Amid a flurry of conflicting information over the weekend, details of Donald Trump’s progress and prognosis remain worryingly unclear. How will this brush with the virus change the campaign, or the president? Asia’s migrant workers had difficult, precarious lives that the pandemic made even worse; only now are matters improving. And the perplexing preponderance of Albanian pop stars.
We're exploring the 12 statewide ballot propositions in our Prop Fest series. This episode tackles Prop 16, which asks voters to overturn a ban on the use of affirmative action by public institutions. The ban was originally put in place by California voters in 1996.
Reported by Katie Orr. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz and Rob Speight. Additional support from Erika Aguilar, Jessica Placzek, Kyana Moghadam, Paul Lancour, Bianca Hernandez, Ethan Lindsey, Vinnee Tong and Michelle Wiley.
This week, Diana gets married, joins her new family and meets the press. Digressions include Judy Garland, Edward Cullen and the AITA subreddit. Unfortunately, this episode includes detailed descriptions of suicide attempts and eating disorders.
The most important Jobs Report of the year is really America’s economic report card. Etsy shares have nearly tripled this year because it’s figured out something crafty that Amazon hasn’t. And Mission Produce’s IPO reminds us more of oil than avocado.
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From who historically wins the awards, to how they portray the process of science and collaboration, host Maddie Sofia and NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce discuss the many problems with Nobel Prizes in science.
“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we. Scientists have wrestled with the problem through the ages, and yet they still don’t agree on what kind of answer they are even looking for. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, physicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life’s origins.
In Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things (Basic Books, 2020), England presents, for the first time for a general audience, his groundbreaking theory of dissipative adaptation. Described simply, in any disordered system, matter clumps together and breaks apart mostly randomly. But some of the clumps that form momentarily dissipate more energy, and these structures are less likely to fall apart. Over time, they become better at both withstanding the disorder surrounding them and creating copies of themselves. From this deep insight, grounded in thermodynamics, England isolates the emergence of the first life-like behaviors. As he shows, rather than being a stroke of miraculous luck, life-like fine-tuning can emerge in matter under a variety of fairly generic experimental conditions.
In this fascinating account, England walks readers through a range of different concepts in physics and biology to sketch out his novel description of how life might emerge. One of the beauties of his approach is the way it matches recognizably with the messy complexity of the everyday world, from the way sleet slides down a windshield in cold rain to how salt and pepper grains dance together in a pan of heated oil.
But that is not the whole story. While the difference between being alive or not may seem as obvious as night and day, physics does not in fact make a clear distinction. That, as England argues, is a matter of perspective, and throughout the book he describes what he sees as the remarkable synergy between the account of life’s origins given by physics, and the account given in the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, England reckons with what, if anything, science can really tell us about life’s great mysteries.
Full of scientific and philosophical insight, Every Life is on Fire is a singular book from one of the most exciting physicists of his generation.
Jeremy England is senior director in artificial intelligence at GlaxoSmithKline, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, and is the former Thomas D. & Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a Hertz Fellow, and was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Rising Stars in Science. He lives in Brookline, MA.
Galina Limorenko is a post-doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch
Andy calls up Rajiv Shah, who is leading an initiative in the US to fix our pandemic response. Rajiv is president of the Rockefeller Foundation and former head of USAID, where he led the response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa.
Keep up with Andy on Twitter @ASlavitt and Instagram @andyslavitt.
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Livinguard masks have the potential to deactivate COVID-19 based on the testing they have conducted from leading universities such as the University of Arizona and the Free University in Berlin, Germany. Go to shop.livinguard.com and use the code BUBBLE10 for 10% off.
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Are you hoping to vote in the 2020 election? Are you confused about how to request an absentee ballot in your state? This website can help you with that: https://www.betterknowaballot.com/
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