Posted on by amowpnas1

Ciència i tecnologia

Algoritmes i privacitat
ciència estancada
març 2018
https://theconversation.com/did-artists-lead-the-way-in-mathematics-75355 artistes dels mosaics islàics anticipant simetries que els matemàtics descobriran més tard, Jackson Pollock
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/the-story-of-a-trans-womans-face la tècnica de modificar una cara per que sigui més femenina [què vol dir femenina?. He gradually came to believe that he should try to make his patients look not just like average women but like beautiful women. In part, this was to counterbalance common masculine traits that a trans patient cannot alter, such as the size of her hands. But Ousterhout’s decision also had the effect of upholding certain cultural assumptions about what is beautiful or feminine. As Plemons, who is trans, writes, “Feminine is a term in which biological femaleness and aesthetic desirability collapse.” At the very least, Ousterhout wished to enable his patients to open the door to the UPS guy in their sweatpants, without the armor of makeup or careful hair styling, and be perceived as female. But he also believed that he had the ability to give his patients a face that emulated a feminine ideal.
dona enginyera de trens
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/how-a-young-woman-lost-her-identity,  una dona amb una síndrome que li fa perdre el sentit de la identitat
ciència estancada
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-hitting-a-wall-part-1/ ja no s’avança en ciència? [les preguntes que fem a la natura han tingut unes respostes espectacularment ràpides però potser estem estancats]
http://nautil.us/blog/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in-the-foundations-of-physics-is-not-normal la física està estancada, i es van publicant i finançant projectes inútils
la ciència s’està estancant
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/were-incentivizing-bad-science/ el sistema actual premia els que publiquen ràpid i amb menys autocontrol; el resultat és ciència mediocre.
https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf article sobre que cada cop requereix més esforç arribar a una idea nova
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/how-frightened-should-we-be-of-ai els riscos d’una AGI Articial general Inteligence que agafi el control de tot i deixi els humans com a obsolets [en funció dels objectius que li definim, preservar le planeta? preservar la vida humana?]
El reptes d ela ciència:
el càncer, Ai als ordinadors, superbacteris, nanotecnologina
 gens a la carta, tecnologies quàntiques, el canvi climàtic i la sóndrome de la granota bullida, el que no explcia el model estàndar  de les partícules, la qualitat de l’aire, els materials del futu grafè i biomaterials.
la realitat i la mecànica quàntica, la interpretació de Copenhague. Kuhn. What is real
experiment d’entrenat AI amb dades de reddit que fan que vegi el món d’una manera negativa.
Norman is just a thought experiment, but the questions it raises about machine learning algorithms making judgments and decisions based on biased data are urgent and necessary. Those systems, for example, are already used in credit underwriting, deciding whether or not loans are worth guaranteeing. What if an algorithm decides you shouldn’t buy a house or a car? To whom do you appeal? What if you’re not white and a piece of software predicts you’ll commit a crime because of that? There are many, many open questions. Norman’s role is to help us figure out their answers.
Hawking: preguntar què hi ha abans del ig bang és com preguntar què hi ha al nord del pol nord
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.
ALGORITMES
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/17/should-we-be-worried-about-computerized-facial-recognition tecnologia que permet reconèixer vaques a les granges. Moltes ciutats enregistren imatges sense dir com les tracten. Els media venen la informació de les imatges a empreses publicitàries., [si hi afdegim el biaix dels algortimes, el risc és molt gran.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/15/how-do-you-fight-an-algorithm-you-cannot-see/ Ni que es facin públics els algoritmes i les dades, és difícil saber com funcionen, és una black box
La nostra identitat digital: el que comnpartim, el que capturen encara que no compartim https://qz.com/1525661/your-digital-identity-has-three-layers-and-you-can-only-protect-one-of-them/
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47267081 evidència que en ciència el deep learning du a resultats euivocats [i si això es pot verificar en ciència, molt més ho deu ser en altres terrenys!]
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-disappear maneres d’evitar que recullin dades sobre nosaltres.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense toolkit
https://www.wsj.com/articles/strange-stories-of-extraordinary-brainsand-what-we-can-learn-from-them-1530286669 cervells que perden la capacitat de tenir el mapa mental, o que són tan empàtics que “senten” el que veuen
Linux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owiwCIhc0I0 Christian Moullec volar amb ocells
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers el cicle de vida del software, ajuda al començament, se li afegeixen prestacions i acaba sent un monstre del qual depenem i complicat de mantenir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslach_Burnout_Inventory
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/whats-inside-fatbergs un estudi del que hi ha a les clavegueres
https://www.inverse.com/article/51084-reference-genome-human-genetics-testing el genoma de refèmcia que es fa servir als tests cobreix només una part determinada de la població, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_genome
https://www.businessinsider.es/dna-modified-babies-researcher-under-investigation-suspended-2018-11 científic xinès suspès després d’haver editat el codi genètic d’uns bessons
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/learning-to-love-robots robots,  In contrast to Shintoism, Judeo-Christian theology suggests that, by begetting artificial life, you create false idols, who, inexorably, will decide to make your life miserable by destroying it. Take heed from the golem, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Mickey Mouse’s enchanted brooms, Dolores in “Westworld”—or, indeed, from try-hard Jibo.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/do-proteins-hold-the-key-to-the-past rastres de proteines als llibres permeten tenir un rastre bioquímic de la gent que els va escriure i fer servir.
2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/magazine/beauty-evolution-animal.html L’evolucó no té una bona explicació pels ornaments o comportaments “inútils”.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/womens-history-in-science-hidden-footnotes/582472/ Dones científiques que no han tingut el reconeixement que mereixien
privacitat al navegador
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9 interpretació de resultats inadequada per no entendre l’estadística.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47891902 La imatge d’un forat negre, Katie Bouman
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/man-woman-and-robot-in-ian-mcewans-new-novel reflexió sobre els robots a partir d’una novel·la d’Ian Mcewan
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic Walter Pitts, que va trobar errors al Principia Mathematica de Russell als 12 anys i que intenbtà un model matemàtic del cervell.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/why-accidents-like-notre-dame-fire-happen/587956/ la complicació dels sistemes automàtics de seguretat incrementa el risc
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian Eagleman i la percepció del cervell, com Kublai Khan fent-se una idea de què passa a partir dels informes que li arriben.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-plants-dont-die-from-cancer les plantes suporten molt millor la radiació, com Chernobyl, perquè tenen una forma “oberta” i no “tancada”.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02211-5 oblidar coses no és una fallada del funcionament normal de la memòria, requereix activament eliminar certes connexions, per tant té una finalitat.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/listening-for-extraterrestrial-blah-blah mesurant l’entropia del llenguatge en animals i persones
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49499444 història de la tecnologia, les peces intercanviables a les armes,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/02/big-techs-big-defector roger mcnamee i la crítica a facebook i google
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/taking-virtual-reality-for-a-test-drive realitat virtual, per a móns ficticis, reunions a distància, entrenament de pilots, ajudar a empatitzar amb víctimes de discriminació,
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-are-there-5-280-feet-in-a-mile la milla ve dels romans, mil passos, cada pas eren uns 5 peus. El furlong era la distància que podia llaurar un bou en un dia, i el parlament va establir la milla com a 8 furlongs, cadascun de 660 peus: 5280 peus. D’aquí també ve acre com a mesura de superfície.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/20/the-past-and-the-future-of-the-earths-oldest-trees Alex ross sobre els Pinus longaeva, els arbres que viuen milers d’anys i com es poden fer servir per la datació corregint el carboni 14.  “A few events are so severe that they show up in every tree,” Salzer said. “2036 B.C., 43 B.C., 627 A.D.” He went on, “2036 B.C. is maybe my favorite. //  Humans tend to make a cult of trees. Many ancient traditions posit the existence of a primal tree that embodies eternal life. Reverence surrounds the Bodhi Tree, in Bodh Gaya, India; the Cypress of Abarkuh, in Iran; the Hibakujumoku trees, in Hiroshima, which withstood the atomic blast. There are trees of life, and trees of death. In Schubert’s song “Der Lindenbaum,” from the death-haunted cycle “Winterreise,” a linden tree calls to a disconsolate wanderer, “Come to me, friend, / Here you will find rest.” Thomas Mann makes much of that song in “The Magic Mountain,” finding it symbolic of a civilization hurtling toward its own destruction.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-meaning-of-life què entenem per vida? què és un planeta habitable?  In other words, the capacity of a planet to sustain life is potentially a very different issue to that of the capacity to initiate life.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/all-your-memories-are-stored-by-one-weird-ancient-molecule la memòria, neurones, es basa en una proteïna que hauria estat com un virus.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-scientific-paper-is-obsolete elsevier, Wolpram i Mathematica, IPython, notebooks per “experimentar, com el Mathematica però lliure https://jupyter.org/, possible integració en WP.
Pérez told me stories of scientists who sacrificed their academic careers to build software, because building software counted for so little in their field: The creator of matplotlib, probably the most widely used tool for generating plots in scientific papers, was a postdoc in neuroscience but had to leave academia for industry. The same thing happened to the creator of NumPy, a now-ubiquitous tool for numerical computing. Pérez himself said, “I did get straight-out blunt comments from many, many colleagues, and from senior people and mentors who said: Stop doing this, you’re wasting your career, you’re wasting your talent.” Unabashedly, he said, they’d tell him to “go back to physics and mathematics and writing papers.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/common-sense-comes-to-computers-20200430/ Intentant aportar sentit comú a la AI, amb models gràfics i deep learning; els models amb regles no han funcionat.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-52579475 amb les dades dels mòbils l’agència de seguretat pot saber en tot moment on està la gent. Una eina pensada per a controlar terroristes ara serveix per al coronavirus
https://www.quantamagazine.org/graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem-20200519/ una matemàtica jove soluciona un problema de nusos (guapíssima)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/thirty-six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea un submarí per baixar a la fossa abissal, fet per un milionari i una colla de frikis 48M$
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/memories-can-be-injected-and-survive-amputation-and-metamorphosis cucs partits per la meitat retenen l’aprenentatge a les dues parts, potser la memòria no es desa en una representació distribuïda
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/31/protests-surveillance-stingrays-dirtboxes-phone-tracking/ la  policia simulant torres de comunicació per identificar telèfons en uan àrea o capturar la informació transmesa.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/omniviolence-is-coming-and-the-world-isn-t-ready drones de 2 cm poden dur 1 gram d’explosiu i ser programats per atacar qui sigui
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 rograma que processa llenguatge natural, pot escriure articles indistingibles dels humans.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-a-band-of-activists-and-one-tech-billionaire-beat-alphabets-smart-city-de19afb5d69e el fracàs de la prova de Google de smart city a Toronto, la tecnologia i les dades no ens salvaran.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/22/us/hagoromo-chalk-great-big-story-trnd/index.html hagaromo, el guix de pissarra que volen els matemàtics
https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-math-gets-impossibly-hard-20200914/ demostracions d’impossibilitat a matemàtica
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-london-54195597 la matemàtica de remenar una tassa de te
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54239180 una televisió vella interfereix amb la internet de tot un poble
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-54327412 nano robots del gruix d’un cabell
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201007-can-driverless-cars-tackle-climate-change els cotxes sense conductor necesiten molta tecnologia que consumeix molta energia
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-architect-of-modern-algorithms Barbara Liskov, que va establir l’arquitrectura de la programació
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/the-race-to-redesign-sugar buscant noves fórmules de sucre que satisfacin el gust sense perjudicar la salut.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/the-elusive-peril-of-space-junk no només hem emmerdat la terra, sinó l’espai que ens envolta.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/with-a-simple-twist-a-magic-material-is-now-the-big-thing-in-physics les propietats de torçar una làmina de grafè [ anem com a l’època de l’alquima, provant, no pas deduint ]
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/stronger-than-steel-able-to-stop-a-speeding-bullet-it-s-super-wood modificant les propietats de la fusta [ i no dependríem dels minerals ]
https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/ un treball sobre teoria de la informació va obrir el pas a la tecnologia 5G (juntament amb la desfeta de Nortel, antic proveidor de Caixa aprofitada per Huawei)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died  evidència fòssil del dia que la caiguda d’un meteorit va causar l’extinció dels dinosaures. Un jaciment amb fòssils al voltant del tall KT (cretàcic – terciari)
COVID
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-coronavirus-hacks-the-immune-system, el sistema immunitari i la covid

 

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/ un article de recerca assenyalava que quan la AI de Google incorpora els significats habituals del llenguatge
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-map-of-mathematics-20200213/ mapa de les branques de la matemàtica avui
https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantas-year-in-math-and-computer-science-2020-20201223/ les descobertes de la matemàtica el 2020 i com cada vegada és més important el paper dels ordinadors.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-understand-the-universe-when-you-re-stuck-inside-of-it Lee Smolin sobre el cosmos com a sistema sense exterior. (ampliat a notes 2020)

https://time.com/5925206/why-do-we-dream/ Eagleman , somiem per mantenir el cervell plàstic i actiu en absència d’estímuls a la nit, igual que el cas d’un jove a qui li extirparen els ulls epr un càncer i va aprendre a construir una realitat amb ecolocació

2021

https://www.wired.com/story/30-years-since-the-human-genome-project-began-whats-next/  If physicians were ready to use that information, and patients were ready to act on it, then investing the $1,000 [the going commercial rate]  to sequence any of our genomes would be trivial in the grand scheme of  our medical care for life. So I don’t think that’s the issue. The issue  is that at the moment, for a generally healthy person, we wouldn’t know what to do with that information. That’s why I haven’t had my genome sequenced yet.
You haven’t?
No.  Because we have the technical ability to generate the sequence, and a  very good quality one at that. But then there’s this massive gap between  having the data in front of us and knowing what it all means. That’s  why one of our bold predictions is to get to a place where we know the  biological function of every human gene. We’re making progress, but that  progress is likely going to be measured more in decades than in years.
One of the other projects we’re supporting is an effort to get to a reference genome that captures the full multidimensional diversity of humanity. What we have now doesn’t do that. If we grab someone from the middle of Asia and sequence their genome, we want to compare their variants to an appropriately matched control group so we can assess any rare changes that might be behind a health problem, or contribute to the risk of developing one. If all we have to compare it to is a standard reference that, like the one we have now, happens to be made from European DNA, it can be really misleading. So the goal of this pan-genome effort is to always have available an appropriately ancestrally matched data set available for medical interpretation. Achieving that is also one of our bold predictions.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/crispr-and-the-splice-to-survive modificar els gens de les plagues per eliminar-les, com els gripaus d’AUstràlia
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00075-2 el codi que ha ajudat al progrés de la ciència
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/08/the-next-cyberattack-is-already-under-way la vulnerabilitat de totes les instal·lacions a control de hackers, el mercat del zero-day
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-history-americas-zero-day-market/
https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-56238018 imatges del Perseverance a Mart
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210310-the-star-fiend-who-unlocked-the-universe Leavit, que notà el període de les estrelles binàries variables, el que va ser el fonament per calcular la distància a la terra
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/why-computers-wont-make-themselves-smarter Ted CHiang sobre l’especulació d’una AI que faci un salt qualitatiu d’intel·ligència, millorant-se exponencialment (i amenaçant la raça human)
https://www.wired.com/story/what-octopus-dreams-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-sleep/ els canvis en la pell dels pops quan estan adormits (no reaccionen a imatges externes) indicaria que estan somiant.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56799755 la nasa fa volar un petit helicòpter a Mart
2021
By the fourth century B.C., the Greeks had made their way to the Arctic Circle; by the second century A.D., the Romans had reached China; and by the ninth century Indonesians had landed in Madagascar. As time went on, we began supplementing observation and memory with more and more physical tools: the astrolabe, the sextant, the compass, the map, the nautical chart, the global-positioning system.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/21/when-graphs-are-a-matter-of-life-and-death història dels gràfics, per explicar, per obtenir organitzar la circulació dels trens. The scatter plot, which some trace back to the English scientist John Herschel, and which Tufte heralds as “the greatest of all graphical designs,” allowed statistical graphs to take on the form of two continuous variables at once—temperature, or money, or unemployment rates, or wine consumption—whether it had a real-world physical presence or not. Rather than featuring a single line joining single values as they move over time, these graphs could present clouds of points, each plotted according to two variables. // A famous example comes from around 1911, when the astronomers Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell independently produced a scatter of a series of stars, plotting their luminosity against their color, moving across the spectrum from blue to red. (A star’s color is determined by its surface temperature; its luminosity, or intrinsic brightness, is determined both by its surface temperature and by its size.) The result, as Friendly and Wainer concede, is “not a graph of great beauty,” but it did revolutionize astrophysics. The scatter plot showed that the stars were distributed not at random but concentrated in groups, huddled together by type. These clusters would prove to be home to the blue and red giants, and also the red and white dwarfs.// If three dimensions are possible, though, why not four? Or four hundred? Today, much of data science is founded on precisely these high-dimensional spaces. // These are scatter plots that no one ever needs to see. They exist in vast number arrays on the hard drives of powerful computers, turned and manipulated as though the distances between the imagined dots were real. Data visualization has progressed from a means of making things tractable and comprehensible on the page to an automated hunt for clusters and connections, with trained machines that do the searching. Patterns still emerge and drive our understanding of the world forward, even if they are no longer visible to the human eye. But these modern innovations exist only because of the original insight that it was possible to think of numbers visually. The invention of graphs and charts was a much quieter affair than that of the telescope, but these tools have done just as much to change how and what we see.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a37093943/uss-gerald-ford-aircraft-carrier-problems/ un portaavions que no va perquè s’hi van introduir massa novetats tecnològiques sense provar,
https://www.quantamagazine.org/karen-miga-fills-in-the-missing-pieces-of-our-genome-20210908/ acabant de desxifrar el genoma [ tots tenim el mateix gen a la mateixa posició? és a dir, a la “capsa” 24 tots tenim un contingut que codifica el color dels ulls, per exemple?]
https://www.wired.com/story/cars-going-electric-what-happens-used-batteries/ els reptes de desfer-nos o reciclar les bateries usades
El biòleg E.O.Wilson. Insects are, of course, also vital. They’re by far the largest class of animals on Earth, with roughly a million named species and probably four times that many awaiting identification. (Robert May, an Australian scientist who helped develop the field of theoretical ecology, once noted, “To a first approximation, all species are insects.”) They support most terrestrial food chains, serve as the planet’s chief pollinators, and act as crucial decomposers. Goulson quotes Wilson’s observation: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
Wilson, who’s been called the “father of biodiversity,” has a bigger idea. In “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life” (2016), he argues that the only way to preserve the world’s insects—and, for that matter, everything else—is to set aside fifty per cent of it in “inviolable reserves.” He arrived at the figure, he explains, using the principles of island biogeography; on fifty per cent of the globe, he calculates, roughly eighty-five per cent of the planet’s species could be saved.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/whaling-whales-food-krill-iron/620604/ les balenes no només consumeixen krill sinó que quan defequen deixen caure al fons ferro i altres materials que serviran per que torni a créixer la població de fitoplancton.  Elles transporten el ferro de l’atlantic, on ve de la pls del sahara, al sud.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-ecological-thinking-fills-the-gaps-in-biomedicine la ecerca sobre el paper del microbioma i els intestins, i la relació amb malalties aparentment no relacionades com l’esquizofrènia o el PArkinson indicarien que el cos funciona més com un ecosistema, recordant la teoria de l’equilibri dels 4 humors, que no pas com una màquina [ com la pintava Fritz Kahn ]
https://www.theverge.com/22787426/netflix-cdn-open-connect la tecnologia de 17000 servidors per que no falli l’streaming. AI anticipa què voldrà veure la gent i ho copia als servidors en hores de poc tràfic.
We think that quantum mechanics is something that operates on the microscopic scale. And there’s some cases in material systems like metals, superconductors and superfluids where quantum mechanics can operate. But when we start talking about scales of people and buildings and planets, the world is classical, and quantum mechanical effects get washed out.
Contrasenya al món analògic
Four Max Carrados Detective (Bramah, Ernest)
– Your Highlight on page 75 | location 1142-1146 | Added on Monday, 5 July 2021 15:50:21
“That simplifies the argument. Let us consider fraud. There again the precautions are so rigid that many people pronounce the forms a nuisance. I confess that I do not. I regard them as a means of protecting my own property and I cheerfully sign my name and give my password, which the manager compares with his record-book before he releases the first lock of my safe. The signature is burned before my eyes in a sort of crucible there, the password is of my own choosing and is written only in a book that no one but the manager ever sees, and my key is the sole one in existence.”
This story begins about two billion years ago, when the world, if not young, exactly, was a lot more impressionable. The planet spun faster, so the sun rose every twenty-one hours. The earliest continents were forming—Arctica, for instance, which persists as bits and pieces of Siberia. Most of the globe was given over to oceans, and the oceans teemed with microbes.
Some of these microbes—the group known as cyanobacteria—had mastered a peculiarly powerful form of alchemy. They lived off sunlight, which they converted into sugar. As a waste product, they gave off oxygen. Cyanobacteria were so plentiful, and so good at what they did, that they changed the world. They altered the oceans’ chemistry, and then the atmosphere’s. Formerly in short supply, oxygen became abundant. Anything that couldn’t tolerate it either died off or retreated to some dark, airless corner.
One day, another organism—a sort of proto-alga—devoured a cyanobacterium. Instead of being destroyed, as you might expect, the bacterium took up residence, like Jonah in the whale. This accommodation, unlikely as it was, sent life in a new direction. The secret to photosynthesis passed to the alga and all its heirs.
A billion years went by. The planet’s rotation slowed. The continents crashed together to form a supercontinent, Rodinia, then drifted apart again. The alga’s heirs diversified.
One side of the family stuck to the water. Another branch set out to colonize dry land. The first explorers stayed small and low to the ground. (These were probably related to liverworts.) Eventually, they were joined by the ancestors of today’s ferns and mosses. There was so much empty space—and hence available light—that plants, as one botanist has put it, found terrestrial life “irresistible.” They spread out their fronds and began to grow taller. The rise of plants made possible the rise of plant-eating animals. During the Carboniferous period, towering tree ferns and giant club mosses covered the earth, and insects with wingspans of more than two feet flitted through them.
Some two hundred million years later, in the early Cretaceous, plants with flowers appeared on the scene. They were so fabulously successful that they soon took over. (Charles Darwin was deeply troubled by the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record, describing it as an “abominable mystery.”) Later still, grasses and cacti evolved.
Through it all, plants continued to make a living more or less the same way they had since that ancient cyanobacterium took up with the alga. Photosynthesis remained remarkably stable over thousands of millennia of natural selection. It didn’t change when humans began to domesticate plants, ten thousand years ago, or, later, when they figured out how to irrigate, fertilize, and, finally, hybridize them. It always worked well enough to power the planet—that is, until now.
Stephen Long is a professor of plant biology and crop sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the director of a project called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, or RIPE. The premise of RIPE is that, as remarkable as photosynthesis may be, it needs to do better.
In 1999, Long decided that he would create his own version of photosynthesis. By this time, he’d moved to the University of Illinois, where many of the major discoveries about the process had been made. Long’s idea was to build a computer simulation that would model each of the hundred and fifty-odd steps in photosynthesis as a differential equation. The effort dragged on for years, in part because Long’s program kept crashing. Eventually, he got in touch with a computer scientist who worked for NASA on rocket engines.
Because photosynthesis is so complicated, and because the math involved is also complicated, Long’s model requires a phenomenal amount of computing power. To simulate the performance of a single leaf over the course of a few minutes, it must make millions of calculations.
One of the opportunities that Long identified in his 2006 paper involves a process known as nonphotochemical quenching, or N.P.Q. Obviously, plants need light, but, like us, they can suffer from too much of it. N.P.Q. enables them to protect themselves by dissipating excess light as heat. The problem is that N.P.Q. is sluggish; once initiated, it’s slow to stop, even as light conditions change. Long’s model suggested that some clever genetic modifications could make the process nimbler.
Researchers at RIPE set about testing this proposition on tobacco plants, which are sort of the lab rats of the ag world. They inserted three extra genes into the plants, then raised them in greenhouses. The modified plants did, indeed, outperform ordinary tobacco plants—they grew faster and put on more weight. The team then ran field trials. Long nervously awaited the outcome. The results were even better than he’d hoped: the modified plants outperformed the control plants by up to twenty per cent.
In 1967, two sober-minded men published a book with a sensational title: “Famine—1975!” The authors, William and Paul Paddock, were brothers; William was an agronomist, Paul a retired Foreign Service officer. “A collision between exploding population and static agriculture is imminent,” the Paddocks wrote. They declared, “The conclusion is clear: there is no possibility of improving agriculture . . . soon enough to avert famine.”
“Famine—1975!” was followed by “The Population Bomb,” by the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, published in 1968. Ehrlich, too, declared disaster unavoidable. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote. “In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich became a regular guest on the “Tonight Show,” and “The Population Bomb” sold more than two million copies.
The catastrophe failed to materialize. Ehrlich and the Paddocks were wrong about the future of agriculture. Even as they were writing, the seeds—both literal and metaphorical—were being sown for what would become known as the Green Revolution.
At the vanguard of the revolution was Norman Borlaug, a plant pathologist who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation at an agricultural-research station in Mexico. By painstakingly breeding wheat over the course of two decades, he developed a series of highly productive, disease-resistant varieties. The varieties were unusually stocky—they’d been bred using dwarf strains—and this allowed them to put more energy into their kernels and less into their stalks. As the varieties were adopted, yields shot up; in the two decades following the publication of “Famine—1975!,” wheat production in Mexico nearly doubled. During the same period in India, it more than tripled.
Many experts shared their anxiety. In the mid-sixties, the global population was growing by more than two per cent a year, which is believed to be the highest rate in human history. In a number of developing countries—Brazil and Ethiopia, for instance—the annual rate was closer to three per cent. Agricultural production wasn’t keeping up.
For his efforts, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. “More than any other single person of this age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world,” the chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee stated.
Like most revolutions, the green one had unintended consequences. The new, high-yield varieties were needy; to realize their full potential, they required plenty of fertilizer, pesticides, and water. These “inputs,” in turn, required money. The bulk of the benefits thus accrued to those with resources. Farms became bigger and more mechanized, developments that often cost the very poorest agricultural workers their livelihoods. Research suggests that the new varieties, combined with the agricultural practices they promoted, exacerbated inequality.
“The availability of 60% cheaper rice would be little consolation to someone who had lost 100% of their income as a result of the Green Revolution,” Raj Patel, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has written.
The ecological costs, too, were high, and by many accounts these are still growing. Fertilizer runoff has filled rivers and lakes with nutrients, producing algae blooms and aquatic “dead zones.” Increased pesticide use has had the perverse effect of doing in many of the beneficial insects that once kept pests in check. The demands of irrigation have emptied aquifers. In the northern Indian state of Punjab, an early center of the Green Revolution, groundwater is being pumped out so much faster than it can be replenished that the water table is falling by about three feet a year.
It is often said that the world now needs a New Green Revolution, or a Second Green Revolution, or Green Revolution 2.0. The rate of yield growth for crops like wheat, rice, and corn appears to be plateauing, and the number of people who are hungry is once again on the rise. The world’s population, meanwhile, continues to increase; now almost eight billion, it’s projected to reach nearly ten billion by 2050. Income gains in countries like China are increasing the consumption of meat, which requires ever more grain and forage to produce. To meet the expected demand, global agricultural output will have to rise by almost seventy per cent during the next thirty years. Such an increase would be tough to achieve in the best of times, which the coming decades are not likely to be.
RIPE’s test plots are to the average farm what a Tesla is to a Model T. Looming above the plots are hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall metal towers strung with guy wires. The wires are controlled by computerized winches imported from Austria—a setup that was originally devised to film professional sports matches. RIPE’s setup carries sensors that, among other things, shoot out laser beams and detect infrared radiation. When I visited, the sensors had just been installed; the idea was to track the plants’ progress on a day-to-day basis.
Long is particularly keen on getting photosynthetically souped-up seed to farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that didn’t much benefit from the yield gains of the original Green Revolution. Today, more than two hundred million people there are chronically undernourished.
“If we can provide smallholder farmers in Africa with technologies that will produce more food and give them a better livelihood, that’s what really motivates the team,” Long told me. One of the Gates Foundation’s stipulations is that any breakthroughs that result from RIPE’s work be made available “at an affordable price” to companies or government agencies that supply seed to farmers in the world’s poorest countries.
A recent study noted that at least two dozen G.M. food crops—some modified for insect resistance, others for salt tolerance—have been submitted to regulatory agencies in the region but remain in limbo.
“A host of viable technologies continue to sit on the shelf, frequently due to regulatory paralysis,” the study observed. (In the U.S., practically all of the soy and corn grown is genetically modified; other approved G.M. food crops include apples, potatoes, papayas, sugar beets, and canola. In Europe, by contrast, G.M. crops are generally banned.)
Some thirty million years ago, a plant—no one knows exactly which one, but probably it was a grass—came up with its own hack to improve photosynthesis. The hack didn’t alter the steps involved in the process; instead, it added new ones. The new steps concentrated CO2 around RuBisCo, effectively eliminating the enzyme’s opportunity to make a mistake. (To extend the assembly-line metaphor, imagine a worker surrounded by crateloads of the right parts and none of the wrong ones.) At the time, carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere were falling—a trend that would continue more or less until humans figured out how to burn fossil fuels—so even though the hack cost the plant some energy, it offered a net gain. In fact, it proved so useful that other plants soon followed suit. What’s now known as C4 photosynthesis evolved independently at least forty-five times, in nineteen different plant families. (The term “C4” refers to a four-carbon compound that’s produced in one of the supplemental steps.) Nowadays, several of the world’s key crop plants are C4, including corn, millet, and sorghum, and so are several of the world’s key weeds, like crabgrass and tumbleweed.
C4 photosynthesis isn’t just more efficient than ordinary photosynthesis, which is known as C3. It also requires less water and less nitrogen, and so, in turn, less fertilizer. About twenty-five years ago, a plant physiologist named John Sheehy came up with what many other plant physiologists considered to be an absurd idea. He decided that rice, which is a C3 plant, should be transformed into a C4. Like Long, Sheehy was from England, but he was working in the Philippines, at the research institute where, in the nineteen-sixties, breeders had developed the rice varieties that helped spark the Green Revolution. In 1999, Sheehy hosted a meeting at the institute to discuss his idea. The general opinion of the participants was that it was impossible.
But, in many ways, the twenty-first century’s problems are holdovers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it’s not clear whether the new tools are a better match for them than the old. As Mabaya, who also serves as the chief scientific adviser for the African Seed Access Index, pointed out to me, researchers have already developed plenty of improved varieties for sub-Saharan Africa, using conventional breeding methods.
“Most of the varieties, maybe eighty per cent of them, just end up on the shelf,” he said. “They never reach smallholder farmers.” (The Access Index, which is working to identify the choke points in African seed systems, is another group funded, in part, by the Gates Foundation.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/understanding-the-body-electric
Timothy J. Jorgensen, a professor of radiation medicine at Georgetown University, writes in his new book, “Spark” (Princeton), that “life is nothing if not electrical.” In our daily lives, seeing lightning in the sky or plugging our appliances into wall sockets, we tend to neglect this fact. Jorgensen’s aim, in this chatty, wide-ranging tour of electricity’s role in biology and medicine, is to show us that every experience we have of our selves—from the senses of sight, smell, and sound to our movements and our thoughts—depends on electrical impulses.
He starts with amber, the material with which humans probably first attempted to harness electricity for medical uses. Amber is the fossilized resin of prehistoric trees; when rubbed, it becomes charged with static electricity. It can attract small bits of matter, such as fluff, and emit shocks, and these properties made it seem magical. Amber pendants have been found dating back to 12,000 B.C., and Jorgensen writes that such jewelry would have been valued for much more than its beauty. In the era of recorded history, accounts of amber’s use abound. The ancient Greeks massaged the ailing with it, believing, Jorgensen writes, that its “attractive forces would pull the pain out of their bodies,” and it is the Greek word for amber—elektron—that gives us an entire vocabulary for electrical properties. In first-century Rome, Pliny the Elder wrote that wearing amber around the neck could prevent throat diseases and even mental illness. The Romans also used non-static electricity from torpedo fish, a name for various species of electric ray, to deliver shocks to patients with maladies including headaches and hemorrhoids.
https://youtu.be/wr_ERUAZflw
As late as the sixteenth century, the eminent Swiss physician Paracelsus called amber “a noble medicine for the head, stomach, intestines and other sinews complaints.” Not long afterward, the English scientist William Gilbert found that other substances, such as wax and glass, could generate charge if you rubbed them, and a German named Otto von Guericke created a crude electrostatic generator. But there was no reliable way of studying electricity until the invention of the Leyden jar, in 1745. (The jar takes its name from the city where a Dutch scientist developed it, though a German scientist achieved the same breakthrough independently around the same time.) The Leyden jar made it possible to accumulate charge from static electricity and then release it as electric current, and Jorgensen does not skimp on relating the bizarre experiments that ensued. In 1747, a French cleric named Jean-Antoine Nollet demonstrated the effect of electricity on the human body for King Louis XV
The discovery that electricity not only shocks the body but is part of what powers it came in the seventeen-eighties, when the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani conducted a series of experiments in which electric current produced movement in severed legs of frogs. Galvani attributed this discovery to what he called “animal electricity,” and for a while the study of such phenomena was known as galvanism. (Meanwhile, a sometime rival of Galvani’s, Alessandro Volta, invented the battery, giving his name to the volt.) Perhaps the most famous galvanic demonstration was conducted by Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini, in January, 1803, in London. In front of an audience, he applied electrodes to the corpse of a man, George Foster, who had just been hanged at Newgate Prison for the murder of his wife and child. Jorgensen quotes a report from the Newgate Calendar, a popular publication that relayed grisly details of executions:
    On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.
Some of the onlookers thought that Aldini was trying to bring Foster back to life, Jorgensen writes. He goes on to note that Aldini’s work drew the interest of the English writer and political philosopher William Godwin, who knew many electrical researchers. Godwin was the father of Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein” (1818), which eventually gave us the image of Boris Karloff as the monster with electrodes sticking out from his neck. That image is pure Hollywood invention—Shelley’s monster doesn’t run on electricity—but the book mentions galvanism elsewhere and it is likely that the popular, bastardized version of the tale brings out something latent in the original.
As interest in electricity spread, there was a medical craze for electrical treatments, to address anything from headaches to bad thoughts or sexual difficulties. Jorgensen tries out the Toepler Influence Machine, a device dating from around 1900, not long before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 brought a colorful era of electro-quackery to an end.
Why are some people injured or killed by lightning and others not? Jorgensen offers an educational vignette. While on a guided camping trip in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, he was caught in a lightning storm. The guide made the group “stand on our backpacks in a crouched fetal position, legs held tightly together, with our heads down and our rain ponchos draped over ourselves.” Deaths from lightning occur in various ways—a direct strike, say, or a current from a strike nearby that flows through the ground and up into the body. Crouching down while standing on a backpack made of a nonconductive material lessens both kinds of risk.
The amperage needed to kill a person is surprisingly small. A current of as little as 0.01 amps can disrupt the electrical signals flowing from our nerves to the muscles of the chest and diaphragm, causing asphyxiation. Amperage ten times higher can stop the heart outright. What makes lightning seem “so capricious,” as Jorgensen puts it, is that some people are killed by low amperage while others survive direct strikes. The reason is a phenomenon called flashover, in which electric current flows over the surface of the body and largely bypasses the internal organs. Flashover occurs when the surface of the body is more conductive than the inside—for instance, if the skin is covered in sweat.
Shocking the brain with electricity under highly controlled circumstances can be effective in treating major depressive disorders, even though the precise mechanism isn’t fully understood. A more selective and recently developed neurological application of electricity is deep brain stimulation, or DBS, which is used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other motor disorders. Electrodes are implanted in the area of the brain to be electrically stimulated and wired up to a controller housed in the chest.
DBS is sometimes described as a pacemaker for the brain. Electrical stimulation of the heart has a longer history, the first pacemaker having been implanted in 1958. An electrode is threaded inside the heart which gives small shocks at a rate of about sixty per minute, in order to stimulate the muscle to pump normally. Jorgensen notes that the technology owes its success largely to the invention of a commercially viable transistor, in 1948, which made possible the miniaturization of electronics. Today, some three million Americans are estimated to have a cardiac pacemaker, and the device has become a model for a newer invention, the “breathing pacemaker,” to treat sleep apnea. “When breathing stops, it sends an electrical impulse to an electrode in the throat that shocks the relaxed tissues into contracting, thus reopening the airway,” Jorgensen writes.
el que no sabem explicar
What is most of the universe made out of? Dark Matter, unexplained
What lives in the ocean’s “twilight zone”? As you dive deeper into the ocean, less and less sunlight shines through, and about 200 meters beneath the surface, you reach an area called the “twilight zone.” Sunlight fades almost completely out of view, and our knowledge about these dark depths fades too.
What killed Venus? Venus could have been a paradise but turned into a hellscape. Earthlings, pay attention.
What will animals look like in the future?
What causes Alzheimer’s?
How is a brainless yellow goo known as “slime mold” so smart?
What’s the oldest possible age a human can reach?
Are long-haul symptoms unique to Covid-19?
Why don’t doctors know more about endometriosis?
Why do we have anuses — or butts, for that matter? And then there’s a whole other question: Why is the human butt so big, compared with other mammals? Katherine Wu’s “The Body’s Most Embarrassing Organ Is an Evolutionary Marvel,” at the Atlantic.
What the heck is ball lightning? For millennia, people have been telling stories about mysterious spheres of light that glow, crackle, and hover eerily during thunderstorms. They’ve been spotted in homes, in rural areas, in cities, on airplanes, and even passing through windows.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59885687 eldesplegament del telescopi James Webb

2022
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/09/are-we-witnessing-the-dawn-of-post-theory-science a mesura que les dades no s’interpreten amb teories sinó amb AI, tenim una ciència que fa prediccions però no explica [ una mica amb la mecànica quàntica ja és així]
https://qz.com/2116375/covid-has-deepened-the-wests-monopoly-of-science-publishing/ l’oest monopolitza les publicacions en poder pagar els alts drets de subscripció
https://www.wired.com/story/fight-right-repair-cars-turns-ugly/ lluita entre fabricants de cotxes, recullen dades en exclusiva i els propietaris i tallers mecànics independents que volen open data
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/a-journey-to-the-center-of-our-cells
It was by accident that Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch cloth merchant, first saw a living cell. He’d begun making magnifying lenses at home, perhaps to better judge the quality of his cloth. One day, out of curiosity, he held one up to a drop of lake water. He saw that the drop was teeming with numberless tiny animals. These animalcules, as he called them, were everywhere he looked—in the stuff between his teeth, in soil, in food gone bad. A decade earlier, in 1665, an Englishman named Robert Hooke had examined cork through a lens; he’d found structures that he called “cells,” and the name had stuck. Van Leeuwenhoek seemed to see an even more striking view: his cells moved with apparent purpose. No one believed him when he told people what he’d discovered, and he had to ask local bigwigs—the town priest, a notary, a lawyer—to peer through his lenses and attest to what they saw.
Today, we take for granted that we are made of cells—liquidy sacs containing the Golgi apparatus, the endoplasmic reticulum, the nucleus. We accept that each of us was once a single cell, and that packed inside it was the means to build a whole body and maintain it throughout its life. “People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell,” the physician Lewis Thomas wrote, in his book “The Medusa and the Snail.” But telescopes make more welcome gifts than microscopes. Somehow, most of us are not itching to explore the cellular cosmos. Today, although there’s still no microscope capable of showing everything that’s happening inside a living cell in real time, biologists grasp the strangeness of the zone, bigger than atoms but smaller than cells, in which the machinery of life exists. They’ve analyzed the tiny parts from which cells are made and learned how those parts interact. They’ve frozen cells, photographed them, and used computer simulations to revivify the pictures. They’ve studied the apparently empty spaces inside cells and discovered that they contain a world governed by unintuitive physical laws.
Several groups of “synthetic biologists” are now close to assembling living cells from nonliving parts. If we could design and control such cells with precision, we could use them to do what we want—generate clean energy, kill cancers, even reverse aging. The work depends on understanding a cell’s inner workings to a degree that van Leeuwenhoek could not have imagined.
They’ve modified a species of bacterium to create a “minimal” cell. It contains only what’s necessary for life—it’s the cellular equivalent of a stock car onto which new components can be bolted. John Glass, one of the project’s leaders, described the minimal cell to me as “a platform for figuring out the first principles in biology.”
J. Craig Venter, an instrumental player in efforts to sequence the human genome, felt a need to simplify. Why not create a cell with as few genes as possible, and use it as a model organism? If you wanted to understand a more complicated biological process, you could add the genes for it to your minimal cell.  Venter assembled a team of biologists that included Glass, who was one of the world’s leading experts on a bacterium called Mycoplasma. “If you went to the zoo and lined up all the mammals and swabbed their urogenital tracts, you would find that each of them has some mycoplasma,” Glass told me. Because the bacteria live in such a nutrient-rich environment, they rarely have to forage for food, or even do much to digest it;
By 2016, after a few revisions, they had devised a minimal Mycoplasma genome half the size of the original. A researcher named Carole Lartigue spent years during her postdoc solving the daunting problem of implanting the genome in a cell. The bacterium that eventually resulted from the work was called JCVI-syn3.0. It was an engine bolted to some wheels.
For contrast, Cook had prepared samples that contained both JCVI-syn3A and E. coli. The lab rat of biology, E. coli grows quickly and uniformly, and is genetically manipulable. It also hunts and eats, has a rudimentary kind of memory, and possesses around five thousand genes, compared with the minimal cell’s roughly five hundred. After Cook loaded the syn3A slide, I peered through the eyepiece, but struggled to distinguish the minimal cells from the floaters in my eyes. Then I looked at the other slide. An E. coli swam by. It was about thirty-five times bigger than the minimal cell by volume, and crenellated with complexity—a destroyer rather than a dinghy.
He showed me a poster noting all of JCVI-syn3A’s genes. About a third were labelled as having an unknown function. When the project began, there were a hundred and forty-nine mystery genes. Now about a hundred were left.
Generally, what a gene does depends on the protein it tells our cells to make. It’s proteins that run the cellular world, by sparking chemical reactions, sending signals, and self-assembling into biological machines. To understand and control a cell, or to design a new one, biologists need to know exactly how a given protein behaves in the cellular environment. What shapes can it take? What does it interact with? What happens when a small molecule, like a drug, gets lodged in one of its crevices?
Our best pictures of the protein-rich cellular interior have come not from a microscope but from the brush of David S. Goodsell, a sixty-year-old biologist and watercolorist at the Scripps Research Institute. When I met Goodsell at Scripps, which is just down the road from J.C.V.I., he had long hair, a full beard, and a funky face mask. A painter since the age of ten, he illustrated his first E. coli during his postdoc, in 1991; the article that resulted, “Inside a Living Cell,
Roseanna N. Zia, a physicist who studies cells, emphasized the importance of physicality in biology. She told me that there were other “colloidal” properties of the cytoplasm, besides liquid-liquid phase separation, that nature might be using to its advantage—for instance, the fact that a shove at one end of the cytoplasm propagates, nearly instantly, to the other. Her group models how individual molecules subtly interact. “This area of understanding how colloidal-scale physics is regulating and orchestrating cell function—this is the frontier,” she said.
[ semblava que la biologia es reduïa a química i la química a física, i tot just estem aprenent a mirar les cèl·lules més simples!]

https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/how-polyester-bounced-back/ el poliester rebutjat per les camises ha tornat com a roba tècnica.

El llenguatge dels animals
Imagine the following scene: You are in a room with an owl, a bat, a mouse, a spider, a mosquito, and a rattlesnake. Suddenly, all the lights go off. Instead of pulling out your phone to call an exterminator, you take a moment to ponder the situation. The bat, you realize, is having no trouble navigating, since it relies on echolocation. The owl has such good hearing that it can find the mouse in the dark. So can the rattlesnake, which detects the heat that the rodent is giving off. The spider is similarly unfazed by the blackout, because it senses the world through vibrations. The mosquito follows the carbon dioxide you’re emitting and lands on your shin. You try to swat it away, but because you’re so dependent on vision you miss it and instead end up stepping on the rattler.
Ed Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, opens his new book, “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us” (Random House), with a version of this thought experiment. (His version also includes a robin, an elephant, and a bumblebee, though not the potentially fatal encounter with the snake.)
Mustill decided to make a documentary, “The Whale Detective,” which ran a couple of years ago on PBS. Now he has written “How to Speak Whale: A Voyage Into the Future of Animal Communication” (Grand Central).
Owing to advances in recording technologies and artificial intelligence, researchers in the burgeoning field of bioacoustics can now download thousands of hours of animal sounds and leave the work of sifting through them to a computer. This has opened up tantalizing new possibilities, including that of translating animal-communication systems into English—or Arabic, or Xhosa. Six years after Mustill was nearly killed by the humpback, a group of scientists from, among other institutions, Harvard, M.I.T., and Oxford formed the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or CETI, to try to decipher whale communications. (The team is working with sperm whales, which, instead of singing, issue patterns of clicks, known as codas, that have been compared to Morse code.)
No less than “An Immense World,” “How to Speak Whale” is dogged by the “what is it like” question. Mustill suggests that decoding whale-speak could finally produce an answer. The problem, or perhaps the paradox, is that to decipher whales’ songs or clicks we would need to have access to the experiences they’re referring to. And this is precisely what we lack. Wittgenstein was even blunter than Nagel. “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” he maintains in “Philosophical Investigations.”
primeres fotos del James Webb
June Huh poeta matemàtic
Projectes per a granges d’algues https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62407504
la navalla suïssa
Els Huxley Thomas i Julian, va defensar l’evolució i atacar la pseudociència en què es basava el racisme. Però alhora creien en la supremacia de l’home blanc i Europa i eren eugenicistes.
Julian developed what he called “evolutionary humanism,” a mashup of his favorite progressivist themes. It featured in many of his lectures and books, although he discussed it in greatest detail in “Religion Without Revelation” (1927).
Where Julian focussed on unity and transhumanism, Aldous turned to experience. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he wrote to Julian about his conviction that the higher states of consciousness described by mystics were achievable. The fascination persisted, and, by the nineteen-thirties, Aldous believed that society’s aim should be to nurture the pursuit of enlightened consciousness. By the time he published “The Doors of Perception” (1954), which connected his experience on the drug mescaline to the universal urge for self-transcendence, he had been writing and lecturing on mystical experiences for decades.
As organized religion declined, people sought guidance and justification in the scientific narratives taking its place. From race science to eugenics, progress to spirituality, the Huxleys combed our deep past for modern implications, feeding an ever-present yearning.
la complexitat del protó
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-empty-brain el cervell humà, la ment humana, NO és com un ordinador
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221206-how-the-uae-got-a-spacecraft-to-mars-on-the-first-try missió dels UAE a Mart, aconseguida en pocs anys, i dirigida per científics dones
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/19/the-world-changing-race-to-develop-the-quantum-computer ordinadors quàntics ( USA, Xina, Intel, IBM, Amazon, Google) Les agències de seguretat estan desant info encriptada per quan l’algortime de SHor es pugui executar.
ELs dimonis a la ciència
the historian of science Jimena Canales has just published one. “Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science” (Princeton University Press) is not a survey of Baal, Stolas, Volac, and their kin. Instead, Canales has gathered together in one book demons with very different origins and responsibilities—among them the scientist James Clerk Maxwell’s demon, the physicist David Bohm’s demon, the philosopher John Searle’s demon, and the naturalist Charles Darwin’s demon.
modern demonology began with René Descartes, who imagined a demon into being in his “Meditations on First Philosophy,” from 1641. The French philosopher was positing a thought experiment most often described today as the brain in a vat: however, instead of wondering if he was just a disembodied brain experiencing a simulated reality, Descartes proposed that “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.” Said demon could alter our senses and convince us of falsehoods, so that what we see, hear, or feel might not be real. Because anything might be a deception, we must assume everything is, and only through extreme skepticism can we distinguish the real from the unreal.
Descartes’s demon was not immediately followed by others, but, in 1773, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace proposed a thought experiment of his own. He imagined a mysterious entity “who, for a given instant, embraces all the relationships of the beings of this universe.” With that single instant of complete knowledge, Laplace wrote in an article on calculus, this entity “could determine for any time taken in the past or in the future the respective position, the movements, and generally the attachments of all these beings.” Because Laplace’s demon knew the present location of every single thing in the universe and all the forces acting on them, it could infer everything that had already happened and everything that would happen in the future.
the demon devised by the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell. The first version of this creature, described in a letter to a colleague in 1867, is only “a very observant and neat-fingered being,” not yet a demon. That being stood between two containers, opening and closing a door between them, allowing only certain molecules to pass, sorting the fast ones from the slow ones without exerting any energy, and thereby making one container warmer than the other. Maxwell had imagined what others called a perpetual-motion machine, one capable of reversing entropy.
Canales quotes a computer scientist at Microsoft who argued that Internet and finance companies today “are trying to become Maxwell’s demons in an information network.” His example was a health-insurance company using Big Data to sort desirable customers from undesirable customers, in essence creating a demon whose job it is to say, “I’m going to let the people who are cheap to insure through the door, and the people who are expensive to insure have to go the other way until I’ve created this perfect system that’s statistically guaranteed to be highly profitable.”
el dimoni de MAxwell seleccionant partícules, AI i Big Data seleccionant gent que no es posarà malalta

2023

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64371426 els assistents de veu com Alexa acaben essent intrusius
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64514573 ASML que fa les màquines que imprimeixen xips. Holanda té l’empresa, no spanya.
https://www.noemamag.com/life-need-not-ever-end/ l’univers no estaria condemnat al desordre perquè no seria un sistema tancat amb límits definits [ no hi ha res a fora, però tampoc està tancat]. La gravetat, que du a agrupacions, seria un factor antidesordre. EN un univers que s’expandeix, la màxima entropia assolible també creix, i a un ritme més ràpid del que suposa la vida, per tant no arribaríem mai al desordre total.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-most-boring-number-in-the-world-is/ els números “avorrits” són els que no tenen propietats, 20067.
només un 2% del codi genètic sembla dedicat a codificar proteïnes (que seria com el hardware). La resta, que fins ara es coneixia com a dark genome, sembla tenir com a primera funció regulating the decoding process, or expression, of protein-making genes. It helps to control how our genes behave in response to all the environmental pressures our bodies face throughout our lives, ranging from diet to stress, pollution, exercise, and how much we sleep, a field known as epigenetics. [però aquesta regulació es deu fer amb nes altres substàncies, molècul·les, no?]
As scientists first began sifting through the book of life in the mid 2000s, one of the biggest challenges was that the non-protein coding regions of the human genome appeared to be littered with sequences of repetitive DNA known as transposons. These repetitive sequences are so ubiquitous that they comprise nearly half the genome in all living mammals.
One of the most fascinating elements of transposons is that they can move from one part of the genome to another – a behaviour which gives them their name – creating or reversing mutations in genes, sometimes with dramatic consequences.
The movement of a transposon into a different gene may have been responsible for the loss of the tail in the great ape family, which led to our species developing the ability to walk upright.
The dark genome also provides instructions for the formation of various kinds of molecules, known as non-coding RNAs, which can have various roles ranging from helping to assemble proteins, blocking the process of protein production, or helping to regulate gene activity. “The RNAs produced by the dark genome act as the conductors in the orchestra, conducting how your DNA responds to the environment,” says Ounzain.
la possibilitat de generar embrions a partir de qualsevol cèl·Lula del cos.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65689580 una científica de Lausanne aconsegueix enviar senyals del cervell a les cames.
microbioma, vinyes tractades amb bacteris resisteixen l’onada de calor https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230727-the-microbes-that-could-protect-grapevines-from-climate-change
https://nautil.us/the-case-against-the-selfish-gene-358473/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/can-we-talk-to-whales?utm_source=pocket_mylist

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03230-z?utm_source=pocket_mylist Com sabíem si hi ha vida a la terra?

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-mathematics-built-the-modern-world/

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/17/1083586/the-pain-is-real-the-painkillers-are-virtual-reality/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/beliefs-about-emotions-influence-how-people-feel-act-and-relate-to-others/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

2024

L’empresa Neurolink d’ELon Musk ha aconseguit implantar un xip wireless amb 64 connexions al cervell per estimular àrees de moviment de pacients amb ferides. BBC La idea final és una simbiosi home/AI [i màquina] BBC

Nou col·lisionador, val la pena? (BBC) Hem batejat la ignorància amb un nom energia fosca, matèria fosca.

Aplle vision, barrejar la realitat amb pantalles virtuals https://www.vanityfair.com/news/tim-cook-apple-vision-pro

https://downdetector.com/ serveis caiguts

https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships? utm_source=pocket_mylist la reparació dels cables submarins que transporten internet.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-experts-declare-20240419/?utm_source=pocket_mylist tenen consciència animals com insectes?

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/physicists-question-fate-universe/?utm_source=pocket_mylist noves hipòtesis sobre el final de l’univers.

http://theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/05/gaia-theory-born-of-secret-love-affair-james-lovelock Lovelock va elaborar la teoria de Gaia inspirat pel treball de la seva amant