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When Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before reporters on Jan. 7 to discuss the military operation that took place in Venezuela four days prior, he added another element of intrigue. He planned to meet with Danish officials this week to discuss purchasing the world’s largest non-continental island: Greenland.

…

When Rubio sits with Danish leaders for those first discussions, he will have entered upon diplomatic deliberations that stretch back to the Andrew Johnson administration. The first inquiry to purchase Greenland from the Danes came in 1868 from Secretary of State William Seward. America had recently purchased a tundra to its northwest: Alaska. That purchase in 1867 was initially mocked as “Seward’s Folly” by the press, but of course, after the discovery of gold and oil, Seward’s decision was more than justified. Nonetheless, Congress proved disinterested in the icy territory to its northwest.

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The driving ethos of academia, “publish or perish,” is fighting for its life.

The requirement that scholars constantly publish or face academic ruin has been considered the primary engine of scientific discovery for decades. But a growing movement of universities and researchers is trying to banish the practice to the archives, saying it has perverted the pursuit of knowledge and eroded the public’s trust in science.

Reformers at top universities in Europe and the U.S., including Cambridge, Sorbonne, and UC Berkeley, say this traditional system of advancement has led to an explosion in the growth of low-quality research, with little meaningful impact on academic fields or society. It has also sparked the spread of fraudulent research, as “paper mills” churn out fake articles for sale to academics seeking to pad their CVs.

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The relationship between energy consumption and national wealth is one of history’s most consistent patterns.

From coal-fired Britain to oil-powered America to today’s renewable energy leaders, access to abundant, affordable energy has been the foundation of economic prosperity. This correlation isn’t coincidental — it’s mechanical. Energy powers industry, transportation, communication, and virtually every productive activity that generates wealth.

The Industrial Revolution provides history’s clearest demonstration. Britain’s dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries directly correlated with its exploitation of coal reserves. Coal powered steam engines, which mechanized textile production, iron smelting, and transportation. Britain’s GDP per capita increased roughly 10-fold between 1750 and 1900, precisely tracking its exponential increase in coal consumption.

Nations without coal access — or unwilling to industrialize — remained agrarian and poor. The energy-wealth gap widened dramatically during this period, creating the modern developed-developing world divide. As an aside, this is how a nation with crooked teeth and zero cuisine could go about bullying and colonizing much of the world.

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Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) does a deep dive.

Just in case you are wondering.

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itchen work is all about proportions: sometimes the recipe is for four servings but you need six; maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g, so you have to adjust the other ingredients to match.

We could use an electronic calculator to figure out the rescaled amounts, but a slide rule makes it so much easier. The picture above was taken while following a recipe that called for 2 tsp of baking powder, and I wanted to make as large a batch as I could given the remaining 3.3 tsp of baking powder I had – a proportion of 2:3.3. You can see the slide rule is set to a proportion of 2:3.3 because – if you open the image in a new tab to make it larger – the number 2 on the C scale (on the bottom of the sliding middle part) is above 3.3 on the D scale just below.

But wait, the number 1 on the C scale is also just above 1.65 on the D scale. And 14 (or, if you will, 1.4, since with slide rules we ignore decimal points) on the C scale is above 23.1 on the D scale. Indeed. It’s set to those proportions too, because they are the same proportion. This is what makes the slide rule so powerful.

You can also do this in Excel, which is probably easier to find than a slide rule.

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Oversight Project President Mike Howell joined “The Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss a new force analysis conducted by The Oversight Project into the ICE-involved shooting of a woman in Minnesota.

“Our team of career law enforcement has carefully reviewed all available evidence and has cleared the officer,” the force analysis reads from the Oversight Project, which has more than 60 years of law enforcement experience on its team. “The ICE officer in question is not only innocent, but was entirely justified in his actions. We pray that the far-left comes to their senses and ends this violence.”

Renne Good, 37, was shot last week by an ICE officer after allegedly attempting to run him over in Minneapolis. Within hours, thousands of protestors gathered, and local lawmakers called for ICE to leave the city.

“Immediately after that event, every anti-American liberal wacko became a ‘use of force’ expert, right? You have a lot like Omar [Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.] and others saying this is murder and all the Democrats saying this is murder,” Howell said. “It’s just incredibly frustrating to watch that because of the effect it has on a population.”

Through these claims’ lawmakers, like Omar, have made, they have convinced this “mentally ill and unhinged population” that you can attempt to block a federal officer from doing their job. Omar did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.

“They’ve called for the violence against the ice officers,” Howell said. “And now they’re use of force experts too.”

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Let’s pretend you are a liberal living in a red state. If you feel aggrieved about the condition of the world and believe that conservatives are to blame, you can find a few like-minded souls, print up some signs covered in half-clever phrases, and go protest. In most cases, unless you chain yourself to a railing on the courthouse steps or attack the police, you will usually be ignored.

That’s democracy, a system under which 51% of the people can pee in the soup of the other 49% and the latter can’t do a thing about it—unless they have a Constitution like that of the U.S., which most countries don’t, the fools.

On the flip side, let’s pretend you are a conservative living in a deep blue state. If you don’t like the school policy, E.V. mandates, high electricity prices, or restrictive gun laws, and you dare to complain, not only will you not be ignored, but you might be harassed, shunned, or canceled. Your solution to the hard blue insanity is a four-letter word: move.

And that’s the difference between the Left and the Right. When the Left protests, the Right ignore them. When the Right protests, the Left responds with violence.

Now let’s pretend you live in a state with a blue megalopolis somewhere over the horizon, but you don’t want to move. Let’s also pretend you have lived in your community all of your life and have roots there — a job or a farm or a business that would be difficult to replicate somewhere else. Why should you suffer because once upon a midnight dreary, councilors to a long dead king or a few drunk senators drew a line on a map that ignored rational boundaries?

And once those boundaries are drawn, you’re stuck. Current boundaries can depend on everyone who has a vested interest in the status quo, and that’s enough. Absent something like the Civil War, which is the only way West Virginia could even hope to split off from Virginia, you’re stuck.

Ever since the founding of the republic, various groups and political movements have sought to redraw state boundaries. Some have been successful. Maine was originally part of Massachusetts, and the states of Kentucky and West Virginia were created from land originally part of Virginia. Other partitions to existing boundaries have been suggested, but none has been adopted. The reason is that the Constitution requires both the blessings of the partitioned state and the U.S. Congress.

Ask yourself a simple question. Why would any state governor or legislature willingly give up territory if it is not forced to? The serfs — excuse me, taxpayers — there help balance the state budget. How they feel about their lives or the number of potholes in their roads is secondary to ensuring that state budgets are met and the state programs, even those for non-citizens, continue.

Which is why discussions such as these are moot. Sure, I enjoy them as much as anybody, but NOTHING WILL EVER HAPPEN.

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If you went searching for the origins of meaning, you would probably start with brains, languages, and culture. You would not start with twenty enzymes whose name looks like the result of a keyboard being sat on. Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases—aaRSs, whose acronym is almost as unwieldy as their name—are widely regarded as the least glamorous molecules in biology. Students meet them once in a lecture and immediately move on with their lives.

Yet tucked into their protein folds is one of the deepest stories in biology. Long before organisms competed, before genomes condensed into chromosomes, this small community of molecules learned to coordinate. They did not evolve muscles or membranes. They evolved something stranger: a way of agreeing what patterns should mean.

Textbooks invite you to think of the genetic code as a neat chart—“AUG” means methionine, “UUU” means phenylalanine—as though the mapping were imprinted into the structure of matter. But a codon is simply a sequence of three nucleotides, a pattern. Nothing inherent in “AUG” connects it to methionine. On a comet or in a prebiotic pond, a triplet of bases has no meaning at all.

Meaning for codons appears only inside a working translation system, in which some entities reliably enforce patterns. In cells, those entities are aaRSs. An aaRS is the physical bridge that bonds a specific amino acid to its matching transfer RNA (tRNA). They do not think, but each of them enacts a rule. Together, they stabilise a correlation that matters. If DNA is a script, aaRSs are the actors.

The American Mind.

At the time of his death in the summer of 1987, James Burnham was falling into obscurity. Today, though, his work has surged rapidly in prominence on the Right, especially among some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. The reasons for this merit close attention.

At one time, Burnham was widely known as one of America’s sharpest Marxist intellectuals. His most recent biographer, intellectual historian David T. Byrne, ably captures the young Burnham’s contradictions in James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography: a professor of philosophy at New York University, unapologetically bourgeois and completely in his element at black-tie dinner parties, he could respectfully engage Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Yet he was also a militant Marxist and a trusted protégé of Leon Trotsky, whom he met and befriended in the 1930s. Distraught over the mass unemployment that was then sweeping across the United States, he admired the ferocious determination of the Marxist revolutionaries who promised an overthrow of America’s supposedly irredeemable capitalist system. Byrne writes that he “loved the idea of violent revolution.”

Yet Burnham was too intelligent and humane to remain impressed with the Soviets for very long. In 1940, his life took a decisive turn when he broke with Marxist-Leninism. Trotsky and his acolytes denounced him as a nefarious traitor. But Burnham would go on to compose what Byrne correctly identifies as “two of the most successful political works of the 1940s”: The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943). He became a public intellectual, appearing regularly in journals of the Left-liberal New York intelligentsia such as the Partisan Review. He was even recommended by George Kennan to help with anti-Communist efforts at the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Beef tallow, a fat that both cardiologists and the federal government told Americans to avoid for nearly half a century, has become an unexpected breakout star in the new federal dietary guidelines.

Folow the Science! Except when it changes … then Follow the New Science!

We’re from the government, and we wouldn’t steer you wrong. (Right….)

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The rendered beef fat has been quietly growing in popularity over the past few years among cooks who like how it crisped fries and doughnuts, beauty influencers who smooth it on their skin and others who favor it for high-fat diets or believe it’s healthier than oil pressed from seeds.

On Thanksgiving in 2024, it was thrust onto the national stage. A barefoot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled a turkey from a vat of boiling beef tallow and declared, “This is how we cook the MAHA way,” referring to the “Make America Healthy Again” movement he leads.

If Hindus don’t like it they can go back where they came from.

Read it.

Few arguments are as self-evident as this one: To learn about some place, you should travel there; traveling makes you learned, and the learned are well traveled. But as so often with truisms, this is not true. I claim that those who stay at home and occasionally read about foreign places on the internet are better informed than those who go somewhere far away on vacation.

To test this theory, try the following experiment. Ask someone who just spent 10 minutes on the Wikipedia article for Turkey for an interesting fact about the country, then ask someone who just came back from a 10 day vacation to Istanbul. Probably both will tell you something equally interesting, with the former being more generally relevant and the latter being more charming or topical. Of course this is wildly unfair—we should give the web surfer 10 days of reading time and ?100,000 to spend as well, but they simply don’t need it to win.

Back in the Good Old Day, when only about 10 percent of the population underwent any schooling, and those were upper class people (or people who wanted to become upper class people) who would have an outsized effect on what direction their society would take, education (in the sense that most humanities professors would use the term) was a good thing. Travel was considered part of that process, certainly in the age of the Grand Tour (which has degenerated into the modern Gap Year). But the advent of pervasive technology and the world that depended on it has converted ‘education’ per say into just a synonym for ‘training’, from which (arguably) more people have the ability to profit.

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Not content with launching a dizzying cascade of international conflicts, Trump just lobbed a nuke at the Fed.

While Trump’s vendetta against the Fed’s Lisa Cook set for a January showdown before the Supreme Court, the Trump admin dramatically raised the stakes on Sunday when the NYT first reported, and minutes later Fed Chair Jerome Powell confirmed that the US central bank had been served grand jury subpoenas from the Justice Department threatening a criminal indictment, in what Bloomberg said was a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on the Fed.

As the NYT first reported, the US attorney’s office in the District of Columbia has opened a criminal investigation into Powell over the central bank’s renovation of its Washington headquarters and whether the Fed Chair lied to Congress about the scope of the project. The inquiry, which includes an analysis of Powell’s public statements and an examination of spending records, was approved in November by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of President Trump who was appointed to run the office last year, the NYT sources said.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed US attorneys offices to look into cases of potential taxpayer abuse, said one of the NYT sources. In comments broadcast by NBC, Trump said that the DOJ’s Fed subpoenas “nothing to do with interest rates” and denied any involvement in the legal matter.

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It is generally acknowledged that the Baby Boom generation (of which I am a member) has been the most successful, socioeconomically speaking, in the history of this planet, and the prospects for the generations following to match or surpass us are not looking good. As a confirmation of the disparity, I recently read that while Baby Boomers make up approximately 20% of the current US population, they possess more than 50% of the wealth.

In speaking with others of my generation, I have come to realize that very few Baby Boomers have even a modicum of insight as to how that success happened. The typical pabulum that I get from my peers is that they got their education and worked hard, implying that it should be no different for the younger generations.

ZMan:

That is the nature of long relationships between people. Integral to Irish identity will be their relationship with the British. The same is true for Scots, Welsh and Cornish to one degree or another. You see it with blacks in America. Who they are depends on their relationship with Whites. We freed them from the perpetual squalor of Africa, and they will never forgive us for it.

Chris Zeeman is dead, but his spirit lives on.

The Telegraph (UK).

First came Russia’s “turtle tank”, a metal shed rumbling across the battlefield. Then Ukraine laughed at the so-called “hairy tank”, coated in long, wavy metal wires.

Now the “dandelion tank” has arrived.

Moscow’s latest crude design, which features flexible metal rods arranged in branched layers, attempts to shield the body of the tank from the ever-present threat of small kamikaze drones.

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There are competing narratives about Wednesday’s ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis. Some left-leaning corporate outlets focused on the fact that a woman was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a federal enforcement deportation operation, while other media, like the New York Post, highlighted that the woman, identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, was part of a left-wing group “Ice Watch” that mounted pressure campaigns on ICE agents on the ground.

Put aside all those viral videos on X; now Alpha News has obtained cellphone footage from what appears to be one of the ICE agents, and it provides a completely new perspective on what happened and why the ICE agent felt threatened enough to fire several shots at Good, killing the activist.

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Supermarket shelves have never been fuller, yet diets have become poorer. Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories alongside widespread micronutrient deficiency, ecological collapse and rural precarity.

This is the outcome of an agricultural model that equates food security with yield and mass production with nourishment. Sustained by billions in subsidies, industrial agriculture increasingly resembles a welfare state for agribusiness and retail giants whose profits depend on public money.

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While today’s ADP report was a solid rebound from the worst monthly report in years (even if it missed expectations due to a sudden plunge in California payrolls), the same could not be said for the JOLTS job opening report that followed less than two hours later, and which was another epic disaster: for the month of November (recall JOLTS lags the payrolls report by a month), the US had only 7.146 million job openings, a huge drop from the 7.670 million in October (which was conveniently revised lower to 7.449 million) and the lowest since September 2024.

Pretty sad when we have to depend on government jobs programs to give us positive employment numbers.

I know nothing, nothiiiinnnnggg….

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I already support it; you don’t have to sell it to me.

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Trump’s successful “special military operation” in Venezuela has prompted a flurry of reactions from governments across the world.

Venezuela’s strategic Russian and Chinese partners predictably condemned the US’ capture of President Nicolas Maduro while the US’ EU junior partner released a statement that lacked any criticism of the US but also didn’t endorse its actions either.

Therein lies the hypocrisy that was just exposed by the US’ “special military operation” in Venezuela since the EU would have certainly condemned Russia’s hypothetical capture of Zelensky in the harshest language possible.

Their implied excuse for these double standards towards the US’ capture of Maduro is that he’s illegitimate, but Russia now deems Zelensky to be illegitimate too, so third parties’ assessments of other leaders’ legitimacy is ultimately subjective and this leads to the reality that was just exposed.

At the end of the day, Great Powers like the US (which is arguably still a superpower even if it was hitherto in decline till Trump’s return to office) always pursue their perceived interests but cloak them in the language of international law or norms, which is more palatable for the global public.

Welcome to the Real World.sd

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In 1971, the world got its first look at an arcade machine, playing the little-remembered space combat game Computer Space. A year later, we got the all-time classic Pong in arcade machine form, and the first ever home console, the Magnavox Odyssey.

In the decades preceding, researchers at various institutes created several experimental games, which paved the way for these commercial successes that spawned a ~$189 billion industry. But the games were not the first to be created. The game widely considered the first true computer game, as it was made for entertainment purposes only, was created by American physicist William Higinbotham in 1958.

Pooh. In 1970 I was playing a space-invaders type game on the CATTC NTDS computers on the USS John F. Kennedy (CVA-67) in Norfolk, Virginia. Our DS personnel were bored, and so….

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The UK government’s digital ID push is escalating into outright dystopia, with ministers privately floating the idea of assigning digital identities to newborns right alongside their health records.

In the U.S., we call them Social Security Numbers. Don’t leave home without it….

The New Neo.

It seems this was the culmination of months – or more? – of planning, with signals and warnings for Maduro to go into exile or else. Now we see the “or else.”

There are also rumors that it’s all staged and Maduro cooperated. I definitely don’t think that’s the case.He almost certainly could have absconded to one of his sponsor states instead. They may not be paradises, but they’re better than US prison.

I’d have put the start of adulthood at 25, where the insurance actuaries do, but yeah.

The Economist.

Prickly pear line the perimeters of brick-red fields. In a few there are crops, but in many the cactus is the only hint of green. Small children, who should be in school, herd Zebu cattle along dusty tracks. Women sell bags of charcoal outside flimsy wooden huts by the main road. It is the tail end of the dry season in southern Madagascar; locals are yearning for rain. They are short of cash and often hungry. They are also lonely.

Many people think loneliness is a first-world problem: that rich societies become atomised as people chase wealth rather than social connections. But surveys suggest this is wrong. Western, individualistic societies, where more people live alone and religion is marginal, tend to be less lonely. People in poor countries are much likelier to be lonely. And the loneliest region of all, surprisingly, is Africa, the home of ubuntu, the sociable notion that “people are people through other people.” In 2024 over a quarter of Africans surveyed said they had felt lonely the previous day.

The War Zone.

A major U.S. military operation, which included airstrikes and the use of special operations forces, resulted in the capture of Maduro.

…

CBS reports that Delta Force captured Maduro. They were very likely at the center of the operation, but it’s possible, if not probable, that other elements, including those from FBI, were also directly present during the operation.

I’ve thought hat since I was an undergraduate and had to listen to a lecture by James Tobin.

Dan Wang.

One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.

It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive. The Communist Party speaks in the same two registers as the tech titans. The po-faced men on the Politburo tend to make extraordinarily bland speeches, laced occasionally with a murderous warning against those who cross the party’s interests. How funny is the big guy? We can take a look at an official list of Xi Jinping’s jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. These wisecracks include the following: “On an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Xi quipped that the true measure of water cleanliness is whether the mayor would dare to swim in the water.” Or try this reminiscence that Xi offered on bad air quality: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Yes, such a humorous fellow is the general secretary.

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee.

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One cannot help but run into people who clearly fantasize about the following scenario: All the great geniuses of the past sit down and take some sort of culture-invariant IQ test, and then we get to line up the numbers and compare them, finally settling once and for all who was the greatest genius of humanity.

In this fantasy they imagine Voltaire in his study, finishing his fortieth cup of coffee (he used to drink around 50 a day), sharpening a #2 pencil at his desk, getting ready to fill in all those little bubbles. Is it A? Or D? Hmm, hasn’t been A in a while. . .

How the great geniuses of the past would do filling in these ovals perennially fascinates. Einstein would get a 160! Darwin a 180! Aristotle, 190! And while speculating about the numerical ranking of the long dead, IQ enthusiasts will refer quite regularly to IQs of 150 or even 200, presumably thinking that intelligence can actually be tracked at those numbers.

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Wireless technology and data being stored in “The Cloud” may lead you to think information is pinged around the globe via satellites. Only a very small portion is. Instant communication, like texts, phone calls and websites, is made possible by copper and fibre-optic undersea cables which carry data between countries.

97% of the internet travels through these cables. All the undersea fibre-optic cables across the world span approximately 1.2 million km (750,000 miles): combined they could wrap around Earth 30 times!

Subsea fibre-optic cables are critical infrastructures that support our global networks. They are essential for our communication, commerce, government and military functions because they securely transport messages and information. The importance of undersea cables means control or disruption of them can have political and economic implications.

In peace, they are a prime target for espionage.

In war, they are a prime target for destruction.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

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I recently overheard a conversation in a River Falls, Wisconsin, coffee shop that has stayed with me.

A person was venting to a friend about being forced to use AI—likely Microsoft Copilot—within a work spreadsheet. After several rounds of frustrating trial and error, she eventually gave up and finished the task manually. In the end, the “shortcut” had cost her more time than if she’d just done the work herself from the start.

To many, this looks like failure, but I see it as a green flag. It is a sign that the system is working exactly as it should: by keeping a human in the loop, much like a pilot in a cockpit. Being frustrated is proof, to me, they’re effectively using this amazing tool in the real world.

But if we want to phase out human-in-the-loop systems for AGI, there is one critical problem we must solve first—at least, if we care about society. Beyond the technical hurdles, the real challenge is taxes.

Governments are funded by people, not software. Our schools, roads, and healthcare systems rely on the taxation of human income. When a worker is removed from the equation, that tax base vanishes with them. At scale, the “efficiency” of AI creates a massive shortfall in public revenue. The results are predictable: crumbling infrastructure, reduced services, and an even heavier tax burden on the few workers who remain.

If you think that governments won’t figure out a way to tax them anyway, then you’re delusional.

Watch it.

Hint: Not much. Unfortunately, the people upon whom we are depending for information about this program are the same people who are responsible for the flying train wreck called F-35. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the U.S. to actually produce a plane that will beat the Russians and Chinese.

Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).

Of course, the nternet makes some political activity easier and cheaper. But it does so for everyone. And if everybody speaks, who will be listened to?

And that underlines the chief problem with ‘democracy’ as a concept and especially with the way people (who ought to know better) deal with it.

The major premise of democracy is that every person’s vote is of the same value. There are various philosophical justifications for this, but the simple fact is that none of us is willing to concede that somebody else’s vote ought to be of more value than ours. The problem with that approach is that every one of us knows people whose vote, we are convinced, is in fact of less value than ours. This inherent contradiction between philosophical theory and actual reality is the root of every conflict over what ‘democracy really means’.

The cognitive dissonace between those two mental states is what causes most of the trouble in the modern world. It’s entertaining at times, but rarely useful.

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Researchers at UC San Francisco used the gene editing technology CRISPR to turn ordinary white fat cells into “beige” fat cells, which voraciously consume calories to make heat. The work is funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH).

Then, they implanted them near tumors the way plastic surgeons inject fat from one part of the body to plump up another. The fat cells scarfed up all the nutrients, starving most of the tumor cells to death. The approach even worked when the fat cells were implanted in mice far from the sites of their tumors.

The approach’s reliance on a common procedure could speed its use as a new form of cellular therapy.

New York Times Magazine, a Voice of the Crust.

It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where we live, and suddenly couldn’t get the word out. The culprit was the “r.” For the previous few months, I had been trying to perfect the French “r.” My failure to do so was the last marker of my Americanness, and I could only do it if I concentrated, moving the sound backward in my mouth and exhaling at the same time. Now I was saying something in English — “reheat” or “rehash” — and the “r” was refusing to come forward. The word felt like a piece of dough stuck in my throat.

Other changes began to push into my speech. I realized that when my husband spoke to me in English, I would answer him in French. My mother called, and I heard myself speaking with a French accent. Drafts of my articles were returned with an unusual number of comments from editors. Then I told a friend about a spill at the grocery store, which — the words “conveyor belt” vanishing midsentence — took place on a “supermarket treadmill.” Even back home in New York, I found my mouth puckered into the fish lips that allow for the particularly French sounds of “u,” rather than broadened into the long “ay” sounds that punctuate English.

My mother is American, and my father is French; they split up when I was about 3 months old. I grew up speaking one language exclusively with one half of my family in New York and the other language with the other in France. It’s a standard of academic literature on bilingual people that different languages bring out different aspects of the self. But these were not two different personalities but two separate lives. In one version, I was living with my mom on the Upper West Side and walking up Columbus Avenue to get to school. In the other, I was foraging for mushrooms in Alsatian forests or writing plays with my cousins and later three half-siblings, who at the time didn’t understand a word of English. The experience of either language was entirely distinct, as if I had been given two scripts with mirroring supportive casts. In each a parent, grandparents, aunts and uncles; in each, a language, a home, a Madeleine.

It’s astonishing how many people who write for publication these days are the children of divorce.

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The most complex engineering of human cell lines ever has been achieved by scientists, revealing that our genomes are more resilient to significant structural changes than was previously thought.

Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Imperial College London, Harvard University in the US and their collaborators used CRISPR prime editing to create multiple versions of human genomes in cell lines, each with different structural changes. Using genome sequencing, they were able to analyze the genetic effects of these structural variations on cell survival.

The research, published in Science, shows that as long as essential genes remain intact, our genomes can tolerate significant structural changes, including large deletions of the genetic code. The work opens the door to studying and predicting the role of structural variation in disease.

I happen to love fruitcake, myself. Don’t dare eat it, of course….

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In 2022, Dr Dawn Wright, a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University, said humans are ‘irrevocably’ changing the planet.

When it comes to exploring the deep sea, unless you suffer from thalassophobia (the fear of large bodies of water), it can be quite fascinating.

But Dr Wright’s strange discovery proved we needed to understand our planet better to preserve it.

Enviro-Nazis won’t be happy until humans become extinct.

“Sitting in sediment at the bottom of the ocean at the Earth’s deepest point: a beer bottle. It had traveled more than 6.7 miles to the darkest depths of the Pacific, label still intact,” Dr Wright explained.

“This discarded trash had managed to reach an unsullied part of our world before we actually did – a symbol of how deeply and irrevocably humans are affecting the natural world.”

Taking to X, she also reinforced her belief that we need to protect the planet better.

I swear, she must think that humans are some alien species come here just to discard sandwich wrappers or something.

For what it’s worth, it looks like a Heineken.

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So hit the gym! Your kids will thank you later.

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Travel agents are the go-to example of an industry killed by the internet. And the numbers are brutal: US agents peaked at around 124,000 in 2000 and collapsed to under 40,000 by 2020 – a 70% drop. Retail locations fell from 34,000 to 13,000[1]. But that collapse took a decade. The ones who survived did it by going upmarket. I keep thinking about this when I look at what’s coming for software engineering – except this time, I don’t think we get ten years.