Heroes of Learning:The Formidable Shirley-Ann Jackson

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Today, gentle readers, we are showcasing the life and times of remarkable American Physicist Shirley-Ann Jackson (b1946), who this year will celebrate her eightieth birthday after a lifetime of intellectual accomplishment. But we’ve picked her out because there is a deeper message for ourselves as members of the Evidence Based, Reason Modulated (EBRM) community, a lesson we could all learn, even some of the members of our exalted Editorial Board.

Shirley’s life and work are admirably described in these two links we have so thoughtfully provided; one from Wikipedia[1] and the other from Shirley’s own alma mater, MIT.[2] Suffice it to say, her career glittered.-Doctorate at MIT, on to years of cutting-edge research at the prestigious Bell Labs, then service as a fully-paid-up member of the Great and the Good at places like Rutgers, the US NRC and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute[3] among others. So far, so good. But now comes the lesson-and it’s humbling for those with eyes to see. Read this, which we have unashamedly pinched from the MIT section of her biography: it dates from the Autumn of 1964:

In the midst of working on her first physics problem set, she emerged from her room and noticed all the other first-year women on her floor out in a common area, doing theirs together. “If you know anything about MIT, you know that working the problem sets is a big deal,” she says. “So I gathered up my paperwork and said, ‘May I join you?’ One of them looked up and said, ‘Go away.’“I said, ‘I’ve done half the problems already and I know how to do the other ones.’“And another girl said, ‘Didn’t you hear her? She saidgo away.”

For Shirley Ann Jackson was Black, Ladies and Gentlemen. And the other people around her were, wait for it, white. Now we at LSS are nothing if not Men of the World, knowing humanity for what it is, its little ways so to speak. And we might expect such attitudes from certain persons who-erm, how to put this gently?- are perhaps less educated, and perform more physically based labour. The sort of bore with the beer belly and the big opinions you find in many a pub, in fact.. But we do not expect it from our own, either, at this time, nor at any other. You go to MIT to learn physics, not to rehearse the petty cruelties of exclusion. Just because we have a degree or two does not mean we are free of the blind spots, intellectual weaknesses and mental laziness. Not necessarily anyway. “Physician heal thyself” comes from Luke, though the saying is much older. It’s a truism for the holder of any Doctorate or other advanced qualification. And that means us.

[1]Shirley Ann Jackson – Wikipedia

[2]The Remarkable Career of Shirley Ann Jackson | MIT Technology Review

[3]Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) :: Architecture, Business, Engineering, Humanities, IT & Web Science, Science

#science #physics #MIT #race prejudice #learning

Hydrogen from Microbiology-another hopeful story from Nature Briefing

You might be forgiven for thinking we’re against bacteria at this blog. Got a beef with them, want more antibiotics to kill them, especially that pesky little Escherichia coli that is always clogging up the pristine pages of our little website. Nothing could be further from the truth: we are simply against bacteria that kill people, that’s all, and we admire the little creatures for all the useful things they do

Nothing more useful it seems than generating hydrogen in clean green ways that massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Of course we need hydrogen for all sorts of things-food, drugs, plastics-but the way it is currently made is depressingly energy intensive Which is what this remarkable team of researchers at Edinburgh University have done, re purposing E coli to make hydrogen in amazingly clean ways Get this extract from the admirable Nature Briefing:

. The new process involves growing a strain of Escherichia coli that naturally produces hydrogen when deprived of oxygen. The researchers added a palladium catalyst and substrate for the hydrogen to bind to, and when they removed oxygen, hydrogen was bound to 94% of the substrate.

And they didn’t stop there:

The team then turned waste bread into a food source that could be given to the bacteria instead of glucose, to show that this type of food waste can be repurposed. The system resulted in a three-fold decrease in greenhouse-gas equivalent emissions compared with using fossil fuels, according to the team’s modelling.

There’s a lot to be said here. First our admiration for the amazing work and intelligence of the scientists[2] whose original paper we seem for once to be able to reproduce in full. The marvellous ways old things like bread and E coli are recycled to useful purposes. And a further point which the team at the admirable Nature Briefing know well. Progress, hope even, comes from the application of the scientific method. The use of evidence and reason to judge it in that order. Nothing else, however much you might want it to be so.

[2] Native H2 pathways enable biocompatible hydrogenation of metabolic alkenes in bacteria | Nature Chemistry

#microbiology #palladium #greenhoiuse gas# hydrogen# E coli #sustainabilityn #drugs #plastics

Round up: Declining lives, Giant Octopuses, Memory modules and more problems for the Nation State

Sick Man of Europe? We’ve said it here before (LSS 10 2 25, 21 12 21):declining health statistics are one of the surest indicators of a society in long term decay. Now this study reported by the Guardian gives further cause to our suspicion that poor old Britain may be heading the way of the poor old USSR.

People in UK spend fewer years in good health than a decade ago, study finds | Health | The Guardian 1

Can your brain get full? It’s a question that has vexed many of us who cannot find their car keys or remember the birthdays of friends and families but seem to recall the lyrics of Living thing by ELO with ease. This article from The Conversation explains how this embarrassing state of affairs may come about:

https://theconversation.com/headspace-can-our-brains-get-full-279173?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20April%2027%20

Squids in Riffing on the above, prepare your brain for a totally new piece of information: apparently the Cretaceous seas were home to a population of hitherto unknown octopuses of terrifying size, easily able to wolf down one of the whale like mosasaurs which had been labelled apex predator of these long-ago seas.

‘Kraken-like’ giant octopuses 100m years ago crunched bones of prey | Palaeontology | The Guardian absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Sovereignty v Sovereign Wealth Funds The title which Larry Elliott gives his article: Why is Britain’s economy so stuck? It’s the tension between what voters want and what the bond markets allow is an almost perfect summary of our theme that as a going concern, the Nation State now seems to be in deep trouble. For those who say we are being hopelessly Anglocentric, we think the UK makes a pretty good model for about 50 other small to medium-sized nations, so everyone can learn from it.

Why is Britain’s economy so stuck? It’s the tension between what voters want and what the bond markets allow | Larry Elliott | The Guardian

Quote of the week: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” Hamlet Act 1 Scene 3

#paleontology #economics #britain #neurology #health #epidemiology

WHO has a Cunning Plan to speed antibiotic development

“The scientific community has developed and approved new antibiotics in recent years. This is good, but unfortunately not sufficient to catch up with evolving drug-resistance bacteria, especially against those of greatest concern. We need a reliable pipeline with new antibacterial agents that are innovative, affordable, accessible to all those who need them.”

Dr Yvan Hutin, Director of Antimicrobial Resistance at WHO

Says it all really, everything that we’ve been banging on about here for the last six years and more. The problem is simple, but deadly. Although more than 90 new antibiotics are now in development, very of few of them target the really high-priority organisms that worry health care professionals: and even fewer of these are really innovative (in the way that penicillin was in its day for example) And so the World Health Organization, that most noble of entities has come up with a Cunning Plan to really get things moving. They gave divided it into three Target Product Profiles:

-our old friends the multidrug resistant gram negative bacteria such as enterobacteriales, Acinobacter baumanii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, who’ve shown up in so many old LSS blogs we won’t bother to list them.

–Gram positives like Enterococcus faecium. We have wondered why the gram negatives have been getting all the attention, and seeing no Darwinian reason why the gram positives should not evolve resistance too, are extremely glad someone is at last paying attention to them.

-their third trope for action is bacterial meningitis, caused by organisms such as Neisseria meningitidis and Streptococcus pneumoniae among others. Particularly welcome, for of those who incur such dreadful infections, one out of six will die and of the survivors, about one in five will be left with some long term disimpairment.

Hats off to Dr Hutin in particular and the World Health Organization in general. The World Health Organization is often treated as a mere federation of its member states, but in practice it is something larger and more coherent than the sum of its parts. Individual nations see only their own budgets, their own pathogens, their own political cycles; the WHO sees the whole epidemiological chessboard. Its strength lies in that cooperative vantage point — the ability to gather data from Lagos and Lima, to convene experts from Seoul and Stockholm, and to turn a hundred local anxieties into a single, rational blueprint for global action. In a field as fragmented and under‑powered as antibiotic development, that kind of coordination isn’t bureaucracy; it’s civilisation defending itself. There’s your glass-raiser for Friday Night Cocktails, gentle readers.

WHO releases new target product profiles for urgently needed antibiotics

#antibiotics #penicillin #world health organisation #epidemiology #microbiology #health #medicine

Friday Night Feast of Fun: What to Wear for Cocktails

A few years ago (LSS 15 5 20) we received a plaintive call for help from a reader in Bridport in Dorset. He posed an age old and much-debated question: how should the Gentleman of Fashion dress for Friday Night Cocktail?. And this is the answer we gave

“Dear Mr AF: the rules on this have always been very prescriptive, but fair. In winter, a dark blue or black jacket, striped shirt, creased chinos and smart black shoes. Tie; anything regimental. old school, or your golf club. The building, not the thing you hit the ball with! In summer you may sport a light jacket, summer being defined as any date from Easter Sunday until the final Bank Holiday in August. You may of course wear a Panama. But don’t wear it indoors, or you will look like a numpty.”

Well, we will not change a dot or comma of that answer. Rules of dress are timeless, like rules of Golf or Morality. What you see above is how it is ladies and gentleman and we can no mor exchange that than we can ask for a rewrite on one of the Ten Commandments. (not even the one about Adultery) But we will add an appendix. A coda if you like, to recognise the times we live in.

Because since that blog was published quite a lot has changed. global temperatures have climbed by roughly 0.3 °C, 2024 became the hottest year ever recorded at about 1.55 °C above pre‑industrial levels , mountain glaciers have kept shrinking with more than 27 m water‑equivalent lost since 1970 and record mass losses in five of the past six years , and extreme events—heatwaves, storms, floods, droughts, and fires—have intensified across almost every corner of the biosphere. Yes, it’s got hotter, quite a lot hotter and it’s not just because you are standing too near the barbecue fire, ladies and gentlemen. So, just as St Benedict wisely relaxed monastic rules to make them more bearable , we are going to relax the Cocktail Code. A bit. In the warmest weather only. Gentleman may, with discretion, wear a polo shirt if working at the barbecue or serving the drinks, provided that you clear it first with the Guests.

Well there’s our advice . It’s nearly Six British Summer Time as we pen these lines, so we, like many of you are already thinking of slipping in to the time-honoured garb and wolfing down that first Pimms. We hope you enjoy your evening too, wherever you are.

#cocktails #clothes #global warming #st benedict #climate change #pimms #gin

Round-up: More Amoc Havoc, IQ Blues, immunity-and is the prequel to Terminator?

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George Monbiot shares fears of Amoc Havoc

Last week we showcased a piece by Damien Carrington about the rising dangers of a collapse in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation(LSS 16 4 26) Several outlets took up the theme, But it took a writer as prescient as George Monbiot to put it into wider context:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/23/catastrophic-climate-event-scientists-atlantic-system-collapse-billionaire-existential-crisis.

A critical eye for IQ

We’ve always had our doubts about IQ tests, and not just because we’re rubbish at them. Now an eminent researcher in psychology shares our concerns that such tests on their own are sufficient to guess at a child’s future development.

https://theconversation.com/the-truth-about-child-iq-research-shows-it-fluctuates-and-may-be-an-unreliable-predictor-of-future-success-27156 nMargherita Malanchini

Running up that hill-it doesn’t hurt ……

Immune cells linked to endurance in mice reports Nature Briefing. Is this what’s going on inside the cells of top athletes?

B cells — the ‘security guards’ of the immune system — also provide crucial support for muscles during exercise. B-cell-deficient mice performed worse on strength and endurance tests than did mice with healthy B-cell counts. Researchers found that the absence of B cells lowers the amount of the amino acid glutamate, which is associated with improved mitochondrial and skeletal muscle function, released by the liver. A lack of glutamate in muscle tissue and the bloodstream could explain the decrease in exercise performance, they suggest.

Nature | 4 min read
Reference: Cell paper

Human machine barrier gets ever more blurred

News that Barcelona surgeon Dr Juan Aibar has successfully implanted electrodes into the brain of an unfortunate sufferer from Tourettes syndrome reinforces another old trope of this blog. That our ability to create functioning interfaces between nervous tissue and artificial technology is advancing ever further. Perhaps you could ask Arnold Schwarzenegger where it might end, or rather Terminate (this El País article by Jessica Mouzo is in Spanish)

https://elpais.com/salud-y-bienestar/2026-04-22/electrodos-en-el-cerebro-para-mitigar-el-sindrome-de-tourette-grave-los-tics-mas-fuertes-junto-con-gritos-y-

Quote of the week “But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak… even that prophet shall die.” — Deuteronomy 18:20,

Harsh words for someone!

#climate change #global warming #amoc #neurology #medicine #immunology #intelligence testing

When Bacteria Explode: a new clue in the old antibiotic arms race

Bacteria are relentlessly evolving resistance to our attacks with antibiotics and phages — but how? If we understood their tricks a little better, we might still have a chance of avoiding the lethal pandemics of antibiotic‑resistant organisms otherwise waiting in the wings. A new paper from researchers at the John Innes Centre[1] has now shed light on at least one way that whole populations of bacteria may be secretly defending themselves from our ministrations.

The team found that the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus has an extraordinary switch mechanism that can cause it to “explode” under certain conditions. When it does, it releases tiny virus‑like particles containing fragments of its own DNA. Pertinent to our quest, gentle reader, is that some of this DNA may include instructions on how to resist antibiotics — or perhaps even the bacteriophages we deploy against them. The researchers also identified the components of this switch, which go by the snappy names LypABC and CdxB. They don’t yet know exactly what flips the switch, but they have their suspicions.

All of this is good news for those of us following the antibiotic‑resistance story. We now have a clearer picture of how at least one type of bacterium spreads resistance among its own members. And if we know what these switches are, we have a fighting chance of intervening to turn them off. If, as the researchers suspect, the presence of a hostile phage is indeed one of the triggers, then this is a very great step forward indeed

[1]A bacterial CARD–NLR-like immune system controls the release of gene transfer agents

Emma J. Banks, Pavol Bárdy, Ngat T. Tran, Phuong M. Nguyen, Boris Stojilković, Kevin Gozzi, Abbas Maqbool & Tung B. K. Le Nature Microbiology (2026)C

[2]John Innes Centre | Excellence in plant science, genetics and microbiology

#antibiotic resistance #bacteria #dna #genes #virus #bacteriophage #health #medicine

Farewell Robert Skidelsky. If you want to know more about the current mess, read this

No one over thirty will forget the terrifying autumn of 2008. For on September 15^th of that year the collapse of Lehman Brothers initiated the acute phase of a chronic financial crisis, tumbling the world economy towards final ruin. And as the indefatigable Larry Elliott [1] notes in the Guardian, in his masterly obituary of Robert Skidelsky, the ruling classes of the west were utterly bewildered:

…… there was almost universal disbelief that the crisis was happening. The entire economic establishment – politicians, bankers, Treasury officials, analysts and pundits – were caught unawares, because according to the free-market orthodoxy there was no chance of such a catastrophe occurring

Robert Skidelsky (1929-2026) might have known better. Having devoted a lifetime to studying the works of John Maynard Keynes, he presumably shared that thinker’s suspicion of the axiomatic beneficence of untrammelled Free Markets. Ironically by the summer of 2008 even he felt the Keynesian game was up, and was contemplating other projects, as Elliott points out. Then, as they say-It happened.

For a few fleeting months Keynes was in vogue again, so desperate was the plight of the Great and Good. Interest rates were cut. Money printed. Governments borrowed and spent, Catastrophe was averted. And then? Well, in Britain the Cameron government was elected and reverted to the via dolorosa of financial orthodoxy. Cutting the budget was all that mattered, as if a nation was like a grocer’s shop in a small market town. Keynes was firmly shown the door: and the consequences of poverty, lost growth, wasted lives and appalling political outcomes are with us to this day.

Like Keynes, Skidelsky was not a tribal Party man, having variously flirted with Labour, the SDP, the Tories, and even Jeremy Corbyn in his time. Both Keynes and Skidelsky preferred solutions that worked, reason and evidence over belief and emotion. And both knew that Keynes’ essential insight was that money is about a lot more than just cash, or even more sophisticated accountants’ tricks like stocks and shares. Money is really a network of obligations, contracts, promises and deliveries which facilitate the flow of energy through human societies and by which they live. Any system which depends ultimately on the unregulated competition of lone individuals will ultimately corrupt the information and break the trust on which all depend. A truth now lost in the declining plutocracies of the west, but which certain other parties have understood very well

[1] Lord Skidelsky obituary | Robert Skidelsky | The Guardian

[2] Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. London: Penguin Books.

#robert skidelski #JM Keynes #economics #politics #financial crash

Beyond the Nation State #6: The Cost of Nations

Identity, it is said, is the most important thing a People can have. So what better way to guarantee that identity than by taking back control and assuring it inside a sovereign nation state.? It’s a very popular policy at the moment, so there must be advantages. But it’s worth at least noting the counterfactual argument, because it has consequences for what we try do here.

If you’re going to have a sovereignty worthy of the name, you must have the following: Defence, Intelligence, Borders, Customs, Taxes, Tariffs, Executive, Legislature, Judiciary, Foreign ministry ,Legal system, Central bank, Currency, Police and Regulators. To say nothing of the fixed obligations such as pensions you inherited from the larger state you have left. You could opt for health education, culture, policy, tourism and transport as well; but these are discretionary. So could smaller entities bear all these costs if they went it alone? Could California? (large-ish) Wales?(medium) Or Jersey? (rather small, with due respect). Take Wales as a hypothesis : let’s say the UK spends £50 billion on Defence and Wales is 3.1% of its population. That ratio would entitle an independent Wales to £1.5 billion. Would they be as well defended? The answer is no. For one thing they would have to set up entirely new structures of command, procurement, intelligence and all the other essentials of a modern force. Secondly, there is the brute fact that larger purchases always generate cheaper prices for anything Defensive-aeroplanes, tanks, guns, even the dusting cloths you need to keep them clean. Bulk purchase means cheaper unit cost. And it works the other way. Even a superb Welsh manufacturer of tanks would only enjoy tiny assured domestic markets, making its borrowing and production costs prohibitive in a world market. That is why American giants like Ford and General Motors thrived in the twentieth century: they had fixed access to the largest Single Market then available. That is why nations which have tried to downsize, like the UK after Brexit, have struggled so badly ever since.

The argument to grow polities into larger units is the same as that for growing companies. Economy of scale and stripping out fixed costs. A World Government would only need one of each the exhaustive list above. Imagine the procurement advantages in any number of things-medicines, schoolbooks, computers or even those wretched dusters again. What a saving for taxpayers! A single world Ministry of Defence would enjoy the highest possible bargaining power against its suppliers, cutting the cost of the $2.7 trillion we spend as a planet on defence by whole orders of magnitude. Of course, if there were a World Government most defence spending would become unnecessary anyway, as most nations’ armies exist sole to defend against other nations’ armies. But that’s something for another day

#nation state #history #politics #economics #world government

Breakthrough for blindness, an old lesson re-learned: and a mystery question

Leber congenital amaurosis, called LCA for short, is the most common form inherited sight loss in children[1] It’s caused by defects in a cluster of genes including RPE65 and until recently was quite untreatable. Now, as Ian Sample reports for the Guardian,[2] a team of researchers have effected a major new treatment called Luxturna: a gene‑replacement therapy delivered by injecting a working copy of the RPE65 gene directly under the retina. By giving retinal cells the functional gene they’re missing, it restores the visual cycle and can improve light sensitivity, visual function, and navigation ability in people with RPE65-related Leber congenital amaurosis. Interestingly the team comprises a husband and wife called Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire who share the prestigious Breakthough Prize [3] with their colleague Katherine High.

Regular readers will share our admiration for the work of this remarkable trio. They may note moreover that the researchers have something else to teach us, something that strongly concurs with opinions often expressed in this blog:

Bennett said it was a “tremendously exciting time” for scientific and medical research, but warned that the US administration’s attacks on science could “cause damage for generations to come”, leading her to fear a brain drain that the country would struggle to recover from.

“Agendas have become politicised, government agencies that support basic and applied research have been undermined, knowledgeable advisers and experts have been dismissed or have fled and revised guidelines contradict decades of rigorous research,”

Says it all really. But don’t just sit around reading it here:tell your friends and neighbours. For us there still remains outstanding question. Is Albert Maguire by any chance a relation of Ken Maguire, one of the best pub landlords of the 1990s, being sometime manager of the superb Latymers in Hammersmith Road London W14?

[1]Leber congenital amaurosis – Moorfields Eye Hospital

[2]‘Oscar of science’ awarded to team behind gene therapy that restores lost vision | Science | The Guardian

[3]Breakthrough Prize – Wikipedia

#LCA #Blindness #gene therapy #medicine #health #science #research #pub #beer