Currently, scientists have only limited ways to create tissue for testing pharmaceutical therapies, such as using lab-grown samples or by relying on traditional 3D bioprinting, per Popular Science’s Andrew Paul. However, cultivating organs in a lab is complex and expensive—and printing them is currently slow and prone to errors, such as positioning cells incorrectly.
“Incorrect cell positioning is a big reason most 3D bioprinters fail to produce structures that accurately represent human tissue,” David Collins, head of the Collins BioMicrosystems Laboratory at the University of Melbourne and a co-author of the study, says in a statement.
“But with our new approach,” Collins and two other researchers write in an article for Pursuit, “not only can we position cells with precision, we can also fabricate at a scale of single cells.”
First, renewable energy. Sometime in recent years, we crossed the point where solar energy became the cheapest form of energy. Cheaper than oil, gas and any other non-renewable energy source. This is quite incredible as it means that research has been driving down the cost per watt incredibly fast. In fact, the price of solar panels measured in watts per dollar follows Moore’s Law, meaning that the cost of solar energy is halved every 18 months.
We also have wind power, tidal power and several other forms of renewable energy. The cost per watt for all of them is dropping rapidly as well. Although humans naturally think linearly instead of exponentially, the cost of these renewable sources of energy is dropping exponentially toward zero due to technological innovation and economies of scale.
The main challenge is of course energy storage. Progress in battery technology is rapid but slower than for generation. But also here, the rapid electrification of vehicles is driving economies of scale that are driving down the cost of storage as well. Already now, battery systems are becoming available for stationary purposes that often have had a previous life as part of a vehicle. This allows for high cost-effectiveness as the economic life of batteries is extended significantly.
This brings us to the second main development in energy: nuclear is on the way back. New generations of nuclear reactors are available that are truly safe, much smaller and much more cost-effective than the traditional reactors. According to the research I’ve seen, nuclear actually has the lowest environmental impact of all energy sources, including solar and wind, and the lowest number of attributable deaths. Using nuclear to fill the gaps in energy generation by renewables and to address the storage challenges will be critical if we want to stop using fossil fuels.
Kind of amusing that MAGA think they can make everyone spend more on energy in perpetuity just because that hate Greens.
The results show that supply-chain variables directly accounted for 79 percent of the rise in underlying inflation in 2021. These effects then continued into 2022, with ongoing supply issues directly explaining 60 percent of the rise in inflation that year. The rest was more than accounted for by spillovers from the 2021 supply-driven inflation. All of which leaves only a modest role for demand-driven effects like the covid relief package.
Why did these effects play out over such a long time? At the start of the pandemic, Americans shifted their spending from services (like travel, eating out and going to the movies) to goods (like computer hardware and exercise equipment) — just as a snarled supply chain caused those goods to be in short supply. This caused prices to spike.
…is having too much money to spend. Tax consumption.
[…] the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.
With Ligeti, however, tragedy is never far away. In his Poème Symphonique (Symphonic Poem) from 1962, 100 mechanical metronomes are set out on the stage in the formation of a symphony orchestra, each one solemnly wound up and set in motion at different speeds by a performer wearing formal evening dress. Ligeti was inspired at the time by the Fluxus movement and it is often billed as a “fun” piece. When the metronomes are let loose, the aural effect of this weird, mechanical orchestra is like rain on a roof or swarms of loud insects. As they gradually wind down, intriguing patterns, rhythms and ticking melodies emerge. By the end, there are only three, then two and then just one solitary metronome – the survivor – ticking away on the stage until it too falls silent. I always find it devastating.
The pandemic shut down much of the global economy in 2020. When the world reopened, consumers found many products running short. Demand outstripped supply, the classic formula for inflation.
“The COVID shutdowns were the biggest, sharpest economic collapse in modern history,” said Joshua Gotbaum, scholar in residence at the center-left Brookings Institution. “And it was followed by the biggest inflation in 40 years.”
In March 2021, President Biden signed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, directing payments of up to $1,400 to pandemic-stricken Americans. The Trump administration had already sent two rounds of stimulus checks, in March and December of 2020.
Some economists pilloried Biden at the time, saying the third round of stimulus relief was unnecessary, excessive and likely to overheat the economy. Many more economists say that now.
Most readers can’t distinguish classic works by poets such as William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson from imitations generated by artificial intelligence. And when asked which they prefer, they often chose the AI poetry.
“Over 78 per cent of our participants gave higher ratings on average to AI-generated poems than to human-written poems by famous poets,” says Brian Porter at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
The Democratic Party was in a structurally bad position in 2024. Very bad. As the political scientist John Sides, who has been called “probably the leading authority on campaigns in the United States,” recently pointed out on our podcast, The Lede, “If you were imagining a year in which the Democrats were fighting into some headwinds in terms of [President Joe] Biden’s low popularity, the shadow that inflation may continue to cast in people’s assessments of the economy, it’s easy to see this as a year that would be a comfortable win for the Republicans.” The election was a toss-up only because of Donald Trump’s huge negatives, Sides noted.
Two years after the eruption of Mount St Helens, local gophers were sent to the area in what must have been quite a confusing day trip, even if the animals were not aware of the news. The gophers were placed in enclosed areas for the experiment and spent their day digging around in the pumice.
Despite only spending one day in the area, the impact they had was remarkable. Six years after their trip, there were over 40,000 plants thriving where the gophers had gotten to work, while the surrounding land remained, for the most part, barren. Studying the area over 40 years later, the team found they had left one hell of a legacy.
“Plots with historic gopher activity harbored more diverse bacterial and fungal communities than the surrounding old-growth forests,” the team explained. “We also found more diverse fungal communities in these long-term lupine gopher plots than in forests that were historically clearcut, prior to the 1980 eruption, nearby at Bear Meadow.”
Despite the lessons of this history, a new round of doomsayers are ready to write the Democrats’ obituary in 2024. According to one journalist, “Democrats are a lost party. Come January, they’ll have scant power in the federal government, and shriveling clout in the courts and states.”
The Washington Post reports, “More broadly, many Democrats view their defeat – with Trump making inroads with Latinos, first-time voters, and lower- and middle-income households, according to preliminary exit polls – not just as a series of tactical campaign blunders, but as evidence of a shattered party with a brand in shambles.”
I believe – as the author of a book about how political parties respond to election defeats, and as the example of 2004 shows – it’s easy to overstate the enduring impact of an election. Unforeseen events arise that alter the political landscape in unpredictable ways. The party in power often makes mistakes. New candidates emerge to energize and inspire the defeated party.
Zigging and zagging
The parties themselves are often incapable of figuring out the best way forward.
Following Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee commissioned what it called an “autopsy” to determine how the party should move forward. The report urged Republicans to become more inclusive to women, young people, Asians, Latinos, and gay Americans by softening their tone on immigration and social issues. The report was a thoughtful and thorough examination of the problems confronting the GOP.
Nonetheless, in 2016 Donald Trump took the party in exactly the opposite direction and ended up winning anyway.
I’d be the last person to try to predict the 2028 election, but there are a number of reasons to be skeptical of doom and gloom scenarios for the Democratic Party.
