Largest and most powerful rocket ever built blasts off on test flight that is hoped to be step on human journey to Mars

The largest and most powerful rocket ever built has blasted off from Texas but blew up within minutes in a test flight that its makers, SpaceX, hope will be the first step on a human journey to Mars.

After a cancelled launch earlier this week because of a pressurisation issue, the 120-metre 

 rocket system took off at 8.33am local time (2.33pm in the UK) on Thursday. It gathered speed, but then started to spin at altitude before exploding about four minutes after leaving the ground.

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After achieving liftoff, the Starship vehicle failed to separate from its Super Heavy booster rocket.

Cleared the Pad

For a hot minute, it looked like SpaceX had done the seemingly impossible.

The space company's gigantic Starship prototype spacecraft and Super Heavy booster officially cleared the launch pad this morning at the company's South Texas testing facilities, an epic conclusion to many years of development.

It was a spectacular sight, given the sheer size of the rocket. The stainless steel tower lifted off at a slight angle, igniting dozens of Raptor rocket engines at once.

But several minutes into its maiden voyage — the stack reached a height of just over 24 miles — the 400-foot tower started spinning uncontrollably and eventually exploded in a huge cloud of gas, likely the result of the rocket's self-destruct system.

It was a sobering failure for the Elon Musk-led venture. It's still unclear what exactly led to its early demise, but it still was one hell of a test flight — and one that SpaceX can likely learn a lot from.

Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly

During the live stream, SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker referred to the event as an "unscheduled rapid disassembly," a tongue-in-cheek term for an explosion.

But there's plenty to be learned from the "anomaly."

"This was a developmental test, the first test flight of Starship, and the goal was to gather the data, clear the pad, and go again," he added. "Excitement is guaranteed."

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, however, appeared far less amused during the live stream, and did little to hide his disappointment while blankly staring at the screen ahead of him.

Fortunately, the launch site is still standing, meaning that SpaceX may be able to try again in the not-so-distant future.

Despite the setback, the launch could still set the stage for a new era in space exploration, a proof of concept of a reusable ultra-heavy-launch vehicle that could return humans to the surface of the Moon and even deliver them to Mars.

"Welcome to the Starship era, humanity," Ars Technica's Eric Berger tweeted. "It began with a bang, as big things often do. The universe awaits."

More on Starship: SpaceX Fails to Launch Mighty Starship

The post Starship Launches First Orbital Attempt, Explodes in Epic Fireball appeared first on Futurism.

Potatoes are the third most important food crop in the world after rice and wheat in terms of human consumption. But globally, potato production is threatened by potato late blight, one of the most devastating potato diseases, which causes 3–10 billion euros in yield loss and management costs annually.

The chemical composition of tropical timber used, for example, for bridges or in window frames, reveals where the trees were growing. This can be used to help trace timber origin and reduce illegal trade.

New insight into proteins called "pioneer factors" helps to explain their unusual ability to open up the typically dense genetic material within our cells. This behavior makes the genetic material accessible for proteins involved in important cellular processes, such as DNA replication and repair, gene expression, and the creation of proteins.

The "spooky action at a distance" that once unnerved Einstein may be on its way to being as pedestrian as the gyroscopes that currently measure acceleration in smartphones.

Moiré patterns occur everywhere. They are created by layering two similar but not identical geometric designs. A common example is the pattern that sometimes emerges when viewing a chain-link fence through a second chain-link fence.

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New insight into proteins called "pioneer factors" helps to explain their unusual ability to open up the typically dense genetic material within our cells. This behavior makes the genetic material accessible for proteins involved in important cellular processes, such as DNA replication and repair, gene expression, and the creation of proteins.

The four-minute flight ended in what the company called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” But there was much to learn from the flight, the latest step in SpaceX’s explode-as-you-learn approach.

Tourists and scientists swell the population of a Western Australia town to view a rare solar eclipse.

Just like people, the simple nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans is driven to consume high-calorie food when its cannabinoid receptors are activated, hinting at a common signalling pathway for preventing starvation

Ultralight dark matter particles that behave like waves, called axions, seem to be a better match for gravitational lensing measurements than more traditional explanations for dark matter

The contents of six sealed ancient Egyptian animal coffins—which were imaged using a non-invasive technique—are described in a new study published in Scientific Reports.

130 højttalere og 25 laserprojektorer sørger for, at publikum i Østre Gasværk hører og ser det samme, uanset hvilken af salens 812 siddepladser de sidder på.

A survey by the Pew Research Center found that most employees expect hiring, firing, and workplace assessment to be transformed by algorithms.

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Scientists used neutron tomography to see inside six sealed ancient Egyptian coffins that were used to bury animals.

Researchers found that roundworms gobble down high-calorie foods when exposed to a compound that acts on the same brain receptor as THC.

When dosed with compounds found in cannabis, nematodes eat more and show an even greater preference for their favorite foods

SpaceX managed to get its Starship spacecraft, the most powerful rocket ever built, off the launchpad at its South Texas testing facilities.

But getting it into orbit proved to be far more difficult, with the 400-foot rocket and booster stack tumbling hopelessly through the air minutes after launch, before ending in a massive fireball.

 

While that kind of early demise should be expected from SpaceX, a company that has blown up countless prototypes over the last couple of years, it's hard not to ignore the very particular date that it chose for Starship's first orbital attempt.

That's right: it was April 20, a date imbued with meaning for CEO Elon Musk. As such, it's hard not to wonder whether the mercurial leader pushed SpaceX to launch the rocket on a meme date before it was fully ready? Did his childish obsession with the date lead to the explosion?

It's pure speculation, but not terribly far-fetched. After all, this is a guy who bought Twitter and then slapped a shiba inu on its home page due to an ancient meme — and, for that matter, covered up the "W" on the company's headquarters to make yet another crude joke.

Musk's obsession with the date, which stoners celebrate around the world, goes way back. In a fateful 2018 tweet, Musk claimed that he was "considering taking Tesla private at $420," which eventually led to several lawsuits and endless drama with investors and regulators.

He even managed to squeeze the three digits into his disastrous bid to buy Twitter last year.

Even Starship's development hasn't been spared, with the company stacking its Super Heavy Booster prototype dubbed Booster 4 on top of its Starship prototype dubbed Ship 20, the first time the two were mated to form a 400-foot tower of stainless steel.

The company even placed two Raptor engines next to each other while building a preceding Super Heavy booster prototype, lining up engine "RB4" right next to "RB20."

Musk's infatuation with the number clearly runs deep — which makes us wonder: did he force SpaceX employees to rush ahead and have the first orbital launch attempt fall on that date?

Circumstantially, it feels plausible. Just days ago, insiders at the company were saying that a 4/20 launch was impossible.

But with the boss relentlessly pushing the tired joke, it's not hard to imagine that voices of caution within the company could have been pushed ahead to make the date.

Of course, plenty of other factors likely went into the decision as well, like the Federal Aviation Administration granting the company a launch license last week. A first launch attempt on Monday, which was scrubbed due to a frozen valve, took place several days before April 20 as well.

But we still wouldn't put it past the billionaire CEO. It certainly wouldn't be the first time he's screwed up over feeble attempts at humor — which, unfortunately for him, just don't seem to be getting many laughs.

More on the launch: Starship Launches First Orbital Attempt, Explodes in Epic Fireball

The post Did Elon's Childish Obsession With 4/20 Lead to Today's Starship Explosion? appeared first on Futurism.

Researchers have found a system in the brain that seems to integrate control of individual muscles with a person's intentions, emotions, and entire body.

(Image credit: Melinda Podor / Getty Images)

The DarkSide experiment is an ambitious research effort aimed at detecting dark matter particle interactions in liquid argon using a dual-phase physics detector located at the underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory. These interactions could be observed by minimizing background signals, and this could be possible thanks to the remarkable discrimination power of the scintillation pulse of liquefied argon in the DarkSide-50 detector, which can separate nuclear recoil events associated with these interactions from more than 100 million electronic recoil events linked to radioactive background.

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Coordination between individuals is a fundamental challenge in collectives, and this is just as true for a country's government as it is for simple multicellular organisms. How does a group of many cells coordinate itself into a body that performs coherent behavior? In more evolved animal groups, that's the nervous system's job.

British Library, London
From a medieval monk mixed with a fish to the call of an extinct Hawaiian bird, this entertaining show revels in nature’s marvels – real or otherwise

In 1255, the King of France gave Henry III of England an elephant; a sensation for medieval eyes that drew crowds to the royal menagerie at the Tower of London, including the artist, chronicler and Benedictine monk Matthew Paris. The picture Paris drew from life shows with clarity how the elephant has its leg tied to a post, how it stands imprisoned and wearily spurts water from its trunk. He shades the ridges and rumples on its vast body, as he tries to accurately depict this creature that’s stepped out of fable.

This 13th-century portrait of an elephant encapsulates the paradoxical delights of the British Library’s cornucopia of animal art. To medieval folk, an elephant was a monstrous legendary beast from their myths of faraway lands – yet Paris pins this fantastic being to reality, tying it down with his objective gaze. From this early attempt at scientific natural history, to a tiny drawing of a bird in flight from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel, to Ludwig Koch’s pioneering 1953 gramophone record of British bird songs, Animals explores how human beings have sought to observe and understand our fellow species. Yet it also revels in the fabulous, impossible dreams we have made of them.

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Commercially available smartwatches and phones can capture key features of early, untreated Parkinson’s disease, according to a new study.

These technologies could provide researchers with more objective and continuous ways to measure the disease and bring new treatments to market faster, particularly for patients in the early stages of the disease.

“This research shows that readily accessible and ubiquitous technology has the potential to detect and objectively measure severity and potentially progression of important symptoms of Parkinson’s disease,” says Jamie Adams, a neurologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and first author of the study in npj Parkinson’s Disease.

While Parkinson’s is the world’s fastest growing 

, most of the drugs used to treat it were developed in the last century. The complexity of the disease and limitation of current measures have been barriers to new therapies.

Onset and severity of symptoms—such as stiffness in the arms and legs, movement and walking difficulty, and tremors—and progression of the disease can vary significantly from patient to patient.

Furthermore, the tools traditionally used to track the disease are subjective and episodic, e.g. only collected during visits to the clinic, limiting insight into how Parkinson’s disease affects people’s daily lives.

In 2015, URMC neurologist Ray Dorsey and the URMC Center for Health + Technology (CHeT) team collaborated with Sage Bionetworks to launch the first smartphone research application to monitor Parkinson’s disease in real time.

Apple featured the app, called mPower, during their semi-annual product launch event, and 15,000 individuals participated in research using the application. Studies have shown that mPower and another Android app can accurately track the severity of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Dorsey is senior author of the new smartwatch study.

Since the launch of mPower, the proliferation of smartwatches and technological improvements, particularly in gyroscopes and accelerometers that can more precisely measure movement, has heightened the research potential of these devices.

In the new WATCH-PD study, researchers at multiple sites across the United States recruited 82 individuals with early, untreated Parkinson’s and 50 age-matched controls and followed them for 12 months.

The study volunteers wore research-grade sensors, an Apple Watch, and an iPhone while performing standardized assessments in clinic. At home, participants wore the smartwatch for seven days after each clinic visit and completed motor, speech, and cognitive tasks on the smartphone every other week.

The smartphone app tracked finger-taping speed, performance on cognitive tasks, and speech, while the smartwatch was able to measure arm movement, duration of tremors, and gait features.

The researchers were able to detect motor and non-motor features that differed between individuals with early Parkinson’s and age-matched controls. The team performing longitudinal analysis and also conducting a study that will follow participants for a longer period to determine which digital measures are sensitive enough to help researchers evaluate whether an experimental therapy is making a meaningful impact on the progression of the disease.

“These findings reinforce what other studies have shown—digital devices can differentiate between people with and without early Parkinson’s and are more sensitive than traditional rating scales for some measures of Parkinson’s disease,” says Adams.

For example, the researchers note that the smartphone app detected abnormalities in speech rated “normal” by investigators. “Better measures will lead to more efficient, patient-centric, and timely evaluation of therapies.”

Additional coauthors are from Harvard Medical School, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Invariant Research Limited, AbbVie Pharmaceuticals, Clinical Ink, and the University of Rochester Medical School.

Biogen, Takeda, and members of the Critical Path for Parkinson’s Consortium 3DT Initiative funded the work.

Source: University of Rochester

The post Your smartwatch could detect early Parkinson’s signs appeared first on Futurity.

Nature, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01378-2

Long-awaited choice comes more than a year after Francis Collins resigned as director of the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.

Nature, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01379-1

Under new proposals, ministerial intervention would be limited to projects where national security is at stake.

Nature, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01377-3

The SpaceX rocket made it partially through its first full test. It could change astrophysics and astronomy, as well as ferry people to the Moon and Mars.

The launch of SpaceX's Starship rocket, the biggest and most powerful to ever fly, didn't quite go as planned. It lifted off from the Starbase launch facility in Texas on 20 April but exploded a few minutes afterwards

The element samarium has been spotted in the atmosphere of a planet called MASCARA-4b, breaking the record for heaviest element ever detected in a world beyond our solar system

In the world of computing, we typically think of information as being stored as ones and zeros—also known as binary encoding. However, in our daily life we use ten digits to represent all possible numbers. In binary the number 9 is written as 1001 for example, requiring three additional digits to represent the same thing.

A team of mineralogists and geologists at the University of Granada has discovered the secret behind the durability of ancient Mayan plaster. In their study, reported in Science Advances, the group studied samples of the ancient plaster and consulted with descendants of Mayans to learn more about how the ancient plaster was made.

A team of materials scientists from NASA working with a colleague from The Ohio State University and another from HX5 LLC has developed a 3D printing process that produces an alloy that is much more resistant to stress than others now in use. Their study is reported in Nature.

We finally know why our DNA has an X shape. This finding by researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute may have much broader implications for how our cells behave. "It looks like we have uncovered a universal mechanism by which cells determine the shape of their DNA."

MIT researchers are using artificial intelligence to design new proteins that go beyond those found in nature.

A single species invades an ecosystem causing its collapse. A cyberattack on the power system causes a major breakdown. These types of events are always on our minds, yet they rarely result in such significant consequences. So how is it that these systems are so stable and resilient that they can withstand such external disruptions? Indeed, these systems lack a central design or blueprint, and still, they exhibit exceptionally reliable functionality.

MIT researchers are using artificial intelligence to design new proteins that go beyond those found in nature.

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37705-4

The authors characterized a fold in the   protein which evolved from SH3 domains for the export of bulky cargos such as collagen. They denote this fold as MOTH (MIA, Otoraplin, TALI/TANGO1 homology) domain.

We finally know why our DNA has an X shape. This finding by researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute may have much broader implications for how our cells behave. "It looks like we have uncovered a universal mechanism by which cells determine the shape of their DNA."

The largest and most powerful rocket ever built blasted off from Texas but blew up within minutes, in a test flight that its makers, SpaceX, hope will be the first step on a human journey to Mars. After a cancelled launch earlier this week due to a pressurisation issue, the 120-metre 

 rocket system took off at 8.33am local time on Thursday. It gathered speed but then started to spin at altitude before exploding about four minutes after leaving the ground. It appeared that the two sections of the rocket system – the booster and cruise vessel – were unable to separate properly after takeoff, possibly causing the spacecraft to fail

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket blows up minutes after launch

 

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One of the most realistic star projectors you can buy —   Homestar Flux is a sophisticated home planetarium with optional expansion possibilities.

With few other food resources to turn to, early residents of the harsh Tibetan Plateau consumed the milk of their animals.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-32795-y

Evaluation of the registry DIALYREG for the assessment of continuous renal replacement techniques in the   patient

The next-generation rocket has been a pet project for the entrepreneur, who tempered expectations ahead of its first flight.

There are high expectations that quantum computers may deliver revolutionary new possibilities for simulating chemical processes. This could have a major impact on everything from the development of new pharmaceuticals to new materials. Researchers at Chalmers University have now, for the first time in Sweden, used a quantum computer to undertake calculations within a real-life case in chemistry.

Mangrove forests are an essential component of the coastal zones in tropical and subtropical areas, providing a wide range of goods and ecosystem services that play a vital role in ecology. They are also threatened, disappearing, and degraded across the globe.

About a quarter of the organic carbon contained in ice-rich Arctic permafrost is more difficult for microorganisms to utilize. The reason for this is a strong binding of the organic material originating from dead plant remains to mineral soil particles.

Every material possesses a unique natural vibration frequency such that when an external periodic force is applied to this material close to this frequency, the vibrations are greatly amplified. In the parlance of physics, this phenomenon is known as "resonance." Resonance is ubiquitous in our daily life, and, depending on the context, could be deemed desirable or undesirable.

SpaceX's new stainless-steel rocket named Starship exploded Thursday just four minutes after liftoff. In a statement, the company said, "with a test like this, success comes from what we learn."

Mangrove forests are an essential component of the coastal zones in tropical and subtropical areas, providing a wide range of goods and ecosystem services that play a vital role in ecology. They are also threatened, disappearing, and degraded across the globe.

Nature, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01281-w

The proliferation of miniature satellites — and a possible switch to iodine exhaust — could have unintended consequences.

Failure to separate from booster leads to setback for Elon Musk-led company building spacecraft capable of flying to Mars

Researchers at the Institute for Future Materials and Systems at Nagoya University in Japan have successfully synthesized barium titanate (BaTiO3) nanosheets with a thickness of 1.8 nanometers, the thinnest thickness ever created for a free-standing film. Given that thickness is related to functionality, their findings open the door to smaller, more efficient devices. The research was published in the journal Advanced Electronic Materials.

Sometimes to make big breakthroughs, you have to start very small.

A process to make paper bags stronger—especially when they get wet—could make them a more viable alternative to single-use plastic bags, a new study shows.

The study suggests a way to create paper bags that are durable enough to be used multiple times and then broken down chemically by an alkaline treatment to be used as a source for biofuel production, says Daniel Ciolkosz, associate research professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Penn State.

“When the primary use of these paper products ends, using them for secondary purposes makes them more sustainable,” he says. “Recycling and reducing paper waste also helps in reducing total solid waste destined for landfills. This is a concept we think society should consider.”

Lead researcher Jaya Tripathi, who will graduate from Penn State this spring with a doctoral degree in biorenewable systems, devised an innovative process in which cellulose in paper is torrefied, or roasted in an oxygen-deprived environment, to greatly increase its tensile strength when wet.

Paper bags are a popular alternative to plastic bags to reduce the environmental impacts caused by using plastics, she explains, but paper bags have short lifespans due to their low durability, particularly when wet.

And a paper bag must be reused several times to reduce its global-warming potential to below that of the conventional high-density polyethylene bag, Tripathi adds.

“Reuse is mainly governed by bag strength, and it is unlikely that a typical paper bag can be reused the required number of times due to its low durability upon wetting,” she says.

“Using expensive chemical processes to enhance wet strength diminishes paper’s ecofriendly and cost-efficient features for commercial application, so there is a need to explore non-chemical techniques to increase the wet strength of paper bags. Torrefaction could be the answer.”

Because torrefaction decreases the glucose yield in the paper, Tripathi then treated the paper with a solution of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye or caustic soda, that increased its glucose yield, making it a better source for biofuel production.

In findings published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, using filter paper as the medium, the researchers reported that the wet-tensile strength of the paper increased by 1,533%, 2,233%, 1,567%, and 557% after torrefaction for 40 minutes at 392 degrees Fahrenheit, 428 F, 464 F, and 500 F, respectively.

Glucose yield decreased with increased torrefaction severity, but after treating torrefied paper samples with an alkaline sodium hydroxide solution, glucose yield increased, the researchers say.

For instance, the glucose yield of raw filter paper was 955 mg/g of substrate, whereas it was 690 mg/g of substrate for the same paper sample torrefied at 392 F. The glucose yield increased to 808 and 933 mg/g of substrate with 1% and 10% alkaline treatment, respectively.

The need for a concept like the one demonstrated by the researchers to replace plastic bags is obvious, Tripathi points out.

According to the UN Environment Programme, 5 trillion plastic bags are produced worldwide annually. It can take up to 1,000 years for these bags to disintegrate completely. Americans throw away 100 billion bags annually—the equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of crude oil.

“By switching to stronger, reusable paper shopping bags, we could eliminate much of that waste,” Tripathi says. “The implications of a technology like the one we demonstrated in this research—if it can be perfected—including using the worn-out bags as a substrate for biofuel production, would be huge.”

Like many scientific discoveries, Tripathi learned about the synergy of torrefaction and alkaline treatment for increased paper capabilities by accident.

“I was looking into something else, studying how torrefaction impacts cellulose for glucose yield for use as a biofuel substrate,” she says. “But I noticed that the paper’s strength was increasing as we torrefied the cellulose. That made me think that it probably would be good for packaging, an entirely different application.”

The US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture funded the work.

Source: Penn State

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SpaceX-rakettens jomfrurejse tager Starship næsten hele vejen rundt om Jorden fra opsendelse i Texas til landing i havet nord for Hawaii.

Orchids seem unique in how they inspire such a devoted following, but why are these much-loved plants so diverse and widespread, wonders Penny Sarchet

It's time to wake up and smell the pitcher plants.

Sea ice algae is an essential resource for the survival of many species living in the Arctic.

Learn about other PCR components—beyond the polymerase—that are essential for optimal results.

Two of the top news stories in recent weeks—the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal indictment in People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump and the three-quarter-billion-dollar settlement in Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network—may seem like independent affairs, but they are parts of one bigger story. That story is how former President Trump has been able to control what information is available to the public, as he has repeatedly done in an effort to aggrandize and cling to his own power. His willing helpers were media companies, but they were not acting as news organizations. The National Enquirer deliberately generated false information and hid true information from the public as part of a scheme to secure Trump’s grip on political power. Fox aired false claims and questioned true ones as it sought to placate Trump’s supporters. Together they have succeeded in polluting the marketplace of ideas in which democratic politics is supposed to thrive.

[John Hendrickson: Inside the Manhattan criminal court with Donald Trump]

But law and litigation has helped bring this story to light. The courts—a place where facts still matter—have shown a path to catching up with the wrongdoers, but worryingly, these cases could also be treated as a guide for future collusive 

 keen on engaging in disinformation while sidestepping exposure.

Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s criminal case—beyond the headlines about the first-ever charge against a former president and the hush money paid to a porn star—is about the capitulation of the National Enquirer to Trump’s 2016 campaign. The two were a natural pair, as seen in the Bragg indictment and statement of facts: a popular media outlet conspiring with a campaign to suppress stories that could damage the candidate’s chances of being elected. The proof of such an unholy alignment is direct: David Pecker, the head of the National Enquirer, admitted to the Department of Justice that he, Trump, and Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen engaged in a catch-and-kill scheme for stories about alleged affairs and one-night stands involving Trump, with the goal of keeping such information from voters. It was a smart move. After all, it had been the Enquirer that broke the 2007 story of then–Democratic Senator John Edwards’s affair, which ended that presidential aspirant’s political career.

The arrangement with Pecker went further than killing negative stories about Trump, to encompass promoting negative stories about Trump’s Republican and Democratic adversaries. On Trump’s road to the GOP presidential nomination, the Enquirer published more than 60 stories attacking his political opponents.

This scheme thus bore an uncanny resemblance to the contemporaneous Russian disinformation efforts, which also promoted Trump and denigrated his Republican primary adversaries while attacking 2016 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and praising her challengers, including Senator Bernie Sanders. (All of this is outlined in the federal indictment of the Internet Research Agency and the Russians helping run that company.) Similarly, the Federal Election Commission sanctioned American Media Inc., the National Enquirer’s parent company, for its illegal interference in the 2016 election. AMI agreed to pay $187,500 in fines after the FEC’s nonpartisan staff found that the catch-and-kill arrangement, in coordination with Trump and Cohen, violated federal campaign-finance law.

That we know of the AMI-Trump alliance is fortuitous. The coordination of a candidate with a powerful media outlet in the lead-up to an election would not have necessarily come to light but for the secret payment of money to kill adverse stories—payments that attracted the attention of federal and state prosecutors and led to Cohen’s conviction for campaign-finance charges and Trump’s indictment on charges of falsifying business records. If Trump and AMI had been content to publish favorable stories about Trump and derogatory pieces about his adversaries—regardless of truth—without the element of hush money, we might be none the wiser as to this systemic corruption of our electoral process.

A very similar fortuity revealed an even more pervasive systemic corruption of our electoral process, one involving Trump’s collusion with another media outlet, this one far more influential. Fox Corporation and its subsidiary Fox News would have avoided their recent legal troubles if they had steered clear of targeting Dominion Voting Systems, a private company with enough resources to sue. If their election-fraud claims had been more diffuse and focused on unspecified figures or governments, the now-infamous Fox emails and texts may have never come to light.

But because Dominion brought its civil suit with its attendant right to discovery of Fox’s internal communications, the public now can see an effort—strikingly similar to that by AMI—to curry favor with one and only one candidate, in spite of many Fox employees’ private antipathy toward the man. The Dominion suit revealed how Fox actively sought to promote Trump’s effort to stay in office after losing the 2020 presidential election. Like AMI, Fox became the amanuensis of the then-president, regurgitating nightly his election-fraud claims, lies that plenty of people at Fox, up to and including News Corp Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch, disbelieved. Such efforts included direct coordination with the White House and Trump campaign, reminiscent of the direct coordination between Sean Hannity and Paul Manafort years earlier.

Indeed, the judge overseeing the Dominion suit found that the plaintiff had so overwhelmingly established certain facts, there was no need for the jurors to consider them at trial. One such fact: Dominion did not tamper with any election results, and any claims to that effect by Fox were false. The court went further in its pretrial rulings with respect to the role Fox played in promoting this falsehood. Remarkably, the court precluded Fox from trying to convince jurors—had a trial taken place—that it was merely reporting the news.

[Read: Stormy Daniels’s oh-so-familiar story]

This is yet another aspect that aligns the two cases. In the defamation lawsuit, Fox had argued that regardless of whether the network believed Trump’s election-fraud claims, they were news and thus it had a responsibility to report them. The court rejected this argument, not because such a defense could not be valid in theory, but because that defense was not factually supported in this case. As Murdoch himself admitted, the Fox anchors were not impartially reporting; they were “endorsing” Trump’s claims.

Similarly, AMI claimed in front of the Federal Election Commission that it was covered by the so-called press exemption, which holds that “any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication” does not count as an expenditure on a political campaign. Relying primarily on AMI’s own statements to the Justice Department, the FEC easily rejected this claim. The company “disclaim[ed] a journalistic or editorial purpose” by admitting that it had made the hush-money payments for the express purpose of assisting the Trump campaign, the FEC legal staff explained.

In short, these conclusions of the federal court in the Fox case and the FEC and Bragg in the hush-money case underscore the nature of this threat to American democracy. In both these cases, the most damning thing is not their outcome—Dominion’s settlement or a Manhattan jury’s eventual verdict—but their revelations.

When national media companies pollute the information environment in collusion with a political campaign, the question becomes whether American institutions and the legal system can adequately respond. The courts may hinder Trump, or for that matter any politician with autocratic leanings, from colluding with media companies. But the worrying messages to such politicians may be to avoid mischaracterizing or paying hush money altogether and to avoid defaming a company with deep pockets when promulgating the next big lie. Bragg and Dominion may win their battles, but the electorate may lose the war.   

As an undergraduate at the University of Chile, Bernardo Subercaseaux took a dim view of using computers to do math. It seemed antithetical to real intellectual discovery. “There’s some instinct or gut reaction against using computers to solve your problems, like it goes against the ideal beauty or elegance of a fantastic argument,” he said. But then in 2020 Subercaseaux fell in love…

Source

It's time to wake up and smell the pitcher plants.

Sea ice algae is an essential resource for the survival of many species living in the Arctic.

Headlines about climate change have filled newsfeeds over the last few years, ranging from catastrophic (natural disasters, endangered species, dire predictions for the future) to a bit more optimistic (electrification, the transition to renewable energy, climate tech advances). The content we see and read plays a key role in shaping our opinions about climate change, but it remains a contentious topic. Is it real? Are humans causing it? How bad is it really? And what’s likely to happen in the future?

A survey carried out by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) and The Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research aimed to find out how Americans really feel about climate change. The results were released over the last couple weeks in anticipation of Earth Day on April 22. In addition to general questions about climate change, the survey asked people about their views on energy policy and electric vehicles.

5,408 adults completed the survey between January 31 to February 15 of this year. There were respondents from all 50 US states, and they varied in age, race, gender, and education level.

In a nutshell, here’s what the survey found: Americans believe climate change is happening, but they’re not terribly worried about it, and are mostly not willing to spend money or go out of their way to help fix it.

Believers, Sort Of

74 percent of the survey respondents said they believe climate change is real. However, less than half—49 percent—believe it’s being caused by human activities (as opposed to natural changes in the environment). That 49 percent is down from 60 percent the last time this survey was carried out, in 2018. The change in viewpoint was uniform across education levels, from college graduates to those who stopped studying after high school. However, more people in the 18 to 29 age group changed their view than did those aged 60 or older.

 

 

In terms of actually taking action, more than half of respondents said they’re already trying to reduce their energy consumption (though this is likely as much of an effort to keep energy bills down as it is to help the environment). Some ways people are doing so is by using energy-efficient appliances (68 percent), turning off unnecessary lights (89 percent), using less paper and plastic (58 percent), eating less meat (37 percent), and using less heat and air conditioning (60 percent). These are relatively easy, low-cost actions that most anyone can take.

Fewer people are opting in to pricier climate-friendly actions, like putting solar panels on their home (11 percent), buying an electric or hybrid vehicle (12 percent), or getting electricity through a supplier that uses renewable sources (25 percent).

Hard to Cough Up the Cash

It seems that much of Americans’ willingness to help combat climate change comes down to economics. Almost two-thirds of those surveyed said they weren’t willing to pay any amount of money to combat climate change—not even $1 a month. 38 percent would pay $1 a month, and 21 percent would pay $100 a month.

 

 

How much people are willing to pay is likely more a function of their disposable income than of their concern over the environment. However, peoples’ willingness to shell out any amount of money, whether $1 or $100, decreased about 10 percent between 2021 and the present. This is likely because of the financial squeeze put on so many people by the pandemic and rising inflation; when you’re worried about making rent or buying groceries, helping the planet isn’t going to be high on your list.

“It’s striking that Americans’ willingness to pay even a $1 monthly fee to combat climate change fell to below half of respondents—the lowest level since we began tracking this data,” said Michael Greenstone, director of EPIC and an economics professor at the University of Chicago. “Americans’ willingness to pay for climate policy is far below what research projects climate change will cost society per ton of CO2 emissions.”

Similarly, 41 percent of people said they would buy an electric vehicle—if the long-term savings on gas and maintenance added up to more than the higher up-front cost of the car (cost was the biggest barrier to buying an EV). Those most likely to buy one are under 45 years old, live on the west coast in urban areas, and have high incomes. Unsurprisingly, people don’t want to be pushed into buying electric cars; just 35 percent support stricter fuel efficiency standards to encourage EV sales, and 27 percent are in favor of requiring new car sales to be electric or hybrid by 2035.

Help From Uncle Sam

Based on these responses, it seems we’re likely to find ourselves in a bit of a pickle in coming years. Despite believing in climate change, most Americans aren’t up for throwing much money at it. This must be partly due to the tough economic times we’re in; inflation and interest rates have soared, and whispers of an impending recession have been circulating for months.

But it’s also a sign that even once the economy improves and people feel more secure in their finances, real progress likely won’t be made without significant government intervention—that is, subsidies, regulation, and incentives. These need to be carefully balanced with practical concerns and realism, which can be a tall order.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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SpaceX's Starship launched on the first of many test flights it will undergo before it is ready to ferry astronauts to the moon.

A blinding flash of light set off air raid alerts across Ukraine’s capital city. Officials at first thought it was a falling NASA satellite, but the space agency has said it isn’t.

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38059-7

Polycyclic indolines are valuable skeletons in drug discovery. Here, the authors report an asymmetric dearomative [3 + 2] annulation of indoles with aminocyclopropanes to construct tricyclic indolines.

SpaceX-rakettens jomfrurejse tager Starship næsten hele vejen rundt om Jorden fra opsendelse i Texas til landing i havet nord for Hawaii.

Researchers are split over how to manage the threats posed by new forms of generative AI

SpaceX's giant new rocket exploded minutes after blasting off Thursday on it first test flight and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

The photocatalytic conversion of CO2 into C2+ products such as ethylene is a promising path toward the carbon neutral goal, but it remains a big challenge due to the high activation barrier for CO2 and similar reduction potentials of many possible multi-electron transfer products.

A large blue swirl that appeared in the night sky and within the aurora borealis did not have to do with aliens but was probably a fuel dump from a SpaceX rocket launch.

DNA replication is the process whereby cells make an exact copy of their DNA before cell division. A key part of the intricate DNA replication machinery is a molecular motor called CMG, which has the vital task of separating the two strands of the DNA double helix so that they can be copied.

The development and use of water resources in drylands is linked to the sustainable development of dryland ecosystems. Therefore, rational allocation of water resources in drylands and scientific assessment of their values are important for sustainable development in the region. However, there is a knowledge gap on how to adequately assess the value of arid ecosystems and the trade-off between their values and the costs of maintaining them.

Agriophyllum squarrosum, also known as "sand rice," is a drought-tolerant and saline-tolerant psammophyte. As a pioneer plant on the quicksand, A. squarrosum is widespread on sandy surfaces in northern China and is well-adapted to climate change. In addition, A. squarrosum is known to be one of the herbage resources for camels, goats and sheep in desert areas of China. However, the nutritional and feeding value of A. squarrosum is still unknown.

Studies have indicated that early- and mid-successional plants generally suffered from negative to neutral plant–soil feedback. However, the role of such plant–soil feedback during the postglacial primary succession of plants and microorganisms has not been fully understood.

Coral reefs are under a growing threat from climate change and human activity, making it more important than ever to understand their strengths and vulnerabilities. A team of EPFL scientists has now taken an important step in this direction with the new RECIFS open-access database on reef environments.

Social media influencers can significantly nudge the purchasing decisions made by their followers through the emotional connection they create and the quality of information they provide, according to a study in the International Journal of Technology Marketing.

Thanks to a recent upgrade to the medical isotope facilities at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, actinium-225 (Ac-225), an isotope that shows great promise for treating  , can now be produced, purified, and shipped ready for use directly from the Lab. The first shipment left Brookhaven in mid-March.

DNA replication is the process whereby cells make an exact copy of their DNA before cell division. A key part of the intricate DNA replication machinery is a molecular motor called CMG, which has the vital task of separating the two strands of the DNA double helix so that they can be copied.

The development and use of water resources in drylands is linked to the sustainable development of dryland ecosystems. Therefore, rational allocation of water resources in drylands and scientific assessment of their values are important for sustainable development in the region. However, there is a knowledge gap on how to adequately assess the value of arid ecosystems and the trade-off between their values and the costs of maintaining them.

Agriophyllum squarrosum, also known as "sand rice," is a drought-tolerant and saline-tolerant psammophyte. As a pioneer plant on the quicksand, A. squarrosum is widespread on sandy surfaces in northern China and is well-adapted to climate change. In addition, A. squarrosum is known to be one of the herbage resources for camels, goats and sheep in desert areas of China. However, the nutritional and feeding value of A. squarrosum is still unknown.

Studies have indicated that early- and mid-successional plants generally suffered from negative to neutral plant–soil feedback. However, the role of such plant–soil feedback during the postglacial primary succession of plants and microorganisms has not been fully understood.

Coral reefs are under a growing threat from climate change and human activity, making it more important than ever to understand their strengths and vulnerabilities. A team of EPFL scientists has now taken an important step in this direction with the new RECIFS open-access database on reef environments.

Using the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO), astronomers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have investigated the atmosphere of MASCARA-4b—a distant "ultra-hot Jupiter" exoplanet. The study, published April 11 on the arXiv pre-print server, resulted in the detection of rubidium and samarium in an exoplanet's atmosphere for the first time.

The first institution we experience in life is family. As long as humans have existed, they have gathered in groups in order to survive—to pass down knowledge, lend protection, and form bonds. Not only does the institution of family help us survive, it has a strong hold on our political beliefs and attitudes.

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– Lego er endt i en blindgyde

The enormous Starship rocket, set for launch today, can carry ten times the payload of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets.

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Nature, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01280-x

Flood mortality rates are far higher in countries with larger income disparities.

Nature, Published online: 19 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01319-z

Ecology and infectious-disease science can help avert financial crises. Plus, Earth’s giant kelp forests are worth $500 billion a year and the amateur variant-sleuths helping scientists to track SARS-CoV-2.

It’s not just tens of thousands of classic films being left behind by the move to ditch DVDs—it’s people too.

Researchers find that when immunostimulatory drugs called imidazoquinolines are delivered using specialized bottlebrush nanoparticles, the drugs provoke the immune system to attack   while eliminating the side effects that occur when the drugs are given on their own.

Jurassic Park helped popularize this head butting dino. Learn why paleontologists are undecided about the evolution and behavior of the Pachycephalosaurus.

What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, constraints on cognition and usage, and language contact. The study used the Grambank database, which contains data on grammatical structures in over 2400 languages.

Researchers have identified neurons in the brain that may contribute to some of the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, making it a good target for potential new drugs to treat the disease.

Researchers have designed a cellulose nanofiber paper (nanopaper) that can be used as a substrate for on-skin electronics. The porous structure of the nanopaper means that it can conform and adhere to the skin well enough for effective signal transfer and allows moisture to pass through for breathability and comfort. It is hoped that the nanopaper can soon be used to acquire electrophysiological data, such as ECGs in the clinic.

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Nature Communications, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37987-8

Although transition metal-catalyzed C–H bond functionalization is a widely used method in organic synthesis, many methods rely on metals of low abundance. Here, the authors report a copper-catalyzed, asymmetric C–H arylation using diaryliodonium salts.

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38040-4

Stretchable and degradable elastomers are crucial for developing transient and bioresorbable electronics. Herein, Han et al. tuned the diverse properties of biodegradable PLCL elastomers and demonstrated their application in soft, perceptive robotic grippers and transient, suture-free cardiac jackets.

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37809-x

 (TAA) causes many sudden deaths each year, however, no effective drug treatment is available. Here, the authors show that   protein therapy attenuates TAA in three different mouse models through integrin α7-mediated inhibition of TGF-β1 maturation and  /2 signalling.

Nature Communications, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37995-8

The use of energy-dense materials is inherently limited in biphasic self-stratified batteries due to the aqueous electrolyte environment. Here, the authors extended the concept of biphasic self-stratified batteries to non-aqueous systems, resulting in increased energy density and output voltage.

Researchers have identified the cause of an inherited   common among people with Lumbee and other Native American heritage, overturning decades of settled science and pointing to new, more effective therapies.

Researchers find that when immunostimulatory drugs called imidazoquinolines are delivered using specialized bottlebrush nanoparticles, the drugs provoke the immune system to attack   while eliminating the side effects that occur when the drugs are given on their own.

Today, foldable phones are ubiquitous. Now, using models that predict how well a flexible electronic device will conform to spherical surfaces, engineers could usher in a new era in which these bendy devices can integrate seamlessly with parts of the human body.

A new study in Science Advances adds weight to a growing body of evidence that iron dysregulation may play an important role in Alzheimer's disease and therefore might provide a better target for treatments than amyloid beta plaques.

What if, by adding a couple of cell layers inside a corn kernel, the grain could become significantly richer in essential nutrients like iron, zinc, and protein? Such an improvement could benefit people who rely on corn for a large portion of their diet, as in many parts of the global south.

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Why your iPhone 17 might come with a recycled battery

Lithium-ion batteries power most of our personal electronics today. Mining the metals that make up those batteries can mean a lot of pollution, as well as harmful conditions for workers. 

The good news is, a growing number of groups are working to make sure batteries get recycled—and some of those efforts are becoming mainstream, including Apple’s recent announcement its batteries would use 100% recycled cobalt beginning in 2025. 

It says a lot about where the battery recycling industry is and where it’s going. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

Casey’s story is from The Spark, her weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

 

Snap is launching augmented-reality mirrors in stores

What’s happening: Snap is planning to launch augmented-reality mirrors that allow shoppers in stores to instantly see how clothes look on them without physically trying them on. The mirrors are going to appear in some US Nike stores later this year, and in the Men’s Wearhouse in Paramus, New Jersey.

Why? The mirrors are part of Snap’s new effort to start offering AR products in the physical world. AR has powered Snapchat filters and Lenses (the company’s term for its in-app AR experiences) for years, but these additional uses of the technology create a potential revenue stream for Snap outside the social media platform’s app. Read the full story.

—Tanya Basu

 

Learning to code isn’t enough

A decade ago, tech powerhouses like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon helped boost the nonprofit Code.org, a learn-to-code program. It sparked a wave of nonprofits and for-profits alike dedicated to coding and learning computer science, and a number of US states that have made coding a high school graduation requirement. 

But just learning to code is neither a pathway to a stable financial future for people from economically precarious backgrounds, nor a panacea for the inadequacies of the educational system. Read the full story.

—Joy Lisi Rankin

This story is from our forthcoming Education print issue, due to launch next Wednesday. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up from just $69 a year—a special low price to mark Earth Week.

 

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 It’s better to be safe than sorry with AI
And yet, the biggest labs aren’t investing in proper safeguarding. (Economist $)
+ Google’s using generative AI for its new ad campaigns. (FT $)
+ Discussions around AI risk are long overdue. (New Scientist $)
+ Do AI systems need to come with safety warnings? (MIT Technology Review)

2 People with long covid are still suffering  
And they’re feeling increasingly isolated due to the lack of restrictions. (The Atlantic $)
+ But new clinical trials are looking promising. (Wired $)
+ We’ve only just begun to examine the racial disparities of long covid. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Matt Walsh’s Twitter hacker did it to stir up drama
They say they compromised Walsh’s phone with the help of an “insider.” (Wired $)
+ Twitter’s getting rid of legacy blue checks—for real this time. (WP $)

4 All US Facebook users are owed money
But it’s not a lot, and isn’t coming anytime soon. (WSJ $)

5 North Korea says it’s built its first spy satellite
The satellite could play a key role in the country’s weapons programs. (FT $)
+ Soon, satellites will be able to watch you everywhere all the time. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The US Supreme Court has delayed its abortion pill decision
It’ll make a decision about the accessibility of mifepristone on Friday. (BBC)
+ Texas is trying out new tactics to restrict access to abortion pills online. (MIT Technology Review)

7 TikTok’s algorithm keeps pushing suicide content to minors
Depression, hopelessness and death are common themes. (Bloomberg $)

8  Erotic hypnosis is ruining women’s lives
Predatory men are using recordings to groom vulnerable people online. (BuzzFeed)

9 WeChat’s ultrashort soap operas are pushing China’s decency laws
The dramas are more provocative than traditional TV fare. (Rest of World)

10 How video games help people work through their grief

It gives them the chance to process their feelings in digital realms. (The Guardian)

 

Quote of the day

“Bard is worse than useless: please do not launch.”

—An internal Google note to workers spells out the problems with the company’s AI chatbot, which it launched last month, Bloomberg reports.

 

The big story

How robotic honeybees and hives could help the species fight back

 

 

October 2022

Something was wrong, but Thomas Schmickl couldn’t put his finger on it. It was 2007, and the Austrian biologist was spending part of the year at East Tennessee State University. During his daily walks, he realized that insects seemed conspicuously absent.

Schmickl, who now leads the Artificial Life Lab at the University of Graz in Austria, wasn’t wrong. Insect populations are indeed declining or changing around the world.

Robotic bees, he believes, could help both the real thing and their surrounding nature, a concept he calls ecosystem hacking. Read the full story.

—Elizabeth Preston

 

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ There’s nothing quite like a teenage bedroom. 
+ If you’ve been looking to mix up your podcast library, this list offers some handy pointers.
+ Shh, don’t tell anyone about America’s hottest, and most secret, restaurants.
+ Stealing close to $200,000 in dimes seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
+ Kenny Loggins is still going—writing Winnie the Pooh songs. 

How we saw the world

When I realized the power of online journalism in the early aughts, I saw transparency as key to its promise. I’d watched Gawker X-ray New York’s media scene, and seen bloggers tear apart mainstream reporting on the 2004 presidential campaign. I found that I could drive the political conversation simply by telling my readers what I knew in plain English, when I knew it. At Politico in 2007, we adopted Gawker’s ethos that many of old-school journalists’ most interesting stories were the ones they told one another in bars, rather than the ones they printed, and applied it to American politics. We immediately hooked political junkies on a steady stream of scoops that assumed readers were on a first-name basis with Hillary and Barack, and that they didn’t need us to provide much context or analysis.

At its best, this ethos bypassed the patronizing, gatekeeping practices that often led great American institutions to mislead the country on vital public subjects. At its worst, it encouraged journalists to publish things that their predecessors had good reason to pass over, such as leaked sex tapes.

And then there were the hard cases, the explosive facts and documents that journalists had long worried citizens would take out of context if they were revealed in full. I found, and still find, that concern ludicrous in this digital age. But the trajectory of the document known as “the dossier” has disabused me of my Panglossian assumption that the new transparency is a simple blessing.

I first got wind of the dossier in December 2016, when I was the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. One of our reporters, Ken Bensinger, received an unusual invitation to a small gathering at a hilltop mansion in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. He’d been invited by an acquaintance, Glenn Simpson, a onetime journalist who had become a kind of private investigator and co-founded the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Ken got lost and showed up late, finding a boisterous, all‑male affair: plenty of booze, hunks of meat on the grill, some weed being smoked outside. Simpson drew him into a conversation about a mutual acquaintance, a former British spy named Christopher Steele. Simpson then told Ken something he didn’t know: Steele had been working the case of the president-elect, Donald Trump, and he’d assembled evidence that Trump had close ties to the Kremlin—including claims that Michael Cohen, one of his lawyers, had held secret meetings with Russian officials in Prague, and that the Kremlin had a lurid video of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in the Ritz-Carlton Moscow that would come to be known as the “pee tape.”

Ken told Simpson’s story to our investigations editor, Mark Schoofs, who told me about it. Simpson wouldn’t give Ken the document, and neither would Steele. It was merely high-grade Washington gossip, irresistible chatter.

I heard about the report again over lunch in Brooklyn, when a peculiar character in Hillary Clinton’s orbit passed through town. David Brock had been an anti-Clinton journalist in the 1990s. Now he was Hillary’s fiercest ally, a genius at raising money for Democratic groups. He showed up at a café a couple of days before Christmas wearing a coat with a lavish fur collar, and stashed full shopping bags beside the table. Brock was consumed with the mission of stopping Trump, manic; he was headed, it turned out, for a heart attack that landed him in the hospital. He wanted to spread the word about a dossier of allegations involving Trump’s ties to Russia. Brock didn’t have the document, he said. But he knew The Washington Post did, and so did The New York Times. Politicians had it too, he told me, and spies; as far as I could figure out, so did everyone, except the reading public. And me.

That, I believed, made it exactly the sort of thing you should publish. The dossier would be a great story, a journalistic and traffic sensation.

We were hardly the first journalists to get the document—but we may have been the first to get it without promising to keep it secret.

Simpson, whose firm was working for the Democratic National Committee, had months earlier summoned the leading lights of Washington journalism to the Tabard Inn, a tatty hotel off Dupont Circle. There, Steele calmly shared his shocking suggestion that Trump had been compromised by the Russian government. The journalists came from The New York Times, The New Yorker, ABC News, CNN. BuzzFeed didn’t get an invite.

To Simpson’s frustration, the reporters couldn’t confirm the dossier’s allegations. And because they had promised Simpson that they wouldn’t write about the dossier itself, its author, or its path through the American government, they couldn’t report on these things either, even as they became equally interesting stories.

On December 29, the Republican foreign-policy expert David Kramer invited Ken to his office at the McCain Institute. He then did something careful Washington insiders do: He left Ken alone in the room with the document for 20 minutes, without, in Ken’s view, giving clear instructions about whether he could make a copy. Ken took a picture of every page. (Kramer later denied that he’d allowed Ken to copy it, though I believed the denial was a fig leaf. Kramer eventually clarified that denial to say that he had wanted Ken to take a paper copy with him, rather than take pictures of the document.) I printed out the 35-page document and pored over it, looking for details that we could confirm, or refute. Then I hid my copy in the back of a closet. We scrambled—as other news outlets had done—sending reporters to check out the details; one went to 61 Prague hotels to ask whether anyone had seen Michael Cohen.

On January 10, CNN’s Jake Tapper announced a big scoop: “CNN has learned that the nation’s top intelligence officials provided information to President-elect Donald Trump and to President Barack Obama last week about claims of Russian efforts to compromise President-elect Trump.” The briefing, CNN reported, was “based on memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S. intelligence officials consider credible.” The memos included, the network said—ominously and hazily—“allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.”

The dossier was in circulation, affecting the course of American politics. Now that CNN had effectively waved it in the air, surely someone, soon, would let regular people in on the secret? I knew what I thought we should do, but I asked Mark; our executive editor, Shani Hilton; and Miriam Elder, the former Guardian Moscow correspondent editing our international coverage, if we should publish it. They all agreed that the document itself was news.

We stood around Mark’s laptop as he started typing. Ken, on speakerphone, warned that we could get sued; I too-curtly told him that I wasn’t asking him for legal advice. Then we turned to writing. “A dossier making explosive—but unverified—allegations” had been in wide circulation, we wrote. The allegations were “specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable.” Miriam had noticed a couple of odd, minor false notes in the discussion of Russian specifics. She took a turn at the laptop. “It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors,” we said. I sent a copy of our story to our in-house lawyer.

By 6:20 p.m., about an hour after Tapper’s segment concluded, we had 350 careful words explaining what we knew. In the best traditions of the internet, we published that short introduction alongside a PDF of the full document.

Then I went to stand in the middle of the newsroom and watch the traffic flow.

For the next hour, my eyes flicked between a big screen where I watched the dossier go viral, and my phone, where I watched it dominate Twitter. The tweet that came up the most included a screenshotted excerpt from the dossier describing a “perverted” scene at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow, where Trump had allegedly hired “a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.” That excerpt was shared and shared again. Our caveats didn’t always accompany it.

The news organizations that had accepted Simpson’s invitation to the Tabard Inn were furious. This was, I believe, in part because they had been boxed out of covering the real story by their agreements with a source, but also because they genuinely thought that what we’d done—floating inflammatory, salacious, and unverified claims about the president-elect of the United States—was wildly irresponsible.

Jake Tapper sent me a furious email that evening saying that publishing the document “makes the story less serious and credible,” which was probably true—but if keeping a document secret makes it more credible, you might have a problem. Tapper also said he wished we had at least waited until morning to give his news the attention it deserved: “Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick,” he wrote.

I’d expected that backlash, and at first welcomed it. I thought we were on the right side of the decade-old conflict between the transparent new internet and a legacy media whose power came in part from the information they withheld. And, of course, I loved the traffic. This was a huge revelation, a secret unveiled. What made me uncomfortable was the gratitude.

My phone lit up with text messages from Democrats thanking us for publishing the dossier and revealing Trump to be as depraved as they had always believed him to be. Hillary Clinton had never mastered social media; her supporters had never developed the dense networks of memes and conspiracy theories that powered the Trump movement. But now liberals, forming a nascent “resistance,” were starting to build their own powerful narratives on social media that were sometimes more resonant than factual. The notion of a single, vast conspiracy seemed to answer their desperate question of how Trump could have been elected. Russia clearly had helped. WikiLeaks’ hack-and-dump operation was a crucial factor among many in a very close election. You didn’t need to believe all the details in the dossier to know those things.

But perhaps I should have thought a little more about WikiLeaks. A couple of weeks before the 2016 election, I’d attended a Trump rally in Edison, New Jersey, and on my way in, I’d encountered a supporter chanting, “WikiLeaks! WikiLeaks!” I asked him which specific documents he thought painted Hillary Clinton in such a bad light. He didn’t exactly know. I realized that I was looking at social media in real life, a man shouting information cast as a symbol of what he already believed about Clintonian corruption, not as anything meant to convey new knowledge.

Something similar happened with the dossier. We had embedded it as a PDF, which meant that it could travel context-free, without our article’s careful disclaimers, and that’s exactly what happened. I watched uneasily as educated Democrats who abhorred Trump supporters’ crude rants about child sex rings in Washington pizza joints were led by the dossier into similar patterns of thought. They read screenshots of Steele’s report; they connected the dots. They retweeted threads about how the plane of a Russian oligarch—previously unknown to them, now sinister—had made a mysterious stop in North Carolina.

We’d been careful, I found myself having to remind people, to say we didn’t know whether everything in the dossier was true when we published it. I defended the decision in public, in a New York Times op-ed and in a deposition, after a Russian man whom Steele had suggested was tied to the Democratic National Committee hack sued us.

Months after we released the dossier, the media executive Ben Sherwood came by my office. We’d met years earlier when he’d been at Disney, which had been trying to buy BuzzFeed. We had turned Disney down, but it had been a hard decision. I told him that running BuzzFeed had gotten more difficult, with the complexities of management and the realities of digital advertising bearing down on me.

So what did I think now? he asked. Didn’t I wish we’d done the Disney deal? “Would we have been able to publish the dossier?” I asked. “Not in a million years,” he told me. Then I told him I was glad we hadn’t taken the money.

That was an easy position to hold in 2017. It seemed reasonable to argue that publishing the dossier had been, on balance, good for the country. It had blown wide open a Russia investigation and forced voters to ask just why Trump seemed so friendly with Vladimir Putin. But although the biggest-picture claim—that the Russian government had worked to help Trump—was clearly true, the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in April 2019 did not support Steele’s report. Indeed, it knocked down crucial elements of the dossier, including Cohen’s supposed visit to Prague. Internet sleuths—followed by a federal prosecutor—had poked holes in Steele’s sourcing, suggesting that he’d overstated the quality of his information.

And there had always been a more mundane version of the Trump-Russia story. Trump was the sort of destabilizing right-wing figure that Putin had covertly supported across Europe. Trump’s value to Putin was related not to a secret deal, but to the overt damage he could do to America. And Trump, BuzzFeed News’s Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold discovered, had a more mundane interest in Russia as well: He had drawn up plans to build the biggest apartment building in Europe on the banks of the Moskva River. The Trump Organization planned to offer the $50 million penthouse to Putin as a sweetener.

That real-estate project wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the dossier. Yet it seemed to explain the same pattern of behavior, without the lurid sexual allegations or hints of devious espionage.

And publishing the dossier wasn’t, in the end, a dagger to Trump’s heart. If anything, it muddied the less sensational revelations of his business dealings and his campaign manager’s ties to Russia. An FBI agent who investigated Trump, Peter Strzok, later said the dossier “framed the debate” in a way that ultimately helped Trump: “Here’s what’s alleged to have happened, and if it happened, boy, it’s horrible—we’ve got a traitor in the White House. But if it isn’t true, well, then everything is fine.”

It was, the reporter Barry Meier wrote, “a media clusterfuck of epic proportions.” The dossier’s overreaching allegation of an immense and perverse conspiracy would, he predicted, “ultimately benefit Donald Trump.”

Six years after publication, I accept that conclusion. And yet I remain defensive of our decision. I find it easiest to explain not in the grandiose terms of journalism, but in the more direct language of respect for your reader. Don’t you, the reader, think you’re smart enough to see a document like that and understand that it is influential but unverified without losing your mind? Would you rather people like me had protected you from seeing it?

Imagine the alternative, a world in which the American public knows that there is a secret document making murky allegations that the president-elect has been compromised, a document that is being investigated by the FBI, that the president-elect and the outgoing president have been briefed on, and that everyone who is anyone has seen—but that they can’t. This would, if anything, produce darker speculation. It might have made the allegations seem more credible than they were.

We faced a difficult series of lawsuits, but we won them all, in part because we’d maintained our journalistic distance. We argued, successfully, that we were not making these claims ourselves; we were making the “fair report” of what amounted to a government document. We’d published the dossier while holding it at arm’s length, noting that we hadn’t been able to verify or knock down its claims—even if we had inadvertently launched a million conspiracy theories in the process.

And that’s the part of the dossier’s strange trajectory that remains most disturbing to me. The way the document became a social-media totem for the anti-Trump resistance rebutted my confidence that people could be trusted with a complex, contradictory set of information, and that journalists should simply print what they had and revel, guilt-free, in the traffic. We seemed to be in an impossible, even dangerous, situation: The public had lost trust in institutions while simultaneously demanding that those same institutions filter the swirl of claims that surround democracy’s biggest decisions.

I have no pat conclusion. If I had to do it again, I would publish the dossier—we couldn’t suppress it, not once CNN had discussed it and its implications on air. But I would hold more tightly to the document, so that no one could read it without reading what we knew about it—that we weren’t sure it was true, and in fact we had noticed errors in it. Releasing a document that could be shared without context—and this is as true of the WikiLeaks material as it is of the dossier—created partisan symbols, not crowdsourced analysis.

In technical terms, that means I wouldn’t simply publish it as a PDF, destined to float free from our earnest caveats. At best, we could have published the document as screenshots attached to the context we had and the context we would learn. Perhaps in some small way, this would have limited its transformation from a set of claims into a banner of the “resistance.” But I’m not under the illusion that journalists could have contained its wildfire spread, any more than I think we could have concealed it.

I’m now leading a news organization, Semafor, that is also rooted in transparency. But I no longer think transparency means that journalists can be simple conduits for facts, obscuring our own points of view, leaving our audiences to figure it out. The best we can do, I think, is to lay our cards on the table in separate piles: Here are the facts, and here’s what we think they mean—and to retain some humility about the difference between the two.

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This essay is adapted from the forthcoming Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.

Until she was 5 years old, Alice Birch lived in a commune in the Malvern Hills, a bucolic area in the west of England known for bluebell woods and wandering poets. It was, she recalls, quite low-key for a commune, “not culty, not wild”—just a 19th-century redbrick country house with orchards and vegetable gardens and adults trying to live out their collectivist ideals. At night, the whole group ate together around a big round table, and Birch would listen quietly as people talked. Though everyone was broadly left-leaning, she remembers a good amount of disagreement; she couldn’t always understand what was being talked about, but she felt the tension, the crackle of ideas sparking as they met in the air.

“That’s theater,” she told me last month, sitting at a table inside London’s National Theatre. Before Birch became a highly prized film and television writer, she was a playwright—“There’s no one better,” the woman in the theater bookstore told me, her eyes glinting, as I picked up some of Birch’s plays—and throughout her work, the dinner table is often where everything kicks off. In the smash TV adaptation of Normal People that she co-wrote with Sally Rooney, a shady alfresco lunch in Italy turns into an eruption of emotional violence. [Blank], a 2019 play that premiered at London’s Donmar Warehouse, features a 45-minute scene called “Dinner Party,” in which a gathering over meze is interrupted by cocaine dealers, wine deliveries, and eventually a child wielding a baseball bat. Dead Ringers, a fiendish new series for Amazon that Birch created with the actor Rachel Weisz, brings even more to the table: At one point, the identical-twin obstetricians played by Weisz pitch a new model for women’s health care to some truly awful rich people over razor clams and kombucha. The resulting scene is one of the funniest and most mordant in TV memory.

[Read: The irresistible intimacy of Normal People]

At 36, Birch has the wholesome features of a woman in a Victorian soap ad, the gentle manner of a therapist (her mother and stepfather both work in the field), and the creative intentions of a Molotov cocktail. She’s an iconoclast in the most tender human form. “It’s quite moving, actually, to see someone continuously be so kind and respectful to everyone while writing these completely outrageous, aberrant, dysfunctional characters,” Weisz told me over the phone. Dead Ringers, a reimagining of the 1988 David Cronenberg film that starred Jeremy Irons as the codependent twin doctors, is a pitch-dark, scabrously funny, occasionally grotesque satire of the upper echelons of American health care. The show is so wildly original that viewers might not notice, at first glance, how radical it is. It forces its audience to absorb the brutality of childbirth and the danger tacitly accepted by any person who chooses—or is forced by the state—to carry a child. “Why are you wearing my vagina like a fucking glove?” a woman in labor shouts at a doctor. Babies crown; blood pools in crimson puddles on the floor.

Dead Ringers feels like not much else that’s ever been on television. It’s more like Birch’s plays than anything—funny, sharp, twisted, and often furious, but also fluid with language and imagery in a way that lets you absorb its ideas at both an intellectual and a not-quite-conscious level. The theater director Katie Mitchell, who mentored Birch and has collaborated with her several times, sees her as carrying on the tradition of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Caryl Churchill, and Sarah Kane. “Whether you’re watching her Normal People or Lady Macbeth on television and film, or her Anatomy of a Suicide or Ophelia in theater,” Mitchell told me, “it’s the same distinct signature and voice. There’s no aesthetic or political compromise across the body of the work.” The only difference with film and television, she notes, is the potential size of Birch’s audience, the almost limitless new realm that a woman with forceful ideas and a streaming series can reach.

Eight years ago, while she was still in her late 20s, Birch did something relatively unconventional for a young woman finally starting to break through in a creative industry: She had a child. For many people, it’s one of the most radicalizing experiences they’ll have. When Birch’s son came, “and it feels like he came, I didn’t have him; when he arrived,” she said, “there was so much about all of it that I couldn’t believe we don’t talk about it all the time. All the time. Because it’s violent. It’s exhausting, and painful, and punishing.” No one else she knew had children at the time. The shock of how much her life had changed was compounded by loneliness. She remembers meeting up one morning with a friend who’d come straight from a rave and was still covered in glitter. Neither of them had slept, for quite different reasons; sitting on a bench, they cried together.

Birch’s son was born during a moment in her career that she describes as being “noisier” than usual: A play she’d written called Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, a ferocious consideration of how language keeps women from true liberation, had premiered with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2014 to critical acclaim (one reviewer called it “a cluster bomb of subversion”), and would debut in New York at the Soho Rep two years later. While heavily pregnant, she’d finished writing her first film, an adaptation of a Nikolai Leskov novella titled Lady Macbeth; the movie, which went into production soon after, became the first starring role for a 19-year-old actor named Florence Pugh. After a dismaying experience being cast in a TV pilot, during which her body, face, and image were scrutinized by studio executives, Pugh had been on the verge of quitting acting when she auditioned for Lady Macbeth. But the film, she told The Telegraph last year, made her “fall back in love with cinema.” Her performance as Katherine—a young bride in the 19th century whose confinement at the hands of her severe older husband turns her violent—propelled Pugh’s reputation as a fascinating, unflinching new star, and Birch’s as a writer of female characters who are knotty, dark, carnal, and compelling.

Since she was very young, Birch had always written plays, without necessarily knowing that that’s what they were. She wrote pantomimes and made her friends perform in them; by herself, she lined up her pens and made them talk to one another. As a teenager, she did a weeklong internship at the Royal Court Theatre in London, historically a hothouse for incendiary British playwrights: John Osborne, Caryl Churchill, Martin McDonagh. Reading unsolicited scripts, she dismissed one by observing that it was too violent and extreme to be staged. “And they gave me a stack of Sarah Kane, Simon Stephens, Beckett, Shakespeare,” she said. “It was such a generous and gentle way of interrogating things.” The point was that transgression and experimentation are necessary to theater, crucial components in the process of making art.

That notion might help explain why so many superlative TV shows now scour theaters to add to their teams (the writers’ room for Dead Ringers included six playwrights, a director, and Weisz), or are themselves adapted from plays (Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum, Katori Hall’s P-Valley). Birch’s first TV job, in 2018, was on Season 2 of Succession, where a writers’ room that included the playwrights Lucy Prebble and Susan Soon He Stanton dreamed up scenarios for the cursed Roy family from a noisy office in Brixton, South London. “I sometimes feel fraudulent saying I worked on it because it was quite overwhelming,” Birch told me. Jesse Armstrong, its showrunner, “is very generous and leads it so kindly and carefully. But it’s rigorous.” She was traveling with her son around that time when she read Normal People, Sally Rooney’s literary sensation about the romantic travails of two Irish teenagers, and stayed up far too late one night to finish it. She could see distinctly how it would work as a TV series—how the structure and dialogue and emotion would play out on-screen. The subsequent show, which she ended up co-writing with Rooney after the author sought out a collaborator, scored Birch her first Emmy nomination, and became a sensation itself when it was released by Hulu and the BBC early in the coronavirus pandemic.

The director Sebastián Lelio—who collaborated with Birch on the 2022 film The Wonder—told me that Birch “has an extraordinary capacity to create very complex characters through dialogue … characters who really express themselves, their light and shadows, through the way they talk, the words they use.” That is, he said, “really the quintessential challenge of writing a script.” During the pandemic, when theatrical productions were canceled everywhere, including Birch’s planned National Theatre production of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, she found herself appreciating the task of adaptation, and the “scaffolding” of an existing work. Before adapting a book into a script, she writes the entire thing out longhand, word by word, to get as intimately acquainted with it as she can. And she usually writes at night, when the isolation and the darkness makes her feel like she can get away with more, creatively. “I feel like when she’s writing at night, in the kitchen, it’s almost like she becomes the characters when she writes,” Weisz said. “I think her imagination is a pretty beautiful, profound thing.”

[Read: Stubborn, determined, and dying]

Since having her son, Birch has been deploying that imagination to expand and sometimes upend portrayals of motherhood. In a different era, having a baby might have challenged a woman’s creative ambitions. For Birch, it turbocharged them; she felt as though she needed to write about everything just to process it. After having her son, she wrote Anatomy of a Suicide, a play written in the round, like a canon, that juxtaposes three generations of women from the same family and the ways in which their experiences rebound and echo over one another. Her next project, a film adaptation of Megan Hunter’s novel The End We Start From, stars Jodie Comer as a new mother fleeing London during a devastating flood. And she’s also in the early stages of adapting a thriller she can’t yet name, whose exploration of matrilineal trauma treads dark psychological terrain.

For its part, Dead Ringers also pushes into fresh territory. Its conception, which coincided with the birth of Birch’s daughter, considers childbearing through the lens of body horror. But it’s also immensely interested in female gratification. Weisz and Birch fixated on the Lacanian idea of “jouissance,” or the vital and sexual impulse for pleasure, while writing Elliot Mantle, the older twin, who eats, drinks, snorts, screws, and—most jarringly of all—says exactly everything that she wants to. “It’s a really particular version of pleasure that is primal and physical, and might be misunderstood,” Birch said. For one scene, filmed in a diner, Weisz had to eat cheeseburgers over and over with carnivorous relish, and, as Birch observed, “it really feels a bit radical to watch a woman eat and enjoy it.” Inevitably, being a Birch-written dinner scene, things go sideways. But in the meantime, there’s subversive joy in seeing something so simple in front of our eyes: the desire gratified, the need met. The woman’s hunger fed.

Few people are neutral about neutrality these days. Sophisticated thought, certainly, has turned against it. The very ideal, we’re told, is misconceived, at best a ruse for prettifying partisanship. Following the recent contretemps at Stanford Law—where an administrator, trying to quiet protesters who were heckling a conservative judge, spoke in a way that appeared to side with the protesters—the law-school dean cited the 1967 Kalven Report, from the University of Chicago, stressing the importance of institutional neutrality. Almost as soon as she invoked that august defense (half a century old, please note), eyes rolled. One scholar declared that it was “extraordinarily difficult” to call out the judge’s slick doublespeak “while claiming to do so from a position of political neutrality.” Whatever roles we play in public life, after all, we’re hardly free from political and ideological leanings. If our personal values are truly important to us, shouldn’t they inform everything we do? Why shouldn’t we all just put our cards on the table and be open about what’s in our hearts?

All sorts of people—judges, journalists, physicians, administrators of public institutions, you name it—maintain, in their professional capacity, some pose of neutrality. U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts famously likened a judge’s role to that of an umpire. (“It’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”) Len Downie Jr., who ran The Washington Post from 1991 to 2008, was so determined to avoid the appearance of bias that he didn’t even vote. (“So that I never make up my mind which party, candidate or ideology should be in power.”) But critics are now convinced that this posture amounts to either self-delusion or manipulation.

[Tom Rachman: America’s is-ought problem]

In How Judges Think, Richard A. Posner, an eminent legal scholar who was, for many years, an appellate-court judge, shook his head at the mirage of “legalism,” a model whereby judges are merely applying statutes to the facts of a case. “Judges are less likely to be drunk with power if they realize that they are exercising discretion than if they think they are just a transmission belt for decisions made elsewhere and so bear no responsibility for any ugly consequences of those decisions,” he wrote. In his opinion, the Supreme Court is the most political court of all—and many have joined in concurrence. A political action group that aims to expand access to abortion has bluntly warned against the “meaningless ‘umpire’ line” that conservative nominees use in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee: “When they get on the court they push their conservative ideology and overturn precedent.”

Is neutrality even attainable? “No journalistic process is objective,” Wesley Lowery, a former Washington Post reporter, observed in a widely discussed New York Times opinion piece from 2020. “And no individual journalist is objective, because no human being is.” Given “the failures of neutral objective journalism,” he urged another ideal: “moral clarity.”

Some critics reject neutrality because they don’t believe that we can be objective; others reject neutrality because they do believe that we can be objective. “Is it even possible for the administration of a university dedicated to seeking the truth to be neutral about matters that can easily be analyzed using objective methods?” asked Holden Thorp, a scientist and former university chief, in an opinion piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Neutrality, in his view, is a squirrelly stratagem: “Faculty, staff, and students know the presidents are human beings who have views on these issues. Many of them knew the president before they got in the role. So, who are they fooling by saying they’re neutral? Nobody.” He wonders that university administrators “tie themselves in knots trying to somehow stay neutral on issues that are clearly in the purview of research and teaching at their institutions.”

Hovering above these arguments is a larger question of political morality: Can and should the state itself be neutral? Liberalism—which, taken broadly as an approach to governance, stresses the liberty rights of individuals and their equality before the law—has traditionally prized some notion of neutrality. Perhaps the most vigorous opponent of liberal neutrality in the past century was the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt. In his essay “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” written in 1929, he indicted liberalism for pretending that all persons and perspectives were entitled to equal standing and that conflicts of vision could and should be worked out through the peaceable, rule-governed debate and deliberation of legislatures and courts. He especially complained about the way that what we’d call the mainstream media promulgated this vision, effectively depoliticizing politics. Politics could never really be supplanted with liberal proceduralism, he argued; real politics was, at bottom, about crushing your enemies.

In some ways, Schmitt’s thinking seems in sync with sophisticated thought in our own times. He despised the cult of Big Tech, or what he called “the torpid religion of technicity.” In his view, technology was bound to intensify conflict, not ameliorate it, and the technologies of mass communication were instruments for “the domination of the masses on a large scale.” Where people imagined that courts and officials might impersonally apply norms to cases, Schmitt insisted that what he called “decisionism”—the rulings of an arbitrary, personal will—would and should play a crucial role alongside those norms. The most powerful impulse in the organization of society—and the one to be earnestly resisted—was “the striving for a neutral domain.”

What we instead needed, he thought, was something like moral clarity: a ride-or-die embrace of a comprehensive set of ideas and values that identified what was good and what was evil. Schmitt, notoriously, embraced one solution to the permissive practices of the Weimar Republic. When Hitler came to power, he joined the Nazi Party—no pose of neutrality there!—and, for a while, served as one of its leading legal theorists. In a 1938 book of political theory, he blamed Jewish thinkers, including Baruch Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, for advocating forms of governance that would accommodate pluralism, the inclusion of minorities and “individual freedom of thought.” He regretted that their ideal of the “neutral state” had gained some traction, burdening government with managerial and procedural responsibilities to treat people evenhandedly.

Schmitt was prescient in attacking neutrality before most liberal theorists even recognized the importance of the concept. In recent decades, many theorists have tried to articulate the core idea of liberal neutrality. In The Ethics of Identity, I argued that the key ideal is that the state treat people of diverse social identities with equal respect: A public act may disadvantage people of a certain identity, but it should never disadvantage them because they are regarded as people of a certain identity. (So, for instance, the placement of doorknobs in public buildings may disadvantage people who are left-handed, but not because they are regarded as left-handers.) Pluralism requires this form of neutrality, what I’ve called “neutrality as equal respect.” The state doesn’t belong to any one group of citizens.

But even if we favor the pluralism that Schmitt detested, how should we reckon with the gap between our human biases and the fair-mindedness we affect in our public roles? Erving Goffman, the great sociologist, distinguished between our “front stage” conduct and our “backstage” conduct. (He was fascinated by the contrast between the way waiters behaved before customers and the way they were in the kitchen.) Is it then all a matter of dramaturgy—with secret agendas lurking behind the judge’s robes, the reporter’s pad, the provost’s bland reticence?

My colleague Michael Strevens is a philosopher of science, and in his book The Knowledge Machine, he took a hard look at a hard problem: Scientists themselves aren’t really dispassionate and objective. They’re affected by their position and their temperament, prone to power politics and vanity and grudges. When they’ve settled on a research program, it’s difficult to get them to give it up. They are, Strevens says, “all too human.”

What, then, explains the triumph of modern science? One way of putting it is that, in their professional roles, these white-coated hot messes have to pose as, well, scientists. They’ve all signed onto a shared etiquette of argument. Pretty much everyone came to agree on what counts as a legitimate move in this game. They’re going to resolve their disputes by coming up with experiments, designed to support or rule out one position or the other. When they write up their papers, they aim to leave out animus and emotion and other forms of subjectivity, in a process he calls “sterilization.” In science, Strevens stresses, reasoning (the way you actually made the inferences that you did) is private; argument (the way you defend your results to your colleagues) is public.

Skeptics insist the public pose of objectivity is a ruse that conceals the subjectivity of actual scientists. What they don’t grasp is that the public protocol, the “front stage” performance, has power. It’s a fiction that is not merely useful, but indispensable: a fiction that creates its own reality, delivering a world-changing cascade of objective facts. In short, the social roles we choose—including those that distance us from overt partisanship—matter.

[Imani Perry: Why I reject the gospel of objectivity]

Jurisprudence is far from any kind of science. But note that from 2008 to 2021, the most common vote count for a Supreme Court ruling was 9–0. (Unanimous decisions have varied in frequency year by year, from as high as 66 percent of rulings to as low as 29 percent.) Because the high-profile rulings are the divisive ones, we’re far more conscious of them, but what Posner calls legalism—statutory interpretation, unentangled in culture-war issues—is still the norm. And although Posner, who finds much to commend in the legal realism that emerged a century ago, is an advocate of “pragmatism,” an approach that’s mindful of results and free from what he describes as the “fig leaf” of some grand model of exegesis, he concedes that the pragmatic judge is “a constrained pragmatist.” He meant that judges are rightly “boxed in … by norms that require impartiality, awareness of the importance of the law’s being predictable enough to guide the behavior of those subject to it (including judges!), and a due regard for the integrity of the written word in contracts and statutes.”

Protocols of neutrality do make a difference. It isn’t that judges are not political; especially in cases that aren’t tightly tethered to case law or the Constitution, we know that they are. (We also know that politics, when they’re our politics, are to be honored as principles.) But the norms of legal argument surely limit the court’s discretion. If we were encouraged to flout those norms, our decisions would become more political (or, for those on our side, principled). That fig leaf does us favors. Keep it on, please.

Journalism is a trickier topic, because some fine journalists are overtly allied with a cause and work for overtly political outlets. In the 18th and 19th centuries, newspapers tended to be organs of a party. But let’s focus on the professional norms that, over the past century or so, became entrenched in the mainstream media. I don’t mean the outlandishly demanding “I don’t vote” credo: Even Thomas Hobbes distinguished between faith and confession, what’s in your heart and what’s on your lips. Nor should we pledge ourselves to both-sidesism. Accuracy, not balance, is the proper aim.

Still, talk of moral clarity supposes a consensus we don’t have. Like today’s progressives, the conservative cleric Richard John Neuhaus was also an enthusiast of “moral clarity,” warned against “self-deceptions about value-neutrality,” and thought that a political order required a shared sense of moral purpose. The similarities end there. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”—that’s Justice John Roberts’s idea of moral clarity with respect to affirmative action, but probably not Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s. The standard professional protocols—speaking to all the involved parties, foregrounding facts rather than feelings, verifying even what you might be inclined to believe, being transparent about sourcing, maintaining some independence from the people or organizations you’re covering—can make reporters better, sometimes by buffering their human passions. Performing fairness can make us fairer.

The social roles I’ve been talking about are ones in which we find ourselves performing public actions—a category that applies not just to government officials but to people who run organizations, including businesses and nonprofit institutions. Yes, there are some pragmatic considerations here. If you’re an officer at a state college and depend on appropriations from the state legislature, the welfare of your institution may inhibit you from delivering your opinions about gun control. “My job is to win friends and influence people,” the president of a state college in Georgia told The Chronicle of Higher Education. Administrators may be striving to maintain relations with multiple constituencies: trustees, alumni, faculty, students. So they’re careful about what stands they take, cognizant that failing to take a stand can sometimes result in discord, too. And plenty has been said about the related quandaries that business leaders have tried to negotiate.

[Read: The myth of neutral technology]

But there’s another objective here: assuring members of an eclectic community that all will be treated with respect. If you manage a corporation, employees want to be reassured that you’re going to treat them fairly. If you’re a university president, particular student groups shouldn’t feel that you harbor a grudge toward them. Neutrality, here, is neutrality as equal respect: the promise that people won’t be disadvantaged in virtue of their identity, including partisan identities. It doesn’t involve the pretense that you personally have no views, but it may involve refraining from expressing some of your views. Faith need not be confession.

Something like this concern applies to the classroom. Even if a professor is a registered Democrat, Republican students should be confident that they won’t be treated worse than their peers simply by virtue of being Republicans. Nobody should want an instructor to be indifferent among scholarly arguments, but students shouldn’t feel disfavored because of what or who they are, even the student writing a thesis on the political theology of Carl Schmitt for her liberal professor.

Maybe it goes without saying that what counts as a virtue in the public realm may not be one in the private realm. Ballplayers want the umpire to be neutral; they don’t want their spouses to be neutral. In the casual intimacy of backstage life, we can rage, revere, condemn, and voice our rooting interests. We each have highly specific conceptions of what kinds of lives are worthy of respect; as citizens, we’re entitled to promote our visions. And precisely because we’re entitled to our own comprehensive conceptions of the good (and the awful), securing a modus vivendi—a way of dwelling peaceably together amid disagreements about value—is the ultimate aim of liberal neutrality.

Our public roles aren’t a ruse when our commitment to these roles is real. Critical theory of one sort or another, long a mainstay of a humanistic education, teaches us—in ways that are often invaluable—to see through the pose of disinterest, the rhetoric of dispassion, the stance of neutrality. The problem comes when seeing through something prevents us from looking at something. It’s a childish illusion to think that what happens backstage is the truth and what happens onstage is a lie. As individuals, we’re entitled to fight for what we believe in. But in a pluralistic society, the ideal of neutrality helps keep the fighting fair.

We all know about the greenhouse effect, but how many of us actually understand it?

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Commonwealth Games medallists since 1930 shown to have greater longevity than general population

Top-level sportspeople can live more than five years longer than the rest of the population, a study has found.

Using Commonwealth Games competitor records from since the inaugural event in 1930, the International Longevity Centre UK found large differences in the longevity of medal winners compared with people in the general population born in the same year.

Continue reading…

Nature, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01317-1

Preparation and flexibility are key to a smooth recovery.

The mass compromise of the VoIP firm's customers is the first confirmed incident where one software supply chain attack enabled another, researchers say.

Menstruation suppression is only a starting point. A more just and safe world for all bodies means shifting the questions we ask.

Ethernet delivers stable, speedy, secure   connections to the internet and between devices.

Researchers have built a database of more than 16,000 formerly enslaved people in St. Lucia in 1815.

Beginning as early as the 15th century, slavers disrupted the lives of more than 12.5 million men, women, and children of African descent by forcing them into the trans-Atlantic slave trade, uprooting them from their homes, and bringing them against their wills to territories around the world, including the British Crown colonies and the colonies in the United States.

When these enslaved people arrived at former British Crown colonies in the Caribbean, territories including St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Grenada, their arrivals were often marked with entries into detailed registries that documented their first and last names, their ages, occupations, specific places of origin, and even familial connections to others enslaved on the same plantation or in the same household.

To capture the important details found in these registries, to both broaden our understanding of slavery, and explain the experiences of people who rarely had the opportunity to leave a record of their lives, Tessa Murphy, an associate professor of history in the Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, collaborated with Michael Fudge, a professor of practice in the School of Information Studies, and student research assistants.

Murphy’s book project, “Slavery in the Age of Abolition,” reconstructs the life histories and genealogies of people enslaved on the expanding frontiers of the British Empire in what is commonly referred to as the age of abolition. It will eventually be searchable, accessible, and available to the public.

“The database is going to be such a powerful research and teaching tool. I used examples from the database in an upper-level history seminar that I’m teaching right now, where I distributed examples to different students and had them analyze these as primary documents,” says Murphy.

“I asked them ‘What do you get from looking at this sheet that you didn’t know before about the realities of slavery?’ There are multi-generational family trees that you can derive from these. They’re quite bureaucratic documents, and when you look at them, they might seem to be just listing facts, but when you really engage with what they’re telling you, they’re testifying to the violence that underlay this system. And that really informed the daily lives of the people whose names are being recorded here,” says Murphy.

“What’s really fascinating about this particular project is the amount of data. The traditional inaccessibility of the data from a search perspective and the effort that we put into making it much more accessible and searchable. It’s going to be transformative for a lot of people,” adds Fudge.

In this podcast episode, Murphy and Fudge discuss how the project came to be, the arduous task of compiling their database, the challenges of digitally capturing historical records from more than 200 years ago, and how this database can serve as a teaching tool for the descendants of these formerly enslaved people:

Note: This conversation was edited for brevity and clarity. A PDF transcript is available here.

Source: Syracuse University

The post Database reveals lives of enslaved people in St. Lucia appeared first on Futurity.

Researchers have identified the cause of an inherited 

, Glutaric Aciduria Type I, common among people with Lumbee and other Native American heritage.

Their results overturn decades of settled science and point to new, more effective therapies.

The finding, publishing in the journal Science Translational Medicine, shatters the textbook explanations for how a type of protein breaks down in a child’s brain, becoming toxic and leading to potentially fatal neurological problems.

Current literature describes the toxic substances as being produced in the brain in Glutaric Aciduria Type I (GA-1), and instead of arising elsewhere and crossing the blood-brain barrier.

Treatments for the condition, including a strict, low-protein diet, have limited success. Up to a third of children with the condition suffer long-term neurologic damage and some die.

Because other metabolic disorders have been shown to break down proteins in the liver and then cause brain damage, the researchers reopened the science into GA-1. The work was led by senior author Karl-Dimiter Bissig, an associate professor in Duke University’s departments of pediatrics, medicine, biomedical engineering, and pharmacology and cancer biology.

Bissig and colleagues launched experiments in mice specially bred to have GA-1. They found that catabolites—the residue left by the breakdown of an essential amino acid called lysine—accumulate in the liver and do cross the blood-brain barrier. This leads to a toxic build-up of glutaric acid in the brain, causing nerve damage that impacts motor skills.

The researchers were able to cure the condition in mice with either a liver transplant or CRISPR gene-editing technology. Other liver-targeted gene therapies might also be effective and could be administered once in a lifetime.

“The original experiments led to the interpretation that the toxic catabolites were produced locally in the brain,” Bissig says. “What our work demonstrates is the importance of challenging paradigms, particularly as new technologies and research approaches are available.”

Bissig says inadequate measures to address different mutations in specific populations are leading to health disparities. People with Native American, Amish, and Irish heritage have high susceptibility to GA-1, which can be identified during newborn screenings; the genetic variant common in Lumbee populations seems to cause the most damaging disease.

Because states decide what diseases are included in newborn screenings, GA-1 goes undiagnosed if it’s not part of a state’s chosen screening panel. Screenings could also be missed if babies are delivered at home.

While early diagnosis and a low-protein diet have been lifesaving, the benefits are concentrated in Amish- and Irish-heritage children, who have historically had better access to health care services than Native Americans.

“With a better understanding of this disease, we can now work to develop treatments that are more effective and easier to access,” Bissig says. “It’s much easier to treat the liver than the brain. We are now working to advance the more efficient and convenient therapies.”

The study received funding support from The Alice and Y. T. Chen Center for Genetics and Genomics; the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease; the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute; and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Source: Duke University

The post Liver may cause metabolic disease that hits Native Americans appeared first on Futurity.

Highlights from our science and technology podcast

Scientific Reports, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-33630-0

Comparison of the neuromuscular response to three different Turkish, semi-professional football training sessions typically used within the tactical periodization training model

Landbruget skal sende gylle fra svinestalde hurtigt på koldt lager og reducere metanen i køers fordøjelse, har Folketinget vedtaget i dag.

Vladimir Putin hails achievement that beat Hollywood project announced by Tom Cruise, Nasa and Elon Musk’s SpaceX

The first feature film shot in space premiered in Russian cinemas on Thursday, as Moscow exulted in beating a rival Hollywood project amid a confrontation with the west.

The Challenge is about a surgeon dispatched to the International Space Station (ISS) to save an injured cosmonaut. Russia sent an actor and a film director for a 12-day stint on the ISS in October 2021 to film scenes aboard the orbiting laboratory.

Continue reading…

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

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One of my friends, more so than anyone else I know, has a remarkable power to make the people around him happy. He does this not through beer or flattery, but simply through the power of his personality. He is extroverted, conscientious, agreeable—all the traits that psychologists predict will attract a lot of friends.

But there’s one personality characteristic of his that I find especially winning: his enthusiasm. He is excited about his work and fascinated by mine. He speaks ebulliently about his family but also about the economy and politics. He has, as the 19th-century philosopher William James put it, “zest [for] the common objects of life.”

My friend is also an unusually happy person, which I had always thought explained his enthusiasm. But I had it backwards. In truth, enthusiasm is one of the personality traits that appear to drive happiness the most. In fact, to get happier, each of us can increase our own zest for the common objects of our lives. And it isn’t all that hard to do.

Research on personality goes back millennia, to ancient Greece at least. In the fourth century B.C., Hippocrates theorized that our characters are made up of four temperaments: choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic. These, he posited, were due to a predominance of one of the four humors, or fluids, in one’s body: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm.

Although medical knowledge has overtaken this approach—for example, black bile doesn’t even exist—Hippocrates foreshadowed a good deal of our modern thinking on personality. During the 20th century, scholars developed a personality typology that we still use today. In 1921, Carl Jung distinguished between introverts and extroverts; in 1949, the psychologist Donald Fiske expanded on that work when he identified five major personality factors. Later research further refined the features of these traits and named them openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

[Read: What your favorite personality test says about you]

Over the past 70 years, the Big Five have been used to investigate and explain many social phenomena. For example, as I have written, extroverts tend to make friends easily, but introverts tend to form deeper bonds. When people high in neuroticism who have money make more money, many of them enjoy it less than those lower in neuroticism. People who are more extroverted and conscientious tend toward conservatism, whereas those who are more open to new experiences typically espouse more liberal views.

Two traits out of the Big Five seem to be especially important for happiness: In 2018, psychologists confirmed that high extroversion and low neuroticism seemed to be the recipe for well-being. More specifically, the correlations hinged on one aspect of extroversion and one aspect of neuroticism—enthusiasm and withdrawal, respectively.

You might say that enthusiasm and withdrawal form the poles of a spectrum of behavior. Enthusiasm is defined as being friendly and sociable—“leaning into” life. Withdrawal denotes being easily discouraged and overwhelmed, leading one to “lean out” of social situations and into oneself. If we could become more enthusiastic and withdraw less, the data suggest, we would become happier. We might become more successful too. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay “Circles.” “The way of life is wonderful: It is by abandonment.”

Perhaps we could conceive of the perfect personality for achieving the happiest life. Of course, this is only helpful if you can change yours to better fit that ideal. This is unlikely, given that huge personality changes are generally only associated with a traumatic brain injury. However, as my colleague Olga Khazan has written, smaller shifts are possible. In one 2020 study, scientists asked people to record their ordinary activities, reminding them by text message to act in certain ways, such as being a bit more conscientious or open than they ordinarily would. It worked: Their behavior changed, at least as long as they were studied.

[From the March 2022 issue: I gave myself three months to change my personality]

If you want to lean into life more enthusiastically, you might try something similar by setting up a system of reminders. For example, you might schedule an alarm on your phone or an email to yourself each day that says, “Open up to all the people and things you see today!” But there are other, deeper interventions worth trying as well.

1. Use the “as if principle.”

In his magisterial 1890 text, The Principles of Psychology, James (a Harvard professor and an Atlantic contributor) outlined a radical philosophy of behavior change: Fake it. “We cannot control our emotions,” he noted. “But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.”

As the psychologist Richard Wiseman argues in his book The As If Principle, James’s approach is surprisingly effective. Academic research undertaken by the psychologists Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky bears this out, showing that if people act more extroverted in general, they do in fact succeed and become happier.

Faking enthusiasm is fairly straightforward. When you want to withdraw from social activities (perhaps you are overwhelmed or bored), act as if you were enthusiastic instead. Tell yourself, “I am going to get into this right now.” This will, the research suggests, establish new cognitive habits that gradually become more automatic.

[Read: A counterintuitive way to cheer up when you’re down]

Obviously, you can push this too far. I am not suggesting that you muster enthusiasm for something dangerous or use it to escape your problems. (“Today, I will enthusiastically act as if I didn’t have to pay my taxes!”) Instead, use the principle to nudge yourself toward positive changes.

2. Reframe challenges as chances.

One of the most popular self-improvement writers of the 20th century was the Protestant pastor Norman Vincent Peale, who sold millions of books on positive thinking. One of his titles was Enthusiasm Makes the Difference, in which he shares advice from a sage friend: “Always be glad when there is trouble on the earth … for it means there is movement in heaven; and this indicates great things are about to happen.”

It’s easy to dismiss this thinking as Pollyannaish and unscientific, but it is a good example of reframing a problem as an opportunity. This is a common strategy in creativity and innovation, and a successful technique in business leadership. Entrepreneurs routinely use reframing after setbacks by asking questions such as “What did I learn from this?” You can increase your enthusiasm for things you would ordinarily withdraw from by affirming, “This is hard for me, which is why I am doing it,” or something similar.

3. Curate your friends.

One of the best ways to become more enthusiastic is to hang around enthusiastic people such as my friend. (I’m not giving out his number; you have to find your own.) By doing this, you’ll be taking advantage of what psychologists call “emotional contagion,” in which people adopt the emotions and attitudes of those around them. If you tend to withdraw, it may be easy to gravitate toward people who do the same. But consciously doing the opposite can help you borrow a better personality trait from those around you. Look for companions who lean into life with gusto. Although it might seem like a chore at first, you’ll be more likely to “catch” this spirit and become enthusiastic about the friendships.

Fighting your tendency for withdrawal doesn’t mean that you can never be alone. There is a difference between a neurotic withdrawal from life and deliberate solitude. And the inability to be without company and stimulation is not necessarily a mark of good health either. What matters is your motive: whether you are moving away from others or toward being alone (or, conversely, whether you are moving toward others or away from your own thoughts).

Henry David Thoreau didn’t write Walden as an exercise in withdrawal but rather as an enthusiastic endorsement of finding oneself in the company of one’s thoughts. His description of waking up alone in a cabin by Walden Pond is a portrait of enthusiasm. “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”

[Read: The virtues of isolation]

Even if your surroundings aren’t as picturesque as Walden, you can choose to treat every morning, every interaction, and every setback as a cheerful invitation. You can make your head into your own cozy cabin, and make life inside it a little brighter.

ChatGPT and other bots have revived conversations on artificial general intelligence. Scientists say algorithms won’t surpass you any time soon.

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The   are reduced by 33% at  : grab a pair of these top running headphones today!

Är det dimma? Eller rök från en begynnande skogsbrand? Det är inte alltid lätt att avgöra från ovan. Men en ny algoritm för bildanalys kan förenkla saken.

Inlägget Drönare kan få lättare att upptäcka skogsbränder dök först upp på forskning.se.

Forskare har utvecklat ett förband som kan visa tidiga tecken på infektion i ett sår, utan att störa läkningen. Det sker genom att förbandet skiftar färg från gult till blått.

Inlägget Sårförband ändrar färg – och avslöjar infektioner dök först upp på forskning.se.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-33323-8

Author Correction: Differential chromatin accessibility in peripheral blood mononuclear cells underlies COVID-19 disease severity prior to seroconversion

Scientific Reports, Published online: 20 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-33633-x

Micro-computed tomography for the identification and characterization of archaeological lime bark

The most powerful rocket ever built got off the launchpad in South Texas but did not achieve its most ambitious goals on Thursday.

Tens of thousands descended on a tiny town in Western Australia, hundreds of miles from any city, to view a celestial spectacle.

Politikere har efter Ingeniørens artikel til morgen, der sætter spørgsmålstegn ved en uvildig undersøgelse af DHI's beregning af propeffekt i Øresund, indkaldt ministeren i samråd.

Driving is ubiquitous—a part of daily life for millions in rural and urban regions across the globe. Its by-products, however, are sobering. According to the World Economic Forum, transportation produces almost one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. There is an undeniable need to design, develop, and implement solutions to decarbonize and transition to net-zero emissions.

Auto industry leaders are keenly aware of the urgency. The industry has attracted more than $400 billion in investments over the last decade—about one quarter of which arrived in the beginning of 2020. Most of that money has been funneled into developing technologies in pursuit of net zero. The advent of software, electrification, digital tools, and data science means that industry players—including suppliers and original equipment makers—have more tools than ever before to rethink the future of mobility. 

Yansong Chen, senior vice president of strategy and technology at Ricardo—an environmental, engineering, and strategic consulting company—says advanced technologies are changing the way the industry looks at its value proposition, at a fundamental level. “They’re also changing the way that the industry perceives its role in interacting with the customer.” 

 

 

Beyond net zero: Data, design, and digital connections

The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) clearly shows how change has swept across the auto industry over the past decade. Global sales of passenger EVs in 2022 exceeded 10 million for the first time ever. One in every sevenpassenger cars bought globally in 2022 was an EV, compared with just one in every 70 cars sold in 2017.

As EV adoption grows, technology and software advancements have become increasingly critical to connect customers digitally and improve their experience. “Our ability to access data and apply it to the design processes in real time is how we will change the industry, reduce costs and carbon output, personalize the driving experience, and create new value for customers,” says Chen. 

However, continual advances in software require a deep understanding of how technology can be applied to the auto industry. Traditional manufacturers, in particular, need to balance legacy operations with new tools and designs. “Advanced technology and AI are helping to make cars more intelligent, but they are also changing the fundamental nature of the car, both internally and externally,” according to Luc Julia, chief scientific officer at French automaker Renault. 

Therefore, bridging the gap between the auto industry and technology providers is essential. For example, Ricardo has partnered with Digital Twin Consortium, which allows it to collaborate with technology organizations such as Ansys, Dell, Lendlease, and Microsoft. The open-membership consortium is an international ecosystem of industry, government, and academic experts shaping digital twin development. 

Rise of the digital twin  

In recent years, digital twin technology has become an almost indispensable tool in auto production, changing how vehicles are made. Renault, for example, has modeled its physical assets into digital twins, and each factory has a replica in the virtual world. This is part of the automaker’s effort to accelerate digitization of its production lines and supply chain data across the enterprise. “By optimizing data, we are able to use AI more effectively on the factory floor and increase the efficiency of our operations,” says Julia. 

Renault’s factories are fed with supplier data, sales forecasts, and quality information, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning–thereby enabling the development of multiple predictive scenarios. For instance, predictive maintenance for robots can anticipate and address potential breakdowns across the operational chain, at each part of the assembly line, before they occur. 

In addition, Renault’s Refactory initiative, which is organized around four key activity centers—Re-trofit, Re-energy, Re-cycle, and Re-start—uses digital twins to reduce its carbon footprint. “It’s not just a question of electric cars, but how the batteries are sourced and the recycling of cars and materials,” says Julia. 

Meanwhile, Ricardo’s marine project NEPTUNE uses digital twin technology and AI-based predictive technology to understand how to effectively deploy EV charging infrastructure, which could boost the industry. NEPTUNE researchers are developing a desk-based decision modeling and support system (DEMOSS) tool to help reduce the planning and implementation costs of a zero-carbon energy system. The results could help EVs achieve optimal charging with a minimal carbon footprint.

Hurdles on the road to net zero 

For businesses, the challenges for reaching net zero are twofold. The first challenge is finding a way to comply with government climate regulations while maintaining their market share and existing business operations. “Auto leaders need to manage the transition from today to tomorrow, without breaking the business in the middle,” Chen says. The EU’s “Fit for 55” program, for instance, requires new car greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced by at least 55% from 1990 levels, by 2030. In the U.S., the Biden administration has introduced a 50% EV target for 2030. 

The second challenge is to recognize evolving customer and investor expectations. The industry must keep pace with shifting views and trends, while remaining focused on its net-zero goals. A key issue that automakers have to grapple with, says Chen, is rollout speed: Customers today want new, improved vehicles at a much faster rate than before. 

“Traditionally, in the transport industry, a refresh would occur every four years or so,” she says. “Changing expectations are disrupting how the industry fundamentally operates with customers now seeking out new models every 18 months or so.” 

Mobility-as-a-service: driving in the moment 

As customer expectations evolve, their mobility habits are also changing quickly, particularly for urban dwellers. Increasingly, says Chen, mobility-as-a-service is morphing into the idea that cars should be a part of lifestyles, both holistically and in the moment. Consider the use of a laptop: one day it could be used to produce a video, and on another to draw a painting. “Now we have to think about the car in that same context, and we’ve never done that before,” she notes. “We have to create these new levels of capability without jeopardizing the quality of delivery throughout the process.”

The global mobility-as-a-service market is expected to grow from about $236 billion in 2022 to $775 billion by 2029. And traditional car manufacturers don’t want to miss out on that growth. Renault’s Mobilize initiative, for instance, focuses on car usage rather than ownership, offering a range of accessible, affordable, and environmentally friendly mobility solutions. 

As the appetite for mobility-as-a-service grows, data is—once again—crucial. Data can be leveraged to simulate new value propositions and provide insights on optimizing use of raw materials, creating a longer lifecycle for the product. “The beauty of today is that data is more readily available to us than ever been before,” Chen says. “It’s not new that a vehicle can create petabytes of data in a given day. What is new is that we have an ability to access it now.” 

The shape of things to come 

An epochal shift in mobility is taking place amid rapid technological changes and the global climate crisis. The auto industry is using innovative technologies to support automotive design and development, while reducing carbon emissions. Traditional industry players must work hard to understand how AI and other technology can help them advance operations, meet customers’ evolving expectations, and drive new ways of creating value across their organizations.

Industry leaders need to first understand where their companies are in the net-zero journey, says Chen. “Once that is ascertained, organizations then need to understand how technology can enable a successful decarbonization strategy in every corner of the enterprise,” Chen says. And to succeed, she adds decarbonization targets need to be “quantifiable, documentable, and traceable with data.” 

Decarbonization will continue to be the primary focus of auto leaders for years to come. Encouragingly, there is a high level of collaboration across the industry, with all parties keen to understand how advanced technology can hasten decarbonization, Chen says. “We’re thinking as an industry—not necessarily as individual components—and that is allowing us to think more holistically about the impact that we have on the planet.” 

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

My phone is basically an extension of my arm at this point. To be honest, I have some mixed feelings about that, and not just because I worry about what being online 24/7 is doing to my brain cells. 

As you might know, lithium-ion batteries power most of our personal electronics today. Mining the metals that make up those batteries can mean a lot of pollution, as well as harmful conditions for workers. All these problems are starting to balloon as we use lithium and assorted other materials not just in our phones and laptops, but in electric vehicles as well. 

The good news is, as I’ve written about before, a growing number of groups are working to make sure batteries get recycled—and some of those efforts are becoming mainstream. 

Last week Apple announced that its batteries would use 100% recycled cobalt beginning in 2025. I think this announcement says a lot about where the battery recycling industry is and where it’s going. So for the newsletter this week, let’s dive into Apple’s recycling pledge. 

iRecycle

There’s obviously a huge array of materials that go into phones and computers, and Apple’s recycling announcement isn’t just about cobalt. The company also said that by 2025, it plans to use recycled rare-earth elements in its magnets (like the ones that help your watch and phone charge wirelessly), as well as recycled materials for the tin soldering and gold plating used for its circuit boards. 

But it’s probably no accident that cobalt is the headline item. The metal has become something of a poster child for all the potential damage mining could do in the name of the clean-energy economy. It’s a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries, and today, cobalt is mined largely in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the activity has been tied to human rights abuses like forced labor. There’s a huge New Yorker feature about this from 2021, as well as a new book, if you want to learn more.

As of 2022, Apple was already using about 25% recycled cobalt in its batteries, up from 13% the year before. And as the new release lays out, in just a few years, all the cobalt in all “Apple-designed batteries” will be from recycled sources. One quick note here—I reached out to Apple to ask what total volume of cobalt this would represent, along with a few other questions about the news. The company hasn’t gotten back to me yet. 

I decided to dig into this announcement a bit more because of a trend I’d come across in my previous reporting on battery recycling—there’s not enough old batteries getting recycled to meet demand for recycled materials. 

Around and around

When it comes to materials for clean energy, a lot of people talk about a “circular economy” where batteries coming off the roads in old EVs can be used to make new ones, with zero (or very little) mining for new materials. For that to happen, you’d need about as many batteries on the metaphorical off-ramp as the number coming onto the on-ramp. And that’s not what’s happening at all. 

In case you hadn’t heard, electric vehicles are on the rise. In 2017, a little over 1% of new vehicles sold globally were EVs. Just five years later, in 2022, that number had increased to about 13%, according to the International Energy Agency. We’re probably going to keep seeing more EVs hitting the road every year for a while, especially as countries pass new policies boosting EVs around the world.

The quick uptake of EVs is great news for climate action, but it’s causing a tricky dynamic for battery recyclers. 

Batteries can last over a decade in a vehicle, and they can be in use for even longer if they end up getting a second life in stationary energy storage. So an EV battery won’t be ready to be recycled for at least around 15 years, in most cases. Looking back 15 years ago, in 2008, the Tesla Roadster had just started production, and the company made just a few hundred annually for the first couple of years. To put it mildly: there aren’t many EVs coming off the roads because of old age today, and there won’t be for a while. 

So as the EV market continues to grow exponentially, there’s going to be a shortage of recycled materials. If all EV and phone manufacturers wanted to use only recycled cobalt, for example, there wouldn’t be enough to go around. 

Production of batteries for EVs is booming: the global total of lithium-ion batteries produced for light-duty vehicles could top 12 million metric tons by 2030. Meanwhile, less than 200,000 metric tons of batteries from the same types of vehicles will be available for recycling by that date. 

Despite that daunting gap, there are a couple reasons Apple can probably meet its pledge on recycled cobalt, says Hans Eric Melin, head of Circular Energy Storage, a consulting firm specializing in battery recycling. 

For one, portable devices have been powered using lithium-ion batteries for decades. Thanks to your dad’s camcorder and your Motorola Razr flip phone from 2006, there’s at least some recycled cobalt floating around the market today. 

And the economics of using recycled materials shake out to be pretty different for personal devices and cars. Because of its size, an EV battery can be nearly 40% of the cost of the vehicle, Melin says. That’s not the case with devices like a phone, so a company like Apple will probably be able to pay a bit more for recycled battery materials without affecting the price of the whole device. 

So your iPhone in 2025 (by my math, that might be the iPhone 17) could be made using cobalt from recycled sources. Vehicles might take a bit longer: EV batteries are bigger, and there are fewer old ones ready for a new life. But we’re inching toward a world where we can reuse more of the materials in the technology we know and love. 

Related reading: 

Battery recycling was one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies in 2023. Check out the list item, as well as my deep dive into the tech. 

I spoke with JB Straubel, Tesla’s former CTO and founder of battery recycler Redwood Materials. Here’s what he had to say about the challenges ahead for batteries.

The first-ever edition of this newsletter was a travel journal of sorts from my trip to Redwood. Revisit that trip here. 

Another thing

Efforts to slow down climate change and adapt to what’s already happening are complicated and difficult. What if we could also try to counteract a bit of the planetary warming we’ve already caused? Some researchers say it’s an intriguing enough idea to at least look into. 

Geoengineering is understandably controversial, since large-scale efforts, or even attempts to study the potential effects, could change life for people across the planet. And what’s good for some might not be good for all. As debates rage on, some groups are working to get a wider range of voices into the room, especially from climate-vulnerable nations that arguably have the most at stake. 

My colleague James Temple took a look inside some of the groups working to open up who’s involved in the conversation around geoengineering. Check out his insightful story for more.

Keeping up with climate

The EPA released new rules last week that will limit emissions from new vehicles sold in the US, beginning in 2027. The policy is another big boost for EVs. The problem is, the country isn’t building chargers quickly enough to keep up. Here’s what the new rules might mean and how charging infrastructure will need to grow to keep up. (MIT Technology Review) 

We can build more fire-resistant structures today than we used to, and urban planners have more strategies to slow down blazes. Changing how people react to wildfires could be the hardest part of adapting. (MIT Technology Review)

EV charging was a constant topic of discussion at one of the country’s biggest auto shows in New York earlier this month. (Canary Media)

I find heat pumps fascinating, but most people find them a little … boring. Three studios took a crack at rebranding them. (Bloomberg)

→ Find out more about how a heat pump works. (MIT Technology Review)

Hydrogen can be a tool to fight climate change—or make things worse. This is a great breakdown of how details matter when it comes to the fuel. (New York Times Opinion)

Lithium-ion batteries can help support renewables like wind and solar by saving energy for when it’s needed. But some communities are scared about what happens if energy storage facilities catch fire. (Inside Climate News)

Fusion energy might be on its way to finally becoming a reality. But even if we see fusion power plants this century, they probably won’t provide the cheap, limitless energy everyone dreams about. (Wired)

→ Here’s what’s really going on with fusion energy. (MIT Technology Review)

This startup has a new way to generate electricity using water: instead of building massive concrete dams or disturbing ecosystems in rivers, it is building hydropower systems in canals. (Associated Press) 

Texas leads US states in renewable power generation. But new legislation could hinder progress. (Inside Climate News)