LINKS - January 26th, 2022
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
How Thich Nhat Hanh pioneered modern mindfulness in the West
By Sakshi Venkatraman, NBC News
“Known as the father of modern mindfulness and one of the key figures in popularizing Buddhism in the West, Thich Nhat Hanh's death was confirmed by Plum Village, the monastic community he founded in France after being exiled from Vietnam.”
Read extended biography from Plum Village
(Editor’s note: I’m by no means a Thich Nhat Hanh scholar, but it would not be a stretch to say that without his teachings that inevitably found their way to me, there would be no Rhapsody. So, I won’t make a habit of this but if you only read one thing this week, I’d make it something about him.)
Giving low-income US families $4000 a year boosts child brain activity
By Jason Arunn Murugesu, New Scientist
“‘Neuroscientists have described links between a child’s socioeconomic background and the structure of the brain,” says Kimberly Noble at Columbia University in New York. ‘But all that work has been correlational to date.’
“Instead, Noble and her team are looking at how exactly child poverty causes reduced grey matter volume in the hippocampus and frontal cortex, which is associated with the subsequent development of thinking and learning. These changes have been seen throughout childhood and adolescence.”
An inside look at how one person can control a swarm of 130 robots
By Kelsey D. Atherton, Popular Science
“Last November, at Fort Campbell, Tennessee, half a mile from the Kentucky border, a single human directed a swarm of 130 robots. The swarm, including uncrewed planes, quadcopters, and ground vehicles, scouted the mock buildings of the Cassidy Range Complex, creating and sharing information visible not just to the human operator but to other people on the same network. The exercise was part of DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program.
“If the experiment can be replicated outside the controlled settings of a test environment, it suggests that managing swarms in war could be as easy as point and click for operators in the field.”
Antimicrobial resistance is a leading cause of death globally
By Aimee Cunningham, Science News
“In 2019, antimicrobial resistance caused an estimated 1.27 million deaths, researchers report January 19 in the Lancet. More people died from untreatable bacterial infections that year than from HIV or malaria.”
Your Body’s Thirst Messenger Is in an Unexpected Place
By Veronique Greenwood, New York Times
“Few pleasures compare to a long cool drink on a hot day. As a glass of water or other tasty drink makes its way to your digestive tract, your brain is tracking it — but how? Scientists have known for some time that thirst is controlled by neurons that send an alert to put down the glass when the right amount has been guzzled. What precisely tells them that it is time, though, is still a bit mysterious.”