’What the opioid crisis illustrates is not that there are a few bad apples in the pharmaceutical industry, but that the country’s entire health care system is driven by profit at the expense of public health and safety. Drug manufacturers, pharmacy chains, drug distributors, and insurance companies got rich while people, especially people lower down the income ladder, suffered—and the DEA, through neglect or incompetence or a mix of both, watched it all happen.…’

Via The New Republic

’This interactive map highlights lesser-known endangered species across America.…’

Via National Geographic

It’s Sentient:

’A product of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Sentient is (or at least aims to be) an omnivorous analysis tool, capable of devouring data of all sorts, making sense of the past and present, anticipating the future, and pointing satellites toward what it determines will be the most interesting parts of that future. That, ideally, makes things simpler downstream for human analysts at other organizations, like the NGA, with which the satellite-centric NRO partners.

Until now, Sentient has been treated as a government secret, except for vague allusions in a few speeches and presentations. But recently released documents — many formerly classified secret or top secret — reveal new details about the program’s goals, progress, and reach.…’

Via The Verge

100x larger than Fukushima disaster:

’Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation Rosatom denies the allegations.…’

Via Big Think

Eugene Robinson:

’Dear Democratic presidential candidates: I know all 23 of you want to run against President Trump, but only one will get that opportunity. If you truly believe your own righteous rhetoric, some of you ought to be spending your time and energy in another vital pursuit — winning control of the Senate.

I’m talking to you, John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who would have a good chance of beating incumbent Republican Cory Gardner. I’m talking to you, Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, who could knock off GOP incumbent Steve Daines. I’m even talking to you, Beto O’Rourke, who would have a better chance than any other Texas Democrat against veteran Republican John Cornyn.

And I’m talking to you, too, Stacey Abrams of Georgia, even though you haven’t jumped in. You came within a whisker of being elected governor, and you have a national profile that would bring in a tsunami of campaign funds. You could beat Republican David Perdue — and acquire real power to translate your stirring eloquence into concrete action.

As the Republican Party has long understood, it’s all about power. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could not care less about lofty words and high ideals. Coldly and methodically, he has used his power to block widely supported progressive measures such as gun control, to enact a trickle-down economic agenda that favors the wealthy and to pack the federal bench with right-wing judges whom we’ll be stuck with for decades.

We all remember how McConnell refused even to schedule hearings for President Barack Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, ostensibly because the vacancy occurred during an election year. Were you surprised when he said recently that if a seat were to come open in 2020, he would hasten to confirm a replacement? I wasn’t. That’s how McConnell rolls. He exercises his power to its full extent and is not bothered by what you or I or anyone else might think. Charges of hypocrisy do not trouble his sweet slumber.

McConnell is not going to be reasoned, harangued or shamed into behaving differently. The only way to stop him is to take his power away, and the only way to do that is for Democrats to win the Senate.…’

Via The Washington Post

“Words matter. And Mr. Trump’s words are dangerous.”:

’In a scorching letter condemning President Donald Trump’s recent racist attacks, the Washington National Cathedral questioned all those who continued to remain silent.

On Tuesday, the capital’s Episcopal cathedral released a letter titled “Have We No Decency? A response to President Trump,” which was signed by the church’s top leadership.…’

Via Vox

Philippe Reines, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Senior Advisor to Hillary Clinton, and co-host of the “UNREDACTED” podcast on the dsr Network:

’The bottom line is that watching a candidate share a debate stage with nine others might be one of the most important ways of deciding whom you like the most, but less useful in determining who is best to debate Trump.

If that were our sole criterion, we should skip the thoughtful policy discussions and instead require each candidate to debate a 10-year-old boy who responds to everything with, “I know you are, but what am I?”

We’ve all had to. That kid is obnoxious. Juvenile. Insufferable. Detestable. Smackworthy. Most of all, the very definition of predictable.

But that kid is hard to beat.…’

Via POLITICO Magazine

Charles Blow writes in The New York Times:

’It seems maddeningly repetitive to have to return time and again to the fact that Donald Trump is a racist, but it must be done. It must be done because it is a foundational character issue, one that supersedes and informs many others, in much the same way that his sexism and xenophobia do.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Representative Elijah Cummings’s district “is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” a “very dangerous & filthy place” and “No human being would want to live there.” Cummings is black, as are most people in his district.

This talk of infestation is telling, because he only seems to apply it to issues concerning black and brown people. He has sniped about the “Ebola infested areas of Africa.” He has called Congressman John Lewis’s Atlanta district “crime infested” as well as telling him to focus on “the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S.” He has called sanctuary cities a “crime infested & breeding concept.” He has talked about how “illegal immigrants” will “pour into and infest our Country.” He has called the presence of the MS–13 gang members “in certain parts of our country” an “infestation.”

None of this is about crime as a discrete phenomenon, but rather about inextricably linking criminality to blackness. White supremacy isn’t necessarily about rendering white people as superhuman; it is just as often about rendering nonwhite people as subhuman. Either way the hierarchy is established, with whiteness assuming the superior position.
A survey of Trump’s tweets reveals that his attachment of criminality to populations is almost exclusively to black and brown people and to “inner cities,” an urban euphemism for black and brown neighborhoods.…’

Via The New York Times

’Politicians Discussing Climate Change’ by Isaac Cordal Via Instagram

’Here we see President Trump making the “white power” hand signal while uttering AOC’s name during his speech at Young Conservatives DC summit. It’s the same hand signal that Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed in the courtroom after he’d been arrested for murdering 50 people in New Zealand mosques.

From the ADL:

In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.

In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.

Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.…’

Via Boing Boing

’Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor who portrayed Roy Batty in the film Blade Runner, passed away recently. To celebrate his iconic role, we are revisiting this piece on the Voight-Kampff test, a device to detect if a person is really human.

Is Rick Deckard a replicant, an advanced bioengineered being? The jury concerning the character in 1982’s Blade Runner is still out. Harrison Ford, who plays Deckard in the film, thinks he’s human. Ridley Scott, the film’s director, is adamant that he’s not.* Hampton Fancher, the screenwriter for the original film and the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, out today, prefers the ambiguity: “I like asking the question,” he’s said, “but I think it’s nonsense to answer it.”

At the center of the question is a fictional test designed to distinguish between replicants and humans, called the Voight-Kampff test. It elicits emotions in the test subject that replicants supposedly can’t have, then monitors physiological responses, like pupillary motion and reaction time. But could such a test really distinguish between humans and replicants? Nautilus caught up with Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London to find out. He’s spent his career studying the neuroscience of consciousness and emotion, specifically its conscious and unconscious processes, and says he’s been influenced by Philip K. Dick’s stories, particularly Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which Blade Runner is based on.…’

Via Nautilus

(Jesse Helms & others…)

I’m coming up out of the tomb, Men of War

Just when you thought you had me down, in place, hidden

I’m coming up now

Can you feel the ground rumble under your feet?

It’s breaking apart, it’s turning over, it’s pushing up

It’s thrusting into your point of view, your private property

O Men of War, Censorious Ones!

get ready big boys get ready

I’m coming up now

I’m coming up with all that was hidden

Get ready, Big Boys, get ready

I’m coming up with all you wanted buried,

All the hermetic texts with stories in them of hot & dangerous women

Women with lascivious tongues, sharp eyes & claws

I’ve been working out, my muscles are strong

I’m pushing up the earth with all you try to censor

All the iconoclasm & bravado you scorn

All the taunts against your banner & salute

I’m coming up from Hell with all you ever suppressed

All the dark fantasies, all the dregs are coming back

I’m leading them back up now

They’re going to bark & scoff & rage & bite

I’m opening the box

boo!

Via Poetry Foundation

’The Y chromosome may be a symbol of masculinity, but it is becoming increasingly clear that it is anything but strong and enduring.

Although it carries the “master switch” gene, SRY, that determines whether an embryo will develop as male (XY) or female (XX), it contains very few other genes and is the only chromosome not necessary for life. Women, after all, manage just fine without one.

What’s more, the Y chromosome has degenerated rapidly, leaving females with two perfectly normal X chromosomes, but males with an X and a shrivelled Y. If the same rate of degeneration continues, the Y chromosome has just 4.6m years left before it disappears completely. This may sound like a long time, but it isn’t when you consider that life has existed on Earth for 3.5 billion years.

The Y chromosome hasn’t always been like this. If we rewind the clock to 166m years ago, to the very first mammals, the story was completely different. The early “proto-Y” chromosome was originally the same size as the X chromosome and contained all the same genes. However, Y chromosomes have a fundamental flaw. Unlike all other chromosomes, which we have two copies of in each of our cells, Y chromosomes are only ever present as a single copy, passed from fathers to their sons.

This means that genes on the Y chromosome cannot undergo genetic recombination, the “shuffling” of genes that occurs in each generation which helps to eliminate damaging gene mutations. Deprived of the benefits of recombination, Y chromosomal genes degenerate over time and are eventually lost from the genome.

Despite this, recent research has shown that the Y chromosome has developed some pretty convincing mechanisms to “put the brakes on”, slowing the rate of gene loss to a possible standstill.

For example, a recent Danish study, published in PLoS Genetics, sequenced portions of the Y chromosome from 62 different men and found that it is prone to large scale structural rearrangements allowing “gene amplification” – the acquisition of multiple copies of genes that promote healthy sperm function and mitigate gene loss.

The study also showed that the Y chromosome has developed unusual structures called “palindromes“ (DNA sequences that read the same forwards as backwards – like the word “kayak”), which protect it from further degradation. They recorded a high rate of “gene conversion events“ within the palindromic sequences on the Y chromosome – this is basically a “copy and paste” process that allows damaged genes to be repaired using an undamaged back-up copy as a template.

Looking to other species (Y chromosomes exist in mammals and some other species), a growing body of evidence indicates that Y-chromosome gene amplification is a general principle across the board. These amplified genes play critical roles in sperm production and (at least in rodents) in regulating offspring sex ratio. Writing in Molecular Biology and Evolution recently, researchers give evidence that this increase in gene copy number in mice is a result of natural selection.

On the question of whether the Y chromosome will actually disappear, the scientific community, like the UK at the moment, is currently divided into the “leavers” and the “remainers”. The latter group argues that its defence mechanisms do a great job and have rescued the Y chromosome. But the leavers say that all they are doing is allowing the Y chromosome to cling on by its fingernails, before eventually dropping off the cliff. The debate therefore continues.

A leading proponent of the leave argument, Jenny Graves from La Trobe University in Australia, claims that, if you take a long-term perspective, the Y chromosomes are inevitably doomed – even if they sometimes hold on a bit longer than expected. In a 2016 paper, she points out that Japanese spiny rats and mole voles have lost their Y chromosomes entirely – and argues that the processes of genes being lost or created on the Y chromosome inevitably lead to fertility problems. This in turn can ultimately drive the formation of entirely new species.

As we argue in a chapter in a new e-book, even if the Y chromosome in humans does disappear, it does not necessarily mean that males themselves are on their way out. Even in the species that have actually lost their Y chromosomes completely, males and females are both still necessary for reproduction.

In these cases, the SRY “master switch” gene that determines genetic maleness has moved to a different chromosome, meaning that these species produce males without needing a Y chromosome. However, the new sex-determining chromosome – the one that SRY moves on to – should then start the process of degeneration all over again due to the same lack of recombination that doomed their previous Y chromosome.…’

Via Big Think

’Trying to see the world through someone else’s eyes is a great way to build empathy and understanding between people. Turns out, this approach – when taken literally – also works with robots. Researchers from the University of Bourgogne, University of Trento, and their colleagues used a head-mounted display to put people “inside” a robot and then studied their “likeability and closeness towards the robot.”…’

Via Boing Boing

 

 

Yes, we are memorializing glaciers now, and no, this is not a joke:

’The demise of Okjökull, the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change, will be memorialized with a plaque by researchers from Rice University in Houston… The monument to Okjökull glacier in Borgarfjörður, Iceland, will be installed on August 18 in a public ceremony.

Tourists scramble to avoid a wave caused by a glacier collapse
“This will be the first monument to a glacier lost to climate change anywhere in the world,” Rice University anthropologist Cymene Howe said. “By marking Ok’s [short for Okjökull] passing, we hope to draw attention to what is being lost as Earth’s glaciers expire.…’

Via CNN

“Everything happens for a reason”:

’This is a popular saying in the United States, often offered in the form of condolence or consolation. The adage is so vague and widespread that it never rings in my ears as a clear assertion, but rather as a desperate, threadbare defense against the obvious conclusions to be drawn from a child getting cancer or someone being struck by lightening: that absolutely nothing happens for a reason, because there are no reasons. Yes, there are certainly causes, always, but in this aphorism, “reason” is a direct substitute for “meaning.” “Everything happens for a reason” asserts a grand plan full of meaning, even if you cannot always discern it.

But of course whenever someone utters this cliché, it immediately shakes me out of whatever stupor of possible meanings I was indulging, and reminds me that there are no cosmic plans, no meanings big or small, discernable or otherwise. That there is no morality or ethics, just our fabrications of them, and that there is certainly no Master Plan through which our lives unfold like pieces on a chessboard.

And in those moments I often feel very alone, not because of the stark reality of meaninglessness, but because I am talking to someone who thoroughly embraces meaning, and am not inclined to puncture their fantasies. Why? Because if there is one of these artificial meanings that I tend to live my life by, it is the effort to avoid causing unnecessary pain. To not be cruel. To not cause someone else’s lived experience to be needlessly awful. And so when someone tells me that everything happens for a reason, I do not respond with a brief treatise on life’s ultimate meaninglessness.…’

— Akim Reinhardt, 3 Quarks Daily

 

 

Geneticist George Church on what genes can be enhanced to give us super abilities:

’Would you improve humanity if you could? Many of us have opinions about how we can boost up society and government. But what about just re-engineering the people themselves, to make them more advanced physically and intellectually? Would better bodies lead to better people? One person who can turn such musings into reality is George Church, the Harvard genetics professor famous for trying to resurrect holly mammoths, among many other accomplishments. Church also made a list of genes that could be targeted through genetic manipulation for the purpose of designing a new version of humans.

In an interview with Futurism, the professor explained that one purpose of assembling such a list is in giving correct information to the people. It has been his long-term mission to drive down the costs of genetics resources. To that end, the list includes both protective and negative consequences of hacking a particular gene.

“I felt that both ends of the phenotype spectrum should be useful,” Church elaborated. “And the protective end might yield more powerful medicines useful for more people and hence less expensive.”

Here are some selections from the so-called Transhumanist Wishlist, drawing upon the philosophical movement of transhumanism that calls for using technology to enhance human physiology and intellect, leading to a transformation of what it means to be human:

• LRP5 – hacking this gene could give people extra-strong bones, as research has shown a mutation of LRP5 can lead to bones that don’t break. The tweak might make it hard to swim, however, as denser bones also mean lower buoyancy.
• MSTN – messing with the myostatin protein could result in larger, leaner muscles, and cure such diseases as muscular dystrophy.
• FAAH-OUT – the amusingly-named FAAH-OUT gene mutation was linked to insensitivity to pain. Wouldn’t you like to have such a super ability?
• ABCC11 – modifying this gene could really pay off socially, as it’s been linked to low odor production. Currently, only 2% of the people in the world carry the mutated version, which helps their armpits not produce any unpleasant smells.
• PCSK9 – people who lack this gene have very low levels of cholesterol. Tweaking it could lead to fighting off coronary disease. On the other hand, the negatives could include a rise in diabetes and even reduced cognition.
• GRIN2B – playing with this gene can lead to enhancing memory and learning abilities.
• BDKRB2 – figuring out how to affect this gene can lead to people who can hold their breath under water for much longer. It figures prominently in the abilities of the indigenous Bajau people (“Sea Nomads”) of Southeast Asia, who are known for amazing feats of deep diving.…’

Via Big Think

An adequate discussion of gene-hacking would have to be as erudite and thoughtful about potential unintended consequences of such changes. Except for Church’s comment about increased bone density making it harder to swim, this list is notable for its absence. 

’Researchers from the University of Michigan recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that describes an incredible device capable of mitigating — and potentially preventing — spinal cord and brain injuries. “In this work,” said researcher Lonnie Shea in a statement, “we demonstrate that instead of overcoming an immune response, we can co-opt the immune response to work for us to promote the therapeutic response.” By injecting nanoparticles that reduce the body’s immune response, these researchers claim that the severity of such an injury can be significantly reduced, potentially preventing paralysis.…’

Via Big Think

’We’re no strangers to the delights of the rude drawings that monks doodled in the margins of medieval manuscripts around here, but University of Bonn medievialist Erik Wade’s epic Twitter thread on the astonishing variety of snail-doodles is genuinely next-level.

Whether it’s the snail-gods that snail-monks pray to, or the snail jousting tourneys, the lives of these molluscs was rich and complex: from the snail/human friendships to the lost art of nude snail-riding.…’

Via Boing Boing

’Trump’s attack on Omar appears to be a preview of his broader 2020 strategy. There is every reason to expect things will get worse.…’

Via Vox

’“I’ve prosecuted predators,” she said. “And we have a predator living in the White House. He has predatory instincts and a predatory nature.”

Harris accused President Trump of wanting to return to an era before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Roe v. Wade decision, in which the US Supreme Court case found a constitutional right to abortion.

“Well, we’re not going back. We’re not going back,” she said to applause.…’

Via Boston Globe

’British politicians and officials have reacted with outrage to the resignation of their ambassador to the U.S. amid a rift with President Trump over leaked diplomatic cables, with many accusing the President of bullying their government.

The leak on July 7 of classified memos written by Kim Darroch to the U.K. government, in which he called the Trump Administration “inept” and “incompetent”, triggered a slew of personal insults from the President. Trump tweeted that Darroch was “a very stupid guy” and “a pompous fool.” He also disinvited him from an official dinner July 8, saying “We will no longer deal with him.”…’

Via Time

’The continuous accumulation of carbon dioxide in the planet’s oceans—which shows no sign of stopping due to humanity’s relentless consumption of fossil fuels—is likely to trigger a chemical reaction in Earth’s carbon cycle similar to those which happened just before mass extinction events, according to a new study.

MIT geophysics professor Daniel Rothman released new data on Monday showing that carbon levels today could be fast approaching a tipping point threshold that could trigger extreme ocean acidification similar to the kind that contributed to the Permian–Triassic mass extinction that occurred about 250 million years ago. 

Rothman’s new research comes two years after he predicted that a mass extinction event could take place at the end of this century. Since 2017, he has been working to understand how life on Earth might be wiped out due to increased carbon in the oceans.

“If we push the Earth system too far, then it takes over and determines its own response—past that point there will be little we can do about it.”
—Timothy Lenton, University of Exeter
Rothman created a model in which he simulated adding carbon dioxide to oceans, finding that when the gas was added to an already-stable marine environment, only temporary acidification occurred.

When he continuously pumped carbon into the oceans, however, as humans have been doing at greater and greater levels since the late 18th century, the ocean model eventually reached a threshold which triggered what MIT called “a cascade of chemical feedbacks,” or “excitation,” causing extreme acidification and worsening the warming effects of the originally-added carbon.…’

Via Common Dreams News

’The U.S. president has reportedly asked aides to find a way to weaken the dollar in an effort to boost the economy ahead of the 2020 election. The strength of the greenback has proven a headache for Trump, who’s made reducing the U.S. trade deficit a priority.…’

Via CNBC

 

 

’If you could restore activity to individual post-mortem brain cells, he reasoned to himself, what was to stop you from restoring activity to entire slices of post-mortem brain?…’

Via The New York Times

’The Stromboli volcano erupted on Wednesday and one lucky videographer was able to capture the moment.…’

Via Digg

 

 

 

Via Instagram (thanks, Marcia)

’News continues to worsen for marine mammals on the west coast. In addition to terrible domoic acid poisoning for seals and sea lions, whales are passing away at a record rate.…’

Via Boing Boing

Books by authors like Neil Gaiman and Gabriel García Márquez have been dismissed as too difficult to adapt. With Netflix offering both time and cash, is that true anymore?:

’It’s remarkable how many “unfilmable” books have been, well, filmed. With this week’s news that Neil Gaiman’s sprawling comic-book series The Sandman has been acquired by Netflix, fans have been excited, if tentative, no doubt remembering the long history of attempts to adapt the 75-issue story that was often dismissed as too difficult to get on screen.

As Gaiman once said: “I’d rather see no Sandman movie made than a bad Sandman movie.” Multiple scripts were written throughout the 1990s, there was a TV show in 2010, a film in 2013, an attempted rewrite of that film in 2016 – but none of this means that Netflix’s latest literary project is doomed to fail.

For “unfilmable” is often just code for “we tried and it didn’t happen”, an excuse for all the films trapped in development hell, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Bradley Cooper was once lined up to play a hunky Lucifer), and the long-awaited adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. “Unfilmable” can also mean “we tried and did a terrible job”. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is not unfilmable, but the 2017 take starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey might make you wish it was. Or the maddening works of William Faulkner, most recently put on screen by actor James Franco, who took time off from insisting he can write novels to ruin someone else’s by directing, adapting and starring in As I Lay Dying in 2013 and The Sound and the Fury in 2015. Or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: three films and three terrible decisions came in 2016 when reviews for part one (“sits there flapping on screen like a bludgeoned seal” declared Rolling Stone) did nothing to dissuade the great minds behind it, who turned their backs on the free-market to supply two sequels in the face of no demand. (Part two: “The film’s excruciating unwatchability transcends politics”; part three: “Cut-rate to the point of incoherence.”) And unfilmable can even apply to books that prove to be brilliant on camera: the new TV show of Joseph Heller’s Catch–22, the Wachowski sisters’ take on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2015 film of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.…’

Via The Guardian

’Scientists in Florida have detected the largest seaweed bloom in the world. Extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the African coast, the unusually large bloom is threatening marine life and coastal regions, with the researchers warning it’s likely a sign of things to come.

New research published today in Science describes the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB)—the largest single expanse of macroalgae in the world. The enormous belt of seaweed is composed of floating, photosynthetic brown algae, called Sargassum. The authors of the new study, led by Chuanmin Hu from the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida, attributed the unusually large bloom to both human-causes and natural processes, saying such “recurrent blooms may become the new normal.”…’

Via Gizmodo

’Researchers at the Center for Quantum Nanoscience (QNS) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) at Ewha Womans University have made a major scientific breakthrough by performing the world’s smallest magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In an international collaboration with colleagues from the U.S., QNS scientists used their new technique to visualize the magnetic field of single atoms.…’

Via Phys.org

Pictures of Other Dictators and Their Boy Toy Tanks:

Via The New York Review of Books

Here’s a better idea:

’We’ve seen it happen too many times. A person calls 911 to report a disturbance next door or out in the street. The police show up. Things go awry and the police shoot the person at the center of the disturbance — and it turns out that the person had a mental health issue.

According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a Virginia-based nonprofit working to improve access to mental health treatment, at least one in four people killed by the police in the US has a serious mental health problem. Stories of these police killings have been in the headlines over the past few months, with anguished family members decrying officers’ violence toward their loved ones.

There’s got to be a better way to handle 911 calls.

Some people say there is: Instead of sending police to deal with non-criminal emergencies, why not send mental health experts?…’

Via Vox

Via 3 Quarks Daily

Tam Hunt, UC Santa Barbara:

’How can you know that any animal, other human beings, or anything that seems conscious, isn’t just faking it? Does it enjoy an internal subjective experience, complete with sensations and emotions like hunger, joy, or sadness? After all, the only consciousness you can know with certainty is your own. Everything else is inference. The nature of consciousness makes it by necessity a wholly private affair.

These questions are more than philosophical. As intelligent digital assistants, self-driving cars and other robots start to proliferate, are these AIs actually conscious or just seem like it? Or what about patients in comas – how can doctors know with any certainty what kind of consciousness is or is not present, and prescribe treatment accordingly?

In my work, often with with psychologist Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, we’re developing a framework for thinking about the many different ways to possibly test for the presence of consciousness.…’

Via The Conversation

’Whether or not fish feel pain has been debated for years. But the balance of evidence says yes. Now the question is, what do we do about it?…’

Via Smithsonian

’Physicist Eugene Paul Wigner predicted more than 80 years ago that hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, could turn into an electricity-conducting solid metal at the right temperature and pressure. Scientists have spent decades since attempting to synthesize this material—and may have finally done so.

A team of researchers in France has posted a paper on the arXiv physics preprint server describing their observation of metallic hydrogen under pressures greater than those inside Earth’s core. Several times, other researchers have claimed to discover this phase of matter, claims that are generally met with varying levels of skepticism. But some experts think that this newest claim could be the real deal.

Metallic hydrogen is exactly what it sounds like—a state of the element hydrogen where it has the properties of a metal. The substance should “indisputably” exist, according to the new paper, thanks to something called quantum confinement: restrict electrons’ motion enough, and the electronic and optical properties of the material change thanks to the rules of quantum mechanics. At high enough pressures, any insulator should become a conductive metal, according to the paper; oxygen becomes a metal at 100 GPa, around a million times the pressure of Earth’s air at sea level, for example.

The discovery of metallic hydrogen would be exciting for a few reasons. Of course, it would prove experimentally that the material existed. It might transmit electricity without heating up, meaning it would be a superconductor, perhaps even a room-temperature superconductor. That’s another long-sought goal of physicists and could revolutionize electronics. Further, such a metal might fill the centers of massive planets like Jupiter, so being able to create it here on Earth could help us learn more about those planets.…’

Via Gizmodo