Lifeboat Foundation

I n his article on “Posthuman Subjectivity and Singularity in the Nature-Culture Continuum” (2020) Hyun-Shik Jun examines Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity through the post-structuralist and philosophical perspectives of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Whereas the technocratic paradigm seems to have eradicated the subject, Braidotti attempts to reinscribe the subject in current posthuman cultural, political and social landscapes. Jun is sympathetic to Braidotti’s work and aims to illuminate posthuman subjectivity as a dialectical and transversal phenomenon.

Braidotti “holds the nature-culture continuum as the starting point for her theory, seeking to distance herself from the social constructivist approach which, she claims, is constrained by a dualistic understanding of the world and hence an opposition between nature and culture” (Jun 2020, 1). Jun thinks that Braidotti’s posthuman nature-culture continuum is in the right direction but lacks a sufficient dialectic in understanding subjectivity more coherently. Hence he looks to the Hegelian trajectory, one which does not see a dialectical reconciliation of opposites but a dialectical paradox, a sublation of contradictions between similarity and difference, yielding to an open-ended process of being without origin or closure.

Relying on Derrida’s notion of différance and Agamben’s signator, Jun states that “the posthuman subject should be understood as the deferred subject” ; that is, the subject who never arrives at final subjectivity because engagement between nature and culture is a constant, indefinite and dialectical movement. Hence the posthuman subject is “neither the centered self-conscious being nor the decentered unconscious automaton of modernity. The posthuman subject emerges with a sort of ontological fold or gap wherein nature and culture meet”.

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Recent developments in chip-based photonic quantum circuits have radically impacted quantum information processing. However, it is challenging for monolithic photonic platforms to meet the stringent demands of most quantum applications. Hybrid platforms combining different photonic technologies in a single functional unit have great potential to overcome the limitations of monolithic photonic circuits. Our Review summarizes the progress of hybrid quantum photonics integration, discusses important design considerations, including optical connectivity and operation conditions, and highlights several successful realizations of key physical resources for building a quantum teleporter. We conclude by discussing the roadmap for realizing future advanced large-scale hybrid devices, beyond the solid-state platform, which hold great potential for quantum information applications.

We are cousins of bats lol.

Dr David Haussler, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator working at University of California, Santa Cruz, co-authors report on computer analysis designed to reconstruct genome of 80-million-year-old mammal; holds that program has 98.5 percent accuracy rate and over next four years will formulate entire genome of ancestral mammal from total of 37 current mammalian species, including humans; research is published in journal Genome Research; graph (M)

Discussion with A biologist answering about Covid in quite a lot of detail.

World Economic Forum

As of 23 March, there were 336,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the world, with more than 250,000 cases outside China. Despite these numbers, much is still misunderstood or unknown about the virus which has brought regions of the globe to a standstill and placed huge pressure on the global economy.

Continue reading “A virology expert answers key questions on COVID-19” »

Fyodor R…

Abstract Immunity is the state of protection against infectious disease conferred either through an immune response generated by immunization or previous infection or by other non-immunological factors. This article reviews active and passive immunity and the differences between them: it also describes the four different commercially available vaccine types (live attenuated, killed/inactivated, subunit and toxoid): it also looks at how these different vaccines generate an adaptive immune response.

This is possibly part of the reasons there flocks of giant locusts ravaging Africa. Rainy periods of time like the March Rain may serve to catalyse their reproduction and they appear right when its time to harvest crops June and July, when farmers are just starting to harvest.

(Kenya, Somalia, and southern Ethiopia have the right conditions with the possibility of migrations to Uganda and South Sudan.)

Every few years, natural swings in the ocean can lead to such a warming, drastically altering weather on land—and setting the stage for flooding rains in East Africa. But at the same time, a second ocean shift was brewing. An unusually cold pool of water threatened to park itself south of Madagascar, leading to equally extreme, but opposite, weather farther south on the continent: drought.

Continue reading “How a team of scientists studying drought helped build the world’s leading famine prediction model” »

Scientists have studied this ebb and flow for centuries, but only began understanding its effects on our planet at the dawn of the space age in the mid-20th century. Now it is clear that around solar maximum the sun is more likely to bombard Earth with charged particles that damage satellites and power grids. The solar cycle also plays a minor role in climate, as variations in irradiance can cause slight changes in average sea-surface temperatures and precipitation patterns. Thus, a better understanding of the cycle’s physical drivers is important for sustainable living on Earth.

Yet scientists still lack a model that perfectly predicts the cycle’s key details, such as the exact duration and strength of each phase. “I think the solar cycle is so stable and clear that there is something fundamental that we are missing,” says Ofer Cohen, a solar physicist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. One obstacle to figuring it out, he says, is that crucial details of the apparent mechanisms behind the cycle—such as the sun’s magnetic field—are largely hidden from our view. But that might be about to change.

Tim Linden, an astronomer at The Ohio State University, and his colleagues recently mapped how the sun’s high-energy glow dances across its face over time. They found a potential link between these high-energy emissions, the sun’s fluctuating magnetic field and the timing of the solar cycle. This, many experts argue, could open a new window into the inner workings of our nearest, most familiar star.

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