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THE GLASS AGE WHERE GLASS BENDS AND GLASS BOUNCES THE MODERN WORLD RUNS ON GLASS, A MATERIAL THAT HAS BECOME ESSENTIAL TO HUMANITY. BY JAY BENNETT PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER PAYNE ON A BRISK MARCH AFTERNOON, Kazuhiko Akiba and a colleague stood in the courtyard of the Chiba Kogaku glass factory in Japan, ready to unveil their latest creation. A forklift wheeled out a large clay pot about the size of a hot tub and set it down before them. Dressed in the company’s sky blue uniforms, the men put ...

WIRED FAST FORWARD I Tested a Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away WIRED experimented with a new form of voice assistant that can browse the web and perform tasks online. Siri, Alexa, and other virtual helpers could soon be much more powerful. The most famous virtual valets around today—Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant—are a lot less impressive than the latest AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard. When the fruits of the recent generative AI boom get properly integrated in...

WE’VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE COMPUTERS The mouse is sorely missed. By Ian Bogosh JANUARY 24, 2024 Once upon a time, long before smartphones or even laptops were ubiquitous, the computer mouse was new, and it was thrilling. The 1984 Macintosh wasn’t the first machine to come with one, but it was the first to popularize the gizmo for ordinary people. Proper use of the mouse was not intuitive. Many people had a hard time moving and clicking at the same time, and “double-clicking” was a skill one had...

EMAIL SEARCH IS A COMEDY OF ERRORS My flight receipt is in there somewhere, right? DECEMBER 13, 2023 Before a flight, I get a Pavlovian stress reaction—not from the prospect of hurtling at 30,000 feet in a concrete tube, but from my email inbox. Airline tickets sometimes get lost in an email abyss, requiring a few stressful minutes of frenzied searching when it’s time to check in. “I can’t find my confirmation for this flight in my email but I know I bought it 😭,” goes one tweet. “Gmail search...

The quantum mind With anaesthetics and brain organoids, we are finally testing whether quantum effects can explain consciousness. We may have misunderstood this long-derided idea, says George Musser  Two weeks before the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, I flew to Tucson, Arizona, and knocked on the door of a suburban ranch-style house. I was there to visit Stuart Hameroff, anaesthesiologist and co-inventor, with Nobel prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, of a radical proposal for how conscio...

Antidepressants Don’t Work the Way Many People Think The most commonly prescribed medications for depression are somewhat effective — but not because they correct a “chemical imbalance.” By Dana G. Smith The New York Times Nov. 8, 2022 Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, rates of depression and anxiety soared, and many Americans turned to antidepressant medication to help them cope. Even before the emergence of Covid, 1 in 8 American adults was taking an antidepressant drug. According...

I stole this from some website, in honour of the dead scoundrel. 1. Give yourself time to mature as a writer. “Well, I’m 34 now. If I don’t make it by the time I’m 60, I’m just going to give myself 10 more years.” 2. Let your creativity find whatever outlet it needs. “Now print my occasionals out by hand and point them up with drawings (like any other madman). Sometimes I just throw the stories away and hang the drawings up in the bathroom (sometimes on the roller).” 3. Treat the submiss...

The secret diary of a Ukrainian soldier: on the counter-offensive As troops blitz through Russian lines, they see the trauma of occupation and the relief at freedom A Ukrainian soldier stands in the clearing of a forest holding his RPG weapon Sep 6th 2023 This is the third part of a diary written by a Ukrainian paratrooper. When war broke out in 2022, he was a civilian. He volunteered to fight and, after cursory training, found himself on the front lines, in charge of a platoon of equally unpre...

Psychotherapy Integration: An Assimilative, Psychodynamic Approach Cross posted from here. George Stricker Jerold R. Gold Original citation: Stricker, G., & Gold, J.R. (1996). Psychotherapy integration: An assimilative, psychodynamic approach. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 3, 47-58. Abstract Psychotherapy integration is an approach to treatment that goes beyond any single theory or set of techniques. The history of the psychotherapy integration movement is described, along...

Can A.I. Treat Mental Illness? New computer systems aim to peer inside our heads—and to help us fix what they find there. By Dhruv Khullar February 27, 2023 There aren’t enough therapists to go around—but there are plenty of smartphones. In the nineteen-sixties, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at M.I.T., created a computer program called Eliza. It was designed to simulate Rogerian therapy, in which the patient directs the conversation and the therapist often repeats her language back t...

Behind the Scenes, McKinsey Guided Companies at the Center of the Opioid Crisis The consulting firm offered clients “in-depth experience in narcotics,” from poppy fields to pills more powerful than Purdue’s OxyContin. By Chris Hamby and Michael Forsythe The reporters pored over a trove of more than 100,000 documents to investigate McKinsey’s unknown work for opioid makers. June 29, 2022 14 MIN READ In patches of rural Appalachia and the Rust Belt, the health authorities were sounding alarms ...

Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Volume 138, Issue 5 p. 401-408 Review Refining the psychiatric syndrome of anti-N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor encephalitis N. Warren, D. Siskind, C. O'Gorman First published: 10 July 2018 Abstract Objective To review the psychiatric symptoms of anti-N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor encephalitis, in an attempt to differentiate the presentation from a primary psychiatric disorder. Method A systematic literature review of PubMed and EMBASE of all published c...

IDEAS The Second Elizabethan Age Has Ended For seven decades, Elizabeth II gave Britain a constant, even as her kingdom was transformed. SEPTEMBER 08, 2022 Suzanne Plunkett / WPA Pool / Getty The first Elizabethan era ended on March 24, 1603, when 69-year-old Queen Elizabeth I died in her sleep at Richmond Palace. “This morning, about three o’clock, her Majesty departed from this life, mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree,” the lawyer John Manningham wrote in his diary. E...

BOOKS Where Our Sense of Self Comes From How did a group of rebellious German playwrights, poets, and writers in the late 18th century revolutionize the way we think of ourselves and the world? Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Getty SEPTEMBER 11, 2022, 9:36 AM ET We accept as self-evident that each of us is free to think and form our own opinions, that we have autonomous selves. Western societies and institutions are founded on this spirit of individual freedom and self-determination. But it is be...

SCIENCE Starting a Revolution Isn’t Enough CRISPR is changing the world—but it can do more. Erik Carter / The Atlantic SEPTEMBER 12, 2022, 8 AM ET Two years ago, I was working on my laptop in an airport lounge in Newark, New Jersey, when I glanced up and saw a couple walking with their two boys. The younger boy slowly made his way on crutches, displaying the telltale signs of a hereditary disease called muscular dystrophy. Generally manifesting in childhood, the disease steadily robs those who ...

IDEAS ‘The Cure for Burnout Is Not Self-Care’ Amelia Nagoski discusses quiet quitting. SEPTEMBER 13, 2022 Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty SEPTEMBER 13, 2022 About the author: Caroline Mimbs Nyce is a staff writer at The Atlantic. The first thing you need to know about quiet quitting is that it’s not actually quitting. Instead, the quitter keeps their job and chooses to do only the bare minimum rather than go above and beyond. The second thing you need to know is that the term is brand-new, s...

What Do We Really Know About Mental Illness?  Rachel Aviv’s unflinching and personal new book, Strangers to Ourselves, rejects pat answers in favor of penetrating questions. WHEN RACHEL AVIV was six years old, she stopped eating. Shortly after, she was hospitalized with anorexia. Her doctors were flummoxed. They’d never seen a child so young develop the eating disorder, yet there she was. Was it a response to her parents’ divorce? Diet culture? Innate asceticism? The episode remained mysterious...

THEATRE REVIEWS In Stratford Festival’s 1939, Shakespeare oppresses and liberates students at a residential school Title: 1939 Written by: Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan Director: Jani Lauzon Actors: Richard Comeau, Sarah Dodd, Wahsonti:io Kirby, Tara Sky Company: Stratford Festival Venue: Studio Theatre City: Stratford, Ont. Year: Runs to Oct. 29, 2022 COVID-19 measures: Reduced-capacity performances available William Shakespeare’s continued pre-eminence in this culture (and so many others ar...

Psychotic Disorders 31 August 2022 Abstract: Psychotic symptoms are a cross-sectional dimension that competes with multiple diagnostic categories and not necessarily identify schizophrenia; all cases of schizophrenia represent a psychotic disorder but not vice versa, as psychotic symptoms are a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Specific criteria are needed to diagnose schizophrenia which is characterized not only by the presence of persisting positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms b...

Statistics Indigenous people make up 4.9% of the population in Canada: over 1.6 million (Statistics Canada, 2018).Suicide and self-inflicted injuries are the leading causes of death for First Nations youth and adults up to 44 years of age (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2016).For First Nations, the suicide rate is three times the national average. For Métis, the suicide rate is twice the national average and for Inuit, the suicide rate is nine times the national rate (Kumar & Tjepkema, 201...

ELAINE K. HOWLEY - Time If you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes, know that you’ve got plenty of company. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) reports that in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, 37.3 million adults in the U.S.—about 11.3% of the population—had the chronic condition, and that number continues to grow. Type 1 diabetes develops when the body isn’t able to produce insulin, and Type 2 occurs when the body doesn’t use insulin correctly. Type 2 is the most common ...

Worst backslide in global vaccinations ‘in a generation,’ U.N. says The coronavirus pandemic coincided with the worst backslide in global vaccination coverage in a generation, according to new data from the United Nations. This came despite a historic effort to develop and distribute billions of coronavirus vaccines during the pandemic. The new data, released late Thursday by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, showed that average global childhood coverage for vaccines developed for 11 ke...

The BA.5 Wave Is What COVID Normal Looks Like The endless churn of variants may not stop anytime soon, unless we do something about it. JULY 14, 2022 After two-plus years of erupting into distinguishable peaks, the American coronavirus-case curve has a new topography: a long, never-ending plateau. Waves are now so frequent that they’re colliding and uplifting like tectonic plates, the valleys between them filling with virological rubble. With cases quite high and still drastically undercounted...

In his great elegy for the psychologist Sigmund Freud, W. H. Auden wrote that Freud was “no more a person / Now but a whole climate of opinion.” The 20th century saw a fair number of writers and thinkers whose life and works seemed to follow the great narrative of their time and who, in turn, seemed to shape the age through which they lived. Among poets writing in English, however, we can say this only of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Auden himself. To read Auden’s Complete Works therefore is no...

The Conversation Iran’s nuclear program is a major topic in President Joe Biden’s meetings this week with leaders in the Middle East. The most challenging part of producing nuclear weapons is making the material that fuels them, and Iran is known to have produced uranium that is near-weapons grade. The Conversation asked Brandeis University professor Gary Samore, who worked on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation in the U.S. government for over 20 years, to explain why uranium enrichment ...

Russian missiles strike Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, killing 23 including three children; 45 nations pledge to coordinate evidence of war crimes in Ukraine See all our Russia-Ukraine war coverage 00:56 UTC Friday, 15 July 2022 At least 23 people, including three children, were killed and up to 66 others wounded after Russian missiles struck civilian buildings and a cultural centre in the city of Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine. The attack on Vinnytsia, far from the war’s front lines, occurred mid-...

Where Are Genitals Represented in the Brain? The homunculus of textbook fame still does not take into account the relevant locations in the cerebral cortex that process touch for the sex organs PARACELSUS, THE GERMAN-SWISS PHYSICIAN and alchemist, asserted in the 16th century that he knew how to create a “little man”—or homunculus—by placing human semen in a sealed vessel packed with horse manure that was then nurtured with blood to gestate. The recipe was no more useful than the ones for turnin...

THE NEW AGE OF FUSION FOR DECADES, THE TECHNOLOGY TO DEVELOP CLEAN, SAFE FUSION POWER HAS REMAINED TANTALISINGLY OUT OF REACH. NOW, THOUGH, A NEW BREED OF START-UPS COULD HAVE CRACKED IT AT LAST. WILL WE FINALLY BE ABLE TO WAVE GOODBYE TO FOSSIL FUELS? Flick through any collection of popular science magazines from the last 50 years and the chances are that you will encounter a feature about nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the process of joining lightweight atoms together to release energy; ...

Canadians are delusional captives to a broken health care system Canadians are delusional captives to a broken health care system. We cling to the status quo with grim complacency, comforting ourselves with the notion that it could be worse. We could wait 18 hours in a hospital emergency room and then be charged for seeing the on-call resident. We could wait nine months to see a specialist and then have to fork over a substantial co-pay. We could languish in a hospital hallway for days, waiting...

WIRED As Covid swept ICUs, doctors prescribed antibiotics to ward off secondary infections. Now bacteria have evolved resistance—but hospitals are fighting back. The desperate need to save the lives of Covid patients during the pandemic’s first waves, coupled with shortages of hospital personnel and protective equipment, drove a shocking reversal in progress against deadly superbugs, according to a new analysis by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report, released July 12,...