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Bill Fulkerson

Syntrophy emerges spontaneously in complex metabolic systems - 0 views

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    By exchanging resources, the members of a microbial community can survive in environments where individual species cannot. Despite the abundance of such syntrophy, little is known about its evolutionary origin. The predominant hypothesis is that syntrophy arises when originally independent organisms in the same community become interdependent by accumulating mutations. In this view, syntrophy arises when organisms co-evolve. In sharp contrast we find that different metabolism can interact syntrophically without a shared evolutionary history. We show that syntrophy is an inherent and emergent property of the complex chemical reaction networks that constitute metabolism.
Bill Fulkerson

Millennials and Gen Z are spreading coronavirus-but not because of parties and bars - 0 views

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    Younger generations are blamed for the pandemic's spread, but also face the brunt of the transmission risk that comes with keeping the economy going. 6 MINUTE READ BY REBECCA RENNER PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 17, 2020 WHEN PARAMEDICS RUSHED the pregnant Honduran woman into the emergency room, 28-year-old Chuan-Jay Jeffrey Chen stood ready to receive her. It was April, and the pandemic had already taken over his final year as an emergency medicine resident. Of all the coronavirus patients surging into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, this 32-year-old patient remains Chen's most memorable. The woman was so short of breath she could barely speak, so Chen would need to intubate her-a tricky procedure that requires precision as well as speed. Every moment without oxygen causes a patient's chances of survival to decline; pregnancy further complicates the scenario by making airways swollen, causing blood pressure to drop more quickly. As Chen set to work and talked her through the steps in Spanish, he also tried to calm his own nerves. "I knew I had very little margin for error," says Chen. The woman's husband had been barred from entering the building because of coronavirus restrictionsgen-z
Bill Fulkerson

This Blizzard Exposes The Perils Of Attempting To 'Electrify Everything' - 0 views

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    The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas - and lots of it - for decades to come.
Steve Bosserman

What does home mean if your bed is on the pavements of Paris? | Aeon Essays - 0 views

  • The American anthropologist Edward Fischer, paraphrasing Aristotle, said that the good life is ‘a life worth living’, or a journey towards ‘a fulfilled life’. It has to do with happiness but is not limited to it; it’s often – perhaps counterintuitively – linked to commitment and sacrifice, to the work of becoming a particular person. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1982 described these practices as technologies of the self. According to Foucault, the self is ‘not given to us … we have to create ourselves as a work of art’. My informants on the streets of Paris were striving – in their own ways – towards being better selves. I came to understand the activities, processes and routines that they engaged in – begging, making a shelter, accessing temporary housing, etc – as practices of the self geared towards a better life, as practices of homemaking on the street, as practices of hope.
  • Aside from François, others I met on the streets of Paris – such as Sabal from India, and Alex from Kosovo – talked about their engagement in such practices of hope. Following them through soup kitchens, drop-in centres, government institutions and homeless shelters, I observed two main ways in which they attempted to push for a better life. Both of them were connected to the idea of home: my informants in Paris were longing to find and go back to a homeland, often one from the past, while on a daily basis they were struggling to construct a home in order to survive. That was what a better life looked like for them.
  • Home, according to the Australian social scientist Shelley Mallett, is always suspended between the ideal and the real. It relates to ‘the activity performed by, with or in person’s things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now.’ While Sabal’s India was part of the ideal, what Alex was dealing with was closer to the ‘real’ side of this distinction. His home-making efforts were a continuous process of daily activities.
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  • For many of the homeless people I’ve met in both London and Paris, home was connected to a place they departed from and have a desire to return to – a place that carried what the English sociologist Liz Kenyon calls a right to return and a sense of one’s origin. Sara Ahmed’s 1999 study of migrants’ writing, particularly Asian women living in Britain, supports this view of home as something in the longer-term future. The British-Australian scholar wrote that home is often a destination, somewhere to travel to: ‘the space which is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance – I am here – but the very space in which one finds the self as almost, but not quite, at home. In such a space, the subject has a destination, an itinerary, indeed a future, but in having such as destination, has not yet arrived.’ Home is, in this sense, not about the present – and surely not a place of passive suffering – but about one’s hopes, about making home an imagined place where one has not yet arrived.
  • Home is exactly such a process, involving the material and the imaginative, social connections and mundane acts. Routines, habits and rhythms – often as simple as regularly visiting certain neighbourhoods, shelters and food kitchens – are important parts of this process, and are deeply connected to a temporal as well as spatial order. This focus on order is best expressed in the classical analysis of home by the English anthropologist Mary Douglas:[Home] is always a localisable idea. Home is located in space but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a board, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control.
  • François, who introduced me to the labour of begging, found something close to home in his daily practices. His home was fashioned by coming face to face with the city around him. These narratives show how far removed these people are from a state of passive suffering. Yes, there were moments of idleness and, for some, long phases of pain. But most of the people I met sleeping rough – independent of age, gender, tenure on the street and level of addiction – were striving, in their way, towards a better life: first on, and hopefully off, the street.
Steve Bosserman

How human evolution was shaped by pride, guilt and gossip - 0 views

  • This brought about “the most important psychological change that enabled us to thrive, rather than just survive, on the savannah: the capacity and desire to work together,” writes von Hippel. The minute early man learned to band together, he also acquired a new weapon: ostracism. If you wanted to be invited to the lion-eating party, you better play by the lion-killing rules.
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