Ghost Dogs Of Amazon

Deep in the Amazon rainforest, there are mysterious canines with short ears, pointy noses, and bushy tails that roam the undergrowth. The creatures, which are one of the least studied variety of dogs on the planet, are rarely seen even by scientists who have spent years studying the region.

Officially, they’re called short-eared dogs, but they’re so elusive that they’re often referred to by the much cooler moniker of “ghost dogs.” As scientists have attempted to better understand these elusive creatures, one of the most significant findings about them has been about the size of their balls—seriously.

Veterinary physician Renata Leite Pitman, an affiliated scholar at Duke University’s Nicholas School of Environment, has devoted years of her life to studying ghost dogs. Twenty years ago, she was set to take a research job at Duke University, looking to launch a career in veterinary research in the U.S. But an advisor told Leite Pitman about his research project in the Peruvian Amazon. At the biological research station where he worked, his team had 10 encounters with the mysterious creatures in as many years.

“That’s a lot,” she told Earther. “There were almost no records of them at the time ... only two studies with records of encountering them. I thought, I need to ... get over to this place.”


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In late 2006, an opportunity arose to get super up close and personal with a ghost dog. By then, Leite Pitman had relocated to another research site in the Peruvian Amazon, and she heard about a man who had bought a ghost dog from a hunter who found it in the rainforest. The man had named him Oso, the Spanish word for bear. When she went to visit Oso at the man’s house, she found that he was being terrorized by other domestic dogs living there.

“They would eat all the [food] and leave him with nothing,” she said. “These animals aren’t supposed to be pets!”

After a year of trying to convince the man to let her reintegrate Oso into the wild, the man agreed to do so in exchange for a fee to cover the costs of Oso’s food. Leite Pitman was delighted—she’d see to it that the animal was re-acclimated to the forest, and along the way, would have an ideal research subject.


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Leite Pitman has continued to study the rare species. Scientists don’t have exact population estimates, but she thinks there’s fewer than 15,000 of them left. In addition to the challenges they face due to reaching sexual maturity at a relatively late age, the animals are also put at risk by hunters’ domestic dogs, which can spread deadly viruses the ghost dogs have no natural defenses against.

In the future, they’ll face even more danger. This year, Leite Pitman coauthored a study that found 30% of the area they inhabit is threatened by deforestation for farming, logging, and mining. Further ecosystem destruction and fragmentation could lead ghost dogs to extinction. Since they’re still not widely studied or understood, it’s hard to know what effect their extinction could have on other species in their ecosystems. But honestly, it’s probably best to not find out.

To protect these good boys, we need to protect the Amazon. That might give the ghost dogs a chance so they don’t become extinct, becoming actual ghosts that haunt the forest.


- More Here

Without Plague, America, As We Know It, Wouldn’t Exist

This is the last piece by Andrew Sullivan on NYMag; he is restarting his world-famous blog Daily Dish again.

This is a brilliant piece that covers the hidden side of history most neglect, a must-read.

We are wrong, therefore, to think of plague entirely as a threat to civilization. Plague is an effect of civilization. The waves of sickness through human history in the past 5,000 years (and not before) attest to this, and the outbreaks often became more devastating the bigger the settlements and the greater the agriculture and the more evolved the trade and travel. What made the American plague of the 16th century so brutal was that it met a virgin population with no immunity whatever. The nightmare that humans had been dealing with and adapting to in Europe and Asia for millennia came suddenly to this continent all at once, and the population had no defense at all. The New World became a stage on which all the accumulated viral horrors of the Old World converged.

That’s why we live in a genocidal graveyard. We always have. But if plague was created by mass urban living, and spread through trade and travel, and made much more likely with every new foray into virgin territory, then this story is far from over because those stories, of course, are far from over as well. As the human population reaches an unprecedented peak, as cities grow, as climate change accelerates environmental disruption, and as globalization connects every human with every other one, we have, in fact, created a near-perfect environment for a novel pathogen-level breakout. COVID-19 is just a reminder of that ineluctable fact and that worse outbreaks are almost certain to come. Compared with past epidemics, this one is, mercifully, relatively mild in its viral impact, even though its cultural and political effects may well be huge. Compared with future ones, against which we may also have no immunity at all, it could serve as a harbinger: We could be the next generation to discover a promised land, only to have it taken brutally and terrifyingly away.

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Paradoxically, the Black Death also reshaped and rebuilt the rural economy to benefit the poor. With half the population suddenly wiped out by bubonic plague, food became plentiful and cheap as soon as the harvests returned, because there were so many fewer mouths to feed, and the price of labor soared because so many workers had perished. Day laborers suddenly had some leverage over the owners of land and exploited it. A manpower shortage also led to innovations. With fewer people on higher wages, for example, the cost of making a book became prohibitive — because it required plenty of scribes and copiers. And so the incentive to invent the printing press was created. Industries like fishing (new methods of curing), shipping (new kinds of ships both bigger and requiring less manpower), and mining (new water pumps) innovated to do more with fewer people. The historian David Herlihy puts it this way: “Plague … broke the Malthusian deadlock … which threatened to hold Europe in its traditional ways for the indefinite future.”

In these two bookends of European plague, in the sixth and then the 14th century, you see two ways in which epidemic disease changed society and culture. In one, the disruption and dislocation of mass disease sent the world into a long de-civilizing process; Roman society was gutted and its empire dissolved into various fiefdoms. In the other, a mass-death event triggered a revival, economic and spiritual, in a kind of cleansing process that restarted European society. They were caused by the same disease. In one case, it brought collapse; in the other, rebirth.

Nallathor Veenai (A Pretty Lyre)

Nallathor Veenai by Mahakavi Bharathi

After making a pretty Veena,

Does anyone throw it in the dust?

Please tell me Oh, goddess Siva Sakthi,

You have made me with,

Glowing sparks of wisdom,

Would you not give me the strength,

To live my life useful to this world?

Please tell me Oh, goddess Siva Sakthi,

Or will you let me become a burden to this earth on which I stand?

I asked you for a body,

Which can travel as it wants like a ball,

I asked you for a mind to cut off poisonous thoughts,

I asked you for a soul which is new every day,

I asked you for a tongue, which would sing,

About you, even if it is burnt,

And I asked you but for a stable mind.

I asked for a mind that cuts of desires

Do you have any objection to granting me all these?

Great poet Bharathi died in 1921; 99 years ago at a tender age of 33. This photo of his intense burning eyes with his hands on his wife's shoulder meant to be a message to the society. Women's rights were not just empty talks to him but he lived what he preached. In a country where donkeys were looked down on, he used to kiss the donkeys in the streets of India.

He lived in a society that was at least 500 years backward to his thoughts. Women's rights were just one piece of his powerful wisdom. Sir, I am privileged to live and share the same earth as you did. Thank you.

He didn't live to see his dream come true but his poems had already ignited the spark. Those lines in his poem of living with the curse of knowledge have a hidden meaning which portrays the difficulty of living in a society filled with mostly vanity. We need more Bharathi's in this generation who can sacrifice and help animals from this brutal and vicious species namely homo sapiens.

Elizabeth Gilbert On Grief

Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself. 

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There’s this tremendous psychological and spiritual challenge to relax in the awesome power of it until it has gone through you. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body — it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level… I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you.

- Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves Through You

Non-invasive Early Detection Of Cancer Using Blood Test

Abstract

Early detection has the potential to reduce cancer mortality, but an effective screening test must demonstrate asymptomatic cancer detection years before conventional diagnosis in a longitudinal study. In the Taizhou Longitudinal Study (TZL), 123,115 healthy subjects provided plasma samples for long-term storage and were then monitored for cancer occurrence. Here we report the preliminary results of PanSeer, a noninvasive blood test based on circulating tumor DNA methylation, on TZL plasma samples from 605 asymptomatic individuals, 191 of whom were later diagnosed with stomach, esophageal, colorectal, lung or liver cancer within four years of blood draw. We also assay plasma samples from an additional 223 cancer patients, plus 200 primary tumor and normal tissues. We show that PanSeer detects five common types of cancer in 88% (95% CI: 80–93%) of post-diagnosis patients with a specificity of 96% (95% CI: 93–98%), We also demonstrate that PanSeer detects cancer in 95% (95% CI: 89–98%) of asymptomatic individuals who were later diagnosed, though future longitudinal studies are required to confirm this result. These results demonstrate that cancer can be non-invasively detected up to four years before current standard of care.

- Full paper here

Here’s How Long It Should Really Take You to Poop

According to a study recently published in the (kind of ickily named, in context) journal Soft Matter and highlighted by New Scientist, the average mammal — regardless of size — takes just 12 seconds to poop.

Led by Patricia Yang, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the study authors analyzed videos of 34 different species of mammals doing their business, running the gamut in size (the smallest was just under 9 pounds, the largest nearly 9,000) and diet (both herbivores and carnivores). Across the board, they found, the length of time it took to go remained more or less consistent. As New Scientist noted, so did a few other things:

The length of fecal pieces was 5 times as long as the diameter of the rectum in each of the animals … Yang also found that the normal, low-level pressure animals apply to push through a bowel movement is constant, and unrelated to a creature’s body mass. This means that, whether it’s a human or a mouse, the pressure used on normal excrement is the same.

In the wild, Yang explained, a quick, easy poop can be a means of survival. “The smell of body waste attracts predators, which is dangerous for animals,” she told New Scientist. “If they stay longer doing their thing, they’re exposing themselves and risking being discovered.” Assuming you’re using a regular old indoor toilet, it’s probably safe to say you’re not at the same risk. But spending too long on the toilet can lead to hemorrhoids, the swollen blood vessels around the anus that happen when you’re straining too hard to go. So take all the time you need if all you’re looking for is a little peace and quiet; if you’re spending more than a few minutes trying to get the poop out of your body, though, you may be better off calling it, drinking some coffee (it really does work!), and trying again a little later.

- More here. Yes, it should take only around just 12 seconds!

Dogs May Use Earth’s Magnetic Field To Take Shortcuts

Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional—albeit hidden—sensory talent: a magnetic compass. The sense appears to allow them to use Earth’s magnetic field to calculate shortcuts in unfamiliar terrain.

The finding is a first in dogs, says Catherine Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies “magnetoreception” and navigation in turtles. She notes that dogs’ navigational abilities have been studied much less compared with migratory animals such as birds. “It’s an insight into how [dogs] build up their picture of space,” adds Richard Holland, a biologist at Bangor University who studies bird navigation.

There were already hints that dogs—like many animals, and maybe even humans—can perceive Earth’s magnetic field. In 2013, Hynek Burda, a sensory ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague who has worked on magnetic reception for 3 decades, and colleagues showed dogs tend to orient themselves north-south while urinating or defecating. Because this behavior is involved in marking and recognizing territory, Burda reasoned the alignment helps dogs figure out the location relative to other spots. But stationary alignment isn’t the same thing as navigation.

- More Here

Lost Reboot In Works?

There are some reliable speculations; I hope they do so (with same characters):

Ten years after the Lost castaways “moved on together” in the emotional series finale, the ABC drama may be pulling a John Locke and getting a second life. 

According to We Got This Covered sources, discussions about a Lost reboot are afoot. Nothing is final, the site cautions, but the prospective reboot would be “more mature” and would likely crash-land on a streaming service.

But some don't want a reboot and the reason is actually very true and beautiful...

I don’t know if you could do it again. It’s lightning in a bottle … Leave it alone. Let it be what it was. It was fabulous, it was wonderful. It was, I think, life-changing for a number of people.

That's from Jean Higgins, executive producer of Lost and Evangeline Lilly who played Kate Austen doesn't want a reboot too...

I feel like it’s just tainting something that’s precious. I’ve said I don’t want to do things in the past and I’ve done them—you know, never say never—but sitting where I am today, my assumption is no.

Reboot or not, Lost was indeed life-changing for a number of people including thyself. It is special and very close to my heart - there are so many lessons one can learn from characters and their personal stories.

Rewatching Lost!

"There is always a choice my brother!"

- Desmond Hume

I still remember the first night in 2004 when I watched the pilot episode of Lost with no expectations. I was immediately hooked.

Max was yet to be born when Lost started and when Lost ended in 2010, Max was already in my life. Those 6 six years had bought a huge transformation inside me. Lost is considered the best show ever in the history of television:

Lost has regularly been ranked by critics as one of the greatest television series of all time.

I don't read too much fiction these days so a good movie or a tv series helps me with good and a much-needed dose of "art" in my life. Lost is one of those greatest doses I ever had.

Now rewatching Lost after 16 years bring so much of memories. Does it still feel like the best tv show ever? Yes, absolutely. This blog even has a "Lost" label.

Soon after I started rewatching, there was a great piece on the health benefits of revisiting your favorite books and tv shows:

Shira Gabriel, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo. A lot of her published work has explored a concept she and her colleagues have termed the “social surrogacy hypothesis.” It’s the idea that spending time with fictional characters can in some ways mimic the benefits of spending time with real-world friends or loved ones.

That is so true. Spending time with Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Syed, Desmond and other characters felt like being with long lost friends.

There is a wonderful book on Lost titled Lost and Philosophy: The Island Has Its Reasons; I love these lines from the book on how ideology can ruin one's life. Locke's character is a prime example:

An ideology is a belief system, but in order for it to be effective, it must be perceived as truth, rather than seen as one of the many possible belief systems. Ideology is like a pair of glasses you don't know you're wearing. You look through those lenses in the world as if that is the only way of seeing the world. Not only do you not know you're wearing glasses, but you also don't even realize that you might see the world differently through a different pair of glasses. Ideology ceases to function when it is seen as an ideology; to function properly, it must be subtly presented as "the truth" and taken for granted. An ideology you're aware of loses its power to construct your worldview. Like a pair of glasses, such ideology can be removed. 

- Karen Gaffney

Sixteen years ago, I felt there was so much of Jack inside me. Even now, I do feel I still have some reminiscence of Jack. Max had helped me overcome so much of the pain but also probably he helped preserve some good side of Jack.

"Jack: What happened, happened and you can let it go.

Locke: What makes you think, letting it go is so easy?

Jack: It's not, in fact, I don't know how to do it myself and that's why I was hoping that maybe you can go first."

This is a show which uses philosophers and scientists as the names of their major characters. A storyline that includes Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, genetics, quantum physics, neuroscience plus so many other well-researched and splendid pieces of writing which spans for 6 seasons. That is what made Lost so unique and special.

Sawyer is the heart of the show with his timely and wise-ass comments which steals hearts even though he acts like an asshole most of the time. I love Desmond Hume since he represents one of my favorite humans ever - David Hume.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about other factors that might have influenced me to bring Max home on 21st, May 2006. Lost was definitely one of those factors.

Very similar to Indian epic Mahabharata, Lost starts and ends with a dog - labrador retriever, no less. Early this month, after 16 years  Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of Lost explained how they came up with the idea of the final scene with Jack and Vicent, the labrador retriever.

Lindelof says they drew specific inspiration for Lost Season 6 from an idea from the Tibetan Book of the Dead

I cannot think of a better final scene than Jack dying next to Vincent, the yellow Labrador who survives. Erie, as it sounds, Max passed away exactly the same way while I was lying next to him... only here I survived and Max didn't.

I will rewatch Lost again in a few years and a few more times before I kick the bucket.

COVID Risk Chart from xkcd

- via here

Cats Choose Humans Very Early

Much like the behavior of cats, the origin of Felis catus is replete with mystery. While domestic cats are one of the most popular pets globally today, the process of how they came to be domesticated is not entirely understood — a situation made more complicated by the fact that cats still are not fully domesticated.

In a new study, scientists examined the relationship between humans and cats during the Neolithic Period to pinpoint when cats became pets. This study indicates that, in Europe, the road to becoming a housecat began when Near Eastern wildcats, the ancestor of domestic cats, followed early farmers to the continent.

The foundation of this study are Near Eastern wildcat bones dated to 4,200 to 2,300 BCE found in Poland — bones that the study team yearned to find, but never expected to actually discover.


Magdalena Krajcarz is the study's first author and a researcher at the Institute of Archeology at Nicolaus Copernicus University. She tells Inverse her interest in ancient cats was triggered by the discovery of a felid mandible from a cave in southern Poland, found within the archeological context of an ancient Celtic ritual.

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"We are not giving up on cats," Krajcarz says. "This is just the beginning of a more in-depth study of cat history."

- More Here

And full paper here:

Abstract

Cat remains from Poland dated to 4,200 to 2,300 y BCE are currently the earliest evidence for the migration of the Near Eastern cat (NE cat), the ancestor of domestic cats, into Central Europe. This early immigration preceded the known establishment of housecat populations in the region by around 3,000 y. One hypothesis assumed that NE cats followed the migration of early farmers as synanthropes. In this study, we analyze the stable isotopes in six samples of Late Neolithic NE cat bones and further 34 of the associated fauna, including the European wildcat. We approximate the diet and trophic ecology of Late Neolithic felids in a broad context of contemporary wild and domestic animals and humans. 

In addition, we compared the ecology of Late Neolithic NE cats with the earliest domestic cats known from the territory of Poland, dating to the Roman Period. Our results reveal that human agricultural activity during the Late Neolithic had already impacted the isotopic signature of rodents in the ecosystem. These synanthropic pests constituted a significant proportion of the NE cat’s diet. Our interpretation is that Late Neolithic NE cats were opportunistic synanthropes, most probably free-living individuals (i.e., not directly relying on a human food supply). We explore niche partitioning between studied NE cats and the contemporary native European wildcats. We find only minor differences between the isotopic ecology of both these taxa. We conclude that, after the appearance of the NE cat, both felid taxa shared the ecological niches.

Shifting Baselines Syndrome

Similar to cockroaches, humans are extremely adaptable creatures in every direction of the spectrum.  Evolution gave us this adaptability so that if we lose an arm or eye, we can adapt quickly. I am still alive and drinking beer even though I am missing Max. It helps to keep us breathing. 

But the dark side of it maybe this makes most of us lack gratitude for what we have; we would rather lose everything and fight in a mad-max world than sacrifice a few stupid habits. It is scary! 

The "official" term for that is Shifting Baselines Syndrome:

David Wallace-Wells, author of the popular and terrifying climate change book The Uninhabitable Earth, discussed this possibility in a New York Magazine piece written during the apocalyptic fires late last year in Australia. One might have thought that fires consuming hundreds of millions of acres and killing more than a billion animals would be a wake-up call, but instead, Wallace-Wells writes, “a climate disaster of unimaginable horror has been unfolding for almost two full months, and the rest of the world is hardly paying attention.”

Maybe climate chaos, a rising chorus of alarm signals from around the world, will simply become our new normal. Hell, maybe income inequality, political dysfunction, and successive waves of a deadly virus will become our new normal. Maybe we’ll just get used to [waves hands] all this.

Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.

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So what are shifting baselines? Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience.

And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.

Over time, the fish goes extinct — an enormous, tragic loss — but no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action. By the time the fish go extinct, the fishers barely notice, because they no longer valued the fish anyway.

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Even those big personal moments fade quickly. One of the most robust findings in modern psychology — made famous by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert — is that we have an incredibly robust “psychological immune system.”

We tend to dramatically overestimate the effect that large events, good or bad, will have on our happiness. We think the death of a family member will make us enduringly less happy, or winning the lottery will make us enduringly happier. In fact, what psychologists find again and again is that we quickly return to our personal happiness equilibrium. A soldier who loses a leg and a soldier who returns home safe to a new baby will generally, a year or two later, be roughly as happy as they were before those events. It’s called “hedonic adaptation.”

Democratic Rights, Food Security in India, Federalism, Citizenship, and Secularism Were Dropped From India CBSE School Syllabus...

Christopher Hitchens would have yelled if he was alive.... this is a very sad day for India. 

Amazing humans such as Ashoka and Akbar to name a few have taught the lessons of secularism to the world for centuries. Now all that goes down the drain.. since less 0.01% of India pick up a non-fiction book to read and improve knowledge once they graduate from college.

I don't think this is temporary, just read the list of removed chapters... it's scary what is about to come.

Important chapters like Democratic Rights, Food Security in India, Federalism, Citizenship, and Secularism were dropped from school courses in the national education board CBSE’s attempt to reduce the burden on students amid the coronavirus crisis.

Because of the “extraordinary situation” due to coronavirus pandemic, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced on Tuesday that the syllabus for 2020-21 would be reduced by a third.

Economics and Political Science courses for grades 9 to 12 have been revised by the board.

Federalism, Citizenship, Nationalism, and Secularism are some of the chapters that are “completely deleted” from the Class 11 Political Science syllabus.

Only two units namely ‘Why do we need Local Governments?’ and ‘Growth of Local Government in India’ have been removed from the ‘Local Government’ chapter.

“Security in the Contemporary World”, “Environment and Natural Resources”, “Social and New Social Movements in India”, and “Regional Aspirations” have also been entirely removed from the Political Science syllabus of class 12.

The Mistakes That Will Haunt Our Legacy

I believe that one will be our cruelty to animals. Modern society relies on factory farming to produce protein that is inexpensive and abundant. But it causes suffering to animals on an incalculable scale.

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Even when this system works perfectly, chickens sometimes have legs or wings broken as they are shackled. When the system fails, they are not stunned and struggle frantically as they are carried to the saw. The saw in turn misses many birds — the Agriculture Department says that 526,000 chickens were not slaughtered correctly last year — and some are boiled alive.

A child who plucks out a bird’s feathers may be punished, but corporate executives who torture birds by the billions are showered with stock options.

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I became a vegetarian almost two years ago (not a strict one, and I do eat fish) because my daughter nagged me (“provided moral guidance” would be a nicer spin), and I suspect that ethical and environmental considerations — and the increasing availability of tasty alternatives to meat — will lead our descendants to eat less meat, and be baffled at our casual acceptance of an industrial agricultural model built on large-scale cruelty.

“One day future generations will look back on our abuse of animals in factory farms with the same attitude that we have to the cruelties of the Roman ‘games’ at the Coliseum,” Peter Singer, a Princeton University philosopher, told me. “They will wonder how we could be blind to the suffering we are so needlessly inflicting on billions of animals.”

-  Nicholas Kristof

What Does It Look Like To “Turn On” A Gene?

This is a mesmerizing beauty inside each and every living being's body... this is hard read if one doesn't know basics on genetics (which everyone should) but it's funny to watch how top scientists struggle with the limitations of our language and come up with analogies to make it comprehensible.

The video, reported last year, is fuzzy and a few seconds long, but it wowed the scientists who saw it. For the first time, they were witnessing details of an early step — long unseen, just cleverly inferred — in a central event in biology: the act of turning on a gene. Those blue and green blobs were two key bits of DNA called an enhancer and a promoter (labeled to fluoresce). When they touched, a gene powered up, as revealed by bursts of red.

The event is all-important. All the cells in our body contain by and large the same set of around 20,000 distinct genes, encoded in several billion building blocks (nucleotides) that string together in long strands of DNA. By awakening subsets of genes in different combinations and at different times, cells take on specialized identities and build startlingly different tissues: heart, kidney, bone, brain. Yet until recently, researchers had no way of directly seeing just what happens during gene activation. 

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A lesson from this? “Beyond the biochemistry, there are all these physical phenomena that may have a role in telling us how genes get turned on,” says biophysicist Ibrahim Cissé of MIT, who led the work.

Shark Whisperer, Great White Shark

Scientists Who Study Complex Systems Offer Solutions To The Pandemic

I have ranted a lot on complexity and complex systems in this blog. This week, I even said

Every school, every university, every office, and every household should learn about complex systems. You do too.

I have also ranted enough on "lock-in" syndrome where we get locked into a bad choice by sheer randomness. Think, if only Christianity emerged in Europe or North American or Asian where there is so much diversity of life instead of middle eastern deserts with only a few rodents then we wouldn't have these monolithic religions putting humans on the pedestal. By sheer, randomness we have to live with this bullshit probably for the remainder of this civilization.  Plus that "lock-in" happening in the middle eastern desert as far as we know might be the cause for the demise of this civilization.

Complexity scientists from Sante Fe Institute have finally broken their silence and have a good hypothesis:

The damage we are not attending to is the deeper nature of the crisis—the collapse of multiple coupled complex systems.

Societies the world over are experiencing what might be called the first complexity crisis in history. We should not have been surprised that a random mutation of a virus in a far-off city in China could lead in just a few short months to the crash of financial markets worldwide, the end of football in Spain, a shortage of flour in the United Kingdom, the bankruptcy of Hertz and Niemann-Marcus in the United States, the collapse of travel, and to so much more.

As scientists who study complex systems, we conceive of a complexity crisis as a twofold event. First, it is the failure of multiple coupled systems—our physical bodies, cities, societies, economies, and ecosystems. Second, it involves solutions, such as social distancing, that involve unavoidable tradeoffs, some of which amplify the primary failures. In other words, the way we respond to failing systems can accelerate their decline.

We and our colleagues in the Santa Fe Institute Transmission Project believe there are some non-obvious insights and solutions to this crisis that can be gleaned from studying complex systems and their universal properties. One useful way to think about a complexity crisis is in terms of the strategic tradeoffs that need to be managed and the complex mechanisms that these tradeoffs involve. These mechanisms include ideas of contagion, epidemic cycles, super-spreading events, critical phenomena, scaling, and path dependence.

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The processes of contagion, super-spreading, self-organized criticality, and urban scaling are all nonlinear and tend to result in multiple different outcomes or equilibria. One of the hallmarks of systems with multiple equilibria is path-dependence, meaning it is far easier to move in one direction than another. This often leads to “lock-in.” For example, it is well known that it’s easier to continue with an existing technology than adopt a newer and better one, such as the preference for silicon transistors over the superior metal oxide transistors in the early 1960s. And the same goes for social habits such as the continued preference for the QWERTY keyboard once it was widely adopted over all alternatives. And vastly more worrying is the lock-in around racial and gender-based hiring preferences which perpetuate an historical precedent rather than rewarding ability. The social habits we tend to see as either the fabric of society or unintended corollaries of social life—gathering at high-density, shaking hands as a greeting, traveling, and interacting when infectious—have become established as social norms. Path-dependence tells us that far more energy needs to be invested in campaigns to eliminate these habits than is required to perpetuate the habits.

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It is high time we attended to issues resulting from the long-term consequences of this crisis and its interconnection with all socio-economic life across the planet. We have modest understanding in these areas, and we are in desperate need of support and new ideas. In the future, we need to be thinking more about the threats of a full complexity crisis with all their attendant tradeoffs rather than the means of mitigating a single threat. The challenge for all healthy societies is deciding where to place the fulcrum that balances competing priorities and not treating priorities as if they were independent concerns. 

Please read the whole piece, it's enlightening.

The First Cell - On Why Questions, Data And Future Treatments (Part 3 of 3)

We all are going to die one day. Eventually, Max too would have died of old age. But why he has to suffer from cancer even after spending trillions of dollars for half a century with no understanding of the root causes nor cure? Why? 

Judea Pearl, father of causal inference in his book The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect instills a meditative-mental anchor in our minds: 

Ironically, the need for a theory of causation began to surface at the same time that statistics came into being. In fact, modern statistics hatched from the causal questions that Galton and Pearson asked about heredity and their ingenious attempts to answer them using cross-generational data. Unfortunately, they failed in this endeavor, and rather than pause to ask why, they declared those questions off-limits and turned to developing a thriving, causality-free enterprise called statistics.

[---]

My emphasis on language also comes from a deep conviction that language shapes our thoughts. You cannot answer a question that you cannot ask, and you cannot ask a question that you have no words for. 

Not only statistics but multi-disciplines failed in this endeavor by working in silos, parochialism - lack of collaboration across disciplines, funding, and more importantly no incentive for bright students to get into the field. 

This is part 3 of my lessons from Russ's latest episode with Dr. Azra Raza, author of the new book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last.

Part 1 of my lessons are here, part 2 here,  and you can listen to the full interview here:

Azra Raza: And, by the way Russ, let me stop here and tell you one other thing. We are talking a lot about immune therapies these days, and there are multiple kinds of immune therapies. But, the most dramatic ones are those that use bodies' own immune cells to activate them and attack the cancer. You might have heard of CAR-Ts [Chimeric Antigen Receptor Therapy]. Nowhere do investigators point out that while CAR-T cellular therapies, the most dramatically effective form of killing every last cancer cell in the body. I acknowledge all of that. It is a fabulous feat of scientific achievement.

Incredible achievement to take the body's own T-cells, which are a kind of immune cells, and engineer them in such a way that they are now carrying part of a B-cell, which is another lymphoid immune cell. And it's activated to kill any cell it means that is expressing a B-cell receptor, CD-19. This is the most common CAR-T therapy used for B-cell lymphoma or leukemia.

But, nowhere do investigators point out that these T-Cells also cannot differentiate between a normal cell and a cancer cell.

So, what they actually do is kill the whole organ. But specifically that organ. Still there are off-target effects, which means other cells in the brain or somewhere else which are expressing the same marker. These engineered cells are so effective they will seek out and kill every cell that even has a molecule of that receptor being expressed.

[---]

Azra Raza: Russ, one of the big problems we have faced in cancer is that, despite looking for 60 years, we have not been able to find molecules that are expressed only by cancer cells and not by normal cells.

In other words, we can't find the address, the unique zip code, of a cancer cell so far.

So, at best what we are trying to do is basically kill cells more effectively irrespective of whether their cancers are normal. When you ask me that, 'Will this immune therapy be applicable to other cancers?' Absolutely. It should be applicable.

But, right now it is not so because if we try to kill liver cancer cells with this kind of CAR-T therapy it will destroy the whole liver, not just liver cancer cells. Or, it will destroy the whole GI [Gastro-Intestinal] tract, the whole colon. So, the entire organ would be killed because normal cells are expressing the same markers as the cancer cells.

However, when we learn to identify by means of whatever biomarkers we develop, in the future as technology is evolving, then not only would we be able to specifically target cancer cells, but the other thing is that we would be able to use these therapies in earlier stages.

So, that right now, when we give these therapies, the only patients who respond are the ones who experience the most severe side effects, called the cytokine storm, which basically puts the patient's life at stake. That, if they survive it, they will enter remission. Those patients who don't experience this horrendous cytokine storm, they don't even eventually respond to this kind of therapy.

In other words, what I am saying is that we are going in the right direction. We have made some significant, dramatic advances in these kinds of immune therapies, but the way they are talked about, the hyperbolic language that is used minimizing not just the financial toxicity but actual physical toxicity of immune therapies.  

[---]

So, now it comes to two issues. One is that we have patients today for whom we need treatments and we need to invest resources to try and improve those treatments and find better ones. I'm saying that the other half of resources need to go to improve the technology we have for earlier detection, which means a really serious, thorough, overall analysis of cells, RNA, DNA, proteins, metabolites from serially, sequentially studied actual human samples, not animal models.

And, the last thing I want to say about this is that this is where real and large-scale studies will have to evolve to provide the sample size for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Since 1984 when I turned my attention towards studying pre-leukemia and following these patients as they are either died of MDS or developed leukemia, I started banking bone marrow and blood samples of my patients.

Today, Russ, this may sound like a very ordinary thing; but I have now collected over 60,000 samples from thousands of patients. Not one cell in my tissue bank has come from another investigator. All of these patients mean something to me because I've personally taken care of them. Most of them I have done with my own hands. This is a tissue repository where, today, I can go in, look at the cells, look at RNA, DNA, proteins, and metabolites in a serial fashion--as the patient progressed from pre-leukemia to acute leukemia.

This is how we can work our way back and then ask the question, why did some patients get pre-leukemia? What were the risk factors that made this individual or these people susceptible to getting pre-leukemia, even? And, this will take us then to identify a group who is at high risk of developing pre-leukemia and then we can start monitoring those individuals, healthy individuals who are at high risk, in a targeted fashion.

So, I can do this for pre-leukemia and acute myeloid leukemia. The resources are needed. I'm making this appeal to everybody that we should not rely on any one test done annually which was developed 50 years ago. Rather, we need to develop using the latest scanning, imaging, biomarking, genomic, proteomic, metabolomic technologies to find maybe 500 different tests that can be amassed in a bar code fashion or can be done rapidly, quickly, to identify individuals in the earliest stages of cancer.

The resources, half the resources, go to treating current cancer patients and developing and improving treatments for them. The other half must be invested towards early detection through the latest technology and prevention and nipping the cancer in the bud.

This is very depressing news... even targeted gene therapy doesn't differentiate between good and cancer cells. It does make sense since we never found the root causes of cancer. 
I am not as optimistic as Dr. Azra is when it comes to AI and Machine Learning. Nevertheless, AI can help us go from zero to 60 or even 80 easily. But the key here is we need data. 

The data needs to come from people like you and me in the form of samples. For the last two decades, Max and I have donated our genes, microbiome, and other samples from home for research. 

Trust me, there is no "John Corner" version of Max and me from the future came nor coming. We self-immolate ourselves by refusing to give out samples. Free samples from each one are more precious than donating billions and science cannot provide an alternative to samples. A piece of great news for animals is that a lot of animal testing in cancer and current medical research doesn't work - which means non-human animal samples don't go too far. 

People believe in magic and assume "they" are working on a cure. One of the biggest lessons I learned as I am getting older is that there is no "they". 

"They" is nothing but collective humanity. So if you want to find the root causes of cancer and cure for cancer - volunteer to give samples. Wearing a yellow bracelet and walking for "pink" in NYC doesn't move mountains expect feeding one's virtue signaling or self-deception. These help to raise money but money will do no good without good samples via your blood, DNA, microbiome, and other samples. 

This is exactly what I said the day Max was cremated. You can check out the responses I got in part 1. I cannot comprehend the idiocy of this without thinking most of us are deluding ourselves that "magically" we will escape cancer or we will be cured. Humans do baffle me. 

We as a society lost the art of asking questions. I cannot think of a better person than Richard Feynman who taught the art of asking the proper "Why" questions:. 

But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn’t satisfy someone who came from another planet and knew nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital. How do you get to the hospital when the hip is broken? Well, because her husband, seeing that her hip was broken, called the hospital up and sent somebody to get her. All that is understood by people. And when you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you’re perpetually asking why. Why did the husband call up the hospital? Because the husband is interested in his wife’s welfare. Not always, some husbands aren’t interested in their wives’ welfare when they’re drunk, and they’re angry.

And you begin to get a very interesting understanding of the world and all its complications. If you try to follow anything up, you go deeper and deeper in various directions. For example, if you go, “Why did she slip on the ice?” Well, ice is slippery. Everybody knows that, no problem. But you ask why is ice slippery? That’s kinda curious. Ice is extremely slippery. It’s very interesting. You say, how does it work? You could either say, “I’m satisfied that you’ve answered me. Ice is slippery; that explains it,” or you could go on and say, “Why is ice slippery?” and then you’re involved with something because there aren’t many things as slippery as ice.

We outsource some of the precious things in life such as our food (by letting corporations cook for it), our thoughts (letting the morons on TV and Radio implant an ideological virus in our heads). 

In the end, what then is precious to humans? 

Crazy as it sounds, we think our "choices" we make while outsourcing is what we think is precious! 

These choices become our habits, "culture", part of our vocabulary, and endowment effect sets in. Yes, we defend the "precious" bullshit we eat and the morons we watch. That pretty much sums up our life outside of our work life and super cuddly family! 

Democracy cannot operate and sustain with such attitudes leave alone giving samples to find the root cause of cancer and finding a cure. 

The worst part of all of it is when you have a personal conversation with a meat-eater or someone refusing to understand the importance of giving samples - they will in ways gaslight you by using your passion against you. They are smart enough to turn the personal conversation into general one by using phrases like people, belief, goodness, busy, work, and such filler bullshit. And the final straw which usually ends the conversation would be acting the victim game. Not sure how they are victims while they are funding animal sufferings and not giving out samples that would help cancer research. They will maintain an unbelievable calmness and soft-spoken the entire conversation but their passions would flare for 10 min traffic job or being a helicopter parent, drop in a few dollars in the stocks. 

These attitudes make me sad. Even after watching Max suffer, the bond we had - they cannot comprehend nor think outside of their ideological walls and habits. This is just a dog and a guy who loved the dog because of lack of relationships he had while he was a kid. This the story they tell themselves and probably would live and die in that belief. 

My Max had to suffer and die of cancer because of collective choices we make every day by voting with our dollars and refusing to give any samples when we are healthy nor when we are unhealthy nor when we are dead - all because of some abstract concept of liberty, individualism and in most cases by lack of caring until shit hits their home. With omnipresent bad luck, you and I might die suffering for the same reason. 

Distilling all my noisy rant and to summarize what can a good person do:

• Always ask the why question. Why we haven't made any progress in finding the root causes of cancer? 
• Never settle for the status quo when it comes to science and answers regarding the world around us. 
• Open up your heart and mind to give out samples of your DNA and microbiome. 
• Data on your eating habits, daily activities (workout, walking, etc.), diversity of life inside your house, your ecological choices (laundry detergent, soap, etc.) 
• Cook your own food with no ingredients made from corporations. They don't understand complex systems nor will they attend your funeral. 
• Don't outsource your thinking to morons on TV and Radio. 
• Vote. Elect representatives who talk less and do more. They are not our leaders but they are our workers. Elect representatives who have a sense of gratitude, are humble,  understand the complexities of science, and don't believe in magic. 
• Make time to read all the bill's that matter to you which are due in the senate. Read the bills which have already passed as well. 
• Understand and follow all the nuances FDA does. 
• There is a brand new "field" named Exposome - We think about all health and illness as a combination of genes and the environment, and now it really is time to fill out the environment side of that equation. Limit and eliminate chemicals in your life. You need to bring to the surface the invisible choices you make in everyday life. 
• Every school, every university, every office, and every household should learn about complex systems. You do too. 
• Repeat all of the above. Understand - democracy, civilization and the life of earth depend on that. If that doesn't convince you - this will help minimize suffering during your final months and days. 

This interactive quiz from the BBC on how much of your body is your own? is a good place to understand the complexities inside "I" and how little of "I" is actually in "I".

One might feel overwhelmed by the little list above. But our brains love when we unleash them on things that matter. The hard part is to get started and persists. Garret Hardin comes to our rescue.

Garret Hardin in his book Filters Against Folly: How To Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists and the Merely Eloquent identifies three major filters against the folly that we citizens can use against blindness, short-sightedness, and sheer idiocy that so often comes disguised as eloquence or expertise.

Hardin contends that most of the major controversies of our time can be better understood as the result of the participants relying too much on any single one of these three filters. Since no one filter by itself is adequate for understanding reality and predicting the consequences of our actions, Hardin devotes the rest of the book to a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three filters (my notes here)

• The first filter is literacy - "the ability to understand what words really mean."
• The second is numeracy - "the ability not only to quantify information but also to interpret it intelligently."
• Hardin calls the last filter ecolacy - "the ability to take into account the effects of complex interactions of systems over time." 

Hardin goes on to explain more on his ecolacy concept: 

More comprehensive development of ecolacy - the ability to ask and answer the question: and then what? so that the effects of the interactions of systems over time can be taken into account - is necessary if we are not to fall victim to the forces we unleash and are unwilling or unable to control. 

Some ecologists have tried to draw attention to the interrelatedness of our world by stating that everything is related to everything else (sometimes called Barry Commoner's first law of ecology).  This statement has been criticized by many scholars because while it is valuable as a warning it is useless as a guide to action. 

While all things in the environment interact they interact in different ways. The ecologist Garrett Hardin restated this important ecological understanding in the following language so that it can serve as a guide to action: WE CAN NEVER DO MERELY ONE THING which is now known as Hardin's Law. The language that we have used to describe the effects of our actions demonstrates the reality that Hardin's Law draws our attention to. We talk about the effects and side effects, products, and wastes. Hardin contends that since we cannot do just one thing we must always ask and answer the question and then what? 

When we try to ascertain the benefits and costs of proposed courses of action on both the individual as well as social levels. The ecological systems' way of thinking employs modern scientific theories and knowledge to study a world of interlocking processes characterized by many reciprocal cause-effect pathways. The ecological systems' way of thinking has to become an integral part of the thinking of the well-educated person if we are to adequately control technology rather than fall victim to the forces we generate and are unable or unwilling to control. Ecological systems thinking provides well-educated persons with the opportunity to act more rationally because they have learned a more comprehensive and more accurate way of estimating the probable costs and benefits of their actions.

We as individuals need to develop an ecolacy way of thinking. A habit of ecolacy thinking helps one not to get lost in a myriad of details and it helps develop meta-level thinking. Nurturing meta-level thinking helps detect bullshit a mile away and helps decipher the essence of progress in any domain without getting lost in details.

I will close with a brilliant philosophical Tamil song from 1964 - the essence of the song might get lost in English translation but it's worth pondering. 

There is no life without asking the why question 

No human with me, me, and me attitude lived a good life 

General knowledge was born only because of asking questions

All the liberties were earned only because of having emotions

Let thousand years pass until the meaning of our patience is understood

Let future generations sing that we are not salves 

There is no life without asking the why question 

No human with me, me, and me attitude lived a good life 

Progress happens only because all the work of those who work 

All the duties are followed because of the wants for freedom 

Manick Bhan's Company LinkGraph Goes Vegan

When I was 12-years old, I witnessed the horrible conditions of animals in slaughterhouses in India. At that young age, I made the commitment to stop eating meat. Later in my twenties, I met my current partner, who was involved in animal rights and activism. From her I learned more about the harm that factory farming has not only on animals, but on rural communities, people of color, and the global climate we all share.

Viewing the documentary, “Dominion,” (narrated by Joaquin Phoenix), solidified my commitment to forgo animal products entirely. And when the time came to build a business, abandoning that conviction under my brand’s name felt impossible. If I was going to create a company, I wanted kindness toward animals and the environment to be equally a part of our workplace practice as it was a part of my daily life. 

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My brand’s commitment to plant-based consumption has nothing to do with wanting to change my employees’ eating habits. Many of my employees are still meat eaters, and they are free to consume meat and dairy at company functions, but on their own dime. Our vegan policy has always been explicitly communicated, and for the most part welcomed. 

Because when it comes to a meaty lunch or a free one, most choose the latter. Many of my employees have enjoyed exploring vegan dining options. Others have expressed their enthusiasm in practicing more healthy eating habits at work. 

For those meat-lovers who have had a harder time mustering up enthusiasm when the delivery guy drops off meatless sandwiches, they always show respect for the company policy. Even if their personal convictions about animal rights are not equal to mine, they are glad to be a part of a mission-driven organization. 

- More here from Manick Bahn

Irene Pepperberg's African Grey, Griffin Kicks Harvard Students Butts In Memory Test

It worked like this: Tiny colored pom-poms were covered with cups and then shuffled, so participants had to track which object was under which cup. The experimenter then showed them a pom-pom that matched one of the same color hidden under one of the cups and asked them to point at the cup. (Griffin, of course, used his beak to point.) The participants were tested on tracking two, three, and four different-colored pom-poms. The position of the cups were swapped zero to four times for each of those combinations. Griffin and the students did 120 trials; the children did 36.

The game tests the brain’s ability to retain memory of items that are no longer in view, and then updating when faced with new information, like a change in location. This cognitive system is known as visual working memory and is the one of the foundations for intelligent behavior.

So how did the parrot fare? Griffin outperformed the 6- to 8-year-olds across all levels on average, and he performed either as well as or slightly better than the 21 Harvard undergraduates on 12 of the 14 of trial types.

That’s not bad at all for a so-called bird brain.

“Think about it: Grey parrot outperforms Harvard undergrads. That’s pretty freaking awesome,” said Hrag Pailian, the postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who led the experiment. “We had students concentrating in engineering, pre-meds, this, that, seniors, and he just kicked their butts.”

Full disclosure: Griffin has been the star of past cognitive studies, like showing he’s smarter than the typical 4-year-old and as intelligent as a 6- to 8-year-old child. But making Harvard students do a double take on their own intelligence is quite the step up.

- More Here

Soon after I started this blog, Irene Pepperberg's book Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence-and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process came out. Her relationship with Alex taught me what I was feeling, my emotions and bond with Max was special, non-transcendental, and more than love. And I wasn't alone.

Sadly, no one was interested in my zest and fascination for the beauty of these bonds.

You be good. I love you.

Those were Alex's last words to Irene. Those words still haunt me and bring tears to my eyes. Those tears and the pure beauty of these bonds keep me alive to give voice to all the animal sufferings.

I like to think of Alex, Marley, Max, and others are ambassadors to change human behavior and minds. I am honored to have lived my life with one of these ambassadors and I owe them the rest of my life.


And Irene went through a lot in this biased world...

I was uncovering cognitive abilities in Alex that no one believed were possible, and challenging science’s deepest assumptions about the origin of human cognitive abilities. And yet I was without a job. I was also without a grant. I had to apply for unemployment insurance. I ate fourteen tofu meals a week, and I kept my thermostat at 57 degrees during the winter to minimize household expenses.

What I've Been Reading

Everything I am now is because of Max. I had nothing when Max into my life, he gave me everything. Now, I have everything but I don't have Max. That's the irony and brutality life played with me. But that's how of the law of impermanence works.

People usually think my love for Max makes me say "everything I am now is because of Max." Yes, I love him more than anything but that sentence is also true without bringing love into picture. What we did together couldn't have happened if either of us were alone.

Our relationship is not transcendental (whatever that means) but it was more earthly which we don't comprehend yet.  I guess, my life is to meant to document what I experienced for future generations can use our relationship for lack of better term - a data point to comprehend these symbiotic relationships better. My aversion of individualist mindsets with me, me and more me world is hence visceral.

Merlin Sheldrake takes my collaborative and symbiotic relationship with Max to even more at a fundamental level and explains one of the most fundamental truths -  symbiotic relationships were the cause of life on earth in his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.

Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been - and continue to be - a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around five hundred million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve on their own. Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi - from the Greek words for fungi (mykes) and root (rhiza) - which can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the "wood wide web." This ancient association gave rise to all recognizable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of the plants and fungi to form healthy relationships. 

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The study of relationships can be confusing. Almost all are ambiguous. Have leaf-cutter ants domesticated the fungus that they depend on, or has the fungus domesticated the ants? Do plants farm the mycorrhizal fungi that they live with, or do the fungi farm the plants? Which way does the arrow point? This uncertainty is healthy. 

Robert Macfarlane last year with this book Underland: A Deep Time Journey (which I still have to finish) opened our minds to new truths and in turn, his book turned out to be one of the top books of the 21st century.  Merlin Sheldrake repeats history this year with this book with this story of mycorrhizal networks.

One of my favorites and underutilized tools in the AI toolkit is Graph Network Algorithms. Little did I know that David Read, a mycorrhizal biologist, and his team unleashed the network science when in 1984, they showed that carbon could pass between normal plants through fungal connections. Thirteen years later, in 1997, Suzanne Simard replicated Read's findings in natural settings and coined the phrase "Wood Wide Web."

The World Wide Web appeared to have more in common with a cell or an ecological system than a Swiss watch. Today, network science is inescapable. Pick any field of study - from neuroscience, to biochemistry, to economic systems, disease epidemics, web search engines, machine learning algorithms that underpin much of AI, to astronomy and the very structure of the universe itself, a cosmic web crisscrossed with filaments of gas and clusters of galaxies - and the chances are that it makes sense of the phenomenon using a network model.

Simard's paper and her catchy concept of wood wide web found its way into James Cameron's Avatar as Pandora where symbiotic networks and relationships thrive.



It is an impossible task to review all the nuanced details Sheldrake covers in this book. I learned so many things on each and every page!

No kidding - the book closes with how language and analogies affect the research and understandings of mycorrhizal networks.

It's the narrative that we tell that needs to be examined. I'd really love to get past the language and try to understand the phenomenon. Once again, it may be more helpful to ask why this behavior has evolved in the first place: who stands to benefit.

Today, the study of shared mycorrhizal networks is one of the fields most commonly beset with political baggage. Some portray these systems as a form of socialism by which wealth of the forest can be redistributed. Others take inspiration from mammalian family structures and parental care, with young trees nourished by their fungal connections to older and larger "mother trees". Some describe networks in terms of "biological markets," in which plants and fungi are portrayed as rational economic individuals trading on the floor of an ecological stock exchange, engaging in "sanctions," "strategic trading investments," and "market gains."

Yes, it is that ridiculous and hilarious how our language biases us into mindless ideologies that affect our thinking and makes it close to impossible to change our minds.

On the positive note, the word "symbiosis" was coined by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1877 while describing the mutualistic relationship in lichens. There is an entire chapter on lichens in this book.

We need to learn to evolve our language as our understandings of realities evolves. Unfortunately, we are dwelling in the bed of Procrustes where we twist reality to fit into our stubborn and static world of languages.

One of the great mistakes I made because of my ignorance is not adding mushrooms to Max's diet regularly. I didn't know. But now, Fluffy, Garph, Neo, and I get our daily dose of mushrooms. This is how knowledge and truth works. A simple bayesian update to learn constantly, change the mind, and bring into action every day.

The bigger question is what other known unknowns I don't know yet?