Sublime

Best-practice steam engine technology could have saved the equivalent of a quarter of labor costs at most plants. Inefficient furnaces were oxidizing away huge amounts of metal. The Germans were pulling ahead in the use of overhead belt conveyors. It was absurdly wasteful to support 119 rail-shape standards. Better management of furnace linings,

his human flock, and it was thus right and natural for his subjects to obey him

Several times in his book, to substantiate one point or another, Darwin had referred to observations by Agassiz (on embryological succession, for example). But Darwin’s conclusions were “the sum of wrong-headedness,” Agassiz told his students. Darwin’s theory, Agassiz instructed the members of the Boston Society of Natural History, was “ingenious

Watson and Crick soon agreed that they would much rather hunt for DNA’s structure than for proteins’. For one thing, this might be easier to find. Proteins were massive and extremely complex. Crick’s advisor, Max Perutz, had been working on the structure of hemoglobin for fifteen years (and he’d work on it for another nine). If genes were proteins,

At present only a fraction of synthesized DNA is screened for potentially dangerous elements, but a global effort like the SecureDNA program to plug every synthesizer—benchtop at home or large and remote—into a centralized, secure, and encrypted system that can scan for pathogenic sequences is a great start. If people are printing potentially

In October 1947, Ben-Gurion, who was at the time head of the Jewish Agency, planned the formation of a committee to begin scientific military research (23). Yohanan Ratner was appointed director, E.D. Bergmann, G. Racah, and H. Heimann were members, and Aharon Katchalsky was secretary. The committee was responsible for controlling the budget and