Here Come the Beetles

The nearly 100-year-old Wailua Municipal Golf Course is home to more than 580 coconut trees. It’s also one of Kaua‘i’s most visible sites for coconut rhinoceros beetle damage.

Located makai of Kūhiō Highway, trees that would normally have full, verdant leaves are dull and have V-shaped cuts in their fronds. Some are bare and look more like matchsticks.

It’s not for lack of trying to mitigate the invasive pest. The trees’ crowns have been sprayed with a pesticide twice, and the trunks were injected twice with a systemic pesticide for longer term protection.

The Kaua‘i Department of Parks & Recreation maintains that even though the trees still look damaged, the treatments are working. Staff have collected 1,679 fallen, dead adult beetles over the last three years.

The most recent treatment, a systemic pesticide that travels through the trees’ vascular systems, was done in January 2025. While crown sprays kill the beetle on contact, systemic pesticides require the beetles to feed from the trees to die. The bugs eat the trees’ hearts — where new fronds develop — so it can take months for foliage damage to appear.

 

“The general public sees these trees that are damaged and thinks, ‘Oh my goodness they’re getting whacked,’ but in actuality, we need them to get whacked to kill (the beetles),” said Patrick Porter, county parks director.

But with the beetles continuing to spread around the island, the county is increasingly turning its attention to green waste, mulch piles and other breeding sites, where beetles spend four to six months growing from eggs to adults. A single adult female beetle can lay up to 140 eggs in her lifetime.

“The reality is if you don’t go after the larvae and you don’t go after your mulch cycle, you’re just pissing in the wind,” said Kaua‘i County Council member Fern Holland. “Because there are just going to be hundreds and hundreds of them hatching all the time, and you can’t go after all of them.” (...)

Last May, the County Council allocated $100,000 for invasive species and another $100,000 for CRB. It was the first time the county designated funds specifically to address the beetle.

Niki Kunioka-Volz, economic development specialist with the Kaua‘i Office of Economic Development, said none of that funding has been spent yet. They’re considering using it to help get the breeding site at the Wailua golf course under control, such as by purchasing an air curtain burner, a fan-powered incinerator of sorts to dispose of green waste. The burner could also be a tool for the broader community. (...)

In 2024, the county received $200,000 from the state Department of Agriculture. That money was used for a CRB outreach campaign, training CRB detection dogs and distributing deterrent materials. State funding was also expected to help the county purchase a curtain burner, but that plan fell through.

Earlier this month, state legislators threatened to cut invasive species funding from the newly expanded Hawai‘i Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity over its slow progress in curbing threats such as coconut rhinoceros beetles.

“I’d like to see the pressure put on them to release the funds to the counties,” Holland said.

by Noelle Fujii-Oride, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Kevin Fujii/David Croxford/Civil Beat
[ed. Tough, ugly, able to leap sleeping bureaucrats in a single bound. See also: As Palm-Killing Beetles Spread On Big Island, State Action Is Slow (CB):]

***

It has been nearly two years since the first rhinoceros coconut beetle was discovered on Hawaiʻi island. And yet, despite ongoing concern by residents, the state is moving slowly in devising its response.

Seven months ago, the state’s Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity said it would begin working to stop the spread of CRB, within and beyond North Kona. But a meeting of the agency’s board Tuesday marked the first concrete step to do so by regulators. Now, as agriculture department staff move to streamline and resolve apparent issues in the proposed regulations, it will likely take until March for the board to consider implementing them.

Many of the attendees at Tuesday’s meeting, including residents of other islands, said that the state is lagging on its pledge to regulate the movement of agricultural materials while the destructive pest is spreading and killing both the island’s coconut palms and its endangered, endemic loulu palms.

The First Two Years

Before making landfall on Hawaiʻi island in 2023, the beetles spent almost a decade in apparent confinement on Oʻahu.

At first they appeared to be isolated to Waikoloa. Then, in March of last year, larvae and beetles were discovered at Kona International Airport and the state-owned, 179-acre Keāhole Agriculture Park, before spreading further.

In response, the county implemented a voluntary order to discourage the movement of potentially-infested live plants, mulch and green waste, and other landscaping materials such as compost from the area in June 2025. The order was described as “a precursor to a mandatory compliance structure” to be implemented by the state, according to a press release from the time. (...)

The board spent about an hour considering the petition and hearing testimony. And while many who testified made recommendations about actual protocol that might be put into place, the board merely voted to move forward in the process. So it’s not yet clear whether it will adopt the Big Island petitioner’s proposed rules or create its own.

Why Even the Healthiest People Hit a Wall at Age 70

Are we currently determining how much of aging is lifestyle changes and interventions and how much of it is basically your genetic destiny?

 

[Transcript:] We are constantly being bombarded with health and lifestyle advice at the moment. I feel like I cannot open my social media feeds without seeing adverts for supplements or diet plans or exercise regimes. And I think that this really is a distraction from the big goals of longevity science. This is a really difficult needle to thread when it comes to talking about this stuff because I'm a huge advocate for public health. I think if we could help people eat better, if we could help 'em do more exercise, if we could help 'em quit smoking, this would have enormous effects on our health, on our economies all around the world. But this sort of micro-optimization, these three-hour long health podcasts that people are digesting on a daily basis these days, I think we're really majoring in the minors. We're trying to absolutely eke out every last single thing when it comes to living healthily. And I think the problem is that there are real limits to what we can do with health advice. 

So for example, there was a study that came out recently that was all over my social media feeds. And the headline was that by eating the best possible diet, you can double your chance of aging healthily. But I decided to dig into the results table. The healthiest diet was something called the Alternative Healthy Eating Index or AHEI. And even the people who are sticking most closely to this best diet, according to this study, the top 20% of adherence to the AHEI, only 13.6% of them made it to 70 years old without any chronic diseases. That means that over 85% of the people sticking to the best diet, according to this study, got to the age of 70 with at least something wrong with them. And that shows us that optimizing diet only has so far it can go. 

We're not talking about immortality or living to 120 here. If you wanna be 70 years old and in good enough health to play with your grandkids, I cannot guarantee that you can do that no matter how good your diet is. And that's why we need longevity medicine to help keep people healthier for longer. And actually, I think even this idea of 120, 150-year-old lifespans, you know, immortality even as a word that's often thrown around, I think the main thing we're trying to do is get people to 80, 90 years old in good health. 'cause we already know that most people alive today, when they reach that age, are unfortunately gonna be frail. They're probably gonna be suffering from two or three or four different diseases simultaneously. And what we wanna do is try and keep people healthier for longer. And by doing that, they probably will live longer but kind of as a side effect. 

If you look at photographs of people from the past, they often look older than people in the present day who are the same age. And part of these are these terrible fashion choices that people made in the past. And we can look back and, you know, understand the mistakes they've made with hindsight. But part of that actually is aging biology. I think the fact that people can be different biological ages at the same chronological ages, something that's really quite intuitive. All of us know people who've waltzed into their 60s looking great and, you know, basically as fit as someone in their 40s or 50s. And we know similar people who have also gone into their 60s, but they're looking haggard, they've got multiple different diseases, they're already struggling through life. 

In the last decade, scientists have come up with various measures of what's called biological age as distinct from chronological age. So your chronological age is just how many candles there are on your birthday cake. And obviously, you know, most of us are familiar with that. But the idea of biological age is to look inside your cells, look inside your body, and work out how old you are on a biological level. Now we aren't perfect at doing this yet, but we do have a variety of different measures. We can use blood tests, we can use what are called epigenetic tests, or we can do things that are far more sort of basic and functional, how strong your grip is declines with age. And by comparing the value of something like your grip strength to an average person of a given age, we can assign you a biological age value. And I think the ones that are getting the most buzz at the moment within the scientific community, but also all around the internet, are these epigenetic age tests. 

So the way that this works is that you'll take a blood test or a saliva sample and scientists will measure something about your epigenome. So the genome is your DNA, it's the instruction manual of life. And the epigenome is a layer of chemistry that sits on top of your genome. If you think of your DNA is that instruction manual, then the epigenome is the notes in the margin. It's the little sticky notes that have been stuck on the side and they tell the cell which DNA to use at which particular time. And we know that there are changes to this epigenome as you get older. And so by measuring the changes in the epigenome, you can assign someone a biological age. 

At the moment, these epigene clocks are a really great research tool. They're really deepening our understanding of biological aging in the lab. I think the problem with these tests as applied to individuals is we don't know enough about exactly what they're telling us. We don't know what these individual changes in epigenetic marks mean. We know they're correlated with age, but what we don't know is if they're causally related. And in particular, we don't know if you intervene, if you make a change in your lifestyle, if you start taking a certain supplement and that reduces your biological age. We don't know whether that actually means you're gonna dilate or whether it means you're gonna stay healthier for longer or whether you've done something that's kind of adjacent to that. And so we need to do more research to understand if we can causally impact these epigenetic measures. (...)

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are gonna be hugely, hugely important in understanding the biology of aging. Because the body is such a complicated system that in order to really understand it, we're gonna need these vast computer models to try and decode the data for us. The challenge is that what machine learning can do at the moment is it can identify correlations. So it can identify things that are associated with aging, but it can't necessarily tell us what's causing something else. So for example, in the case of these epigenetic clocks, the parts of the epigenome that change with age have been identified because they correlate. But what we don't know is if you intervene in any one of these individual epigenetic marks, if you move it in the direction of something younger, does that actually make people healthier? And so what we need to do is more experiments where we try and work out if we can intervene in these epigenetic, in these biological clocks, can we make people live healthier for longer? 

Over the last 10 or 15 years, scientists have really started to understand the fundamental underlying biology of the aging process. And they broke this down into 12 what are called hallmarks of aging. One of those hallmarks is the accumulation of senescent cells. Now senescent is just a biological technical term for old. These are cells that accumulate in all of our bodies as the years go by. And scientists have noticed that these cells seem to drive a range of different diseases as we get older. And so the idea was what if we could remove these cells and leave the rest of the cells of the body intact? Could that slow down or even partially reverse the aging process? And scientists identified drugs called it senolytic drugs. 

These are drugs that kill those senescent cells and they tried them out in mice and they do indeed effectively make the mice biologically younger. So if you give mice a course of senolytic drugs, it removes those senescent cells from their body. And firstly, it makes them live a bit longer. That's a good thing if you're slowing down the aging process, the basic thing you want to see. But it's not dragging out that period of frailty at the end of life. It's keeping the mice healthier for longer so they get less cancer, they get less heart disease, they get fewer cataracts. The mice are also less frail. They basically send the mice to a tiny mouse-scale gym in these experiments. And the mice that have been given the drugs, they can run further and faster on the mousey treadmills that they try them out on. 

It also seems to reverse some of the cognitive effects that come along with aging. So if you put an older mouse in a maze, it's often a bit anxious, doesn't really want to explore. Whereas a younger mouse is desperate to, you know, run around and find the cheese or whatever it is mice doing in mazes. And by giving them these senolytic drugs, you can unlock some of that youthful curiosity. And finally, these mice just look great. You do not need to be an expert mouse biologist to see which one has had the pills and which one hasn't. They've got thicker fur. They've got plumper skin. They've got brighter eyes. They've got less fat on their bodies. And what this shows us is that by targeting the fundamental processes of aging, by identifying something like senescent cells that drives a whole range of age-related problems, we can hit much perhaps even all of the aging process with a single treatment. 

Senescent cells are, of course, only one of these 12 hallmarks of aging. And I think in order to both understand and treat the aging process, we're potentially gonna only treatments for many, perhaps even all of those hallmarks. There's never gonna be a single magic pill that can just make you live forever. Aging is much, much more complicated than that. But by understanding this relatively short list of underlying processes, maybe we can come up with 12, 20 different treatments that can have a really big effect on how long we live. 

One of the most exciting ideas in longevity science at the moment is what's called cellular reprogramming. I sometimes describe this as a treatment that has fallen through a wormhole from the future. This is the idea that we can reset the biological clock inside of our cells. And the idea first came about in the mid 2000s because there was a scientist called Shinya Yamanaka who was trying to find out how to turn regular adult body cells all the way back to the very beginning of their biological existence. And Yamanaka and his team were able to identify four genes that you could insert into a cell and turn back that biological clock. 

Now, he was interested in this from the point of view of creating stem cells, a cell that can create any other kind of cell in the body, which we might be able to use for tissue repair in future. But scientists also noticed, as well as turning back the developmental clock on these cells, it also turns back the aging clock, cells that are given these four Yamanaka factors actually are biologically younger than cells that haven't had the treatment. And so what scientists decided to do was insert these Yamanaka factor genes into mice. 

Now if you do this in a naive way, so there's genes active all the time, it's actually very bad news for the mice, unfortunately. because these stem cells, although they're very powerful in terms of what kind of cell they can become, they are useless at being a liver cell or being a heart cell. And so the mice very quickly died of organ failure. But if you activate these genes only transiently, and the way that scientists did it the first time successfully was essentially to activate them at weekends. So they produced these genes in such a way that they could be activated with the drug and they gave the mice the drug for two days of the week, and then gave them five days off so the Yamanaka factors were then suppressed. They found that this was enough to turn back the biological clock in those cells, but without turning back the developmental clock and turn them into these stem cells. And that meant the mice stayed a little bit healthier. We now know that they can live a little bit longer with this treatment too.

Now the real challenge is that this is a gene therapy treatment. It involves delivering four different genes to every single cell in your body. The question is can we, with our puny 2020s biotechnology, make this into a viable treatment, a pill even, that we can actually use in human beings? I really think this idea of cellular reprogramming appeals to a particular tech billionaire sort of mentality. The idea that we can go in and edit the code of life and reprogram our biological age, it's a hugely powerful concept. And if this works, the fact that you can turn back the biological clock all the way to zero, this really is a very, very cool idea. And that's what's led various different billionaires from the Bay Area to invest huge, huge amounts of money in this. 

Altos Labs is the biggest so-called startup in this space. And I wouldn't really call it a startup 'cause it's got funding of $3 billion from amongst other people, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Now I'm very excited about this because I think $3 billion is enough to have a good go and see if we can turn this into a viable human treatment. My only concern is that epigenetics is only one of those hallmarks of aging. And so it might be the case that we solve aging inside our individual cells, but we leave other parts of the aging process intact. (...)

Probably the quickest short-term wins in longevity science are going to be repurposed existing drugs. And the reason for this is because we spent many, many years developing these drugs. We understand how they work in humans. We understand a bit about their safety profile. And because these molecules already exist, we've just tried them out in mice, in, you know, various organisms in the lab and found that a subset of them do indeed slow down the aging process. The first trial of a longevity drug that was proposed in humans was for a drug called metformin, which is a pre-existing drug that we prescribe actually for diabetes in this case, and has some indications that it might slow down the aging process in people. (...)

I think one of the ones that's got the most buzz around it at the moment is a drug called rapamycin. This is a drug that's been given for organ transplants. It's sometimes used to coat stents, which these little things that you stick in the arteries around your heart to expand them if you've got a contraction of those arteries that's restricting the blood supply. But we also know from experiments in the lab that can make all kinds of different organisms live longer, everything from single-cell yeast, to worms, to flies, to mice, to marmoset, which are primates. They're very, very evolutionarily close to us as one of the latest results. 

Rapamycin has this really incredible story. It was first isolated in bacteria from a soil sample from Easter Island, which is known as Rapa Nui in the local Polynesians. That's where the drug gets its name. And when it was first isolated, it was discovered to be antifungal. It could stop fungal cells from growing. So that was what we thought we'd use it for initially. But when the scientists started playing around with in the lab, they realized it didn't just stop fungal cells from growing. It also stopped many other kinds of cells as well, things like up to and including human cells. And so the slight disadvantage was that if you used it as an antifungal agent, it would also stop your immune cells from being able to divide, which is obviously be a bit of a sort of counterintuitive way to try and treat a fungal disease. So scientists decided to use it as an immune suppressant. It can stop your immune system from going haywire when you get an organ transplant, for example, and rejecting that new organ. 

It is also developed as an anti-cancer drug. So if it can stop cells dividing or cancer as cells dividing out of control. But the way that rapamycin works is it targets a fundamental central component of cellular metabolism. And we noticed that that seemed to be very, very important in the aging process. And so by tamping it down by less than you would do in a patient where you're trying to suppress their immune system, you can actually rather than stopping the cell dividing entirely, you can make it enter a state where it's much more efficient in its use of resources. It starts this process called autophagy, which is Greek for self-eating, autophagy. And that means it consumes old damaged proteins, and then recycles them into fresh new ones. And that actually is a critical process in slowing down aging, biologically speaking. And in 2009, we found out for the first time that by giving it to mice late in life, you could actually extend their remaining lifespan. They live by 10 or 15% longer. And this was a really incredible result. 

This was the first time a drug had been shown to slow down aging in mammals. And accordingly, scientists have become very, very excited about it. And we've now tried it in loads of different contexts and loads of different animals and loads of different organisms at loads of different times in life. You can even wait until very late in a mouse lifespan to give it rapamycin and you still see most of that same lifespan extension effect. And that's fantastic news potentially for us humans because not all of us, unfortunately, can start taking a drug from birth 'cause most of us were born quite a long time ago. But rapamycin still works even if you give it to mice who are the equivalent of 60 or 70 years old in human terms. And that means that for those of us who are already aged a little bit, Rapamycin could still help us potentially. And there are already biohackers out there trying this out for themselves, hopefully with the help of a doctor to make sure that they're doing everything as safely as possible to try and extend their healthy life. And so the question is: should we do a human trial of rapamycin to find out if it can slow down the aging process in people as well? (...)

We've already got dozens of ideas in the lab for ways to slow down, maybe even reverse the age of things like mice and cells in a dish. And that means we've got a lot of shots on goal. I think it'll be wildly unlucky if none of the things that slow down aging in the lab actually translate to human beings. That doesn't mean that most of them will work, probably most of them won't, but we only need one or two of them to succeed and really make a big difference. And I think a great example of this is GLP-1 drugs, the ozempics, the things that are allowing people to suddenly lose a huge amount of weight. We've been looking for decades for these weight loss drugs, and now we finally found them. It's shown that these breakthroughs are possible, they can come out of left field. And all we need to do in some cases is a human trial to find out if these drugs actually work in people. 

And what that means is that, you know, the average person on planet earth is under the age of 40. They've probably got 40 or 50 years of life expectancy left depending on the country that they live in. And that's an awful lot of time for science to happen. And if then in the next 5 or 10 years, we do put funding toward these human trials, we might have those first longevity drugs that might make you live one or two or five years longer. And that gives scientists even more time to develop the next treatment. And if we think about some more advanced treatments, not just drugs, things like stem cell therapy or gene therapy, those things can sound pretty sci-fi. But actually, we know that these things are already being deployed in hospitals and clinics around the world. They're being deployed for specific serious diseases, for example, where we know that a single gene can be a problem and we can go in and fix that gene and give a child a much better chance at a long, healthy life. 

But as we learn how these technologies work in the context of these serious diseases, we're gonna learn how to make them effective. And most importantly, we're gonna learn how to make them safe. And so we could imagine doing longevity gene edits in human beings, perhaps not in the next five years, but I think it'll be foolish to bet against it happening in the next 20 years, for example. 

by Andrew Steele, The Big Think |  Read more:

Image: Yamanka factors via:

[ed. See also: Researchers Are Using A.I. to Decode the Human Genome (NYT).]

Why I Fell For Transcendental Meditation

We might consider yogic flying the crowning oddity of transcendental meditation (TM), a practice that promises higher states of consciousness as well as a happier, calmer, more productive daily life. The basics of TM are not particularly out there – a 15- to 20-minute meditation, twice a day, in which you silently repeat a mantra to yourself. But for those who want to take things to the next level, the “TM-Sidhi program” taught by the Maharishi Foundation (which runs the Peace Palace), allows meditators to go even deeper – culminating in what I witness in the men’s flying hall. And this is only the first of three stages of yogic flying (though it is the only one for which there is evidence of anyone managing to achieve). In the second stage, you briefly hover above the ground; in the third, you actually… move through the air.

It is a most curious ending to my three-night retreat at the Peace Palace, which I am undertaking having started to practise TM two months before.

 
I turn up to my first session at the Foundation’s London headquarters with a collection of items I have been asked to bring along – two pieces of sweet fruit, some freshly cut flowers, a new white handkerchief – and press the buzzer on which I find a little label: “TM – a simple effortless effective meditation for everyone.”

A bald Russian man opens the door, looking more finance bro than guru in smart jeans, a pink shirt and a black gilet. His name is Pavel Khokhlachev and he will be my teacher. An interpreter, he is also “the voice of Putin on Sky News”, he tells me. He brings me down into the basement, past a little shrine to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the man who brought TM to the west in the late 1950s (both the meditation technique itself and the yogic flying are ancient Vedic practices), and into a room containing a couple of chairs and an altar covered in a gold-trimmed white cloth. Above us looms a large picture of the Hindu monk Brahmananda Saraswati, more commonly referred to as Guru Dev, who was Maharishi’s teacher.

Khokhlachev begins by performing a little ceremony, which I am told to keep confidential, and I am given my mantra, which I am also told I must never share with anyone. The mantra is a Sanskrit sound that does not convey any meaning. It is allocated to me using a system that is kept secret but which also comes from India’s ancient Vedic religion. The idea is that repeating it will allow some reprieve from one’s mental chatter – Khokhlachev likens it to giving a puppy something to chew on so that it doesn’t chew up your furniture. We sit down on the chairs and I do my first meditation. Unlike in some other meditation practices, in TM you don’t need to sit up poker straight or in lotus position to practise; you just need to be comfortable. If you have an itch, you can scratch it. If you want to cross your legs around the other way, you can. Even if you find yourself thinking, that’s also fine; thoughts aren’t the enemy. Just “innocently return to the mantra”, Khokhlachev tells me. The idea is that it should all feel easy, simple, effortless. If it doesn’t, you’re doing something wrong.

 
Like many people, I was drawn to TM by David Lynch, the filmmaker and artist who would have turned 80 on 15 January (the one-year anniversary of his death is five days after that). Lynch practised TM for more than 50 years and devoted much of the last two decades of his life to promoting it, setting up his own foundation in 2005 to fund its teaching in schools and to at-risk populations around the world. 

Lynch’s passion notwithstanding, I have always suspected TM to be a bit of a cult. Even the fact that it’s abbreviated to TM has always felt a bit off to me, somehow. I was quite ready for this piece to be an exposé of what a scam the whole thing is.

 
But while I can’t say I immediately feel the same level of bliss that some describe during my first meditation, something does happen that takes me by surprise. Suddenly, it’s like I’ve fallen down a hole – a very nice, quiet, relaxing hole. And the strangest thing is that it feels somehow… familiar. It’s as if I have fallen asleep, and yet I am wide awake. Some people have described it as “falling awake”. I describe my experience to Khokhlachev, and he tells me it sounds like I transcended. I leave the centre feeling most pleased with myself.

 
Over the four days of consecutive sessions – the introductory course is priced between £295 and £725 depending on one’s earnings – we continue to discuss and refine my TM technique. After my first successful session, I find it harder to access the transcendent for the next few days but I’m told not to worry. “We should come to the meditation with no anticipation and no expectation,” Khokhlachev advises. “Don’t chase the transcendence, because then it’s not innocent.”

How is this form of meditation really different from any other? Bob Roth, CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, who has taught TM to Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Jerry Seinfeld and Sting, as well as many thousands of others, tells me that there are three different meditation techniques that all have measurably different effects on the brain. There’s focused attention, such as when you concentrate on your breath, which produces gamma waves such as you might see if you were solving a complex maths problem. Open monitoring, in which you observe your thoughts coming and going in a non-judgmental way, which generates calming theta brain waves, such as we experience just before we dream. And then there’s this one, “automatic self-transcending”, which produces “alpha coherence” – increased and synchronised activity across the brain. Scientists call this “restful alertness”; some TM practitioners call it “pure consciousness”. The idea is that it has a twofold effect: the lovely feeling of transcendence while you are in it, and then the extra energy, clarity and creativity you are left with. When you have a really good meditation, the time really flies.

 
Research has demonstrated that transcendental meditation specifically has strong positive effects on a whole range of conditions. In 2013, the American Heart Association formally recognised TM as a complementary technique for reducing blood pressure and cardiovascular risk, and noted its association with a reduced risk of heart attack, stroke and death in patients with heart disease. Other studies have shown TM significantly reduces anxiety and stress more effectively than other relaxation or meditation techniques, while long-term practitioners have been found to have increased cognitive clarity, memory and emotional resilience. 

After about a month of practising TM, I start finding it easier to “transcend” – I begin to reach that place most times that I do it (although not every time). I’m struck by how much more focused I am for several hours after meditating, and how much energy it gives me – meditating in the morning sets me up for the day; meditating in the afternoon feels a bit like having a nap, but more powerful and without the grogginess. It isn’t just a vague feeling, either: according to my Fitbit, during meditation my heart rate tends to drop a beat below its lowest rate during my nightly sleep.

 
I was not expecting any of this to happen. I have meditated before and found it helpful for reducing anxiety and putting things into perspective. But I haven’t ever found it transformational in this way. I have also always found doing it a bit of an effort – something I should be doing – whereas now, most of the time, I relish the chance to do it. Lynch said that he never missed a single one of his twice-daily sessions and, inspired by him, I have so far kept a clean record, though admittedly not always for the full 20 minutes. I would suggest, tentatively, that TM might be a gamechanger.

by Jemima Kelly, Financial Times/AT | Read more:
Image: Getty

[ed. I took up TM in the early 70s (but just an occasional practioner now). Everything described here is exactly how the TM experience feels. Highly recommended.]

Target on Tongass

GRAVINA ISLAND, Tongass National Forest — Rain drips from the tips of branches of a grandmother cedar, growing for centuries. In verdant moss amid hip-high sword ferns, the bones of a salmon gleam, picked clean by feasting wildlife. “Gronk,” intones a raven, from somewhere high overhead in the forest canopy.

This is the Tongass National Forest, in Southeast Alaska. At nearly 17 million acres, it is the largest national forest in our country by far — and its wildest. These public lands are home to more grizzly bears, more wolves, more whales, more wild salmon than any other national forest. More calving glaciers; shining mountains and fjords; and pristine beaches, where intact ancient forests meet a black-green sea. These wonders drew more than 3 million visitors from around the nation and the world to Alaska from May 2024 through April 2025 — a record.

In the forest, looming Sitka spruce, western hemlock and cedars quill a lush understory of salal and huckleberry. Life grows upon life, with hanks of moss and lichen swaddling trunks and branches. Nothing really dies here, it just transforms into new life. Fallen logs are furred with tree seedlings, as a new generation rises. After they spawn, salmon die — and transubstantiate into the bodies of ravens, bears and wolves they nourish.

Strewn across thousands of islands, and comprising most of Southeast Alaska, the Tongass was designated a national forest by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. The trees here were coveted by the timber industry even before Alaska was a state, and industrial logging began in 1947 with construction of two pulp mills, each with a federally subsidized 50-year contract for public timber.

While the Tongass is big, only about 33% of it is forested in old and second growth, and clear-cuts disproportionately targeted the most productive areas with the biggest trees. In North Prince of Wales Island, notes Kate Glover, senior attorney for EarthJustice in Juneau, more than 77% of the original contiguous old growth was cut.

The logging boom that began in the 1950s is long since bust; the last pulp mill in Alaska shut in 1997. But now, the prospect of greatly increased cutting is once again ramping up.

President Donald Trump wants to revoke a federal rule that could potentially open more than 9 million acres of the Tongass to logging, including about 2.5 million acres of productive old growth. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, widely known as the Roadless Rule, was adopted by President Bill Clinton in 2001 to protect the wildest public lands in our national forests, after an extensive public process. Trump revoked it during his first term of office. President Joe Biden reinstated it. Now Trump has announced plans to rescind it again.

“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule,” said Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, in a June announcement. “This move opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests … to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land.”

The Roadless Rule is one of the most important federal policies many people have never heard of, protecting nearly 45 million acres in national forests all over the country from logging, mining and other industrial development. In Washington state, the rule preserves about 2 million acres of national forest — magnificent redoubts of old growth and wildlife, such as the Dark Divide in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

The rule is popular. After Rollins announced the proposed rollback, more than 500,000 people posted comments defending it in just 21 days during an initial public comment period. Another public comment period will open in the spring.

At stake in the Tongass is one of the last, largest coastal temperate rainforests in the world. (...)

The Tongass also is home to more productive old-growth trees (older than 150 years) than any other national forest. And the biggest trees store the most carbon.

In a world in which wilderness is rapidly disappearing, “the best is right here,” DellaSala says. “If you punch in roads and log it, you lose it. You flip the system to a degraded state.

“What happens right now is what will make the difference in the Tongass.”

“Who knew this could happen?”

Revoking the Roadless Rule isn’t the only threat to the Tongass. It’s also being clear-cut, chunk by chunk, through land transfers, swaps and intergovernmental agreements affecting more than 88,000 acres just since 2014.

Joshua Wright bends low over a stump, counting its tightly packed rings. Certainly 500, maybe 700, it’s hard to tell in the driving rain. This stump he and DellaSala are standing on is as wide as they are tall. “Who knew this could happen?” says Wright, looking at the clear-cut, with nearly every tree taken, all the way to the beach fringe. So close to the beach, delicate domes of sea urchin shells sit amid the logging slash, as do abalone shells, dropped by seabirds, their shimmering opalescent colors so out of place in a bleak ruin of stumps.

This is representative of the type of logging that can happen when lands are removed from the national forest system, says Wright, who leads the Southeast Alaska program for the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition, based in Tacoma. More such cuts could be coming. Legislation proposed last summer would privatize more than 115,000 acres of the Tongass.

The legislation is part of a yearslong effort since 1985 to wrest more of the Tongass from federal control to private, for-profit Native corporations. In 1971, a federal land claims settlement act transferred 44 million acres of federal land to regional and village corporations owned by Alaska Native shareholders.

Five communities that were not included in that 1971 settlement would receive land under the so-called landless legislation, though none of them met the original criteria for eligibility. Native people in these communities were made at-large/landless shareholders, with payments to them managed by Sealaska Corporation, which owns and manages a range of for-profit businesses and investments throughout Southeast Alaska. (...)

Industrial scale clear-cut logging in the Tongass, in addition to its environmental destruction, has never made economic sense. U.S. taxpayers heavily subsidize the cutting, in part through the construction and maintenance of Forest Service roads to access the forest. A recent study done by the independent, nonpartisan group Taxpayers for Common Sense found that the Forest Service lost $16.1 million on Tongass timber sales in fiscal year 2019, and $1.7 billion over the past four decades. Most of Alaska’s timber harvest is exported as raw logs to Asian markets. (...)

Only about 240 people work in the logging business in Alaska today, most of them at two sawmills. The industry, states the Alaska Forest Association, an industry group, will collapse unless it is fed more old growth from public lands. The AFA made the claim in a lawsuit, joined with other plaintiffs, against the Forest Service, demanding release of more old-growth forest from the Tongass for cutting.

Booming business

But while the timber industry is fighting for a lifeline, more than 8,263 people work locally in a thriving tourism business built on wild and scenic Alaska. In 2023, tourism became the largest economic sector in Southeast, according to a 2024 report by Southeast Conference, the regional economic development organization.

Mary Catharine Martin, spokesperson for SalmonState, a nonprofit based in Juneau, notes that the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center at the Tongass National Forest is visited by about 700,000 people annually from all over the world. “This is what people come to see,” says Martin, regarding the glacier, its ice glowing blue as a husky’s eye. “They come to see this amazing place, and to be out in it.”

by Linda Mapes, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Amy Gulick

[ed. They've been chipping away at the Tongass for decades. Trading old growth trees for pulp and chopsticks.]

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark."

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.

A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or later, they’ve contended, a scientist will discover dinosaurs much closer to the moment of destruction.

Locked in the KT boundary are the answers to our questions about one of the most significant events in the history of life on the planet. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-­metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species.

On August 5, 2013, I received an e-mail from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel I’d written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by the KT impact. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues.” He went on, “It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via e-mail, if possible.” He gave me his cell-phone number and a time to call...

DePalma’s find was in the Hell Creek geological formation, which outcrops in parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and contains some of the most storied dinosaur beds in the world. At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea. The land teemed with life and the conditions were excellent for fossilization, with seasonal floods and meandering rivers that rapidly buried dead animals and plants.

Dinosaur hunters first discovered these rich fossil beds in the late nineteenth century. In 1902, Barnum Brown, a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, found the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, causing a worldwide sensation. One paleontologist estimated that in the Cretaceous period Hell Creek was so thick with T. rexes that they were like hyenas on the Serengeti. It was also home to triceratops and duckbills. (...)

Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. He holds the unpaid position of curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, a nascent and struggling museum with no exhibition space. In 2012, while looking for a new pond deposit, he heard that a private collector had stumbled upon an unusual site on a cattle ranch near Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) The collector felt that the site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. In July, 2012, the collector showed DePalma the site and told him that he was welcome to it. (...)

The following July, DePalma returned to do a preliminary excavation of the site. “Almost right away, I saw it was unusual,” he told me. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. This “overburden” is typically material that was deposited long after the specimen lived; there’s little in it to interest a paleontologist, and it is usually discarded. But as soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated ­droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!” DePalma recalled. Micro­tektites are the blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The site appeared to contain micro­tektites by the million.

As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-­tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.

by Douglas Preston, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Richard Barnes

Finding Peter Putnam

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street.

It was 1987 in Houma, Louisiana, and he was headed to the Department of Transportation, where he was working the night shift, sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. He was just picking up speed when a car came barreling toward him with a drunken swerve.

A screech shot down the corridor of East Main Street, echoed through the vacant lots, and rang out over the Bayou.

Then silence.

 

The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.

His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.

“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.

Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”

That word—unknown—it came to haunt me as I spent the next 12 years trying to find out why.

The American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, with its marbled floors and chandeliered ceilings, is home to millions of rare books and manuscripts, including John Wheeler’s notebooks. I was there in 2012, fresh off writing a physics book that had left me with nagging questions about the strange relationship between observer and observed. Physics seemed to suggest that observers play some role in the nature of reality, yet who or what an observer is remained a stubborn mystery.

Wheeler, who made key contributions to nuclear physics, general relativity, and quantum gravity, had thought more about the observer’s role in the universe than anyone—if there was a clue to that mystery anywhere, I was convinced it was somewhere in his papers. That’s when I turned over a mylar overhead, the kind people used to lay on projectors, with the titles of two talks, as if given back-to-back at the same unnamed event:

Wheeler: From Reality to Consciousness

Putnam: From Consciousness to Reality

Putnam, it seemed, had been one of Wheeler’s students, whose opinion Wheeler held in exceptionally high regard. That was odd, because Wheeler’s students were known for becoming physics superstars, earning fame, prestige, and Nobel Prizes: Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Kip Thorne.

Back home, a Google search yielded images of a very muscly, very orange man wearing a very small speedo. This, it turned out, was the wrong Peter Putnam. Eventually, I stumbled on a 1991 article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly newsletter called “Brilliant Enigma.” “Except for the barest outline,” the article read, “Putnam’s life is ‘veiled,’ in the words of Putnam’s lifelong friend and mentor, John Archibald Wheeler.

A quick search of old newspaper archives turned up an intriguing article from the Associated Press, published six years after Putnam’s death. “Peter Putnam lived in a remote bayou town in Louisiana, worked as a night watchman on a swing bridge [and] wrote philosophical essays,” the article said. “He also tripled the family fortune to about $40 million by investing successfully in risky stock ventures.”

The questions kept piling up. Forty million dollars?

I searched a while longer for any more information but came up empty-handed. But I couldn’t forget about Peter Putnam. His name played like a song stuck in my head. I decided to track down anyone who might have known him.

The only paper Putnam ever published was co-authored with Robert Fuller, so I flew from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, to meet him. Fuller was nearing 80 years old but had an imposing presence and a booming voice. He sat across from me in his sun-drenched living room, seeming thrilled to talk about Putnam yet plagued by some palpable regret.

Putnam had developed a theory of the brain that “ranged over the whole of philosophy, from ethics to methodology to mathematical foundations to metaphysics,” Fuller told me. He compared Putnam’s work to Alan Turing’s and Kurt Gödel’s. “Turing, Gödel, and Putnam—they’re three peas in a pod,” Fuller said. “But one of them isn’t recognized.” (...)

Phillips Jones, a physicist who worked alongside Putnam in the early 1960s, told me over the phone, “We got the sense that what Einstein’s general theory was for physics, Peter’s model would be for the mind.”

Even Einstein himself was impressed with Putnam. At 19 years old, Putnam went to Einstein’s house to talk with him about Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British astrophysicist. (Eddington performed the key experiment that proved Einstein’s theory of gravity.) Putnam was obsessed with an allegory by Eddington about a fisherman and wanted to ask Einstein about it. Putnam also wanted Einstein to give a speech promoting world government to a political group he’d organized. Einstein—who was asked by plenty of people to do plenty of things—thought highly enough of Putnam to agree.

How could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity? When I asked why, if Putnam was so important, no one has ever heard of him, everyone gave me the same answer: because he didn’t publish his work, and even if he had, no one would have understood it.

“He spoke and wrote in ‘Putnamese,’ ” Fuller said. “If you can find his papers, I think you’ll immediately see what I mean.” (...)

Skimming through the papers I saw that the people I’d spoken to hadn’t been kidding about the Putnamese. “To bring the felt under mathematical categories involves building a type of mathematical framework within which latent colliding heuristics can be exhibited as of a common goal function,” I read, before dropping the paper with a sigh. Each one went on like that for hundreds of pages at a time, on none of which did he apparently bother to stop and explain what the whole thing was really about...

Putnam spent most of his time alone, Fuller had told me. “Because of this isolation, he developed a way of expressing himself in which he uses words, phrases, concepts, in weird ways, peculiar to himself. The thing would be totally incomprehensible to anyone.” (...)

Imagine a fisherman who’s exploring the life of the ocean. He casts his net into the water, scoops up a bunch of fish, inspects his catch and shouts, “A-ha! I have made two great scientific discoveries. First, there are no fish smaller than two inches. Second, all fish have gills.”

The fisherman’s first “discovery” is clearly an error. It’s not that there are no fish smaller than two inches, it’s that the holes in his net are two inches in diameter. But the second discovery seems to be genuine—a fact about the fish, not the net.

This was the Eddington allegory that obsessed Putnam.

When physicists study the world, how can they tell which of their findings are features of the world and which are features of their net? How do we, as observers, disentangle the subjective aspects of our minds from the objective facts of the universe? Eddington suspected that one couldn’t know anything about the fish until one knew the structure of the net.

That’s what Putnam set out to do: come up with a description of the net, a model of “the structure of thought,” as he put it in a 1948 diary entry.

At the time, scientists were abuzz with a new way of thinking about thinking. Alan Turing had worked out an abstract model of computation, which quickly led not only to the invention of physical computers but also to the idea that perhaps the brain, too, was a kind of Turing machine.

Putnam disagreed. “Man is a species of computer of fundamentally different genus than those she builds,” he wrote. It was a radical claim (not only for the mixed genders): He wasn’t saying that the mind isn’t a computer, he was saying it was an entirely different kind of computer.

A universal Turing machine is a powerful thing, capable of computing anything that can be computed by an algorithm. But Putnam saw that it had its limitations. A Turing machine, by design, performs deductive logic—logic where the answers to a problem are contained in its premises, where the rules of inference are pregiven, and information is never created, only shuffled around. Induction, on the other hand, is the process by which we come up with the premises and rules in the first place. “Could there be some indirect way to model or orient the induction process, as we do deductions?” Putnam asked.

Putnam laid out the dynamics of what he called a universal “general purpose heuristic”—which we might call an “induction machine,” or more to the point, a mind—borrowing from the mathematics of game theory, which was thick in the air at Princeton. His induction “game” was simple enough. He imagined a system (immersed in an environment) that could make one mutually exclusive “move” at a time. The system is composed of a massive number of units, each of which can switch between one of two states. They all act in parallel, switching, say, “on” and “off” in response to one another. Putnam imagined that these binary units could condition one another’s behavior, so if one caused another to turn on (or off) in the past, it would become more likely to do so in the future. To play the game, the rule is this: The first chain of binary units, linked together by conditioned reflexes, to form a self-reinforcing loop emits a move on behalf of the system.

Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior.

That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”

So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state.

Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn; its sequences of moves will become increasingly less random. It will create rules for how to behave in a given situation, then automatically root out logical contradictions among those rules, resolving them into better ones. And here’s the weird thing: It’s a game that can never be won. The system never exactly repeats. But in trying to, it does something better. It adapts. It innovates. It performs induction.

In paper after paper, Putnam attempted to show how his induction game plays out in the human brain, with motor behaviors serving as the mutually exclusive “moves” and neurons as the parallel binary units that link up into loops to move the body. The point wasn’t to give a realistic picture of how a messy, anatomical brain works any more than an abstract Turing machine describes the workings of an iMac. It was not a biochemical description, but a logical one—a “brain calculus,” Putnam called it.

As the game is played, perturbations from outside—photons hitting the retina, hunger signals rising from the gut—require the brain to emit the right sequence of movements to return to its prior state. At first it has no idea what to do—each disturbance is a neural impulse moving through the brain in search of a pathway out, and it will take the first loop it can find. That’s why a newborn’s movements start out as random thrashes. But when those movements don’t satisfy the goal, the disturbance builds and spreads through the brain, feeling for new pathways, trying loop after loop, thrash after thrash, until it hits on one that does the trick.

When a successful move, discovered by sheer accident, quiets a perturbation, it gets wired into the brain as a behavioral rule. Once formed, applying the rule is a matter of deduction: The brain outputs the right move without having to try all the wrong ones first.

But the real magic happens when a contradiction arises, when two previously successful rules, called up in parallel, compete to move the body in mutually exclusive ways. A hungry baby, needing to find its mother’s breast, simultaneously fires up two loops, conditioned in from its history: “when hungry, turn to the left” and “when hungry, turn to the right.” Deductive logic grinds to a halt; the facilitation of either loop, neurally speaking, inhibits the other. Their horns lock. The neural activity has no viable pathway out. The brain can’t follow through with a wired-in plan—it has to create a new one.

How? By bringing in new variables that reshape the original loops into a new pathway, one that doesn’t negate either of the original rules, but clarifies which to use when. As the baby grows hungrier, activity spreads through the brain, searching its history for anything that can break the tie. If it can’t find it in the brain, it will automatically search the environment, thrash by thrash. The mathematics of game theory, Putnam said, guarantee that, since the original rules were in service of one and the same goal, an answer, logically speaking, can always be found.

In this case, the baby’s brain finds a key variable: When “turn left” worked, the neural signal created by the warmth of the mother’s breast against the baby’s left cheek got wired in with the behavior. When “turn right” worked, the right cheek was warm. That extra bit of sensory signal is enough to tip the scales. The brain has forged a new loop, a more general rule: “When hungry, turn in the direction of the warmer cheek.”

New universals lead to new motor sequences, which allow new interactions with the world, which dredge up new contradictions, which force new resolutions, and so on up the ladder of ever-more intelligent behavior. “This constitutes a theory of the induction process,” Putnam wrote.

In notebooks, in secret, using language only he would understand, Putnam mapped out the dynamics of a system that could perceive, learn, think, and create ideas through induction—a computer that could program itself, then find contradictions among its programs and wrangle them into better programs, building itself out of its history of interactions with the world. Just as Turing had worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of computation, Putnam worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of mind. It was a model, he wrote, that “presents a basic overall pattern [or] character of thought in causal terms for the first time.”

Putnam had said you can’t understand another person until you know what fight they’re in, what contradiction they’re working through. I saw before me two stories, equally true: Putnam was a genius who worked out a new logic of the mind. And Putnam was a janitor who died unknown. The only way to resolve a contradiction, he said, is to find the auxiliary variables that forge a pathway to a larger story, one that includes and clarifies both truths. The variables for this contradiction? Putnam’s mother and money.

by Amanda Gefter, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: John Archibald Wheeler, courtesy of Alison Lahnston.
[ed. Fascinating. Sounds like part quantum physics and part AI. But it's beyond me.]

An Incredible Privilege and a Daunting Task

Darkness had fallen and the tide was rolling in, lapping at the heels of the team of people who were quickly disassembling the big whale, piece by piece, bone by bone.

The young humpback, 26 feet long and 20,000 pounds in all (roughly the size of a small school bus), had become entangled in crabbing gear and had beached itself along the central Oregon coast over the weekend. After two days of efforts to save the whale failed, it was euthanized. After that, it was up to the Siletz tribe to take the whale carcass apart.

Lisa Norton, who works as the chief administrative officer for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and who is also an experienced elk hunter, helped organize the harvest and has been speaking on behalf of the team who worked for nearly 12 hours on the beach Tuesday.

This was the first time in generations that the Siletz tribe has harvested a whale, she said. Nobody in the tribe had ever done it before, and nobody could remember the last time it happened. Ancestors of some of the 30 bands that make up the tribe were prolific whalers, but those cultural practices had long been suppressed by the U.S. government. The Siletz tribe has only recently regained its fishing and hunting rights (the tribe still needed a special permit to harvest the humpback).

“We recognized the importance of what could be with this,” Norton said. “I prefer to think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we can learn from.”

It was also an enormous undertaking.

“Exhausting would be an understatement,” she said.

The young humpback whale came ashore north of Yachats on Saturday afternoon. Over the next 48 hours, people flocked to the beach to help the still-living whale, despite urges from the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network not to do so. Online, thousands watched a livestream of the event, pouring out their sympathies for the animal in Facebook comments.

Meanwhile, 50 miles up the coast, Siletz tribal members were gathered at the Chinook Winds Casino Resort for the tribe’s annual Restoration Powwow, which celebrates the restoration of the tribe’s federal recognition in 1977. Word about the whale spread around the powwow, where some prayed and danced for the whale, Norton said.

On Monday, when it was clear the humpback would not survive and would ultimately need to be euthanized, Oregon State Police (who had previously worked with Siletz hunters) reached out to the tribe about the possibility of harvesting the animal. The tribe rushed to secure the proper permits and assembled a team of hunters to take apart the whale.

“What an incredible privilege and a daunting task,” Norton said. “The folks that stood up and said ‘We could do this’ were very brave. And what they did was a very important piece to the next chapter of this whale.” (...)

Before anyone cut into the animal, they smudged and prayed over its body. They honored the animal for its sacrifice. They offered thanks to the bounty it provided. They asked Creator to guide their hands.

“That is what you do,” Norton said. “As experienced hunters we always give thanks to what has been provided.”

Some members of the team had stayed up late Monday night, researching the bone structure of humpback whales, which parts should be taken, how to cut into the animal. Once on the beach, they also relied on their own instinct as hunters. But the whale was very different from an elk, Norton said, and not just because it was 30 times as big.

The team already knew that unlike the tribe’s ancestors, they wouldn’t harvest any meat from the whale. Since the animal had been chemically sedated and euthanized, everyone was concerned the meat wouldn’t be safe for human consumption. But there was still plenty to harvest. The team took all the whale’s blubber, thousands of pounds of it, as well as virtually all its bones. They also separated the head so they could later harvest the baleen, the keratin structure that helps the whale filter feed in the ocean.

As they worked into the night, the tribe got a helping hand from Tru-North Construction, local contractors who were on site with heavy equipment. The contractors used an excavator to dig a trench for the whale meat and organs that wouldn’t be used and helped maneuver the animal around for the team of harvesters. The company also provided a flatbed truck so tribal members wouldn’t have to transport the blubber and bones in their own cars — a godsend, Norton said. (...)

When the sun rose over the beach the next morning, the spot where people had spent days trying to save the dying whale was now a mess of meat and skin — food for the foragers that would clean it all up.

To some, it may seem like a gruesome end to a tragic story, Norton said, but for the tribe it was a heartfelt experience that honored the life so many had tried to save.

“As we were processing and collecting these materials, folks were telling us the stories of how strong this whale was,” Norton said. “That story will stay with each of those pieces that are then put back out in the world.”

The tribe has not yet decided what, exactly, they’re going to do with the animal parts. They plan to render the blubber down to oil, but they’re first going to check to make sure it isn’t toxic. Whale bones have historically been used to make tools or art, which are possibilities, Norton said, and baleen can be used to decorate regalia. One elder told her that a large whale vertebra makes a nice stool, but she said it probably wouldn’t go with her home décor.

“We anticipate that this process is going to continue for a year or two until it’s done,” Norton said.

by Jamie Hale, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Graves via

[ed. Fortunately this whale was relatively fresh - old bloated ones can be barf-inducing. I can only imagine the frantic discussions and conflicted feelings many tribal members felt when suddenly given this opportunity and told ' have at it'. The tension between ancestral obligations and long forgotten skills, between 'hunters' and googlers, logistics. Some might have never seen a whale before. Panic at the casino!]

I Taught an Octopus to Play Piano in 6 Months

via: YouTube
[ed. It's been said that if there are intelligent aliens on earth, octopuses are probably the best candidates. Too bad they're so tasty.]

Getting Jacked Is Simple

It’s actually really simple to get jacked. That’s not to say it’s easy- just that the complexity of the challenge is trivial, requiring only time and energy to succeed.

Now, you’re probably raising your eyebrows at this claim. Everywhere you look, there are personal trainers, fitness influencers, nutritionists, and even exercise scientists with conflicting information. Go to any gym, and you’ll see different people doing wildly different exercise routines. Surely, that implies building muscle is a complicated subject? Well, no. For 2 reasons:

1. The fitness industry thrives on misinformation, because all the money is made in selling supplements, accessories, and ‘personal training expertise’ that have no scientific legitimacy

2. Most people are cognitive misers who actively avoid mentally demanding tasks and refuse to read anything academic

The result is a very large proportion of fitness enthusiasts have essentially no idea what they’re doing, and even the somewhat knowledgeable ones are still full of misinformation. So, how do we cut through the noise?

Getting Jacked

Think of getting jacked as something like this formula:

GettingJacked = Time * (0.6x + 0.3y + 0.1z)

X is your adherence to primary concepts, y is your adherence to secondary concepts, and z is your adherence to tertiary concepts. Primary and secondary concepts are a collection of just a handful of relatively simple ideas that require little financial investment. If you just focused on these, you would find getting jacked to be relatively straightforward. But tertiary concepts, predominantly supplements, are innumerable, complex, and require tons of money.

The entire fitness industry is built around obfuscation such that the tertiary concepts can be promoted and sold. And it works wonderfully for making money- but terribly for our motivation to actually get into the gym and train properly.

The paradox of choice is a concept introduced by psychologist Barry Schwartz which suggests that the more options we have, the less satisfied we feel with our decision. This phenomenon occurs because having too many choices requires more cognitive effort, leading to decision fatigue and increased regret over our choices.

The sheer amount of conflicting information out there certainly makes it difficult to know who to listen to, but it also actively discourages people from getting into fitness at all. And even if you were able to expertly navigate this whole industry of tertiary concepts to find the absolute optimal program, that would still represent just 10% of your results! Nearly everyone should be ignoring Z entirely and instead focusing their efforts on the simple stuff in X and Y.

But what is this simple stuff, you might be wondering? Fortunately, unlike in decades past, we no longer have to rely on the ‘bro-science’ of anecdotes and dubiously extrapolated study conclusions. On the contrary, in the age of information we now have robust research data on what actually matters for getting jacked.

Primary Concepts (60% of Results)

1. Progressive Overload

The most important concept is progressive overloading, which is simply increasing your weight resistance over time as your body adapts. Muscle growth is a continuous cycle: the body adapts to a given stress, and to continue improving, that stress (e.g., weight, reps, sets) must be gradually increased, forcing the body to adapt again. No matter what exercises you’re doing, or for how long, or with what intensity, the most important thing is that you need to constantly be increasing the challenge. Going to the gym every week for 3 years curling the same 20lb dumbbell isn’t going to do anything. But if you’re curling 30lb at the end of year 1, 40lb at the end of year 2, and 50lb at the end of year 3, guess what- you’re getting jacked.

2. Train to Failure (1 RIR)

You also need to be really pushing yourself hard in the gym, because it’s specifically the last few reps right before your muscles fail that seem to drive results. Modern studies have consistently shown that training to 1 rep-in-reserve (RIR)- continuing a set until you have only enough strength left to complete 1 more final rep- maximizes strength gains and muscular hypertrophy while limiting risk of injury. Basically, keep lifting until you have doubts about whether or not you can complete another rep. If you can squat 100lb for 10 reps, for 3 sets in a row, then that first set was almost certainly not being trained to 1 RIR. What those 3 sets should look like is something like 10 reps, 8 reps, 6 reps- despite you giving it maximum effort on every set. This indicates that you were indeed pushing yourself close to failure and fatiguing yourself in the process.

3. Consume Sufficient Protein

It’s a trope that gym bros are obsessed with protein, but this is for good reason. Muscle growth cannot occur without sufficient protein. And relatively high amounts of protein are required in order to optimize muscle growth. Studies suggest increasing protein has a significant impact on muscle growth up to about 1.6-2.2g/kg (0.7-1g/lb) of body weight with substantially diminishing returns after that. The International Society of Sports Nutrition currently suggests consuming a slightly lower range of 1.4-2.0 g/kg. In other words, if you’re hitting anywhere close to 1g/lb of body weight of daily protein, you’re getting the full benefits. It doesn’t matter much where the protein comes from, though great sources include grilled chicken, Greek yogurt, and protein powder. It also doesn’t matter much how you split this protein up throughout the day, though there is some evidence that protein intake of no more than 40g per meal is optimal. But, in general, just focus on hitting the absolute numbers and the rest will follow.

4. Abs are made in the gym, and revealed in the kitchen

The final basic concept is that nobody can admire your muscle if you’re fat.9 Building muscle mass is step 1, but step 2 is cutting down to a low enough body fat to reveal that muscle. Overall appearance even at the same leanness can vary depending on individual skeletal structure, body fat distribution, and muscle mass- but nonetheless this is what fairly muscular men and women look like at various body fat percentages.

The American Council on Exercise (ACE) has the following classifications for body fat %.

Today’s beauty standards for ‘jacked’ tends to fall somewhere around 12% for men and 20% for women- just making it into the ‘athletes’ category. Most amateur fitness enthusiasts dramatically overestimate how lean they actually are. At 12% body fat for men, you should be seeing:

• Defined abs visible when flexed, with a noticeable “V-cut” above the hips

• Clear separation between muscle groups, such as rear delts to side delts

• Increased vascularity with prominent and visible veins on the arms and shoulders

• Sharper facial features, particularly noticeable around the jawline

And at 20% body fat for women:

• Muscle definition pops when flexed, particularly in shoulders and quads

• Flat stomach (but without sharply segmented abs)

• Little excess fat, mostly in hips, thighs, and buttocks- with a smaller waist

• Sharper facial features, noticeable around the jawline and cheekbones

Secondary Concepts (30% of Results)

If you’re following the above concepts perfectly, it literally does not matter what else you will do- you will get jacked. But if you really want to optimize your routine, here are a few other concepts to consider.

by Dylan, Chaotic Neutral |  Read more:

Image: uncredited