your science briefing for 04.17.2025

The techno-communist utopia of Musk's grandfather, the sheer complexity of seeing things, the mystery of hot-swapping mitochondria, and more...

A 1930’s proposal for something called the Technate of America has been going viral on social media, mostly because Co-President and Temu Bene Gesserit Elon Musk’s grandfather in Canada was involved in the movement. The idea was to establish a sort of government by technocrats using nothing but cold, hard data to make decisions for the greater good, its territory encompassing almost everything north of the equator in the Western Hemisphere, including Greenland. It’s frequently referred to as a plan for a techno-fascist totalitarian empire, but the truth is much more complicated. In fact, a former Soviet citizen like me would call it techno-communism… (The Conversation)

Vision is complicated. Even given bleeding edge modern technology, we still lack the full picture of how brains turn what our eyes see into clear, stable images given what we know about all the weird stuff eyeballs do on a regular basis. In an attempt to get a better understanding, scientists mapped out the approximately 75,000 neurons with their 500 million or so connections in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s visual cortex we are pretty sure does this job. Next, trying to understand exactly how it all works and if we can apply these insights to our own brains… (Princeton)

Human infrastructure has been affecting the behavior and evolution of animals for as long as we’ve been an industrial civilization. This is true even in the somewhat remote Galápagos Islands where a songbird called the yellow warbler is apparently becoming louder and more aggressive. I’m sorry to break this to you, but the songs to which we love to listen waking up in the morning are mostly birds yelling “come over here tough guy and I will lay you the fuck out!” or responding “you and what army?!” So, why are yellow warblers even more angry and hostile than usual? Road noise. Birds closer to roads are having to scream more and louder to be heard… (Anthropocene)

Ask anyone in the U.S. what they learned about biology in science class and they will tell you “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!” Which is true. They’re pivotal to creating adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, a molecule which stores energy cells use to do cell things, like keep us alive. We think they were once bacteria which merged with larger cells in a symbiotic relationship 1.5 billion years ago, doing a biological version of turning a tiny propeller plane into a supersonic jet and allowed multicellular life like us to evolve because we had a scalable power plant built into our cells. And there’s a new development we’ve never seen before. It seems cells can just swap mitochondria like our electronics swap batteries, and we don’t know why… (Nature)

Inflammation is bad for you. It’s not just a mantra you hear of self-help podcasts from a crank shilling supplements. Scientists really suspect that excessive and pervasive inflammation from our current lifestyles is responsible for a significant majority of the health problems we experience today. Inflammation is a stress response and it greatly taxes our immune system, which can lead to auto-immune diseases, chronic pain and fatigue, several types of cancers, and perhaps even depression… (Psychology Today)