Facebook, Twitter, and now Google have discovered that Russia bought political ads during the election. Kaspersky is spying. So is the Google Home Mini. Google buys 60db. Project Loon may give Puerto Rico Internet while Elon Musk gives them power, and Zuckerberg looks on in VR. Don't try to rob a bank using information you find online. YouTube bans bump stock videos. Carl's Jr begs Amazon to buy them in bizarre Twitter campaign. Oculus announces a standalone VR headset. Google Assistant has a higher IQ than Siri.
Hard as he tried, Murray Gell-Mann could never make himself into a legend like his rakish colleague and collaborator, Richard Feynman -- even if he was probably the greater physicist
Great story of two physicists. There has to be some interesting study one could do here on scientific communication to compare these two.
President Trump wanted then-FBI Director James Comey to investigate the infamous pee-tape allegations to reassure First Lady Melania Trump that he hadn’t actually paid Russian hookers to urinate on…
As you may have read on the WooCommerce blog, Prospress blog, WP Tavern, Post Status, or Techcrunch, the team at Prospress is joining forces with WooCommerce at Automattic to help accelerate the adoption and democratization of ecommerce across the web. Whew that’s a lot of links! Prospress was bes...
I've been searching for the perfect monthly book club for years, one that could send me new science, math, philosophy, and technology books every month. I contacted several publishers, reached out to various existing companies, and nobody seemed to be interested. Finally, earlier this year, after he...
Wednesday on the NewsHour, Nancy Pelosi asks President Trump to postpone his State of the Union address over security concerns due to the government shutdown. Also: ISIS on the attack in Syria, two mayors share how the shutdown is affecting their cities, how new members of Congress are adapting to Washington, the shutdown’s impact on the EPA, an NBA player fears his country and much more.
I've been meaning to do some kind of index card style template for the site for ages and never got round to it. Now I have. I’m quite pleased with it. CSS repeating gradient lines and all that. ❧
An absolutely beautiful design for short notes. This is the sort of theme that will appeal to zettelkasten users who are building digital gardens. A bit of the old mixed in with the new.
One of the things I love most about The New York Times‘ podcast The Daily is that the storytelling and analysis are just as strong when listening months later as they are if you’re listening contemporaneously.
An update to the tree of life has revealed a dominance of bacterial diversity in many ecosystems and extensive evolution in some branches of the tree. It also highlights how few organisms we have been able to cultivate for further investigation.
Abstract
The tree of life is one of the most important organizing principles in biology. Gene surveys suggest the existence of an enormous number of branches, but even an approximation of the full scale of the tree has remained elusive. Recent depictions of the tree of life have focused either on the nature of deep evolutionary relationships or on the known, well-classified diversity of life with an emphasis on eukaryotes. These approaches overlook the dramatic change in our understanding of life’s diversity resulting from genomic sampling of previously unexamined environments. New methods to generate genome sequences illuminate the identity of organisms and their metabolic capacities, placing them in community and ecosystem contexts. Here, we use new genomic data from over 1,000 uncultivated and little known organisms, together with published sequences, to infer a dramatically expanded version of the tree of life, with Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya included. The depiction is both a global overview and a snapshot of the diversity within each major lineage. The results reveal the dominance of bacterial diversification and underline the importance of organisms lacking isolated representatives, with substantial evolution concentrated in a major radiation of such organisms. This tree highlights major lineages currently underrepresented in biogeochemical models and identifies radiations that are probably important for future evolutionary analyses.
Laura A. Hug, Brett J. Baker, Karthik Anantharaman, Christopher T. Brown, Alexander J. Probst, Cindy J. Castelle, Cristina N. Butterfield, Alex W. Hernsdorf, Yuki Amano, Kotaro Ise, Yohey Suzuki, Natasha Dudek, David A. Relman, Kari M. Finstad, Ronald Amundson, Brian C. Thomas & Jillian F. Banfield in Nature Microbiology, Article number: 16048 (2016) doi:10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.48
A reformatted view of the tree in Fig. 1in which each major lineage represents the same amount of evolutionary distance.
Carl Zimmer also has a nice little write up of the paper in today’s New York Times:
Most of the diversity outlined on the new tree has been hiding in plain sight.
Spotted doing the viral rounds and unattributed (though watermarked with a URL that redirects to Elbe Spurling's website) this wall of Dr. Pepper knockoffs is a magnificent lesson in branding magic and semiotics and all that fancy jazz.
Henry Hobhouse’s book Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind (now six, with the addition of cacao) contains the remarkable fact that at the height of the slave trade a single teaspoon of sugar cost six minutes of a man’s life to produce. Reason enough to cheer the abolition of slavery, I suppose. But that doesn’t mean that everything is sweetness and light in the business of sugar. Or salt. A photo gallery in The Big Picture made that very clear, and inspired Rachel Laudan, a food historian, to write in praise of industrial salt and sugar.
We often don’t know how lucky we are to live in the modern highly linked world. The concept of industrialized foods like salt and sugar and their prior histories will certainly bring our situation into high relief. The history here and its broad effects could certainly be fit into the broader category of big history as well.
Aegir
