What I've Been Reading

This book is not about sadness - at least, not in the modern sense of the word. The word sadness originally meant "fullness" from the same latin word, satis, that also gave us sated and satisfaction. Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn't just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness - setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once. 

When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be. That's why you'll find traces of blues all over this book, but you might find yourself feeling strangely joyful at the end of it. And if you are lucky enough to feel sad, well, savor it while it lasts - if only because it means that you care about something in this world enough to let it under your skin. 

Wow!! I would in the top 0.0001% of the people in the world who hates constant happiness in life. 

Pleasure, happiness, joy are such a small subset of zillion feelings all living beings can experience in their life time. Limiting oneself to just "happiness" robs one of these other innumerable rich and wonderful experiences which are necessary for a fully lived life. 

Who knew one day I would devour a dictionary in no time plus relish each page of it? 

That's the feeling I got while reading The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. 

Here's my favorite word: 

Ambedo - a momentary trance of emotional clarity. 

You look around at all the people who happen to share this corner of the world, and imagine where they came from, marveling that all of their paths managed to cross at this particular point in time. You think back to the series of events that bought you here, your choices and your mistakes and your achievements, such as they are. All the twists and turns over the years. It wasn't what you thought it would be and yet you can still look back on all the things you've lost, and the opportunities that cat came and went, and feel a pang of gratitude that it happened at all. And now here you are, feeling a kind of joyful grief for your life, in all its blessings and mysteries and chances and changes. 

You look around with a new sense of gratitude, taking in the complexity of things" raindrops skittering down window, tall tress leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee. Everything falls quiet, and the words start to lose their meaning. It all seems to mix together, until you can't tell the difference between the ordinary and the epic. And you remember that you too are guest on this Earth. Your life is not just a quest, or an opportunity, or a story to tell; it's also just an experience, to be lived for its own sake. It doesn't have to mean anything other than what it is. A single moment can still stand on its own, as a morsel of existence. 

But after a minute or two, you'll feel your hand reaching for your phone or the car radio, eager to drown out your thoughts with distraction. Perhaps there's a part of you that's instinctively wary of lingering too long in any one moment. 

We breathe this world in, and hold on to it as long as we can, but we can't just stop there. We have to keep moving, digging around for some deeper meaning, hoping to find an escape hatch between one experience and the next. So we never feel stuck inside one little little moment, one little life. 

And maybe when you read this book, you will find some of your rich feelings and experiences has a new word for it. And when you coin a word to an emotion, maybe it will make you more grateful and humble. Just, maybe. 

Ant's Can Detect Cancer Soon!

Ants have such a refined sense of smell, in fact, that researchers are now training them to detect the scent of human cancer cells.

A study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences highlights a keen ant sense and underscores how someday we may use sharp-nosed animals — or, in the case of ants, sharp-antennaed — to detect tumors quickly and cheaply. That’s important because the sooner that cancer is found, the better the chances of recovery.

“The results are very promising,” said Baptiste Piqueret, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany who studies animal behavior and co-wrote the paper. He added, however: “It’s important to know that we are far from using them as a daily way to detect cancer.”

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For his study, Piqueret’s team grafted pieces of a human breast-cancer tumor onto mice and trained 35 ants to associate urine from the tumor-bearing rodents with sugar. Placed in a petri dish, the silky ants (Formica fusca) spent significantly more time near tubes with urine from the “sick” mice compared with urine from healthy ones.

“The study was well conceived and conducted,” said Federica Pirrone, an associate professor at the University of Milan who was not involved in the ant research but has conducted similar investigations into the smelling ability of dogs.

[---]

The way we diagnose cancer today — by drawing blood, taking biopsies and conducting colonoscopies — is often expensive and invasive. Animal behaviorists are imagining a world in which doctors one day tap species with keen senses to help spot tumors quickly and cheaply.

Dogs can sniff out the presence of cancer in body odor, past research has shown. Mice can be trained to discriminate between healthy and tumor-bearing compatriots. Nematodes are attracted to certain organic compounds associated with cancer. Even the neurons of fruit flies fire in the presence of certain cancerous cells.

But ants, Piqueret suggested, may have the edge over dogs and other animals that are time-consuming to train.

- More Here 

E.O. Wilson would have been delighted to hear this progress!

Beauty Of Curiosity!

A serene trip to Yellowstone serendipitously lead to a beautiful science spanning fifty years.  

This is how science works. We should teach adults and kids these beauties and wonders. 

Back in 1964, the microbiologist Thomas Brock visited Yellowstone National Park to do some sightseeing. He was on a long car ride, and wanted to break up the monotony.

While peering into the hot springs, he noticed a curious blue-green tinge. When he asked a park ranger about it, he was told it was algae. That surprised Brock: Those pools are so hot that some of them reach a boiling temperature. At the time, scientists didn’t know of many lifeforms that could readily thrive such scalding environments.

But Brock couldn’t stop wondering about what exactly was going on in those boiling pools. He was dying to know: What was alive down there? How was it surviving?

So he spent the next six years revisiting Yellowstone and taking samples from pools, geysers, and vents. And along with his colleague Hudson Freeze, he discovered a species — Thermus aquaticus — that was previously unknown.

Essentially, they’d documented the category now known as “extremophiles”. As they wrote in a 1967 paper that hit the scientific world like an earthquake, “It is thus impossible to conclude that there is any ‘upper temperature of life.’”

[---]

But the story took an even more significant turn ten years later. Kary Mullis, a biochemist, was trying to create a faster way to copy DNA using enzymes — but the process he was designing required a lot of heat, he didn’t have any enzyme that could readily endure it, making it hard to scale.

Then one day he found Brock and Hudson’s Thermus aquaticus. Bingo: It thrived in heat, which is precisely the condition he was looking for. Using T. aquaticus, Mullis found the enzyme Taq polymerase, which could do the high-temperature copying necessary. Mullis wound up creating a process that could rapidly generate millions of duplicates. It’s a trick that’s incredibly useful for everything from police investigators trying to isolate crime-scene DNA to doctors trying to diagnose diseases.

Mullis co-won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing this concept. You’ve probably heard of it: It’s called Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR for short.

In fact, PCR has been crucial in managing COVID. If you’ve ever taken a PCR test to determine if you’ve really got the coronavirus (PCR is much more accurate than home rapid-antigen tests) then you were using technology that owes its existence to Brock noodling around Yellowstone in 1964 and marveling at the boiling-hot algae pools.

This piece reminds of one of my favorite books The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Homes.

All That Breathes...

Most Underrated Problem - There Are No Effective Mechanisms For Bringing The Depth Of Specialized Knowledge To Public Consciousness

This is one of the core problems of the modern world. 

Tremendous growth in knowledge of the world around us ironically overlaps with little or no growth in humans understanding of the complex system we live in. 

The movie Don't Look Up captured this essence and this brilliant piece captures this situation better through some of my favorite movies. 

The leader of the Soviet Union cannot find even an appropriate posture in response, shifting uneasily before throwing up his hands in bewilderment. Likewise, in Contagion, when epidemiologist Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) describes to a touchy public official how a recent spate of infections will develop into an epidemic, the official can only think to remind Mears that releasing such information to the public would cause panic and economic contraction. Whether under Soviet Communism or the liberal capitalist order, there are no effective mechanisms for bringing the depth of specialized knowledge to public consciousness. The calamities beggar belief because the knowledge that unveils them seems to have been developed in seclusion, secret to all but a collection of elite minds.

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Just as the expert is ennobled in the technical disaster movie, his responsibilities expanded by dire circumstance, so too is the ordinary person demoted and infantilized. Each entry has its surrogates for the layman; those whom Margin Call calls “normal people,” represented by janitors, plumbers, valets, firefighters or the pedestrian masses. Inevitably, they all exhibit the same characteristics: desperation, superstition, panic and an ignorance that tends to self-destruction. They cannot be anything but numbers, vectors, collateral, victims. They are never so lucky as to receive knowledge when it still matters.

[---]

Make no mistake: the truth of any technical matter undergoes a similar filtration when it is disseminated to the actual public, government officials or within private institutions. The raw facts, the data, when they reach you, have been neatly ordered, interpreted and summarized for your benefit. Such is the cost and convenience of living in modernized society; to “trust the experts” and their liaisons not out of goodwill but stark necessity. But only during technical disasters, storied and real, can the full severity of this bargain be recognized: a technical elite will accept an unfathomable responsibility in exchange for the public’s unwavering trust and obedience. The citizen and his representatives are asked to forget the many instances in which experts have been grievously mistaken, and to overlook that many disasters now originate in the cloisters of technical institutions (the disasters of both Chernobyl and Margin Call are expert-made.) There is no time to consider past errors.

I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t accept the guidance of experts. We have to. But we could reexamine how and why this social necessity emerged, especially when so much popular media is content to simply chastise the skeptical layman for not upholding their end of the irrefusable bargain. This was recently exemplified in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, an unbearably stupid allegory for climate-change denial in which two astronomers discover an Earth-bound comet that will destroy human civilization and most life on the planet. As they try to inform the public of the coming apocalypse, the astronomers are ritually ignored from all quarters of society—a manic political class; a glib media; shallow celebrities; a droolingly stupid public; and a pseudo-intellectual capitalist cult leader. The film cloaks itself in Cassandrian garb but only serves to vindicate liberals and progressives who want to unearth an ancient idea about disasters: that they are punishment. McKay’s film carries forward the logic of the technical disaster movie, but only after perverting it into a petty morality play, where the catastrophe is the only natural fate of a society so aloof and disdainful of expertise. Don’t Look Up manages to partake in the lethal incuriousness it means to bemoan by finding the suspicion of experts to be a moral failing, rather than a manifestation of the structure of technical knowledge itself. 

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Specialized knowledge progresses in a sort of fractal pattern, further departing from commonsense understanding as it reaches deeper into nature, reticulating endlessly at ever greater resolution. Its complexity and abstraction are always rising. But it also works, bringing us closer to what is apparently true about our world. And what works reliably makes its way into the mechanisms of society. The theory that earthquakes are the result of faulting is developed and tested until it becomes the basis of building codes. Likewise, securitization is prototyped and refined by bankers and economists until it becomes a mainstay of the global financial system.

[---]

The technical disaster movie and the real events that inspire it serve as the most advanced expression of this social reality. Yet we will never find within these films a way out of the problem they uncover. The project of synthesizing technical knowledge into broader social concern, much like specialization, is a long collective haul—and we lag far behind the progress of knowledge. Until then, the expert class will remain in the unenviable position of convincing the public, with every compounding crisis, that ours is a technocracy of necessity.

So how do we solve this problem. There is no panacea. 

• Understanding humans nature and human phycology would help in curating and convening the message to masses. 
• Religious places should help in spreading the knowledge (yes, its possible and important) 
• Educating kids in early age to appreciate and meditate on the gift of complex systems, curiosity and wonder. 
• Educating people through movies and TV series
• From home to work encourage people to be humble towards the limits of one individual understanding everything and limits of human knowledge
• Encourage people to act more than talk. 
• Most importantly - people with depth of specialized knowledge should be humble, not label themselves politically and money, fame etc., should not be the primary drivers. 
• What else?

What We Can Learn From Lichens In Garden

Max's Walden is full of lichens.  

I wondered what are these lichens and why are so many of them here? 

I have the answer now and it's good news!

Which lichens are present in our gardens can tell us a lot about the conditions that are present. In particular, they are known to be useful indicators of air quality.

Lichens get their nutrients from the air and cannot filter what they absorb, so they are commonly intolerant of air pollution. This means that we can see how polluted air is by looking at the lichens present in our gardens. As a general rule, the smaller and less varied the lichen in an area, the more pollution there is in the air.

Lichens can, in particular, tell us about the presence of nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide. When it comes to nitrogen dioxide, some lichens will thrive in its presence, while others will die. Crustier lichens tend to be hardier than hairy or leafy-looking types. Where there is a lot of nitrogen, crustier lichens will thrive. So, seeing these can be a sign that there is a lot of nitrogen dioxide around from traffic or farms.

Sulphur dioxide pollution comes from coal burning and industry. Where there is a lot of this pollutant in the air, lichens will often die. If you have hairy lichens growing where you live, then this is unlikely to be a problem.

But is lichen an indicator of problems when it grows on trees? Does it pose a threat to the tree or show that something is wrong? No, lichen does not harm a tree. There is absolutely no need to get rid of it, and trying to do so may do more harm than good.

Dead or dying trees may be the perfect habitat for lichens, due to the more open canopy letting light through and the moist conditions. But lichen can also often grow on perfectly healthy trees, so the lichen itself does not indicate a potential issue.

Don't be tempted to try to eradicate lichens from trees or other locations in your garden. Just learn from the lessons it has to teach us, and be aware of what it has to tell us about the air quality where we live.

 

Chimpanzee and Human Risk Preferences Show Key Similarities

Abstract

Risk preference impacts how people make key life decisions related to health, wealth, and well-being. Systematic variations in risk-taking behavior can be the result of differences in fitness expectations, as predicted by life-history theory. Yet the evolutionary roots of human risk-taking behavior remain poorly understood. Here, we studied risk preferences of chimpanzees (86 Pan troglodytes; 47 females; age = 2–40 years) using a multimethod approach that combined observer ratings with behavioral choice experiments. We found that chimpanzees’ willingness to take risks shared structural similarities with that of humans. First, chimpanzees’ risk preference manifested as a traitlike preference that was consistent across domains and measurements. Second, chimpanzees were ambiguity averse. Third, males were more risk prone than females. Fourth, the appetite for risk showed an inverted-U-shaped relation to age and peaked in young adulthood. Our findings suggest that key dimensions of risk preference appear to emerge independently of the influence of human cultural evolution.

- Full paper here

We Owe Debt Of Gratitude To Flies

Flies generally get a bad rap. People associate them with dirt, disease and death. “No one except entomologists really likes flies,” Finch says. Yet there’s good reason why we should cherish, encourage, even nurture them: Our future food supply could depend on it. The past few years have seen growing recognition that flies make up a large proportion of wild pollinators — but also that we know little about that side of their lives. Which sorts of fly pollinate what? How effective are they at delivering pollen where it’s needed? Which flies might we harness to boost future harvests — and how to go about it? With insect populations plummeting and honeybees under pressure from multiple threats, including varroa mites and colony collapse disorder, entomologists and pollination specialists are urgently trying to get some answers.

Animals are responsible for pollinating around 76 percent of crop plants, including a large number of globally important ones. Birds, bats and other small mammals do their bit, but insects do much more — pollinating flowers of many fruits, vegetables and nuts, from almonds to avocados, mangoes and melons, cocoa and coconuts, as well as crops grown to provide seed for future vegetable harvests. In a recent analysis for the Annual Review of Entomology, Australia-based biologist Romina Rader and colleagues from Australia, New Zealand and the US calculated that the world’s 105 most widely planted food crops that benefit from insect pollination are worth some $800 billion a year.

Bees, especially honeybees, get most of the credit, but overlooked and underappreciated is a vast army of beetles, butterflies, moths, ants, flies and more. In Rader’s analysis, only a handful of crops were visited exclusively by bees; most were visited by both bees and other insects. She and her colleagues assessed the contribution of each type of insect and found that flies were the most important pollinators after bees, visiting 72 percent of the 105 crops.

[---]

Making fields and orchards more fly-friendly won’t always be enough. With that in mind, researchers round the world are trying to identify flies that can be reared commercially and released where and when their services are needed. But where to start? The vast majority of pollination studies have focused on bees, and although many species of flies have been reported visiting crops, in most cases little is known about how good they are at transporting pollen, let alone whether their visits translate into more fruit and vegetables.

That’s beginning to change. Scattered studies have logged how often flies visit flowers, counted the pollen grains stuck to their bodies and recorded crop yields, and found that some flies give bees a run for their money — and in some cases, outdo them. Researchers studying avocados in Mexico, for instance, found that the large green blowfly Chrysomya megacephala (aka the oriental latrine fly) visited more flowers in a given time than bees and carried pollen grains on parts of the body that would contact the stigma of the next avocado flower it visited. Studies in Israel, Malaysia and India all suggest that blowflies are effective at pollinating mangoes, while trials in the US and New Zealand showed that the European blue blowfly (Calliphora vicina) produced as good a yield of leek and carrot seed as bees.

- The essential fly