Gentle readers, we have a confession. Yesterday in our otherwise impeccable blog about Mobile Crisis Construction, that admirable charity that does so much to help victims of wars and other catastrophes, we inadvertently misunderstood a detail of their production process. Today we had the honour of a message from Nic Matich, their Founder and Director, who wrote
Please note that there is no “Oven”. This makes our technology work anywhere in the world. Nothing but a generator is needed.
First of all, Sorry to Nic and all the team. Secondly-well it does show we get read all around the world(they are based in Australia). Thirdly-we’ve just bunged them a tenner to say sorry-any chance any of you out there could do the same? Their website and donation page may be accessed below [1]
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Have you ever wondered what happens at a disaster scene or a battlefield after the cameras are turned off and the media circus has rolled on elsewhere? Do all those mounds of rubble and broken buildings suddenly disappear? Do all those dreadfully traumatised survivors go home to a nice cup of tea? You know as well as we do that the physical damage of war can take years, decades sometimes, to clear up. Which means a lot of people could be homeless or living in primitive tents and shanties for a very, very long time.
Until now. Because our researchers, bless them have come across a truly remarkable charity called Mobile Crisis Construction.[1] Who saw the need to provide solid, decent and healthy homes for all these pitiful victims as soon as possible. And what struck us here at LSS, humble researchers and Senior Management alike, was the astute simplicity with which they have gone about it. “You’ve got all that debris at the site”, they reasoned” all that broken brick, glass, etc. That’s not rubbish, that’s a raw material, mate!” So the first thing they do is move in a special mill which crushes it all up into a useable powder. Next the powder is put into a special oven and baked, on site, into bricks. Not just any bricks but ones with special grooves and sticky out bits on them so that anyone can run up a decent wall-after a bit of training of course. Their website is a trove of impressive statistics but here’s one for starters: they estimate that they can knock out enough bricks to create one school, or five large houses in a week[2]
Now gentle readers, we guess you have already spotted the true genius in their idea. No more supply chains! No more lorries carrying all those materials, skilled labourers and all the bureaucracy and red tape that goes with it. Instead, they take the factories to the site. You know we love inspired new solutions to ancient problems here (LSS passim). But this surely has to be one of the simplest and best so far? We wish this new venture every success and we hope you will too. Because all the suffering people of the world deserve something better.
It’s hard to remember how different human evolution was before Svante Pääbo and his transformative discoveries in genetics. There were some bones, but they were bit few and fragmentary. People argued interminably over them like so many medieval nominalists and realists. There were tools, and heroic studies of the scratches thereon. People spent lifetimes following various primates in and out of the rain forest: but it is hard to say whether a chimpanzee is really like a human ancestor, or a baboon is : or is not.
Then in 1997 at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Svante Paabo announced a breakthrough: the actual DNA from inside the mitochondrion of a real (dead) neanderthal. For the very first time here was something tangible, data rich, and available for statistical scrutiny. Now we knew who we were, and who they were. As if that were not enough, in 2009 his team announced a whole Neanderthal genome. Then came immortality: on the floor of a cave in distant Siberia came a tiny bone which Pääbo showed to be a third type of human: the Denisovans. The utter. twisted, anastomosing complexity of the modern human story became clear: and with it the implication that it had always been thus. Giving him the Nobel Prize in 2022 must have been the easiest decision since that monkey in 2001: a space odyssey thought a horse skull might be a good place to land a good thwack.
But the real significance of Svante Pääbo lies deeper. It’s in the observable phenomenon that every so often some genius comes along and turns a field upside down. That every debate, however heated and angry, will one day become futile as more gets found out. It’s like that in all sciences, and a good many non sciences too. The biggest mistake any of us can make is to think we have all the answers. Thanks Svante Pääbo for showing there’s always something new around every corner.
If ever there was a journalist whom we have learned to take seriously, it is John Harris of the Guardian. He it was, along with film-maker John Domokos , who first went round the people in the heartlands of Britain in the 2010s. And thereby revealed the depths of bewilderment, rage and despair that now lurk ubiquitously just below the surface of our national life. “Anywhere but Westminster” they called their work, revealing the deep cleavage between the formal politics of governance and the real feelings of most voters. His article which we riff on for you today, gentle readers is a neuralgically painful contrast between the increasingly empty rituals of the nation’s leaders and an ever more bloody-minded and fractious populace. [1]
Being a thoughtful sort of chap, Harris goes deeper. suggesting that this explains the sudden rise in the fortunes of formerly small parties such as the Greens, Reform, Plaid Cymru and the others. And the agonising decline in the fortunes of those two stalwarts of 20th Century British politics, the Conservative and Labour Parties. He cites the obvious causes- a stagnated economy, changing identities and “the failures of the various administrations that have run the UK since 2008” And this:
The essential point was made a few days before Reeves’s speech by Luke Tryl, the UK director of the thinktank and research organisation More In Common, and someone with an incisive understanding of where we have arrived. “I still don’t think enough people realise how much traditional mainstream politics is in the last chance saloon, in no small part because it can’t be trusted to deliver what it promises,” he said on X.
Why has every single administration failed to deliver the things people want? Governments in the last century used to deliver quite acceptable levels of health, defence, housing and so on.. Here we move beyond Harris (we never put words in others’ mouths) to our own speculations, touched on in our blog Pity poor Rachel Reeves, LSS 23 10 25, and earlier ones in this vein. Remember how we said every nation state, even the richest, are plagued with such debts and poor economies that they no longer have any room to seriously mitigate the lives of their citizens? That the combined weight of investment capital, expressing its power in things like bond and currency markets, could stymie the efforts of any finance minister? Could it therefore be that the Nation State, which has hitherto served us so successfully, is no longer an effective vehicle to manage the the lives of its citizens? It is a terrifying conjecture: for we have no idea of what may replace it. But one thing we do remember: read everything you can lay your hands on about the collapse of Yugoslavia, and what followed.
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), that debilitating melancholy that so many people report as autumn draws in is very real, according to Linda Geddes of the Guardian. [1]. It’s not just Linda’s article itself that intrigues, although it’s full of good facts and useful advice. Because the approach her scientists have taken illustrates one of the most exciting and hopeful trends in human learning since the Renaissance: the use of giant data sets combined with powerful IT tools to handle them.
The SAD researchers at the University of Edinburgh., led by the redoubtable Dr Cathy Wyse analysed four years of data, comprising records of 500 000 people from the UK Biobank,[2] a vast compendium of learning on all things medical in these islands To paste Linda’s killer quote
Large-scale resources such as the UK Biobank have transformed this area of research, allowing scientists to track seasonal patterns across hundreds of thousands of people over many years – something that was previously impossible.
It wasn’t long, gentle readers, before we found how this whole new area of learning, depending on whole new technologies such as AI, Cloud Computing and High Performance Computing is transforming our understanding in many areas such as medicine, biotechnology, meteorology, epidemiology…. remember our own praises for Deep Mind and its generation of the alpha fold proteins?(LSS passim). It is revolutionising human sciences like economics and can even help us understand more about the authorship of old texts such as The Bible and Greek Masters like Homer. Because only by looking at really huge data sets can you see patterns, meaningful patterns, which the close view of the human mind alone could never have detected.
Being the curious little monkeys we are, we couldn’t resist asking how this all works. It was like lifting the bonnet on a Rolls Royce when you don’t know what a variable valve timing system is-or anything else. For we were in an arcane mathematical world of Combinatories, Probabilities, Big O numbers, floating point approximations, Complexity, Catastrophe, and countless other recondite concepts which t will always remain beyond our comprehension. You try a few and see how far you get! But our admiration for the people who can handle such stuff, and use their computers to make all our lives richer, like the great Dr Wyse, grew even more limitless. Nevertheless, we will leave you with one fact hitherto unknown to us. If you shuffle one standard pack of 52 cards, there are 52! possible permutations: that’s 8.07x 1027. More than all the atoms in the solar system. Good job no one has tried it with two packs, we say: or they would have to move the Smaller Magellanic Cloud out of the way to make room for all the possibilities.
Today, gentle readers, we bring you really good news in our joint quest to finally overcome the problem of antibiotic resistant micro organisms. And it comes of course from Nature Briefing, that indispensable source of all good science news and reporting. Let’s start with their summary Antibiotic was hiding in plain sight, and then briefly run through all the implications
Okay, so wanted the implications? Firstly for us at LSS. Great reassurance to see progress in our core area of real, old-skool antibiotics. Now, if these make a comeback, can they please be used sparingly, and in conjunction with therapies like vaccines and bacteriophages, so we are not in this whole mess again around the year 2065? Secondly, the new compound premethylenomycin C , though only a precursor is a hundred times more powerful than methylenomycin A. As Dr Challis, one of the co-authors of the work observes, that’s a turn up for the evolutionary book if ever there was one. But for us the Big One is how many years of painstaking research this all took, how many tiny detailed steps in the synthetic chain had to be weeded out. They started back in 2006 when one George W Bush was still President of the United States and everyone thought that Katy Perry was the way of the future. Blue sky abstract research; done as much out of intellectual curiosity as anything else. Which is odd. Because every so often one of our Right Leaning media outlets comes up with tropes such as WOI ARE VE WYESTIN ORL DIS TEXPAYUHS MUNNI ONNER RESURTCH WOT DON’T DO NUFFINK? SPEN IT ON SUMFIN USEFUL GUVNOR, INNIT! Which raises a deep question; how do you measure the value of research like premethylenomycin ? The costs are small but substantial enough to cash-strapped Universities. But the pay-off is almost infinite. That one we will leave to you, faithful readers of our words.
Ihave lived long enough, my way of life is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf…..Macbeth Act V scene 3)
Most of us would pretty much agree with the Thane of Glamis. But up to now, achieving that Pan-like state of eternal youth has been no more than a dream, whatever the cosmetics companies say. Until today, when recent discoveries of a protein in the Bowhead whale suggests that this same eternal dream may actually come true. We’ve two takes on the story: a popular one from Ashleigh McCaul of the Mail: and a more in-depth view from Nature BriefingsSecrets of a 200 year old whale which carries, as ever, links to deeper coverage (no whale pun intended)
A cold-activated protein that helps to repair broken DNA could be the bowhead whale’s secret to living sometimes for more than 200 years. Researchers travelled to northern Alaska to collect samples of tissue from the whales (Balaena mysticetus) from Iñupiaq Inuit communities. The team found that the whale’s cells produce a protein called CIRPB, which helps to mend potentially cancerous DNA mutations. The results show that an efficient DNA repair system is “a very effective strategy to confer this extreme longevity”, says molecular biologist Zhiyong Mao.Nature | 4 min read Reference: Nature paper
And our opinion? it’s interesting how science is fine when its discoveries coincide with the deepest wishes of the population. Yet science is not so convenient when it reminds of certain uncomfortable truths, such as the imminence of catastrophic climate change, The response of some is to launch culture wars, wherein the conclusions and recommendations of the educated must not only be resisted, they must be actively torn down if at all possible. This article by Alex Heffron and Tom Carter-Brooks for the Conversation chronicles how this is currently playing out in the English countryside., where some persons are trying to foment opposition to the installation of solar panels on private land. Of course, motives will be mixed: and not all of us think an array of panels is quite as pretty as a meadow of waving wheat. But we must have clean power: or we will surely die, young and old alike.
We are certain you will find a comparable example near to where you live, gentle reader Yet it’s the psychology of all this that gives us this thought, for what it may be worth. Now, It was said of Peter Pan than he never grew up. The best definition of growing up is to realise not all your wishes can come true at once. It seems some people must do more to recognise that, however many decades they have accumulated.
Our earnest recommendation of the second part of Steve Schirreres’ excellent diptych of articles for The Conversation
As Britain declined after world war one, no other power replaced it with the necessary financial, military and cultural power necessary to avert the political and financial instability that followed. The result was revolution, boom, crash and depression, leading rapidly to the Second World War. “Ah!” we hear you say, “Ah! That could never happen again. Look for example how well the world did to wriggle out of the consequences of the financial crash of 2007-2008!” But that, gentle readers, is to beg the question. For back in those days the world had two shots in its locker which are now fully fired. First, a spirit of co-operation among the great powers which let them co-ordinate rescue plans quickly: and the trust to make them stick. (Schifferes is rather good on this, having had a ringside seat) Now Mr Trump has declared that he will only ever consult American national interest. He may have valid domestic reasons for taking this line; but it will make any recovery from a future recession very much harder indeed.
Secondly, the America of those days still had deep and unrivalled capital markets, which enabled its Federal Reserve to act as a lender of last resort to the whole world. And this is where Schifferes gets really interesting. Firstly he details deep worries about the long term stability the US Bond market and the dollar. Remember- a hegemon needs both bonds and a currency to ensure global stability. Combine this with the threats to the US Stock market( a concern to many commentators at the time of writing) and you have not only the elements for a perfect storm, but no obvious lifeboat to climb into when it strikes.
If you want to know how the world really works, and get some glimpse of where it might be heading, then these articles are a must read. And remember- next time you get cross because the train is late, or service slow in your local restaurant: these troubles may be slight compared to what is coming down the line.
Recently the residents of the Canadian State of Ontario irritated US President Donald Trump by running a series of TV ads showing former President Ronald Reagan disparaging trade tariffs,. Why would such hero of the global Right have taken such a heterodox view? The answer is that Reagan thought that free trade was the best way to distribute prosperity as widely as possible. Under the hegemonic power of the United States of America of course. And he had good evidence for this belief, as Steve Schifferes makes clear in this article for the Conversation.
Schifferes is such a good writer. His sentences are always short and to the point, He keeps away from jargon. Which clarity allows him to range over the last 400 years or so of history tracking the rise and fall of the various powers-China, France, The Netherlands, Britain the USA all of whom aspired to the hegemonic position in world affairs. In the first of two such called The Rise and Fall of Globalisation: the battle to be top dog he comes to one overarching conclusion. Things go better, and the world grows when there is one such dog. The period of British dominance , roughly 1815-1914 was marked by ever closer union of world markets and ever greater flows of capital and people. The American hegemon, roughly lasting from 1944 to 2016 was a second such example. The great problem for the world was that, as Britain stepped down in 1918, the USA did not step up to the plate. Leading to two decades of deep economic and international stability that culminated in the most destructive war in History. This one we shall urge you to read, gentle readers. It not only describes, it explains.
And now? Populists everywhere not only proclaim that globalisation is dead, they actively seek to undermine it wherever possible. Tariffs, restrictions on free movement of goods and people, hostility to learning and science-all indicate the flow of history is one way. Yet populist nationalists can point to one overarching weakness in the globalists argument. The whole system when it worked, depended on the successful nationalism of one nation,the hegemonic power. Their nationalism was a good thing. From which many concluded “if nationalism is a good thing, we want some of it too.” So as the hegemon declines, as America now does precipitously, they will assert their own nationalisms more and more. World war Three anyone?
Good heavens, but it takes a long time to get a new medicine in use. To go from first concept to everyday pharmaceutical use in the high street can take from 10 to 15 years on average. There’s all that Discovery and Initial research: followed by Preclinical Testing, Clinical Trials, and Regulatory Review. Quite right too: we support all this red tape , as there no point in killing the people (or animals) we’re trying to cure. Occasionally things are permitted to speed up (think mRNA vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic) But we admit the whole thing can be a tad frustrating, particularly for a blog like this one, ever campaigning for new forms of antibiotic and other ways to combat resistant micro-organisms,
Which is why we support every endeavour to speed the process of drug development up. None more so than when its exponents try fresh thinking, as the ingenious Dr Alex Shalek of MITI. Read this AI offers drug-screening shortcut from Nature Briefing
Dr Shalek and his admirable team think they have accelerated the process by anything between 13 and 17 times, as you will discover if you drill down on the links which we have provided.
It’s easy to bemoan the modern trend for instant narcissistic gratification, where every want is satisfied by the click of a button and a funny little man showing up in a blue van a few hours later. Of course it is essential to test new drugs, and maintain the high standards which we in the educated community hold ourselves to. You can’t run a drugs company at the same moral and intellectual level that you run a popular newspaper. But anything that speeds things up safely, as this technique appears to do, will save many lives and much suffering. We hope we’ve cheered up your morning break.
#drug development #medicine #health #AI #research #mRNA vaccine
Learning, Science and Society 