From Phys.Org:

Interactions between an animal cell and its environment, a fibrous network called the extracellular matrix, play a critical role in cell function, including growth and migration. But less understood is the mechanical force that governs those interactions. A multidisciplinary team of Cornell engineers and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania have devised a method for measuring the force a cell—in this case, a breast cancer cell—exerts on its fibrous surroundings. Understanding those forces has implications in many disciplines, including immunology and cancer biology, and could help scientists better design biomaterial scaffolds for tissue engineering. The group, led by Mingming Wu, associate professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, developed 3-D traction-force microscopy to measure the displacement of fluorescent marker beads distributed in a collagen matrix. The beads are displaced by the pulling of migrating breast cancer cells embedded in the matrix. An important part of the puzzle was to calculate the force exerted by the cells using the displacement of the beads. That calculation was carried out by the team led by Vivek Shenoy, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. The group's paper, “Fibrous nonlinear elasticity enables positive mechanical feedback between cells and extracellular matrices,” published online Nov. 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Matthew Hall, Ph.D. '16, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, is lead author and engineered the collagen matrices used in the study.

Wu—who also was affiliated with the Cornell Center on the Microenvironment and Metastasis at Weill Cornell Medicine, which existed from 2009 through 2015—said her group's work centered on a basic question: How much force do cells exert on their extracellular matrix when they migrate? “The matrix is like a rope, and in order for the cell to move, they have to exert force on this rope,” she said. “The question arose from cancer metastasis, because if the cells don't move around, it's a benign tumor and generally not life-threatening.” It's when the cancerous cell migrates that serious problems can arise. That migration occurs through “cross-talk” between the cell and the matrix, the group found. As the cell pulls on the matrix, the fibrous matrix stiffens; in turn, the stiffening of the matrix causes the cell to pull harder, which stiffens the matrix even more. This increased stiffening also increases cell force transmission distance, which can potentially promote metastasis of cancer cells.

More here.

Matt Wolfe in The New Republic:

Early one summer morning, Son Yo Auer, a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia, found a naked man lying unconscious in front of the restaurant’s dumpsters. It was before dawn, but the man was sweating and sunburned. Fire ants crawled across his body, and a hot red rash flecked his skin. Auer screamed and ran inside. By the time police arrived, the man was awake, but confused. An officer filed an incident report indicating that a “vagrant” had been found “sleeping,” and an ambulance took him to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Savannah, where he was admitted on August 31, 2004, under the name “Burger King Doe.”

Other than the rash, and cataracts that had left him nearly blind, Burger King Doe showed no sign of physical injury. He appeared to be a healthy white man in his middle fifties. His vitals were good. His blood tested negative for drugs and alcohol. His lab results were, a doctor wrote on his chart, “surprisingly within normal limits.” A long, unwashed beard and dirty fingernails suggested he had been living rough. But the only physical signs of previous trauma were three small depressions on his skull and some scars on his neck and his left arm.

Psychologically, though, something was obviously wrong. Doe refused to eat or speak. He kept his eyes shut. Whenever a doctor touched his chest, he thrashed his limbs. After several days, Doe ate some ice chips and spoke a few words to a nurse. He said he had lived in the woods for 17 years. Asked his name, he replied, “They call me B.K. around here.” No, she said, your real name. “B.K.,” Doe said. “But you’re getting me confused.” Then he went silent.

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

Kevin Hartnett in Wired:

Over the last decade physicists and mathematicians have been exploring a surprising correspondence that has the potential to breathe new life into the venerable Feynman diagram and generate far-reaching insights in both fields. It has to do with the strange fact that the values calculated from Feynman diagrams seem to exactly match some of the most important numbers that crop up in a branch of mathematics known as algebraic geometry. These values are called “periods of motives,” and there’s no obvious reason why the same numbers should appear in both settings. Indeed, it’s as strange as it would be if every time you measured a cup of rice, you observed that the number of grains was prime.

“There is a connection from nature to algebraic geometry and periods, and with hindsight, it’s not a coincidence,” said Dirk Kreimer, a physicist at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Now mathematicians and physicists are working together to unravel the coincidence.

More here.

Jennifer Senior at The New York Times:

Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book — its ranking soared on Amazon and by day’s end it was no longer available. (Harvard University Press is reprinting the book for the first time since 2010, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.)

It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

more here.

Lorraine Daston at The Hedgehog Review:

The history of science is punctuated by not one, not two, but three modernities: the first, in the seventeenth century, known as “the Scientific Revolution”; the second, circa 1800, often referred to as “the second Scientific Revolution”; and the third, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when relativity theory and quantum mechanics not only overturned the achievements of Galileo and Newton but also challenged our deepest intuitions about space, time, and causation.

Each of these moments transformed science, both as a body of knowledge and as a social and political force. The first modernity of the seventeenth century displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, showered Europeans with new discoveries, from new continents to new planets, created new forms of inquiry such as field observation and the laboratory experiment, added prediction to explanation as an ideal toward which science should strive, and unified the physics of heaven and earth in Newton’s magisterial synthesis that served as the inspiration for the political reformers and revolutionaries of the Enlightenment. The second modernity of the early nineteenth century unified light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and gravitation into the single, fungible currency of energy, put that energy to work by creating the first science-based technologies to become gigantic industries (e.g., the manufacture of dyestuffs from coal tar derivatives), turned science into a salaried profession and allied it with state power in every realm, from combating epidemics to waging wars. The third modernity, of the early twentieth century, toppled the certainties of Newton and Kant, inspired the avant-garde in the arts, and paved the way for what were probably the two most politically consequential inventions of the last hundred years: the mass media and the atomic bomb.

more here.

William Dalrymple at the New York Review of Books:

In the intense heat of the Indian summer of 1739, a Persian army could be seen heading in triumph away from the looted city of Delhi. Delhi was the capital of the great Mughals, the Muslim dynasty, originally of Central Asian origin, that had ruled much of India since the mid-sixteenth century. As the Persian army made its way homeward through the Punjab, it carried away with it piles of treasures gathered from across India by many generations of Mughal emperors.

At the head of the column rode Nader Shah. Nader was the son of a nomadic shepherd from the Iranian-Afghan borderlands of Khurasan. He had risen rapidly owing to his remarkable military talents. In 1732 he had seized the Persian throne. Seven years later, in the spring of 1739, he invaded Afghanistan, then descended the Khyber Pass into India. At Kurnal, north of Delhi, he defeated three merged Mughal armies—around a million men—with a force of only 150,000 musketeers.

Nader Shah lured the old-fashioned Mughal cavalry into making a massed frontal charge. As they neared the Persians, his light cavalry then parted like a curtain, leaving the Mughals facing a long line of mounted musketeers, each of whom was armed with the latest in eighteenth-century weaponry: armor-penetrating, horse-mounted swivel guns. They fired at point-blank range. Within a few minutes, the flower of Mughal chivalry lay dead on the ground.

more here.

UNDERSTANDING THE OTHER SIDE: Only a fraction of the articles we post are normally about politics but it is also true that the editors of 3QD are all (to a person) liberal progressives and none of us supported or voted for Donald Trump. In the interest of dialogue and trying to understand the conservative point of view better, I have decided to start occasionally posting relatively well-argued articles from the right side of the political spectrum. Some of these are sent to me by friends who did vote for Trump. (And, yes, I have such friends and hope you do too.) Trust me, it will not hurt you to read them. I hope that people will keep the comments civil and focused on the issues, and not engage in ad hominem attacks. This is the first of this series.

John Tierney in City Journal:

My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?

My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.

More here.

Emily Bobrow in The Economist:

Seth and his girlfriend of many years were already engaged when he discovered she had cheated on him. It was only once, with a co-worker, but the betrayal stung. “I had jealousy, insecurity, anger, fear,” he recalls. “It was really hard to talk about it.” He wondered whether his fiancée’s infidelity meant there was something fundamentally wrong with their otherwise loving relationship. He worried it was a sign that their marriage would be doomed. He also still felt guilty about an indiscretion of his own years earlier, when he’d had a one-night stand with an acquaintance. “I knew that what I had done meant nothing,” said Seth, a New York-based entrepreneur in his early 30s. “It felt like a bit of an adventure, and I went for it.” But anxiety about these dalliances gnawed at his conscience. How could he and his fiancée promise to be monogamous for a lifetime if they were already struggling to stay loyal to each other? Did their momentary lapses of judgment spell bigger problems for their union?

For help answering these questions, Seth and his partner went to Esther Perel, a Belgian-born psychotherapist who is renowned for her work with couples. Her two TED talks – about the challenge of maintaining passion in long-term relationships and the temptations of infidelity – have been viewed over 15m times. Her bestselling 2006 book “Mating in Captivity”, translated into 26 languages, skilfully examined our conflicting needs for domestic security and erotic novelty. Recently she has taken her work further, into more controversial terrain. Her forthcoming book “The State of Affairs”, expected in late 2017, addresses the thorny matter of why people stray and how we should handle it when they do. When Perel is not seeing clients in New York, she is travelling the world speaking to packed conferences and ideas festivals about the elusiveness of desire in otherwise contented relationships. After Seth saw Perel speak at one such conference, he sought her out for guidance with his fiancée.

More here.

Mainen et al in Nature:

At least half a dozen major initiatives to study the mammalian brain have sprung up across the world in the past five years. This wave of national and international projects has arisen in part from the realization that deciphering the principles of brain function will require collaboration on a grand scale. Yet it is unclear whether any of these mega-projects, which include scientists from many subdisciplines, will be effective. Researchers with complementary skill sets often team up on grant proposals. But once funds are awarded, the labs involved often return to work on their parts of the project in relative isolation. We propose an alternative strategy: grass-roots collaborations involving researchers who may be distributed around the globe, but who are already working on the same problems. Such self-motivated groups could start small and expand gradually over time. But they would essentially be built from the ground up, with those involved encouraged to follow their own shared interests rather than responding to the strictures of funding sources or external directives.

…We propose that researchers join forces in 'meso-scale' collaborations of around 20 principal investigators and between 50 and 100 researchers to conduct experiments that are beyond the reach of single labs. Even at this scale, there will be many hurdles to clear. Specifically, an effective collaboration would need to do the following.

Focus on a single brain function. The downfall of many neuroscience collaborations — and especially of mega-projects — is setting goals that are too broad. The common goal has to be ambitious, yet reachable within, say, ten years, and well defined. A whole-brain theory of one brain function — a single behaviour — could meet those requirements. If a collaboration were largely limited to labs interested in the same behaviour — such as courtship in fruit flies, or foraging in mice — clear, shared objectives could be defined at the start. The labs would apply a range of recording and manipulation techniques to the same common behavioural task, allowing the functional data to be seamlessly combined.

More here.

What we want and what we get
are often at odds
Today’s tales are unstraight histories
They often have jogs
…….. —Roshi Bob
___________________________________________

From the Frontier of Writing

the tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration–

a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road

past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.
.

Seamus Heaney
from The Haw Lantern
Noonday Press, 1987
.

Vladimir Cora. Cabeza con Iluvia, 2012.