Second Helpings: 2016's Underappreciated Science, Tech, and Health Stories

“The danger of infusing light with political meaning is, of course—who decides what the message is?” Tillett told me. “Lighting of buildings in particular, but public lighting in general, can have a strong coercive power. We are creatures drawn to light, and if you choose to broadcast your political message or advertise on the top of or on the face of a building, we will look at it, even if we would prefer to look away.”

Despite the efficacy of early-warning systems, politics can thwart them. Five years ago, many experts who pay attention to food scarcity around the world started saying alarming things about the Horn of Africa…

Why was the famine not prevented? Thanks to the local militant group Al-Shabaab—and U.S. laws preventing humanitarian groups from interacting with it—food did not reach many areas of Somalia in time or at all.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: “Is that your good side?”

JAMES HAMBLIN: “Neither one is my good side.”

“Writing has become very difficult. I can manage to write at a good level for only about 10 minutes, and then I make a lot of spelling errors. I can no longer read a whole scientific paper in one go. And I can really manage one reasonable length conversation a day. Thirty minutes.”

Police, too, have used license-plate readers heavily in low-income areas. The Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted a request in 2014 for information about the Oakland Police Department’s use of license-plate readers. When the advocacy organization analyzed the data it got back, it found that the readers were deployed disproportionately often in low-income areas and in neighborhoods with high concentrations of African-American and Latino residents.

Parker foresees that we will enter a “second age of genomics,” one where sequencers will become like telescopes: a formerly boutique scientific instrument that you can now buy from a toy store.

For the first few years after the Midland clinic began providing abortions, there was an “eerie quiet,” as Holeva describes it. Then, practically overnight, the protesters materialized. One group wore matching Jesus robes. Another had what Holeva calls “Mary on a surfboard”—a statuette of the virgin mother affixed to a plank. “It was like a three-ring circus,” she said.

Inside the box, a notice, printed in lower-case casual: “downtime. redesigned.” It promises that my new slippers will offer a “search for adventure” and a communion with “perfection in the mundane.”

Suddenly, I am not even sure what slippers are, even.

At this point in technological history, interfaces are built so that computers can do as much as possible within the limitations of a human’s sensory motor system. Given what many people use computers for, this arrangement works out well—great, even… For others though, traditional interfaces aren’t enough.

“That’s a very American idea, that if you’re unhappy, you’re doing something wrong,” Norem says. “It’s your own fault. I think there is guilt and anxiety about not being happy, and that’s part of what drives the market for self-help books.” (And now, apps.) Unhappiness is sometimes treated like a moral failing.  The individualist American dream of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps can leave people wondering where they went wrong if they’re not happy and successful.

In just four months, the dengue-proof insects had almost totally replaced the native ones. For the first time in history, scientists had transformed a population of wild insects to stop them from spreading human diseases. And they did it through symbiosis.

Trump is both a product of a masculine culture and a beneficiary of its musky tenets. Rather than criticize him or lose faith, his fans forgive and apologize for his words. Masculine culture is both a reason that Trump does what he does and a reason that people accept and trust it.

Clarity is an ambiguous virtue today. It’s more frequently called “transparency” now, and the naive still advance it as a simple salve for all ills... Today that false dream remains, in the form of technological innovation that promises to “change the world” by producing an even more commercialized version of progress than we endured two decades ago. Would it be a step too far to call Silicon Valley one big, compostable bottle of Crystal Pepsi? Probably.

“To me it feels like legal robbery, like a shake down. If our clients were doing what the police are doing, it’d be called robbery, and they’d be charged or indicted within a day or two.”

“If someone dies of a herpes infection, their temporal lobes look like soup,” Strick explained to me.

The solution, Judy decided, was to steer kids away from sex, rather than describe how to do it safely. “You might as well say, ‘Well, you're going to smoke dope,’” she told me, “‘so we're going to offer free dope at lunch.’”

A mosquito is a vampire. It sucks your blood and leaves a mark...But it’s never more vampiric than when it spreads a virus. Like a vampire, its bite hijacks your body. The bite leaves behind a poison that weakens you, that changes you.

It is clear that, in 2016, Trump embodies Hughes’s worst fears about what television would engender in presidential politics. Trump is an entertainer-turned-politician who blurs the issues rather than clarifying them, a fear monger who is as adept at exaggeration as he is antagonistic to nuance. Television alone is not responsible for Trump—he’s responsible for himself—but it did help him along the way.

It’s a mass problem. The more mass you have to take, the more expensive it is to escape Earth’s gravity and get to Mars. And some of the heaviest cargo will be material to shelter astronauts from the radiation zipping through Mars’ thin atmosphere. With 3D-printing, you don’t need to bring shelter. You build it out of dirt or ice already on Mars.

The Republican presidential candidate, lately famous for coarsening public debate and attempting to delegitimize the democratic process, has also perpetrated a crime against the English language. It seems probable that his campaign will doom a perfectly pleasant word, a happy verb with a 750-year history.

What does making more cashmere—through a process as widely misunderstood and disliked as genetic modification—do to its value? What happens to a luxury product in the age of genetic engineering?

“There is not a god-given year, basically, as to when the ice is gone, but it really is this limit of total emissions. So if we emit less, then it will take longer. It’s as simple as that.”

The formal education system is exclusionary, they say, because it considers people illiterate if they can’t read and write French—the colonial language—rather than asking whether or not they can read or write their own native tongue.

“That’s one of the things that’s really hindering the progress in Africa and Guinea in particular,” Ibrahima says. “We spend so many resources learning new languages, even though we already have languages that we can use to develop our countries.”

There are many things literature can ‘do.’ It can give voice to perspectives that are often silenced, offer refuge, and allow readers “try on” the lives of others. But this is slow work that depends so much on social circumstance. No reader, writer, or book exists in a vacuum. Trying to reduce the process of reading to a snapshot task leaves out some of this context.

“Moral superiority becomes a mechanism of preserving advantage,” she says. This is true even if the feeling of moral superiority doesn’t lead to outright hostility to other groups. Preferring members of your own group means that they get the trust, generosity, and benefit of the doubt that outsiders don’t. Blatant hate isn’t always necessary. The absence of positive feeling toward a group leaves a negative space, and bigotry often rushes in to fill it.