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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: the structure of folklore can help explain how unrelated facts and false information connect into a compelling narrative framework that can then go viral as a conspiracy theory.

"Harvard got what it wanted. Mediocrity in the name of diversity. It was a classic example of how the white power structure plays people of color. It decides whom to promote and whom to silence. When then-Maj. Colin Powell helped cover up the 1968 massacre of some 500 civilians at My Lai in Vietnam he was assured a glittering career in the Army. When Barack Obama proved obedient to the Chicago political machine, Wall Street and the Democratic Party establishment he was promoted to the U.S. Senate and the presidency. Diversity in the hands of the white power elites-political and corporate-is an advertising gimmick. A new face, a brand, gets pushed out front, accompanied by the lavish financial rewards that come with serving the white power structure, as long as the game is played. There is no shortage of women (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile), Latinos (Tom Perez and Marco Rubio) or blacks (Vernon Jordan, Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson) who sell their souls for a taste of power."

Groups of firms often achieve a competitive advantage through the formation of geo-industrial clusters. Although many exemplary clusters are the subjects of case studies, systematic approaches to identify and analyze the hierarchical structure of geo-industrial clusters at the global scale are scarce. In this work, we use LinkedIn's employment history data from more than 500 million users over 25 years to construct a labor flow network of over 4 million firms across the world, from which we reveal hierarchical structure by applying network community detection. We show that the resulting geo-industrial clusters exhibit a stronger association between the influx of educated workers and financial performance, compared to traditional aggregation units. Furthermore, our analysis of the skills of educated workers reveals richer insights into the relationship between the labor flow of educated workers and productivity growth. We argue that geo-industrial clusters defined by labor flow provide useful insights into the growth of the economy.

"It is now possible to trace the migratory paths of anatomically modern humans using genetic data. Early research pointed to a sub-Saharan African origin for modern humans by around 200,000-150,000 years ago1, and analyses of autosomal markers2 and Y DNA haplogroups3, 4 suggest the earliest structuring of the human population occurred approximately 140,000 years ago5,6,7,8. Initial efforts to characterize the movement of early humans in relation to ancestry grouped populations according to five geographical regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe/the Middle East/Central Asia/South Asia, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas9. Subsequent analyses allowed for refinement of the genetic history of global ancestries, revealing regional structure through the identification of 710, 1411, and 19 ancestries2."

"Ultimately, the Holobiont issue suggests that when we look at the connections - as opposed to what's connected - a new structure of the world is revealed. To build for that structure is to break with how we've built for centuries. As designers, scientists, and everyone else in the holobiont that we're part of, we have invited papers, essays, videos: anything to clarify and sharpen this lens."

The application of network science to biology has advanced our understanding of the metabolism of individual organisms and the organization of ecosystems but has scarcely been applied to life at a planetary scale. To characterize planetary-scale biochemistry, we constructed biochemical networks using a global database of 28,146 annotated genomes and metagenomes and 8658 cataloged biochemical reactions. We uncover scaling laws governing biochemical diversity and network structure shared across levels of organization from individuals to ecosystems, to the biosphere as a whole. Comparing real biochemical reaction networks to random reaction networks reveals that the observed biological scaling is not a product of chemistry alone but instead emerges due to the particular structure of selected reactions commonly participating in living processes. We show that the topology of biochemical networks for the three domains of life is quantitatively distinguishable, with >80% accuracy in predicting evolutionary domain based on biochemical network size and average topology. Together, our results point to a deeper level of organization in biochemical networks than what has been understood so far.

The application of network science to biology has advanced our understanding of the metabolism of individual organisms and the organization of ecosystems but has scarcely been applied to life at a planetary scale. To characterize planetary-scale biochemistry, we constructed biochemical networks using a global database of 28,146 annotated genomes and metagenomes and 8658 cataloged biochemical reactions. We uncover scaling laws governing biochemical diversity and network structure shared across levels of organization from individuals to ecosystems, to the biosphere as a whole. Comparing real biochemical reaction networks to random reaction networks reveals that the observed biological scaling is not a product of chemistry alone but instead emerges due to the particular structure of selected reactions commonly participating in living processes. We show that the topology of biochemical networks for the three domains of life is quantitatively distinguishable, with >80% accuracy in predicting evolutionary domain based on biochemical network size and average topology. Together, our results point to a deeper level of organization in biochemical networks than what has been understood so far.

Prepublication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behaviour of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing prepublication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. We conclude that on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo.

Researchers have resolved a longstanding biological debate by revealing the existence and function of complex RNA structures in plants.

team of scientists from ASU and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) led by Hao Yan, ASU's Milton Glick Professor in the School of Molecular Sciences, and director of the ASU Biodesign Institute's Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics, has just announced the creation of a new type of meta-DNA structures that will open up the fields of optoelectronics (including information storage and encryption) as well as synthetic biology.

Over the past few decades, researchers have gathered evidence suggesting that tensegrity is a key design principle in nature, as it applies to a number of biological systems, including bodies, organs, cells and molecules. Tensegrity structures could thus also prove valuable for the development of bio-inspired robots, as it may enable the creation of systems that closely resemble those observed in living organisms.