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" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

"The big news to emerge from recent archeological research concerns the time lag between "sedentism," or living in settled communities, and the adoption of agriculture. Previous scholarship held that the invention of agriculture made sedentism possible. The evidence shows that this isn't true: there's an enormous gap-four thousand years-separating the "two key domestications," of animals and cereals, from the first agrarian economies based on them. Our ancestors evidently took a good, hard look at the possibility of agriculture before deciding to adopt this new way of life. They were able to think it over for so long because the life they lived was remarkably abundant. Like the early civilization of China in the Yellow River Valley, Mesopotamia was a wetland territory, as its name ("between the rivers") suggests. In the Neolithic period, Mesopotamia was a delta wetland, where the sea came many miles inland from its current shore."

To overcome - once and for all - the false separation between nature and culture requires us to acknowledge that learning from human ingenuity and long-term adaptations to particular environments is also learning from nature. Among indigenous peoples there is a long tradition of solving human problems by learning from other species and from the wider natural processes in which we participate.

The synthesis of structurally complex organic molecules is the first task in the discovery of functional compounds needed for new technologies, including those in medicine and flexible electronics. Starting with relatively simple, purchasable reactants, the process involves sequences of chemical reactions in which the complexity of the molecules produced gradually increases with each step towards the final target. The sequences can be linear, or convergent (different parts of the target molecule are made in separate sequences and then joined together). To ensure that large amounts of the final product are prepared, each synthetic step must be high-yielding and reproducible, and must generate few side products.

A deep-dive into the recent crypto-collectible or NFT craze and separating the hype from the facts.NFT

The New Siberian Islands were the birthplace of the MOSAiC floe: the sea ice in which the research vessel Polarstern is now drifting through the Arctic was formed off the coast of the archipelago, which separates the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea to the north of Siberia, in December 2018. Sediments, and even small pebbles and bivalves, were incorporated into the ice during the freezing process, which the ongoing melting process has brought to light on the surface of the MOSAiC floe. This is an increasingly rare phenomenon as today, most "dirty ice" melts before it even arrives in the Central Arctic. These are among the main findings of a study that MOSAiC experts have published now in the journal The Cryosphere, and which will provide the basis for numerous upcoming scientific assessments.

Researchers .... have made reported some exciting findings relating to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a class of porous materials, which could benefit a wide range of important gas separation processes.