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It might sound like dystopian science fiction, but discovering how to reshape memories responsibly is helping us to heal the brain from within, says Steve Ramirez

Women's hidden extra work, positive tipping points and new thinking on autism – there's much to chew on in this year's best reads, says Liz Else

Feedback dives into a new piece of research on the merits of swimming briefs or looser swimming shorts – and raises an eyebrow at its conclusion

The JWST has done it again. It's revealed new details hidden from lesser telescopes. The space telescope has detected four spiral dust shells around Apep, a triple star system about 15,000 light-years away.

I decided when I read the NYT review of Ian McEwan’s latest (and 18th) novel, What We Can Know, that I had to read the book.  (Click the screenshots to read the review if you have NYT access, or find the review archived here.)  I quote some of the encomiums from the review:

Ian McEwan’s new novel, “What We Can Know,” is brash and busy — it comes at you like a bowling ball headed for a twisting strike. It’s a piece of late-career showmanship (McEwan is 77) from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing.

McEwan has put his thumb on the scale. This is melodramatic, storm-tossed stuff. There is murder, a near kidnapping, a child hideously dead of neglect, multiple revenge plots, buried treasure and literary arson. Writers treat other writers’ manuscripts and reputations the way Sherman treated Georgia. No one is a moral paragon.

. . . I’m hesitant to call “What We Can Know” a masterpiece. But at its best it’s gorgeous and awful, the way the lurid sunsets must have seemed after Krakatau, while also being funny and alive. It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.

I had to get it via interlibrary loan, and since it’s new it took some time. But I did get it, and read the 300-page book in a week. And yes, it’s excellent.

 

 

I’m a fan of McEwan, and especially like his novels Atonement (made into a terrific movie) and the Booker-winning Amsterdam. This one also does not disappoint. The NYT gives a plot summary, but I’ll just say that it’s a novel about a poem, and the action takes place over two years more than a century apart: 2014 and  2119. A well-known British poet named Francis laboriously pens a “corona” poem for his wife Vivien on her 53rd birthday. It would be hard to write a normal corona, much less one that, like this one, is said to be a masterpiece. Here’s what the form comprises according to Wikipedia:

A crown of sonnets or sonnet corona is a sequence of sonnets, usually addressed to one person, and/or concerned with a single theme. Each of the sonnets explores one aspect of the theme, and is linked to the preceding and succeeding sonnets by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as its first line. The first line of the first sonnet is repeated as the final line of the final sonnet, thereby bringing the sequence to a close.

Imagine how hard that would be to write, as the first lines have to form a stand-alone sonnet, and rhyme properly, when put in sequence at the end! To see an example, go here, though the corona has only 12 rather than 14 included sonnets.  At any rate, Francis’s poem gets a national reputation although Francis won’t let it be reproduced or published; it is read aloud on Vivien’s birthday to a dozen guests and then given to her, handwritten on vellum. But only Vivien sees it in print.

Over a hundred years later, with the world devastated by nuclear exchanges, global warming, and skirmishes, a scholar named Thomas Metcalfe, specializing in poetry of the early 2000s, decides to track down the corona to see why it was so renowned despite being unpublished (a nostalgia for the past pervades the 22nd century). As he searches for the work, the story flips back and forth between the 21st and 22nd centuries, giving us two casts of characters, both of which engage in adultery and, in the earlier century, crime.  These intrigues determine the fate of the poem, but I won’t give away the ending. The novel starts a bit slowly, but builds momentum to a roller-coaster finish.  And yes, it’s the best novel of McEwan’s I’ve read since Atonement.

This one I recommend highly.  I keep hoping that McEwan, like Kazuo Ishiguro, will win a Nobel Prize, for he’s pretty close to that caliber. (I tend to lump the authors together for some reason.) But do read it if you like good fiction, and dystopian fiction even more. Two thumbs up!

By the way, it makes constant references to things going on in 2014: cellphones, social media, and people prominent today. I was surprised to find on p. 282 (near the end) a reference to Steve Pinker.  In the earlier century, the pompous poet Francis and his wife invite a couple over to dinner, and the man, named Chris, who is relatively uneducated, uses the word “hopefully” in a sentence, meaning “I hope”.  That was (and is to me) a faux pas, and Francis rebukes the speaker at the dinner table, saying that he doesn’t want to hear that word in his house again. (What a twit!)  But at a later dinner, Chris, rebuked again for the same word, takes Francis apart, showing how he used the word properly and, in addition, a bloke named Pinker said it was okay (I presume this is in Pinker’s book A Sense of Style).  Here’s the passage on p. 282. Chris is speaking and explaining how he discovered that it’s okay to say “hopefully”:

“I don’t know a thing. First time Francis jumped down my throat, I look on Harriet’s shelves. She poined me towards Burchfield’s Fowler and a bloke called Pinker. Seems like some ignorant snob years back picked on hopefully, and a mob of so-called educated speakers got intimidated and joined in and scared each other into never using the word and crapping on anyone who did. Pathetic!”

Below is the book with a link to the publisher. Read it. And, of course, my reviews hopefully will prompt readers to tender their own recommendations. If you have such a book, please name it and tell us why you liked it in the comments below.

Captive giant pandas have been seen breaking off twigs and bamboo pieces to scratch hard-to-reach spots, using a crude opposable thumb that other bears don’t have

New tools that create ultra-precise maps of our tissues are transforming our ability to diagnose and cure once-fatal illnesses

Scientists have finally assigned foot bones found in 2009 to an ancient human species, and the move suggests that different types of hominins lived close by in harmony

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “tricksy”, features a trademark tendency of Mo: he criticizes something, and then Jesus then points out Mo’s hypocrisy, for what he’s criticized is also true of Islam. Poor Mo, blinded by faith!

As the artist commented, “That’s exactly what you’d expect from Mo.”

Remember, the strip has been going 20 years, and you might donate a few bucks to support the artist.

What are the physics of life? That is more than just a philosophical question - it has practical implications for our search for life elsewhere in the galaxy. We know what Earth life looks like, on a number of levels, but finding it on another planet could require us to redefine what we even mean by life itself. A new paper from Stuart Bartlett of Cal Tech and his co-authors provides a new framework for how life could be defined that could reach beyond just what we understand from our one Pale Blue Dot.

Well, these Thanksgiving photos are the last I have, so if you have others suitable for Readers’ Wildlife, please send them in. Thanks!

Today’s butterfly photos come from reader Martin Riddle. His IDs are below (indented), and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Top to bottom:  Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui), American Lady (Vanessa virginiensis), Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele),Yellow Swallowtail (Papilio machaon), and Monarch (Danaus plexippus). All photos are from the resident gardens at Brooksby Village in Peabody, Massachusetts.

Using a smart computational search, scientists discovered a catalyst ingredient that finally makes tough alkyl ketones behave the way chemists want. The reaction now runs cleanly and reliably, opening the door to faster and easier molecule-building.

Researchers developed a powerful new manganese complex that could revolutionize light-driven chemical reactions. It absorbs light extremely efficiently, has a uniquely long excited-state lifetime, and is far easier to synthesize than previous manganese systems. The team confirmed it successfully transfers electrons as intended. This breakthrough could enable large-scale, sustainable photochemical applications.

The headline reads, “Breakthrough blood test finally confirms Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” As you might imagine, the story is far more complicated than that. Let’s start with some background of chronic fatigue syndrome, also called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS). As the name implies, it is a syndrome, meaning a collection of symptoms with a typical natural history – CFS is characterized by severe debilitating […]

The post A New Test for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Michigan State University astrophysicists are closing in on one of space science’s biggest mysteries: where the galaxy’s most energetic particles come from. Their studies uncovered a pulsar wind nebula behind a mysterious LHAASO signal and set important X-ray constraints on other potential sources.

Mars’s Coloe Fossae reveals a landscape shaped by ancient ice ages, with deep valleys, cratered terrain, and frozen debris flows preserved from a time when the planet’s climate dramatically shifted.

In the long tradition of scientific wagers, Skeptic magazine publisher and historian of science Dr. Michael Shermer has issued a $1000 bet that…

Discovery or disclosure of alien visitation to Earth in the form of UFOs, UAPs, or any other technological artifact or alien biological form, as confirmed by major scientific institutions and government agencies, will not happen by December 31, 02030.

Taking him up on that challenge is Harvard astronomer and Director of the Galileo Project Dr. Avi Loeb. The wager is placed through the Long Now Foundation’s Long Bets program (“an arena for competitive, accountable predictions”), which adds a 0 at the front of all dates on a 10,000 year calendar (“to foster better long-term thinking”), in keeping with their Clock of the Long Now, being built in Texas and designed to tick for 10,000 years. Details of the Shermer-Loeb wager may be found here.

Whoever wins, the $1000 stakes will be donated to the Galileo Project Foundation. Here are the terms for deciding who wins:

By Dec 31st 02030, at least two of these three scientific organizations—NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the American Astronomical Society—will affirm that discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence in the form of UAPs, UFOs, or any other interstellar objects that are determined to be ETI technological in nature, or any alien biological life form found here on Earth, has been made.

Here is Dr. Loeb’s argument:

The search for technological artifacts has just started in earnest in 2025 with the discovery of the anomalous interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, the launch of the Rubin Observatory and the construction of three Galileo Project Observatories.

Given that there are billions of Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky-Way galaxy—most of which are billions of years older than the solar system, and that it will take less than a billion years for our Voyager spacecraft to cross the Milky-Way disk, we must engage in the scientific search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts.

It is better to be an optimist because life is sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is why I am engaged in the search with the hope that we will find a partner on our blind date with interstellar objects.

Here is Dr. Shermer’s argument:

Since the founding of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine in 1992, I have been documenting predictions by UFOlogists that discovery or disclosure of alien visitation to Earth is coming any day now.

Believers appear in the media boldly predicting that by the end of the year we will have proof of alien contact—33 years later I’m still waiting for said proof. More recently, proponents of UAPs as alien spacecraft have appeared before the U.S. Congress, confidently claiming that they know people who have seen and even touched aliens and/or their spaceships, back-engineered their technologies, and even communicated with the aliens.

Yet when pushed for evidence, they always demur, saying that it’s “classified,” “top-secret,” that Men-in-Black threatened them into silence, that their careers and even their lives are at stake if they disclose said evidence, that they could only reveal the evidence in a “SCIF” (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) but not in Congress, and that many people in the U.S. government, CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. (never named) have this information and evidence of alien visitation.

The purpose of this bet, in keeping with the rules of Long Bets and the philosophy of the Long Now Foundation, is to reveal the actual confidence of UFO/UAP alien believers by getting them to put their money where their beliefs appear to be. You say we will have alien disclosure by the end of the year? O-kay, let's place a wager on that prediction. I say it won’t happen.

The Long Bets program was started in 2003 by Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, and is part of a long tradition of scientific wagers dating back at least to 1870 when Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of natural selection, accepted a £500 wager (a workingman’s wages for one year) placed by flat-Earther John Hampden that scientists could not prove that the Earth is round.

Wallace proved it by demonstrating same-height poles placed at even intervals along a six-mile stretch of the Old Bedford Canal (north of London) appeared through a telescope lower by the exact “amount calculated from the known dimensions of the earth.”

Unfortunately, Wallace had to take Hampden to court to collect his winnings. Thus, it is important that such wagers be professionally adjudicated by neutral referees. Other wagers include:

• In 1975, cosmologist Kip Thorne bet cosmologist Stephen Hawking that Cygnus X-1 was a black hole. Thorne won. 
• In 1980, biologist Paul Ehrlich bet economist Julian Simon that the price of a portfolio of five mineral commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would rise in price over the next decade. Simon won.
• In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the Hard Problem of Consciousness (a term coined by Chalmers) would be solved in 25 years. Chalmers won.
• In 2017, astronomer Martin Rees bet psychologist Steven Pinker that “a bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six-month period starting no later than December 31, 02020.” Since the lab-leak hypothesis for Covid-19 (bioerror) was never proven, Pinker was declared the winner on the Long Bets platform.

If Loeb wins the bet, it will represent what would arguably be the greatest discovery in human history, namely that we are not alone in the universe.

If Shermer wins the bet, it does not mean that we are the only intelligence in the cosmos, only that claims of contact are likely greatly exaggerated and that we need to keep search for the truth about extraterrestrial intelligence.

Unexplained gamma ray radiation coming from the edge of the Milky Way galaxy could be produced by self-annihilating dark matter particles – but the idea requires further investigation

The laws of thermodynamics don't accurately account for the complex processes in living cells – do we need a new one to accurately measure the ways living systems are out of equilibrium?

Hoverflies, often mistaken for bees and wasps, pollinate three quarters of our crops. Now we’re discovering we can train them to be even more efficient