perestroika

What is even better, they are doing stage 1 (safety only, not efficacy) trials in humans already. I hope it doesn't get stuck in the testing pipeline but comes out of the other end. :)

Wow, incredibly fitting analysis. :)

I've also observed that comic book heroes aren't exactly revolutionary stuff. To change things, you need a mandate, and creating a story about how a person got a mandate to use superpowers to change the world, or delegates their superpower to others, bypassing the need for mandate... that would require talk of philosophical concepts like power (and the right to use it).

Crafting stories where power gets used in a purely defensive way against violent change, allows for simplicity. No censor will find the stories politically offensive, nobody is too dense to understand... lowest common denominator -> maximum circulation -> great profit. :)

If you’d like a more scientific explanation of what sages have been telling us forever, just ask Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin talked about the inevitable collapse of any creature that grows exponentially in a finite environment.

Interestingly, humans seem to be already doing pretty well at stopping population growth - without needing a "totalitarian climate communism", as the article suggests, to force them to.

In that sense, Darwin either was wrong, or didn't spend much time thinking of human behaviour ecology and the possibility of both education, contraception and smartphones. :)

What refuses to come down, however, is our resource consumption. Apparently, a creature can be an individualist and decide: "I won't have kids because that will reduce my chances of living a good life" (or reason to the conclusion "I want kids, but will have only two, because medicine can ensure their survival")...

...but making the decision of "I won't consume excessive resources" is hard, because the definition of "good life" seems to include ample supply of resources. Let's see if something can be changed there. Maybe "consume as much as you want, but only renewables" is the answer?

The process had been known for a while, but researchers got considerably better at recreating it artificially. :) The potential of this method for treating acquired autoimmunity and allergies looks big, to say the least. It is less likely to help against translplant rejection.

Hubbell and his colleagues knew that the body has a mechanism for ensuring that immune reactions don’t occur in response to every damaged cell in the body — a phenomenon known as peripheral immune tolerance, which is carried out in the liver. They discovered in recent years that tagging molecules with a sugar known as N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal) could mimic this process, sending the molecules to the liver where tolerance to them develops.

Tracking points on their beaks and heads as the animals pecked on wood, the scientists found that all the woodpecker skulls remained stiff—that is, their heads didn’t come to a halt any slower than their beaks, the team reports today in Current Biology.

Apparently, they must have more resilient brains then. Or maybe the really helpful trick is having less mass -> less inertia -> less damage.

One speculation is that animals might use recursion to represent relationships within their social groups.

Seems logical enough. Identifying a crow as "one of the family" vs. "someone who'se been helpful" or "some random crow" may convey practical benefit when favours are exchanged.

I would add another guess: birds often feed on fruit, and might have need for a concept of "empty" vs. "full". A tree might be empty of fruit, or full of fruit, a nest might be empty, or it might be occupied, there might be X eggs in the nest, or X+1 (cuckoo has raided the nest) or X-1 (predator has raided the nest).

If some skill is useful for a particular form of life, those creatures who need it will acquire the skill. :)

Interesting, thanks for sharing. :)

For me, this autumn should finally be the "get lithium out of living premises" time. I have an off-grid household with a considerable battery bank. The major risk factor is keeping lithium cells (from an unrepairable Nissan Leaf) indoors. They have redundant equalizers and redundant alarms, but if something should go wrong - if there should ever be a fire - it would be totally unextinguishable with domestic methods, and the battery bank is too large to quickly drag out of the house.

So my plan is a sturdy aluminum platform with wheels, about 2 x 2 meters, located about 4 meters from the house, capable of carrying hundreds of kilos, non-flammable thermal insulation (stone wool) around the batteries and a greenhouse polycarbonate exterior cladding. The battery bank will also have temperature control - during winter, a thermostat and silicone heating ribbons ought ensure at least +15 C battery temperature. Later on, I will also need to arrange remote monitoring, so I could read cell voltages and even later, balancing currents from indoors.

Dress code: umbrellas. :)

(In a somewhat more unruly situation, someone would want to point a projector at the drone. Or laser its camera to permanent oblivion.)

My personal pet idea about how to neutralize the state (and by neutralize, I mean "make neutral", not "disappear immediately") is to try returning from elections to sortition. Perhaps locally at first, then regionally, then a bicameral parliament with an elected and sortitioned half, until after many iterations, only sortition remains (singular leaders like presidents and prime ministers would obviously need to go). Upon success, there would still be a state, but not a state steered by borderline psychos, but a random sample of the (hopefully educated) population.

A long time ago, in a certain city-state where the term "democracy" originates from, it was considered oligarchic to elect representatives. Instead they were chosen by lottery, and only military leaders were elected. Modern politicians of course, would shudder at the thought of their kind being drawn by lot, and modern military leaders might not like being elected either. We have somehow stumbled to the point where we choose civil administrators using a method ancient democrats considered suitable for choosing warlords. And indeed, we get wannabe warlords using this method, and sometimes real ones.

Switching democracy over to sortition is, of course, a pathway short of revolution - it requires campaigning and constitutional change in almost any state, and one can expect long-term resistance - but the end result doesn't slip away immediately after one electoral cycle, after power has corrupted those who sought to correct it. Sortition tends to eliminate political parties (read: at most times, most parties will oppose sortition). It tends to hinder corruption and make lobbying cumbersome.

In sortition, you can't advertise your way to power with generous donations, the composition of a representative body can't be altered by owning the media, a lottery is fairly hard to manipulate with bribes, and a lottery can be cheaply repeated with nobody losing anything they worked for, since they didnt climb to power (doing that requires certain psycholoogical traits which aren't healthy), but power came to them by chance.

Another pathway is of course building up autonomy in low-level societal structures, so that those could take over functions gradually.

So I admit: I'm a reformist anarchist who doesn't shy away from asking people to vote (because it's easy, just don't expect much to happen) and thinks it might be possibe to wind down some states using their own mechanism, while others must wait till failure. I don't expect it to happen fast.

Iceland keeps using geothermal for nearly 1/3 of its energy production. However, Iceland is a really poor benchmark to compare with the rest of the world - in some places, you can cook food on the surface there. :)

The most audacious vision for geothermal is to drill six miles or more underground where temperatures exceed 750 degrees Fahrenheit. At that point, water goes supercritical and can hold five to 10 times as much energy as normal steam. If it works, experts say, “superhot” geothermal could provide cheap, abundant clean energy anywhere.

Folks in Finland recently tried exactly that, drilling 2 holes 6.4 km deep in Otaniemi, Vantaa. Unfortunately their fracking attempts failed and sufficient flow could not be established between the two wells. Also, temperature at the bottom was 120 C, not enough to get supercritical water (374 C is required). They donated the boreholes to scientific use, someone will try again and try better..

Once the "how" can be sorted out, it should be usable anywhere on Earth, not just volcanic regions. :) But it's not easy.

Dolphins, whales, apes, bats, elephants and prairie dogs would be good candidates. For most species however, since their repertoire of communication is quite limited, attempting communication wouldn't be likely to succeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_language

Prairie dogs, being a species well accessible by humans (they live in fixed underground "settlements", don't swim or fly where people cannot record them, and aren't dangerous to approach) have been studied to an extent, and their language does have semantics:

Their calls transmit semantic information, which was demonstrated when playbacks of alarm calls in the absence of predators led to escape behavior appropriate for the types of predators associated with the calls. The alarm calls also contain descriptive information about the general size, color, and speed of the predator.[25]

I imagine that prairie dogs are already capable of coming up with statements like "big cat coming slowly from north", so maybe some of their colonies, in the right conditions, develop more complex language. Since they don't travel much, each of their colonies might have a different language, however.

Perhaps the most interesting language would be that of squids:

In addition to camouflage and appearing larger in the face of a threat, squid use color, patterns, and flashing to communicate with one another in various courtship rituals. Caribbean reef squid can send one message via color patterns to a squid on their right, while they send another message to a squid on their left.[38][39]