Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
"The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained
... See moreAgriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrialized farms with... See more
Sari Azout • Notes on Scale + Quality
Walking the edge between humanity and nature, scientific curiosity guides the river of inquiry while also pushing against the banks to expect the unexpected.
Perry Zurn • Curious Minds: The Power of Connection
Both in urban and psychological space, Schulman witnessed “the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones,” a process leading to a kind of social monoculture.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
The body of an octopus is remarkable enough. The common octopus, O. vulgaris, has eight armlike appendages, three hearts pumping blue blood, an ink-based defense mechanism, and highly developed jet propulsion. An octopus can change size, shape, texture, and color at will, and all at the same time if necessary.
Anil Seth • Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
This “prey-switching” behavior is common to generalist predators and turns out to be ecologically stabilizing for the whole food web. As generalists turn their attention to different prey species, the species that were getting depleted get a chance to recover, reducing the risk of extinction.
Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)
So Dunbar proposed a novel idea: the size of a species’ brain determines the optimal size of their social groups. Maintaining relationships, argued Dunbar, requires brain power. More relationships require more neurons. Extrapolating his straight line from primate brains to human brains, he found that the optimal human group size, if this hypothesis
... See moreSafi Bahcall • Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
Brenner was in a thoughtful mood, drinking sherry before dinner at King’s College. When he began working with Crick, less than two decades before, molecular biology did not even have a name. Two decades later, in the 1990s, scientists worldwide would undertake the mapping of the entire human genome: perhaps 20,000 genes, 3 billion base pairs. What
... See moreJames Gleick • The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
group of E. coli will sprout a new kind of flagellum, one that’s far longer than its ordinary tail.