Andy Borowitz: ‘There is a deep-seated fear among some Americans that an Ebola outbreak could make the country turn to science.In interviews conducted across the nation, leading anti-science activists expressed their concern that the American people, wracked with anxiety over the possible spread of the virus, might desperately look to science to save the day.’ (via New Yorker)

Via Science Alerts: ‘Mind-controlled prosthetic limbs that work outside the lab are now a reality, with a Swedish man becoming the first recipient of a fully implanted device in the world.’

Via Jezebel: ‘The Western medical discourse on Africa has never been particularly subtle: the continent is often depicted as an undivided repository of degeneration. Comparing the representations of disease in Africa and in the West, you can hear the whispers of an underlying moral panic: a sense that Africa, and its bodies, are uncontainable. The discussion around Ebola has already evoked—almost entirely from Tea Party Republicans—the explicit idea that American borders are too porous and that all manners of perceived primitiveness might infect the West.

And indeed, with the history of American and European panic over regulating foreign disease comes a history of regulating the perception of filth from beyond our borders, a history of policing non-white bodies that have signified some unclean toxicity.’

Via WIRED: ‘…So far McGuire’s team has built a structure—a few meters long by a meter in diameter—to test its plasma confinement claims. If they can iterate fast enough, they may just be the first to get to a functional nuclear reactor… probably in about 10 years.’

[And just what is Neil Patrick Harris doing moonlighting as a nuclear engineer?]

• Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
• Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.
• The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.
• It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
• The only link between Literature and Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play.
• In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
• Most women are so artificial that they have no sense of Art. Most men are so natural that they have no sense of Beauty.
• Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.
• What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.
• A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.
• The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious. The result is the Criticism of the Journalist.
• Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
• To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
• Dandyism is the assertion of the absolute modernity of Beauty.
• The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.
• One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.
• Even the disciple has his uses. He stands behind one’s throne, and at the moment of one’s triumph whispers in one’s ear that, after all, one is immortal.
• The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them. They are so far away from us that only the poet can understand them.
• Those whom the gods love grow young.

(via Brain Pickings)