Four hooded figures seemed to float down the stage, through the soft exhalations of a fog machine. On their shoulders, they carried a body clothed in black. Rain and lightning flashed a clean white on the screen behind them. When the man was finally laid on the ground, what followed looked like a resurrection: The spotlights found him, screams rose, and at last he stirred. Then he raised a microphone to his mouth.

This rock-star Lazarus was Min Yoongi, better known as the rapper and songwriter Suga of the Grammy-nominated, chart-topping South Korean group BTS. But none of his bandmates were onstage that night at UBS Arena, on Long Island, New York, because it was the first date of his solo world tour. Since last summer, the members have been focusing on individual projects as each prepares to complete his mandatory military service. The first in BTS to do a solo tour, Suga was also performing as Agust D, the name he adopted in 2016 for making music that was darker, more raw, and more personal than his group work. Last month, he released his studio album D-Day, the powerful conclusion to his trilogy of Agust D records, which delivered social critique and meditations on trauma, fame, mental illness, alienation, and forgiveness.

Suga’s ongoing tour, also titled D-Day, is the first real showcase of his oeuvre, and, on the sold-out U.S. leg of his tour, it felt like a declaration of artistic individuality more than a decade in the making. His concerts exploded with frontman energy and auteurist flourishes. But his most striking achievement was embracing pop music’s empathy-fueling potential while resisting its dehumanizing effects.

All 11 of his U.S. tour dates, which wrapped Wednesday night in Oakland, California, began with a short film that ended with Suga lying on a road in a thunderstorm. This was a reference to when he was hit by a car while working in Seoul part-time as a delivery boy to support himself while training to debut with BTS. The crash left him with a painful shoulder injury that continued to dog him even as BTS went on to achieve international fame. The segue from the video to the real-life Suga being carried onstage, seemingly lifeless, was smooth yet jarring—a reminder of the human vulnerability of a pop star whose fans camp outside concert venues for days.

When I saw Suga on that first night, at UBS Arena, as well as the final U.S. night, at Oakland Arena, his show challenged expectations of what a pop concert can do. On one level it was a dynamic hip-hop show, put on by a technically proficient rapper who as a kid would sample the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music to make his own beats. Suga set the tone for the evening with “Haegeum,” whose title refers both to a Korean string instrument and to the notion of lifting a ban on something that was forbidden. “Endless influx of information prohibits freedom of imagination / And seeks conformity of thought,” Suga rapped in Korean. “Slaves to capitalism, slaves to money, slaves to hatred and prejudice / Slaves to YouTube, slaves to flexin’.” The haegeum’s haunting strings and a deliciously grimy bass vibrated the air. Though the track was written entirely in Korean, the crowd roared the lyrics back to him. He practically entered a hypnotic state while running through a rap-heavy opening sequence with the defiant “Daechwita” and the earlier fan favorites “Agust D” and “Give It to Me.”

[Read: The friends who listen to BTS together stay together]

Before the audience could get too settled, Suga brought out his acoustic guitar, its body decorated with messages and drawings from the other six BTS members. He’d only learned to play the instrument during the pandemic, so his unplugged version of “Seesaw” cut a sharp contrast to previous performances of the song, which featured choreography, backup dancers, and an elaborate set. His effortless swagger during the earlier hype songs gave way to the quieter spectacle of Suga in singer-songwriter mode. Later, he sat down at an upright piano and performed his own version of the 2020 BTS track “Life Goes On” and, in a particularly emotional moment, a solo rendition of the song “Snooze,” which features the singer Woosung and the late Sakamoto. A clip of Suga and Sakamoto’s sole meeting, from late 2022, played beforehand on the big screen—the older musician playing the song on a grand piano while the younger man tries to contain his joy. Sakamoto’s presence on “Snooze,” one of his final collaborations, was especially poignant to Suga, who idolized him and wrote the song to comfort younger struggling artists.

[Read: The astonishing duality of BTS]

Again and again, D-Day allowed Suga to experiment in ways that he hadn’t been able to with BTS, and it was thrilling to see. Yes, he was still clearly a seasoned entertainer, who knew how to command the attention of tens of thousands of people, who could jump around a stage rapping without appearing to take a breath, as during the exhilarating medley of BTS rap songs in the middle of the concert. And at two Los Angeles shows, he welcomed guest appearances by the American singers Max and Halsey for their respective collaborations. But his subversive choices stood out too. The concert was interspersed with short films that evoked the dream logic of David Lynch and the grainy aesthetic of grind-house movies, telling the story of the musician’s three identities: the pop idol Suga, the shadow self Agust D, and the human Min Yoongi. The ultimate artistic aim of the concert seemed to be to clarify each of these distinct selves to the audience while recognizing that they must all exist together. Seeing him perform his solo BTS songs, including “Interlude: Shadow,” as well as his verses from tracks with the other BTS rappers, affirmed that he wasn’t looking to reject his past but instead was proud of it. After all, it had taken him to South Korea’s Blue House, America’s White House, the United Nations General Assembly, and the Grammys stage.

In another fascinating production choice, throughout the show, pieces of the extended stage were pulled to the ceiling by chains, giving Suga less and less space to perform, requiring him to navigate the platform more carefully. For his last pre-encore song, “Amygdala,” he stood on a lonely-looking square as fire blazed all around him, a terrifying prison. The centerpiece of the D-Day album, the emo-rap track serves as an origin story for the alter ego of Agust D, referencing his life’s defining traumas—the car accident, his mother’s heart surgery, and his father’s liver-cancer diagnosis—and how they shaped him. During the song’s final lines, apparently depleted, he collapsed on the ground, and the hooded figures returned to carry him away. Only this time, he wore all white, as though he’d been cleansed, his catharsis complete.

By the encore, all of the stage pieces had been removed, revealing the technical equipment that had been hiding beneath it. Scattered about were fire extinguishers, electrical cords, pyrotechnic devices. No longer elevated above the crowd, Suga performed his last few songs at ground level, right in front of fans, sometimes grabbing their phones and filming himself. These last moments were bittersweet: Much of the audience knew that after the tour ended in Seoul in late June, Suga would begin his military service for at least 18 months. That reality made the concerts feel like a temporary farewell. Fans’ glowing lightsticks rippled like a single wave throughout the arena. Every so often, carried by a feral energy, the crowd would start barking, making Suga gawk or laugh. In Oakland, he told the audience that he would return with the rest of the BTS members, asking fans to wait just a little longer.

On the tour’s first night, one more surprise awaited. I had assumed that the final song would be something sentimental or light-hearted. Instead, Suga walked over to an ominous circle of video cameras, stood right in the middle, and began murmuring the opening bars of “The Last.” This song, off his first mixtape, is one of his best and one of my favorites. It’s also a song I have a hard time listening to these days. On “The Last,” Suga raps about his OCD, depression, and social anxiety. His delivery starts out low and subdued and gradually grows more desperate; by the end he sounds like he’s somewhere between screaming and crying. When I first heard it years ago, I recalled my own unceasing panic attacks and the suffocating desire to die. The song lodged itself in my heart, a welcome shard.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

In recent years, Suga has made more music about growth, about self-love and being okay with uncertainty and suffering. He spoke early during the concert, in English, about wanting to perform with less anger, highlighting songs such as “SDL,” “People,” and “People Pt. 2”; these tracks painted a portrait of someone with a great capacity for measured reflection, forgiveness, and humility in the face of life’s challenges. I understand that too: The relief of no longer hurting so badly, of discovering healing on your own terms. So when I heard the first lines of “The Last” (“On the other side of the famous idol rapper stands my weak self, it’s a bit dangerous”), I froze. What was he doing? Those cameras—arrayed like a surveillance system, transmitting the videos to the screen above him—devoured and projected the anguish he was performing, suggesting that I was devouring it too.

But after a minute, I understood. Though he rapped with the same breathless passion he did as a striving 23-year-old, I realized that he wasn’t performing with pure fury but with an anger tempered by time. This emotion was no less powerful or sincere, but it was less damaging to the person communicating it. These days, he could stand in the flames and feel their heat, but not be consumed by them. He could connect with his younger self without fully becoming that person again.

Then the spell was over. The moment the song ended, the house lights went up so that we could see him walking in silence offstage. No goodbye, no drawn-out thank yous and waves to the cheering audience. Not even a glance backward. On the first night, people exchanged confused looks, shocked by his sudden exit. You could perhaps see this whole finale as a quiet confrontation with an audience, a grand assertion of the self by a beloved artist. But if it was a confrontation, it was one rooted in trust rather than condescension. Trust that the audience can sit with discomfort, that they’re self-aware enough not to be offended or horrified by what he’s showing them.

It was the perfect ending. A concert that began in darkness and mythmaking ended in light and exposure. Suga started the show being carried by others; he ended it by carrying himself out. What more could we want? He had just shown us everything.

Nature Communications, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38677-1

 

 

Drawing a Line

 has told Washington, DC lobbying company FiscalNote that it can't advertise using ChatGPT for politics, Semafor reports.

The Sam Altman-led company jumped into action after FiscalNote proclaimed in a recent press release that it's "bringing the power of next-generation AI and workflow productivity to the multi-billion dollar lobbying and advocacy industry" by integrating ChatGPT into its platform.

The integration was supposedly meant to enhance "political participation," according to an earlier version of the press release, which clearly had OpenAI spooked. Shortly afterward, per Semafor, those last two words were replaced with "grassroots advocacy campaigns" in an editorial note, effectively putting distance between ChatGPT and any potential political use.

The incident sets a new precedent for the AI juggernaut — and possibly for the rest of the industry as well. According to Semafor, it's the first known instance of OpenAI policing how its technology is being advertised by third parties.

Getting Political

The use of AI in politics is a looming topic these days. For instance, we've already seen the Republican National Committee (RNC) make use of generative AI tech for a political ad — which doesn't bode well with a presidential election right around the corner.

According to OpenAI's usage policies, which were last updated back in March, using its products for political campaigning or lobbying is banned.

OpenAI also told Semafor that it's working on a machine learning classifier that can flag when ChatGPT is being used to generate large bodies of electoral campaign or lobbying-related materials.

As tools like ChatGPT become ubiquitous in modern society, companies like OpenAI are bound to face increased scrutiny over how their tech is being used.

And if the rocky history of social media moderation is anything to go by, policing how these products are being deployed, let alone advertised, is only going to become more difficult.

More on ChatGPT: Professor Falsely Accuses Students of Cheating Because ChatGPT Told Him To

The post OpenAI Annoyed by Lobbyists Seizing on ChatGPT appeared first on Futurism.

From upsetting jobs and causing intellectual property issues to models that make up fake answers to questions — here's why we're concerned about Generative AI.

The United States has suffered from a deliberate fuzziness in formulating its objectives in the Russian war in Ukraine. Flaccid phrases like “helping Ukraine defend itself” or, even worse, “putting Ukraine in the best possible position for negotiations” are either meaningless or insipid. Bureaucratic mental fog is masquerading as artful policy, and it is dangerous. Strategy is the matching of means to ends. In war it is easy to become obsessed with action rather than purpose, and thereby to fall into Nietzsche’s famous description of the most common human stupidity: forgetting what one intended to do in the first place.

Ukraine knows how it defines victory: the pre-2014 borders cleansed of the invader, its exiles and refugees returned, its society and economy rebuilt, membership in the European Union and NATO attained, and some measure of justice for Russian rapists, torturers, and murderers secured. Similarly, we know how the Russians define victory: a Ukraine broken and severed from the West, much of its territory annexed; a Europe in disarray that resumes its addiction to cheap natural resources and business opportunities in Moscow; and the reconstruction of much of the old Russian imperial state.

We should want victory as Ukraine defines it. But to achieve it, the West must not only aid in the defeat of Russia—it must convince Russia that it has been defeated.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

A Russia that prevails would be a Russia even further empowered to meddle in Europe and to expand its influence with unlimited violence; a Russia that will have learned that it can commit slaughter and atrocities with impunity; a Russia whose ambitions will grow with success. A Russian victory would, as well, teach the world that the West—including the United States—lacks the resolve, despite its wealth, to follow through on its commitments, offering Beijing an encouraging lesson.

Conversely, Russian defeat would put Beijing—already somewhat nervous about its partner’s incompetence and wild statements—on the defensive, consolidate the Western alliance, and help preserve some of the essential norms of decent behavior in those parts of the world most important to us. Above all, it would block the Russian imperial project for good, because without Ukraine, as the historian Dominic Lieven has noted, Russia cannot be an empire.

Russian defeat does not require a march on Moscow (rarely a good idea in the past), and it does not require a Russia that is defenseless and devastated (impossible without World War III). Rather, it will be achieved inside the heads of Russia’s leaders and population. Russia must be convinced that the military instrument, and its deployment in large-scale war, will inevitably fail, and it must realize that Ukraine is permanently and completely lost.

Such things have happened before. Israel did not occupy Arab capitals in 1967, but that war caused the Arab states to abandon the notion that they could annihilate the Jewish state through conventional means. The 1973 war forced the conclusion that even limited conventional conflict was too hazardous to attempt.

In Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States was defeated without losing a single battle. We became convinced that fighting was both futile and painful, that our enemies were implacable and unbeatable, and that the price paid in blood, treasure, and attention was in no way worth the cost and never would be.

Carl von Clausewitz, the German philosopher of war, said that war is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter. Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.

[Hein Goemans and Branislav Slantchev: Why Ukraine shouldn’t talk to Russia—yet]

Russia’s theories of victory in Ukraine have collapsed one by one. Putin began by believing that the country would fall in a week; then that it would succumb to a month or two of hard fighting; then that Europe would abandon it during a cold winter without Russian gas; then that Ukraine could be bludgeoned into submission by attacking its cities. The final theory of victory—that the West does not have the heart to pour vast resources into Ukraine indefinitely—needs to be disproved as well, because there is nothing beyond that.

To that end, with the utmost urgency, the West should give everything that Ukraine could possibly use, including long-range missiles to break for good the 11-mile Kerch bridge between the mainland and Crimea, and cluster munitions to devastate Russian fighting vehicles and infantry. Breaking the Russian army, as we have, by spending only a small fraction of our defense budget and none of our blood is an astounding strategic bargain.

Russians must, moreover, conclude that Ukraine—formerly, in their view, a pseudo-state containing “cousins” or “little brothers”—is gone forever. That means speedy accession to the EU and NATO, but also a deep Western commitment to rebuilding Ukraine economically and, most important, arming it to the teeth for years to come.

The paltering of the administration about giving our superabundant F-16s to Ukraine is foolish and shortsighted. These jets might not make a difference on the battlefield two months from now, but the knowledge that several hundred of them are in the pipeline for the next five years would have profound symbolic importance. We should be talking about how we will rebuild Ukraine’s armed forces, the West’s largest, most combat-tested, and in some ways most determined army.

The West needs an aggressive information campaign to drive home the reality of Russian defeat. Russians need to be reminded that their faltering economy is only a tenth the size of the EU’s; that they cannot build and deploy a modern tank; that their latest high-performance jet, the Su-57, will be outnumbered by the F-35s of the four small Nordic states; that their generals are superannuated and incompetent; that their high command is indifferent to their men’s lives; that their equipment is inferior to that of Ukraine; and that their logistics are rotted by graft and corruption.

Information warfare should be reinforced by continued sanctions, whose aim is not so much to win the war as to cripple Russian war-making potential for the long run by depressing the economy and forcing Russia to make do with inferior components and spare parts.

Russia must be isolated politically and psychologically as well, thereby playing on the country’s historical ambivalence about the West, represented in its two capitals: St. Petersburg, facing Europe, and Moscow, facing Asia. But Russian literature, art, culture, and political practice are rooted in its relationship with Europe. The time may come—years or, more likely, decades from now—when a postimperial Russia will turn westward again.

This is all doable. In fact, it has happened on a smaller scale before. Russian leaders became convinced in the late 1970s and early ’80s that they could not keep up with advances in Western military technology, even as they fought and lost the war in Afghanistan. The Gorbachev upheaval was in part the result of this realization.

[David J. Kramer, John Herbst, and William Taylor: The only realistic answer to Putin]

But our expectations today should be measured. Unfortunately, a defeated Russia will still be malevolent, angry, and vengeful; it will probably still be ruled by the “vertical of power,” the hard men from the security ministries; it will be suffused with lawlessness and murder; and it will engage in subversion, political warfare, and malicious behavior of all kinds. But who would not prefer to deal with a thousand troll farms and front organizations than one Mariupol? And this Russia would be far less dangerous to us, far less useful to China, far less likely to raise monstrous new threats in the years to come.

The key to this strategy is courage. We must conquer our fears of Russian threats and escalation, of its nuclear bravado, and even of Russian collapse. We must be strategic and shrewd, but nothing can be accomplished without courage. In the words of John Paul II—the unarmed, lone old man who did so much to bring Soviet communism to its knees—“Never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”

This article was adapted from a speech given to the Polish Institute of International Affairs’s Strategic Ark conference on May 17, 2023.

Nature Communications, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38714-z

 

 

Fandom Fracas

Writers are threatening to pull their stories from Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the world's largest fanfiction websites, after staff posted that they will not prohibit the publication of artificial intelligence-generated fanfiction on the website.

Typifying the anger, one Twitter user wrote that they "would rather have one hundred thousand unreadably bad human-written fics added to AO3 every day than one AI fic."

The fandom drama kicked off earlier this month when the nonprofit group Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which oversees AO3, posted an excerpt of an interview with Betsy Rosenblatt, professor of law at The University of Tulsa and chairperson of OTW's legal committee, who expressed enthusiasm over AI scraping fanfiction on the Internet.

"One of the things that excites me — which is probably a bit off to the side of what most people are talking about with AI and copyright — is that AIs are reading fan fiction now," she said in the interview, originally published in February by the Association of Research Libraries.

Friends to Enemies

Fanfic writers expressed outrage.

"I think OTW’s Legal Chair Betsy Rosenblatt needs to step down," one wrote on Twitter. "I don't want a rep of OTW chatting happily about how great it is to train AI on fanfic."

But at least one writer was pleased that somebody, even an AI bot, was reading their smutty fanfic.

"AI CHATGPT fanfic bots scraping my AO3 and filling their neural networks with my depraved gay incest porn," one quipped.

Epilogue Ride

After deleting the interview excerpt and posting an apology, OTW published a blog post that said staff members had put in place "technical measures to hinder large-scale data scraping on AO3" in a bid to calm frayed tempers.

However, in the same blog post, OTW staff also wrote that AO3's Terms of Service does not prohibit AI-generated fanfiction.

"If fans are using AI to generate fanworks, then our current position is that this is also a type of work that is within our mandate to preserve," it wrote.

This isn't the first bump in the road for the fanfiction community when it comes to AI. It recently came to light, for instance, that Sudowrite, an AI writing assistant, was able to generate fiction that featured the concept "omegaverse," an erotic fanfiction trope — leading to suspicion that OpenAI's GPT, which powers Sudowrite, had trained its model on data scraped from the AO3 website, which has an ever-expanding trove of stories set in disparate worlds ranging from "Harry Potter" to Goethe's "Faust."

More on AI: Newspaper Apologizes for Accidentally Running Deranged AI-Generated Article

The post Writers Furious When Fanfiction Site Won’t Ban AI-Generated Work appeared first on Futurism.

A new artificial intelligence system called a semantic decoder can translate a person’s brain activity—while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story—into a continuous stream of text.

The system might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again.

The study in the journal Nature Neuroscience was led by Jerry Tang, a doctoral student in computer science, and Alex Huth, an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. The work relies in part on a transformer model, similar to the ones that power Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

You can listen to a short podcast about the research here:

How it works

Unlike other language decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive. Participants also do not need to use only words from a prescribed list. Brain activity is measured using an fMRI scanner after extensive training of the decoder, in which the individual listens to hours of podcasts in the scanner. Later, provided that the participant is open to having their thoughts decoded, their listening to a new story or imagining telling a story allows the machine to generate corresponding text from brain activity alone.

“For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences,” Huth says. “We’re getting the model to decode continuous language for extended periods of time with complicated ideas.”

The result is not a word-for-word transcript. Instead, researchers designed it to capture the gist of what is being says or thought, albeit imperfectly. About half the time, when the decoder has been trained to monitor a participant’s brain activity, the machine produces text that closely (and sometimes precisely) matches the intended meanings of the original words.

For example, in experiments, a participant listening to a speaker say, “I don’t have my driver’s license yet” had their thoughts translated as, “She has not even started to learn to drive yet.” Listening to the words, “I didn’t know whether to scream, cry or run away. Instead, I said, ‘Leave me alone!'” was decoded as, “Started to scream and cry, and then she just said, ‘I told you to leave me alone.'”

Beginning with an earlier version of the paper that appeared as a preprint online, the researchers addressed questions about potential misuse of the technology. The paper describes how decoding worked only with cooperative participants who had participated willingly in training the decoder. Results for individuals on whom the decoder had not been trained were unintelligible, and if participants on whom the decoder had been trained later put up resistance—for example, by thinking other thoughts—results were similarly unusable.

“We take very seriously the concerns that it could be used for bad purposes and have worked to avoid that,” Tang says. “We want to make sure people only use these types of technologies when they want to and that it helps them.”

In addition to having participants listen or think about stories, the researchers asked subjects to watch four short, silent videos while in the scanner. The semantic decoder was able to use their brain activity to accurately describe certain events from the videos.

The system currently is not practical for use outside of the laboratory because of its reliance on the time need on an fMRI machine. But the researchers think this work could transfer to other, more portable brain-imaging systems, such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).

“fNIRS measures where there’s more or less blood flow in the brain at different points in time, which, it turns out, is exactly the same kind of signal that fMRI is measuring,” Huth says. “So, our exact kind of approach should translate to fNIRS,” although, he notes, the resolution with fNIRS would be lower.

Frequently asked questions

Could this technology be used on someone without them knowing, say by an authoritarian regime interrogating political prisoners or an employer spying on employees?

No. The system has to be extensively trained on a willing subject in a facility with large, expensive equipment. “A person needs to spend up to 15 hours lying in an MRI scanner, being perfectly still, and paying good attention to stories that they’re listening to before this really works well on them,” says Huth.

Could training be skipped altogether?

No. The researchers tested the system on people whom it hadn’t been trained on and found that the results were unintelligible.

Are there ways someone can defend against having their thoughts decoded?

Yes. The researchers tested whether a person who had previously participated in training could actively resist subsequent attempts at brain decoding. Tactics like thinking of animals or quietly imagining telling their own story let participants easily and completely thwart the system from recovering the speech the person was exposed to.

What if technology and related research evolved to one day overcome these obstacles or defenses?

“I think right now, while the technology is in such an early state, it’s important to be proactive by enacting policies that protect people and their privacy,” Tang says. “Regulating what these devices can be used for is also very important.”

This work was supported by the Whitehall Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

Alexander Huth and Jerry Tang have filed a PCT patent application related to this work.

Source: UT Austin

The post Brain activity decoder translates thoughts into text appeared first on Futurity.

Antonio Vento is 13 years old. He’s a tiny figure in bandages who doesn’t walk and, until recently, couldn’t see more than shadows. He has dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, an inherited disease that makes his skin so fragile that kids with the illness are called “butterfly children.”

But now, thanks to a novel gene therapy squirted onto his skin and dripped into his eyes, things are better. His wounds have gotten smaller, and a visit to the eye doctor this week confirmed that his vision had dramatically improved.

“They said my right eye is 20/25,” he chirped in Spanish during a phone call. “Now I can see small things.” That includes the blocks and items in the video game Minecraft, which he has started to play.

And call him Anthony, he said. He prefers it.

On Friday, the 

 approved the gene-replacement treatment Anthony received, making it the first gene therapy for sale that is applied to the outside of a patient’s body—as well as the first intended to be used on the same person repeatedly.

For “butterfly children” like Anthony, the problem is that their bodies don’t make the type of collagen that holds the skin’s layers together. The result is chronic, blistering wounds—all over the skin, but also inside the throat and sometimes on the eyes.

The treatment introduces a missing gene to skin cells so they can make collagen, and the novel delivery strategy is already being studied to treat other rare skin conditions. An inhaled gene therapy to treat cystic fibrosis is also being explored.

The treatment, called Vyjuvek, was developed by the Pittsburgh startup Krystal Biotech and is approved for treating anyone older than six months of age with this specific form of epidermolysis bullosa, a condition that until now has had few treatment options and affects only about 3,000 people in the US, according to the company.

“Since he was born, all I do is change bandages and heal wounds,” says Anthony’s mother, Yunielkys Carvajal, who emigrated to the US from Cuba in 2012 under a humanitarian visa to seek treatment for Anthony.

Since 2017, the FDA has approved five gene therapies for rare inherited diseases—Krystal’s will make it six—and several others for treating blood cancer.

But those earlier treatments are all delivered by injection or by altering immune cells outside the body. By formulating gene therapy into an ointment that’s rubbed on, Krystal has achieved what its CEO, Krish Krishnan, has called “a simple, convenient, patient-friendly way to provide the missing gene to these patients.”

The company did not say how much the treatment will cost, but other gene therapies have set record prices with the highest, for hemophilia B, coming in at $3.5 million.

Gene replacement for skin may also have lucrative future uses in cosmetics. A subsidiary established by Krystal has begun testing a version of the drug on volunteers to try to reverse crow’s feet and other wrinkles caused when people’s bodies make less collagen as they age.

That project, if it succeeds, could lead to a future where gene therapy is given to adults for non-medical enhancement, not just to treat dire health conditions. The subsidiary, named Jeune, refers to itself as a “gene-based aesthetics company.”

Really impressive

Evidence that the treatment works was presented in  a 2022 study carried out by Krystal in which Anthony was among 31 epidermolysis bullosa patients between the ages of one and 44 who had the gene-therapy ointment applied to their most severe wounds, while a placebo was put on other wounds they had for comparison. 

Caravajal, Anthony’s mother, says that during the study they picked a particularly big and painful wound on his heel. “We put it on and it went away and never opened again,” she says. “That was incredible. That was a big, chronic wound, and I’ve never seen it again. That really impressed me.”

The treatment made that wound go away, and others are shrinking, but it’s not a cure. One reason is that skin cells are constantly being replaced with new cells, which suffer from the same genetic defect. That means the therapy has to be reapplied by a nurse or doctor once a week.

Krystal says its treatment is the first gene therapy approved for such repeated use.

“I think it is really exciting, but I do worry about how durable the treatment is,” says Denitsa Milanova, founder of a Boston startup, Marble Therapeutics, which also works on gene therapy. She says collagen forms fibers in the skin that last about two or three months.

Milanova also believes the ointment only works because it’s applied to raw wounds, where the underlying layers, including skin stem cells, are exposed and can accept new genes. “But you can’t rub this on healthy skin, it wouldn’t work,” she says. That is because of how normal skin acts as a barrier, a fact which may explain why, in Krystal’s tests to combat wrinkles, its gene therapy is being injected into the skin with a needle.

Herpes virus

Scientists now have numerous tools to manipulate genes in their labs, where fixing cells in a dish or even curing mice of deadly conditions is commonplace. But the challenge in treating people is that it is harder to get corrected DNA into their bodies, a problem known as gene delivery.

Krystal is among dozens of companies seeking innovative ways to deliver replacement genes to more locations in the human body, including hard-to-reach organs like the brain.

“Delivery is the most important factor in genetic medicine,” says Maxx Chatsko, founder of Solt DB, a publisher and investment analysis company, who also buys and sells shares in biotech companies (including Krystal). “I think this could eventually be the first gene therapy people dose at home.”

Gene delivery usually involves placing a DNA strand inside a virus naturally equipped to enter a human cell and drop off the gene. In Krystal’s case, the company is using herpes simplex virus, the same one that causes cold sores.

HSV-1, as the virus is known, is very common—about half the people in the world are infected by it. That means it is fairly safe, but it also has the advantage that it naturally evades the immune system. Krishnan says that feature is what permits the drug to be used repeatedly, without causing negative reactions.

While the startup has been successful, Chatsko says there has also been some controversy over how it hit upon its strategy. In 2022, Krystal agreed to pay up to $75 million to another startup, PeriphaGen, which accused Krishnan and the company of pilfering its ideas and technology.  

Eye drops

Whether or not this is a case of a stolen “Eureka,” Krystal has already demonstrated the versatility of its approach by developing an eye-drop version of the drug at the request of Anthony’s ophthalmologist, Alfonso Sabater, director of the Corneal Innovation Lab at the University of Miami’s medical school.

“When I learned he was in the skin trial, I thought, why don’t we try that on the eye,” says Sabater, who reached a special agreement with the FDA to test the idea on a single patient, Anthony. First, Sabater surgically removed a layer of scar tissue that had built up on Anthony’s eyes. After that, he says, monthly use of the eye drops appears to have stopped those injuries from returning. 

“I think this is also the first time there’s a gene therapy for the cornea, and the first time it’s in an eye drop,” says Sabater.

It’s unclear whether or not Krystal intends to commercialize the eye-drop version of the drug.

Flight from Cuba

Anthony’s mother says the family’s encounter with cutting-edge gene technology couldn’t have been predicted when her son was born. By the time he was three, however, he had blisters on his eyes and found it difficult to swallow.

He later lost his vision, and as wounds formed on his joints, Anthony says, “it became scary to walk, so I stopped walking.”

Caravajal says she left her job at a telephone company to care for Anthony and then resolved to leave her country as well. “Cuba is a Third World country. They didn’t know the condition, and there was no medicine,” says Caravajal. “If we’d stayed in Cuba, I don’t know what would have happened.”

“I had two choices, and I chose to launch myself into the unknown,” she says.

Anthony’s father, Antonio Vento, holds a Spanish passport, so he was able to fly to the US and secure a humanitarian visa for Anthony and his mother. She remembers the date they arrived: the 16th of December, 2012.

The family first tried to get acclimated and sought out a team of doctors to help Anthony. But his mother was ready to try for more. “It’s a degenerative disease. It’s not something you can go to the pharmacy for, but you don’t want to sit with your arms crossed, either,” she says.

Anthony was first enrolled in a clinical trial in California with a company called Fibrocell. That treatment had no effect, but Caravajal says that’s when she met Suma Krishnan, president of Krystal (she and Krystal’s CEO are married), who encouraged her to enroll Anthony in the study of the gene-therapy ointment.

The results have been impressive. “It’s not a definitive cure, but it’s the best I have seen with his wounds. Every time we see the doctor we take pictures, and his injuries are smaller now, and some are gone,” says Caravajal

The family has remained part of the clinical study, which has continued in an open phase that allows the volunteers to keep accessing the drug. Each visit, they get to use eight small ampules of the gene cream, and they can decide where on Anthony’s body to put it.  

What happens next, when the drug needs to be purchased, is an open question for the family.

“We tell them that we need this medicine, and we don’t want it to stop,” says Caravajal. “If it were possible, we’d use more.”

 

 

Fire Sale

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), a federal watchdog, is warning customers that certain combination smoke and carbon monoxide detectors being sold on 

 are absolutely terrible at alerting consumers that their homes are on fire.

In other words, the e-commerce giant is selling smoke detectors that can't reliably detect smoke — an astoundingly troubling finding that could put consumers at great risk.

The brand in question was selling the battery-powered safety devices for around $46 a pop, according to the CPSC. Fortunately, Amazon appears to have already intervened and a quick search on the platform of the brand now offers up no results.

Besides, the brand's letter salad name itself should've made anybody think twice about pulling the trigger.

"I'm positively shocked that a product made by the long-trusted, loyalty-inducing, stalwart brand 'BQQZHZ' turns out to be a dangerous piece of garbage,"quipped Consumer Reports investigative reporter Lauren Kirchner.

No Smoking

The incident demonstrates the very real risks Amazon exposes its customers to. Experts have long warned that the retailer has been selling thousands of banned and unsafe products, making it a dangerous flea market of mindboggling proportions.

A 2019 investigation by The Wall Street Journal found over 4,000 items for sale that had been declared unsafe, deceptively labeled, or outright banned. At least half of them were toys or medications that lacked the necessary warning labels.

In 2021, the CPSC sued Amazon in an attempt to stop it from allowing third parties of selling hazardous products to its customers. Among those products were children's pajamas that could catch on fire, hair dryers that could electrocute you if they were dropped in water — and, of course, dysfunctional carbon monoxide detectors.

As a response, Amazon simply removed the listings in question.

Unfortunately, the CPSC only has limited powers to order any recalls itself, and going to court is a costly endeavor.

But putting public pressure has already worked out for the watchdog as a strategy in the past. In 2021, fitness brand Peloton refused to recall its treadmills in light of reports that they could be dangerous to children.

After the CPSC released a graphic video of a child being sucked underneath a Peloton treadmill to up the pressure on the stationary bike brand, though, the company eventually gave in and ordered a recall.

More on Amazon: Amazon Is Being Flooded With Books Entirely Written by AI

The post Government Warns That Amazon Smoke Detector Doesn't Detect Smoke appeared first on Futurism.

This has never been done before.

Early on in Master Gardener, the taciturn, mysterious protagonist sits down and starts writing in a journal, essaying his thoughts in voice-over. I saw the film with a packed audience that immediately let out a knowing chuckle. The director Paul Schrader’s explorations of the inner life of “God’s lonely man” have included a lot of cinematic diaries over the years. Master Gardener completes a trilogy that began with 2018’s First Reformed and 2021’s The Card Counter, tales of men wrestling with chaotic guilt and seeking a modicum of redemption. The series has helped bring new attention and deserved praise to Schrader’s body of work.

Master Gardener focuses on perhaps the touchiest topic yet in Schrader’s challenging filmography: neo-Nazism and white supremacy. It’s also, surprisingly, the most optimistic of his “man in a room” movies. Is Schrader becoming a softie in his advancing age? Maybe, but I think Master Gardener’s sensitivity is provocative in and of itself, daring the audience to forgive a man whose past is steeped in profound evil.

[Read: A film that draws you into a frightening—and compelling—psyche]

The atonement arc largely succeeds, though Schrader is guilty of barreling through some moments of character development and acceptance that might take a lifetime to achieve in reality. Each film in the trilogy takes on themes of staggering weight: In First Reformed, the specter of an apocalypse hangs over the main character. In The Card Counter, the protagonist is haunted by his former identity as a torturer for the U.S. military in Iraq. In Master Gardener, Narvel Roth (played by Joel Edgerton) is a meticulous gardener on a huge estate run by the wealthy dowager Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver); only she knows that he was once a violent neo-Nazi, and that his body is covered in white-supremacist tattoos.

The relationship between Norma and Narvel is cloyingly genteel on the surface. She calls him “sweet pea” and completely trusts in his maintenance of her gardens. But she has an unspoken level of control over him, fueled by his shame; he wants his past to remain unknown, and he dresses in long sleeves and pants even on the sunniest days to hide it away. The statuesque Weaver expertly underplays Norma’s frightening WASPiness, letting out the barest hints of her true vindictiveness; meanwhile, Edgerton directs all his intensity inward, taking as much care with every brusque line reading as Narvel does with his beloved plants.

The garden landscape, a hideaway that looks prim and proper but is also a habitat for radical transformation, is a perfect metaphor for the overall story. Much like the time lapses that Schrader layers throughout the film, of flowers growing and blooming under scrupulous care, Narvel’s own progress is aided by his strict schedule and spartan lifestyle (along with, the audience learns, an arrest for violent crimes that led to a plea deal and his placement in witness protection). The final step in that journey arrives with Norma’s grandniece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), a disaffected young biracial woman in need of a job and stability that Norma thinks the regimented Narvel can provide.

Narvel and Maya’s eventual bond is the most complicated twist in his metamorphosis. And it’s another thread that’s deeply reminiscent of First Reformed and The Card Counter, whose protagonists open up after more-grounded women enter their lives. There’s something endearing about Schrader repeating the same plot beats again and again; even his famed script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver back in 1976 saw a man writing in a diary and struggling with both his potential for evil and his capacity to forge a romantic bond.

That film ends extremely pessimistically, whereas this recent trilogy equivocates on whether people can genuinely better themselves. Master Gardener needs the audience to buy into Narvel and Maya’s relationship, and if they don’t, the heartfelt finale may come off to some as an unrealistic fairytale. But it worked for me, largely because of the way Edgerton’s wounded, cautious performance bumps up against Swindell’s raw nerviness. Master Gardener is a spiky and often mournful tale, but I appreciated the bits of hope Schrader mixes in to temper the bleaker realities he’s tended to for so long.

Nature, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01702-w

 

 

Two years after losing NASA's much-coveted Human Landing Systems (HLS) contract to SpaceX and its explosion-prone Starship spacecraft, Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin has finally scored some of its own federal funding to build a lunar lander.

After Blue Origin made a huge fuss over NASA's decision to award SpaceX — and SpaceX only — the almost $3 billion HLS contract back in 2021, the agency established a second initiative called the Sustaining Lunar Development program.

And today, NASA officially awarded a Blue Origin-led team, which also includes industry titans Lockheed Martin and Boeing, a $3.4 billion contract for its upcoming Artemis V mission.

Put simply, Bezos has finally got his consolation prize, possibly — but by no means certainly — putting an end to years of bickering between two of the richest men in the world.

Before we go on, here's a little refresher: Artemis II is the first scheduled crewed mission of NASA's Orion spacecraft and will involve a crewed lunar flyby. NASA selected SpaceX's Starship as its lunar lander — but not launch rocket — for its Artemis III mission, the first planned lunar landing mission, which is tentatively scheduled for 2025. Artemis IV will add NASA's Lunar Gateway to the mix.

And the agency's Artemis V mission is slated to launch in 2029, and will involve sending astronauts from the Lunar Gateway to the Moon's south pole inside Blue Origin's lunar lander.

"Today we are excited to announce Blue Origin will build a human landing system as NASA’s second provider to deliver Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in an announcement, adding that "we are in a golden age of human spaceflight."

NASA backed up its decision to award Blue Origin the contract, arguing that adding a second lunar lander system partner "will increase competition, reduce costs to taxpayers, support a regular cadence of lunar landings, further invest in the lunar economy, and help NASA achieve its goals on and around the Moon in preparation for future astronaut missions to Mars."

Much love was lost over the years leading up to today's decision, a process that was fraught with fingerpointing, mudslinging, and legal action.

The original HLS contract sent sparks flying, with Bezos and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk repeatedly butting heads over who got to enjoy the fruits of NASA's ambitious plans to return humans to the Moon.

Things really started heating up when Blue Origin called out NASA's decision to award its HLS contract to SpaceX as being "flawed," accusations that culminated in Bezos suing NASA.

Musk took the opportunity to tear into Bezos, going as far as to suggest that Bezos should be zapped "on the head with our space lasers."

"He should consider spending some money on actual lunar lander hardware, instead of shady lobbyists," Musk tweeted at the time.

Blue Origin didn't take these accusations lightly and attempted to undermine public confidence in SpaceX's Starship launch platform, arguing that it was "immensely complex and high risk."

Meanwhile, NASA was trapped in the crossfire, stuck with its own heavy-launch rocket that wasn't just years late, but billions of dollars over budget.

To its relief, NASA's Space Launch System performed admirably during the agency's first Artemis mission late last year, an uncrewed journey around the Moon and back.

The mission sets the stage for both SpaceX and Blue Origin, which now have their work cut out to live up to their promises of developing a reliable capsule capable of safely delivering astronauts to the lunar surface.

While SpaceX has made tangible progress in developing its Starship spacecraft — explosions notwithstanding — we have yet to see much of Blue Origin's "Blue Moon" lander beyond some renders and a full-scale dummy lander being delivered to NASA back in 2020.

Fortunately, Blue Origin has a bit more time, with until 2029 to get its ducks in a row.

Beyond the bitter feud between the two space companies, today's news highlights NASA's immense confidence in the private space industry to realize its goal of returning the first astronauts to the lunar surface in over half a century.

"This is an incredible pivot in history," Ars Technica's Eric Berger tweeted. "We have a private competition to build landers to put humans on the Moon, with fixed price contracts, that pits two of the richest Americans against one another."

"This is not your mama's NASA," he added.

More on Artemis: NASA's New Artemis II Graphics Are So Freaking Awesome

The post NASA Awards Sore Loser Jeff Bezos a Consolation Prize Moon Contract appeared first on Futurism.

Nature Communications, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38696-y

Nature Communications, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38403-x

Last week, at Google’s annual conference dedicated to new products and technologies, the company announced a change to its premier AI product: The Bard chatbot, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, will soon be able to describe images. Although it may seem like a minor update, the enhancement is part of a quiet revolution in how companies, researchers, and consumers develop and use AI—pushing the technology not only beyond remixing written language and into different media, but toward the loftier goal of a rich and thorough comprehension of the world. ChatGPT is six months old, and it’s already starting to look outdated.  

That program and its cousins, known as large language models, mime intelligence by predicting what words are statistically likely to follow one another in a sentence. Researchers have trained these models on ever more text—at this point, every book ever and then some—with the premise that force-feeding machines more words in different configurations will yield better predictions and smarter programs. This text-maximalist approach to AI development has been dominant, especially among the most public-facing corporate products, for years.

But language-only models such as the original ChatGPT are now giving way to machines that can also process images, audio, and even sensory data from robots. The new approach might reflect a more human understanding of intelligence, an early attempt to approximate how a child learns by existing in and observing the world. It might also help companies build AI that can do more stuff and therefore be packaged into more products.

GPT-4 and Bard are not the only programs with these expanded capabilities. Also last week, Meta released a program called ImageBind that processes text, images, audio, information about depth, infrared radiation, and information about motion and position. Google’s recent PaLM-E was trained on both language and robot sensory data, and the company has teased a new, more powerful model that moves beyond text. Microsoft has its own model, which was trained on words and images. Text-to-image generators such as DALL-E 2, which captivated the internet last summer, are trained on captioned pictures.

These are known as multimodal models—text is one modality, images another—and many researchers hope they will bring AI to new heights. The grandest future is one in which AI isn’t limited to writing formulaic essays and assisting people in Slack; it would be able to search the internet without making things up, animate a video, guide a robot, or create a website on its own (as GPT-4 did in a demonstration, based on a loose concept sketched by a human).

[Read: ChatGPT changed everything. Now its follow-up is here.]

A multimodal approach could theoretically solve a central problem with language-only models: Even if they can fluently string words together, they struggle to connect those words to concepts, ideas, objects, or events. “When they talk about a traffic jam, they don’t have any experience of traffic jams beyond what they’ve associated with it from other pieces of language,” Melanie Mitchell, an AI researcher and a cognitive scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, told me—but if an AI’s training data could include videos of traffic jams, “there’s a lot more information that they can glean.” Learning from more types of data could help AI models envision and interact with physical environments, develop something approaching common sense, and even address problems with fabrication. If a model understands the world, it might be less likely to invent things about it.

The push for multimodal models is not entirely new; Google, Facebook, and others introduced automated image-captioning systems nearly a decade ago. But a few key changes in AI research have made cross-domain approaches more possible and promising in the past few years, Jing Yu Koh, who studies multimodal AI at Carnegie Mellon, told me. Whereas for decades, computer-science fields such as natural-language processing, computer vision, and robotics used extremely different methods, now they all use a programming method called “deep learning.” As a result, their code and approaches have become more similar, and their models are easier to integrate into one another. And internet giants such as Google and Facebook have curated ever-larger data sets of images and videos, and computers are becoming powerful enough to handle them.

There’s a practical reason for the change too. The internet, no matter how incomprehensibly large it may seem, contains a finite amount of text for AI to be trained on. And there’s a realistic limit to how big and unwieldy these programs can get, as well as how much computing power they can use, Daniel Fried, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, told me. Researchers are “starting to move beyond text to hopefully make models more capable with the data that they can collect.” Indeed, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and, thanks in part to this week’s Senate testimony, a kind of poster boy for the industry, has said that the era of scaling text-based models is likely over—only months after ChatGPT reportedly became the fastest-growing consumer app in history.

How much better multimodal AI will understand the world than ChatGPT, and how much more fluent its language will be, if at all, is up for debate. Although many exhibit better performance over language-only programs—especially in tasks involving images and 3-D scenarios, such as describing photos and envisioning the outcome of a sentence—in other domains, they have not been as stellar. In the technical report accompanying GPT-4, researchers at OpenAI reported almost no improvement on standardized-test performance when they added vision. The model also continues to hallucinate—confidently making false statements that are absurd, subtly wrong, or just plain despicable. Google’s PaLM-E actually did worse on language tasks than the language-only PaLM model, perhaps because adding the robot sensory information traded off with losing some language in its training data and abilities. Still, such research is in its early phases, Fried said, and could improve in years to come.

We remain far from anything that would truly emulate how people think. “Whether these models are going to reach human-level intelligence—I think that’s not likely, given the kinds of architectures that they use right now,” Mitchell told me. Even if a program such as Meta’s ImageBind can process images and sound, humans also learn by interacting with other people, have long-term memory and grow from experience, and are the products of millions of years of evolution—to name only a few ways artificial and organic intelligence don’t align.

[Read: AI search is a disaster]

And just as throwing more textual data at AI models didn’t solve long-standing problems with bias and fabrication, throwing more types of data at the machines won’t necessarily do so either. A program that ingests not only biased text but also biased images will still produce harmful outputs, just across more media. Text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion, for instance, have been shown to perpetuate racist and sexist biases, such as associating Black faces with the word thug. Opaque infrastructures and training data sets make it hard to regulate and audit the software; the possibility of labor and copyright violations might only grow as AI has to vacuum up even more types of data.

Multimodal AI might even be more susceptible to certain kinds of manipulations, such as altering key pixels in an image, than models proficient only in language, Mitchell said. Some form of fabrication will likely continue, and perhaps be even more convincing and dangerous because the hallucinations will be visual—imagine AI conjuring a scandal on the scale of fake images of Donald Trump’s arrest. “I don’t think multimodality is a silver bullet or anything for many of these issues,” Koh said.

Intelligence aside, multimodal AI might just be a better business proposition. Language models are already a gold rush for Silicon Valley: Before the corporate boom in multimodality, OpenAI reportedly expected $1 billion in revenue by 2024; multiple recent analyses predicted that ChatGPT will add tens of billions of dollars to Microsoft’s annual revenue in a few years.

Going multimodal could be like searching for El Dorado. Such programs will simply offer more to customers than the plain, text-only ChatGPT, such as describing images and videos, interpreting or even producing diagrams, being more useful personal assistants, and so on. Multimodal AI could help consultants and venture capitalists make better slide decks, improve existing but spotty software that describes images and the environment to visually impaired people, speed the processing of onerous electronic health records, and guide us along streets not as a map, but by observing the buildings around us.

Applications to robotics, self-driving cars, medicine, and more are easy to conjure, even if they never materialize—like a golden city that, even if it proves mythical, still justifies conquest. Multimodality will not need to produce clearly more intelligent machines to take hold. It just needs to make more apparently profitable ones.

The risk of wildfire is higher in areas where trees and shrubs have replaced grasses, according to a new study.

Across the United States over the past decade, an average of over 61,000 wildfires have burned some 7.2 million acres per year.

Once a wildfire starts spreading, the firefighting task is exacerbated by issues like spot fires, where winds carry lofted sparks and start new fires outside of the original fire perimeter. The greater the potential spot fire distance, the more difficult wildfires are to monitor, control, and suppress.

The new study finds that as woody plants like shrubs and trees replace herbaceous plants like grasses, spot fires can occur farther away from the original fire perimeter. This “woody encroachment” is not only a major issue in grasslands where the study takes place, but also in wetland and savanna systems like longleaf pine, an important ecosystem in Florida.

“Spot fires are one of the most common reasons why houses burn in a wildfire,” says Victoria Donovan, an assistant professor with the School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences at the West Florida Research and Education Center at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).

“It’s not typically because the flames from wildfire reach a house, but that embers from that fire land on roofs, travel through home ventilation systems, or land on other combustible material on or near the home, and ignite the house from there. They’re a big concern for structural damage.”

The findings indicate that prescribed fire, which is commonly used in Florida to control woody plant growth, could help reduce spot fires.

The researchers looked at three phases of woody encroachment: the first a largely grassland area, the second grassland with new forested growth, and the third a dense forest.

They modeled the research using a mathematical fire simulation program and considered various conditions in Loess Canyons Experimental Landscape in south Nebraska. Donovan conducted this study as a researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“Our study shows that the risk of spot fire is much lower when you’re burning under the weather conditions used for prescribed fire, regardless of encroachment phase, compared to waiting for the potentially more extreme conditions we can see during wildfires,” Donovan says.

“This tells us that using prescribed fire early to control encroachment and reduce fuel load is a lot safer than waiting for a wildfire to occur.”

The safety concerns of woody encroachment extend beyond structures and residents to also include the firefighters battling the blaze.

“It is not only spot fire distance that increases wildfire risk from woody encroachment. Shrubs and trees can grow much taller than grasses,” Donovan says. “Think about putting out your campfire on the ground by pouring water on it, and compare that to trying to put out a fire a couple stories above you.”

The concerns are universal, she says, and reveal similarities no matter the land type where the wildfires occur.

“We’re seeing the same kind of issue here in Florida, where fire suppression has led to a lot of encroachment of shrubs,” Donovan says. “This creates these really dense forest stands rather than the open savannah systems that we would have seen historically with more frequent fire.”

Florida has become a model for prescribed burning across the country, though there is still hesitancy among some private landowners, she says. “Using prescribed fire as a controlling process for woody encroachment has far less risk than allowing woody encroachment and waiting for wildfire to occur.”

“Across the country, data has shown that fire is inevitable. Using prescribed fire allows us to decide what we want a lot of that fire to look like.”

The study appears in the journal PLOS ONE.

Source: University of Florida

The post Wildfire risk goes up where trees and shrubs replace grasses appeared first on Futurity.

Nature Communications, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38533-2

Nature Communications, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38550-1

Scientific Reports, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-35396-x

Scientific Reports, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-35418-8

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

All her life, Victoria Rutledge thought of herself as someone with an addictive personality. Her first addiction was alcohol. After she got sober in her early 30s, she replaced drinking with food and shopping, which she thought about constantly. She would spend $500 on organic groceries, only to have them go bad in her fridge. “I couldn’t stop from going to that extreme,” she told me. When she ran errands at Target, she would impulsively throw extra things—candles, makeup, skin-care products—into her cart.

Earlier this year, she began taking semaglutide, also known as Wegovy, after being prescribed the drug for weight loss. (Colloquially, it is often referred to as Ozempic, though that is technically just the brand name for semaglutide that is marketed for diabetes treatment.) Her food thoughts quieted down. She lost weight. But most surprisingly, she walked out of Target one day and realized her cart contained only the four things she came to buy. “I’ve never done that before,” she said. The desire to shop had slipped away. The desire to drink, extinguished once, did not rush in as a replacement either. For the first time—perhaps the first time in her whole life—all of her cravings and impulses were gone. It was like a switch had flipped in her brain.

As semaglutide has skyrocketed in popularity, patients have been sharing curious effects that go beyond just appetite suppression. They have reported losing interest in a whole range of addictive and compulsive behaviors: drinking, smoking, shopping, biting nails, picking at skin. Not everyone on the drug experiences these positive effects, to be clear, but enough that addiction researchers are paying attention. And the spate of anecdotes might really be onto something. For years now, scientists have been testing whether drugs similar to semaglutide can curb the use of alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and opioids in lab animals—to promising results.

Semaglutide and its chemical relatives seem to work, at least in animals, against an unusually broad array of addictive drugs, says Christian Hendershot, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Treatments available today tend to be specific: methadone for opioids, bupropion for smoking. But semaglutide could one day be more widely useful, as this class of drug may alter the brain’s fundamental reward circuitry. The science is still far from settled, though researchers are keen to find out more. At UNC, in fact, Hendershot is now running clinical trials to see whether semaglutide can help people quit drinking alcohol and smoking. This drug that so powerfully suppresses the desire to eat could end up suppressing the desire for a whole lot more.  

The history of semaglutide is one of welcome surprises. Originally developed for diabetes, semaglutide prompts the pancreas to release insulin by mimicking a hormone called GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide 1. First-generation GLP-1 analogs—exenatide and liraglutide—have been on the market to treat diabetes for more than a decade. And almost immediately, doctors noticed that patients on these drugs also lost weight, an unintended but usually not unwelcome side effect. Semaglutide has been heralded as a potentially even more potent GLP-1 analog.

Experts now believe GLP-1 analogs affect more than just the pancreas. The exact mechanism in weight loss is still unclear, but the drugs likely work in multiple ways to suppress hunger, including but not limited to slowing food’s passage through the stomach and preventing ups and downs in blood sugar. Most intriguing, it also seems to reach and act directly on the brain.

GLP-1 analogs appear to actually bind to receptors on neurons in several parts of the brain, says Scott Kanoski, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California. When Kanoski and his colleagues blocked these receptors in rodents, the first-generation drugs exenatide and liraglutide became less effective at reducing food intake—as if this had eliminated a key mode of action. The impulse to eat is just one kind of impulse though. That these drugs work on the level of the brain—as well as the gut—suggests that they can suppress the urge for other things too.

In particular, GLP-1 analogs affect dopamine pathways in the brain, a.k.a the reward circuitry. This pathway evolved to help us survive; simplistically, food and sex trigger a dopamine hit in the brain. We feel good, and we do it again. In people with addiction, this process in the brain shifts as a consequence or cause of their addiction, or perhaps even both. They have, for example, fewer dopamine receptors in part of the brain’s reward pathway, so the same reward may bring less pleasure.  

In lab animals, addiction researchers have amassed a body of evidence that GLP-1 analogs alter the reward pathway: mice on a version of exenatide get less of a dopamine hit from alcohol; rats on the same GLP-1 drug sought out less cocaine; same for rats and oxycodone. African vervet monkeys predisposed to drinking alcohol drank less on liraglutide and exenatide. Most of the published research has been conducted with these two first-generation GLP-1 drugs, but researchers told me to expect many studies with semaglutide, with positive results, to be published soon.

In humans, the science is much more scant. A couple of studies of exenatide in people with cocaine-use disorder were too short or small to be conclusive. Another study of the same drug in people with alcohol-use disorder found that their brain’s reward centers no longer lit up as much when shown pictures of alcohol while they were in an fMRI machine. The patients in the study as a whole, however, did not drink less on the drug, though the subset who also had obesity did. Experts say that semaglutide, if it works at all for addiction, might end up more effective in some people than others. “I don’t expect this to work for everybody,” says Anders Fink-Jensen, a psychiatrist at the University of Copenhagen who conducted the alcohol study. (Fink-Jensen has received funding from Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, for separate research into using GLP-1 analogs to treat weight gain from schizophrenia medication.)  Bigger and longer trials with semaglutide could prove or disprove the drug’s effectiveness in addiction—and identify whom it is best for.

Semaglutide does not dull all pleasure, people taking the drug for weight loss told me. They could still enjoy a few bites of food or revel in finding the perfect dress; they just no longer went overboard. Anhedonia, or a general diminished ability to experience pleasure, also hasn’t shown up in cohorts of people who take the drug for diabetes, says Elisabet Jerlhag Holm, an addiction researcher at the University of Gothenburg. Instead, those I talked with said their mind simply no longer raced in obsessive loops. “It was a huge relief,” says Kimberly Smith, who used to struggle to eat in moderation. For patients like her, the drug tamed behaviors that had reached a level of unhealthiness.

The types of behaviors in which patients have reported unexpected changes include both the addictive, such as smoking or drinking, and the compulsive, such as skin picking or nail biting. (Unlike addiction, compulsion concerns behaviors that aren’t meant to be pleasurable.) And although there is a body of animal research into GLP-1 analogues and addiction, there is virtually none on nonfood compulsions. Still, addictions and compulsions are likely governed by overlapping reward pathways in the brain, and semaglutide might have an effect on both. Two months into taking the drug, Mary Maher woke up one day to realize that the skin on her back—which she had picked compulsively for years—had healed. She used to bleed so much from the picking that she avoided wearing white. Maher hadn’t even noticed she had stopped picking what must have been weeks before. “I couldn’t believe it,” she told me. The urge had simply melted away.

The long-term impacts of semaglutide, especially on the brain, remain unknown. In diabetes and obesity, semaglutide is supposed to be a lifelong medication, and its most dramatic effects are quickly reversed when people go off. “The weight comes back; the suppression of appetite goes away,” says Janice Jin Hwang, an obesity doctor at UNC School of Medicine. The same could be true in at least certain forms of addiction too. Doctors have noted a curious link between addiction and another obesity treatment: Patients who undergo bariatric surgery sometimes experience “addiction transfer,” where their impulsive behaviors move from food to alcohol or drugs. Bariatric surgery works, in part, by increasing natural levels of GLP-1, but whether the same transfer can happen with GLP-1 drugs still needs to be studied in longer trials. Semaglutide is a relatively new drug, approved for diabetes since 2017. Understanding the upshot of taking it for decades is, well, decades into the future.

Maher told me she hopes to stay on the drug forever. “It’s incredibly validating,” she said, to realize her struggles have been a matter of biology, not willpower. Before getting on semaglutide, she had spent 30 years trying to lose weight by counting calories and exercising. She ran 15 half marathons. She did lose weight, but she could never keep it off. On semaglutide, the obsessions about food that plagued her even when she was skinny are gone. Not only has she stopped picking her skin; she’s also stopped biting her nails. Her mind is quieter now, more peaceful. “This has changed my thought processes in a way that has just improved my life so much,” she said. She would like to keep it that way.

Nature, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01654-1

 

 

Space Race

Gone are the good old days of homophobia and racism at NASA — and to some senators, that's a problem.

During a budgetary hearing this week, a pair of Republicans on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee criticized NASA's efforts to both combat climate change and increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), calling the initiatives "woke."

As Space Policy Online breaks it down, the senators — onetime presidential hopeful Ted Cruz of Texas and Eric Schmitt of Missouri, both ranking members of the committee — spoke in broad, Fox News-friendly terms when denouncing NASA's DEI and environmental proposals.

For his part, Schmitt trashed the agency's "obsession with misguided woke policies related to climate change and diversity, equity, and inclusion." He also opined that "China has no interest in out-DEIing us and they’re not intimidated at all by this divisive radical policy that’s found its way into this budget."

"If NASA is seen as partisan, that is very bad for space and space exploration," Cruz added. "So I hope NASA will continue its tradition of staying out of those battles."

NAS Ackwards

As Futurism and other outlets have reported, the American space agency has long been a white boys' club. During the race to the Moon in the 1960s, it had the opportunity to select a highly accomplished Black astronaut for the Apollo program — but ultimately didn't. And though the contributions of numerous Black women as mathematicians during the agency's formative years were well documented in the 2016 book "Hidden Figures," it took decades for their efforts to be recognized.

Strides have been made, but the agency has never had a female administrator and has only had one Black man at its helm. It took until last year for a Black woman to become a crew member on the International Space Station.

So to the contrary of Cruz and Schmitt's grandstanding, it's clear that DEI is still very much needed at NASA. And needless to say, the climate isn't a partisan issue either.

Besides, anyone familiar with current right-wing rhetoric knows that "woke" has become a sort of catch-all code word for progressive anti-bigotry ideals and efforts. From attempts to use more inclusive language in reproductive healthcare to debates about artificial intelligence guardrails, the fear of a "woke" planet has much of the country veritably frothing at the mouth and pining away for the days when there were no consequences for being a bigot — and that outlook, it seems, has made its way to the lawmakers overseeing NASA.

Bottom line? Instead of worrying about the very real ways racism harms America financially, Cruz and Schmitt are instead invoking the "woke" boogeyman to score political points — and frankly, it's pretty embarrassing to witness.

More on NASA: New NASA Goddard Director Explains Why She Was Sworn In On a Carl Sagan Book

The post Senators Complain That NASA Isn’t Allowed to Be Racist Anymore appeared first on Futurism.

Written sources from Mesopotamia suggest that kissing in relation to sex was practiced by the peoples of the ancient Middle East 4,500 years ago, researchers report.

Recent research has hypothesized that the earliest evidence of human lip kissing originated in a very specific geographical location in South Asia 3,500 years ago, from where it may have spread to other regions, simultaneously accelerating the spread of the herpes simplex virus 1.

But according to a new study in Science that draws on a range of written sources from the earliest Mesopotamian societies, kissing was already a well-established practice 4,500 years ago in the Middle East. And probably much earlier, moving the earliest documentation for kissing back 1,000 years compared to what was previously acknowledged in the scientific community.

“In ancient Mesopotamia, which is the name for the early human cultures that existed between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in present-day Iraq and Syria, people wrote in cuneiform script on clay tablets,” says Troels Pank Arbøll, assistant professor in the cross-cultural and regional studies department at the University of Copenhagen.

“Many thousands of these clay tablets have survived to this day, and they contain clear examples that kissing was considered a part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, just as kissing could be part of friendships and family members’ relations.

“Therefore, kissing should not be regarded as a custom that originated exclusively in any single region and spread from there but rather appears to have been practiced in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia.”

“In fact, research into bonobos and chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, has shown that both species engage in kissing, which may suggest that the practice of kissing is a fundamental behavior in humans, explaining why it can be found across cultures,” says Sophie Lund Rasmussen, junior research fellow at Linacre College and Aalborg University.

In addition to its importance for social and sexual behavior, the practice of kissing may have played an unintentional role in the transmission of microorganisms, potentially causing viruses to spread among humans.

However, the suggestion that the kiss may be regarded as a sudden biological trigger behind the spread of particular pathogens is more doubtful. The spread of the herpes simplex virus 1, which researchers have suggested could have been accelerated by the introduction of the kiss, is a case in point.

“There is a substantial corpus of medical texts from Mesopotamia, some of which mention a disease with symptoms reminiscent of the herpes simplex virus 1,” Arbøll says.

He adds that the ancient medical texts were influenced by a variety of cultural and religious concepts, and it therefore must be emphasized that they cannot be read at face value.

“It is nevertheless interesting to note some similarities between the disease known as bu’shanu in ancient medical texts from Mesopotamia and the symptoms caused by herpes simplex infections. The bu’shanu disease was located primarily in or around the mouth and throat, and symptoms included vesicles in or around the mouth, which is one of the dominant signs of herpes infection.”

“If the practice of kissing was widespread and well-established in a range of ancient societies, the effects of kissing in terms of pathogen transmission must likely have been more or less constant”, Rasmussen says.

Arbøll and Rasmussen conclude that future results emerging from research into ancient DNA, inevitably leading to discussions about complex historical developments and social interactions—such as kissing as a driver of early disease transmission—will benefit from an interdisciplinary approach.

Source: University of Copenhagen

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The trailer for Gareth Edwards’ new film shows humanity being outsmarted by AI – and is released just as our overlords-to-be are rearing their terrifying heads

It’s been a while since we had a truly great movie about devious, dystopian AIs priming themselves to take over the world, in which the key choices made by mere humans will decide whether we end up as just an organic footnote in histories written by our machine conquerors. Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina (2014) springs to mind, while 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron was a fun comic book romp, if lacking the spiky gravitas and sly intellectual thrust of Garland’s debut. Grant Sputore’s I Am Mother explored similar territory in 2019 with a rather more claustrophobic, yet devastatingly incisive touch. Now there’s Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, the first trailer for which debuted this week, arriving just as very real concerns about the ability of artificial intelligence to really muck things up for us humans are rearing their terrifying digital heads.

At first glance, it looks as if Edwards has thrown in all our favourite sci-fi tropes. The basic scenario – tooled up military man fails in mission to wipe out robot child because she is just too cute – reminds us of kind-hearted Din Djarin’s inability to bounty hunt Grogu in early episodes of The Mandalorian.

 

 

Open Sesame!

Meta is cracking the AI arms race wide open. Literally.

According to a report from The New York Times, Meta-formerly-

 is doubling down on its decision to make its large language model called LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) — which competes with the likes of OpenAI's GPT-4 — open source.

No Good Option

As the NYT points out, Meta began to dip its toes into the open-source waters back in February, when it made the underlying code for its advanced large language model available for download via email to anyone that Meta deemed safe.

The code, however, was leaked to 4Chan almost immediately. In an experiment, researchers at Stanford used the renegade LLM to build an AI system to capture how it behaved. But they were shocked to find that it was able to generate some seriously problematic text.

Stanford researcher Moussa Doumbouya reportedly told colleagues that making this technology widely available would be like making "a grenade available to everyone in a grocery store," according to the NYT.

LeCun, for his part, seems to disagree with that conclusion.

"You can't prevent people from creating nonsense or dangerous information or whatever," LeCun told the NYT. "But you can stop it from being disseminated."

But considering that at-scale content moderation is imperfect enough as it is even without generative AI, LeCun's argument isn't exactly bulletproof.

Whether Meta's open-source — or OpenAI and Microsoft's secrecy — approach will turn out to be the winning strategy remains to be seen.

As the AI war is really starting to heat up, companies are drawing their lines in the sand — and the stakes are higher than ever before.

The post Facebook Has Crowbarred Open the Pandora’

 of AI, Experts Warn appeared first on Futurism.

Researchers have sequenced the genome of the Montmorency tart cherry for the first time.

The scientists were searching for the genes associated with the tart cherry trees that bloom later in the season to meet the needs of a changing climate.

They started by comparing DNA sequences from late-blooming tart cherry trees to the sequenced genome of a related species, the peach. However, in a surprise, the genetic discrepancies between the species outweighed the similarities, leading the team to create the first annotated Montmorency tart cherry genome and identify the DNA segments that code for each gene.

“I naively thought that this would be an easy endeavor; we would simply sequence a few early and late-blooming cherry trees and align the sequences to the peach genome and get an answer in just a few weeks,” says Courtney Hollender, an assistant professor in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University. “I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Genomes contain all the genes and genetic instructions for an organism’s development. Sequencing it provides a map for researchers when they are trying to, for example, grow a cherry tree that will bloom later in the season.

For Charity Goeckeritz, Hollender’s doctoral candidate, an exercise in frustration piqued her curiosity.

“I was trying to align the tart cherry DNA sequences with the peach genome and they just weren’t aligning very well,” says Goeckeritz. “I was complaining about it to everyone and, finally, one of my friends suggested we just sequence the tart cherry genome.”

Doing so showed the Montmorency tart cherry genome was more intricate than the researchers originally thought.

The complexities come from the tart cherry’s parental plant chromosomes. Tart cherries are allotetraploids meaning instead of having two sets of chromosomes like humans, they have four sets from at least two different species.

“Not only does tart cherry have four copies of every chromosome, but it also is the product of a natural cross between two different species,” says Goeckeritz. “The ground cherry, Prunus fruticosa, and the sweet cherry, Prunus avium, that may have happened almost two million years ago.”

While Goeckeritz is using the genome to study bloom time, doctoral student Kathleen Rhoades, who conducted the RNA sequencing or gene expression analysis for the project, is working to identify genes that are associated with specific fruit traits, such as color and firmness.

Having the Montmorency tart cherry genome sequence opens the possibilities for a tremendous amount of future research that will ultimately benefit the industry and the consumer by growing more trees that can withstand varying spring weather and produce more cherries.

“Before this genome, there were some sequences for tart cherries but it wasn’t a complete picture, and I just wanted to have the genome for research and breeding purposes,” says Hollender.

“Now we have a complete picture, and this research will have a major impact on all future tart cherry research and breeding efforts worldwide.”

The study is published in the journal Horticulture Research.

Source: Michigan State University

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Scientific Reports, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-34609-7

Scientific Reports, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-34843-z

In a bygone era, Americans could be confident that conservatives, like the former General Electric pitchman Ronald Reagan, were friendlier to corporations than their ideological opponents, and that the most aggressive efforts to rein in corporate power were coming from the left.

Today, the relationship that the American left and right each have with Big Business is different. When corporations advance voting rights or acceptance of gays and lesbians, or oppose racism or laws that restrict the ability of trans people to use the bathroom where they feel most comfortable, many progressives are happy to see corporate power exerted as a counter to majorities in state legislatures or even views held by a majority of voters in red states. And some Republicans who pass socially conservative measures into law, like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, have responded to corporate opposition with retaliatory rhetoric and actions that cast dissenting corporate speech as illegitimate and antidemocratic.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

These changing relationships to corporate power are shaped by the left’s increasing focus on race and gender relative to class and by the rise of populism on the right. They also reflect the never-ending push and pull between public and private power that is found in all healthy free societies. Politicians on both sides of the aisle sometimes get overzealous in the behavior they try to restrict. Though the right and the left both lose sight of this whenever a company takes a stand they don’t like, non-state actors—including corporations—play an important role in tempering excesses of the state. Absent such counterweights to state power, liberty would be at greater risk.

The right has long understood the value of corporate speech when defending free markets and economic liberty. The left now appreciates it more clearly on social issues.

To understand all that has recently changed, recall the world as it looked during President Barack Obama’s first term. Before Black Lives Matter or the #MeToo movement or mainstream support for trans rights or the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies, Occupy Wall Street was the focus of grassroots energy on the left. Bernie Sanders, the senator most aligned with that protest movement, introduced a constitutional amendment with radical implications. Constitutional rights “are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations,” it declared in part. On the contrary, corporations are “subject to regulation by the people through the legislative process,” it continued, “so long as such regulations are consistent with the powers of Congress and the States and do not limit the freedom of the press.”

Sanders’s attempt to end corporate influence on politics by stripping corporations of free-speech rights was a response to the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which said that First Amendment rights extend to corporations. “If the First Amendment has any force,” the majority held, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

Many progressives were furious about Citizens United. If corporations have the same free-speech rights as people, the decision’s opponents argued, they will be free to marshal power and resources far greater than most people to influence American democracy, calling the integrity of government by the people into question. Conservatives, in turn, argued that corporations were invariably made up of many people, just like labor unions and think tanks and foundations and institutions of higher education. Why should the state have more power to censor associations of people than individuals?

Of course, Sanders and his allies never came close to amending the Constitution and overturning Citizens United. But if they had, I wonder how the left would feel about the change now, as Republican politicians go after companies that take progressive stands.

This brings us back to one of the most powerful state officials opposed to progressivism, DeSantis, who pushed the Parental Rights in Education Act through the Florida legislature last year. Progressives called it a “Don’t Say Gay” bill and were upset with Disney, the most powerful corporation in Florida, for declining to use its power in the fight against the bill. Blasted by progressive activists, socially liberal employees, and left-of-center journalists and celebrities, who objected to the corporation’s disinclination to influence the political process, Disney reversed course. The company declared that it would use its corporate speech to advocate for the law’s repeal while giving millions of dollars to political opponents of the law.

DeSantis was apoplectic, responding as if corporate political advocacy and political giving were affronts to representative democracy. “You’re a corporation based in Burbank, California, and you’re gonna marshal your economic might to attack the parents of my state,” DeSantis said, sounding a bit like Sanders. “We view that as a provocation, and we’re going to fight back against that.”

Thus began a campaign by DeSantis to retaliate against Disney for its political speech. That retaliation ultimately caused Disney to file a lawsuit alleging a violation of the First Amendment rights that the corporation enjoys, rights affirmed in that 2010 Citizens United decision––rights that Sanders and others tried and failed to strip from corporations. Because Sanders failed, the GOP is far more limited now in how much it can constrain what the right calls “woke capital.” Just like “woke” persons, “woke” corporations have free-speech rights (and the right to shift jobs away from any state where the political leadership is not to their liking).

And if the Disney lawsuit goes to the Supreme Court, many progressives will be rooting for the corporation’s victory––rooting, in effect, for the Citizens United precedent to stand––in part because the most common progressive view in 2023 is not that corporations should stay out of the American political process but that corporations are obligated to intervene on the side of progressives. As Joni Madison, then the interim president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the largest LGBTQ-advocacy organizations in the United States, put it during the legislative fight in Florida, “We need Disney’s partnership in getting the bills heading to DeSantis’s desk vetoed. And if that doesn’t happen, to get these bills repealed. But this is not just about Bob Chapek [then the CEO of Disney] and Disney. This is about every CEO and company in America.”

[Edward Wasserman: My newspaper sued Florida for the same First Amendment abuses Desantis is committing now]

Progressive nonprofit corporations are wildly successful at lobbying their corporate cousins on some issues. In 2016, the business community largely opposed a North Carolina bill that sought to restrict which bathrooms trangender people could use. In 2021, as Republican-controlled state legislatures sought new restrictions on voting, hundreds of companies, including Amazon, Coca-Cola, and General Motors, publicly opposed the GOP. Meanwhile, as The New York Times reported, “Senior Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, have called for companies to stay out of politics.” Of course, even when progressives applaud and conservatives denounce corporate influence on a particular issue, politicians from both ideological camps continue to eagerly seek and accept corporate contributions.

None of this is to say that the right and left have completely switched places. There are many issues on which the GOP remains more aligned with corporate interests and many elected Republicans who remain sympathetic to corporate power. But neither coalition is reliably aligned with or opposed to the power of corporations. The relationship, on both sides, tends to be issue-specific, transactional, and opportunistic, with the left more likely to be closely aligned on social issues and the right more likely to be aligned on fiscal issues.

Principled stands against all corporate influence are few.

Take corporate influence on the education system. As recently as 2016, leftist outlets like AlterNet that were sounding the alarm when the Walmart Family Foundation exerted money and influence to change the public-education system, particularly when it supported the often right-coded solution of charter schools. Today, however, Walmart and the nonprofits associated with it are using their money and influence to support the expansion of left-coded diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in Arkansas schools, according to the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon, which is raising concerns, even as most progressives don’t seem to mind.

Corporations wield cultural power, too, apart from electoral contests and legislative fights. And there, too, the left and right coalitions are adopting noticeably different postures than before.

Consider the past and present of major beer brands.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, labor disputes at Coors Brewing and opposition to the conservative politics of the Coors family fueled a beer boycott that lasted into the ’80s.

“Women’s groups are joining labor unions, Chicanos and homosexuals in an informal but increasingly powerful boycott,” the Copley News Service reported in March 1978. “Though the National Organization of Women is not participating in the anti-Coors campaign, local chapters of NOW are carrying ‘Don’t Drink Coors’ banners in their newsletters.”

By the mid-’80s the company worked to end the boycott by making concessions to the left. “The boycott stirred up negative feelings for a long time, and the job now is to wipe them away,” Peter H. Coors, then president of the Coors brewery division, told the Los Angeles Times. “Who wants to drink a beer when the guy on the next bar stool might say, ‘The people who make that beer are anti-union, or anti-this or that’?”

The beer industry, especially its advertising, was a common target of feminist critique that same decade. By the ’90s, such critiques of sexism in beer advertising were sufficiently common and well known for The Simpsons to spoof the conflict in a 1993 episode. As recently as 2015, Anheuser-Busch was under fire from feminist critics for its “Up for Whatever” campaign, which included the slogan “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night” on bottle labels.

Across all those years, a premise of the feminist critiques was: Beer advertising matters in that it shapes American culture. And those critiques got results. In 2016, The New York Times reported that beer companies were moving away from misogynistic advertising messages. “It was fine to show a frat party making fun of girls five or eight years ago,” a brand consultant told the Times. “But it’s ineffective and potentially damaging to do today.” In March of this year, at Forbes, Jeanette Hurt wrote that Miller Lite had launched a new campaign to “collect sexist advertisements and turn it into compost to grow hops for women brewers.”

In April, Bud Light partnered with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social-media promotion. “Some conservative commentators and celebrities began calling for a boycott,” The New York Times reported soon after. The conservative boycotters believed that beer ads matter in that they shape American culture––and they, too, got results. The Times wrote, “After Bud Light’s sales slumped and the brand found itself thrust into the nation’s culture wars, Anheuser-Busch, the beer’s brewer, announced last week that two of its executives were taking a leave of absence. The company also said on Thursday that it would focus its marketing campaigns on sports and music.”

I have tended to believe that beer advertisements pander to existing attitudes in society rather than shaping future attitudes, so I don’t know if this change in Bud Light’s marketing strategy really matters. But some on the right consider it a major victory. “I’m not sure if most people fully appreciate the significance of this Bud Light stuff,” the socially conservative, anti-transgender-rights commentator Matt Walsh declared. “We made an iconic American brand toxic, virtually overnight, because it endorsed gender ideology. This is a pivotal moment. A map to follow going forward.”

What are the next 10 years likely to bring in the left’s and right’s relationship with corporations? I’d wager that corporations will continue to side with progressives and against democratic majorities on some social issues, even as they continue making campaign contributions to many Republicans.

As Josh Barro once explained at Business Insider, “Free markets are not small-d democratic. Some consumers matter more than others.” That is to say, many corporations want to attract consumers who are young and affluent, two demographics that are trending progressive on most social issues. “And that’s why ‘woke capitalism’ is likely to persist even if it’s not an effective strategy for getting Democratic lawmakers to stay away from tax increases and new regulations,” Barro wrote. “As long as companies’ core customer demographics remain opposed to cultural conservatives on these issues, companies will end up in opposition to cultural conservatism––not as a lobbying strategy, but as a customer retention strategy.”

In turn, I suspect that the more those corporations articulate values that Republicans dislike, the more Republican politicians will try to use the power of the state to constrain corporations, even as they themselves keep raising as much as they can from corporate donors. Finally, corporations will sometimes be targeted by both the right and the left, as when conservatives and progressives scrutinize content-moderation policies at big social-media companies.

As the left and right coalitions change their positioning relative to Big Business, it will be tempting––perhaps even fruitful––to point out instances of hypocrisy. But those instances should also serve as an opportunity for people on all sides of American politics to better understand why well-meaning fellow citizens have always been on all sides of the questions of if, when, and how corporations should influence America’s political and cultural disagreements. When corporations wield power, they do so undemocratically. They might be acting to advance the interests, values, or opinions of shareholders, their board of directors, their CEO, their employees, or some complicated combination thereof. Regardless, the general public doesn’t get a say. And corporations often succeed in influencing government in a way that serves their special interests rather than the general interest. Such rent seeking can fuel unjust inequality. And no matter what stances a corporation takes, there is never a moment when any citizen can go to the ballot box and replace it.

There are good reasons, in other words, to have checks on corporate power. But one can go too far in that direction. “Corporations are fundamentally illegitimate,” the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky declared in an interview that appears in the 1998 book Common Good. “Just as other oppressive institutions—slavery, say, or royalty—have been changed or eliminated, so corporate power can be changed or eliminated,” Chomsky continued, championing the power of the state. “What are the limits? There aren’t any. Everything is ultimately under public control.” The Italian fascists had a similar formulation: “everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” But it is actually better for a society if power is not concentrated wholly in the state. A healthy society has many power centers, including undemocratic ones like churches, media outlets, universities, fraternal organizations, and, yes, corporations.

None of those alternative repositories of power are fully unaccountable.

For-profit corporations are all accountable to consumers and all corporations are subject to  laws––but also benefit from the limits on state power set forth in the Constitution. The Obama administration could not force Hobby Lobby to fund contraceptives for its employees because of the company’s religious-freedom rights. The Trump administration could not force Nike to nix relations with athletes who kneeled during the national anthem because of that company’s free-association rights. Such limits on the state enable America to have a thriving civil society and a private sector that generates wealth and innovative goods that Americans enjoy as much as Disney World and use as often as Google Search. The result isn’t perfect but is better than systems where businesses are powerless to dissent, whether fascism or communism or an alternate America where Senator Sanders and Governor DeSantis could suppress corporate speech. If you don’t like the status quo, you can boycott a corporation or start your own.

Can hands that look like lobster claws hold a secret that could upend the artistic canon? The historian Benjamin Binstock thinks so. He has a controversial theory: Several of the paintings attributed to Johannes Vermeer were in fact made by his young daughter Maria. A set of late-career works don’t match the artist’s established style, and the hypothesis hinges on their dates, the identities of their subjects, and the clumsily painted hands—sometimes stubby, pudgy, or absent altogether. Could they have “come from someone else’s hand?” Lawrence Weschler posits. Could the little-known Maria have been an artist in her own right? Might she have stared at herself with a slack jaw while painting the self-portrait that became Girl With a Red Hat?

Revising settled history is a juicy prospect. Even more tempting is the urge to flesh out the people who made that history—to picture Maria at the mirror, with parted lips. That desire sometimes ignores the constraints of actual archives. In our June 2023 issue, the scholar Mary Beard examined a biography of Cleopatra’s daughter and the risks of turning a figure from antiquity into a thoroughly modern hero. “To hold up as an ideal for today’s young people a woman about whom we know next to nothing is to promote fantasy over fact,” she writes. Yet, as Beard acknowledges, publishers tend to prefer narratives of the past that are as elaborate and convenient as fantasy.

The biographer Lois Leveen fell for the seduction of a too-convenient story—as did NPR, and U.S. Army Intelligence, when they all circulated an image that misidentified a subject as the Black Union spy Mary Bowser. The event diagnosed “how much our expectations of history are products of the way we live in the 21st century,” Leveen writes. When we don’t properly contextualize figures from the past, we can also miss their most revolutionary acts; Tiya Miles revisits Phillis Wheatley’s overlooked politics and cites a biography that finally takes seriously the poet’s subtle critiques of slavery.

Biographies, at their best, uncover the mechanics at work beneath a known story—the hidden truths that don’t just conform to surface expectations. In this way, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments “exhume[s] the often-buried stories of working-class black women in the early 20th century,” Giovanni Russonello writes. Hartman pinpoints outcast women who liberated themselves, women who weren’t aiming to be heroes of our modern age, but simply of their own lives.

​Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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

What We’re Reading

 

 

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Girl With a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer / Mauritshuis; Girl With a Red Hat, Johannes Vermeer / National Gallery of Art.

Did Johannes Vermeer’s daughter paint some of his best-known works?

“We may never know the absolute truth one way or the other—and for myself, I can live in a perhaps necessary state of uncertainty.”

📚 Vermeer’s Family Secrets, by Benjamin Binstock

 

 

Ángel Hernández

Who was Cleopatra’s daughter?

“The young Cleopatra may be an extreme case, but there is [almost] no character in antiquity … for whom we have enough information to create a biography that satisfies the expectations of modern readers and publishers.”

📚 Cleopatra’s Daughter, by Jane Draycott

 

 

Wikimedia Commons

The spy photo that fooled NPR, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center, and me

“The subsequent century and a half of technological advances in capturing and reproducing images have so substantially increased our expectation—our demand—for reliable, historic visual sources that it can be difficult for us to understand how ahistoric this desire is.”

📚 The Secrets of Mary Bowser, by Lois Leveen

 

 

Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty

The great American poet who was named after a slave ship

“[The author’s] painstaking interpretations equal Wheatley’s own intentional verse, making it a joy to follow along as he unpacks her words and their arrangement, instructing us to read a line of Wheatley’s and then read it again with an eye roll to see how the meaning changes.”

📚 The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence, by David Waldstreicher

 

 

Fadi Kheir

How art can double as historical corrective

“Through deep archival work, Hartman managed to recover the powerful subjectivity of her characters, often by giving voice to their thoughts and desires—and to the music and art they made.”

📚 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, by Saidiya Hartman

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Nicole Acheampong. The book she’s reading now is Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

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Moral panics aimed against trans people are both attacks on that community and part of a broader strategy to control youth across the U.S.

 

 

Am I Covered?

After what scientists say was a meteorite smashed through a family's roof in New Jersey, Garden State residents began wondering whether insurance covers extraterrestrial damage.

In an advice column published to NJ.com, a Jersey insurance specialist said that in the extremely unlikely case of meteorite or other space debris damage, residents who have homeowners' or business property insurance should be covered.

"Based on the feedback from our members and other industry partners, it seems that a falling object, such as a meteor or falling satellite, would typically be covered by a standard homeowners or business property insurance policy," Gary La Spisa, the vice president of the Insurance Council of New Jersey, told the outlet.

"Of course," La Spisa added, "it is always critical to read your policy and familiarize yourself with any exclusions that your policy may have."

Scientifically Speaking

While South Jersey astronomy expert Chris Bakley said that it's very unlikely for a piece of space debris to make its way down to the tri-state area, it nevertheless did happen last week in Hopewell Township, NJ, when a chunk of what is probably a meteorite crashed through resident Suzy Kop's roof and "ricocheted" around a blessedly-uninhabited bedroom.

Uncommon as it is, Bakley said that the apparent Hopewell Township meteorite "excites the science community" because this sort of impact makes it "easier to identify and confirm that it undeniably came from the sky."

He added that there may be more bits of space rock "lodged and scattered in the roof and ceiling of the impacted house," though given that the homeowner didn't respond to NJ.com's request for comment, the public doesn't yet know if more pieces have been recovered.

So there you have it, folks: if you own a house in New Jersey, you should be covered in case of falling space junk.

More on space junk: Cosmonauts Caught Littering Directly Into Space During Spacewalk

The post New Jersey Ponders Whether Meteor Damage Is Covered by Insurance appeared first on Futurism.

Nature Communications, Published online: 19 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38542-1

Imagine using your cell phone to control the activity of your own cells to treat injuries and disease. It sounds like something from the imagination of an overly optimistic science fiction writer. But this may one day be a possibility through the emerging field of quantum biology.

Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. And yet, the extent to which quantum effects influence living systems remains barely understood.

Quantum effects are phenomena that occur between atoms and molecules that can’t be explained by classical physics. It has been known for more than a century that the rules of classical mechanics, like Newton’s laws of motion, break down at atomic scales. Instead, tiny objects behave according to a different set of laws known as quantum mechanics.

For humans, who can only perceive the macroscopic world, or what’s visible to the naked eye, quantum mechanics can seem counterintuitive and somewhat magical. Things you might not expect happen in the quantum world, like electrons “tunneling” through tiny energy barriers and appearing on the other side unscathed, or being in two different places at the same time in a phenomenon called superposition.

I am trained as a quantum engineer. Research in quantum mechanics is usually geared toward technology. However, and somewhat surprisingly, there is increasing evidence that nature—an engineer with billions of years of practice—has learned how to use quantum mechanics to function optimally. If this is indeed true, it means that our understanding of biology is radically incomplete. It also means that we could possibly control physiological processes by using the quantum properties of biological matter.

Quantumness in Biology Is Probably Real

Researchers can manipulate quantum phenomena to build better technology. In fact, you already live in a quantum-powered world: from laser pointers to GPS, magnetic resonance imaging and the transistors in your computer—all these technologies rely on quantum effects.

In general, quantum effects only manifest at very small length and mass scales, or when temperatures approach absolute zero. This is because quantum objects like atoms and molecules lose their “quantumness” when they uncontrollably interact with each other and their environment. In other words, a macroscopic collection of quantum objects is better described by the laws of classical mechanics. Everything that starts quantum dies classical. For example, an electron can be manipulated to be in two places at the same time, but it will end up in only one place after a short while—exactly what would be expected classically.

In a complicated, noisy biological system, it is thus expected that most quantum effects will rapidly disappear, washed out in what the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called the “warm, wet environment of the cell.” To most physicists, the fact that the living world operates at elevated temperatures and in complex environments implies that biology can be adequately and fully described by classical physics: no funky barrier crossing, no being in multiple locations simultaneously.

Chemists, however, have for a long time begged to differ. Research on basic chemical reactions at room temperature unambiguously shows that processes occurring within biomolecules like proteins and genetic material are the result of quantum effects. Importantly, such nanoscopic, short-lived quantum effects are consistent with driving some macroscopic physiological processes that biologists have measured in living cells and organisms. Research suggests that quantum effects influence biological functions, including regulating enzyme activity, sensing magnetic fields, cell metabolism, and electron transport in biomolecules.

How to Study Quantum Biology

The tantalizing possibility that subtle quantum effects can tweak biological processes presents both an exciting frontier and a challenge to scientists. Studying quantum mechanical effects in biology requires tools that can measure the short time scales, small length scales, and subtle differences in quantum states that give rise to physiological changes—all integrated within a traditional wet lab environment.

In my work, I build instruments to study and control the quantum properties of small things like electrons. In the same way that electrons have mass and charge, they also have a quantum property called spin. Spin defines how the electrons interact with a magnetic field, in the same way that charge defines how electrons interact with an electric field. The quantum experiments I have been building since graduate school, and now in my own lab, aim to apply tailored magnetic fields to change the spins of particular electrons.

Research has demonstrated that many physiological processes are influenced by weak magnetic fields. These processes include stem cell development and maturation, cell proliferation rates, genetic material repair, and countless others. These physiological responses to magnetic fields are consistent with chemical reactions that depend on the spin of particular electrons within molecules. Applying a weak magnetic field to change electron spins can thus effectively control a chemical reaction’s final products, with important physiological consequences.

Currently, a lack of understanding of how such processes work at the nanoscale level prevents researchers from determining exactly what strength and frequency of magnetic fields cause specific chemical reactions in cells. Current cell phone, wearable, and miniaturization technologies are already sufficient to produce tailored, weak magnetic fields that change physiology, both for good and for bad. The missing piece of the puzzle is, hence, a “deterministic codebook” of how to map quantum causes to physiological outcomes.

In the future, fine-tuning nature’s quantum properties could enable researchers to develop therapeutic devices that are noninvasive, remotely controlled, and accessible with a mobile phone. Electromagnetic treatments could potentially be used to prevent and treat disease, such as brain tumors, as well as in biomanufacturing, such as increasing lab-grown meat production.

A Whole New Way of Doing Science

Quantum biology is one of the most interdisciplinary fields to ever emerge. How do you build community and train scientists to work in this area?

Since the pandemic, my lab at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Surrey’s Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre have organized Big Quantum Biology meetings to provide an informal weekly forum for researchers to meet and share their expertise in fields like mainstream quantum physics, biophysics, medicine, chemistry, and biology.

Research with potentially transformative implications for biology, medicine, and the physical sciences will require working within an equally transformative model of collaboration. Working in one unified lab would allow scientists from disciplines that take very different approaches to research to conduct experiments that meet the breadth of quantum biology from the quantum to the molecular, the cellular, and the organismal.

The existence of quantum biology as a discipline implies that traditional understanding of life processes is incomplete. Further research will lead to new insights into the age-old question of what life is, how it can be controlled, and how to learn with nature to build better quantum technologies.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: ANIRUDH / Unsplash