E Journal416

Water World 3
Gravity’s grip on heat and fire to be studied in space 11

Florentijn Hofman’s Latest Work is a Gigantic Bunny Gazing Up at the Moon in Taiwan 14
Longer cycle life for zinc-anode batteries 19
A Pixelated Wooden Snorkeler Sculpted by Hsu Tung Han 20
How to Live to the Full While Dying 25
NSF funds new multidisciplinary approaches to study the brain 36
Photos of Extremely Unusual Mushrooms and Other Fungi by Steve Axford 41
91-Year-Old Poet, Philosopher, and Painter Etel Adnan on Memory, the Self, and the Universe 52
A new method to make valuable olefins from abundant carboxylic acids 57
Dripping Glass Fusion “Jellyfish” Sculptures by Daniela Fortiby Christopher Jobson on August 9, 2017 61
What does the “we don’t understand how artificial intelligence takes decisions” statement mean? 67
The Phenomenon Of “Crown Shyness” Where Trees Avoid Touching 69
Intelligence: a mishmash of genetic ingredients 74
Peanut Allergy Treatment Works Long Term 76
The Terror Within and the Evil Without 77
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Stem cell technique could reverse a major type of infertility 80

Digitally Rendered Alien Creatures by Zhang Chenxi 82
Sun and Moon: Stunning Illustrations of Celestial Myths by Ten of India’s Greatest Indigenous Artists 91
Supernova’s messy birth casts doubt on reliability of astronomical yardstick 104
A Turbulent Black Sea Fills a Three-Story Wall in Kiev, Ukraine 107
Primate Brains Made to See Old Objects as New Again 113
John Quincy Adams on Efficiency vs. Effectiveness, the Proper Aim of Ambition, and His Daily Routine 115
Clouds on 'Failed Stars' Resemble Those on Neptune 120
Miniature Scenes With A Darkly Satirical Twist by Frank Kunert 122
Child obesity and brain function 128
Your City's 'Ghost Signs' Have Stories to Tell 132
Giant Dabs of Thick Oil Paint Captured as Hyperrealist Colored Pencil Drawings 134
What are reasons for? 147
Figures From Hieronymus Bosch’s Paintings Recreated as Sculptural Piñatas 150
Communal space at the Saunalahti School, Espoo 155
The monster atomic bomb that was too big to use 160
A skateboarder rides past a homeless encampment alongside a street in Los Angeles. Richard Vogel/AP 167
A Secret Work Studio Suspended Below a Highway Overpass by Fernando Abellanas 170
How to say no at work when you don't have kids 175
Are These Dutch Floating Homes a Solution for Rising Seas? 181
How Manhattan Got Vertical Retail Right, Again 185
The Foreign Buyers You Haven’t Heard About 189
The Midwest Town That Designs Above Its Weight 192
Statement from NSF Director France A. Córdova on G7 Science Ministerial 196
Validating the existence of a new phase of matter, the exciton condensate 199
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Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 416 october 2017
Water World
Writer Gregg Segal August 10
A pool in Echo Park in Los Angeles. (Gregg Segal)
The public pool is a lot of things: It’s a vital sanctuary for those who don’t live in gated communities or
belong to private swim clubs. It’s a destination that, for kids, sets the rhythm of summer days until school
starts again. And — as I’ve found in visiting pools from Washington, D.C., to Chippewa Falls, Wis., from
Villisca, Iowa, to Los Angeles — it’s a great place to get a feel for the character and culture of a community.
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Perhaps most important right now, public pools are also common ground. In our polarized society, we all too
rarely mix with people outside our immediate circle, preferring to surround ourselves with familiar voices in
our social media echo chambers. But a public pool is an institution where all are welcome: a place to go on a
blistering hot day where social barriers might be crossed and labels can become irrelevant.
Ridgway Pool in Philadelphia. (Gregg Segal)
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Banneker Pool in Washington. (Gregg Segal)
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Gregory Robinson and Janelle Floyd at Banneker Pool. (Gregg Segal)
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A group of friends at the Hansen Dam pool in Los Angeles. (Gregg Segal)
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Michael Tyler and daughter Ne’veah at Banneker Pool. (Gregg Segal)
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Laurie Haynes, center, with friends, at Barton Springs Pool in Austin. (Gregg Segal)
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Astoria Park Pool in Queens, N.Y. (Gregg Segal) (Animations by May-Ying Lam/The Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2017/08/10/water-
world/?utm_term=.401542787d74&wpisrc=nl_insight&wpmm=1
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Gravity’s grip on heat and fire to be studied in space
NSF and CASIS are sending three engineering experiments into microgravity.
Credit and Larger Version
August 9, 2017
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $900,000 for fundamental research in combustion and
thermal transport to be performed on the International Space Station (ISS) U.S. National Laboratory for the
benefit of life on Earth.
The awards are made jointly with the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), which will
manage operations for the experiments.
"NSF is thrilled to offer researchers the chance to conduct studies in the microgravity environment onboard
the ISS National Laboratory," says Dawn Tilbury, NSF assistant director for engineering. "With these
experiments in space, NSF grantees will help us understand fundamental aspects of heat and flame that cannot
be isolated on Earth and that will help protect and improve the lives of all Americans."
The behavior of heat and flame are affected by fluid motion, chemistry, pressure, thermodynamics — and
gravity.
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"We can envision one of gravity's effects on heat and flame, known as buoyancy, by thinking of a candle's
flame," explains Song-Charng Kong, one of the NSF program directors overseeing the joint projects. "If you
burn a candle on Earth, the flame has a tear-drop shape and its products rise because of buoyancy. In space,
flame has a spherical shape and its products spread in all directions."
Studying fire in microgravity will help engineering researchers understand the spread of fire in wildlands
and confined spaces on Earth.
Credit: Courtesy NASA
Engineers estimate the behavior of heat and flame when creating models of, for example, combustion for
automotive and airplane engines, the spread of fire in wildlands and confined spaces, or liquid cooling of
supercomputers and high-power electronics.
And if the models do not match real-life performance, the discrepancies arising from buoyancy or other
gravity-related phenomena can be impossible to pin down.
"We have a lot to learn about gravity’s effects on buoyancy, convection, hydrostatic pressure and other
processes involved in combustion and heat transfer," says José Lage, the second NSF program director
involved. "These NSF-funded experiments on the ISS will help us separate and understand the effects of
gravity on the behavior of several important thermal transport processes."
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Supercomputers and high-power electronics are kept cool with the help of liquids, but vapor bubbles that form
on hot surfaces often impede heat dissipation. In new NSF-funded experiments on Earth and the International
Space Station National Lab, a micro-structured surface will be used to impart directional mobility to vapor
bubbles released from a heated surface and help mitigate premature burnout. The long-term goal is to develop
a simple, passive, self-regulating micro-structured surface technology for heat sinks.
Credit: Sushil H. Bhavnani, Auburn University, and Vinod Narayanan, University of California-Davis
The findings from the new NSF fundamental research onboard the ISS promise advances in fire protection,
electronics, supercomputers, combustion engines, biomedical technologies and many other areas.
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Experiments involving a micro-structured surface designed to improve heat dissipation from electronics will
be conducted in a modified version of the Pore Formation and Mobility Furnace (developed by Teledyne
Brown Engineering) on board the International Space Station (ISS) National Lab.
Credit: Sushil H. Bhavnani, Auburn University, and Vinod Narayanan, University of California-Davis
Research begins during fall 2017 on the following three-year, collaborative projects:
 Flame spread in confined spaces — study of the interactions between flame and surrounding walls,
led by Ya-Ting Liao of Case Western Reserve University and Paul Ferkul of the Universities Space
Research Association (1740478)
 Spherical cool diffusion flames burning gaseous fuels, led by Peter Sunderland of the University of
Maryland (1740490), Richard Axelbaum of Washington University (1740471) and Forman Williams
of UC San Diego (1740499)
 Thermally activated directional mobility of vapor bubbles in microgravity using microstructured

surfaces, led by Sushil Bhavnani of Auburn University (1740515) and Vinod Narayanan of UC
Davis (1740506)
The NSF–CASIS awards are funded through the combustion and fire systems program and the thermal
transport processes program of the NSF Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport
Systems (CBET) in the Directorate for Engineering. CBET supports discoveries in chemical and biochemical
systems; environmental engineering and sustainability; bioengineering and engineering healthcare; and
fundamental transport, thermal and fluid phenomena. - NSF -
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=242772&WT.mc_id=USNSF_56&WT.mc_ev=click
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Florentijn Hofman’s Latest Work is a Gigantic Bunny Gazing Up at the Moon in Taiwan
by Johnny Strategy on September 15, 2014
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Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, known for his large scale installations of animal characters, recently unveiled
his latest work. Located at the Dayuan Town Naval Base in Taiwan, “Moon Rabbit” is an enormous yet
adorable bunny that’s propped up against a grassy military bunker gazing up at the moon. To create the large-
scale work, which is based on the East Asian folklore about a rabbit that lives on the moon, Hofman first
created a wood and Styrofoam frame. And to achieve the fluffiness but also keep it weather-resistant the artist
used over 12,000 sheets of Tyvek paper, a material normally reserved for home builders. Unfortunately, the
bunny caught fire earlier today as workers were trying to disassemble it. But its counterpart can still be seen
on the moon, or at least that’s how the story goes. (via Street Art News)
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/09/florentijn-hofmans-latest-work-is-a-gigantic-bunny-gazing-up-at-the-
moon-in-taiwan/
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Longer cycle life for zinc-anode batteries
A new generation of manganese dioxide-zinc batteries with unprecedented cycle life and energy density is
said to have been developed by researchers at The City College of New York-based CUNY Energy Institute.
According to the research team, the discovery could make the common household battery suitable for large
grid storage applications.
A recent trend in the energy storage field has been to replace lithium-ion batteries with zinc-anode versions as
zinc is cheap, abundant and much safer. Until now, the only detriment of this version has been the latter's
relatively short cycle life, which has not allowed it to be successfully commercialised as a rechargeable
battery.
To resolve this issue, the team developed a battery that takes advantage of intercalation and complexation
chemistry, which they claim improves the cathodes’ capacity to recharge, maintaining its high-energy density
to more than 900 cycles.
"A new layered crystal structure of manganese dioxide is used in this chemistry, which is intercalated with
copper ions. This makes it rechargeable to its theoretical capacity for a significant number of cycles," said
Senior Research Associate Gautam Yadav.
According to the researchers, this is the first time a calcium hydroxide interlayer is used to block the zinc ions
through complexation.
Peggy Lee
http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-news/longer-cycle-life-for-manganese-dioxide-zinc-
batteries/158189/
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A Pixelated Wooden Snorkeler Sculpted by Hsu Tung Han
by Christopher Jobson on August 5, 2017
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Taiwanese artist Hsu Tung Han recently unveiled his latest sculptural work, a 5-foot snorkeler that appears
partially pixelated. Han often incorporates digital glitches into has carved figurative works, a few of which we
shared earlier this year. You can see more views of this piece and other recent works on Flickr.
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/08/a-pixelated-wooden-snorkeler-sculpted-by-hsu-tung-
han/?mc_cid=5209ac0341&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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How to Live to the Full While Dying: The Extraordinary Diary of Alice James, William and Henry James’s
Brilliant Sister
“It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,” wrote the poet Mark Strand in his stunning ode to what
Emily Dickinson termed “the drift called ‘the infinite.'”
Hardly any writer has chronicled their own drift toward death with more dignified composure and attentive
aliveness than Alice James (August 7, 1848–March 6, 1892) — sister of pioneering psychologist William
James and novelist Henry James — in The Diary of Alice James (public library).
Alice was a woman who considered herself “simply born a few years too soon.” She was also an exquisite
writer from whose pen seemed to flow the best of her brothers’ aptitudes — William’s insight into human
psychology and Henry’s novelistic splendor of style — along with a sublimity of sentiment entirely her own.
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In a letter to William penned two years after their sister’s death, Henry extolled Alice’s diary as an
embodiment of her “extraordinary force of mind and character, her whole way of taking life — and death —
in very much the manner in which the book does… It is heroic in its individuality, its independence — its
face-to-face with the universe for-and-by herself — and the beauty and eloquence with which she often
expresses this, let alone the rich irony and humour.”
Alice James, age 11, in 1857

(Harvard Houghton Library)
An awareness of mortality had haunted Alice since her youth — her body was assailed by a mysterious
ailment that kept her bedridden, with only intermittent relief from disability. For years, physicians failed to
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find an organic cause and diagnose her illness. (This, lest we forget, was the heyday of such “therapies” as
blistering, leeches, cold water treatments, and medication with mercury — rudimentary medicine’s blind
shots in the dark of the body.)
In Alice’s thirtieth year, her physical pain exploded into a severe mental breakdown. Her father wrote that she
was “half the time, indeed much more than half, on the verge of insanity and suicide” — a wish for self-
annihilation she had confided in him directly, asking whether he thought it was a sin. Subverting the dogma of
his era, he responded that there is nothing sinful in wishing to end one’s extreme suffering, and gave her his
fatherly permission to take her own life if the physical and psychological pain became too unbearable, asking
her only to do it in a gentle way.
Alice
James circa 1873 (Harvard Houghton Library)
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But to Alice, there was something liberating about this surprising permission to take charge of her own death,
which had the paradoxical effect of giving her a sense of agency in her own life. Half a century before Albert
Camus posed the most important question of existence, Alice answered it in the affirmative — she chose to
live. Still, the specter of death remained always near and animated her days for decades.
Alice James in 1891

(Harvard Houghton Library)
Just before her forty-third birthday, Alice received a diagnosis that was likely unrelated to the neurological
nightmare of the preceding decades but was as devastatingly unambiguous as can be: late-stage breast cancer.
Writing on the last day of May in 1891, in an era before the combined influence of Darwin and Freud shaped
our relationship to mortality, Alice records the strange relief of her terminal diagnosis — the comforting
concretization of death’s amorphous presence, which had haunted her many hears of undiagnosed suffering.
A century before modern doctors treated Rosanne Cash in much the same way, Alice writes:
Ever since I have been ill, I have longed and longed for some palpable disease, no matter how conventionally
dreadful a label it might have, but I was always driven back to stagger alone under the monstrous mass of
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subjective sensations, which that sympathetic being “the medical man” had no higher inspiration than to
assure me I was personally responsible for, washing his hands of me with a graceful complacency under my
very nose. Dr. Torry [James’s final physician] was the only man who ever treated me like a rational being,
who did not assume, because I was victim to many pains, that I was, of necessity, an arrested mental
development too.
Katharine Peabody Loring
The following day, she writes:
To any one who has not been there, it will be hard to understand the enormous relief of [the doctor’s]
uncompromising verdict, lifting us out of the formless vague and setting us within the very heart of the
sustaining concrete. One would naturally not choose such an ugly and gruesome method of progression down
the dark Valley of the Shadow of Death, and of course many of the moral sinews will snap by the way, but we
shall gird up our loins and the blessed peace of the end will have no shadow cast upon it.
What allowed Alice to meet her mortality with such serenity was not a physical fact but the single most
important psychological and emotional event of her life, which had taken place a decade earlier. When she
was thirty-two, Alice had met Katharine Peabody Loring — an energetic young education reformer and
activist, whom she described as having “all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman,
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combined with all the distinctive feminine virtues.” Alice marveled that “there is nothing [Katharine] cannot
do from hewing wood and drawing water to driving runaway horses and educating all the women in North
America.” In short, she was in love, and so was Katharine, who proved to be the most loyal and loving partner
one could wish for.
The two women shared the remainder of the Alice’s life, and her family came to accept Katharine as one of
them. Henry James admired her “strength of wind and limbs, to say nothing of her nobler qualities,”
recognized that she and his sister were bonded by “a permanency,” and came to love the devotion with which
Katharine simply loved Alice. (His novel The Bostonians, published four years after Alice’s death, would
popularize the term “Boston marriage” — a domestic partnership between two women, financially
independent of any man, likely modeled on his sister’s relationship with his sister-outside-law.) Katharine, for
her part, assured Henry of her own desire “quite as strongly as Alice’s, to be with her to the end.”
Alice James and Katharine Peabody Loring in Alice’s sickroom (Harvard Houghton Library)
In an entry from New Year’s Day of 1892, three months before the end, Alice writes:
As the ugliest things go to the making of the fairest, is it not wonderful that this unholy granite substance in
my breast should be the soil propitious for the perfect flowering of Katharine’s unexampled genius for
friendship and devotion. The story of her watchfulness, patience and untiring resource cannot be told by my
feeble pen, but all the pain and discomfort seem a slender price to pay for all the happiness and peace with
which she fills my days.
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Despite the interminable rapidity with which death approached, Alice didn’t slip into the ideology of eternal
life — her era’s greatest coping mechanism against the prevalence of untimely deaths. Like Emily Dickinson,
who renounced the escapist rhetoric of immortality, Alice made her own spiritual path. (She was, in fact, a fan
of Dickinson. In the final weeks of her life, she found enough good humor to record this wry observation: “It
is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate, they have such a capacity
for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle.”) In a journal entry from August of 1890,
she writes:
Sketch of Alice James by Henry James, 1872
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There has come such a change in me. A congenital faith flows thro’ me like a limpid stream, making the arid
places green, a spontaneous irrigator of which the snags of doubt have never interrupted [n]or made turbid the
easily flowing current. A faith which is my mental and moral respiration which needs no revelation but
experience and whose only ritual is daily conduct. Thro’ my childhood and youth and until within the last few
years, the thought of the end as an entrance into spiritual existence, where aspirations are a fulfillment, was a
perpetual and necessary inspiration, but now, altho’ intellectually nonexistence is more ungraspable and
inconceivable than ever, all longing for fulfillment, all passion to achieve has died down within me and
whether the great Mystery resolves itself into eternal Death or glorious Life, I contemplate either with equal
serenity.
In December of 1891, several months after her terminal diagnosis, she revisits the absurdity of immortality
and considers the far greater redemption to be found in life and death:
How little all assurances of one’s own immortality seem to concern one, now, and how little to have gained
from the experience of life, if one’s thoughts are lingering still upon personal fulfillments and not rooted in
the knowledge that the great Immortalities, Love, Goodness and Truth include all others… References to
those whom we shall meet again make me shiver, as such an invasion of their sanctity, gone so far beyond, for
ever since the night that Mother died, and the depth of filial tenderness was revealed to me, all personal claim
upon her vanished, and she was dwelt in my mind a beautiful illuminated memory, the essence of divine
maternity from which I was to learn great things, give all, but ask nothing.
Writing four weeks before her death, Alice arrives at the perennial question of the nature of the self — or
what Walt Whitman considered the paradox of identity — and where it resides. With unsentimental and
almost buoyant poignancy, she observes that even as the body fails part by part, we adapt by folding the
losses into our consent to reality, the integrity of our deepest sense of self remaining all the while intact:
This long slow dying is no doubt instructive, it it is disappointingly free from excitements: “naturalness”
being carried to its supreme expression. One sloughs off the activities one by one, and never knows that
they’re gone, until one suddenly finds that the months have slipped away and the sofa will never more be laid
upon, the morning paper read, or the loss of the new book regretted; one revolves with equal content within
the narrowing circle until the vanishing point is reached, I suppose.
Vanity, however, maintains its undisputed sway, and I take satisfaction in feeling as much myself as ever,
perhaps simply a more concentrated essence in this curtailment.
A week before her death, sensing the proximity of the end, she considers the futility of regret:
How wearing to the substance and exasperating to the nerves is the perpetual bewailing, wondering at and
wishing to alter things happened, as if all personal concern didn’t vanish as the “happened” crystallizes into
history. Of what matter can it be whether pain or pleasure has shaped and stamped the pulp within, as one is
absorbed in the supreme interest of watching the outline and the tracery as the lines broaden for eternity.
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Art from Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch, an uncommonly tender illustrated meditation on life
and death
In her final journal entry, dictated to Katharine the day before her death, Alice writes with gratitude for her
partner’s loving care and caress:
I am being ground slowly on the grim grindstone of physical pain, and on two nights I had almost asked K.’s
lethal dose, but one steps hesitantly along such unaccustomed ways and endures from second to second; and I
feel sure that it can’t be possible but what the bewildered little hammer that keep some going will very shortly
see the decency of ending his distracted career; however this may be, physical pain however great ends in
itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous sorrows sear the soul.
These last, Katharine has completely under the control of her rhythmic hand, so I go no longer in dread. Oh
the wonderful moment when I felt myself floated for the first time into the deep sea of divine cessation, and
saw all the dear old mysteries and miracles vanish into vapour!
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But Alice’s most profound meditation on life and death was penned in a letter to her brother William a year
earlier, after her terminal diagnosis had relieved the decades of uncertainty. Echoing Rilke’s assertion
that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is
here, that is natural, that is love,” she writes:
It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life, and I count in
the greatest good fortune to have these few months so full of interest and instruction in the knowledge of my
approaching death. It is as simple in one’s own person as any fact of nature, the fall of a leaf or the blooming
of a rose, and I have a delicious consciousness, ever present, of wide spaces close at hand, and whisperings of
release in the air.
Alice James in 1870 (Harvard

Houghton Library)
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Compare this with Oliver Sacks’s stirring farewell to life, written more than a century later after his own
terminal diagnosis:
I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of
the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life… .
In a spectacular counterpoint to the disadvantages life had conferred upon her with her particular lifelong
infirmity and the general case of her gender in the nineteenth century, Alice adds a proud note of assurance to
William:
Don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else… Notwithstanding the poverty
of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumble along my
straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask
for?
Compare again with Sacks:
I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an
enormous privilege and adventure.
The Diary of Alice James is a magnificent read in its entirety. Complement it with an uncommonly tender
German illustrated meditation on mortality and a subtle Japanese pop-up masterpiece about the cycle of life,
then revisit its contemporary counterpart in a young neurosurgeon’s beautiful meditation on the meaning of
life as he faces his death.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/08/07/diary-of-alice-james-
death/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=d4ffdaf0b0-
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-d4ffdaf0b0-
234059117&mc_cid=d4ffdaf0b0&mc_eid=d1c16ac662
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NSF funds new multidisciplinary approaches to study the brain
$16 million for cross-cutting research into neural and cognitive systems
How does the brain listen and adapt in noisy scenarios?

Credit and Larger Version
August 8, 2017
The National Science Foundation (NSF) made 19 awards to cross-disciplinary teams from across the United
States to conduct innovative research focused on neural and cognitive systems. Each award provides a
research team with up to $1 million over two to four years.
The awards will contribute to NSF's investments in support of Understanding the Brain and the BRAIN
Initiative, a coordinated research effort that seeks to accelerate the development of new neurotechnologies.
The awards will advance frontiers in cognitive science and neuroscience with an emphasis on four themes:
 Neuroengineering and brain-inspired concepts and designs.
 Individuality and variation.
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 Cognitive and neural processes in realistic, complex environments.
 Data-intensive neuroscience and cognitive science.
The projects will leverage advanced research within these themes to investigate how neural and cognitive
systems interact with education, engineering and computer science, thanks to the support of the
NSF Integrative Strategies for Understanding Neural and Cognitive Systems (NCS) program. The NCS
program supports innovative, boundary-crossing efforts to push the frontiers of brain science.
Cynthia Moss holds a big brown bat in her laboratory flight room at Johns Hopkins University.
Credit: Homewood Photography
"It takes insight and courage to tackle these problems," said Ken Whang, NSF program director in the
Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE). "These teams are combining their
expertise to try to forge new paths forward on some of the most complex and important challenges of
understanding the brain. They are posing problems in new ways, taking intellectual and technical risks that
have huge potential payoff."
The new projects are supported by four NSF directorates, allowing the program to identify interdisciplinary
areas of research: CISE; Education and Human Resources; Engineering; and Social, Behavioral and
Economic Sciences. The NSF Office of International Science and Engineering's Mathematical Sciences
Innovation Incubator program also provided additional support this year. In addition to conducting
neuroscience research, NCS-supported projects will use insights from neuroscience to advance the fields of
engineering, social and behavioral sciences and education.
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Recording electrical signals from many neurons at once can be noisy. Il Memming Park of SUNY at Stony
Brook and Alexander Huk of University of Texas at Austin are looking at the trajectories of neural
activities in lower dimensional space to understand the dynamics that drive neural computation. Shown
here is a 3-D projection of the trajectories of neural activities in a monkey's primary visual cortex.
Credit: Il Memming Park, Stony Brook University
The award titles, principal investigators and sponsor institutions are listed below.
 Ground-truth analysis and modeling of entire individual C. elegans nervous systems: Edward
Boyden of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi of Northeastern
University
 Decoding and reconstructing the neural basis of real world social perception: Avniel Ghuman of
University of Pittsburgh and Max G'Sell of Carnegie Mellon University
 Relationship of cortical field anatomy to network vulnerability and behavior: Thomas Grabowski of
University of Washington and Wanpracha Chaovalitwongse of University of Arkansas
 Understanding the neural basis for sensorimotor control loops using whisker-based robotic hardware
platforms: Mitra Hartmann of Northwestern University and Sarah Bergbreiter of University of
Maryland, College Park
 A neurally inspired, event-based computer vision pipeline: Garrett Kenyon of the New Mexico
Consortium and Michael Flynn of University of Michigan Ann Arbor
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 Neurobehavioral integration of visual and semantic number knowledge and its role for individual
variation in the math ability of children and adults: Melissa Libertus of University of Pittsburgh
 A computational theory to model the neurobiological basis of a visuo-cognitive neuroprosthetic:

Stephen Macknik of SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn
 Active listening and attention in 3-D natural scenes: Cynthia Moss of Johns Hopkins University
 Seizure control through state-specific manipulation of cell assemblies: Sarah Muldoon of SUNY at
Buffalo and Ethan Goldberg of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
 Super resolution mapping of multi-scale neuronal circuits using flexible transparent arrays: Piya Pal
of University of California, San Diego
 Connecting spikes to cognitive algorithms: Il Memming Park of SUNY at Stony Brook and
Alexander Huk of University of Texas at Austin
 Connectome mapping algorithms with application to community services for big data neuroscience:
Franco Pestilli of Indiana University
 Integrative foundations for interactions of complex neural and neuro-inspired systems with realistic
environments: Terrence Sejnowski of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and John Doyle of
California Institute of Technology
 Data-driven modeling of visual cortex: Robert Shapley of New York University
 Extracting functional cortical network dynamics at high spatiotemporal resolution: Jonathan Simon
of University of Maryland, College Park
 Neuroimaging to advance computer vision, NLP and A.I.: Jeffrey Siskind of Purdue University
 Fully passive and wireless multi-channel neural recording for chronic in-vivo studies in animals:
John Volakis of Ohio State University and Junseok Chae of Arizona State University
 The impact of real world stressors on problem-solving: Ying Choon Wu of University of California,
San Diego
 Volitional modulation of neural activity in the visual cortex: Byron Yu of Carnegie Mellon
University and Matthew Smith of University of Pittsburgh
The program also awarded supplemental funds of up to $200,000 each to four projects to maximize the
impact of basic research in computing, engineering and education on new challenges in neuroscience and
cognitive science. This is the third round of brain research funding for this program.
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Researchers study rat whiskers to learn how the brain combines information about movement and touch.
Shown here is a laboratory rat exploring with its whiskers. Mitra Hartmann of Northwestern University and
Sarah Bergbreiter of University of Maryland, College Park will develop artificial whiskers of multiple
lengths to better understand how animals sense their environments.
Credit: Hartmann Laboratory, Northwestern University
 Probing neural connectivity at multiple temporal scales: Laleh Najafizadeh of Rutgers University-
New Brunswick
 Scalable neuromorphic learning machines: Emre Neftci of University of California, Irvine
 Development of integrated memristive crossbar circuits for pattern classification applications: Dmitri
Strukov of University of California, Santa Barbara
 Moving objects databases for exploration of virtual and real environments: Ouri Wolfson of
University of Illinois at Chicago
To learn more about NSF investments in fundamental brain research, visit NSF.gov/brain.
-NSF-
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Photos of Extremely Unusual Mushrooms and Other Fungi by Steve Axford
by Christopher Jobson on July 29, 2016
It’s been well over a year since we last checked in with Australian photographer Steve
Axford (previously here and here) who ventures into forested areas near his home in New South Wales to
photograph the unusual forms of fungi, slime molds, and lichens he finds growing there. The permutations in
color, shape, and size found in each specimen are a testament to the radical diversity of living creatures found
in just a small area.
A handful of the images seen here, namely the “hairy” fungi called Cookeina Tricholoma, were photographed
last year on a trip to Xishuangbanna, China and Chiang Mai, Thailand. Axford suspects that some of the
species he encounters may be unknown to science and that he may have documented them for the first time.
You can see more mushroom goodness on Axford’s Facebook and Flickr pages.
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/07/steve-axford-macro-mushrooms/
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91-Year-Old Lebanese-American Poet, Philosopher, and Painter Etel Adnan on Memory, the Self, and the
Universe
“The universe is itself the glue that keeps it going, therefore it is memory in action and in essence, in
becoming and in being. Because it remembers itself, it exists. Because it exists, it remembers.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Oftentimes during meditation, I am visited by flash-memories dislodged from some dusty recess of my
unconscious — vignettes and glimpses of people, places, and events from long ago and far away, belonging to
what feels like another lifetime. They are entirely banal — the curb of a childhood sidewalk, mid-afternoon
light falling on a familiar building in a familiar way, the smell of a leather armchair on a hot summer day —
but in their banality they intimate the existence of the former self who inhabited those moments, a self that
seems so foreign and so remote, yet one to which I am forever fettered by this half-conscious memory.
Memory, indeed, is the centerpiece of our selfhood and moors our bodies to our minds, as those flashes of the
embodied mind unclenched by meditation reveal. Memory endows us with creativity and animates some of
our most paradoxical impulses.
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A century after Virginia Woolf painted memory as the capricious seamstress that stitches our lives together,
Paris-based Lebanese-American poet, essayist, philosopher, and visual artist Etel Adnan(b. February 24,
1925) picks up Woolf’s thread throughout Night(public library) — her slender, powerful collection of prose
meditations and poems that, from the fortunate vantage point of Adnan’s ninety-first year on Earth, concretize
in luminous language and incisive thought life’s most elusive perplexities: time, memory, love, selfhood,
mortality.
Etel Adnan: “The Weight of the

World” (Serpentine Galleries)
Adnan, whom the polymathic curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has celebrated as one of the most influential artists
of the past century, was born in Beirut to a Greek mother and a Syrian father. She began writing poetry in
French at twenty and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne a generation after Simone de Beauvoir, then crossed
the Atlantic for graduate studies at Harvard and Berkeley. In the 1960s, Adnan took a teaching position at a
small Catholic school in California, where she began painting and transcribing the work of Arab poets. She
moved back to Beirut and in the midst of the Lebanese civil war composed politically wakeful poetry and
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prose that arrested the popular imagination with an uncommon precision of insight. Adnan now lives in Paris
with her partner, the Syrian-born artist and publisher Simone Fattal, where she continues to paint and write.
Drawing on the rich span of her life across time and space, Adnan reflects on the role of memory in the
continuity of our personal identity:
Memory, and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks, and constantly merging. Both escape our will,
though we depend on them. Measured, but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other,
outside, or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us, but where? Memory is right here,
in the head, but it can exit, abandon the head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite
patience.
Is memory produced by us, or is it us? Our identity is very likely whatever our memory decides to retain. But
let’s not presume that memory is a storage room. It’s not a tool for being able to think, it’s thinking, before
thinking. It also makes an (apparently) simple thing like crossing the room, possible. It’s impossible to
separate it from what it remembers.
Etel Adnan
(Photograph by Simone Fattal)
In stretching between the poles of existence and nonexistence, memory, Adnan suggests, might be the native
consciousness of the universe:
We can admit that memory resurrects the dead, but these remain within their world, not ours. The universe
covers the whole, a warm blanket.
But this memory is the glue that keeps the universe as one: although immaterial, it makes being possible, it is
being. If an idea didn’t remember to think, it wouldn’t be. If a chair wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be tomorrow. If
I didn’t remember that I am, I won’t be. We can also say that the universe is itself the glue that keeps it going,
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therefore it is memory in action and in essence, in becoming and in being. Because it remembers itself, it
exists. Because it exists, it remembers.
Art by Etel Adnan (Sfeir-Semler Gallery)
In a sentiment that calls to mind Joan Didion’s unforgettable assertion that “we are well advised to keep on
nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Adnan
considers how memory binds us to each other and to our own former selves:
Memory is intelligent. It’s a knowledge seated neither in the senses, nor in the spirit, but in collective
memory. It is communal, though deeply personal. Involved with the self, though autonomous. At war with
death.
It helps us rampage through the old self, hang on the certitude that it has to be.
[…]
Reason and memory move together.
And night and memory mediate each other. We move in them disoriented, for they often refuse to secure our
vision. Avaricious, whimsical, they release things bit by bit.
Building upon Woolf’s metaphor, Adnan adds:
Memory sews together events that hadn’t previously met. It reshuffles the past and makes us aware that it is
doing so.
[…]
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Memory is within us and reaches out, sometimes missing the connection with reality, its neighbor, its
substance.
Complement this particular fragment of Adnan’s wholly enchanting Night with Sally Mann on the treacheries
of memory and Cecilia Ruiz’s poetic illustrated meditation on memory’s imperfectionsinspired by Borges,
then revisit Kahlil Gibran, another Lebanese-American poet and philosopher of uncommon insight, on why
artists make art.
Thanks, Jen
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/08/10/etel-adnan-night-
memory/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=d4ffdaf0b0-
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A new method to make valuable olefins from abundant carboxylic acids
Posted: 07 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT
The investment in new olefin plants can easily surpass the USD 5 billion bulding budget to produce more than
1 million metric tonnes per annum of ethylene per plant.
Organic chemistry is the science and the art of making carbon containing molecules. In these, carbon atoms
may be linked by a single, double or triple bond to another carbon atom. Bonds are not more than the way we
humans represent the sharing electrons between two atoms. In this regard, a single bond consists of two
bonding electrons, a double bond of four and a triple of six. Single bonds are the most prevalent ones in
organic molecules, but double bonds are of great importance, and they are present in fragrances, drugs and
natural products. Moreover, they are especially interesting because contrary to single carbon-carbon bonds,
which are typically inert, double bonds are reactive. This means that they can be transformed into other
molecules easily, and the chemistry of double bonds (also called olefins) is very rich. Despite their
importance, the methods for their synthesis are limited, and most of them rely on chemistry developed more
than 30 years ago. Now a new method has been reported by the Baran Lab 2 which employs alkyl carboxylic
acids, a ubiquitous and diverse building block (Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Summary of the new approach for the synthesis of olefins. Credit: Baran et al. (2017)
The protocol starts with the reaction of alkyl carboxylic acids with the commercially available tetrachloro-N-
hydroxyphthalimide (TCNHPI), which results into redox-active esters (RAE). (Figure 2) These can be
isolated (i.e., purified from other undesired products) but can also be used in situ. In any case, the next step is
the formation of the double bond. This is achieved by coupling with an alkenylzinc reagent. These have to be
prepared, but there are several robust methods already reported for that. The discovery of this research was
that nickel(II) (and in some cases also iron) together with a simple and abundant ligand (2,2’-bipyridine)
could catalyze the coupling thus affording the desired olefins (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Reaction scheme for the decarboxylative alkenylation. Credit: Baran et al. (2017)
They have termed this new method decarboxylative alkenylation, and it is very self-explanatory. Alkenylation
means the making of alkenes, which is just another term for olefins or double bonds. The decarboxylative
term is because of the redox-active ester, upon accepting one electron leads to CO2 fragmentation and a
radical formation. For example, the molecule between brackets in Figure 2 upon fragmentation would lead to
the loss of the part drawn in black, with just the blue part remaining as a radical. This part is then coupled
with the alkenylzinc reagent thanks to the nickel. Many different types of compounds could be made with this
methodology, including medicines and natural products (Figure 3)
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Figure 3. Some examples of the many compounds that were made with the new methodology. Credit: Baran
et al. (2017)
Apart from the abundance and low cost of carboxylic acids, another of the advantages of the new
methodology is the control of stereochemistry. The stereochemistry of a molecule is how the different atoms
are arranged in it. A double bond can have up to four substituents (groups at the ends) and their position can
vary. This is illustrated in figure 4. Whereas there is only one option in the formation of
compound 29, 27 and 28 have the CO2Et group in a different position. 27 has the two substituents(groups,
blue and green) towards the same side, and in organic chemistry is termed Z. If they are pointing towards
opposite direction as in 28 the stereoisomer is said to be E. These isomers are different molecules, and thus,
their properties vary. Consequently, is important to be able to control the position of the substituents when
double bonds are, but this is not straightforward. Currently, the method for the synthesis of an olefin is chosen
according to which of the isomers is needed. The reaction mechanism of each method will determine which
will be formed. Moreover, is common that with the existing methods a mixture of both isomers will be
obtained. On the contrary, with this new method, the desired stereoisomer can be obtained, just the correct
alkenylzinc reagent has to be prepared. Fortunately, this is not a big issue, as there are methods for accessing
them.
Figure 4. Control over the stereochemistry of the newly formed double bond. Credit: Baran et al. (2017)
Another big advantage of this method is the step economy. In the article, it is showcased by the synthesis of
several natural products, which needed fewer steps than with the traditional synthetic route. In figure 5 the
synthesis of (-)-desmosterol acetate, a drug precursor, is shown. While the previous methodology required 7
steps to transform the steroidal substrate 1 into (-)-desmosterol acetate, the new protocol can furnish it in
merely 2. The step economy results in higher yield too, and this is of crucial importance in the synthesis of
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drugs, as it makes their production cheaper. Moreover, this new methodology adds versatility and allows the
easy synthesis of analogs (2b and 2c in Figure 5). Again, this is highly desirable for the finding of new drugs.
Figure 5. Comparison of the synthesis of (-)-desmosterol acetate by the previous approach and the newly
developed methodology. Credit: Baran et al. (2017)
Double bonds are essential constituents of many natural products and drugs, but also important precursors for
further chemistry, such as in polymer chemistry. The newly developed decarboxylative alkenylation turns
abundant alkyl carboxylic acids into more difficult to make olefins with an operationally simple setup. This
new discovery is likely to become soon a standard practice in organic synthesis.
References
1. J. T. Edwards, R. R. Merchant, K. S. McClymont, K. W. Knouse, T. Qin, L. R. Malins, B. Vokits,

S. A. Shaw, D. H. Bao, F. L. Wei, T. Zhou, M. D. Eastgate, P. S. Baran (2017) Decarboxylative
alkenylation, Nature, 545, 213. DOI:10.1038/nature22307 ↩
2. J. T. Edwards, R. R. Merchant, K. S. McClymont, K. W. Knouse, T. Qin, L. R. Malins, B. Vokits,

S. A. Shaw, D. H. Bao, F. L. Wei, T. Zhou, M. D. Eastgate, P. S. Baran (2017) Decarboxylative
alkenylation, Nature, 545, 213. DOI:10.1038/nature22307 ↩
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Dripping Glass Fusion “Jellyfish” Sculptures by Daniela Fortiby Christopher Jobson on August 9, 2017
Artist Daniela Forti lives and works in Chianti, Tuscany where she produces these fantastic artworks of
dripped glass. She refers to the pieces as “Jellyfish” because of their undulating tentacles that are formed by
hand through a melted glass fusion process. Each piece appears to balance like a small platter or table atop
colorful, spindly drips that somehow manage to support the weight above. Many examples of her work are on
view (and also available) over at Artemest.
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/08/dripping-glass-fusion-jellyfish-sculptures-by-daniela-
forti/?mc_cid=774f60f263&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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What does the “we don’t understand how artificial intelligence takes decisions” statement mean?
Specialized media sometimes publishes similar headlines to the title of the present article. For
instance 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. They are all referred to deep learning, which is a part of artificial intelligence.
However, if we get algorithms to work and achieve advanced intelligent applications, what is exactly not
understandable?
Deep learning is based on neural networks, which is just a way of artificial learning. An example of a neural
network with a single hidden layer is shown in next figure, where x and y represent input and output values,
respectively. w and b are used for the weight and the bias:
Source: Neural Networks and Deep

Learning / Michael Nielsen
what’s being computed by the hidden neuron is: , where is the sigmoid function. Neural networks are trained
so that inputs obtain specific outputs, and this is what scientists and programmers pursue. However, the output
of the system is quite sensible to bias and weight, as can be seen in the following video:
http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/movies/create_step_function.mp4
Now it comes the shocking part, named as the universal approximation theorem. This rule assures that a feed-
forward network with a single hidden layer containing a finite number of neurons can approximate any
continuous function, under mild assumptions on the activation function. In 1989 it was proved that this
theorem was true for the sigmoid activation function. In other words, the simple neural network shown before
can approximate any continuous function. The bigger the number of nodes of the hidden layer, the better the
approximation of the function
Now, substitute y for f(x) in the image before. x, w, and b can be tuned so that they approximate to any
continuous function, and this is exactly what scientists don’t understand well. They get the output-input
relations and understand the mathematics, but they can’t predict how the mapping and evolution of the tuning
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of the neural network will be due to the infinite number of possibilities. Neural networks can approximate to
any function that you can imagine. For instance,
It is sure that it exists at least one neural network whose output is that function.
Deep learning makes reference to neural networks of many hidden layers, where many degrees of freedom
and parameters to tune exist. It is a very used technique for complex AI problems today, and universal
approximation theorem can be applied also to know why scientists don’t understand exactly how neural
networks learn. This fact could lead to undesirable results or not planned learning.
References
[1] Guoqiang Zhang, B. Eddy Patuwo, Michael Y. Hu, Forecasting with artificial neural networks:,
International Journal of Forecasting, Volume 14 (1), 1998, Pages 35-62, ISSN 0169-2070,
doi: 10.1016/S0169-2070(97)00044-7.
[2] Michael A. Nielsen, “Neural Networks and Deep Learning“, Determination Press, 2015
The post What does the “we don’t understand how artificial intelligence takes decisions” statement
mean?appeared first on Mapping Ignorance.
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The Phenomenon Of “Crown Shyness” Where Trees Avoid Touching
by Christopher Jobson on August 14, 2017
Photo © Dag Peak. San Martin, Buenos Aires.
Crown shyness is a naturally occurring phenomenon in some tree species where the upper most branches in a
forest canopy avoid touching one another. The visual effect is striking as it creates clearly defined borders
akin to cracks or rivers in the sky when viewed from below. Although the phenomenon was first observed in
the 1920s, scientists have yet to reach a consensus on what causes it. According to Wikipedia it might simply
be caused by the trees rubbing against one another, although signs also point to more active causes such as a
preventative measure against shading (optimizing light exposure for photosynthesis) or even as a deterrent for
the spread of harmful insects. (via Kottke, Robert Macfarlane)
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/08/the-phenomenon-of-crown-shyness-where-trees-avoid-
touching/?mc_cid=774f60f263&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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Intelligence: a mishmash of genetic ingredients
What makes an intelligent brain? Credit: Max Pixel
Like father like son. We have all heard it one time or another. The layman explanation to hereditary
characters. Whether the cause is genetic inheritance or the effect of growing up in a certain environment, is
quite something else. When talking about the origin of intelligence, there are always discussions. Even though
there is undoubtedly an environmental component (socioeconomic factors, culture, language, family
interactions…) it is widely acknowledged that intelligence is a strongly influenced genetic trait. Despite
having a complex inheritance pattern, since there is no single intelligence gene, a recent meta-analysis 2 on
more than 78.000 people has been used to characterize better the genetic landscape of intelligence.
By means of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on intelligence, the researchers compiled a list of
genetic variations that correlated with intelligence levels. In spite of the wealth of intelligence tests available,
the authors employed Spearman’s g, a measure of general intelligence independent of the specific test used to
characterize it.
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An example of GWAS for skin color in the Cape Verdean cohort. Credit: Beleza et al.
As a result of their meta analysis, they identified more than 300 SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism, that
is genetic variations within a gene of only one letter. For example, C to G, or A to T) in 18 genomic locations,
about the half of those SNPs are located within a gene (in up to 22 genes), which might lead to protein
changes. Moreover, they got to identify 29 new genes implicated in intelligence.
Of all those new genes, the majority were found to be expressed in brain tissue, while functionally many of
those genes would be implied in cell development regulation. On the other hand, they could show a
significant genetic association with certain neuropsychiatric (negative association to Alzheimer’s and
depression/anxiety of schizophrenia; positive with autism) and metabolic disorders (negative association to
waist-to-hip ratio; positive with intracranial volume)
In conclusion, this work represents a step forward in mapping and understanding the molecular signatures
behind human intelligence. However, even considering this huge step forward in the genetic characterization
of intelligence, we are far from being able to create a super brain. Sorry, Scarlett Johansson, your character
in Lucyis still a dream…or a fake?
References
1. Sniekers S, Stringer S, Watanabe K, et al. (2017) Genome-wide association meta-analysis of

78,308 individuals identifies new loci and genes influencing human intelligence. Nat
Genet. doi: 10.1038/ng.3869. ↩
2. Sniekers S, Stringer S, Watanabe K, et al. (2017) Genome-wide association meta-analysis of

78,308 individuals identifies new loci and genes influencing human intelligence. Nat
Genet. doi: 10.1038/ng.3869. ↩
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Peanut Allergy Treatment Works Long Term
Four years after taking a probiotic and peanut protein for 18 months, two-thirds of children in a small clinical
trial can eat peanuts with no health issues.
By Jef Akst | August 17, 2017
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FLICKR, AIRPIXIn 2013, researchers at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia dosed 48
children either with a probiotic with increasing amounts of a peanut protein, a treatment known as PPOIT, or
with a placebo once daily for a year and a half. This week (August 15), they reported that some 70 percent of
the participants who received PPOIT can ingest peanut-containing foods with no adverse reactions, according
to a study published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.
That result represents only a slight dip from the original results that found 82 percent of the treated children
could tolerate peanuts one month after finishing their PPOIT courses, suggesting the treatment is the first
long-lasting option for those who suffer from a peanut allergy.
“These children had been eating peanut freely in their diet without having to follow any particular program of
peanut intake in the years after treatment was completed,” lead researcher Mimi Tang says in a statement sent
to The Scientist. “This is a major step forward in identifying an effective treatment to address the food allergy
problem in Western societies.”
The probiotic used was Lactobacillus rhamnosus, a bacterium that may help mitigate allergic symptoms. “The
probiotic acts on the immune system, encourages the immune system to generate a protective, or tolerance,
response rather than allergy,” says Tang, according to ABC. “When given regularly over time, we hope to see
the immune system recognise the antigen.” The next step is to trial PPOIT in a larger study.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/50117/title/Peanut-Allergy-Treatment-Works-Long-
Term/
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The Terror Within and the Evil Without: James Baldwin on Our Capacity for Transformation as
Individuals and Nations
“It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without
than to locate the terror within.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“The self,” the poet Robert Penn Warren observed in his immensely
insightful meditation on the trouble with “finding yourself,” “is a style of being, continually expanding in a
vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the
life process of a healthy society itself.” Indeed, if the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich
Fromm was correct, as I believe he was, in asserting that self-love is the foundation of a sane society, our
responsibility to ourselves — and to our selves — is really a responsibility to one another: to know our
interiority intimately and hold our darkest sides up to the light of awareness. But part of our human folly is
that we do this far less readily than we shine the scorching beam of blameful attention on the darknesses of
others.
That is what James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) explores in a magnificent 1964 piece titled
“Nothing Personal,” found in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction (public library) — the
indispensable volume that gave us Baldwin on the creative process and his definition of love.
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James Baldwin (Photograph: Sedat Pakay)
A year after he contemplated “the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are,” Baldwin
writes:
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It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without
than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our
labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap
between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a
provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to
bits.
Echoing Bruce Lee’s assertion that “to become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of
what we are,” Baldwin turns his critical yet uncynical intellect toward our capacity for self-transformation —
the most difficult and rewarding of our inner resources comprising our collective potentiality:
It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning,
or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that
the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw
material will one build a self again? The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally
unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the
mind, of course; but if the question does not live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth,
which is a synonym for corruption.
Complement this particular portion of the wholly invigorating The Price of the Ticket with pioneering social
scientist John Gardner on the art of self-renewal and Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön on self-
transformation through difficult times, then revisit Baldwin on freedom and how we imprison ourselves, the
artist’s struggle, the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, and his increasingly timely forgotten
conversations with Chinua Achebe about the political power of art, with Margaret Mead about identity, race,
and the experience of otherness, and with Nikki Giovanni about what it means to be truly empowered.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/08/14/james-baldwin-nothing-personal-
evil/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=2dd665101b-
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-2dd665101b-
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Stem cell technique could reverse a major type of infertility
Fertile sperm are rare in men with an extra sex chromosome
Dennis Kunkle Microscopy/SPL
By Andy Coghlan
Turning skin cells into sperm may one day help some infertile men have babies. Research in mice has found a
way to make fertile sperm from animals born with too many sex chromosomes.
Most men have two sex chromosomes – one X and one Y – but some have three, which makes it difficult to
produce fertile sperm. Around 1 in 500 men are born with Klinefelter syndrome, caused by having an extra X
chromosome, while roughly 1 in 1000 have Double Y syndrome.
James Turner of the Francis Crick Institute in London and his team have found a way to get around the
infertility caused by these extra chromosomes. First, they bred mice that each had an extra X or Y
chromosome. They then tried to reprogram skin cells from the animals, turning them into induced pluripotent
stem cells (iPS), which are capable of forming other types of cell.
To their surprise, this was enough to make around a third of the skin cells jettison their extra chromosome.
When these cells were then coaxed into forming sperm cells and used to fertilise eggs, 50 to 60 per cent of the
resulting pregnancies led to live births.
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Cancer risk
This suggests that a similar technique might enable men with Klinefelter or Double Y-related infertility to
conceive. But there is a significant catch.
We don’t yet know how to fully turn stem cells into sperm, so the team got around this by injecting the cells
into mouse testes for the last stages of development. While this led to fertile sperm, it also caused tumours to
form in between 29 and 50 per cent of mice.
“What we really need to make this work is being able to go from iPS cells to sperm in a dish,” says Turner.
“It has to be done all in vitro, so only normal sperm cells would be used to fertilise eggs,” says Zev
Rosenwaks of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. “The danger with all iPS cell technology is
cancer.”
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aam9046
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2144380-stem-cell-technique-could-reverse-a-major-type-of-infertility/
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Digitally Rendered Alien Creatures by Zhang Chenxi
byChristopher Jobson on August 11, 2017
For this ongoing series of digital illustrations titled “UNKNOWN × UNKNOWN,” designer Zhang
Chenxi imagines an alien world crawling with gloopy, squishy, anemone-like creatures that share hybrid
characteristics of plants and animals. Chenxi starts each piece as a concept sketch on paper and then models it
in Cinema 4D before rendering in Octane. If you want to see more, he shares new works every few days
on Instagram.
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/08/digitally-rendered-alien-creatures-by-zhang-
chenxi/?mc_cid=774f60f263&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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Sun and Moon: Stunning Illustrations of Celestial Myths by Ten of India’s Greatest Indigenous Artists
Ancient allegorical reflections on the universal themes of life, love, time, harmony, and our eternal search for
a completeness of being.
BY MARIA POPOVA
“The dark body of the Moon gradually steals its silent way across the brilliant Sun,” Mabel Loomis Todd
wrote in her poetic nineteenth-century masterpiece on the surreal splendor of a total solar eclipse. Nearly a
century earlier, in his taxonomy of the three layers of reality, John Keats listed among “things real” the
“existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakespeare.” Indeed, the motions of the heavenly bodies
precipitated the Scientific Revolution that strengthened humanity’s grasp of reality by dethroning us from the
center of the universe. But, paradoxically, the Sun and the Moon belong equally with the world of
Shakespeare, with humanity’s most enduring storytelling — they are central to our earliest sky myths in
nearly every folkloric tradition, radiating timeless stories and parables that give shape to the human
experience through imaginative allegory.
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In Sun and Moon (public library), ten Indian folk and tribal artists bring to life the solar and lunar myths of
their indigenous traditions in stunningly illustrated stories reflecting on the universal themes of life, love,
time, harmony, and our eternal search for a completeness of being.
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This uncommon hand-bound treasure of a book, silkscreened on handmade paper with traditional Indian dyes,
comes from South Indian independent publisher Tara Books, who for the past decades have been giving voice
to marginalized art and literature through a commune of artists, writers, and designers collaborating on books
handcrafted by local artisans in a fair-trade workshop in Chennai, producing such treasures as The Night Life
of Trees, Drawing from the City, Creation, and Hope Is a Girl Selling Fruit.
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Among the indigenous traditions represented in the book are Gondi tribal art by Bhajju Shyam (of London
Jungle Book fame), Durga Bai (featured in The Night Life of Trees), and Ramsingh Urveti (of I Saw a
Peacock with a Fiery Tail); Madhubani folk art by Rhambros Jha (of Waterlife); and Meena tribal art by
Sunita (of Gobble You Up).
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Complement the gorgeous Sun and Moon with Michael Benson’s stunning and scholarly compendium of
4,000 years of celestial illustrations and these striking Medieval illustrations of comets, then revisit artist Vija
Celmins and writer Eliot Weinberger’s mythopoetic masterpiece serenading the night sky through myths and
stories from around the world.
Illustrations courtesy of Tara Books; photographs by Maria Popova
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/08/15/sun-and-moon-tara-
books/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=2dd665101b-
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Supernova’s messy birth casts doubt on reliability of astronomical yardstick
Brightness of exploding stars may vary more than researchers realized.
 Shannon Hall
NASA
This artist's conception shows a white dwarf (left) siphoning material from a larger star, a process that will
eventually cause a stellar explosion.
The exploding stars known as type Ia supernovae are so consistently bright that astronomers refer to them as
standard candles — beacons that are used to measure vast cosmological distances. But these cosmic mileposts
may not be so uniform. A new study finds evidence that the supernovae can arise by two different processes,
adding to lingering suspicions that standard candles aren't so standard after all.
The findings, which have been posted on the arXiv preprint server 1 and accepted for publication in
the Astrophysical Journal, could help astronomers to calibrate measurements of the Universe’s expansion.
Tracking type Ia supernovae showed that the Universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and helped to
prove the existence of dark energy — advances that secured the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The fact that scientists don’t fully understand these cosmological tools is embarrassing, says the latest study’s
lead author, Griffin Hosseinzadeh, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “One of the
greatest discoveries of the century is based on these things and we don’t even know what they are, really.”
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It's not for lack of trying: astronomers have put forth a range of hypotheses to explain how these stellar
explosions arise. Scientists once thought that the supernovae were built uniformly, like fireworks in a cosmic
assembly line. That changed in the 1990s, when astronomers noticed that some of the supernovae were
dimmer than the others.
Astronomers can correct for the difference because the brightest supernovae seem to fade more slowly than
their dimmer kin. Still, the fact that each ‘standard candle’ looks slightly different from the next is cause for
concern. “When you’re trying to measure the expansion rate of the Universe to 1%, these subtle differences
make you worry that maybe type Ia supernovae are throwing you off,” says Peter Garnavich, an astronomer at
the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
Burning bright
At least one thing seems clear, however. Astronomers remain convinced that a white dwarf, an Earth-sized
remnant of a Sun-like star, plays a central part in the formation of each type Ia supernova. But they’re not sure
what pushes white dwarves over the edge, because these stars are too stable to explode on their own. That
suggests that a companion star — another white dwarf, a star like the Sun or even a giant star — helps to set
each supernova in motion.
If this companion star is large, the idea goes, then the white dwarf would siphon material from it. Eventually,
it would accumulate so much extra mass that the pressure would ignite a runaway thermonuclear explosion.
But if the companion star is small — perhaps a second white dwarf — the two celestial bodies would spiral
towards each other and merge together before exploding.
Researchers have been searching for evidence of these processes by hunting for newly formed supernovae.
That’s because a supernova created in the first scenario would leave evidence behind: material travelling out
from the stellar explosion would light up as it hit the slightly smaller, but still intact, companion star. But a
supernova formed by the merger of a white dwarf and a small companion would obliterate all traces of the
stars involved in its birth.
Astronomers had only seen evidence for the second scenario — until now. Griffin and his team’s paper is the
first to report a supernova formed by a white dwarf leaching material from a massive companion star. The
results add weight to the idea that type Ia supernovae can form through two different stellar assembly lines.
On the hunt
The first hint of the discovery came on 10 March, when a supernova appeared on the outskirts of the spiral
galaxy NGC 5643, 16.9 million parsecs from Earth (55 million light years). David Sand, an astronomer at the
University of Arizona in Tucson and a co-author of the study, found it as he pored over data from the DLT40
supernova search, which scans roughly 500 galaxies every night.
Sand quickly took another image to verify that what he had seen was a stellar explosion, not an unknown
asteroid. Within a few minutes, he knew it was time to alert the Las Cumbres Observatory — a network of 18
telescopes around the world that allows astronomers to monitor objects continuously as they move across the
sky.
Hosseinzadeh, Sand and their colleagues observed the supernova every 5 hours for roughly 6 days and then
once a night for 40 days after — allowing them to map its changing luminosity. During this period, they saw a
temporary jump in brightness caused by material ejected from the supernova striking the companion star.
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“This is the best evidence yet for a shock due to a companion star in a normal type Ia supernova,” Garnavich
says.
But the discovery is just the beginning of unravelling the mystery behind these not-so-standard candles. To
better pin down their measurements of the cosmos, astronomers will keep searching for more of these dim
young supernovae.
“It’s like having a tool that you know how to use, but you don’t know how it works,” Hosseinzadeh says.
“Understanding the physics of the tool that you're using seems better than just using it blindly.”
Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2017.22066
References
1. Hosseinzadeh, G. et al. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08990 (2017).
https://www.nature.com/news/supernova-s-messy-birth-casts-doubt-on-reliability-of-astronomical-yardstick-
1.22066
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A Turbulent Black Sea Fills a Three-Story Wall in Kiev, Ukraine
by Kate Sierzputowski on August 10, 2017
London-born and Cape Town-based artist Jake Aikman paints scenes that aim to capture the mysterious
nature of environments at the edge of civilization, producing dramatic seascapes and dense patches of tropical
forests in his oil paintings. His latest work moves from canvas to wall, upscaling his practice for the first time
to produce a three-story tall mural of a stormy Black Sea. The two-layer public painting was produced for Art
United Us over nine days last month in Kiev, Ukraine. You can see more of Aikman’s work on
his Instagram and through SMAC Gallery where he is represented. (via Brooklyn Street Art)
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/08/a-turbulent-black-sea-fills-a-three-story-wall-in-kiev-
ukraine/?mc_cid=774f60f263&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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Primate Brains Made to See Old Objects as New Again
Optogenetic stimulation of the perirhinal cortex can cause macaques to process never-before seen-objects as
familiar and known objects as brand new.
By Abby Olena | August 17, 2017
WIKIMEDIA, ALFONZOPAZPHOTOOur brains quickly characterize everything we see as familiar or new,

and scientists have been investigating this connection between vision and cognition for years. Now, research
in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) reveals that the activation of neurons in a part of the primate brain
called the perirhinal cortex can cause monkeys to recognize new objects as familiar and vice versa. The study
was published today (August 17) in Science.
“There are a lot of really exciting aspects to this paper,” says neuroscientist David Sheinberg of Brown
University, who did not participate in the work. “This group continues to make advances that are helping us
understand how we convert visual impressions into things we know.”
Primate brains process visual information through several brain structures that make up the ventral visual
stream. The last stop in this stream is the perirhinal cortex, part of the medial temporal lobe. Scientists know
that this brain structure plays roles in visual memory and object discrimination. But one open question is
whether the perirhinal cortex represents objects’ physical traits or whether it might also communicate
information about nonphysical attributes, such as whether an object has been seen before.
“In the primate, the perirhinal cortex is the link between the visual pathway and the limbic memory system,”
coauthor and University of Tokyo neuroscientist Yasushi Miyashita writes in an email to The Scientist.
“Therefore, the perirhinal cortex is one of the most likely candidates in the brain where visual information is
transformed to subjective semantic values by referring to one’s own memory.”
“By increasing the firing of the perirhinal neurons, there’s a general signal sent out that says, ‘This is
familiar.’”—Paula Croxson,
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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To investigate the role of this brain area, the researchers first trained four adult male macaques to indicate
whether an object on a screen was new or one they’d seen before. After more than three months of practice,
the animals were able to accurately pick out 20-30 familiar objects from a pool of more than 6,000.
Miyashita’s team then developed an optogenetic switch in the monkeys’ perirhinal cortex. They used light or
electricity to activate neurons in different parts of this brain region while the animals performed their object-
recognition task. The researchers masked the images with varying amounts of visual noise in order to evaluate
the relationship between the visual stimuli and the perceptions evoked by these stimuli at several levels of
difficulty of recognition.
“The ability to do optogenetics—particularly with this level of precision—in a primate is something very
novel,” says Dwight Kravitz, a neuroscientist at George Washington University who was not involved in the
study.
When the authors stimulated both anterior and posterior perirhinal neurons optogenetically, the macaques
were more likely to identify both old and new objects as familiar. These results suggest that activation of
these neurons produces a signal about whether the object is learned, and not a signal related to the object’s
specific physical traits.
“By increasing the firing of the perirhinal neurons, there’s a general signal sent out that says, ‘This is
familiar,’” explains Paula Croxson, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who did
not participate in the work.
The research team saw similar results when they stimulated neurons in the anterior part of the perirhinal
cortex with electricity. But when they electrically stimulated more posterior perirhinal cortex neurons, the
monkeys were more likely to identify all objects as new.
The difference in outcomes when stimulating with light versus electricity does not change the fundamental
finding: that activation of perirhinal neurons causes a behavioral shift, says Kravitz. But future work will
benefit from an exploration of “exactly what the two different forms of stimulation are doing, how they differ,
and which one of them is going to give us a better understanding of the circuit itself,” he adds.
“We need further direct evidence for the underlying cellular mechanisms [that govern] activation of various
neural elements by electrical stimulation in the perirhinal cortex,” agrees Miyashita.
As with all animal studies, another open question is how well the findings will generalize to people. “The
monkey is a good model for the human, but it’s not a perfect one,” explains Kravitz. “This is a very exciting
development methodologically, which could lead to very interesting places, but it is in no way a silver bullet
for dealing with the complexities of the medial temporal lobe.”
K. Tamura et al., “Conversion of object identity to object-general semantic value in the primate temporal
cortex,” Science, doi:10.1126/science.aan4800, 2017.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/50112/title/Primate-Brains-Made-to-See-Old-Objects-
as-New-Again/
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John Quincy Adams on Efficiency vs. Effectiveness, the Proper Aim of Ambition, and His Daily
Routine
“The spark from Heaven is given to few — It is not to be obtained by intreaty or by toil.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Those who work much do not work hard,”Henry David Thoreau observed in his prescient meditation on the
myth of productivity and the measure of meaningful labor a century before the dawn of the cult of
workaholism, which continues to bedevil us with ever-accelerating virulence to this day.
A generation earlier, John Quincy Adams (July 11, 1767–February 23, 1848) — another man of introspective
genius and uncommon wisdom — dug at the heart of modernity’s foundational disconnect between efficiency
and effectiveness: our tendency to pour tremendous energy into doing things, with little reflection on whether
those are the right things to do in the first place.
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His journals, now published as John Quincy Adams: Diaries 1779–1821 (public library), offer an exceedingly
insightful record of one extraordinary man’s reflections on his own nature, haloed with luminous wisdom on
the universals of human nature. Throughout them, the sixth President of the United States examines the
paradox of how even the most industrious self-exertion can fail to attain a worthwhile result and why
unfocused ambition is a guarantee of frustration rather than fulfillment.
John Quincy
Adams. Portrait by John Singleton Copley, 1796.
In the spring of 1819, six years before he won the Presidency, 52-year-old Adams anticipates Kierkegaard’s
proclamation that “of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous [is] to be busy,” and laments the absurdity of
ineffectual busyness that animates his days in office as Secretary of State:
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Every day starts new game to me, upon the field of my duties; but the hurry of the hour leaves me no time for
the pursuit of it, and at the close of my Career I shall merely have gone helter skelter through the current
business of the Office, and leave no permanent trace of my ever having been in it behind.
“Down the Rabbit

Hole.” Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Years earlier, in observing his own habits of mind in the course of his voracious self-education, Adams had
become aware of the meager correlation between effort exerted and results obtained when a clarity of purpose
is lacking — even the mightiest discipline, after all, is wasted without a clear direction. In a diary entry
penned on the final day of 1804 — a year he considered distinguished by “its barrenness of Events” — the
thirty-seven-year-old Adams laments his tendency to lose himself in rabbit holes of what may be interesting
but is not relevant to his larger aims:
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My studies were assiduous and seldom interrupted. I meant to give them such a direction, as should be useful
in its tendency; yet on looking back, and comparing the time consumed with the knowledge acquired, I have
no occasion to take pride in the result of my application — I have been a severe Student, all the days of my
life — But an immense proportion of the time I have dedicated to the search of knowledge, has been wasted
upon subjects which can never be profitable to myself or useful to others — Another source of useless toil, is
the want of a method properly comprehensive and minute, in the pursuit of my enquiries — This method has
been to me a desideratum for many years; I have found none in books; nor have I been able to contrive one
for myself. From these two causes, I have derived so little use from my labours, that it has often brought me
to the borders of discouragement, and I have been attempted to abandon my books altogether — This
however is impossible — for the habit has so long been fixed in me, as to have become a passion, and when
once severed from my books, I find little or nothing in life, to fill the vacancy of time — I must therefore
continue to plod, and to lose my labour; contenting myself with the consolation, that even this drudgery of
Science, contributes to Virtue, though it lead not to wealth or honour.
Illustration from Bright Sky, Starry City, a children’s book celebrating citizen astronomy
Several years later, finding himself so absorbed in learning logarithmic calculation that a whole day had fled,
he chastises himself for an unfocused curiosity that flits from subject to subject, unbridled by poor time-
management, lacking focused commitment to deeper study of any one discipline:
I find it easy to engage my attention in scientific pursuits of almost any kind, but difficult to guard against two
abuses — the one of being insensibly drawn from one to another, as I now have from Chronology to
Astronomy and from Astronomy to Logarithms — the other of misapplying time, which is essential to the
business of life; public and private.
And yet life affords Adams a counterpoint to this harsh self-criticism — it is by such kaleidoscopic curiosity
that we arrive at what we don’t know we didn’t know and gradually broaden the shorelines of our knowledge
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amid the ocean of our ignorance. The following November, finding himself confined indoors by inclement
weather and short days, his eyes wearied by long hours of reading by candlelight, Adams writes in his diary:
I this day discovered a new particular of my own ignorance of things which I ought to have known these
thirty years — One clear morning about a fortnight since I remarked from my bed-chamber windows a certain
group of stars forming a Constellation which I had not before observed and of which I knew not the name — I
marked down their positions on a slip of paper with a view to remember them hereafter and to ascertain what
they were — This day on looking into the Abridgment of La Lande’s Astronomy, one of the first figures that
struck my eye in the plates was that identical Constellation — It was Orion — That I should have lived nearly
fifty years without knowing him, shews too clearly what sort of an observer I have been… I am ashamed at
my age to be thus to seek for the very first Elements of practical Astronomy.
Two weeks later, Adams records his daily routine and its higher purpose:
I rise on the average about 6 O’Clock, in the morning, and retire to bed between ten and eleven at Night —
The interval is filled as it has been nearly two years, more particularly, as since I placed Charles at school —
The four or five hours that I previously devoted to him I now employ in reading books of Science — These
studies I now pursue, not only as the most delightful of occupations to myself, but with a special reference to
the improvement and education of my children.
Alluding to the dying words of the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe — “Let me not seem to have lived
in vain,” memorably immortalized by Adrienne Rich a century and a half later in her sublime ode to women
in astronomy — Adams add the closest thing to a personal mission statement he would ever commit to words:
I feel the sentiment with which Tycho Brahe died, perhaps as strongly as he did — His “ne frustra vixisse
videar” was a noble feeling, and in him had produced its fruits — He had not lived in vain — He was a
benefactor to his species — But the desire is not sufficient — The spark from Heaven is given to few — It is
not to be obtained by intreaty or by toil — To be profitable to my Children, seems to me within the compass
of my powers — To that let me bound my wishes, and my prayers — And may that be granted to them!
John Quincy Adams: Diaries 1779–1821 is a magnificent read in its totality. Complement this particular
portion with Walt Whitman’s advice on living a rewarding life and Bruce Lee’s previously unpublished letters
to himself about the measure of success, then revisit education reformer Abraham Flexner on the usefulness
of useless knowledge and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck on using the diary as a tool of discipline.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/08/16/john-quincy-adams-diaries-
effectiveness/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=2dd665101b-
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Clouds on 'Failed Stars' Resemble Those on Neptune
By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor | August 17, 2017 03:40pm ET
Researchers have found Neptune-like bands of clouds circling the surface of a brown dwarf, an object in
between the size of a planet and a star.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
For the first time, scientists have seen bands of clouds drifting across the skies of failed stars known as brown
dwarfs.
This work could help scientists analyze Earth-like planets someday, the new study's researchers said.
In the past 25 years or so, astronomers have confirmed the existence of more than 3,500 exoplanets, or planets
outside Earth's solar system. Scientists have also detected numerous so-called brown dwarfs, objects that are
about 13 to 90 times the mass of Jupiter — too big to be planets, but not quite big enough to be true stars.
Researchers sometimes call brown dwarfs "failed stars," because nuclear fusion never ignited in their cores.
[Brown Dwarf Photos: Failed Stars and Stellar Misfits Revealed]
Advertisement
Scientists have previously detected evidence of clouds on exoplanets and brown dwarfs. However, this is the
first time that cloud bands have been spotted on one of those objects, study team members said.
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Previous work suggested that brown dwarfs have much in common with giant exoplanets in terms of size,
temperature and composition. As such, study lead author Daniel Apai, who is an astrophysicist and planetary
scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and his colleagues investigated brown dwarfs to learn more
about giant exoplanets.
The fact that many brown dwarfs are located away from stars makes them easier for astronomers to examine
than many giant exoplanets, Apai told Space.com. In contrast, giant exoplanets are typically obscured partly
by the brightness of their stars, he added.
In the past five years, a number of studies have found that the infrared light from many brown dwarfs could
vary in unusual ways over time. However, until now, there was no convincing explanation for this
phenomenon.
To help solve this mystery, Apai and his colleagues analyzed data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
They focused on the way the infrared brightness of three brown dwarfs changed over time as the objects
completed a total of 192 rotations over the course of 1.5 years.
The observations of these brown dwarfs helped "derive crude maps for how their clouds are distributed and
how they evolve," Apai said.
The scientists discovered rotating bands of clouds in the atmospheres of these brown dwarfs that are broadly
similar to bands of clouds seen on Neptune. As the bands on the brown dwarfs rotated, slight differences in
the speeds of the bands generated a pattern of beats in their infrared light, explaining the mystery regarding
their shifting brightness, Apai said.
"This is the first time that the presence of bands is shown in brown dwarfs," Apai said. He added that
scientists have not yet reported any evidence for bands of clouds in exoplanets.
Although the researchers looked at only three brown dwarfs, "the fact that all three brown dwarfs behaved the
same way suggests that what we see should be a common, perhaps general behavior," Apai said. "What we
learn from brown dwarfs should be applicable to the majority of the gas giant exoplanets, too."
In the future, the next major NASA space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, will help researchers
analyze brown dwarfs and exoplanets in even greater detail, Apai said."The same technique we used for
brown dwarfs now could be used to build crude maps of Earth-like planets, once we have the right telescopes,
and NASA is exploring some designs that could do that in the future," he added.
The scientists detailed their findings in the Aug. 18 issue of the journal Science.
Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi.
https://www.space.com/37837-cloud-bands-spotted-brown-dwarfs.html
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Miniature Scenes With A Darkly Satirical Twist by Frank Kunert
German photographer Frank Kunert builds miniature scenes that at first glance appear like mundane
depictions of everyday domestic and urban settings. However after glancing at the photographs longer, one is
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able to dissect the strange anomalies found in his playgrounds, kitchens, and parks, noticing that his half pipe
has the markings of a tennis court and his children’s slide leads straight onto a busy highway.
“On the surface, these photographs confront us with all of the hollow words, catchphrases and banalities we
encounter in our daily lives,” says Dr. Christine Donat, who provided the text for Kunert’s online
portfolio. “The stereotypical and senseless aspects of human communication cannot be unveiled more
convincingly than in their literal conversion into a visual medium.”
The works are a part of Kunert’s series Photographs of Small Worlds, handcrafted models that play with the
audience’s perception through the use of darkly satirical twists. Each miniature set is created over the course
of several weeks to months, and are not captured until they can perfectly convey the scene without digital
assistance.
Kunert’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum Boppard from September 10 to January 28, 2018 shares the
same name as his most recent photo book, Wunderland. You can view more of his miniature works and past
photo books on his website. (via Cross Connect Magazine)
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/08/miniature-scenes-with-a-darkly-satirical-twist-by-frank-
kunert/?mc_cid=774f60f263&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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Child obesity and brain function
José Ramón Alonso August 21, 2017
The OECD report on obesity in Spain published in 2014 (PDF) presented worrying data: 1-in-6 adults is
obese and more than half are overweight, including obesity. The percentage of obesity has grown in the last
years and its prevalence is linked to educational level: men with low studies are 1.6 times more likely to be
obese than men with higher education. In the case of women, the proportion is 2.4 times higher. In the case of
children, the rates are also alarming, 26% of Spanish boys and 24% of Spanish girls are overweight, a
percentage higher than the average in the OECD countries (23% and 21%, respectively).
Childhood obesity is a severe public health problem as it is linked to diabetes, hypertension, depression, and
inflammation and all these conditions increase the risk of cognitive decline in adult life. Children with obesity
are at higher risk of other chronic health problems such as asthma, sleep apnea, bone and joint problems, and
overweight is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. There are also social aspects: obese children are
harassed and bullied more than their normal weight partners and are more likely to suffer social isolation,
depression and low self-esteem. In the long run, childhood obesity is associated with being obese as an adult
and exhibiting a concordance with different diseases and conditions such as cardiovascular disease, type II
diabetes, metabolic syndrome and several cancers. Finally, there is mounting evidence that an imbalanced and
hypercaloric diet may increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias later in life.
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So far research has focused mainly on adults but there is growing evidence that the situation in children can
be equally problematic. Recent research shows that obese children have early brain damage and it appears to
be associated with attention deficit and memory problems 1. Overweight coupled with a diet rich in sugar and
saturated fats affect the brain and diminish impulse control, which in turn makes it difficult for those children
to resist the temptation to eat those same foods that are causing the damage, establishing a vicious circle.
There are those who argue that brain alteration could be prior to excess food intake and even be, rather than
the effect of obesity, its cause.
A review by June Liang and her group published in the International Journal of Obesity shows there is solid
evidence to support that overweight children have a number of negative differences versus controls on issues
such as executive function, attention, visuospatial ability, and motor skills 2. In other aspects such as the
relationship between obesity and general cognitive functioning, language, memory, learning and academic
achievement the available information is less solid. On the other hand, executive dysfunction is associated
with behaviors related to obesity such as increased intake, lack of inhibition in diet and less physical activity.
One of the topics subject to discussion is whether the effects on the brain are diet- or weight-related. The
Baym group performed a study of 52 children between the ages of 7 and 9 and found that children who ate
more saturated fat had worse memory scores related to the hippocampus, regardless of their body mass
index 3. On the other hand, a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids improved the so-called relational memory, which
helps distinguish and remember relationships between things and ideas. So it seems that diet is more
determinant than obesity itself although the “perfect storm” happens when both things are combined: excess
weight and a diet rich in sugars and saturated fats, which is sadly known as the Western diet.
Obese children have more health problems, they miss classes more often, they often belong to families of a
lower socio-economic level and they have to face a certain social stigma, all of which can affect their school
performance. This is why the studies laboratory animals, where these variables are eliminated, are important.
These studies reinforce the evidence that obesity changes the structure and function of the brain.
We are beginning to understand what is in obesity or in the diet that generates brain alterations, that cause the
cognitive dysfunctions and the worse school performance. Studies in laboratory animals have shown that diets
rich in saturated fats and sugars weaken the integrity of the blood-brain barrier, particularly in the
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hippocampus. A more permeable barrier may allow more toxic substances to pass with consequent neuronal
damage and the effect will be greater in the hippocampus, a key region in memory and executive function.
Logically an immediate question is whether this damage can be reversed. Inhibitory control can be trained to
avoid compulsive eating. The same group of Liang uses computer programs in which the children see images
of the typical harmful food and other objects and are asked to press a key with a “no” to indicate that they do
not want that food. It seems that this practice helps later in the table to resist that temptation and eat healthier.
One study with adults showed a significant weight loss compared to controls using a similar technique. The
family also plays a crucial role. Parents can help their children avoid the poor choice of food if they support
them instead of being too controlling or embarrass them or blame them.
There is a brain zone, the frontal lobe, which is responsible for making the right decisions, wisely,
judiciously. In a certain way during childhood parents have to be the frontal lobe of their children because this
region has not yet matured. We have to encourage them and congratulate them for doing things well in food,
we have to control the environment of the kitchen and the dining room so that it is not full of temptations and
we have to use with intelligence the organization of the menus and the size of the portions to favor an
adequate food in quantity and composition.
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Another key factor is physical activity, particularly aerobic exercise, which has been shown to promote
executive function in overweight children. The problem is that it is not easier to get children to play sports
than to stop eating candy. We need to develop strategies to increase physical activity.
References
1. Lu S (2016) Obesity and the growing brain. American Psychological

Association. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/06/obesity-brain.aspx ↩
2. Liang J, Matheson BE, Kaye WH, Boutelle KN (2014) Neurocognitive correlates of obesity and
obesity-related behaviors in children and adolescents. Int J Obes (Lond) 38(4): 494-506. ↩
3. Baym CL, Khan NA, Monti JM, Raine LB, Drollette ES, Moore RD, Scudder MR, Kramer AF,
Hillman CH, Cohen NJ (2014) Dietary lipids are differentially associated with hippocampal-
dependent relational memory in prepubescent children. Am J Clin Nutr 99(5): 1026-1032. ↩
written by
José Ramón Alonso
José R. Alonso has a PhD in Neurobiology and is professor of Cell Biology at the University of Salamanca.
He has been researcher and visiting professor at the University of Frankfurt/Main and the University of Kiel,
in Germany, and the University of California, Davis and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in the
United States. He has authored more than 145 articles in peer-reviewed journals and written 20 books
including university textbooks and popular science for both adults and children.
 Website:http://jralonso.es/
 Twitter:@jralonso3
https://mappingignorance.org/2017/08/21/child-obesity-brain-
function/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%2
8Mapping+Ignorance%29
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Courtesy of Craig Winslow
Your City's 'Ghost Signs' Have Stories to Tell
1. MATTHEW KRUCHAK
AUG 17, 2017
The faded advertisements on old brick buildings often go unnoticed, and they’re disappearing fast. That’s why
one artist is shining a light on just how much they tell us about a city’s history.
When the side of a 111-year-old brick building lit up in Winnipeg, Canada, on a recent night in July, a crowd
of about 50 people looked up to see a newly vivid message that had been there all along: “Porter & Co.,
crockery, china, glassware, lamps, silverware, cutlery.” A few moments later, the words faded and a new
message appeared: “The Home of Milady Chocolates.” This late-night light show was a seance of sorts, and
Craig Winslow was the medium.
Winslow revives ghost signs, those faded hand-painted ads left to weather on the sides of old buildings in
cities around the world. He doesn’t repaint the old signs; instead, he brings them back to life through light. By
digging deep into historical archives, he finds what these advertisements looked like when they were fresh,
digitally reconstructing them and projecting them over the faded remnants that hang there today. Many ads
have several layers, so he animates each of them, briefly recalling images of a city's forgotten past for the
sake of nostalgia and conversation in the community.
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“The giddy, nerdy version of me is just crazy to think I’m this mad scientist opening portals in walls to what
things actually used to look like,” says Winslow, an experiential designer from Portland, Oregon. He calls his
digital recreations “Light Capsules.”
A “Light Capsule” from Portland, Maine (Courtesy of Craig Winslow)
Ghost signs have a special place in any city. Hand-painted signs were a popular form of advertising between
the 1880s and the 1950s, before ads could be inexpensively mass produced, installed, and replaced. Their
remnants offer a lens into a neighborhood’s past, reminding viewers about elements of commerce and life at
certain points in history. They acquaint us with the type of businesses that once lined the streets, and offer
glimpses of products and services that were important at the time of the sign's painting, such as fur coats,
canned hams, or the ubiquitous Coca-Cola.
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“What I love, as simple as they are, is just these old worn ads that actually become a catalyst to get people
excited about the local history around them,” Winslow says.
That’s how his work caught the eye of Matt Cohen, a Winnipeg-based ghost sign expert. Winnipeg has more
than 150 ghost signs, especially concentrated in the historic Exchange District, a 20-block area with buildings
built between 1880 and 1913. At one time, Winnipeg was known as “Chicago of the North” and was an
important center for grain, finance, and manufacturing. Because of this, the Exchange District is a Canadian
National Historic Site, a designation that protects the ghost signs.
Cohen invited Winslow to recreate five of the city’s signs. On the evening of July 29, the Light Capsules
brought those messages from the past back to life.
Craig Winslow (Photo by Jon Duenas)
“I thought it was a neat way of blending the physical and digital and exploring these in a new way that is
unlike anything people have seen before,” Cohen says.
The idea to revive ghost signs came to Winslow two years ago. “I started seeing them everywhere and
realized I wanted to do something with these to preserve them,” he says. “So many of them were being
painted over, destroyed. They all have such a unique character to them that I wanted to do something.”
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He wanted to preserve this history uniquely, but he had no idea how he was going to fund the project. A
friend told him about Adobe’s Creative Residency program, so he applied and was one of four people
selected to have a passion project fully funded in 2016. Over the course of his year-long residency, he created
22 Light Capsules around the world, from Los Angeles to Detroit to London.
It takes a couple of days to create each Light Capsule. He begins in the archives researching old photographs
to find out what the signs looked like initially. It’s not an easy task since people didn’t take many photos of
signs—back then, these were just run-of-the-mill advertisements. So he relies on streetscapes for windows
into the past. He then takes photographs of the signs in their current state and uploads them to his computer.
He uses several programs—Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and MadMapper—to create his final
animated product and uses projection mapping to display his recreations on the sides of buildings.
Light Capsules in Winnipeg. (Courtesy of Matthew Kruchak)
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Winnipeg’s preservation of the ghost signs isn’t common; in most cities and towns, they’re increasingly in
danger, being painted over or lost entirely to demolition.
“By not embracing these as an aesthetic of the city, you lose a lot of the feeling of the city itself and the
history that is there,” Winslow says. “It’s amazing to be able to say, ‘Oh, that business used to be there and it
clearly used to be there because it is painted right there on that building.’ It’s a remnant of history, and it’s a
shame to see them lost.”
Light Capsules in Winnipeg. (Courtesy of Craig Winslow)
Some cities and towns are restoring ghost signs with fresh paint, but that can be a contentious issue. Winslow
says that in the sign painting community, many people believe that for a restoration to be authentic, it must be
repainted by the person who originally painted the sign, or a direct apprentice. That’s tough for a 75-year-old
sign.
Color and paint choice presents another problem. Ghost signs have lasted so long because the paint contained
lead. Modern paints peel, rather than slowly fading away. Many of today’s restorations are painted in bright
colors, but old paints were less vibrant, and the available palette was limited.
“I just really love the aesthetic of seeing these be worn, and it’s sort of akin to an elderly person trying to
cover up their wrinkles instead of being like ‘No, this is my age. This is natural.’ So I love that aesthetic,”
Winslow says.
1. HENRY GRABAR
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FEB 12, 2013
Berlin Preserves Its Trippy 1980s Subway Stations
1. FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN
MAR 29, 2017
However, Tod Swormstedt, founder of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, doesn’t take sides on the
restoration debate.
“It’s kind of a subjective call, like when you restore an old house; are you going to restore it back to not
having electric lights and have gas lights and not have a bathroom, not have indoor plumbing like some of the
early Victorian houses?” Swormstedt says. “How purist do you want to get?”
Back in Winnipeg—below the brightly restored Milady Chocolates sign—people continued to line the street
looking up at Winslow’s non-invasive preservation project. Clusters of people discussed what they saw; some
took photos. It’s likely that this is the largest crowd ever gathered in this one spot to contemplate the sign on
the wall. A time warp opened, for one night only.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/08/ghost-signs-painted-advertisements-light-capsules-craig-
winslow/535851/?utm_source=nl__link6_081717
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Giant Dabs of Thick Oil Paint Captured as Hyperrealist Colored Pencil Drawings
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Australian artist Cj Hendry (previously) tricks the eye with her hyper-realistic drawings, works that recreate
the appearance of thick swabs of brightly colored paint. To achieve the dimensionality and sheen of fresh oil
paint she layers dry pigment atop colored pencil, accurately portraying the liquid medium’s viscosity.
The series, Complimentary Colors, is far different than the artist’s previous style, which for several years had
been exclusively black and white. You can view pieces from her past and present, as well as a series
of billboard-sized works, on the artist’s Instagram. (via My Modern Met)
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What are reasons for?
Today's selection -- from The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. Psychologists have
known for some time that people generally make decisions or take actions intuitively, and then construct
reasons after the fact. But what is the purpose of constructing these reasons?:
"Contrary to the commonsense picture, much experimental evidence suggests that people quite often arrive at
their beliefs and decisions with little or no attention to reasons. Reasons are used primarily not to guide
oneself but to justify oneself in the eyes of others, and to evaluate the justifications of others (often critically).
When we do produce reasons for guidance, most of the time it is to guide others rather than ourselves. While
we would like others to be guided by the reasons we give them, we tend to think that we ourselves are best
guided by our own intuitions (which are based, we are sure, on good reasons, even if we cannot spell them
out).
"Whether or not it would be better to be guided by reasons, the fact is that in order to believe or decide
something, we do not need to pay any attention to reasons. Purely intuitive inference, which generates so
many of our beliefs and decisions, operates in a way that is opaque to us. You look at your friend Molly and
somehow intuit that she is upset. What are your reasons for this intuition? Or you check what films are
playing tonight at the Odeon: Star Wars 12 and Superman 8. You decide to go and see Superman 8. What are
your reasons for this choice? If asked, sure, you would produce reasons, but the fact is that at the moment of
intuiting that Molly was upset or of choosing Superman 8, you were not consciously entertaining, let alone
pondering, reasons. The opinion and the choice came to you intuitively. ...
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"If, as we suggest, the point of reasons isn't to guide the formation of beliefs and the making of decisions, then
what are reasons for?
"Whatever humans do is likely to contribute for better or worse to the way they are seen by others -- in other
words, to their reputation. These indirect reputational effects may turn out to be no less important than the
direct goal of their action, whatever it is. Socially competent people are hardly ever indifferent to the way
their behavior might be interpreted. By explaining and justifying themselves, people may defend or even
improve their own reputation. By failing to do so, they may jeopardize it.
"Thinking about good reasons for their actions is something that people often do proactively, anticipating that
they may be called upon to explain or justify themselves. The minute you have engaged in a course of action
that may have reputational costs -- and sometimes even before, when you are merely considering it -- a
different mental mechanism may start working. Its function is to manage your reputation and for this, to
provide an explanation that will justify your behavior. ...
"The reputation management mechanism acts like a lawyer defending you, whatever you have done. Still,
given the opportunity, a lawyer may advise a regular client against a course of action that would be hard or
impossible to defend. What happens when the reputational mechanism cannot come up with a good narrative?
Then the course of action considered (and possibly already undertaken) turns out to have costs that weren't
initially taken into account in the decision process. In such a case, the failure of the reputational mechanism to
produce an adequate narrative may have a feedback effect and cause the initial decision to be rescinded, or at
least revised. ...
"There is some fascinating experimental evidence that the search for reasons aimed at justification may, in
fact, influence action. Still, living up to the story you want to be able to tell about yourself isn't quite the same
thing as telling a true story. ...
"When we give reasons for our actions, we not only justify ourselves, we also commit ourselves. In the first
place, by invoking reasons, we take personal responsibility for our opinions and actions as described by us,
that is, as attitudes and behavior that we had reasons to adopt. We thereby indicate that we expect others to
either accept that we are entitled to think what we think and do what we do or be ready to challenge our
reasons. When what we thought or did is unlikely to be approved, by giving reasons, we may indicate a line or
defense: we had, if not good reasons, at least reasons that seemed good at the time. A defense based on
reasons typically allows us to accept responsibility while denying guilt.
"By giving reasons, we also commit ourselves to a future line of thought and conduct. Invoking reasons as
motivations of one's past views and actions expresses a recognition of the normative aptness of these reasons
and a commitment to being guided by similar reasons in the future. For our audience, this commitment to
accepting responsibility and to being guided in the future by the type of reasons we invoked to explain the
past is much more relevant than the accuracy of our would-be introspections. This is why we all pay attention
to the reasons of others and why we produce our own.
"To put it in more sociological terms: Reasons are social constructs. They are constructed by distorting and
simplifying our understanding of mental states and of their causal role and by injecting into it a strong dose of
normativity. Invocations and evaluations of reasons are contributions to a negotiated record of individuals'
ideas, actions, responsibilities, and commitments."
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author: Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
title: The Enigma of Reason
publisher: Harvard University Press
date: Copyright 2017 Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
pages: 113-114, 123-127
All delanceyplace profits are donated to charity and support children’s literacy projects.
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Figures From Hieronymus Bosch’s Paintings Recreated as Sculptural Piñatas
Artist Robert Benavidez focuses on the art of piñata making in much of his sculptural practice, producing
birds, sugar skulls, and paintings out of the same technique used to create the iconic candy-filled party object.
His latest series of piñatas focuses on the work of the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch,
reimagining Bosch’s 2D figures as life-size sculptures.
Although most of the pieces focus on the various bird figures in Bosch’s work, Benavidez has also sculpted a
blue, armless frog and a winged boy from his famous work, The Garden of Earthly Delights. You can see
more of his sculptural piñatas on his Instagramand website. (via Hi-Fructose)
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/08/hieronymus-bosch-
pinatas/?mc_cid=afd348a52d&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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Communal space at the Saunalahti School, Espoo, completed to a design
by Verstas Architects in 2012. Andreas Meichsner
Why Finland Is Embracing Open-Plan School Design
1. FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN
AUG 18, 2017
The country’s educational successes are undeniable, but simply demolishing school walls alone won’t
necessarily replicate them.
Children in Finland may have difficulty recognizing their schools upon their return from summer vacation.
The country is currently undergoing one of the most ambitious school redesign projects in Europe,
exchanging traditional walled-in classrooms and rows of desks for more flexible and informal open-plan
layouts. Finland is currently going through a wave of school construction and refurbishment, following a new
national curriculum introduced last autumn. Out of a total of 4,800 schools nationally (a small-sounding
number because most teach students from age 7 to at least 16 in one institution), 57 new schools began
construction in 2015 and 44 the following year. All of these new schools—as well as recently refurbished
ones—incorporate open-plan principles. This still leaves most schools with more traditional layouts, but the
overall ambition is to steadily replace or adapt these as their facilities come up for renovation.
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Schools across the world have been experimenting with more open layouts—and teaching techniques that suit
them—since at least the 1950s. But such efforts, even in Finland, have not always proved successful because
open-plan schools can suffer from distractingly high levels of noise. So how has Finland learned from the
problems of the past to create a more effective model?
A rendering of Kastellin School, Oulu, designed by the ARKLM studio and completed in 2014. (ARKLM)
The contemporary open-plan Finnish school is an altogether softer, calmer space, one that rarely has a block-
like rectangular layout. According to Reino Tapaninen, chief architect at Finland’s Department of Education,
what’s striking about contemporary Finnish school design is partly the sheer variety and flexibility of
furnishings. “We've given up the old type of school desk and chair and have a real diversity now,” he tells
CityLab. “[In a redesigned school] there are a lot of soft chairs, big cushions, rocking chairs, sofas as well as
moveable walls and partitions behind which you can hide yourself for private discussions." Tapaninen
continues, “[In a contemporary school] you will see lots of different kind of furniture, lots of colors and, I
would say, a lot of happy people.”
To make sure noise disruption is minimal, an acoustic designer now works on the layout of every new or
refurbished Finnish school. Part of this new approach, Tapaninen says, is about both using better surfacing
materials and promoting noise-reducing habits. “We are using more acoustic materials on the ceilings, while
textile flooring has become more popular—the materials are much better than they used to be, and now far
easier to clean,” he says. “We now have what we call ‘shoe-less schools,’ where pupils either change into
softer shoes or simply wear socks when they come indoors.”
“In order to create teaching spaces that encourage focus,” adds Tapaninen, “we also provide movable sliding
walls that can be drawn across to create separate reading spaces.”
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There’s more to managing noise than soft floors and sound-absorbent ceilings, however. A school with a
broadly open classroom plan doesn’t have to be a vast communal hall. Many new school designs feature
curved or elongated footprints so that louder areas for assembly are concentrated at one end. And rather than
dispensing with internal walls entirely, they can be used more sparingly so that, say, three classrooms are
grouped together behind a wall with a closing door but are divided from each other only by movable
partitions.
A rendering of Kastellin school, Oulu, showing the variety of open and glassed-in space. (ARLKM)
This flexible layout is the expression of an educational philosophy that promotes a high level of autonomy for
teachers and students, who are being given more responsibility in organizing their own learning that—like the
school’s layout—can vary from week to week. Indeed, the role of students in helping to shape what they
focus on from day to day now starts as early as kindergarten.
“We are experimenting with schools with no divisions between ages so that different ages can make
teamwork together with teachers working in pairs and groups,” says Tapaninen. “There is a lot of variety in
learning situations, and the schools, teachers can decide at the beginning of the month or week, or even at the
beginning of the school day, how they want to work.”
It may also be the case that the open school concept’s acceptance in Finland relies partly on changes that have
happened off school grounds. Over the past few decades the country has been moving steadily towards a more
informal culture where slightly higher levels of noise are tolerated. “It's possible that society itself wasn't
ready during the 1950s and '60s for the open classroom experiments that took place,” Tapaninen says. “Now,
conditions and attitudes are different, and the idea that a school needs to be entirely quiet is disappearing to an
extent.”
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Backed up by a well-funded education system where teachers have an unusually high level of pay and
prestige, this situation sounds healthy, even utopian. Finland is nonetheless subject to many of the pressures
found in other countries—sometimes tragically so. The country suffered school two shootings in 2007 and
2008, one by a still-enrolled student, in which 20 people were killed and more injured. This led to a wave of
soul searching about all aspects of the country’s education system. Tapaninen tells CityLab that the shootings
caused an initial panic that “we were building our schools the wrong way, that we needed to put in walls of
brick and bulletproof glass.” But open-plan schools, he says, typically offer more escape routes. Finland’s
schools now also have a safety plan that they rehearse.
“We need to keep our schools transparent and inviting, that this in itself helps keeps schools safe by creating a
culture of openness,” says Tapaninen.
More flexible and informal than entirely free of walls — a teaching space at Saunalahti School, Espoo.
(Andreas Meichsner)
So should Finland’s approach be a model for others? The country’s educational successes are undeniable, but
simply demolishing school walls alone won’t necessarily replicate them. Finland’s desire for less rigidly
structured school buildings is in fact a direct reflection of its national curriculum, which rejects traditional
academic silos and instead favors a multi-disciplinary approach.
As detailed in an October 2016 Education Week article, this could mean taking a subject such as climate
change and addressing it through mathematics or biology, rather than sitting down to an hour of pure, abstract
math. The open classroom concept thus fits neatly with an educational ethos that favors student autonomy and
making cross-curricular connections, eschewing such internationally common assessment markers as
standardized tests. Fitting such a layout to the teaching of a more obviously traditional curriculum might
prove more difficult.
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There’s another vital factor that lies behind the open classroom’s success in Finland that isn’t automatically
that easy to replicate: investment.
This investment isn’t just a case of high specifications for buildings, it means using more funds on training
teachers in methods that suit such layouts, paying them well, and empowering them to pilot the day-to-day
use of these skills. The effectiveness of the flexible smaller spaces that contemporary Finnish school design
creates, meanwhile, depend partly on low student-to-teacher ratios (13.2 students to every teacher in 2013)
that make it easier for classes to break up into smaller groups without entirely foregoing supervision.
Finland’s generally high educational standards prove that their approach works, but their combination of
consistently high investment and constant curricular innovation might prove politically and practically
difficult for others to emulate.
About the Author
Feargus O'Sullivan
 @FEARGUSOSULL
 FEED
Feargus O'Sullivan is a contributing writer to CityLab, covering Europe. His writing focuses on housing,
gentrification and social change, infrastructure, urban policy, and national cultures. He has previously
contributed to The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, and Next City, among other publications
https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/08/why-finland-is-embracing-open-plan-school-
design/537060/?utm_source=nl__link6_082117
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The monster atomic bomb that was too big to use
In 1961, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb so powerful that it would have been too big to use in war.
And it had far-reaching effects of a very different kind.
 By Stephen Dowling
On the morning of 30 October 1961, a Soviet Tu-95 bomber took off from Olenya airfield
in the Kola Peninsula in the far north of Russia.
The Tu-95 was a specially modified version of a type that had come into service a few
years earlier; a huge, swept-wing, four-engined monster tasked with carrying Russia’s
arsenal of nuclear bombs.
The last decade had seen enormous strides in Soviet nuclear research. World War Two had
placed the US and USSR in the same camp, but the post-war period had seen relations
chill and then freeze. And the Soviets, presented with a rivalry against the world’s only
nuclear superpower, had only one option – to catch up. Fast.
On 29 August 1949, the Soviets had tested their first nuclear device – known as ‘Joe-1’ in
the West – on the remote steppes on what is now Kazakhstan, using intelligence gleaned
from infiltrating the US’s atomic bomb programme. In the intervening years, their test
programme had surged in leaps and starts, detonating more than 80 devices; in 1958 alone,
the Soviet tested 36 nuclear bombs.
But nothing the Soviet Union had tested would compare to this.
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The Tu-95 carried an enormous bomb underneath it, a device too large to fit inside the
aircraft’s internal bomb-bay, where such munitions would usually be carried. The bomb
was 8m long (26ft), had a diameter of nearly 2.6m (7ft) and weighed more than 27 tonnes.
It was, physically, very similar in shape to the ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ bombs which
had devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade-and-a-half earlier.
The bomb had become known by a myriad of neutral technical designations – Project
27000, Product Code 202, RDS-220, and Kuzinka Mat (Kuzka’s Mother). Now it is better
known as Tsar Bomba – the ‘Tsar’s bomb’.
The remote archipelago of Novaya Zemlya was selected as the target (Credit: Alamy)
Tsar Bomba was no ordinary nuclear bomb. It was the result of a feverish attempt by the
USSR’s scientists to create the most powerful nuclear weapon yet, spurred on by Premier
Nikita Khruschchev’s desire to make the world tremble at the might of Soviet technology.
It was more than a metal monstrosity too big to fit inside even the largest aircraft – it was a
city destroyer, a weapon of last resort.
The Tupolev, painted bright white in order to lessen the effects of the bomb’s flash,
arrived at its target point. Novya Zemlya, a sparsely populated archipelago in the Barents
Sea, above the frozen northern fringes of the USSR. The Tupolev’s pilot, Major Andrei
Durnovtsev, brought the aircraft to Mityushikha Bay, a Soviet testing range, at a height of
about 34,000ft (10km). A smaller, modified Tu-16 bomber flew beside, ready to film the
ensuing blast and monitor air samples as it flew from the blast zone.
In order to give the two planes a chance to survive – and this was calculated as no more
than a 50% chance – Tsar Bomba was deployed by a giant parachute weighing nearly a
tonne. The bomb would slowly drift down to a predetermined height – 13,000ft (3,940m)
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– and then detonate. By then, the two bombers would be nearly 50km (30 miles) away.
It should be far enough away for them to survive.
On Novya Zemlya, the effects were catastrophic
Tsar Bomba detonated at 11:32, Moscow time. In a flash, the bomb created a fireball five
miles wide. The fireball pulsed upwards from the force of its own shockwave. The flash
could be seen from 1,000km (630 miles) away.
The bomb’s mushroom cloud soared to 64km (40 miles) high, with its cap spreading
outwards until it stretched nearly 100km (63 miles) from end to end. It must have been,
from a very far distance perhaps, an awe-inspiring sight.
On Novaya Zemlya, the effects were catastrophic. In the village of Severny, some 55km
(34 miles) from Ground Zero, all houses were completely destroyed (this is the equivalent
to Gatwick airport being destroyed by a bomb that had fallen on Central London). In
Soviet districts hundreds of miles from the blast zone, damage of all kinds – houses
collapsing, roofs falling in, damage to doors, windows shattering – were reported. Radio
communications were disrupted for more than an hour.
This mock-up of Tsar Bomba show's the weapon's enormous size (Credit: Science Photo Library)
Durovtsev’s Tupolev was lucky to survive; the blast wave from Tsar Bomba caused the
giant bomber to plummet more than 1,000m (3,300ft) before the pilot could regain control.
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One Soviet cameraman who witnessed the detonation said:
“The clouds beneath the aircraft and in the distance were lit up by the powerful flash. The
sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent.
At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in
the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The ball was powerful and arrogant like
Jupiter. Slowly and silently it crept upwards... Having broken through the thick layer of
clouds it kept growing. It seemed to suck the whole Earth into it. The spectacle was
fantastic, unreal, supernatural.”
Tsar Bomba unleashed almost unbelievable energy – now widely agreed to be in the order
of 57 megatons, or 57 million tons of TNT. That is more than 1,500 times that of the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and 10 times more powerful than all the
munitions expended during World War Two. Sensors registered the bomb’s blast wave
orbiting the Earth not once, not twice, but three times.
Because the fireball had not made contact with the Earth, there was a surprisingly low amount of radiation
Such a blast could not be kept secret. The US had a spyplane only tens of kilometres from
the blast. It carried a special optical device called a bhangmeter useful for calculating the
yield of far-off nuclear explosions. Data from this aircraft – codenamed Speedlight – was
used by the Foreign Weapons Evaluation Panel to calculate this mystery test’s yield.
International condemnation soon followed, not only from the US and Britain, but from
some of the USSR’s Scandinavian neighbours such as Sweden. The only silver lining in
this mushroom cloud was that because the fireball had not made contact with the Earth,
there was a surprisingly low amount of radiation.
It could have been very different. But for a change in its design to rein in some of the
power it could unleash, Tsar Bomba was supposed to have been twice as powerful.
***
One of the architects of this formidable device was a Soviet physicist called Andrei
Sakharov – a man who would later become world famous for his attempts to rid the world
of the very weapons he had helped create. He was a veteran of the Soviet atomic bomb
programme from the very beginning, and had been part of the team that had built some of
the USSR’s earliest atom bombs.
Sakharov began work on a layered fission-fusion-fission device, a bomb that would create
further energy from the nuclear processes in its core. This involved wrapping deuterium –
a stable isotope of hydrogen – with a layer of unenriched uranium. The uranium would
capture neutrons from the igniting deuterium and would itself start to react. Sakharov
called it the sloika, or layered cake. This breakthrough allowed the USSR to build its first
hydrogen bomb, a device much more powerful than the atomic bombs of only a few years
before.
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Sakharov had been told by Khrushchev to come up with a bomb that was more powerful
than anything else tested so far.
The Tsar Bomba was carried to the drop zone by a modified version of the Tu-95 'Bear' bomber (Credit:
Alamy)
The Soviet Union needed to show that it could pull ahead of the US in the nuclear arms
race, according to Philip Coyle, the former head of US nuclear weapons testing under
President Bill Clinton, who spent 30 years helping design and test atomic weapons. “The
US had been very far ahead because of the work it had done to prepare the bombs for
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then it did a large number of tests in the atmosphere before
the Russians even did one.
“We were ahead and the Soviets were trying to do something to tell the world that they
were to be reckoned with. Tsar Bomba was primarily designed to cause the world to sit up
and take notice of the Soviet Union as an equal,” says Coyle.
The original design – a three layered bomb, with uranium layers separating each stage –
would have had a yield of 100 megatons – 3,000 times the size of the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki bombs. The Soviets had already tested large devices in the atmosphere,
equivalent to several megatons, but this would have been far, far bigger. Some scientists
began to believe it was too big.
With such immense power, there would be no guarantee that the giant bomb wouldn’t
swamp the north of the USSR with a vast cloud of radioactive fallout.
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It was the beginning of his journey from being a bomb designer to becoming a dissident – Frank von Hippel
That was of particular concern to Sakharov, says Frank von Hippel, a physicist and head
of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
“He was really apprehensive about the amount of radioactivity it would create,” he says,
“and the genetic effects that could have on future generations
“It was the beginning of his journey from being a bomb designer to becoming a dissident.”
Before it was ready to be tested, the uranium layers that would have helped the bomb
achieve its enormous yield were replaced with layers of lead, which lessened the intensity
of the nuclear reaction.
The Soviets had built a weapon so powerful that they were unwilling to even test it at its
full capacity. And that was only one of the problems with this devastating device.
The Tu-95 bombers built to carry the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons were designed to
carry much lighter weapons. The Tsar Bomba was so big that it couldn’t be placed on a
missile, and so heavy that the planes designed to carry it wouldn’t have been able to take
them all the way to their targets with enough fuel. And, if the bomb was as powerful as
intended, the aircraft would have been on a one-way mission anyway.
The power of the bomb persuaded nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov to renounce nuclear weapons (Credit:
Science Photo Library)
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Even where nuclear weapons are concerned, there can be such as thing as too powerful,
says Coyle, who is now a leading member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-
Proliferation, a think tank based in Washington DC. “It’s hard to find a use for it unless
you want to knock down very large cities,” he says. “It simply would be too big to use.”
Von Hippel agrees. “These things [large free-falling nuclear bombs] were designed that if
you wanted to be able to destroy the target even if you were a mile off, it could be done.
Things moved in a different direction – increasing missile accuracy and multiple
warheads.”
It’s hard to find a use for it unless you want to knock down very large cities – Philip Coyle
Tsar Bomba had other effects. Such was the concern over the test – which was 20% of the
size of every atmospheric test combined before it, von Hippel says – that it hastened the
end of atmospheric testing in 1963. Von Hippel says that Sakharov was particularly
worried by the amount of radioactive carbon 14 that was being emitted into the
atmosphere – an isotope with a particularly long half-life. “This has been partly mitigated
by all the fossil fuel carbon in the atmosphere which has diluted it,” he says.
Sakharov worried that a bomb bigger than the one tested would not be repelled by its own
blastwave – like Tsar Bomba had been – and would cause global fallout, spreading toxic
dirt across the planet.
Sakharov become an ardent supporter of the 1963 Partial Test Ban, and an outspoken critic
of nuclear proliferation and, in the late 1960s, anti-missile defences that he feared would
spur another nuclear arms race. He became increasingly ostracised by the state, a dissident
against oppression who would in 1975 be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and referred to
as “the conscience of mankind”, says von Hippel.
Tsar Bomba, it seems, may have had fallout of a very different kind.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170816-the-monster-atomic-bomb-that-was-too-big-to-use
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A skateboarder rides past a homeless encampment alongside a street in Los Angeles. Richard
Vogel/AP
L.A. County’s Latest Solution to Homelessness Is a Test of Compassion
1. LINDA POON
Residents can get up to $75,000 to build a “granny flat”—if they open it up to a homeless family.
California’s budding YIMBY movement is up for a real test. Under a new pilot program approved this week,
Los Angeles County homeowners are being asked to literally open up their backyards to the homeless.
The county’s board of supervisors gave the green light to the The Granny Flats Motion project on Tuesday,
which would give homeowners up to $75,000 to build a backyard home—if they agree to rent it to a homeless
family or individual. (For those who already have a unit to offer, the county will to provide up to $50,000 in
subsidies to convert it according to the county’s requirements.) On top of that, the county will also streamline
the permitting process, an arguably attractive incentive considering that most of these “accessory dwelling
units” in U.S. cities are illegal.
The county will take the next two months to flesh out the details with the hope of implementing the program
within the next year and a half, says Monique King-Viehland, the deputy executive director of the community
development commission. As for figuring out the rent and utilities costs, that’s largely left up to the
homeowners and their future tenants. “Right now the thought is there will be some kind of note on the
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property that basically says you have to maintain a certain level of affordability for a certain time period,” she
tells CityLab.
At the heart of the program is an effort to curb the county’s homeless population, which has ballooned to
nearly 60,000—a staggering 23 percent increase over the last year. The pilot, for which the county has
earmarked $550,000, will grant two or three of such units in areas where zoning is managed by the county as
officials assess whether to scale up in the future. It’s part of L.A. county’s broader initiative to address
homelessness, in which 51 strategies—from opening up vacant lots for housing to subsidize housing—have
been approved between 2016 and 2017.
This wouldn’t be the first county to address homelessness through the growing popularity of backyard homes.
In March, Oregon’s Multnomah County introduced a similar program, going a step further and offering
to build as many as 300 tiny homes—roughly 200 square feet, according to the local news site Willamette
Week—if homeowners agree to let a homeless family live there for at least five years. Initially, the county
aimed to build the first four houses by the end of June, but progress has stalled—though not for a lack of
interest.
Tiny Homes Are Baby Steps Toward Reversing the Housing Crisis
1. HANIYA RAE
When the county made a call-out to interested homeowners, they received more than 1,000 responses.
“There’s a bunch of research that says when we know somebody personally, we are much more able to see
them as a human being, understand their struggles, and are much more predisposed to be in relationships with
them,” Mary Li, director of the Multnomah Idea Lab (which runs the program), told Fast Company back in
April.
Officials were close to narrowing the submissions down to four—looking at each site’s proximity to things
like schools, job opportunities, and public transit—when they realized that an existing ordinance regarding
construction around trees meant that they had to physically evaluate the potential sites. Multnomah County
expects to complete the process at the start of next month.
It’s encouraging news: Some jurisdictions at least seem enthusiastic about the experiments. “We’ve, in a short
period of time—even prior to the motion that went forward this week and since then—received a lot of
interest via the web, email, responses, phone calls,” King-Viehland says. “Not just from the media but from
the general public.” She expects architectural design competition for backyard houses, organized by the L.A.
County Arts Commission, will draw even more people to the project in the fall.
In part, the enthusiasm comes from the recent momentum of the nationwide YIMBY movement that
welcomes the development of affordable units in several cities, including L.A. and Portland. Just a month ago,
a conference in Oakland, California, drew hundreds of attendees from around the country, including
researchers, techies, and even senators, to brainstorm policies and solutions to the current housing shortage
crisis. That enthusiasm is also coupled with the recent passage of a new California lawthat makes it easier for
homeowners to build granny flats by easing associated parking restrictions and utility fees.
With the long-term fate of both Multnomah and L.A.’s projects uncertain—there is no guarantee that either
will continue after the pilot project—critics question whether the $350,000 and $550,000 budgeted for them,
respectively, could be better spent elsewhere. But King-Viehland disagrees: “We need to be creative and look
at multiple methodologies and mechanisms for addressing the issue,” she says. “This is only one small part of
a much larger home initiative strategy that Los Angeles County is focusing on, and this is one of those
strategies that we think is worth exploring.”
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About the Author
Linda Poon
 @LINPOONSAYS
 FEED
Linda Poon is an assistant editor at CityLab covering science and urban technology, including smart cities and
climate change. She previously covered global health and development for NPR’s Goats and Soda blog
https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2017/08/los-angeles-granny-flat-motion-homelessness-
yimby/537117/?utm_source=nl__link5_082117
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A Secret Work Studio Suspended Below a Highway Overpass by Fernando Abellanas
by Laura Staugaitis on August 21, 2017
All images by Jose Manuel Pedrajas, courtesy Lebrel
Spanish furniture designer Fernando Abellanas has carved out a new creative home in a section of Valencia
that isn’t the typical artist neighborhood: he’s built a studio affixed to a highway underpass. The workspace is
complete with a desk and chair, as well as shelves stocked with homey framed artworks and potted
succulents―all attached to the highway’s cement framework. The floor and walls function as a self-operated
horizontal elevator. Using mechanics adapted from a metal dolly, Abellanas hand-cranks his way to his
studio, completing the picture of a cozy four-walled workspace.
As he described in an interview with le cool Valencia, Abellanas has a lifelong interest in refuges―locating
peace and solitude in unexpected places, like under the dinner table as as a child, and now, hidden underneath
the whir of traffic. The designer is also inspired by the way people with very limited resources use neglected
spaces to create homes.
The studio hasn’t been sanctioned by the city of Valencia, so its exact location is a secret, and it will remain
intact for as long as Abellanas is able to keep it there. You can follow more of Abellanas’ work for his brand
Lebrel via Instagram and Facebook, and the video below (in Spanish) offers a closer look. (via FastCo)
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/08/secret-moveable-work-
studio/?mc_cid=afd348a52d&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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How to say no at work when you don't have kids
Despite a boom in flexible working, many singles say they’re still picking up the slack from colleagues
with families. Career coaches are advising them to say no.
 By Maddy Savage
15 August 2017
Janice Chaka had spent her lunch hour organising a surprise cooking class for a close
friend who was visiting from out of town. After getting stuck in traffic on the way back
from the venue she ended up back in her office five minutes’ late from her break.
“I got asked a lot of questions and I had to stay and do extra work,” she says. “But I know
if I’d been late back from taking my kid to the doctor, that wouldn’t have even been an
issue, in fact I probably could have taken the whole afternoon off.”
A study of 25,000 workers found that two thirds of childless women aged 28 to 40 felt that they were
expected to work longer hours
That happened a decade ago, when Chaka was working in human resources in
Guadalajara, Mexico. But the experience conformed to a pattern that she says was
common as she forged a career working for Fortune 100 companies in the US and Mexico
throughout her twenties, both as a singleton and while in childless relationships.
Colleagues with children were also prioritised when it came to taking their preferred
vacation dates, she claims, while fellow single or childless workers struggled to get time
off to care for elderly relatives or were asked to go on more frequent business trips.
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“Make sure single employees know that they, too, have every right to a full life,” advises Facebook COO
Sheryl Sandberg (Credit: Getty Images)
“The assumption is that you can drop everything or that you don’t have a care in the
world,” says Chaka. “Actually, as a single, life is more expensive, you have to run all
errands yourself and you don’t have someone to fall back on financially if things go
wrong.”
While it’s tricky to nail down concrete statistics that prove how much singles might be
being indirectly penalised in the workplace, a recent UK study of 25,000 workers found
that two thirds of childless women aged 28 to 40 felt that they were expected to work
longer hours. Growing numbers of workers, academics and analysts are documenting the
issue.
Corporate workhorses
During research for his book Going Solo, Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at
New York University interviewed hundreds of single people in Europe and America and
discovered “there was widespread perception that singles became the workhorses in
corporate offices”.
“I met countless workers who complained that their managers viewed them as always
available for late night and weekend assignments, because they didn't have children or
spouses,” he says.
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“In a few cases, I met women who said that they had been denied raises that they
deserved, because their managers believed that they didn't need the extra money as much
as colleagues with children,” adds the author.
Bella DePaulo, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara,

explores the phenomenon in her books and studies, and coined the word “singlism” to pin
down the stigmatisation, negative stereotyping and discrimination against singles that she
believes is widespread in the workplace and society at large. She argues that
many employers are missing a trick when it comes to single employees, who, far from
being lonely and isolated, are actually more likely to be actively engaged in their
communities and have strong relationships with friends who “feel like family, even if they
are not family in the traditional sense”.
For Jonas Almeling, a former entrepreneur turned Head of Innovation for a Sweden’s export and trade
agency, being lenient is a constant balance (Credit: Jonas Almeling)
So, what should single workers do if they feel they’re being singled out because of their
personal life choices or situation, yet don’t want to jeopardise their careers and
reputations?
“Don’t bitch and moan about your particular circumstances,” is the first advice dished out
by UK-based business mentor David Carter.
He argues that “the answer is in the crowd.” Single colleagues should consider clubbing
together, he says, to identify and propose changes to company practices that might benefit
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the organisation more widely, while at the same time demonstrating their own problem-
solving skills.
That may be easier to do than ever, as unprecedented numbers of us are settling down later
in life or not at all. A 2014 Pew Report study estimated that one in four young adults in the
US will have never married by the time they turn 50, while the most common type of
household in the European Union in 2016 was that of a single person, according to the
EU’s number-crunching agency Eurostat.
One technique favoured by Carter is a kind of sharing economy points system, tracked
digitally or even using physical items like buttons, giving employees the chance to swap
hours or tasks, and help others out in return. By making sure no-one goes more than five
points into credit or debit, no-one should end up unfairly disadvantaged.
“It’s not about what you’re going to use your time off to do — whether it’s bungee
jumping, Christmas shopping, a date or taking your children to the school play — it’s just
about being able to work your 40 hours a week when it suits you,” he says.
Carter, who allows his own own employees to work “wherever or whenever they want as
long as they get the job done” accepts that the points system he recommends may appear
tougher for larger corporations to implement. However, he insists that companies that fail
to find ways to improve flexibility for all workers will ultimately lose out on talent.
Bella DePaulo coined the word “singlism” to describe the stigmatisation and discrimination against singles
that she believes is widespread (Credit: belladepaulo.com)
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“The dinosaurs died out for a reason. Unless you adapt and start to embrace flexibility —
which is part of the millennial mindset — in terms of the recruitment and retention of
talent, you will go the way of the dinosaurs,” he says.
Singled out
Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg makes a similar, much-quoted

assessment in her book Lean In, sharing the story of a single woman who felt that going to
a party should be considered just as legitimate a reason to leave work on time as a kids’
soccer game, since she needed to meet new people in order to eventually start a family and
have kids of her own. “Make sure single employees know that they, too, have every right
to a full life,” Sandberg advises managers.
Offering equal latitude to all employees is easier said than done
Other business leaders argue that offering equal latitude to all employees in terms of work
schedules is easier said than done.
“There’s a difference in perspective between people who are parents and people who
aren't. If you aren't a parent, you really can't see how that changes your life and your
priorities,” says Jonas Almeling, a former entrepreneur turned Head of Innovation for a
Sweden’s export and trade agency, who is a father-of-one.
“I would definitely not have the same flexibility for someone saying ‘oh sorry I am off
kayaking’ compared to someone doing a pick-up from kindergarten,” he argues.
“But on the other hand, a valuable employee is someone who has a high quality of life as a
whole, no matter what choices they’ve made. So, there might be a need for a wider
perspective.”
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Janice Chaka feels at times she's been unfairly treated as a result of not having the right reasons for being out-
of-office (Credit: Janice Chaka)
Ten years on from that cooking class she organised, Janice Chaka is now a
successful business coach, consultant and podcaster. She admits that she felt guilty,
previously, for asking for time off when other colleagues might want that time to spend
with their kids. She sometimes even felt the need to exaggerate her reasons for leaving the
office on time, to avoid coming across as someone who didn’t care about other people’s
families. But, having since quit the corporate world to work for herself, she advises her
clients to avoid that approach.
“You shouldn’t feel threatened or bad for having a work-life balance, regardless of
whether you’ve got kids or no kids,” she argues.
Her advice is to thoroughly research any business you’re interviewed by, to find out its
culture and policies in advance. More practically, once in the job, she advocates not
befriending work colleagues on social media. That way, they’re not given the opportunity
to judge photos of the activities that were important to you on a night you needed to leave
promptly or a time you wanted to take a day’s vacation.
“Find a company that doesn’t ask – or doesn’t care – why you need time off. You can still
get that promotion, not by working harder or longer, but by working smarter.”
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170814-how-to-say-no-at-work-when-you-dont-have-kids
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Houses float on the harbor in Amsterdam's IJburg neighborhood. Margriet Faber/AP
Are These Dutch Floating Homes a Solution for Rising Seas?
1. OLGA MECKING
Houseboats have long been a common sight near Amsterdam, but a new community may signal a premise that
could work elsewhere, too.
Not far from Amsterdam's Central Station lies IJburg. Hidden in plain view, the city's newest district is
somewhat of an undiscovered secret. In fact, IJburg is known better to the people outside of the country rather
than the ones who actually live in the Netherlands.
Moriam Hassan Balogun, who is originally from the United Kingdom, moved there in 2009 and now
considers herself an "international local." She loves IJburg's family friendly atmosphere, the space, and the
many cafes and possibilities for work and leisure. It also attracts many business owners and mostly people
with liberal political views.
IJburg is built on four artificial islands that are connected to each other and the rest of the city via bridges. It
has around 21,000 inhabitants, the first of whom moved there in early 2002. But the district still isn't
completely built. Though the goal was to finish building IJburg by 2012, that has not happened due to
environmental concerns and slow uptake of houses. When finished, it will offer 18,000 homes for 45,000
people and create around 12,000 jobs.
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Of late, the islands have been of particular interest to climate change researchers; in particular, the area of
Waterbuurt West. There, 120 floating homesteads have been built to deal with Amsterdam's housing shortage
and to prevent the citizens of Amsterdam from moving farther away, to Purmerend or Almere—a
phenomenon known as urban sprawl. Living on water is not that surprising in a country that's surrounded by
it. All over the Netherlands, people live on barges or houseboats. But these new houses in IJburg are different
because they are very visibly not boats. They are houses.
A Dutch saying goes, "God created the world but the Dutch created Holland." The Netherlands has long been
a pioneer in reclaiming land from water, spending centuries drying out the sea to build. That may have been a
mistake, says Koen Olthuis, the founder of the Waterstudio in Rijswijk, an architectural bureau specifically
devoted to designing buildings on water.
"The Dutch are crazy, that's fun about the Dutch. We are here now in a part of Holland where we shouldn't be.
It's man-made," Olthuis says. A much better solution would be to simply build floating houses, or even whole
floating neighborhoods instead.
The technology used to build houses on water is not really new. Whatever can be built on land can also be
built on water. The only difference between a house on land and a floating house is that the houses on water
have concrete "tubs" on the bottom, which are submerged by half a story and act as counter-weight. To
prevent them from floating out to sea, they are anchored to the lakebed by mooring poles.
As sea levels are rising globally, many cities around the world are under threat from water. Some areas are
projected to disappear completely in the next few decades. Therefore, designing houses to float may, in some
instances, be safer than building on land and risking frequent floods. "In a country that's threatened by water,
I'd rather be in a floating house; when the water comes, [it] moves up with the flood and floats," Olthuis says.
He believes that water shouldn't be considered an obstacle, but rather a new ingredient in the recipe for the
city.
Floating houses are not only safer and cheaper, but more sustainable as well. Because such a house could
more readily be adapted to existing needs by changing function, or even moving to a whole new location
where it can serve as something else, the durability of the building is much improved. Olthuis compares this
to a second-hand car: "By having floating buildings, you're no longer fixed to one location. You can move
within the city, or you can move to another city, and let them be used and used again."
Houses built on land are very static, while on water it's possible to add, take away, or easily change parts. And
communities built on water can be constructed more densely, which would allow for more efficient energy
use. Water allows houses (and even whole cities) more flexibility, and, for Olthuis, it's this characteristic that
makes it such a fascinating element.
“In a country that’s threatened by water, I’d rather be in a floating house.”
He sees the use and incorporation of water as the next logical step in the evolution of cities. Cities are not
unlike brands, and the ones with a lot of water would be the most flexible, and therefore the most desirable.
This branding is already visible in many regions around the world: Think of Los Angeles as the city of
movies, New York as the city for writers. Blue cities, or cities that can utilize the water, would also be the
cities that would attract residents.
But Olthuis goes one step further. He imagines cities that can quickly change, depending, for example, on the
season. In the summer, they could be open to allow the collection of sun energy, and in the winter they could
huddle closer together for warmth and energy preservation. He also prefers to talk about functions, or
modules, rather than actual buildings.
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"In the next city, it's no longer about what you have; it's about what you can load. You're going to load
functions to your neighborhood on the water, and if you need new functions, you take them out and you
reload them with other profiles," he imagines. Cities of the future will share certain functions, like, for
example, museums, stadiums, or other facilities. "It will be a completely new way of thinking about these
[establishments]."
Incorporating water into the cities will also introduce more equality, says Olthuisk, referring to a principle
known as "the democracy of water." In fact, something similar is already happening not just in IJburg but in
the whole of the Netherlands, where house owners and social housing recipients share neighborhoods. In
IJburg itself, around 30 percent of the houses are earmarked for this very form of government assistance.
People of various nations, races, religions, and ethnicities live on the island. "There's no group that's more
than the other," Hassan Balogun says. However, the people who move to IJburg tend to be politically similar.
"There's quite a lot of liberal thinkers, very open-minded people here. I think that like seeks like," she says.
The residents of IJburg often vote for D66 and Groenlinks parties, both known for their liberal views and a
focus on sustainability.
A floating home in Ijburg. (Margriet Faber/AP)
The inhabitants of IJburg don't really have the need to leave the island unless they want to. There are plenty of
options in that part of the city, including cafes, gyms, yoga studios, and parks. There are also 10 schools. The
whole area has an atmosphere of newness, of opportunity.
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And this opportunity—the concept of floating houses—could spread to other areas around the world. Due to
very strict regulations in the Netherlands, Olthuis is often exporting his ideas abroad, including to China, the
United Arab Emirates, India, and the Ukraine. He recognizes that American cities face the same threat towns
in the Netherlands did: urban sprawl. “So we have to bring the cities back, make them more compact,” he
says. “That's what I hope that people in the States will learn.”
Floating houses are an idea American cities should consider not just to combat sprawl. Many major cities—
like New York, Washington, or Miami—could soon find themselves under water. Olthuis does, however,
caution against a Waterworld-like future.
He doesn't believe in cities existing solely on water due to high costs of maintenance and constant energy
consumption. He thinks the future lies in already existing cities that use naturally existing water to expand and
improve. His hope is that, one day, 10 percent of the Netherlands could become a blue city. But it doesn't
have to stop there. "It's not only about architecture, it's not just about having fun in IJburg. It's about
rethinking how we, as communities, want to live in cities,"
The city may not be fully built yet, but, given its multi-faceted approach to sustainable urban design, IJburg
could be seen as a first step in that direction. At the very least, it is an already existing example for how to
successfully integrate water into our cities.
This story originally appeared as "Are the Floating Houses of the Netherlands A Solution Against the Rising
Seas" on Pacific Standard, an editorial partner site. Subscribe to the magazine in print and follow Pacific
Standard on Twitter to support journalism in the public interest.
About the Author
Olga Mecking
 @THEEUROPEANMAMA
https://www.citylab.com/environment/2017/08/are-the-floating-houses-of-the-netherlands-a-solution-for-
rising-seas/537645/?utm_source=nl__link6_082317
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The Shops at Hudson Yards starts its interior retail on a plaza level one floor up and its signature draw is the
city’s first and only Neiman Marcus, on the 5th through 7th floors. Such a plan would have likely seemed
unhinged in the early 2000s. Related
How Manhattan Got Vertical Retail Right, Again
1. ANTHONY PALETTA
AUG 10, 2017
After building a few duds in the late 20th century, architects and developers are giving New Yorkers a better
multi-level retail experience with a mix of new ideas and lessons from the past.
 SHARE
 TWEET
New York might have always seemed like the ideal city for multi-level retail complexes—until you actually
went into one.
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By the turn of the century, such places in America’s densest city ranged from failed to mediocre examples of
the genre. In the last decade, however, retail designers appear closer to figuring out the problem. Developers
have brought a new attention to this retail paradox, now most dramatically in the form of Related Company’s
forthcoming Shops at Hudson Yards, which, buoyed by recent lessons, is upending expectations about how
multi-level retail works.
A preference for street-level retail in multi-story urban shopping complexes is often reflected in the rent and
profits, which plunge with each ascending level. “First floor retail is golden, second floor retail struggles,
third floor retail is a disaster,” says Nico Dando-Haenisch, project manager for Grimshaw’s Fulton Street
Transit Center.
The Shops at Hudson Yards defies this concept by starting its interior retail on a plaza level one floor up and
siting its signature draw, the city’s first and only Neiman Marcus, on the 5th through 7th floors. Such a plan
would have likely seemed unhinged in the early 2000s, but in the last decade a number of surprising successes
have sent retail skyward: the Shops at Columbus Circle (opened in 2003), the renovation of the former World
Financial Center’s retail space into the Shops at Brookfield Place (opened in 2015), Westfield World Trade
Center (2016), the Fulton Street Transit Center (2016), and additional developments at Pier 17 and elsewhere.
These are part of a new generation of shopping center design, locating retail floors both above and below
street level with a frequency not seen in decades.
“First floor retail is golden, second floor retail struggles, third floor retail is a disaster.”
The Shops at Columbus Circle in the Time Warner Center, also a Related project, is the pioneer in
Manhattan’s shopping center revival, overcoming considerable initial skepticism. As Ken Himmel, president
and CEO of Related Urban, says of their considerably larger shopping center under development at Hudson
Yards, “There are people who are talking to me now who absolutely said ‘I never thought this could work at
Time Warner.’”
The Shops at Columbus Circle required deliberate care in leasing and design, which derived inspiration both
from venerable traditional retail avenues and from institutions as typologically alien to Manhattan as the
suburban mall.
The experience of going up or down a floor is routine within street-level stores across the country, and
laziness or lack of interest hasn’t shuttered the upper levels of shops on Fifth Avenue. The most iconic
subterranean shop on earth, the Apple store on 5th Avenue, proves that you don’t have to offer even a single
piece of merchandise on a ground level to entice shoppers downward.
Himmel says that the retail floors inside the Shops at Columbus Circle were inspired by shops on Madison
Avenue, with internal stairways between shop levels providing additional fabric linking the floors together.
This model is becoming routine in vertical shopping centers.
Several of the earliest examples of luring shoppers up six or seven floors are just a brief walk away inside the
city’s department stores, which furnish over a century’s evidence of successful mutli-level retailing.
“You’d place certain departments in certain spaces to draw people through the typology of spaces,” explains
Himmel. Restaurants are always found near the top of department stores: department stores would also make
deliberate efforts to strategically intersperse high-profile drivers of traffic on upper floors. Lord and Taylor
recently completed a renovation of its 5th floor “Dress Address.” Five floors to find a dress is clearly not too
many.
186
***
But something went awry between the ‘70s and ‘90s, when New York became an index of retail design errors
as new malls created an often isolating and confusing user experience.
The Manhattan Mall was originally built to accommodate 13 floors of retail (left) but was eventually
scaled down to just three, with other floors converted into office space (right). (Wikimedia Commons/Mean
Mr. Mustard, Jim.Henderson)
The Manhattan Mall (opened in 1989) featured a shocking 13 retail floors with shopping aeries at a height
that might have worked for falcons but not humans. The retail floors were eventually scaled back to only three
levels, with the remainder converted to offices. Many arcades such as the World Financial Center (opened in
1988) featured winding and confusing circulation patterns with no obvious anchor draws, amended in that
complex’s conversion into Brookfield Place—which now features clear circulation patterns and a Saks Fifth
Avenue. The former Mall at the World Trade Center, located in the center’s underground concourse (opened
in 1975) was a reliable leasing success but its aesthetics were those of a transit basement.
The salience of the department store as a draw is rigorously applied to new, vertical urban retail in ways that
draw upon its success in suburban malls encouraging shoppers to go somewhere and its urban reliability at
drawing them upwards. One of the country’s most successful older urban retail centers, 900 North Michigan
Avenue* in Chicago, features a Bloomingdale’s spread over every floor of the complex while the Westfield
San Francisco Center Nordstrom begins at the 4th floor. If a descent to the maelstrom is unappealing, ascent
to the Nordstrom is not.
Non-retail uses are increasingly prized on upper floors of these new projects. On the 5th floor of the Shops at
Columbus Circle, there’s Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall concert venue, reliably injecting
patrons during evening hours and providing new customers for food and retail tenants.
There’s also an increasing realization that circulation from unrelated upper floor uses—whether residences,
offices, or hotels—should be introduced into retail floors at the highest point possible to compel passage past
shops. And as the traditional food court has stalled, places like Hudson Eats now bring trendy fast casual
vendors and local flavors to Brookfield Place, while others malls have embraced sit-down restaurants in lieu
of the traditional food court model. The Shops at Columbus Circle offers not one but four restaurants on its
fourth floor.
“The old department store model of stacking escalators doesn’t work that well.”
New tenants aside, the architecture of these centers has taken a great leap forward, with a frequent emphasis
on street accessibility, clear sight lines, and easy links between floors. Westfield World Trade Center features
many retailers oriented towards the street. The aim of its two-story Oculus retail space was not to create a
traditional arcade but to emulate exterior spaces. Santiago Calatrava tells CityLab via email that he “designed
the Oculus as a sunken piazza in the long European tradition of central urban spaces, creating a wide space
opened to all citizens.”
Designers are thinking about the simple but essential task of making upper floors visible. After all, if a visitor
can’t see a destination they’re almost certain to ignore it. Even something as rudimentary as a handrail can be
a problem: ubiquitous 1980s granite and metal have been supplanted by glass at Brookfield Place and
multiple other centers.
187
Circulation is also crucial. Being able to easily reach an upper level attraction is as important as seeing it.
Recent shopping centers have prioritized the frequent and highly visible placement of connections between
levels. Norm Garden, a designer at Callison RTKL says “you can’t put enough [escalators] in.” He also says
that they’re best introduced as a sequence. “The old department store model of stacking escalators doesn’t
work that well,” adds Garden. “I prefer a terraced or a cascading approach, sometimes you can be seduced
into going up and find yourself on the third or fourth floor before you think about it.”
Inside Westfield World Trade Center, which opened last year. Its architect says he designed the Oculus
“as a sunken piazza in the long European tradition of central urban spaces, creating a wide space opened to all
citizens.”(Westfield)
***
Nothing will change the primacy of the street-level experience and yet recent work has revealed that
enticement elsewhere is not nearly so hard as it was thought to be. Multilevel design principles have recently
been tweaked into an effective formula that did not previously exist.
Today, there’s no telling what future innovations might produce or how they might undercut this model. The
rise of online retail has proven a threat not merely to suburban malls but to the kind of retailers that we might
have seen in urban centers. An Amazon Books location replaced a former upper floor Borders at the Shops at
Columbus Circle, but most retailers lost in the 2000s haven't been replaced by anything of the kind. Who
knows what the next decade's culling might bring.
Leasing in most New York centers also inclines clearly towards the higher end—-many of the more vibrant
locations of urban shopping centers in Asia have retail sectors less desiccated by online pressures. American
multi-level retail has increasingly reflected a turn towards community and unrelated uses that’s been common
both in suburban centers and abroad. Garden notes that his multilevel design work across Southeast Asia
includes a chapel, museum space, community halls, and university centers.
If the composition of retail complexes is inevitably fated to change, their location is likely to inch just a bit off
of street level. With a recent generation of architects and developers having successfully built up, it's unlikely
they're going to look back down anytime soon.
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified the address of a Bloomingdale’s in Chicago
Anthony Paletta
 @PALETTAANTHONY
 FEED
Anthony Paletta is a freelance writer located in New York City. He's contributed to the Wall Street
Journal, The Guardian, Metropolis, Architectural Record, and other publications
https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/08/how-manhattan-got-vertical-retail-right-
again/536274/?utm_source=nl__link1_081117
188
A real estate sign advertising a home "Under Contract" is pictured in Vienna, Virginia. Larry
Downing/Reuters
The Foreign Buyers You Haven’t Heard About
1. RICHARD FLORIDA
AUG 10, 2017
Despite a public focus on vacant luxury condos, more than half of foreign buyers actually live in the
U.S.
With housing prices hitting record highs in some cities, it is not surprising that foreign buyers have become a
target. The popular press is filled with accounts of wealthy foreigners buying up luxury condo towers in New
York, London, Vancouver and Miami, leaving buildings and entire neighborhoods
dark. Vancouverand Toronto have imposed a foreign buyers’ tax in an attempt to cool their skyrocketing
housing markets. Pundits complain that old-line gentrification is morphing into a new phase of
“plutocratization” or “oligarchification.”
There’s no doubt that foreign real estate buying in America is on the rise: Between April 2016 and March
2017, foreign buyers bought 284,455 homes for a dollar value of $153 billion, a jump of 50 percent over the
prior year. And foreign purchases have been tracking consistently up, rising from just $66.6 billion since
2011, the earliest year covered by the survey. In the time span of this survey, foreign buyers made up ten
percent of the dollar volume of all residential home sales across the United States last year. And, foreigners
accounted for five percent of the number of units purchased, because on average they buy more expensive
homes in more expensive areas than the average US buyer.
189
Many of these buyers, 42 percent, are “non-residents” who may indeed be leaving their properties vacant
some or all of the time. But there’s another even larger population of foreign buyers that isn’t getting much
attention. The lion’s share of the homes, almost 60 percent, were bought and occupied by people who reside
permanently in the United States as either recent immigrants or foreigners on work, student or other visas.
Those are some of the key conclusions of a recent survey of realtors by the National Association of Realtors,
which covers the year spanning April 2016 to March 2017. The data from the survey gives broader context to
the image of foreign buyers gentrifying, dullifying, and darkening America’s cities. Foreign investment in the
U.S. housing market is on the rise, to be sure. But the people who comprise this group aren’t just the owners
of the “empty house next door,” according to the self-reported accounts of the realtors surveyed. They’re
often our neighbors, too.
Foreign buyers of both types do tend to purchase homes that are more expensive—an average of $537,000
overall compared to the U.S. average of $278,000. But this number is higher for non-resident foreign buyers
than it is for immigrants who live permanently in the United States. While non-resident buyers spent an
average of $627,000 in the studied period, resident foreign buyers paid $473,500. And despite the image of
oligarchs, plutocrats and wealthy foreigners buying up trophy real estate in New York and other superstar
cities, roughly ten percent of foreign buyers bought homes worth a million dollars or more.
Another popular image is that of rich foreign buyers in luxury condos in exclusive urban neighborhoods. But,
actually, foreign buyers were much more likely to buy in suburbs, small towns and rural areas. This is
especially true for resident foreign buyers, 60 percent of whom bought homes in the suburbs. A slew of
research shows that new immigrants prefer suburbs, partially because of their perception that they offer good
schools for their children. Even among non-resident foreign buyers, 41 percent purchased a home in the
suburbs. Another 13 percent, mainly non-resident Canadians and Brits, purchased homes in resort areas,
compared to just one percent of resident buyers.
Data and graphs from the National Association of Realtors, 2016-2017
Despite the image of wealthy immigrants living in luxury high-rise towers, just 17 percent of foreigners
purchased condominiums. The largest share of condo buyers were not wealthy Chinese, Russian or Middle
Eastern buyers, but Canadians scooping up vacation condos in resort destinations. The reality is nearly two-
thirds (64 percent) of foreign buyers bought conventional detached homes and another 12 percent bought
townhomes.
And only a very small proportion of foreign buyers bought homes for their kids to use while in college— just
4 percent did so.
More than half of foreign buyers do fit the image of all-cash offers, but with demographics that might be
surprising. More than three quarters of Canadians bought their U.S. homes in cash, compared to 65 percent of
Chinese buyers and just 18 percent of Indian buyers. While roughly half of foreign buyers did make all-cash
purchases, this was driven by non-residents—more than seven in ten (72 percent) of whom paid for their
property in cash. Fifty-seven percent of foreign residents took out a mortgage for their home.
190
Chinese buyers spent the most money overall on U.S. homes, spending $31.7 billion between 2016 and 2017,
accounting for about 20 percent of all foreign real estate sales. But Canadians came in second, spending $19
billion or 12 percent, followed by buyers from the UK, Mexico and India.
Despite all the talk of foreign buyers in New York City, New York did not make the top five states for foreign
buyers. Florida was far and away the leading state for foreign purchases with 22 percent followed by Texas
and California, with 12 percent each. The study did not break these numbers out by resident and non-resident
buyers. As I wrote in the New Urban Crisis, if you take the 116 some billionaires that live in New York City
and combine them with the 3,000 or so multi-millionaires (with over 30 million in net worth), they would not
fill the seats in the Radio City Music Hall.
The takeaway here is that while wealthy oligarchs who buy trophy condos in superstar cities do exist in
growing numbers, they are in the minority. The lion’s share of foreign buyers are hard-working immigrants
who have moved to the U.S. to pursue the American dream—and they, too, are included in the generic term,
“foreign buyer.”
About the Author
Richard Florida
 @RICHARD_FLORIDA
 FEED
Richard Florida is a co-founder and editor at large of CityLab and a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is a
University Professor and Director of Cities at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, and a
Distinguished Fellow at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/08/the-foreign-buyers-you-havent-heard-
about/536490/?utm_source=nl__link4_081117
191
Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) and Jin (John Cho), standing in front of Eero Saarinen's North Christian Church
in a scene from Columbus. Elisha Christian, Superlative Films/Depth of Field
The Midwest Town That Designs Above Its Weight
1. KAREN LOEW
AUG 10, 2017
A new film, Columbus, stars a cast of stunning mid-century buildings across the small Indiana city
where it takes place. New initiatives may cultivate its reputation for years to come.
The new movie Columbus, set against the backdrop of largely unknown Columbus, Indiana, tells the story of
the budding friendship between Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a local high school grad, and Jin (John Cho), a
professional visiting from Korea.
Equally important, it’s a moving portrayal of the influence thoughtful architecture can bring to a place,
something the city is thinking about off-screen today.
Columbus is a growing workshop for those who may fashion the next generation of public space. Its unique
story is coming to broader recognition now as a touchstone and inspiration.
This city of 44,000, less than an hour’s drive south of Indianapolis, benefited over many decades from both
the business savvy and civic-minded philanthropy of the Irwin and Miller families, epitomized in the person
of J. Irwin Miller.
“The radical architecture somehow is kind to its traditional neighbors. A lot of modernist architecture is rude
to its neighbors.”
Miller, who died in 2004, studied at Yale and Oxford before leading the family business, the Cumminsengine
company. Cummins is still headquartered in Columbus, generating $17.4 billion in sales last year. As part of
192
his strategy in the 1950s to lure workers to Columbus, Miller offered to pay the architects’ fees for new public
works. Such projects, Miller believed, would foster even more buildings with architectural merit.
The results transformed the city. Layered atop its traditional buildings of the 19th and 20th centuries is a
collection of over 100 Modernist buildings, including schools, housing, fire stations, banks, churches, homes,
a mall, a bridge, and more. Miller asked Eero Saarinen for recommendations of young talent that he thought
would be stars one day. This eventually brought to Columbus the designs of I.M. Pei, Harry Weese, Kevin
Roche, Deborah Berke, and seven by Saarinen himself, among others.
“The radical architecture somehow is kind to its traditional neighbors. A lot of modernist architecture is rude
to its neighbors,” says T. Kelly Wilson, an East Coast architect and academic who has spent the last few years
in Columbus, leading an effort by Indiana University to expand its design program while capitalizing on the
city’s heritage. “These guys knew how to understand the forces of local.”
It didn’t take long for Wilson, a Brooklyn native who taught at Harvard and was initially doubtful about
Columbus, to be won over. Wilson ended up not only being sold on the architecture, but also the
entrepreneurial and community spirit that go with it. “They call it ‘The Columbus Way,’” he says. “This little
town has been punching above its weight forever.”
A scene from Columbus inside the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library designed by I.M. Pei. (Elisha Christian,
Courtesy of Superlative Films)
In fact, IU’s quest has led to the formation of a Master of Architecture degree program*, set to open in Fall
2018. Here, in relationship with the breathtaking buildings and outdoor spaces, Wilson will be able to shape a
graduate architecture program around a different paradigm than the copy-this-to-get-hired approach he
experienced in the Master’s program at Harvard. He’s also a painter, and encourages his students to
understand buildings and cities better by drawing them. He envisions a largely art-based program that thrives
on interdisciplinary learning, similar to the Bauhaus. “Synthesis happens in the mind of the individual. And in
doing so, you find your own voice,” he says.
Wilson currently directs IU’s Center for Art and Design Columbus, with a variety of outreach programs,
including a Young Designers book series for local schoolchildren. Later this month, the annual Exhibit
Columbus opens, featuring newly built structures that interact with famous ones. Wilson has advised the high
school team on its project.
He acknowledges that there are plenty of locals who don’t care about Columbus’s special buildings. Others,
however, are nourished by them on some level in the way you might brag about the national park next door,
even if you don’t hike. “They’re more proud of the spirit that made those buildings, than the buildings,”
Wilson says.
“You have these beautiful buildings to walk by as part of your life.”
Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, is mentioned several times in the movie. In it, a bank
she designed captivates Casey, leading to the character’s newfound interest in architecture and her hometown.
Berke saw Columbus for the first time last Saturday night at a screening in Manhattan. In an interview
afterward, she said the building program (still supported by the Cummins Foundation), “really has given that
place a beautiful, unique character that the citizens appreciate, even if they’re not swooning over it.” She
added, “It’s part of their everyday lives, and they’re deeply fortunate for that to be the case. You have these
beautiful buildings to walk by as part of your life.”
193
Indeed, in Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, architect Sarah Williams
Goldhagen analyzes recent research across a variety of disciplines to offer scientific proof that “the built
environments we inhabit are drastically more important than we ever thought they were.” In a recent
CityLab interview, she explained that everyone benefits from architecture in ways that speak to our needs as
humans and confers dignity on a building’s inhabitants.
Once a person makes that realization, it seems inescapable. In the movie, even a skeptical layman like Jin
comes to be moved by the designs Casey shows him.
“Why does your building look like that?” is the essential question that T. Kelly Wilson is determined his new
architectural training program will answer. Columbus and its namesake reminds us all what the answer can
be: To uplift all who encounter it.
Correction: A previous version of the story stated that Indiana University is opening a new School of
Architecture in Fall 2018. It is only launching a Master’s of Architectureprogram through the School of Art
and Design.
About the Author

Karen Loew
 FEED
Karen Loew is a writer in New York, and director of the new short dance film No Man’s Land.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/08/the-midwest-town-that-designs-above-its-
weight/536478/?utm_source=nl__link2_081117
194
Statement from NSF Director France A.

Córdova on G7 Science Ministerial
NSF Director France A. Córdova.
September 28, 2017
National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France A. Córdova represented the U.S. at the 2017 G7
Science Ministerial.
I'd like to thank Minister Fedeli and the government of Italy for their warm welcome and
exceptional work hosting the G7 Science Ministerial here in Turin. It has been my pleasure to
represent the U.S. science and engineering research community in this international venue.
The United States recognizes that science and technology are critical to achieving our highest
priorities: national security, economic growth and job creation. The ingenuity of our research
community, in partnership with the government and the private sector, has built an innovation
ecosystem whose successes originate with investments in basic research. The history of
science is replete with examples of basic research leading to real-world applications and
commercialization.
I think it was particularly fitting that we started with a discussion of the need for a commitment
to improving technical training through science, technology, engineering and mathematics
(STEM) education and apprenticeships. This is critical to increasing the number of people who
can contribute to and benefit from the new knowledge economies. Last Monday, President
Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing the US Department of Education to
invest in grant funding each year to expand STEM and computer science education in
195
schools. The U.S. private sector then joined this initiative by pledging funds for computer
science programs.
We also had the opportunity to talk about many of the other big topics facing the research
community today, such as:
 Interdisciplinarity and the move to convergence research.

 Partnerships for innovation.
 The research and workforce demands of the new digital technologies.
 Responsible conduct of science and research integrity.
 And the importance of effective public communication of science.
The United States also recognizes that long-term, sustained investment in state-of-the-art
research infrastructure, such as gravitational-wave observatories, provides the capabilities
needed to conduct world-leading research. Maintaining and modernizing this infrastructure is
critical to getting the best value out of R&D investments. We also recognize the advantages of
a merit-based peer review system for guiding investments in research and infrastructure.
It is essential that nations come together to discuss these important issues, and we look
forward to continuing work on these objectives. Thank you.
-NSF-
196
Statement on impact of Hurricane Maria on

Arecibo Observatory
Jim Ulvestad, NSF acting assistant director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences
issues statement
Arecibo staff after the storm.
 Credit and Larger Version
September 27, 2017
With winds of 155 miles per hour, Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico Sept. 20. The
eye of the storm passed over Arecibo Observatory, which is operated and managed for the National
Science Foundation (NSF) by SRI International, Universities Space Research Association (USRA), and
Universidad Metropolitana (UMET).
While Arecibo Observatory suffered some damage, initial indications are that the damage was
less severe than might have been expected from a storm of the magnitude of Hurricane Maria.
Operations at the Observatory are suspended until further notice. NSF Acting Assistant
Director Jim Ulvestad issued the following statement to address continued concern.
NSF is deeply concerned about the impact of Hurricane Maria on the people of Puerto Rico,
and our thoughts go out to Puerto Rico at this challenging time. The number one priority for
NSF is the safety and recovery for Puerto Rico's population and any concerns regarding NSF
197
activities are secondary to that top priority. While we know that there is some damage to
Arecibo Observatory, we do not yet know the full extent of the damage. Inspections to assess
the infrastructure are underway. Preliminary assessments describe minimal damage in
comparison to many other parts of Puerto Rico. As a result of the relatively intact Arecibo
Observatory infrastructure, the Observatory is currently being used as a search and rescue
hub by FEMA. At this time, we cannot predict when research operations at Arecibo
Observatory might resume, however test observations to evaluate performance have begun.
After the damage assessments are completed, NSF will evaluate whether any adjustments
need to be made to our ongoing environmental review process regarding future operations of
Arecibo Observatory. We will provide further updates once we have more information.
-NSF-
198
Validating the existence of a new phase of matter, the exciton condensate

DIPC September 28, 2017
According to how the electronic band theory is usually explained, solids can be
classified as insulators, semiconductors, or metals. But, actually, there is another
kind of solid between semiconductors and metals, the semimetals. In insulators
and semiconductors the filled valence band is separated from an empty
conduction band by a band gap, in metals there is a partially filled conduction
band and in semimetals we find a very small overlap between the bottom of the
conduction band and the top of the valence band.
Semimetals could undergo, at sufficiently low temperatures, a phase transition into an
insulating state. This state is described by excitons. A hole being a vacant electron
position in the lattice structure of the solid, an exciton is a electron-hole pair that is
bound in a manner analogous to the electron and proton in a hydrogen atom. These pairs
form a so-called exciton condensate and the system is said to be in an excitonic
insulating phase. The ground state of such a phase can be described with the help of
a BCS-like theory, in analogy with the superconducting phase.
However, the coupling strength in an excitonic insulator is expected to be even weaker

than in a superconductor. Furthermore, electron-hole recombination can be quite fast,
thereby preventing the formation of the condensate. For these reasons the exciton
condensate remains an elusive phase of matter.
Possible semimetal candidates suggested to undergo a transition to the excitonic

insulating phase with an exciton condensate are transition-metal dichalcogenide
199
TiSe2 and HgTe quantum well with a thickness of 20 nm. However, there is no conclusive
evidence for an exciton condensate in such systems.
In addition to bulk semimetals, there have been several proposals to create an exciton
condensate in systems with spatially separated electron and hole gases in order to reduce
the electron-hole recombination rate. The exciton formation in such electron hole bilayers
can be detected by Coulomb drag measurements. According to the theory, if the excitons
form a condensate, one expects a discontinuity in the drag at the critical temperature and
a divergence when the temperature approaches 0. However, the experimental evidence
shows that, even if certain anomalies of the Coulomb drag as a function of temperature
have been observed, it is hard to attribute them to the formation of an exciton
condensate.
Figure 1.
Sketch of the electron-hole bilayer with the two normal (N) and two
superconducting (S) electrodes ; the exciton condensate (EC) region in the middle
has length L. Energy spectra are shown for the semimetal (SM) region (b), the EC
region (c), and the SSM region (d).
It is clear that additional type of measurements to validate the existence of an exciton
condensate in electron-hole bilayers are needed. Now, Ikerbasque researcher Dario
Bercioux (DIPC), Teun Klapwijk (Kavli Institute of Nanoscience) and F. Sebastián Bergeret
(CFM; DIPC) suggest 1, instead of measuring the Coulomb drag, to perform a differential
conductance measurement using normal and superconducting electrodes (see Figure 1) in
order to unveil the presence of the excitonic gap directly.
200
The researchers theoretically study the electronic transport through an electron-hole

bilayer in contact with normal and superconducting electrodes, assuming that the
electron-hole bilayer hosts an exciton condensate.
They find that the transport properties of this junction are determined by the competition
of different coherent reflection processes occurring at the interfaces with the normal and
superconducting electrodes. As a consequence of this competition, the differential
conductance has a minimum. The observation of this minimum in an electron-hole bilayer
system would represent a unique hallmark of the presence of the exciton condensate.
Good candidates to check experimentally this proposal would be double bilayer-graphene

systems separated by hexagonal boron nitrate. Actually, some results could be
reinterpreted in the light of these results. Namely, the zero-bias peak observed in the
differential resistance of a HgTe quantum well-superconductor junction could be a
manifestation of an exciton condensate phase.
Author: César Tomé López is a science writer and the editor of Mapping Ignorance.
References
1. D. Bercioux,T. M. Klapwijk, and F. S. Bergeret (2017) Transport Properties

of an Electron-Hole Bilayer in Contact with a Superconductor Hybrid
Junction Phys. Rev Lett. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.067001 ↩
DIPC
Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) is a singular research center born in 2000 devoted to
research at the cutting edge in the fields of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science.
Since its conception DIPC has stood for the promotion of excellence in research, which demands a
flexible space where creativity is stimulated by diversity of perspectives. Its dynamic research
community integrates local host scientists and a constant flow of international visiting researchers.
 Website:http://dipc.ehu.es/
 Twitter:@DIPCehu
201
https://mappingignorance.org/2017/09/28/validating-existence-new-phase-matter-exciton-
condensate/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+
%28Mapping+Ignorance%29
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Longer cycle life for zinc-anode batteries

A Pixelated Wooden Snorkeler Sculpted by Hsu Tung Han

by Christopher Jobson on August 5, 2017

Alice James, age 11, in 1857

Alice James in 1891

Katharine Peabody Loring

The following day, she writes:

Sketch of Alice James by Henry James, 1872

Alice James in 1870 (Harvard

Compare again with Sacks:

NSF funds new multidisciplinary approaches to study the brain

How does the brain listen and adapt in noisy scenarios?

 Neuroengineering and brain-inspired concepts and designs.

 Individuality and variation.

 Cognitive and neural processes in realistic, complex environments.

 Data-intensive neuroscience and cognitive science.

Credit: Homewood Photography

Credit: Il Memming Park, Stony Brook University

 A computational theory to model the neurobiological basis of a visuo-cognitive neuroprosthetic:

 Data-driven modeling of visual cortex: Robert Shapley of New York University

Credit: Hartmann Laboratory, Northwestern University

 Scalable neuromorphic learning machines: Emre Neftci of University of California, Irvine

Photos of Extremely Unusual Mushrooms and Other Fungi by Steve Axford

by Christopher Jobson on July 29, 2016

Etel Adnan: “The Weight of the

Art by Etel Adnan (Sfeir-Semler Gallery)

Reason and memory move together.

Building upon Woolf’s metaphor, Adnan adds:

A new method to make valuable olefins from abundant carboxylic acids

Posted: 07 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

1. J. T. Edwards, R. R. Merchant, K. S. McClymont, K. W. Knouse, T. Qin, L. R. Malins, B. Vokits,

2. J. T. Edwards, R. R. Merchant, K. S. McClymont, K. W. Knouse, T. Qin, L. R. Malins, B. Vokits,

Posted: 14 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

Source: Neural Networks and Deep

The Phenomenon Of “Crown Shyness” Where Trees Avoid Touching

by Christopher Jobson on August 14, 2017

Photo © Dag Peak. San Martin, Buenos Aires.

Intelligence: a mishmash of genetic ingredients

Posted: 16 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

What makes an intelligent brain? Credit: Max Pixel

1. Sniekers S, Stringer S, Watanabe K, et al. (2017) Genome-wide association meta-analysis of

2. Sniekers S, Stringer S, Watanabe K, et al. (2017) Genome-wide association meta-analysis of

Peanut Allergy Treatment Works Long Term

By Jef Akst | August 17, 2017

James Baldwin (Photograph: Sedat Pakay)

Stem cell technique could reverse a major type of infertility

Fertile sperm are rare in men with an extra sex chromosome

Dennis Kunkle Microscopy/SPL

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aam9046

Digitally Rendered Alien Creatures by Zhang Chenxi

byChristopher Jobson on August 11, 2017