A new view of a record-shattering distant star shows it to be twice as hot as our sun, and likely accompanied by a stellar companion

 

 

The Perseids

Break out the binoculars, folks. Time to see some shooting stars!

As The Washington Post reports, the biggest and brightest meteor shower of the year, the annual Perseids, will be on full display this Saturday and Sunday.

The Perseids, per NASA, is known for incredible fireballs amid a spatter of fainter, falling bits of light, which often leave mesmerizing streaks in their wake. It's also considered a "high-rate meteor shower," with 50 to 100 meteors often seen every hour.

Though folks Northern Hemisphere will have the optimal viewing position, it can be seen anywhere, ideally in the early hours of the morning — though anytime after 10 is fine — on Saturday-night-slash-early-Sunday-morning. And according to the experts, you won't want to miss the sparkling show.

"This is one of the three most active in meteor showers," NASA ambassador Tony Rice told WaPo, meaning it's one of the three heavenly showers that produce "the most visible meteors."

Follow Perseus

According to NASA, Perseids is comprised of pieces of tiny bits of space rock originating from the Swift-Tuttle comet. Discovered in 1862 by Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle, the comet orbits the Sun every 133 or so years, last making its way to our inner solar system in 1992.

The shower's radiant, or the point in the sky where they appear to come, is right around the constellation Perseus — indeed, that's how the starshow originally got its name. And ideally, Rice told the paper, if you look towards Perseus this weekend, "you might see some meteors that last a couple of seconds."

"There will be fewer of them," he added, "but they're going to be more spectacular."

No Phone Zone

If you do plan on staying up — or waking up — for the show, Rice did offer WaPo some recommendations. Darkness is essential, and so is patience; once get outside, you need to wait about 15 minutes for your eyes to adjust. And once you're adjusted, Rice told WaPo, you'd do well to stay outside for about an hour. Don't want to go inside too early and miss a fireball!

Oh, and one last tip? Leave the phone inside. Per the paper, the brightness of your phone screen will mess with your night vision. And trust us, that would be a shame.

More on space rocks: Meteor Explodes over Texas, Causing Epic Noise and Scattering Debris

The post The Most Amazing Meteor Shower of the Year Is This Weekend appeared first on Futurism.

This first-of-its-kind federal funding is meant to jump-start a new industry that can siphon climate pollution from the air

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40463-4

 

 

As the AI industry's market value continues to balloon, experts are warning that its meteoric rise is eerily similar to that of a different — and significant — moment in economic history: the dot com bubble of the late 1990s.

The dot com bubble — and subsequent crash — was an era defined by a gold rush-like frenzy and inflated valuations. Hungry to cash in on a new, lucrative age of technology, venture capitalists took to throwing large sums at companies that, though they made all the right promises about their ability to change the world, had yet to actually prove their viability. And when the vast majority of these ventures ultimately fell short, they failed, swallowing roughly $5 trillion in fundraising as they sank into www dot oblivion.

Fast forward to today, as The Wall Street Journal details in a new report, and that same gold rush energy is palpable in the burgeoning AI marketplace. VCs are all too happy to pour massive amounts of cash into a growing constellation of AI firms, even those that have yet to turn a profit. Or, for that matter, have yet to even introduce a discernible product.

Company leaders, meanwhile, continue to make sweeping claims about the transformational power of their tech, which they consistently argue could save the world, destroy it, or — conveniently — both. Investors keep biting, and, per the WSJ, the stocks keep rising — shares of Nvidia, for example, the chipmaker whose GPUs are sought after for AI projects, have tripled in value this year, while tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, which are all working on AI tech, have seen their stock prices skyrocket by 154 percent, 65 percent, and 35 percent, respectively.

And yet, though the tech is impressive, its true value — nevermind path to profitability — is still wildly unclear.

"There's a huge boom in AI — some people are scrambling to get exposure at any cost, while others are sounding the alarm that this will end in tears," Kai Wu, founder and chief investment officer of Sparkline Capital, told the WSJ. "Investors can benefit from innovation-led growth, but must be wary of overpaying for it."

Another striking similarity between AI and dot com? Market concentration. Per the WSJ, the ten biggest stocks in the S&P 500 right now make up more than a third of the total market, and this "concentration of leadership," as Mike Edwards, the deputy chief investment officer at the firm Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, told the WSJ, is "the market story that rhymes most with the internet bubble."

But while the comparisons between these economic times certainly shouldn't be ignored, there are some big differences as well. Most notable is that most of the biggest players in the AI industry are longtime Silicon Valley behemoths, and have been working on developing the technology for a while. Think Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and so on. Some of these firms are even dot com survivors, and for decades have been able to keep themselves afloat amid various technological trends.

And sure, a fair share of newer companies have entered the public mainstage. But even the most prominent newbie of the bunch, the heavily Microsoft-funded OpenAI, was founded by a gaggle of Silicon Valley vets — Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, since-defected Elon Musk, et al — with deep tech industry ties. The same goes for ventures like Character.AI and Humane Inc., founded by ex-Google and Apple executives, respectively.

"It's not like 1999 when investors were racing to hot IPOs for companies that had no chance of making money," Edwards told the WSJ. "Today's winners are disciplined, enormous companies that have moats in place and data sets to exploit."

Still, even the most seasoned companies, executives, and VCs can get too caught up in the hype of it all, and may well stumble in the race to establish their dominance and relevancy in a changing technological landscape. Plus, as a general rule, a high-dollar feedback loop never feels particularly healthy, and cracks in some leading industry players are already starting to show.

As a select few dot com firms did, some AI ventures will likely stick around. But a lot of them probably won't, and given what we know about the ghosts of dot com's past, wariness — something often lost in the fog of war — is more than warranted.

More on AI: The Company Behind Stable Diffusion Appears to Be Crumbling into Chaos

The post AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble appeared first on Futurism.

When Donald Trump appeared last week in a Washington, D.C., courtroom for his arraignment on federal election charges, the presiding judge gave the former president a few simple instructions for staying out of jail while he awaited trial.

Trump could not talk to potential witnesses about the case except through lawyers, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya told him, and he could not commit a crime on the local, state, or federal level. Both are standard directives to defendants. But then Upadhyaya added a warning that seemed tailored a bit more specifically to the blustery politician standing before her: “I want to remind you,” the judge said, “it is a crime to intimidate a witness or retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or otherwise obstruct justice.”

When Upadhyaya asked Trump if he understood, he nodded. Fewer than 24 hours later, Trump appeared to flout that very warning—in its spirit if not its letter—by threatening his would-be foes in an all-caps post on Truth Social: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Over the following week, he attacked a potential witness in the case, former Vice President Mike Pence (“delusional”); Special Counsel Jack Smith (“deranged”); and the federal judge assigned to oversee his case, Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama (Smith’s “number one draft pick,” in Trump’s words).

Trump’s screeds highlight a challenge that will now fall to Chutkan to confront: constraining a defendant who’s both a former president and a leading candidate to take the White House—and who seems bent on making a mockery of his legal process.

“She’s in a tight spot,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Michigan, says of Chutkan. Conceivably, the judge could find Trump in contempt of court and toss him in jail for violating the terms of his pretrial release. But even though in theory Trump should be treated like any other defendant, former prosecutors told me that he was exceedingly unlikely to go to prison over his pretrial statements. And Trump probably knows it. (Whether Trump will go to prison if he is convicted is another hotly debated matter.)

[Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump]

“I’m sure she would be very reluctant to do that, in light of the fact that he’s running for president,” McQuade told me. “So I think as a result, he has a very long leash, and I think he will simply dare her to revoke [his freedom] by saying the most outrageous things he can.”

At a pretrial hearing today, Chutkan issued her first warnings to Trump’s lawyers about their client, according to reporting by Steven Portnoy of ABC News and Kyle Cheney of Politico. “Mr. Trump, like every 

, has a First Amendment right to free speech,” she said. “But that right is not absolute.” She said Trump’s presidential candidacy would not factor into her decisions, and she rebuffed suggestions by a Trump lawyer, John Lauro, that the former president had a right to respond to his political opponents in the heat of a campaign. “He’s a criminal defendant,” she reminded him. “He’s going to have restrictions like every single other defendant.”

Chutkan said she would be scrutinizing Trump’s words carefully, and she concluded with what she called “a general word of caution”: “Even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel,” the judge said, “can threaten the process.” She added: “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”

Chutkan had called the hearing to determine whether to bar Trump and his lawyers from publicly disclosing evidence provided to them by prosecutors—a standard part of the pretrial process. The evidence includes millions of pages of documents and transcribed witness interviews from a year-long investigation, and the government argued that Trump or his lawyers could undermine the process by making them public before the trial. Despite her warnings to Trump’s team, she sided with the defense’s request to narrow the restrictions on what they could disclose, and she did not add other constraints on what he could say about the case.

Yet the effect of Chutkan’s courtroom comments was to put Trump on notice. If he continues to flout judicial warnings, she could place a more formal gag order on him, the ex-prosecutors said. And if he ignores that directive, she would likely issue additional warnings before considering a criminal-contempt citation. A further escalation, McQuade said, would be to hold a hearing and order Trump to show cause for why he should not be held in contempt. “Maybe she gives him a warning, and she gives him another chance and another chance, but eventually, her biggest hammer” is to send him to jail.

Judges have sanctioned high-profile defendants in other cases recently. In 2019, the Trump ally Roger Stone was barred from posting on major social-media platforms after Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that he had violated a gag order she had issued. (Stone did honor this directive.) The Trump foe Michael Avenatti, who represented Stormy Daniels in her case against Trump and briefly considered challenging him for the presidency, was jailed shortly before his trial on extortion charges after prosecutors accused him of disregarding financial terms of his bail. “He was just scooped up and thrown into solitary,” one of his former lawyers, E. Danya Perry, told me. She said that Avenatti was thrown into the same jail cell that had held El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord. (Avenatti later claimed that his treatment was payback ordered by then–Attorney General Bill Barr; the prison warden said he was placed in solitary confinement because of “serious concerns” about his safety, and Barr has called Avenatti’s accusation “ridiculous.”)

Neither Stone nor Avenatti, however, is as high-profile as Trump, arguably the most famous federal defendant in American history. And Perry doubts that Chutkan would imprison him before a trial. Trump has ignored warnings from judges overseeing the various civil cases brought against him over the years and has never faced tangible consequences. “He has done it so many times and he has managed to skate so many times that he certainly is emboldened,” Perry said.

Indeed, Trump has also suggested he would ignore a gag order from Chutkan. “I will talk about it. I will. They’re not taking away my First Amendment rights,” Trump told a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday.

Trump’s political motives for vilifying his prosecutors and once again portraying himself as the victim of a witch hunt are obvious: He’s trying to rile up his Republican base. Trump also seems to be executing something of a legal strategy in his public statements about the trial. He’s called Washington, D.C., “a filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment,” possibly reasoning that these remarks will force the court to agree to his request to shift the trial to a venue with a friendlier population of potential jurors, such as West Virginia.

[David A. Graham: Trump is acting like he’s cornered]

That’s less likely to work, according to the former prosecutors I interviewed. “I’d be shocked to see that be successful,” Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor who heads the anti-corruption advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “It’s sort of like the old joke about the child who kills his mother and father and then asks for mercy because he’s an orphan. I just don’t see a court going for that.”

Trump’s attacks also present a problem for Smith, the special counsel. On one hand, prosecutors have a clear interest in ensuring that their witnesses do not feel intimidated; on the other, Smith could feel that trying to silence Trump would play into the former president’s victim narrative. Justice Department prosecutors alerted Chutkan to Trump’s “I’m coming after you” post in a court filing, and during today’s hearing they voiced concerns that if not restricted, Trump could disclose evidence to benefit his campaign. (A Trump spokesperson said the former president’s warning was “the definition of political speech,” and that it referred to “special interest groups and Super PACs” opposing his candidacy.) But Smith’s team did not ask Chutkan to fully gag Trump or even admonish him. “You see the prosecutors being very, very restrained,” Bookbinder said. “With a lot of defendants who were bad-mouthing the prosecutor and witnesses, they would have immediately gone in and asked for an order for the defendant to stop doing that.”

Bookbinder described the citation of Trump’s post as “a brushback pitch” by the government, a signal that they are watching the former president’s public statements closely. But like Chutkan, Smith might be reluctant to push the matter very far. Fighting with Trump over a gag order could distract from where the government wants to focus the case—on Trump’s alleged crimes—and it could indulge his desire to drag out the trial, Bookbinder noted. But the special counsel has to weigh those concerns against the possibility that an out-of-control defendant could jeopardize the safety of prosecutors and witnesses. “My strong suspicion is that Jack Smith doesn’t want to go there,” Bookbinder said. “I think at some point he may have little choice.”

Nature Communications, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40474-9

The cultural and musical movement known as hip-hop celebrates 50 years today, August 11.

Michigan State University experts Emery Petchauer and Ruth Nicole Brown explain what marks August 11, 2023, as the 50th anniversary of hip-hop and dig into the importance of the milestone.

Petchauer, a professor in the English department, focuses on the aesthetic practices of urban arts, particularly hip-hop culture, and their connections to teaching, learning, and living. He is the author of the first scholarly study of hip-hop culture on college campuses, and the co-editor of Schooling Hip-Hop: Expanding Hip-Hop Based Education Across the Curriculum (Teachers College Press, 2013 ) .

Brown is an MSU Research Foundation Professor and the inaugural chair of the African 

 and African studies department. She is the author of Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy (Peter Lang, 2009), and coauthor of Wish to Live: The Hip-Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader (Peter Lang, 2012) with Chamara Kwakye, an academic specialist in the MSU Department of African American and African Studies.

The post What marks 2023 as hip-hop’s 50th anniversary? appeared first on Futurity.

The deadly wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, has killed dozens of people so far. Here’s how fires threaten human health

A new paper proposes a potential way to reduce “fictitious pricing,” which can mislead consumers.

Fifty years ago, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stopped enforcing deceptive pricing regulations, assuming that competition would keep retailers honest.

Since then, competition has increased significantly—yet the practice of posting false, inflated comparison prices alongside sale prices has continued unchecked.

Think of an advertisement from a furniture store that touts a $599 sale price for a couch as an $800 savings from a promoted regular price of $1,399. The problem is that the store may have never offered the couch for sale at the higher price.

This practice, called “fictitious pricing,” is ubiquitous in the retail trade. One recent investigation tracked the prices of 25 major retailers and found that “most stores’ sale prices… are bogus discounts” because the listed regular price is seldom, if ever, the price charged for the products.

The new paper in the Journal of Marketing critically evaluates two assumptions underlying the FTC’s decision to halt deceptive pricing prosecution.

2 assumptions

The first is that consumers largely ignore inflated reference prices and instead focus primarily on the sale prices, leading to price competition that pushes selling prices lower and renders reference prices harmless.

However, dozens of empirical studies in marketing and psychology reveal that advertised reference prices—even those exaggerated to unrealistic levels—have significant impact on consumer decision-making. This is explained by the natural value that consumers place on getting a good deal, labeled “transaction utility” by Richard Thaler in his Nobel Prize-winning body of work.

In contrast to the FTC’s second assumption that competition drives out economic incentives to cheat, a number of recent economic models show the opposite. Competition in fact increases the chance that a firm will offer noisy information in an attempt to shield itself by looking different to customers. As a result, deception is found to be more profitable as competition increases.

These are fundamental forces that encourage the use of fictitious pricing. They also explain why state-level regulatory efforts and even a growing number of class action lawsuits have done little to discourage the practice.

“There are limits to enforcement by litigation,” says coauthor Joe Urbany, professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “It allows only a relatively small number of meaningful actions in a given time period, leading to limited visibility and impact on widespread practice.”

‘True normal price’

The authors propose instead a disclosure solution in the form of requiring firms that use comparison prices in their sales promotion to additionally post the item’s true normal price (TNP). The TNP is the most frequently offered price for that product in a given period.

For example, let’s say a price-promoting furniture retailer actually offers the sofa for sale at $1,399 for the first two weeks in a quarter (making zero sales), and then advertises the sofa on sale at $599, promoting $800 in savings for the other 10 weeks. Under the TNP disclosure proposal, the retailer would need to post $599 as its true normal price for the product in any subsequent sales promotions that included statement of a “regular price.”

Through a controlled experiment with 900 participants, the authors found that providing TNP information largely eliminates the effect of an advertised regular price, which otherwise significantly raises the chance a consumer will buy.

To gauge the likely response of firms to the TNP disclosure concept, the authors also interviewed a dozen senior retail executives, each with extensive experience in pricing.

“Our interviews revealed that some practitioners are very supportive of efforts to rein in what is perceived to be an ‘out-of-control’ promotional environment,” Urbany says. “At the same time, they and others offered more sobering insights about the realities of likely resistance to intervention.”

The paper concludes with conjectures about how TNP provision would motivate greater honesty in pricing, likely having an impact on average market prices, promotion frequencies, and firm profits.

Additional coauthors are from Duke University and Microsoft.

Source: University of Notre Dame

The post Most sale prices are bogus, but 1 tweak could help appeared first on Futurity.

The deadly wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, has killed dozens of people so far. Here’s how fires threaten human health

 

 

Crash Course

While it's customary to hear about 

 crashing, burning, or exploding, hearing about one that seems to have come back from the dead is another thing entirely.

In a now-viral Twitter post, CNBC executive editor Jay Yarow wrote of his puzzlement after his Model X, which he'd crashed and totaled in the US, blinked online again in 

 — yes, the same country currently in the throes of a brutal land war. What's weirder: whoever was driving it was using the journalist's Spotify account to listen to Drake.

As CNBC notes in its reporting on the strange incident, Yarow totaled the car at the end of 2022 and, like many people whose cars have crashed, sold it for parts. He only discovered that it was cruising around war-torn Ukraine after he began getting notifications to the 

 app, which he still had downloaded on his phone.

In interviews, security experts and parts salespeople told the business news outlet that internet-connected cars — by no means exclusive to Tesla — can indeed pose security risks for their former owners, even if the car in question is totaled like Yarow's.

CNBC found that its executive editor had sold the totaled Model X to a junkyard in New Jersey that works with the online auction site Copart, which specializes in selling "salvage titles" issues when wrecked cars are determined by insurance to be a total loss. While it's illegal to drive such cars in the US, other countries are less strict — and as Carfax 

 noted in a 2021 report on salve title imports, more than 90 percent of the cars imported into Ukraine have salvage titles.

Stay Connected

Although neither the site nor the junkyard confirmed that it was sold to someone in Europe or Ukraine, experts who spoke to CNBC said it would have been pretty simple for the car to end up there.

"Cars go to the repair shop or junkyard," Mike Dunne, a former General Motors executive who now runs the car consulting firm ZoZoGo, told the outlet. He added that such cars "then find their way to a second market and then are suddenly being shipped overseas."

Yarow told his employer that after he totaled his car, Tesla instructed him via email to disconnect his account from his car. It's unclear from this report whether he actually followed the instructions, though it seems clear, at least, that he didn't disconnect his Spotify.

Data gleaned from a Spotify account probably isn't that huge a deal, but nevertheless, having cars connected to the internet is going to cause some weird problems — even if it's just getting the jumpscare that your former car is driving through Ukraine with their woes.

More on Tesla: Poll Finds That Tesla Drivers Increasingly Can't Stand Elon Musk

The post Man 

 When His Totaled Tesla Comes Back Online in Ukraine appeared first on Futurism.

 

 

CAPTCHA Real Smooth

Researchers have found that bots are shockingly good at completing CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which are those small, annoying puzzles designed — ironically — to verify that you're really human.

In fact, as the team led by Gene Tsudik at the University of California, Irvine discovered, the bots are actually way better and faster at solving these tests than us, a worrying sign that the already-aging tech is on its way out.

As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, the researchers found that despite CAPTCHAs having "evolved in terms of sophistication and diversity" over roughly two decades, techniques to "defeat or bypass CAPTCHAs" have also vastly improved.

"If left unchecked, bots can perform these nefarious actions at scale," the paper reads.

"We do know for sure that [the tests] are very much unloved. We didn’t have to do a study to come to that conclusion," Tsudik told New Scientist. "But people don’t know whether that effort, that colossal global effort that is invested into solving CAPTCHAs every day, every year, every month, whether that effort is actually worthwhile."

Turing Guessed

The researchers found that 120 of the 200 most popular websites used CAPTCHAs to verify users were human. They then asked 1,400 participants of various levels of tech savviness to complete a total of 14,000 of these CAPTCHAs and compared the accuracy to bots designed to defeat the puzzles.

The major takeaway: CAPTCHA-beating bots that have been created by researchers over the years soundly beat these human participants, not only in speed, but accuracy as well: human accuracy ranged from 50 to 84 percent, while bots boasted a stunning 99.8 percent accuracy.

"There’s no easy way using these little image challenges or whatever to distinguish between a human and a bot anymore," co-author Andrew Searles, also a researcher at UC Irvine, told New Scientist.

Recent progress in the development of machine learning has given the bots a huge leg up. In fact, OpenAI's GPT-4 was even able to fool a human into solving a CAPTCHA on its behalf earlier this year.

"In general, as a concept CAPTCHA has not met the security goal, and currently is more an inconvenience for less determined attackers," Shujun Li at the University of Kent, 

, who was not involved in the study, told New Scientist, adding that we need "more dynamic approaches using behavioral analysis."

More on CAPTCHAs: Uh Oh, OpenAI's GPT-4 Just Fooled a Human Into Solving a CAPTCHA

The post AI Is Now Better Than Humans at Solving Those Annoying "Prove You're a Human" Tests appeared first on Futurism.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40367-3

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40169-7

Expert Sam R. Telford, III, has advice to make your summer free of mosquito bites and can debunk some myths about the flying pests.

No one likes mosquitoes. Their bites can cause uncomfortable and sometimes painful reactions and put a damper on even the best summer soiree. They can also carry diseases and viruses like Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), the most dangerous virus spread by insects in North America, and West Nile virus, the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in 

.

West Nile virus was recently detected in a few Massachusetts counties, and the next few weeks will be peak risk, according to Telford, professor in the infectious disease and global health department at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, a commissioner for the Central Massachusetts Mosquito Control Project, and a member of the state Mosquito Advisory Group.

It’s important to protect yourself from mosquitoes. Products such as citronella oil advertise themselves as effective against mosquitoes, but citronella has been proven less effective than other products such as DEET. Newer to the market are patio products such as appliances that heat repellents to keep groups safe outdoors, and were shown to be highly effective against four species of mosquitoes. Wearables, on the other hand, sound like a great idea but studies show they do not reduce mosquitoes’ attraction to humans.

With these products making up a fraction of the overwhelming variety of options on the market, it can be hard to know what really works.

Here, Telford shares fact-based ways to keep you and your loved ones safe from mosquitoes:

1. Wear long sleeves and long pants.

MYTH: Have you been outdoors in the warmer months, clad in pants and long sleeves, but went home with mosquito bites? It’s likely because mosquitoes can bite through tight-fitting clothing if it’s made of thin material. Try wearing loose-fitting clothing that has been treated with an insecticide like permethrin (0.5%), but be careful with clothing that is still wet from the treatment—permethrin is toxic to cats.

2. Bug sprays can go a long way toward protecting you.

FACT: Insect repellents with active ingredients such as DEET, picaridin, IR3535, or oil of lemon eucalyptus will help protect you from mosquitoes, among other insects. The Environmental Protection Agency has a tool to help find the right insect repellent for you. Certain EPA-approved products are safe to use on children and infants as young as two months, but read the label for instructions. For infants, invest in mosquito netting to cover their outdoor spaces, like playpens or strollers.

3. Mosquitoes are attracted to certain people more than others.

FACT: Studies have shown that certain biological factors make mosquitoes more attracted to some people over others, though why remains a mystery. Some species of mosquitoes prefer birds or mammals, while others prefer humans. Independent of species, mosquitoes tend to prefer humans with type O blood, and another bodily fluid—sweat—can also have an impact. Researchers have found that mosquitoes search for people with higher body temperatures and receptors in their antennae are trained to detect specific chemicals in our sweat.

4. Mosquitoes can lay eggs in most standing water.

FACT: Mosquitoes love containers that collect water, like upright buckets, uncovered trash barrels, and even clogged roof gutters. Depending on the species of mosquito, eggs can hatch anywhere from a few days to several months after being laid, which can make for a miserable summer. Keep your yard safe by overturning buckets or potting containers (or store them in a shed or garage), covering barrels, and keeping areas like gutters or bird baths clean.

5. Both male and female mosquitoes bite.

MYTH: It’s the lady mosquitoes you need to look out for, which is harder since they’re smaller than their male counterparts. Female mosquitoes bite for a simple reason: to produce eggs—and they’ll lay an average of 100 at a time. In the process, though, they can get infected with viruses and parasites when they bite infected species (human or animal). And although mosquitoes are more active in the dusk hours, they can bite at any time.

For more information on mosquitoes and how you can protect yourself, visit the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and your local department of public health.

Source: Emily Wright Brognano for Tufts University

The post Expert breaks down mosquito bite myths and facts appeared first on Futurity.

 

 

A professor at the University of Pittsburgh is suing the institution and two administrators, alleging they discriminated against him because he is Black.  

The researcher, Moses Bility, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and microbiology in the university’s School of Public Health, alleges the school’s response to a 2020 paper he published and later withdrew that proposed jade amulets may prevent COVID-19 was discriminatory.

He also claims the school discriminated against him by blocking him from transferring his lab to the Pitt-affiliated Hillman Cancer Center, and that one of the named administrators plagiarized his COVID-19 paper, among other allegedly discriminatory acts. Bility says the school denied his application for tenure in June as retaliation for his complaints of discrimination. 

Bility is seeking lost wages, compensatory and punitive damages, and attorney’s fees. His complaint states: 

As a result of all the conduct of Defendants as set forth above, Dr. Bility has suffered embarrassment, substantial mental anguish and emotional distress, and loss of wages and potential earnings. The discrimination has affected his family, including his wife and children, who have been deprived of receiving his best care and attention due to him coping with all Defendants’ discriminatory conduct.

Pitt and the two administrators, Donald Burke and Maureen Lictveld, the former and current deans of the school of public health, respectively, have filed a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that Bility “alleges no facts actually linking perceived wrongs to either his race or his complaints of discrimination.” 

Jeremy Engle, a lawyer at the Pittsburgh firm Marcus & Shapira, who is representing the defendants, declined to comment. (The firm is unrelated to Retraction Watch co-founder Adam Marcus.)

Bility’s lawyer, Steven O’Hanlon of the firm O’Hanlon Schwartz, told us:

The motion to dismiss is meritless given the extensively detailed amended complaint. 

The article that proposed jade amulets may prevent COVID-19, “Can Traditional 

 Medicine provide insights into controlling the COVID-19 pandemic: Serpentinization-induced lithospheric long-wavelength magnetic anomalies in Proterozoic bedrocks in a weakened geomagnetic field mediate the aberrant transformation of biogenic molecules in COVID-19 via magnetic catalysis, was published as an “article in press” in Science of the Total Environment, an Elsevier title, in October 2020. 

Following critique online, the authors of the paper withdrew it, and Bility planned to replace the paper with a new version on which he would be the sole author. (In the process of our previous reporting on the article, Bility accused Retraction Watch of racism.) 

Bility told us that he had presented the work at several conferences this year and resubmitted an updated version of the manuscript to Science of the Total Environment a few months ago. However, the journal rejected it as “not well aligned with the aims and scope of this environmental science journal,” according to the decision letter Bility shared with us. 

He told us: 

I believe that Science of the Total Environment was afraid to review the work due to the previous backlash against the journal when the work was reviewed and published in 2020. I will be submitting my work to another journal in the coming months.

An updated version of the paper Bility shared with us no longer mentions traditional Chinese medicine in the title or jade amulets in the body of the text. 

In his complaint, Bility alleges that he withdrew the paper after receiving “violent threats, racial abuse and harassing actions.” 

Some of the alleged harassment involved vandalism. The name tag on Bility’s office wall was torn down multiple times, he says. Later, in the fall of 2021, the complaint says that someone broke into his office: 

the ceiling was tempered [sic] with; Dr. Bility believed that electronic recoding [sic] devices were placed in the ceiling.  

Bility claims he also received pressure from others at Pitt. Jean Nachega, an associate professor in the school of public health whom Bility listed as last author on the paper, told Bility that Nachega’s “research funding was threatened to be withheld if the article was not withdrawn,” according to the complaint. School officials demanded Bility’s chair investigate him and his research.

When the findings of the investigation – that Bility “did not violate any academic integrity standard” – were presented at a departmental town hall meeting over Zoom, “students in Defendant Pitt’s School of Public Health called Dr. Bility derogatory names, such as stupid, retarded, unintelligent, etc.,” he alleges. Bility also received two emails “from anonymous individuals who Dr. Bility assumes came from the Defendant Pitt community” that included racial slurs.  

In the fall of 2020, Bility says he received a verbal offer to move his research lab to the Hillman Cancer Center, which is also affiliated with Pitt, but he alleges the move was blocked on account of the withdrawn paper: 

On December 21, 2020, Dr. Bility was informed (via a zoom call) by Dr. Robert Ferris, the Director of the Hillman Cancer Center and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Cancer Research, Defendant Pitt Health Sciences, that he was instructed by an unnamed powerful individual in the Defendant Pitt Health Sciences not to allow Dr. Bility to move to the center. Dr. Ferris offered Dr. Bility an opportunity that if he apologized for engaging in the research in question, the powerful individual in the Defendant Pitt Health Sciences might reconsider the decision to block the transfer; Dr. Bility refused to apologize. 

Bility also alleges that, in 2021, Burke, who had retired from his role as dean that January, published a preprint that plagiarized “the assumptions, findings, and prediction framework” of the withdrawn Science of the Total Environment article. (Burke, Bility alleges, had earlier discouraged him from pursuing the line of research and presenting his work at a school workshop in 2019.) 

Bility submitted a formal complaint to the university, which an inquiry panel found did not warrant a formal investigation. The school closed the matter in July 2022. Bility alleges the inquiry panel was biased against him.

In August of 2021, Bility alleges that Lichtveld, the current dean of the public health school, emailed him to relay requests from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that he remove two grant funding acknowledgments from a Scientific Reports article he had published in 2020. 

A correction in September 2021 removed one of the grants, but Bility was “very concerned” about the request to remove the other, from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), according to the complaint, and doubted that NIH had indeed asked for it. He alleges: 

Defendant Lichtveld was aware of the legal consequences Dr. Bility would have faced had he violated Public Law 101-166, Section 511, (also known as the Steven’s Amendment), which requires the acknowledgement of NIH (

U.S.

 Government) funding in research articles. Defendant Lichtveld was aware of the legal consequences Dr. Bility would have faced had he provided false information to the NIH to alter the federal records for his grant to reconcile removing the acknowledgement. Defendant Lichtveld only targeted Dr. Bility, who is Black

Pitt and Lichtveld’s motion to dismiss called these allegations “outlandish.” 

Bility’s complaint details other behavior by Lichtveld he alleges created a “hostile work environment,” which he attributes to “the belief that a Black scientist should not engage in scholarly activities that challenge the scientific paradigm established by non-Black scientists,” namely, his research “investigating the weakening geomagnetic field, changes in Earth’s environment/hydroclimate, and human health.” 

O’Hanlon, Bility’s lawyer, filed a motion for the judge assigned to the case, Marilyn J. Horan, to recuse herself on the grounds that she is a member of the University of Pittsburgh Law School Board of Governors. The defendants opposed the motion and Horan denied it, writing that the volunteer role “​​will have no actual or apparent impact in this case.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40011-0

 

 

Et Tu, Brute?

Are you not entertained?

Fear not! It sounds like we might get to see X-formerly-Twitter owner Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg bash each other's brains out after all.

And if the former's recent posts are anything to go by, it'll be an epic, "Gladiator"-style affair.

"Livestream will be on this platform and Meta," Musk tweeted. "Everything in camera frame will be ancient Rome, so nothing modern at all."

And no, this fight won't go down UFC-style at the octagon in Las Vegas — Musk and Zuckerberg will apparently travel to 

 for the battle.

"I spoke to the PM of Italy and Minister of Culture," Musk said. "They have agreed on an epic location."

While we personally couldn't care less where the fight will take place, we're just glad we might still get to see two tech titans beat each other down. Whether weapons will be part of the Gladiator brawl is still unclear.

What is clear, however, it's that Musk sees the event as an opportunity to clown around and have a bit of fun. In other words, we're wholly expecting to see him in costume, not unlike the $7,500 one he wore to Halloween last year.

"Estne volumen in toga, an solum tibi libet me videre?" Musk wrote in a tongue-in-cheek post, which roughly translates to "is that a scroll in your toga, or are you just happy to see me?"

Veni, Vidi, VC

The news comes after a seemingly apprehensive Musk suggested a "noble" debate with Zuckerberg instead.

Musk has also come up with plenty of other excuses to wriggle out of a fight, including claims of needing surgery before going at it.

"I spent three hours in an MRI machine on Monday," Musk tweeted today. "Bottom line is that my C5/C6 fusion is solid, so not an issue."

"However, there is a problem with my right shoulder blade rubbing against my ribs," he added, "which requires minor surgery. Recovery will only take a few months."

In other words, if Musk were to choose to have such a procedure done soon, we'd likely have to wait for quite some time to watch him flail — and likely be beaten to a pulp by his far more experienced opponent.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is clearly ready to meet Musk in the ring now, and has yet to respond to his terrible Latin dad jokes.

"I suggested Aug 26 when he first challenged, but he hasn't confirmed," Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post earlier this week. "Not holding my breath."

More on the fight: Terrified Elon Musk Suggests "Debate" With Zuckerberg

The post Elon Says the Zuck Fight Is Back On, Gladiator-Style appeared first on Futurism.

Nature, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-02570-0

Nature, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-02503-x

Nature Communications, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40497-2

The latest weapon in the war on robocalls is an automated system capable of analyzing content to shed light on both the scope of the problem and the type of scams being perpetuated.

The tool, called SnorCall, is designed to help regulators, phone carriers, and other stakeholders better understand and monitor robocall trends—and take action against related criminal activity.

“Although telephone service providers, regulators, and researchers have access to call metadata—such as the number being called and the length of the call—they do not have tools to investigate what is being said on robocalls at the vast scale required,” says Brad Reaves, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University.

“For one thing, providers don’t want to listen in on calls—it raises significant privacy concerns. But robocalls are a huge problem, and are often used to conduct criminal fraud. To better understand the scope of this problem, and gain insights into these scams, we need to know what is being said on these robocalls.

“We’ve developed a tool that allows us to the characterize the content of robocalls,” Reaves says. “And we’ve done it without violating privacy concerns; in collaboration with a telecommunications company called Bandwidth, we operate more than 60,000 phone numbers that are used solely by us to monitor unsolicited robocalls. We did not use any phone numbers of actual customers.”

SnorCall  essentially records all robocalls received on the monitored phone lines. It bundles together robocalls that use the same audio, reducing the number of robocalls whose content needs to be analyzed by around an order of magnitude. These recorded robocalls are then transcribed and analyzed by a machine learning framework called Snorkel that can be used to characterize each call.

“SnorCall essentially uses labels to identify what each robocall is about,” Reaves says. “Does it mention a specific company or government program? Does it request specific personal information? If so, what kind? Does it request money? If so, how much? This is all fed into a database that we can use to identify trends or behaviors.”

As a proof of concept, the researchers used SnorCall to assess 232,723 robocalls collected over 23 months on the more than 60,000 phone lines dedicated to the study.

“Those 232,723 robocalls were broken down into 26,791 ‘campaigns,’ or unique audio files,” Reaves says. “And we were able to extract a tremendous amount of information from those campaigns.”

Perhaps most importantly, the researchers were able to extract the phone numbers used in these scams. Robocallers often “spoof” the number they are calling from, making it impossible to tell where the call actually originated. However, scammers increasingly encourage the people receiving robocalls to call a specific phone number. This may be to resolve a (fictional) tech support issue, resolve a (fictional) tax problem, resolve a (fictional) issue with Social Security, and so on.

“Scammers can fake where a robocall is coming from, but they can’t fake the number they want their victims to call,” Reaves says. “And about 45% of the robocalls we analyzed did include this ‘call-back number’ strategy. By extracting those call-back numbers, SnorCall gives regulators or law enforcement something to work with. They can determine which phone service providers issued those numbers and then identify who opened those accounts.”

The proof of concept analysis also shed light on how specific robocall campaigns operate over time.

“For example, we saw very clear trends in the number of robocalls about Social Security scams being made during the pandemic,” Reaves says. “As COVID shut down offices, we saw the number of Social Security scam robocalls dwindle to nearly zero. And then saw the number of these scam calls ramp back up as COVID restrictions were lifted. This tells us that Social Security scam robocall operations are based in offices—they weren’t able to adjust to conditions where the people behind those robocalls would have to work from home. If nothing else, it helps us understand the level of scale and organization behind these robocall Social Security scams.”

One of the other advantages of incorporating the Snorkel framework into SnorCall is that Snorkel makes it relatively easy to modify SnorCall to meet stakeholder-specific needs.

“For example, if investigators want to focus on a new scam topic, Snorkel is very good at identifying key terms or phrases associated with topics,” Reaves says. “This could be a valuable feature for investigators who are focused on specific types of criminal fraud.”

“Our findings demonstrate how illegal robocalls use major societal events like student loan forgiveness to develop new types of scams,” says Sathvik Prasad, a PhD student at NC State and first author of the paper. “SnorCall can aid stakeholders to monitor well-known robocall categories and also help them uncover new types of robocalls.”

Stakeholders who are interested in this work can learn more about the Reaves lab’s efforts at https://robocall.science.

The researchers will present the paper at the USENIX Security Symposium, which is being held in Anaheim, California.

Support for the work came from the National Science Foundation; the 2020 Facebook Internet Defense Prize; and the Google Cloud Research Credits program.

Source: NC State

The post New tool is the latest weapon in fight against robocalls appeared first on Futurity.

The Luna 25 spacecraft will attempt to land at the lunar south pole for the first time in a hunt for valuable water ice

 

 

Imperfect Conductor

LK-99 was meant to revolutionize the world of physics, as a superconductor that could provide perfect electrical conductivity at room temperature.

For a sweet moment in time, the promises felt tangible: vastly improved efficiency of power grids, cheaper maglev trains, lightning-speed device charging.

But as it turns out, we're more than likely looking at an overly optimistic and inherently flawed scientific claim, with more and more researchers piling on to confirm our suspicion that LK-99 is simply too good to be true.

Sloppy Data

In a pair of highly controversial preprints published last month, South Korean researchers claimed to have found the "first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor," a lead-based material that advocates said was set to usher in a new era in physics.

The researchers came out swinging in their lofty claims.

"We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind," they wrote.

Ever since, experts have dismantled their findings, calling the data "sloppy" and "fishy."

Some even tried the recipe for themselves to see whether they could replicate the findings, with greatly varying degrees of success.

The Great Disappointment

For the last week or so,  the thrill of finding the next miracle in science was palpable, with armchair physicists going as far as to stream their efforts on Twitch.

But as more and more preprints detailing the results of these efforts come rolling in, things aren't looking good.

"With a great deal of sadness, we now believe that the game is over. LK99 is NOT a superconductor, not even at room temperatures (or at very low temperatures)," University of Maryland’s Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) tweeted earlier this week. "It is a very highly resistive poor quality material. Period. No point in fighting with the truth."

Several lab tests have since failed to produce a material that passes the test of superconductivity, as The Washington Post reports. While the resulting material exhibited some interesting magnetic properties, it simply didn't live up to expectations.

And unfortunately, that's par for the course in many respects.

"At the end of the day, science fails more often than not," Christopher H. Hendon, an associate professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Oregon, told WaPo.

More on the superconductor: The Claim of a Room Temperature Superconductor Is Starting to Look Fishy

The post That Room-Temperature Superconductor Seems to Be Falling Apart appeared first on Futurism.

We look at the health hazard of the bacteria discovered on the Bibby Stockholm barge and who is most at risk

• Legionella discovery forces asylum seekers off barge

With legionella bacteria having been discovered in the water supply on the Bibby Stockholm barge just days after asylum seekers were moved onboard, we take a look at the health hazard.

Years ago, when I lived in Southern California, I worked with an extremely responsible project manager I’ll call Rocco. Rocco was reliable to the point of neurosis. Accountable to a fault, he was a first-guy-in-the-office guy whose shirts were always pressed and whose meetings started and ended on time. Everyone liked Rocco, but we also wished he would lighten up a little.

One day, Rocco didn’t make it to a scheduled meeting. The next time we saw him, we asked what happened. Was he okay? Rocco wore an ear-to-ear grin as he explained that, yes, he was fine. “I just flaked,” he said, beaming. “I flaked!”

He had done it. Rocco had adopted a social strategy that everyone else grapsed, even if they never spoke of it: Sometimes you just flake.

Alas, flaking—which is to say, failing to keep a commitment—is rarely celebrated with Rocco’s newfound enthusiasm. The term has long been used in a derogatory rather than liberatory sense: “I can’t believe Rocco flaked on us. He’s so unreliable.”

It is time for everyone to adopt flaking in the way Rocco did. Flaking, understood and used correctly, is an important and healthy social tool. It relieves you of the burden of always requiring a reason or an excuse, whether rational, psychological, clinical, or otherwise. No need to blame “the subway” or “a thing that came up” or “my anxiety.” Just, “I flaked.” Ah, okay, you flaked. Thanks for letting me know.

[Read: How to flake gracefully]

Before I go any further, let me acknowledge that to flake is a precious act. Flake too much and you become, as in the derogatory sense, “a flake.” Unreliable. That’s bad. Nobody likes a flake. Those cases are usually clear because they are patterned: Gavin just never shows up on time or You can’t rely on Sarah to have done the work.

But to flake when the circumstances are right—that is a glorious good. People have long relished in canceling plans or avoiding obligations, whether in the name of self-care, procrastination, conflict avoidance, exhaustion, or social awkwardness. Relaxed social conventions have helped by making etiquette less delicate, and our very online culture has inspired more reasons to wring hands or strategize about avoidance. But flaking, ghosting, and their kin typically get celebrated as an almost divine intervention or guilty pleasure. True flaking must never be indulged this way. To embrace flaking means casting off mysticism, shame, and secrecy.

To keep those devils at bay, one must refuse to investigate a flake’s rationale. Why did Rocco flake? We didn’t ask, because the reason behind a true flake need not be known. Overwork or burnout, family strife or flat tires—these are excuses that underlie and motivate an outcome that might wrongly be deemed flaky. Flaking abstracts from them, allowing space to have failed absent specific reason. To flake is to recognize that the vastness of the universe, and the many forces at work within it, cannot always be unpacked like a suitcase. Over some you have control: your alarm clock, your laundry, the preparation devoted to a task, the physical and mental effort exerted to make good on a promise. But over others, no control is possible. Or, at least, submission to forces greater than human will should be expected. Maybe the subway did fail to come or your anxiety did get the best of you. But not necessarily. Perhaps daylight’s golden end proved paralyzing. Maybe a simple refusal to act overtook you, absent restlessness or rebellion. In any event, you didn’t show up; you didn’t do the work. You flaked.

Who can blame you? Everyone is suffocating under the incessant demand for rationales, explanations, justifications. Online life is surely to blame, even if not exclusively. For every question, suggestion, and idea that comes up, someone can always, and immediately, seek affirmation or disproof. You say you emailed the document, and yet look at my screen—no email arrived. Did you really tell me you were stuck at work? The text-message record says no. You say the subway didn’t come, and yet you posted an Instagram selfie at the cronut shop, hmmm. It’s easy to feel like every thought and action demands deep reason, a whole scaffolding of support, as if every solitary decision has emerged from a master narrative backed by lore sufficient to withstand investigation by attorneys, conspiracists, and redditors.

[Read: The six forces that fuel friendship]

Explanations have their place, and certainly they’re understandable currency for avoiding awkwardness or hurt feelings. But all of us can benefit from taking a breath and remembering that a human’s existence is not a judicial proceeding or a franchise screenplay. It is a mess, a pile of accidents that somehow, if you’re lucky, coheres into a structure more often than not. Flaking, taken selectively, allows you to acknowledge that life is porous. Errors seep through its gaps. The source of those errors might be knowable—you were tired or hungover—but they might be unknowable. A strange brew of accidents, sensations, events, and sensibilities that led you just not to. Resist the temptation to make excuses, at least sometimes. No need for diagnoses to overshare, tragedies to invoke, white lies to cover the truth: You don’t even really know why you didn’t do whatever it was you didn’t do. You just didn’t do it.

That doesn’t make flaking an ace in the hole, however. Some requirements distinguish the good flaking from the bad. For one, the stakes must be relatively low. Failing to complete the big report the day before the presentation is not flake-eligible. Nor is forgetting to pick up the kids at tae kwon do. One can flake only if having done so will injure no one more than it benefits you. What responsibility did Rocco fail to show up for? I don’t remember. Nothing important. The Earth continued turning.

For this reason, flaking can only be assessed retroactively. You can’t text someone, “Hey, just a heads-up, I’ll be flaking tonight.” But likewise, you can’t flake until the consequences release you from serious potential blame. That makes every flake a risk, but a calculated one. Experienced flakers can tell the difference by instinct. Some meetings demand your presence; others do not. Failing to show up at a group dinner is different from standing up a date. With practice, these distinctions will become intuitive.

Furthermore, the good kind of flaking must be done in the first person: “I flaked.” You must acknowledge it, and publicly too. Flaking is always shameful if unconfessed, because it disrespects both those who might have been affected by your flaking and the institution of flakery itself. To truly flake requires owning up to it, ideally proactively. “Sorry about last night. Dunno what happened. I flaked.”

If you are not already an adept flaker, learning this new skill will be difficult. People will likely mistake you for an asshole, especially if you do it wrong (or if you’re not flaking in a flake-aware geography, like Rocco in SoCal). Flaking is not just an act but an ethos. A fading one, too. It is harder to flake today than it once was. Back when I bore witness to Rocco’s first flake, nobody had mobile phones. It was more of a hassle to check up or check in, so nobody had such high expectations. Now you should really call, or text, or reply to a text or call. “Rocco, are you coming?” Silence isn’t flaking; it’s just rude. And yet, the demand for a response has undermined the institution of flakery. It is a dying art.

But one you can yet revive. You can start by flaking yourself, and then explaining matters as a curative to your reason-addled friends, family, or colleagues. Eventually, with practice, an advanced mentality of flaking will unlock. And at expert level, a calm acceptance of its righteousness. A flake has no reason and no rebuke. “I just flaked.” Silent nods. It happens. Nothing anyone could have done.

Growing up in Maryland, Radha Patel didn’t see anyone in her area using a matchmaker. But she was aware that in India, where her parents had emigrated from, plenty of couples were fixed up—by relatives, respected elders, women in the community trusted to intuit good pairs. For some reason, the idea of it stuck in the back of her mind. It was still lingering there in 2018, when friends, frustrated with dating apps, started asking for help finding love. “I’m not a tech person,” she thought. “What can I do?” Then she realized that she could play matchmaker.

She started setting people up, and that turned into a hobby, which later that year became a business, Single to Shaadi. She and many of the matchmakers she knows saw a wave of new clients in 2020, when the popular Netflix show Indian Matchmaking, which follows a professional cupid from Mumbai, came out. The coronavirus pandemic might have contributed to the surge; especially early on, plenty of people didn’t want to go on more in-person dates than absolutely necessary. And perhaps they also realized that their time was too precious to waste by swiping fruitlessly on dating apps. According to Patel, Single to Shaadi doubled its number of active clients from 2019 to 2020, and again the next year.  

The field still has momentum. New matchmaking companies have launched in the past few years, and the matchmakers I spoke with told me they’ve had an uptick in interest recently. Some dating sites have tried to take advantage of the trend, too. In 2021, Match Group, the behemoth company that owns Tinder, Hinge, and several other dating apps, introduced a feature on Match.com through which human coaches suggest two profiles a week for each member willing to pay $4.99 weekly. And earlier this year, a spinoff show hit Netflix: Jewish Matchmaking.

Something about this historical tradition appears to be meshing well with contemporary society. In a time when dating apps give users an incredible amount of control over their romantic life, for some people, letting someone else take the wheel seems more and more appealing.

In societies through time and across the world, people have turned to a third party to find a partner. In Jewish communities, for thousands of years, trusted figures such as scholars and rabbis acted as shadkhan, or matchmakers. In Japan, a nakōdo (“middle person”) was traditionally enlisted to present romantic candidates. Korean families historically visited a jung-me to ask for a pairing, and in medieval Catholic society, the village priest sometimes played a role. In all of these customs and many others, the matchmaker typically worked for the parents of an eligible young person; the families, not just the individuals, were linked. Moira Weigel, the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, told me that until at least the Industrial Revolution, marriage in many cultures was commonly about agriculture: uniting families to share farm labor, and to ensure a next generation that would continue that work.

But starting around the 19th century, Weigel told me, industrialization made that kind of union less necessary for many families; love became a more common ideal. And while matchmaking has remained popular in plenty of cultures, in many others, the search for romance became a more individual pursuit. People still had some informal help; friends and family members might try, welcome or unwelcome, to set singles up. But then came dating apps—an especially solitary form of courtship.

Not only can online dating be lonely—it can be extremely time-consuming. Combing through the apps can feel like a part-time job. In 2016, Hinge reported that only one in 500 swipes on the app had resulted in phone numbers being exchanged. When the company surveyed 300 of its users that same year, it discovered that 81 percent of them had never found a long-term relationship on any swipe-based dating app. In 2018, when the dating company Badoo surveyed 5,000 18-to-30-year-olds in the U.K., it found that users spent an average of 10 hours a week on dating apps.     

All of that work gives daters more agency over their love life than they had in earlier eras. They don’t have to wait for a serendipitous encounter, or even leave the house. At any time, they can swipe, send messages, and ask people to meet up. But that sense of control, which for many people is a blessing, can also be a burden—especially if you’re talking with several suitors at once, a common situation on apps. Patel calls it “DIY dating”: All of the analysis and overthinking involved—“What’s not working? What’s right? … Am I waiting too long in between messages? Is the dude on the other end real?—you have to do it all yourself.”

No wonder, then, that matchmakers are having a moment. Many people who can afford to outsource dating labor are eager to do so. Matchmaking services can be very costly: While some companies might promise a few matches for a few hundred dollars, many charge thousands, even hundreds of thousands, for a six-to-12-month-long membership, or for a handful of guaranteed dates. But they advertise a meticulous process, in which experts methodically narrow down a large pool of candidates based on clients’ interests, values, and assessments of past relationships. And people don’t tend to use matchmakers unless they’re looking for long-term commitment, so clients can feel pretty confident that they’re not wasting time on confusing situationships or misrepresented intentions.

[Read: The scariest part of a relationship]

A matchmaker can also act as a guide throughout the very vulnerable process of dating. It might be appealing to trade in an algorithm for an intermediary who is warm, comforting, and … human. Unlike the apps, many matchmakers give advice on what to look for in a partner, how to present oneself, when to give someone another shot, even where someone might be going wrong in relationships. I heard about this when the matchmaking company Selective Search put me in touch with their client Connie Weaver, the chief marketing officer for a life-insurance company. She told me she’d been married for more than three decades before her husband died in 2020. When she started dating again, in her late 60s, she didn’t know what she wanted or how to go about finding it. She was a successful executive and people person, skilled at carrying a conversation in any business meeting. “But that doesn’t mean, after 35 years,” she told me, “that I was good at this.” At Selective Search, “I had someone take me by the hand and give me confidence,” she said.

Weaver’s second match was someone she likely wouldn’t have swiped right on, had they been on an app. She hadn’t wanted to date anyone in medicine—his field. (She’d had bad experiences.) But she decided to have faith in the process. “You have to trust that they’re going to draw out of you the real you,” she told me. Four months later, Weaver’s still seeing him; it’s new, but it feels special. “I can’t be happier,” she told me. “Everybody says that I’m glowing. And I haven’t glowed for a long time.”  

For people floundering in the dating world, the idea that experienced chemistry professionals could pick up on qualities hidden deep within you—and use them to lead you to someone you might have missed—could be very enticing. But in order for matchmakers to do that, they’d probably need to read beyond what their clients tell them. Humans don’t tend to be very good at deducing what we want for ourselves, Eli Finkel, a Northwestern University psychologist who studies romantic attraction, told me. In some studies, researchers have asked participants what they look for in a partner—and found that their answers don’t predict the type of people whom they really go for. And people tend to be drawn to the same qualities anyway; if you’re searching for someone who’s, say, attractive, nice, and funny, you’re not exactly unique.

[Read: The woman who made online dating into a “science”]

Even if matchmakers try not to take clients at their word, Finkel thinks predicting compatibility in advance is inherently an uphill battle. “A whole lot of what makes us compatible with people is emergent,” he told me. “That is, it starts to exist after we’ve met.” Even then, chemistry is complex and mysterious, and based partly on luck. He spitballed an example: Maybe one person on a date says they’re from Arkansas, and the other says, Oh! I went to Arkansas on this road trip, and I went to Joseph’s Mother’s Deli. Have you been there? How well the evening goes might depend, in part, on the answer to that question, because yes and no will spin the conversation off in different directions. Perhaps both people have been there, and they compare notes, and that leads to laughter, to an inside joke, which feels like a spark.

But love’s enigma is part of matchmakers’ allure. If you don’t have the answers yourself, you can at least hope that someone else does. Weaver told me she sees matchmaking as both “an art and a science.” On the one hand, it’s comforting to think that there’s a compatibility code that can be cracked. On the other, we don’t want romance to be too clinical, deduced purely from a couple of interviews or a detailed questionnaire. Michal Naisteter, a Philadelphia-based matchmaker and co-host of the podcast The Yentas, told me that that’s part of why people turn to her—and, generally, to humans rather than algorithms—for help. “Some of this process is miraculous,” she told me. “It’s a little cosmic.”

This is the modern approach to romance: People want efficiency, but also humanity. They want to be independent, rather than relying on family, but they still want guidance; they want options, rather than just choosing from whatever handful of suitors are in the area, but they don’t want to spend hours sifting through them. Contemporary matchmaking sits at the fulcrum of humans’ opposing impulses when it comes to love: It tries to balance modernity and tradition, to outsource labor, and to give people an ally in a lonely dating world, without removing their autonomy.

Patel is just one of the many matchmakers trying to show customers that they can have it all. She gave her company the tagline “Not your parents’ matchmaker,” and she’s modernized her process: She doesn’t match based on caste. She makes a point to work with people of various religions, as well as different sexual and gender orientations. Single to Shaadi doesn’t work with clients’ parents (though Patel has another matchmaking company that’s more family-oriented), and Patel tries to keep her services relatively affordable—starting at just over $100—so that younger singles can pay without involving their families. It looks a little different from the matchmaking she grew up hearing about, but it’s not unrecognizable. She hasn’t gotten rid of the essential perk: the gift of not needing to know exactly what you want, because you’re not making decisions alone.

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Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

How should liberal democracies utilize or eschew taboos? (See any and all items below for context, and feel free to construe the question broadly or to focus on anything related to it.)

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

In the September 2023 issue of The Atlantic, my colleague Graeme Wood profiles Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonymous illiberal philosopher who has gained a cult following on the ideological right while mixing “ultra-far-right politics, unabashed racism, and a deep knowledge of ancient Greece.” Many people understandably believe that his self-published manifesto ought to be taboo. Might successfully maintaining such a taboo safeguard liberal society from those who seek to end it?

BAP’s rise has been especially upsetting to some of the academics who worked with him as a graduate student. Here is a passage from Graeme’s article in which Professor Bryan Garsten, speaking at a conference of political philosophers, laments the seductions of illiberalism and wonders if he could have done more to arrest them:

Garsten told his listeners that they—he—may have failed to cultivate students’ imagination. His illiberal students, Garsten said, had learned why the Greeks admired Achilles, the fiery warrior. But they neglected the Greeks’ admiration for Ulysses, a subtler and greater model of manhood. Ulysses’s greatness emerged not from his rejection of this world, but from his mastery of its constraints. He owed myriad debts to those around him: to his men, to his son, to his wife. The students romanticized the tyrant, while assuming that liberalism bred sloth and laziness. “Life in a liberal democracy is full of demanding moments,” Garsten said … I had the impression that he was addressing BAP apostrophically, delivering a warning he wished he had delivered in person. “As far as I have read, life under tyrants is full of lassitude, selfishness, duplicity, betrayal.”

Listening to discussions like that one, Graeme sensed “the stirrings of dormant liberal passions—as if the mere invocation of BAPism, after many years ignored, had inspired a counteroffensive.”

He wrote:

Another political theorist, a former Marine and a Brookings Institution scholar named William A. Galston, piped up to remind everyone that when liberalism had come under mortal threat in the Pacific theater, “

Americans

 as a whole found it in themselves to do something.” Specifically, his fellow Marines charged, shot, and bayoneted their way from island to island until illiberalism, in the form of Japanese fascism, begged them for mercy. “Is there really an opposition between the open society and the virtue of courage?” Galston asked.

The defeat of imperial Japan illustrated the point nicely, I thought. But it also raised a much stranger question, about how liberals acquired such a reputation for sissydom in the first place.

The Battle of Iwo Jima wasn’t that long ago.

As Graeme concludes his article, he winds up arguing not that BAP’s work ought to be shunned or ignored, but that the impulse to confront and rebut its ideas is overdue and good for liberalism.

He writes:

Liberalism’s victory had been so overwhelming that for generations it grew soft, flabby, and unaccustomed to the hard work of defending itself from a vigorous challenger. As such challengers left universities and newspapers, those institutions became self-congratulatory monocultures, inhospitable even to conservatives far less nutty than BAP. By now, a ranting nudist [Bronze Age Pervert] poses a real danger—of poisoning politics, splitting apart societies, and persuading otherwise talented people to spurn the modern world’s greatest achievements, which are peace, tolerance, and prosperity …

Allan Bloom predicted doom for liberalism when these challenges disappeared … An unchallenged liberal democrat, he argued, ceases to want to improve, unless he confronts his enemies in their most potent forms. Those forms will shock and humble us, he wrote … I have come to think of BAP’s performances in immunological terms: a gnarly virus that had lain dormant for decades in circles of philosophers and their unread books. Now that it’s loose in the human population, it is a vicious kick to the liberal immune system. And that is not entirely bad. Unchallenged, liberalism’s defenses waned, and liberals forgot, temporarily, why their cause was worth defending. The antibodies are stirring.

Taboos in the Internet Era

What should happen when a public intellectual is revealed to have published virulently racist, flagrantly white-supremacist articles under a pseudonym? I pose the question as someone who values maintaining the taboo against such things. Does it matter how long ago the deplorable views were published or how young their author was at the time? What if he purports to disavow or renounce some of those views? What if he has also written racist things more recently under his own name? Can his new account be trusted? When is forgiveness or redemption appropriate? Who should be able to extend or deny it? What incentives best serve society?

These are among the questions a corner of the internet is debating thanks to a specific public intellectual’s deeds. Because his case is eliciting such diametrically opposed reactions from observers I follow, and because the writer’s work more generally is often too trolly for my earnest taste, I suspect that focusing on his case in particular will be less constructive for our purposes than asking what general rules we ought to apply when such situations arise. Here are a few more questions: Should a forthcoming book by such a person be judged solely on its words, or should the author’s outside actions color its reception? If the book were pulled from publication, a course that some of the author’s critics favor but that shows no sign of happening, would more or fewer people read it (assuming it was self-published like Bronze Age Mindset, or picked up by a less mainstream publisher)? Should that bear on the publisher’s decision?

Book Report

The free-expression advocates at PEN America have published a report titled “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” It argues that insofar as advocates of an open society stand for “the principle that books should be as widely available as possible,” their concern must extend “not just to government book banning but also to how the literary community governs itself.” In major publishing houses, an introductory statement frets, “staffers have increasingly expressed opposition to specific book contracts with writers whom they allege to be promoting forms of harm, in some cases going so far as to demand that contracts be nullified.”

More broadly, PEN America warns:

Some readers, writers, and critics are pushing to draw new lines around what types of books, tropes, and narrative conventions should be seen as permissible and who has the legitimacy, authority, or “right” to write certain stories. At one extreme, some critics are calling for an identity-essentialist approach to literature, holding that writers can only responsibly tell the stories that relate to their own identity and experiences. This approach is incompatible with the freedom to imagine that is essential to the creation of literature, and it denies readers the opportunity to experience stories through the eyes of writers offering varied and distinctive lenses.

These critics have argued that “problematic” books or authors deserve special censure from the literary world—with “problematic” being a catchall term ranging from an author accused of committing a crime to one who relies on lazy narrative conventions. Fiction that is regarded as employing stereotypes, outdated tropes, or unrealistic character sketches may be described as threatening “harm” or being “dangerous.” In the past several years, books deemed problematic due to their authorship, their content, or both have been subjected to boycotts, calls for withdrawals, and harassment of their authors. Some have argued that merely to read the book is to become complicit in its alleged harms. While proponents of these arguments are, of course, free to make them, such arguments risk laying the groundwork for, and justifying, the ostracism of authors and ideas and the narrowing of literary freedom writ large.

In The Atlantic, George Packer contrasts this recent report with a bygone report that the same organization published on a different subject:

In “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing,” PEN examined in detail how the American book business has always been and, despite recent improvements, remains a clubby world of the white, well connected, and well-off. It presented a damning picture, backed by data, of “the white lens through which writers, editors, and publishers curate America’s literature.” It called for publishers to hire and promote more staff of color, publish more books by writers of color, pay them higher advances, and sell their books more intelligently and vigorously.

The two reports are related, but the relation is fraught. The first showed the need for an intensified campaign of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the industry. The second argues for greater freedom to defy the literary strictures of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Is there a contradiction between the two?

PEN doesn’t think so. The new report states: “It is imperative that the literary field chart a course that advances diversity and equity without making these values a cudgel against specific books or writers deemed to fall short in these areas.” In the words of Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s chief executive officer, “You can dismantle the barriers to publication for some without erecting them anew for others.” But this might be wishful thinking, and not only because of practical limits on how many books can feasibly be published.

In a different world, it would be entirely possible to expand opportunity without creating a censorious atmosphere. In our world, where DEI has hardened into an ideological litmus test, the effort to place social justice at the center of publishing almost inevitably leads to controversies over “representation” and “harm” that result in banned books. The first report presented DEI in publishing as an urgent moral cause. The second report takes issue with “employees’ increasing expectation that publishers assume moral positions in their curation of catalogs and author lists.” But those employees no doubt believe that they are carrying out the vision of the first report.

Social justice and intellectual freedom are not inherently opposed—often, each requires the other—but they are not the same thing, either. “The Freedom to Read” makes this clear: “It would conflict with the public interest for [publishers and librarians] to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated.” That statement was written at a time when the cause of intellectual freedom was non- or even anti-ideological. Its authors advocated no other goal than the widest and highest-quality expression of views. But in PEN’s new report you can feel a struggle to reconcile the thinking of its earlier one, in which every calculation comes down to identity, with the discriminating judgment and openness to new and disturbing ideas that are essential to producing literature. As one editor told me, “There’s no equity in talent.”

Provocation of the Week

In The Atlantic, the writer and onetime feminist blogger Jill Filipovic revisits her bygone support for trigger warnings:

I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.

Feminist writers were trying to make our little corner of the internet a gentler place, while also giving appropriate recognition to appallingly common female experiences that had been pushed into the shadows. To some extent, those efforts worked. But as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?

Since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011 …

Applying the language of trauma to an event changes the way we process it. That may be a good thing, allowing a person to face a moment that truly cleaved their life into a before and an after, and to seek help and begin healing. Or it may amplify feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, elevating those feelings above a sense of competence and control … A person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling … To help people build resilience, we need to provide material aid to meet basic needs. We need to repair broken community ties so fewer among us feel like they’re struggling alone. And we need to encourage the cultivation of a sense of purpose beyond the self. We also know what stands in the way of resilience: avoiding difficult ideas and imperfect people, catastrophizing, isolating ourselves inside our own heads.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

Our lives are shaped by networks: of family, friends, and colleagues, or the wider ones that encompass neighbors and fellow citizens. We exist in relation to others. And yet novels, beginning almost as soon as Don Quixote set out on his quest, have long fixated on the individual as a shaper of his or her fate, as the fundamental unit for a story. The individual acts or is acted upon, and narrative results from this tension. Which is why James McBride’s most recent two novels are so radical and satisfying. They are, at their foundation, about networks. The unit he’s interested in is community.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

• Ibram X. Kendi on why working class does not equal white
• Seven books that will make you put down your phone
• The greatest feminist novelist you may not have heard of
• The owls are not what they seem.

McBride’s latest is The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which Ayana Mathis wrote about for our September issue. Describing the plot of a McBride novel is a little hard because his books are structured like relay races: One charismatic character hands off the story to another every few pages as the world they inhabit together keeps expanding. Naming that world itself is much easier, and in this case it’s the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s. At the time, Chicken Hill was home to a hodgepodge of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Black families that had recently migrated from the South. Their shared poverty leads to a fairly copacetic coexistence, one that deepens as the book progresses and members of this lively community work together to save one of their vulnerable own, a 12-year-old deaf orphan named Dodo.

Mathis is taken with how in McBride’s fiction “almost nothing of significant value is accomplished by people acting alone”—and it’s hard not to agree. She sees this as part of his wider project of undoing our sense that the past was purely segregationist, with racial and ethnic groups existing only as divided and mutually antagonistic entities. But he is not paving over hard truths: “McBride’s integrationist vision isn’t utopian or easy. Nor is it assimilationist,” Mathis writes. “His fiction doesn’t seek to erase differences, or to deny the realities of racism and marginalization.”

The first McBride novel I read was Deacon King Kong, which was similarly jostling with a cast of hundreds, most residents of an imagined housing project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the 1960s. At first, I found the book’s baton-passing quality jarring. The same was true of The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Who should claim my sympathies? Maybe Moshe Ludlow, the Jewish music-hall owner; or Addie Timblin, the Black woman who works for Moshe and is particularly attached to his wife, Chona; or maybe Paper, the town gossip; or the hulking Sicilian immigrant nicknamed Big Soap … And that becomes the beauty of the novel. Rooting for any one of them connects you to the whole chain of interconnected characters, and what you end up caring about is the chain itself. McBride’s hit memoir, The Color of Water, provides some evidence about how he earned this worldview. His mother—raised Orthodox Jewish but disowned when she married a Black man—was saved by the Red Hook community, which took her up and showed her and her 12 children the kind of care she never received as a girl.

What binds his characters is what most concerns McBride. In keeping with the jazzman’s ethic (he’s an accomplished jazz musician himself), he lets them each take solos, glorious horn-blowing ones. But the power of the story is in the way these individuals all fit together—sometimes hindering but more often helping one another muddle through their shared reality.

 

 

Lost Histories of Coexistence

What to Read

If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery

Escoffery’s debut collection of linked stories is a tale of biting sibling rivalry and a moving family saga about the immigrant experience and living between cultures in Miami. Our 

-born protagonist, Trelawny, clashes with his Jamaican-born older brother, Delano, in their disparate pursuits of financial stability, parental love, and masculinity. Delano, the clear favorite, follows in his father’s footsteps by supporting his wife and children as a landscaper, while Trelawny pursues a college education. But after the recession, Trelawny’s degree fails to protect him from living out of his car and working a slew of precarious jobs (predatory building management, Craigslist sexual race play). Escoffery is a wordsmith who keeps us laughing even as he runs his characters through capitalism’s meat grinder. When the siblings’ fortunes are flipped, Trelawny must decide whether to be a better brother to Delano than he’s been to him. The choice is a sour one, laced with that particular ache that only bone-deep disappointment engenders.  — Ruth Madievsky

From our list: Six books that show no one can hurt you like a sibling

Out Next Week

📚 In Defense of Love: An Argument, by Ron Rosenbaum

📚 The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, by Clare Carlisle

📚 The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race, by Farah Karim-Cooper

Your Weekend Read

 

 

The Three Attacks on Intellectual Freedom

“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” The second threat to intellectual freedom comes from inside the house. This threat is the subject of a new report that PEN America has just published, “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” The report is focused on the recent pattern of publishers and authors canceling their own books, sometimes after publication, under pressure organized online or by members, often younger ones, of their own staffs. PEN has tracked 31 cases of what might be called literary infanticide since 2016; half occurred in just the past two years. “None of these books were withdrawn based on any allegation of factual disinformation, nor glorification of violence, nor plagiarism,” the report notes. “Their content or author was simply deemed offensive.”

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40354-8

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40406-z

In at least one species of butterfly, the variation in the vision of males and females results from a vision gene’s jump onto a sex chromosome.

As butterflies flit among flowers, they don’t all view blossoms the same way. Females of some species perceive ultraviolet color while the males see light and dark.

The new discovery, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first known finding that this kind of genetic change causes sexually dimorphic vision.

The researchers were investigating the Heliconius butterfly genus. Some of its species see ultraviolet color, an array wider than the visible light spectrum that humans perceive. A substance produced by the opsin gene accounts for these butterflies’ visual capacity. In Heliconius species with sexually dimorphic vision, ultraviolet color perception is only present in females.

In searching for the genetic mechanism behind this difference, the biologists selected as their subject Heliconius charithonia, in which visual capacity is sexually dimorphic. When they finished assembling the first complete genome for this species, they learned that its W—or female—chromosome contained the opsin gene.

“This is the first known instance where dimorphic color vision in animals comes from a single gene moving to a sex chromosome,” says first author Mahul Chakraborty, an assistant project scientist in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine.

“Besides the discovery’s scientific significance, it highlights the complexities of automated genetic sequencing and the crucial role of validation.”

Chakraborty did much of his work on the project while a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratories of co-corresponding authors Adriana Briscoe and J.J. Emerson, both faculty members in the ecology and evolutionary biology department.

Previously assembled genomes for Heliconius charithonia were fragmentary. None included the W chromosome, whose highly repetitive code can pose stumbling blocks for automatic sequencing.

To begin the study, the researchers automatically sequenced the species genome, but this failed to reveal all expected copies of the opsin gene. They next examined the coding manually.

“I went through every bit of the sequencing,” says Angelica Lara, who was an ecology and evolutionary biology undergraduate when she started working with the investigative team. Lara continued to participate in the project as a postbaccalaureate researcher after earning her degree.

“I still couldn’t find the opsin after all that review. Then I realized a part of the code for the W chromosome had not been well formatted, and I believed the opsin had to be located there,” she says.

Lara’s efforts cued Chakraborty to examine that segment more closely. It turned out that the automatic sequencing had dropped that section of the chromosome’s coding, likely stymied by its repetitiveness. Restoring it revealed the opsin gene, and the team confirmed the finding with additional tests.

“Without this manual annotation and investigation, we would have made assumptions that were incorrect and misleading,” says Briscoe, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “Now that we’ve made this discovery, we can dig much deeper into the mechanics behind the dimorphism and understanding its purpose.”

Scientists believe the vision difference may be the reason that females and males within some butterfly species feed on different types of flowers. So far, the only other creatures known to have sexually dimorphic vision are certain kinds of primates.

The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the UCI Optical Biology Core Facility, and Texas A&M University funded the work.

Source: UC Irvine

The post Gene jump explains why some butterflies see color differently appeared first on Futurity.

Even when they are asleep, the sounds babies hear play a big role in language development, especially for babies at risk of language delays, according to a new study.

Although it’s well-known that music and speech boost babies’ ability to learn, there’s robust evidence that the developing brain analyzes certain brief auditory cues in an infant’s environments and uses them to guide the formation of networks involved in language processing.

Researcher April Benasich, an expert in early brain plasticity who studies infant language and cognitive development, demonstrated that when infants were passively exposed to a series of brief non-speech sounds once a week for six weeks they were able to more accurately identify and discriminate syllables and had better language scores at 12 and 18 months compared to infants who had not received that exposure.

The study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, is important because it’s the first to show that passive exposure to non-speech sounds—which contains tiny acoustic transitions in the 10s of milliseconds, similar to those that allow babies to detect that language is present—facilitate the formation and strengthening of neuronal connections that are essential to language processing.

Previous research in Benasich’s lab showed that interactive exposure to certain auditory cues had a significant impact on critical brain networks and improved both attention and infant language outcomes over time.

But the jury was still out on whether passively exposing infants to these same types of sounds would have an effect on language networks. In fact, there were impressive impacts on both language processing and later language outcomes.

Results suggest that supporting rapid auditory processing abilities early in development, even with only passive exposure, can positively influence later language.

“The ability to impact developing language networks passively is a very important step forward. The passive route provides a simpler, cheaper alternative to promote optimal networks, allowing parents the opportunity to support typical development at home as well as offering a path to an accessible intervention in the clinic or pediatrician’s office for infants for developmental language disorders,” says Benasich, a professor of neuroscience at Rutgers-Newark’s Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience and the nation’s first endowed chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Her previous research found that measures of rapid auditory processing ability can be used to identify infants at highest risk of language delay and impairment, providing an opportunity to intervene and mitigate outcomes.

“Babies need the small sound transitions that brains must analyze to develop language,” she says. “Their brains are hard wired to analyze any pertinent environmental sounds coming in. If those sounds are all the same frequency, all at the same intensity, the brain might stop listening for these important variations which could impede the creation of language networks.”

Source: Rutgers University

The post Sounds sleeping babies hear can boost language development appeared first on Futurity.

Nature, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-02556-y

 

 

Mud Veins

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has come across a fascinating hexagonal pattern in salt deposits — and they look eerily reminiscent of Earth-based basins that dry out seasonally, providing a fascinating new clue about the ancient history of the Red Planet.

The landmark finding, as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature, is the "first fossil evidence of a sustained, cyclical, regular Martian climate with dry and wet seasons," according to a press release.

"Instead of sporadic hydrological activity induced by impacts or volcanoes, our findings point to a sustained, cyclic, possibly seasonal, climate on early Mars," the paper reads.

In other words, we've never been closer to confirming once and for all that the Red Planet went through periods of lush water-rich seasons and much drier conditions — something that could bring us a step closer to answering the question of whether Mars was once teeming with life as Earth is now.

My Wets!

Curiosity, which has been roaming the barren Martian landscapes for over a decade now, spotted the mud cracks in 2021 while ascending the sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp, a massive mountain that rises three miles from the floor of the Gale crater.

As the Martian mud in the area dries out, it shrinks and cracks, forming T-shaped junctions, something Curiosity had already discovered. But now scientists are saying that prolonged — and more importantly recurring — exposure to water likely caused these cracks to turn into Y-shaped junctions, forming hexagonal patterns.

"This is the first tangible evidence we’ve seen that the ancient climate of Mars had such regular, Earth-like wet-dry cycles," said lead author William Rapin of 

’s Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in a NASA statement.

"But even more important is that wet-dry cycles are helpful — maybe even required — for the molecular evolution that could lead to life," he added.

"Over 11 years, we’ve found ample evidence that ancient Mars could have supported microbial life," said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada. "Now, the mission has found evidence of conditions that may have promoted the origin of life, too."

More on Curiosity: NASA Rover Snaps Amazing View of Sunset on Mars

The post Scientists Intrigued by Hexagonal Pattern on Surface of Mars appeared first on Futurism.

 

 

Scientists say they've successfully reversed hearing loss in mice, suggesting that certain forms of deafness caused by faulty genetic activity could not only be avoided, but outright reversed in humans, too.

As detailed in a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers were able to restore the hearing of some mice in the low to mid-frequency ranges to near normal levels.

"Degenerative diseases such as progressive hearing loss are often believed to be irreversible, but we have shown that at least one type of inner ear dysfunction can be reversed," said study author Karen Steel, a professor of sensory function at King's College London, in a statement.

Most treatments for hearing loss such as hearing aids and cochlear implants, the researchers said, do not actually restore hearing or prevent it from worsening.

"Seeing the once-deaf mice respond to sounds after treatment was truly thrilling," said study lead author Elisa Martelletti, a professor at King's College, in the statement. "It was a pivotal moment, demonstrating the tangible potential to reverse hearing loss caused by defective genes."

The researchers made their breakthrough by focusing on a gene called Spns2. In the study, mice bred with defective Spns2 genes showed rapidly worsening hearing loss, implicating its role in the condition.

Using a specialized enzyme, the researchers essentially reactivated these dud genes in the mice at different ages, and then evaluated the rodents' hearing using what's known as an auditory brainstem response test.

Young mice, they found, had their hearing loss almost completely reversed once the gene was activated. However, the older a mouse was when it received the treatment, the less hearing it regained. And, past a certain age, the treatment was not effective at restoring hearing above 18 kHz — a pretty high frequency, to be fair.

Furthermore, the researchers found that by activating the Spns2 gene early on, the treatment also protected the cells of sensory hairs — which are essential for hearing — from future degeneration. In effect: a true and long-lasting reversal, that crucially must be administered at as young an age as possible for the best results.

It's worth noting, however, that this treatment was only effective at reversing hearing loss caused by this form of reduced gene activity, but the researchers believe their genetic approach will prove useful at reversing other diseases, not just deafness.

More on hearing: Scientists May Have Figured Out How to Regenerate Lost Hearing

The post Scientists Successfully Reverse Hearing Loss in Mice appeared first on Futurism.

From a heart-shaped stem cell colony to purple gold and ‘science candies’, these are the 12 finalists for the 2023 Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology image contest. Each year in the lead up to National Science Week, researchers at the University of Queensland’s AIBN have a competition to find the best image taken using imaging equipment and microscopes. This year’s winner will be announced on 14 August

• Zoom in: national science week prize puts photography under the microscope – in pictures

Researchers hope a modified solitaire version of the game mancala can help solve the central problem of quantum state engineering.

The game mancala may have originated as far back as 6000 BCE in Jordan and is played around the world to this day. It consists of stones that players move between a series of small pits on a wooden game board. The point of the game is to get all the stones into the last pit at the end of the board.

In a new study in the journal AVS Quantum Science, researchers apply a modified solitaire version of mancala, which they call ManQala, to quantum state engineering, a field of quantum physics that deals with putting quantum systems into specific states.

The central problem quantum state engineering is trying to solve, says Ryan Glasser, associate professor of physics at the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University, is “what do I need to do to get my quantum system to be in the state I desire?”

Essentially, researchers need to know how to get particles to be in certain places or have certain energies in order to study them and to use quantum computers.

This is more difficult with quantum particles than it is with, for instance, the stones on a mancala board.

“Quantum things are, generally speaking, very delicate and difficult to control,” says Glasser. “The system can fall apart quickly and make you lose any quantum advantage you have or desire to have.”

Quantum physicists already have a few methods to solve these problems, but the simulations researchers did in this study showed that ManQala is more effective, even in simpler systems.

“We see advantages already, even in these simplified systems of three stones and three pits,” says Glasser.

The study is one of many in the field of quantum games, which is “effectively taking normal games like sudoku or checkers or tic-tac-toe and applying rules of quantum physics to them and seeing what interesting things might happen,” says Glasser.

When dealing with quantum particles rather than physical stones, there is the opportunity for the particles to interfere with each other when they are in neighboring “pits.” This means that there are more moves available, and for ManQala, at least, “you can win the game if you use quantum rules where you wouldn’t be able to if you use classical rules,” Glasser says.

Although this study focused on simulations, Glasser is optimistic about future applications of ManQala. “It’s in the realm of theory currently, but I think it’s definitely doable experimentally,” says Glasser.

He hopes to apply ManQala to the IBM Quantum cloud computer, which he has used for research in the past, along with fellow researchers Thomas Searles of the University of Illinois Chicago and Brian Kirby, an adjunct professor of physics at Tulane.

Source: Tulane University

The post Can an ancient board game solve quantum problems? appeared first on Futurity.

 

 

Bone Apple Teeth

Bleach-infused rice surprise, anyone?

As The Guardian reports, a New Zealand grocery store's recipe-suggesting AI, dubbed the Pak 'n Save Savey Meal Bot, has gone viral this week after suggesting that its users chef up a series of poisonous, cannibalistic, or otherwise death-inducing-slash-horrifying meals.

Per the report, the bot is billed as a sort of recipe-brainstorming device, designed to help Pak 'n Save shoppers find creative new ways to cook leftovers or everyday fridge and pantry items. Users, however, soon realized that they could successfully prompt the bot to create recipes with other, non-grocery items — even if those items could prove to be outright deadly.

Mystery Meat Stew

Per the Guardian, the bot had already been going somewhat viral, due to its suggestion of disgusting-sounding — but not deadly — recipes like "Oreo vegetable stir fry."

From there, users kept experimenting, and on August 4, New Zealand political commentator Liam Hehir took to X-formerly-Twitter to share a particularly unappetizing recipe: "aromatic water mix," a poisonous concoction comprised of bleach, ammonia, and water — otherwise known as deadly chlorine gas.

Other recipes by the bot include appetizing dishes such as "non-alcoholic bleach and ammonia surprise" — another blend of bleach, ammonia, and water that "promises to leave you breathless" — and, yes, a "bleach-infused rice surprise," described by the AI in the recipe description as a "surprising culinary adventure."

Elsewhere, when someone asked the bot to give them a recipe idea for using the ingredients potatoes, carrots, onions, and, uh, human flesh, the bot happily offered the user a recipe for a "mysterious meat stew," recommending that 500 grams of human flesh should be enough.

Lessons Learned

Pak 'n Save has not been amused, telling the Guardian that they were disappointed to see that "a small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately and not for its intended purpose." And in a disclaimer, the AI now warns users that recipes are "not reviewed by a human being" and there's no guarantee that the AI-generated recipes will be "suitable for consumption."

And while we do understand their annoyance, it's also worth noting, as Hehir pointed out in another tweet, if you ask ChatGPT to chef up a recipe using bleach, water, and ammonia, it won't comply — and will instead warn users that the resulting mix would be toxic. If anything, maybe let this be a reminder that AI guardrails should always be considered, even for the most innocuous-seeming AI integrations.

Anyway. Rice is ready!

More on AI recipe bots: Buzzfeed AI Struggles to Recommend Recipe for Laid-off Journalists

The post Supermarket's Meal-Planning AI Suggests Deadly Poison for Dinner appeared first on Futurism.

Creation of hundreds of signs aimed at making conversations about climate more accessible for deaf people

Scientists and 

 Sign Language users have created new signs for greenhouse gases, carbon footprint, and more than 200 other environmental terms.

It is hoped the effort to “rewild” BSL will make climate and biodiversity science more accessible for deaf people.

Carbon footprint: Left hand as a C shape with right hand fingers moving away from the left hand to resemble carbon being released to the environment.

Greenhouse gases: Both hands in circular shapes move around to represent gases, then put the left hand at the horizontal position and move the right hand, with the index finger pointing, down and back up to the left hand to show the sunlight reflecting on Earth’s surface.

Carnivores: Two five-fingered claws coming together as sharp teeth.

Herbivores: Closed fists together, palms facing, with right hand on top + slide knuckles against each other in a circular “teeth grinding” motion.

Omnivores: Sign for “carnivores” + sign for “herbivores”

Cetaceans (marine mammals including whales, dolphins and porpoises): Bring hands together to form a circle that faces the ground (sign for “group”) + link thumbs, palms facing the body, and fan palms up and out to resemble “whale tail fin”.

Natural selection (the natural process whereby the best-adapted individuals survive longer, have more offspring, and thereby spread their characteristics): Two index fingers moving forward and the right hand, index still pointed, “falls down”, and the left index finger continues to stay upright and moves forward.

Rewilding (the process of creating habitats that are similar to the conditions present before the natural habitat was changed by human actions): Two flat hands, palms facing down, then drop palms while pulling hands back (sign for “habitat” but upside down). Then right hand at a distance from the body turns from palm facing up to down.

Fusion power has long been seen as a pipe dream, but in recent years the technology has appeared to be edging closer to reality. The second demonstration of a fusion reaction that creates more power than it uses is another important marker suggesting fusion’s time may be coming.

Generating power by smashing together atoms holds considerable promise, because the fuel is abundant, required in tiny amounts, and the reactions produce little long-lived radioactive waste and no carbon emissions. The problem is that initiating fusion typically uses much more energy than the reaction generates, making a commercial fusion plant a distant dream at present.

Last December though, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made a major breakthrough when they achieved “fusion ignition” for the first time. The term refers to a fusion reaction that produces more energy than was put in and becomes self-sustaining.

Now the team at the National Ignition Facility has repeated the feat, according to a report in the Financial Times. And this time they produced an even higher energy yield than the previous demonstration, suggesting that progress is gathering pace.

“Since demonstrating fusion ignition for the first time at the National Ignition Facility in December 2022, we have continued to perform experiments to study this exciting new scientific regime. In an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF,” a spokesperson for the laboratory told the FT. “As is our standard practice, we plan on reporting those results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications.”

The National Ignition Facility uses an approach to fusion called inertial confinement, in which an array of 192 incredibly powerful lasers is fired into a gold canister with a tiny pellet of fuel in the middle. The fuel pellet consists of two different isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium.

As the lasers hit the inside of the gold canister, they generate X-rays that heat and compress the fuel pellet to extremely high levels, creating a plasma. This creates the conditions for the fuel’s hydrogen atoms to fuse together and create helium atoms, releasing a burst of energy in the process. The entire process lasts just a billionth of a second and the fuel pellet is just one millimeter across, but this is still enough to generate a considerable amount of energy.

During last year’s test, the facility was able to generate 3.15 megajoules of energy, which was roughly 50 percent more than the energy in the laser beams. This time around, the group generated more than 3.5 megajoules, marking a significant improvement in just a matter of months.

The key to the improvement is down to the researchers’ growing understanding of how to control the underlying fusion reaction, Jeremy Chittenden at Imperial College London told New Scientist. By maintaining the plasma for longer, the team was able to squeeze more energy out of the process.

There are a lot of caveats. For a start, while the reactions generated more energy than was in the laser beams, actually powering the lasers and the rest of the facility used considerably more energy. For a fusion reactor to be viable, it would need to generate significantly more power than the total energy required to run the plant.

What’s more, the approach to fusion taken at the lab is not particularly well-suited to creating a working power plant. It takes a full day to set up a single ignition experiment like this because the lasers need time to cool, and the researchers need to replace the fuel pellet manually. To generate a significant amount of power you’d need to be running the reaction multiple times a second.

Most other efforts to create a fusion reactor rely on an approach called magnetic confinement, in which ultra-powerful magnets are used to contain a high-temperature plasma for extended periods of time. While none of these have yet achieved fusion ignition, the approach is probably more amenable to building a commercial power plant.

But even if it’s unlikely to lay down the blueprints for future fusion power plants, the NIF’s demonstration of fusion ignition and its rapid progress in energy yields is likely to provide considerable encouragement to the field.

Image Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Reuters

Like any other technology, whether nuclear power or the printing press, social media is only as good as the people who use it—and over the past decade, we haven’t exactly used it well. What began as a promising prospect for connecting communities and amplifying new voices has gradually evolved into an engine for sowing upset, distrust, and conspiracy. As the next generation of social-media sites emerges, one question is: Can we do better?

I think so. Rather than holding out for unlikely top-down solutions from Washington or Silicon Valley, users can solve our problems from the bottom up. As individuals, we can’t necessarily make better social-media platforms, but we can make better choices on them. So whether you’re joining a new site like Threads or trying to get more out of an old haunt like Facebook, here are some tips for how to use social media without it using you.

Have a block party.

In real life, if someone crashed a gathering of strangers and started disrupting conversations while shouting abuse, they’d quickly be bounced from the party. Yet on social media, this sort of caustic conduct is not only tolerated but sometimes celebrated. In our day-to-day lives, getting disciplined for misbehavior is how we learn to be better. But because such norms were never upheld on the internet, many spaces turned toxic, and many people never got the feedback they needed to grow out of their bad habits. Blocking is part of that feedback. When people realize that their opinions won’t be heard if they express them in a certain way, they stop. Even if they don’t, you have no obligation to accommodate them. Your social-media feed is your party and you decide the guest list. By doing so, you’re not being thin-skinned; you’re being a conscientious host who cultivates good vibes.

Read the room—correctly.

The admonishment to “read the room” is one of the lazier retorts on social media. It’s a way for the intellectually unserious to dismiss an argument without engaging with its substance by gesturing to the reaction of an imaginary audience. But the concept contains a kernel of truth. On social media, we all operate in different rooms and have different people in mind when we speak. A lot of online conflict results from crossed wires, when conversation intended for one context (an ironic in-joke for like-minded people) bleeds into another (among people who don’t understand the joke). But this problem has an easy fix: Before posting something, ask yourself if this is the right platform for what you’re about to say.

Some pronouncements are meant for the group chat, not the entire internet. Others benefit from the widest possible hearing. Want TV or travel recommendations? Ask the hive mind of Twitter or Facebook. Trying to share your scenic vacation? Instagram it. Want to discuss sensitive personal stuff or work through a thorny political question? Hit up your friends in the chat or just send a private message to a trusted confidant. Done right, reading the room shouldn’t stop you from saying what you want but rather help you say things where they can genuinely be heard.

[Yair Rosenberg: How to take back control of what you read on the internet]

Don’t use social media as a proxy for public opinion.

Precisely because different platforms are good for different things, they attract different types of people and discourse. This means that these sites are pretty poor barometers of popular sentiment. To take one example, the Pew Research Center has found that only 23 percent of 

 adults use Twitter—the site now known as X—and of those people, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” Put another way, nearly all U.S. tweets come from about 5 percent of adults. There’s nothing wrong with this. In general, social-media sites each serve their own niches and communities. The problem arises when people try to use these platforms as something they’re not: representative samples of the public. This tends to result in wrong conclusions about our world, because the sites were never meant for this purpose.

Places such as TikTok and Twitter tend to privilege the loudest, most entertaining, or most abrasive voices—not necessarily the wisest or the kindest. Moreover, as is the case with most new technologies, the user base of social-media platforms skews young, which means one is less likely to hear from the elderly about their perspectives and experiences. (This is one reason why political candidates like Joe Biden tend to perform poorly on social media but better at the ballot box.) When adopting new platforms and using old ones, we should keep their limits in mind, and not uncritically permit what’s popular on them to influence the course of entire companies or countries.

Resist rage bait.

“The tricky thing about twitter is: you see how angry people get about injustice, and you’re like ‘oh this is a great place’, but then you scroll a bit further and the conversation about apple sauce is just as angry and you start to think maybe it’s not so great after all.” This 2020 observation from the video-game streamer Stephen Flavall perfectly captures the way that social media runs on outrage and othering, to the point that seemingly every online subculture is eventually overtaken by the angriest and most oppositional version of itself. There’s a reason for this: Rage travels.

In 2021, researchers at the University of Cambridge and NYU found that tweets about a person’s ideological opponents were more likely to be shared, and more likely to evoke angry responses, than tweets about their political allies. Disagreement, in other words, proved more viral than agreement. Meanwhile, researchers at Yale found that likes and shares of angry posts encouraged those who wrote them to make more angry posts in the future. Taken together, these studies illustrate how social media creates a feedback loop in which users are encouraged by the platform itself to post progressively more unhinged utterances about their enemies. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.

[Derek Thompson: Click here if you want to be sad]

Marinating in spaces optimized for outrage has many negative consequences for both our civic discourse and mental health. If everything is outrageous, nothing is, and we lose the ability to express opprobrium when it’s genuinely necessary. Professional trolls have weaponized the fury of others for personal profit, purposely provoking outraged responses to their content in order to elevate their profile. (One of them even became president.) But there’s a simple way to escape this trap: Boost things you like and ignore things you don’t. Block bad actors rather than engaging with them. There can be exceptions to this rule, but sticking to it as a default will greatly improve your online experience and disincentivize incendiary individuals from attempting to hijack our collective attention.

Put down the pitchfork.

In June 2020, Peter Weinberg trended on Twitter and was inundated across multiple platforms with vicious, excoriating messages from people he’d never met. The 49-year-old’s home address was even posted online. The reason: He’d been captured in a viral video assaulting a girl who had been posting flyers in support of George Floyd. Except he wasn’t. The entire affair was a case of mistaken identity on the part of amateur internet sleuths. Weinberg had been at the scene of the incident—the day after it occurred. He also wasn’t the only victim of this drive-by vigilante justice. As New York magazine reported, “Another man, a former Maryland cop, was wrongly accused, too. The tweet accusing him was retweeted and liked more than half a million times.”

Outrage mobs are perhaps the most pernicious manifestation of social media’s pathologies. Many of these pile-ons are mistaken in their choice of target and nearly always disproportionate to the offense. Because you can’t know in the moment whether you are joining an outpouring that is justified or misguided, the responsible choice is to abstain. If you wouldn’t want your existence upended over a grainy partial video clip or a poorly phrased post, you shouldn’t help upend someone else’s. And frankly, getting repeatedly exercised over the antics of individuals you’ve never met and wouldn’t know existed if not for social media is neither a healthy nor productive use of our limited time on this Earth.

Choose your lane.

When it seems like everyone is talking about something, it’s natural to feel compelled to talk about that thing. In this way, social media prods us to perform as pundits and comment on events as they unfold in real time. Plenty of people ignore this impulse and just keep posting pictures of their grandkids or dog. But others give in to it, which leads to all sorts of problems. That’s because no one is an expert on everything, and we all have plenty of blind spots that could lead to embarrassment—whether about communities of people we don’t know or intellectual topics we haven’t studied. In real life, we usually don’t run into many situations where these blind spots are exposed, and when we do, we hopefully have friends who will gently correct us. A platform like Twitter is not so forgiving—it’s more like a string of ideological banana peels laid out in front of an audience of millions of strangers. Every day, something on the site or its many successors tempts us to comment outside our expertise. But we don’t have to do it.

Not only will such restraint save you from embarrassment, it will prevent you from overreacting to the latest breaking news, and it will help you make a difference when you have something important to say. The more topics you publicly pontificate about online, the more likely you will slip up and give people reasons to discount whatever else you say. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be outspoken on the internet! But you should limit yourself to your areas of actual expertise, where you most hope to be heard or influence people. The last thing you want is for your off-the-cuff take on a culture-war issue to discredit your deeply informed insights on the things that truly matter to you. This is also why journalists and academics, who rely on public trust to get their message across, should stick to their beats rather than post about subjects outside their ambit. When in doubt, recall the wisdom of the first-century rabbi who said, “All my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence.”

Read before burning.

We’ve all done it. Incensed by a headline, tweet, or screenshot of an article, we shared our upset about a story—without actually reading the piece in question and finding out whether the headline was accurate or the context of the excerpted quotation changed its meaning. Doing this may seem harmless in isolation, but in practice, it’s not happening in isolation. Many social-media users today believe it is perfectly reasonable to pass judgment on content they haven’t actually consumed, and the collective accretion of such potemkin pontification has the effect of polluting the public discourse.

Your first-grade teacher had this one right: Don’t judge a book by its cover, or, in this case, a story by its tweet or headline. Commenting confidently on material you haven’t bothered to read isn’t just intellectually dishonest; it disrespects your followers by telling them you don’t think enough of them to read the things you share with them. It turns social media into a farce in which individuals spar over imagined arguments that nobody actually made. No one wins these debates, and no one emerges any wiser. It’s time to collectively commit to ending this practice, and, when necessary, call out those who engage in it.

Oh, and if you got to this point before commenting on what’s written here: congratulations. You’re already part of the solution. Now feel free to tell me why I’m completely wrong.

I have to take my hat off to the folks at The Guardian; this is a really well-done article on a topic that general readers are surely not up to speed on at all. They're getting people up to speed on the sorts of reactions I enjoy writing about here from time to time, alchemical-looking atom-swapping reactions to dramatically change molecular scaffolds. It's hard to get the significance of these across to a lay readership, because what really makes them stand out is a knowledge of standard organic chemistry.

And standard organic chemistry elevates carbon-carbon bond formation (justifiably), and we give out Nobels to people who come up with really new ways to accomplish it. But even with these, we mostly settle on a backbone/scaffold and then set about messing with the functional groups that decorate it as a separate category of reactions. That's why you find so many compendia in the literature over the years of "How To Turn Functional Group X into Functional Group Y" – I mean, that's what we spend a lot of our time doing, and we design our syntheses by thinking this way. You work out the order in which these things can be feasibly done, what other parts of your molecule might be troublesome for a given set of conditions, and what groups will be robust enough to be done first (and survive the following reaction steps). 

So the "alchemical"-looking transformations, where it looks like you've just dropped in a nitrogen out of the sky or something, come as a shock but definitely not an unwelcome one. A related field is late-stage transformations, where the idea is to come up with useful reactions that don't disturb the functionality found in complex end-stage molecules. Now in both cases it would be quite nice to be able to selectively get them to work at just the spots you'd like, but this isn't an absolute requirement, either, because you can generate a lot of interesting structures and new building blocks by just using your Magical Methylation, Amazing Amination, or Freaky Fluorination on the compounds you already have and seeing where things end up. I should trademark a whole suite of those names; riches await.

I wrote years ago about how you can take very well-known chemical structures and immediately land in unknown territory by doing these things as a mental exercise. Take a steroid backbone, for example, and change one of those carbons to the corresponding secondary or tertiary amine: you will get in most cases very few literature hits or none at all. Same goes for oxygens in the framework, sulfonyls, what have you. Chemically, a lot of these just don't exist yet. It's not that they would be absolutely impossible to synthesize, but building them up by traditional methods would be a fair amount of work (putting it lightly!), and no one is going to do it without a good reason up front. "I wonder what would happen", while a good reason in principle, is not generally enough to start on a sixteen-step leap into the unknown.

But if you can just bang some of these structures out in one step, well, let's go! The Guardian piece interviews a number of synthetic chemists around the world who are working on such reactions, and believe me, I'm cheering them on. Richmond Sarpong at Berkeley is quoted as saying "I think the most important thing is that it changes the way chemists think", and he's got a point there. The existing framework of organic synthesis is quite a magnificent structure, in its way, but you also keep banging into parts of it as you try to move around. I would enjoy seeing it opened up!

Optimization problems can be tricky, but they make the world work better. These kinds of questions, which strive for the best way of doing something, are absolutely everywhere. Your phone’s GPS calculates the shortest route to your destination. Travel websites search for the cheapest combination of flights that matches your itinerary. And machine learning applications, which learn by analyzing…

Source

Nature Communications, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40407-6

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40373-5

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40361-9

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-39985-8

Scientific Reports, Published online: 11 August 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-40344-w