Katarina Zimmer in The Scientist:

Sometime around 2 billion years ago, a bacterium slipped inside a larger cell, started producing energy there, and became the indispensable powerhouse we know today as the mitochondrion, so the working theory goes. But that old story now has a new twist. Scientists have detected the organelles outside of cells, apparently functioning perfectly well while drifting around the blood of healthy people, according to findings published recently (January 19) in The FASEB Journal. The researchers who made the discovery propose that the independent mitochondria may be released by cells for signaling purposes, although more work is needed to validate that hypothesis. “It’s very exciting. . . . I think altogether the combined evidence is pretty strong that they definitely are whole mitochondria,” remarks Martin Picard, a physiologist at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the new research. “I think there’s a lot more work to be done to know . . . whether they have a functional role to play,” he adds.

The findings were the result of a multi-year project led by Alain Thierry, an oncologist who researches the development of cancer biomarkers at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. About seven years ago, he and his colleagues were studying cell-free mitochondrial DNA—long known to circulate in human blood—as a potential diagnostic marker for cancer.

More here.

Glenn Rifkin in The New York Times:

When Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railway’s No. 8 train in New Orleans on June 7, 1892, he knew his journey to Covington, La., would be brief. He also knew it could have historic implications. Plessy was a racially mixed shoemaker who had agreed to take part in an act of civil disobedience orchestrated by a New Orleans civil rights organization. On that hot, sticky afternoon he walked into the Press Street Depot, purchased a first-class ticket and took a seat in the whites-only car. The civil rights group had chosen Plessy because he could pass for a white man. It was asserted later in a legal brief that he was seven-eighths white. But a conductor, who was also part of the scheme, stopped him and asked if he was “colored.” Plessy responded that he was. “Then you will have to retire to the colored car,” the conductor ordered.

Justin E. H. Smith in his personal blog:

I believe there is much to be learned philosophically from the study of languages that are spoken by only a small number of people, who lack a high degree of political self-determination and are relatively powerless to impose their conception of history, society, and nature on their neighbours; and who also lack much in the way of a textual literary tradition or formal and recognisably modern institutions of knowledge transmission: which for present purposes we may call “indigenous” languages.

This is of course going to be a hard sell, given that the great majority of Anglophone philosophers do not even recognize the value of learning German, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Chinese, and believe that they can penetrate as deeply as one might possibly go into fundamental philosophical questions from a standpoint of monolingualism. German, Latin, and the others are cosmopolitan languages, and historically all cosmopolitan languages, rightly or wrongly, have functioned as vehicles of what most discerning people are prepared to recognise as philosophy. But there is a significant difference even among the five cosmopolitan languages I’ve listed, which can begin to point us towards the even greater difference between all five of these, on the one hand, and, say, Yanomami, Ainu, Ket, or Sámi on the other: the first three cosmopolitan languages may be grouped together, as having a long legacy of shared and standardised terminology such that problems of translation between them are relatively small; by contrast, while there is to some extent a legacy of translation from Sanskrit towards Chinese, often via Tibetan, for the most part philosophical terminology has developed in these languages independently and without any felt need to establish cross-linguistic equivalencies.

More here.

Elizabeth Svoboda in Undark:

On the Puerto Rican island of Cayo Santiago, it’s the monkeys, not the humans, who are in charge. Yet this palm-fringed haven — home to about 1,000 rhesus macaques—can feel strangely similar to a weekend watering hole or middle-school cafeteria. Among these gregarious macaques, cliques, best-friend pairs, and social climbers are all much in evidence, giving scientists a close look at the primate origins of our drive to affiliate.

As science journalist Lydia Denworth visited places like Cayo, she grew convinced that humans’ social connectedness was far more deep-rooted, and far more biological, than experts had long assumed. For centuries, Denworth notes in “Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond,” our desire to make friends “was considered purely cultural, an invention of human society — and modern human society at that.”

But Denworth marshals new evidence that in friendship, as in so many areas, we’re not all that different from our primate forebears. Friendship isn’t just “the leavening in our lives”; it evolved because it has a direct bearing on our mental and physical health. Among the Cayo macaques, biologist Lauren Brent reports, those with the strongest social networks have lower levels of stress hormones — a factor known to buffer against disease.

More here.

Heather Alberro in Scroll.in:

The annual World Economic Forum in Davos brought together representatives from government and business to deliberate how to solve the worsening climate and ecological crisis. The meeting came just as devastating bush fires were abating in Australia. These fires are thought to have killed up to one billion animals and generated a new wave of climate refugees. Yet, as with the COP25 climate talks in Madrid, a sense of urgency, ambition and consensus on what to do next were largely absent in Davos.

But an important debate did surface – that is, the question of who, or what, is to blame for the crisis. Famed primatologist Dr Jane Goodall remarked at the event that human population growth is responsible, and that most environmental problems wouldn’t exist if our numbers were at the levels they were 500 years ago.

This might seem fairly innocuous, but its an argument that has grim implications and is based on a misreading of the underlying causes of the current crises. As these escalate, people must be prepared to challenge and reject the overpopulation argument.

More here.

Kelly Richman-Abdou in My Modern Met:

For years, artist and photographer Fong Qi Wei has been skillfully slicing photographs into awe-inspiring scenes showcasing the passage of time. Known as “time slice” photographs, each work of art combines several photos taken at different times of day to produce a single, strikingly cohesive composition.

To create each piece, Wei snaps several photographs of the same location over a period of several hours. He then digitally divides the images and extracts a single strip from each. Finally, he pieces together these strips, creating a harmonized scene that beautifully depicts a range of time.

While time slice photography is a prevalent practice among contemporary artists, Wei’s work is renowned for its creative compositions. Rather than simply combining the “slices” into vertical stripes, the artist experiments with angles, shapes, and placement. Some are arranged into ray-like formations, for example, while others are split into series of circles.

More here.

Birds of Texas

I like to be alone in someone else’s house,
practicing my cosmic long-distance wink.
I send it out toward a mirror
some distracted bored cosmonaut dropped
on an asteroid hurtling
closer to our star. No one watches
me watching thousands
of television hours, knitting
a golden bobcat out of
tiny golden threadlets. These good
lonely days everything
I’ve claimed I’ve seen
for me to use it glows.
I’m waiting for the love
of Alice Ghostley, who keeps
in various faces and guises
appearing amid the plot machines,
always to someone more beautiful
and central in complex futile relation.
They call her plain but to me her name
sounds full of distant messages
beamed a thousand years ago,
only now to flower. Penultimate
cigarette, high desert breezes,
I’ve written all my plans and vows
on careful scraps of paper piled
beneath weirdly heavy little black rocks
I gathered on many slow walks
into town to ask no one who
would bother naming this particular
time between later afternoon
and twilight. Crazed bee, I know
the name of the plant you are in!
Salvia! Also, the jay is not blue,
nor the sky or indigo bunting,
within particles and feathers sun
gets lost making expert holographers
out of us all. Passarina, I saw
your dull blaze from the railing flash
and an insect disappeared. Afternoon
once again slipped into
the gas station like it did those old
days it had a body that moved
and smoked among the people,
whistling a cowboy song concerning
long shadows, happy and unfree.

by Matthew Zapruder
All rights reserved.

Philip Ball in Prospect Magazine:

Most AI systems used today—whether for language translation, playing chess, driving cars, face recognition or medical diagnosis—deploy a technique called machine learning. So-called “convolutional neural -networks,” a silicon-chip version of the highly-interconnected web of neurons in our brains, are trained to spot patterns in data. During training, the strengths of the interconnections between the nodes in the neural network are adjusted until the system can reliably make the right classifications. It might learn, for example, to spot cats in a digital image, or to generate passable translations from Chinese to English. Although the ideas behind neural networks and machine learning go back decades, this type of AI really took off in the 2010s with the introduction of “deep learning”: in essence adding more layers of nodes between the input and output. That’s why DeepMind’s programme AlphaGo is able to defeat expert human players in the very complex board game Go, and Google Translate is now so much better than in its comically clumsy youth (although it’s still not perfect, for reasons I’ll come back to).

In Artificial Intelligence, Melanie Mitchell delivers an authoritative stroll through the development and state of play of this field. A computer scientist who began her career by persuading cognitive-science guru Douglas Hofstadter to be her doctoral supervisor, she explains how the breathless expectations of the late 1950s were left unfulfilled until deep learning came along. She also explains why AI’s impressive feats to date are now hitting the buffers because of the gap between narrow specialisation and human-like general intelligence. The problem is that deep learning has no way of checking its deductions against “common sense,” and so can make ridiculous errors. It is, say Marcus and Davis, “a kind of idiot savant, with miraculous perceptual abilities, but very little overall comprehension.” In image -classification, not only can this shortcoming lead to absurd results but the system can also be fooled by carefully constructed “adversarial” examples. Pixels can be rejigged in ways that look to us indistinguishable from the original but which AI confidently garbles, so that a van or a puppy is declared an ostrich. By the same token, images can be constructed from what looks to the human eye like random pixels but which AI will identify as an armadillo or a peacock.

More here.

From Teaching american history:

I have had but one idea for the last three years to present to the American people, and the phraseology in which I clothe it is the old abolition phraseology. I am for the “immediate, unconditional, and universal” enfranchisement of the black man, in every State in the Union. [Loud applause.] Without this, his liberty is a mockery; without this, you might as well almost retain the old name of slavery for his condition; for in fact, if he is not the slave of the individual master, he is the slave of society, and holds his liberty as a privilege, not as a right. He is at the mercy of the mob, and has no means of protecting himself.

It may be objected, however, that this pressing of the Negro’s right to suffrage is premature. Let us have slavery abolished, it may be said, let us have labor organized, and then, in the natural course of events, the right of suffrage will be extended to the Negro. I do not agree with this. The constitution of the human mind is such, that if it once disregards the conviction forced upon it by a revelation of truth, it requires the exercise of a higher power to produce the same conviction afterwards. The American people are now in tears. The Shenandoah has run blood—the best blood of the North. All around Richmond, the blood of New England and of the North has been shed—of your sons, your brothers and your fathers. We all feel, in the existence of this Rebellion, that judgments terrible, wide-spread, far-reaching, overwhelming, are abroad in the land; and we feel, in view of these judgments, just now, a disposition to learn righteousness. This is the hour. Our streets are in mourning, tears are falling at every fireside, and under the chastisement of this Rebellion we have almost come up to the point of conceding this great, this all-important right of suffrage. I fear that if we fail to do it now, if abolitionists fail to press it now, we may not see, for centuries to come, the same disposition that exists at this moment. [Applause.] Hence, I say, now is the time to press this right.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will honor The Black History Month. This year’s theme is “African Americans and the Vote.” Readers are encouraged to send in their suggestions)

Michael D. Gordin in the LA Review of Books:

TRAINING TO BECOME a physicist is really hard work. I know because I’m not one. A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I thought I might become a physicist but instead, early in college, I became captivated with the history of science and have never looked back. Well, almost never. My advisor in graduate school, out of what I am sure to him felt like benevolence but to me more like sadism, insisted that I keep enrolling in advanced courses in physics. As he put it in 1998: “In two years the physics of today will be last century’s physics, and you will want to be its historian.”

One of the physics courses I took was an advanced laboratory. It contained two kinds of students: undergraduate whizzes in experimental physics, who were rendering helium superfluid and measuring sound waves, and those in the other half of the room, all of them standing agog. Required to be there in order to prove their bona fides as “real physicists,” this second half (excluding me, the historian) was composed of graduate students in theoretical physics who were only marginally more competent at manipulating voltmeters than I was.

My lab partner was one of these theorists, earning a joint PhD in physics and the history of science. Our lab reports contained the best “historical overviews” any of the instructors had ever seen, if not the best results. Perhaps the most comic of the three experiments we performed was an attempt to verify the irreducible weirdness of quantum mechanics, a quantity called “Bell’s inequality.”

More here.

Alexander Klein in Aeon:

In November 1914, Bernard Bosanquet delivered the inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society’s 36th session. An ageing titan of British idealism, Bosanquet called his talk ‘Science and Philosophy’. It was a broadside on Bertrand Russell’s now-legendary book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) in which Russell sought to model a new ‘scientific’ method for doing philosophy that made the logical analysis of propositions fundamental. This logic-centric style would come to define what we now know as analytic philosophy.

Bosanquet’s opening complaint about Russell’s methodology was, surprisingly, political. He argued that the ‘scientific’ methodology would inevitably make philosophy ‘cosmopolitan in character and free from special national qualities’. Since logic, and science more generally, respects no political or cultural boundaries, Russell’s philosophy could never function as a distinctive expression of a people. This was a problem for Bosanquet. He held ‘that philosophy, being, like language, art, and poetry, a product of the whole man, is a thing which would forfeit some of its essence if it were to lose its national quality’. British idealism for Britons, and German idealism for Germans.

More here.

Alan Livsey in the FT:

Donald Trump was thinking about the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg when he took aim at what he called the “prophets of doom” at Davos in January. But just as easily he could have been targeting global investors whose trenchant criticism of hydrocarbons has led to a shift in investment away from the traditional energy sector and into renewables.

This move represents a big problem for energy groups such as Exxon, BP and Saudi Aramco. Vast swaths of their oil, gas and coal reserves may never be extracted and burnt because doing so would intensify global warming, worsening freak weather events and threatening the loss of farmland and huge population displacement. That could leave them with large numbers of what are known as “stranded assets”.

In that context of the climate emergency, the cost of writing off stranded assets could be seen as a small price to pay. But the amounts involved would be breathtaking. According to Lex estimates, around $900bn — or one-third of the current value of big oil and gas companies — would evaporate if governments more aggressively attempted to restrict the rise in temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the rest of this century.

Even in what the industry might see as the more benign case of a 2C rise — which was the target countries agreed to meet at the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change — energy producers, including coal miners, would have to write off over half of their fossil fuel reserves as stranded. If the 1.5C threshold were to be met then the pain would be greater, leaving over 80 per cent of hydrocarbon assets worthless.

More here.

Bruce Robbins in The Nation:

So vegetables are politics now!” The line is pronounced by a character in Alain Tanner’s 1976 film Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, a film that bids farewell to the political hopes of 1968 but somehow manages to be upbeat. John Berger, the English art critic, novelist, and universal man of letters who cowrote the film with Tanner, also managed to sustain an almost magical political buoyancy in the grim and uncertain years that followed the ’60s—and, like the character in Tanner’s film, he seems to have done so in part through vegetables, as well as animals, relocating so as to live in proximity to both.

I met Berger in Geneva a couple of years after the film came out. At the time, he was living in the French Alpine village of Quincy. There were already whispers about how, after the heady 1960s, his work had become too nostalgic for the apparently disappearing simplicities of peasant existence, and the day I met him he did nothing to dissuade me of this view. He was speaking, in torrential French, at the launch of an exhibition of Jean Mohr photographs of mountain villagers. I don’t remember much of what he said, except that, like Mohr’s portraits, he found in his neighbors a nobility that otherwise seemed to be lacking in modern life. In a café afterward, he invited me to Quincy. I was looking forward to the visit with embarrassing eagerness, but it was not to be. Before it could be arranged, I wrote something on the nostalgia question, beginning with an examination of Pig Earth, Berger’s newly published account of French peasant experience. I sent him a draft and got a letter back signed by his wife, Beverly Bancroft. The letter was slightly ambiguous: He hadn’t read it, and he didn’t like this sort of thing. That was the end of our budding relationship.

More here.

Leslie Jamison at the NY Times:

Offill’s writing is shrewd on the question of whether intense psychic suffering heightens your awareness of the pain of others, or makes you blind to it. The answer, of course, is that it can do both; that it inevitably does both. Sometimes Offill’s narrators seem vulnerable to the delusion that their dysfunction sets them apart — that they are breaking down against the backdrop of others’ composure, which can come across as self-deprecation but is actually its own form of egotism. But part of the brilliance of Offill’s fiction is how it pushes back against this self-deception: “Stay, just stay,” the wife in “Dept. of Speculation” tells her suicidal student, a girl overcome by pain of her own; while Lizzie’s meditation teacher, who believes in reincarnation, insists that “everyone here has done everything to everyone else.” Lizzie is often overwhelmed by her interior landscape, but she is also often aware that everyone around her inhabits an interior landscape that feels just as intense; and that they are all inhabiting an exterior landscape with intensities of its own.

more here.

Kate Wagner at The Baffler:

What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many abandoned factories one passes by train, and vice versa. That doesn’t mean, though, that all industrial landscapes are created equal. Urban manufacturing factories are considered beautiful—tastefully articulated on the outside, their large windows flooding their vast internal volumes with light; they are frequently rehabilitated into spaces for living and retail or otherwise colonized by local universities. The dilapidated factory, crumbling and overgrown by vegetation, now inhabits that strange space between natural and man-made, historical and contemporary, lovely and sad. The power plant, mine, or refinery invokes strong feelings of awe and fear. And then there are some, such as the Superfund site—remediated or not—whose parklike appearance and sinister ambience remains aesthetically elusive.

more here.

Madeleine Schwarz at the NYRB:

Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement. “Stop reading this review, just read her books!” you want to say. For several weeks now I’ve been carrying around NDiaye’s novels, telling friends to pick up her work. “She’s the smartest writer working today!” I say. Or else: “She’s going to win the Nobel Prize!”

Reading her books, you see a voracious, condensed history of much of twentieth-century literature. Here is an “I” reminiscent of what is often called autofiction, cool and probing; here is an interest in every tick of a woman’s mind that recalls the miniatures of French writers like Marguerite Duras. Here, where the women turn into dogs, where the birds may have a human spirit, is what seems like magical realism, though the line between what is happening and what is imagined is never quite clear.

more here.

Editorial in Nature:

This week, Nature is publishing a suite of papers that sheds new light on the genetic causes of cancer. The results show how far our understanding of cancer has come — and how far we still have to go. The Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium brought together researchers with nearly 750 affiliations across 4 continents. Between them, they sequenced full genomes from more than 2,600 samples representing 38 different types of cancer. The work is summarized in a News & Views article in this issue. The project is remarkable in both scope and complexity, and, partly because of this, faced challenges at every step; from acquiring samples to protecting patient privacy while putting terabytes of data into the hands of researchers.

Thanks to these efforts — and previous full-genome sequences — scientists now have an unprecedented view of the genetic changes that can contribute to cancer, and a clearer idea of where gaps in knowledge remain. Altogether, the team pinpointed 705 mutations that occurred repeatedly in the cancer genomes, suggesting that they are important for tumour growth. Of these, about 100 fell outside the protein-coding regions of the genome, but more such mutations might be uncovered with improvements in computational techniques for analysing non-coding regions. Overall, the authors found that cancer genomes contain an average of four to five mutations that drive tumour growth. In 5% of cases, however, they found no such mutations. Cancer genomes have been sequenced for more than a decade, but now researchers and the funders who support them must tackle the next challenge. The goal has always been to improve the lives of those affected by cancer, and the reams of data amassed by sequencing projects have helped. They are used by researchers to find new drug targets, and to generate new markers that can be used to match patients with the treatment most likely to help.

But most of the data so far have been limited in one crucial respect: clinical details of the sample donors are often missing.

More here.