and authoritarianism. Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together. He well understood that the “desperation of those in power” could make them eager to buy what he was selling: connections with other powerful figures and security systems to clamp down on dissent.

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Ana Lucia Araujo in Aeon:

Over the past century, historians of the United States have made increasing efforts to challenge the predominant 19th-century view that slavery in the US South was somewhat a benevolent institution. The old, idealised and paternalistic understanding of the history of slavery featured prominently in novels and motion pictures like Gone with the Wind (1939). Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, in his 1918 survey of American slavery, and other influential historians promoted this distortion too, claiming that slave owners in the US South treated their enslaved property with kindness, by providing them decent rations of food and good clothing, while encouraging the formation of stable family ties, education and Christianity.

In the years between the First World War and the Second World War, the historians W E B Du Bois and Carter G Woodson challenged this misrepresentation, stressing the profits made by US slave traders and owners, and underscoring the cruelty of bondage in the US. Later, the historians Frederic Bancroft and Kenneth M Stampp followed suit, noting the ubiquity of family separation and sexual violence, and the near-impossibility of emancipation. The misleading view of slavery as a benign institution didn’t survive the post-Second World War period, which brought racism into new disrepute. However, into the 1960s and beyond, some scholars continued to see slavery in Latin America, especially in Brazil, as less significant and milder than in the US. There were different reasons for this view, some deriving from the fact that the US was a Protestant country in a mostly Catholic hemisphere. Catholicism predominated in French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, and the strong influence of the Catholic Church on Iberian legal codes and custom influenced the practice of slavery. In the French and Spanish colonies in the Americas, as well as in Brazil, the doctrines of Catholicism gave enslaved people some rights, including the right to marry and the ability to buy their freedom.

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Quentin Bruneau in Phenomenal World:

How should we explain periods of profound global transformation? Since the late nineteenth century, historically-minded scholars have viewed socio-political change as a reflection of property relations and technological shifts in the productive process. Capitalism was positioned as the principal driver of the international state system, with states broadly operating in the interest of maintaining capitalist social relations. In recent years, however, a parallel tradition of thought has gained ground. In this tradition, the bureaucratic and military consolidation of states operates as the driver of economic relations. From this perspective, capitalist forms of exploitation appear as a means to finance the state’s coercive power and navigate competition between states internationally. The relation between states and markets underpins nearly every major challenge of our time, from climate change, to war, to austerity and sovereign debt. Should we understand these developments through the interests of Capital, or should we instead conceive of them as the product of inter-state competition and power? The question is not merely of analytical interest; where we place emphasis directly informs the sort of solutions we envision to global problems. If climate change and war are the result of inter-state competition, greater cooperation can lead to a solution. If they are the result of Capitalism, instead, they will remain unresolved until we do away with the economic system itself. In what follows, I survey this longstanding debate and introduce an important and overlooked turningpoint: the rise of Great Power politics. Ultimately, however, I argue that our global order cannot be understood outside of the complex social contexts out of which it emerges—contexts which cannot be reduced to any single dimension alone.

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Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times:

As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this? A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.

At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.

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Nora Bradford in Quanta Magazine:

Such moments of insight are written across history. According to the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius, in the third century BCE the Greek mathematician Archimedes suddenly exclaimed “Eureka!” after he slid into a bathtub and saw the water level rise by an amount equal to his submerged volume (although this tale may be apocryphal(opens a new tab)). In the 17th century, according to lore, Sir Isaac Newton had a breakthrough in understanding gravity after an apple fell on his head. In the early 1900s, Einstein came to a sudden realization that “if a man falls freely, he would not feel his weight,” which led him to his theory of relativity, as he later described in a lecture.

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Hindsight

A comet in ten shades of fire
seared your quiet morning sky.
The unblinking sun blinked.
Birds, crickets, every chirping being
in a wide circle around you held a breath.
Held another, waiting …
The flame of your heart
gathered to a perfect burning
stillness where you turned
to this imagined, other way.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

The drone is increasingly regarded as the infantryman’s basic weapon. The U.S. Army is ordering a million drones to equip its soldiers (a war would require many, many times that). Drones are replacing artillery, now having the capability to take out infantry, tanks, artillery, and basically anything else at a fairly long range. Strike drones are supplementing bombers and long-range missiles as a way of dealing damage behind the lines; Ukraine’s drone strikes are degrading Russia’s oil industry from thousands of miles away.

And drone technology is still in its infancy. Currently, drones are still piloted by humans. This makes them subject to electronic warfare that jams the link between pilot and drone, forcing them to use spools of fiber-optic cable to maintain a secure connection. And it means that drone operators have to stay somewhat near the front, exposing them to enemy strikes. Skilled human operators are a valuable resource that limits the amount of drones that can be used at once.

This is about to change.

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Lola Butcher at Undark:

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the organization now called March of Dimes, with the goal of wiping out polio, the viral disease that caused his paraplegia. Just 17 years later, clear evidence arrived that Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was effective — the first step in the near-total eradication of polio around the world. In the organization’s 1955 annual report, its top executive called the vaccine a “planned miracle.”

In “Planning Miracles: How to Prevent Future Pandemics,” science journalist Jon Cohen introduces readers to biologists, veterinarians, epidemiologists, and others who are trying for another miracle: to blunt pandemics, or even prevent them altogether.

Cohen, a longtime correspondent for Science magazine, traveled the globe to document the vast amount of work being done to identify emerging threats, along with the vaccines and other containment practices to stop their spread. The sheer volume of effort is a reason for hope. But polio had one highly visible attribute — a world leader partially paralyzed by the disease — that our viral diseases today do not have.

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Dwight Garner at the NY Times:

Jack Kerouac’s only child, Jan Kerouac, lived hard and died young. She was 44 when she succumbed to complications of liver failure in Albuquerque in 1996. She met her famous father, the author of “On the Road” and the avatar of the Beat generation, only twice.

She was born in 1952, shortly after her parents, Kerouac and his second wife, Joan Haverty, separated. At the time, her father was penniless and all but unknown. The publication of “On the Road” was still five years off. He didn’t feel ready to have a child. He attempted to deny paternity and never publicly acknowledged his daughter before his own death in 1969. Jan lugged a famous last name through her short life, and it was both a blessing and a curse. Father and daughter looked alike, and there was a continuity of soul between them. She inherited Jack’s imperative toward motion, and she too became a writer, publishing three semi-autobiographical novels: “Baby Driver” (1981), “Train Song” (1988) and the unfinished “Parrot Fever” (2005), published posthumously. Each has long been out of print.

That changes now with the reissue of “Baby Driver,” the most sharply realized of her books.

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