Doctors wanted to ensure they didn’t compromise parts of the brain necessary for playing the violin, so they asked their musician patient to play for them mid-operation.
Were humans designed to eat meat? Did we evolve to consume other creatures? Is flesh eating enshrined in our DNA? Here, we discuss these divisive queries.
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
Posted in biotech/medical, economics, employment
Never in history have we seen wealth concentrated (Apple is worth over a trillion dollars). Money and congressional power answers why legislators: let drug companies squeeze dollars from sick people, refuse to stop a president who winks and nods at Putin, at right-wing agitators, who stoke bigotry, or singles out Black, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees (let’s just lump them together). Fear of others comes from seeds planted early in life. Fear is personal — you don’t feel mine, I don’t feel yours.
But, alas, the future will be like nothing we have experienced. It’s a HUUUGE planet, with decades to come, which, if we lived long enough would from today’s vantage be unrecognizable. What we do know from our lives is that we are but a small part, not only small in terms of our kind or beliefs (political, religious, cultural), but small in influence over the planet’s trajectory (war, maybe atomic, population growth, immigration, climate, economy, racial, ethnic composition, e.g., in the U.S.).
Exceptionalism once stood for the idea that Americans served as an example of progressive values (democracy, justice and humanity), control over their destiny; could tame the environment, extract resources (oil, coal) without limit, and provide jobs for everyone through capitalism. For our successors, what they look like and what they believe in will go beyond change wrought by anything imaginable, today.
Warning: This article presents information that sounds like it comes out of a high-tech Hollywood sci-fi production. I suggest you first view the patent filing linked here to verify its credibility before proceeding.
Because the patent was filed by the US Navy and is now under an “Active” status, this is the real deal. This is NOT a work of fiction.
The Short Story
How much do you really know about dark matter? Symmetry looks at one of the biggest remaining mysteries in particle physics.
Engineered living materials (ELM) are designed to blur boundaries. They use cells, mostly microbes, to build inert structural materials such as hardened cement or woodlike replacements for everything from construction materials to furniture. Some, like Srubar’s bricks, even incorporate living cells into the final mix. The result is materials with striking new capabilities, as the innovations on view last week at the Living Materials 2020 conference in Saarbrüken, Germany, showed: airport runways that build themselves and living bandages that grow within the body. “Cells are amazing fabrication plants,” says Neel Joshi, an ELM expert at Northeastern University. “We’re trying to use them to construct things we want.”
Engineered microbes shift from making molecules to materials.
Together, they founded W-Cycle, a start-up that develops compostable packaging solutions to tackle the masses of C-PET plastic used in the huge ready-meal packaging industry. Rather than producing single-use trays from plastic and aluminum, W-Cycle’s patented “SupraPulp” packaging product is based on sugarcane pulp, known as bagasse.
In a wild galaxy over half a billion light-years away, astronomers have detected molecular oxygen. It’s only the third such detection ever outside the Solar System — and the first outside the Milky Way.
Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the Universe, behind hydrogen (naturally) and helium. So its chemistry and abundance in interstellar clouds are important for understanding the role of molecular gas in galaxies.
Astronomers have searched for oxygen again and again, using millimetre astronomy, which detects the radio wavelengths emitted by molecules; and spectroscopy, which analyses the spectrum to look for wavelengths absorbed or emitted by specific molecules.