The
discovery of carbon dioxide by Joseph Black (1728–1799) marked a new era of
research on the respiratory gases. His
initial interest was in alkalis such as limewater that were thought to be
useful in the treatment of renal stone.
When he studied magnesium carbonate, he found that when this was heated
or exposed to acid, a gas was evolved that he called “fixed air” because it had
been combined with a solid material. He
showed that the new gas extinguished a flame, that it could not support life,
and that it was present in gas exhaled from the lung. Within a few years of his discovery,
hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen were also isolated. Thus arguably Black's work started the
avalanche of research on the respiratory gases carried out by Priestley,
Scheele, Lavoisier, and Cavendish. Black
then turned his attention to heat and he was the first person to describe
latent heat--the heat added or lost when a liquid changes its state, for
example when water changes to ice or steam.
Latent heat is a key concept in thermal physiology because of the heat
lost when sweat evaporates. Black was a
friend of the young James Watt (1736–1819) who was responsible for the
development of early steam engines. Watt
was puzzled why so much cooling was necessary to condense steam into water, and
Black realized that the answer was the latent heat. The resulting improvements in steam engines
ushered in the Industrial Revolution.
John B. West https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajplung.00020.2014
James Hutton
(1726–1797), a Scottish farmer and naturalist, is known as the founder of
modern geology. He was a great observer
of the world around him. More
importantly, he made carefully reasoned geological arguments. Hutton came to believe that the Earth was
perpetually being formed; for example, molten material is forced up into
mountains, eroded, and then eroded sediments are washed away. He recognized that the history of the Earth
could be determined by understanding how processes such as erosion and sedimentation
work in the present day. His ideas and
approach to studying the Earth established geology as a proper science. https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/earth-inside-and-out/james-hutton
Charred Cabbage and Warm
Apple Salad by Donna Hay
Warm Cabbage Apple Salad
with Pecans by Joanne Gallagher
Writing in the April 29, 2020 Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe how they’ve engineered
so-called xenobots (from the species of frog, Xenopus laevis,
whence their cells came) with the help of evolutionary algorithms. They hope that this new kind of
organism—contracting cells and passive cells stuck together—and its eerily
advanced behavior can help scientists unlock the mysteries of cellular communication. Michael Levin and his coworkers then try building
some of these designs; others they throw out.
They send the ones that work back to the computer scientists, who adjust
their simulator based on what the lab folks learned. “So it's this kind of back and forth cycle
between the design and the biology that helps understand the rules of what the
biology is doing,” says Levin. The
brainless blobs end up behaving in ways that are downright spooky. “They change their movement from time to time,
so they will move in a particular way, then they'll change it, then they'll
turn around and go back,” says Levin. When
they encounter other loose cells, they’ll herd them into little piles. Slice a xenobot open and it’ll pull itself
together again, à la T-1000 from Terminator 2. Two xenobots might join together and scoot
around as a happy couple. A xenobot with
a hole in it can pick up and carry things.
Then we can start to think about a whole
new way of going about robotics. Your typical humanoid
robot is
a collection of dumb parts that makes up an (ideally) intelligent whole
that can walk around and manipulate objects. But a human body is intelligent all the way
down—cells are communicating to make tissues, which collaborate to make organs,
which make up the (ideally) intelligent whole. “We are interested in feeding that information
back to engineering and AI,” Levin says.
The path there
won’t be easy, though. “Constructing
robots out of living tissue shares many of the same challenges that are being
worked on in the field of soft robotics, only turned up to 11,” says Tønnes
Nygaard, who studies evolutionary robotics at the University of Oslo, but
who wasn't involved in this research. The
real world is a messy and noisy place that any robot has a hard time adapting
to, much less a robot made out of fussy living cells. But the beauty of using these kinds of
evolutionary techniques means the robots in a sense adapt themselves to the
environment like real living things, albeit with the guiding hand of humans. So a warm welcome to the xenobots, hybrid
robot-organisms like no other. May the
world treat you kindly. Matt Simon courtesy of Sam Kriegman and Josh Bongard,
UVM See graphics at https://www.wired.com/story/xenobot/ See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot
Andy Serkis is reading The
Hobbit live and in its entirety on May 8, 2020, in an effort to raise money for
charity. The 56-year-old began streaming
his online performance of JRR Tolkien's 1937 novel at 10:00 BST. "Thank you so much for joining me on
this huge expedition we're about to go on in our living rooms," Serkis
told viewers before he began the reading.
The Gollum actor said over £100,000 had already been raised for NHS
Charities Together and Best Beginnings. Around
15,000 viewers watched the first hour of his reading, dubbed the
"Hobbitathon". Serkis played
the corrupted character, originally known as Smeagol, in the The Lord of the
Rings and Hobbit films. Before he began
the reading, Serkis thanked "the NHS and all the charities who are out
there doing important work saving our lives and keeping us safe". His reading is expected to last for up to 12
hours, with viewers watching via his YouTube stream and Go Fund Me Page.
John
McPhee quotes
from Annals of the Former World, Book 1:
Basin and Range “A roadcut is to
a geologist as a stethoscope is to a doctor.” “Since the late Miocene, the
earth's magnetic field had reversed itself twenty times--from
north to south, from south back to north--and the dates of
those reversals had by now become well established.” “California will be an island. It is just a matter of time.”
John
McPhee imagery from Annals of the Former World, Book 1: Basin and Range “rouge sky” “oven weather” “delirium of sage”
John
Angus McPhee (born March 8, 1931) is
an American writer, widely considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General
Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of
the Former World (a collection of five books,
including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008, he received the George Polk Career
Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly
half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris
Professor of Journalism at Princeton
University. McPhee's writing career began at Time magazine, and led
to a long association with the weekly magazine The New Yorker from
1963 to the present. He has been a
staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965. Many of his twenty-nine books include material
originally written for this latter periodical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McPhee
The New York Public
Library has released an album of all the sounds
you might miss—including the sound of the New York Public Library,
which closed all its branches in mid-March 2020. Each track, NYPL says, contains its own
little narrative: “The Library
recording, for example, follows a New Yorker entering a branch, running into a
tour group, interacting with a helpful librarian looking to make a reading
recommendation, walking past a toddler story time and then sitting down to
begin quiet work.” https://electricliterature.com/missing-reading-in-public-bring-the-sounds-of-the-library-to-your-home/
The Michigan Capitol
Commission has sought legal advice and could make a decision May 11, 2020 on
whether guns should be banned inside the Capitol, the vice chairman of the
commission said May 5, 2020. The
long-standing practice of allowing open carry of firearms inside the Capitol
came under national scrutiny on April 30 when demonstrators, some carrying long
guns, pressed together outside the
entrance to the House chamber and shouted to be allowed inside. Earlier, several hundred protesters gathered
on the Capitol lawn, urging the Legislature not to extend Michigan's
coronavirus state of emergency, which provides the legal basis for Gov.
Gretchen Whitmer's stay-at-home order and other emergency orders. Whitmer extended the state of emergency
through May 28 without legislative approval. The stay-at-home order runs through May
15. Demonstrators carrying rifles
entered the Senate public gallery and shouted at state senators on the chamber
floor. The demonstration included the
display on the Capitol lawn of at least one Confederate flag and a sign
reading, "Tyrants get the rope." At least one lawmaker, state Sen. Sylvia
Santana, D-Detroit, wore a bulletproof vest at her desk. John Truscott, a Republican and vice chairman
of the six-member Michigan State Capitol Commission, which oversees the
building, said he was "very disturbed" by what he saw. "We do not like seeing guns brought into
the building—loaded guns—and I'm a Second Amendment advocate," Truscott
said, speaking on the "Morning Wake-Up" radio show with Dave Akerly
on WILS-AM. Paul Egan https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/05/05/michigan-capitol-guns-inside-banned/3083564001/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2265
May 8, 2020
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