THE NEW ATLANTIS JOURNAL (January 14, 2025): The latest issue features…
The gatekeepers are dying. Why is everything so mid?
Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life
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.”
John Trowsdale Yale Univ. Press (2024)
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”.
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.
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.
Stéphane Douady et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
SCIENCE MAGAZINE (January 9, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Not Skipping Meals’ – A narrow diet not responsible for extinction of short-faced kangaroos…
The first clinical trial of zebrafish embryos acting as cancer “avatars” will start soon
The fast-growing platform may be more equitable than X, but gives scientists a smaller stage
Their keen noses are helping researchers uncover the diversity of the Pacific Northwest’s underground fungi
Pulsating blood vessels push fluid into and out of the brains of slumbering mice
NATURE MAGAZINE (January 8, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Skin Deep’ – How the crocodile’s head got its scales…
A battery-like technology uses a metal called tantalum to create an equivalent of digital 0s and 1s.
The use of shed skins might help to ward off predators, experiments suggest.
Proteins could serve as biomarkers for senescent cells, which have stopped dividing but have not yet died.
Models and experiments demonstrate what happens when a knitted fabric is deformed.
Science Magazine (December 18, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Light Emission with a Twist’ – Hot, twisted carbon nanotube yarns emit bright circularly polarlized light…
A brace of new studies probes benefits and risks for an understudied group
Carbon nanotube filaments with a twisted geometry emit spinning heat waves at high temperatures
Scientific American (December 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Search for Planet Nine’….
If there’s a hidden world in the solar system, a new telescope should find it
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An injectable HIV drug with a novel mechanism shows remarkable ability to prevent infection
When the forces of plate tectonics tear continents apart, it’s an incredibly violent process, unfolding in slow motion. It was also thought to be very local: Magma from hot, rising mantle rock seeds volcanoes along the rift zone, while the far-removed cold interiors of continents remain intact.
Microscopic algalike fossils from China reported early this year astounded evolutionary biologists with their extreme age. Dated at 1.6 billion years old, the specimens suggest one of the hallmarks of complex life—multicellularity—arose far earlier than previously thought.
For 98 years, physicists knew of two types of permanently magnetic materials. Now, they’ve found a third. In familiar ferromagnets such as iron, unpaired electrons on neighboring atoms spin in the same direction, magnetizing the material so that, for example, it sticks to a refrigerator. Antiferromagnets such as chromium have zero overall magnetism, but they possess an atomic-scale magnetic pattern, with neighboring electrons spinning in opposite directions. Novel altermagnets—hypothesized 5 years ago—share aspects of both.
The Guardian Weekly (December 11, 2024): The new issue features The fall of Syria’s brutal dictatorship. Plus The best books of 2024.
Not even the most optimistic of rebels could have predicted the rapid collapse, last weekend, of the Assad dynasty that ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than 50 years. Yet while there was relief and joy both inside Syria and among the nation’s vast displaced diaspora, it was also accompanied by apprehension over what might come next.
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Spotlight | Russia and Ukraine wait warily for Trump transition
The idea of the US president-election as a saviour for Ukraine, as unlikely as it may seem, holds an appeal for an exhausted nation without a clear path to victory. Shaun Walker and Pjotr Sauer report
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Environment | The jailed anti-whaler defiant in face of extradition threat
Capt Paul Watson talks to Daniel Boffey about his arrest on behalf of the Japanese government, his ‘interesting’ Greenland prison, and separation from his children
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Feature | The growing threat of firearms that can be made at home
One far-right cell wanted to use 3D-printed guns to cause ‘maximum confusion and fear’ on the streets of Finland. Could the police intercept them in time? By Samira Shackle
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Opinion | Farage is lying in wait. Britain can’t afford for Starmer to fail
It is not enough for the Labour leader’s ‘milestones’ to be achieved. Voters must feel the improvement in their daily lives, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland
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Culture | The best books of 2024
From a radical retelling of Huckleberry Finn to Al Pacino’s autobiography, our critics round up their favourite reads of the year
Largest study of links between consumption of the beverage and gut diversity finds coffee-loving bacteria.
Chemistry of the planet’s atmosphere suggests that its interior has never held water.
Artefacts from a Mesopotamian archaeological site suggest that people in the region founded and later rejected an early form of the organized state.
Johns Hopkins Magazine (December 6, 2024): Microplastics are among and in us; meet opera composer and hitmaker Kevin Puts; the science of seeing faces in nature; addressing the epidemic of eatings disorders in America, and more…
Next to opioid use disorder, anorexia is the most deadly mental health illness. In all, 5% of patients will die within the first four years of diagnosis as a result of heart failure, organ shutdown, low blood sugar, or suicide. The Eating Disorders Coalition reports that every 52 minutes, at least one person loses their life as a direct result of an eating disorder.
Maya Dizack, BSPH ’24 (ScM), set out years ago on a journey down the Mississippi River to see how widespread microplastics were in this major body of water. Her findings were more alarming than expected. But just how concerned
Boomers Daily 