SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE (January 21, 2025): The latest issue features ‘A Cellular Revolution’ – Long-overlooked molecular blobs are transforming our understanding of how life works….
Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life
The Tyranny of Now
There’s no time like the present to revisit the warning of forgotten media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.”
To understand the body, “we might picture the heart as a pump, the brain as a kind of computer, the lungs as bellows, the kidney as filters”. But what about the immune system — asks immunologist John Trowsdale in his engaging analysis. It has no straightforward analogy, operating simultaneously as an antiviral software, a surveillance camera, a weapons system and a way to share resources. The system is “unobtrusive yet extensive, nowhere and everywhere, redundant yet essential, powerful yet remote”.
Wild Chocolate
Rowan Jacobsen Bloomsbury (2024)
When residue inside decorative pots from ancient Mexico was analysed, it yielded traces of cacao — early evidence of cocoa consumption. The Spanish word chocolate might have been influenced by the Nahuatl (Aztec) cacahuatl, or cacao water. Journalist Rowan Jacobsen’s appealing book explores wild chocolate’s history as he travels through Central and South America, meeting chocolate makers, activists and Indigenous leaders who revive the bean’s variety in taste and prestige, lost during its modern industrial manufacture.
Talking Images
Eds Silvia Ferrara et al. Routledge (2024)
The logo of the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games was a figure with a red dot ‘head’, blue ‘body’ and single, straight green ‘leg’ — adapted from the Chinese character zhi, meaning ‘birth, life’, ‘arrival’ and ‘achievement’. It is one of a huge variety of “talking images” in a collection edited by three scholars interested in writing. Images range from Palaeolithic symbols and ancient Mesopotamian pictograms to modern Chinese calligraphy and Indian comics. The book traces links between images, marks, language and writing.
Do Plants Know Math?
Stéphane Douady et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
MIT Technology Review (January 8, 2025): The latest issue features ’10 Breakthrough Technologies’ – Fast-learning robots, next-gen jet fuel, new HIV protection meds, the largest camera ever built to document the cosmos, and more. Plus: digital twins, high-tech fisheries, and the AI Hype Index.
Boomers Daily 