Ten Science Stories That Changed Our Decade

The Book of Life Recorded: Our understanding of human genetics reached a new milestone with the mapping of the human genome. The Human Genome Project announced a rough draft of the human genome in 2000, followed by a more complete version in 2003; the sequence of the last chromosome was published in 2006. Though the genome hasn’t been 100 percent mapped, the Human Genome Project has completed its mapping goals. We still have to interpret the sequences we have recorded, but hopefully as we translate the book of our genetic lives, we will get a better understand of how our genes interact and improve our treatment of genetic diseases. Plus, the project has paved the way for sequencing other critters and plants, and, just this week, the lung cancer and melanoma genomes were sequenced.

It’s Full of Planets: This was a big decade for planets, and not just because Pluto got a downgrade. In 2005, astronomers discovered Eris, a dwarf planet larger Pluto (as well as smaller dwarf planets Haumea and Makemake). Eris’ discovery prompted the International Astronomical Union to actually define the term planet, leading to Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet. But the discovery of Eris after all this time suggests there is still a lot to learn about our solar system.

We also got our first direct look at exoplanets, worlds outside our solar system, thanks to the Hubble Telescope. In 2008, astronomers at the Keck and Gemini captured the first images of planets orbiting distant stars. And the planetary discoveries just keep getting more exciting; just this week, astronomers announced that they had observed a super-Earth that might be made largely of liquid water.

Water, Water Everywhere: The world watched on as the Phoenix Lander dug through the Martian terrain for signs of water on the Red Planet. In the summer of 2008, NASA announced it had found definitive proof of water ice on Mars. More recently, scientists discovered that large deposits of water ice exist beneath the planet’s surface. This fall, the moon became the center of our watery attention when astronomers found evidence of water throughout the moon’s surface. Although the supervillainous plot to bomb the moon didn’t seem as initially impressive as we had hoped, the probe did confirm researchers’ suspicions that the moon does, in fact, contain a significant amount of frozen water. These discoveries not only reveal more about our solar system, they indicate that, should humans try to colonize Mars or the moon, there will be resources to make survival a little easier.

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5:33 pm  •  9 February 2010

theelephantschild asked: I have a couple of questions. 1) What drew you to the college you attended and what was it like? 2) What do you do now? Job, etc.-wise. I assume you're a recent grad because of your age. You seem pretty smart, and I'm just kind of curious what kind of luck you've had since college.

You’d be right to assume I’m a recent grad — I finished in 2009.

1) Initially, the main reason I attended New College was because it was in my hometown and I was still in high school. My first year there, I was still living with my parents, and felt that saving money on rent was reason enough to go there. But now, it’s hard for me to imagine going anywhere else. Because it’s so small, drama gets blown way out of proportion, and any change in the social structure or general music taste seems like the end of everything. I can’t say I’m immune to that judgment, but I can say that New College is a great place to grow up, particularly if you enter thinking you don’t need any growing up. And you will miss the place after you’re gone. Academically, no matter what you study, you will be extremely well-versed in the issues, arguments, and minutae of your discipline by the time you graduate. Having no grades means that many idiots will pass, but it also means that interested and intelligent individuals can explore their discipline without pressure or competition. And that is highly valuable, far more than you might think.

2) I’ve had an interesting time since graduating. I moved to Boston and tried to enter the job market in the worst depths of the recession. I ended up working very part-time for a New College alum in Boston doing data entry, and then after months of searching found a full-time position laying out newsletters and other propaganda materials for environmental groups in the Western U.S. I had to leave that job for personal reasons and now I’m working as a ghostwriter in my hometown and applying to law school. I don’t assume that everyone’s experience is going to be like mine, but I think it’s wise to assume that a) your plans are going to change and b) you’re not going to end up doing anything related to what you studied. Particularly b) — unless you go to a vocational school or immediately enter a graduate program, your studies in college aren’t going to matter an iota.

1:35 am  •  9 February 2010

peachbee:

axinomancy:

heythatismybike:

spiritguide:

goldensilence:

kickinkristin:

(via spoilthequiet)

It’s not all that different from high school.

That’s severely true. I like the more in-depth learning, but it’s almost “more high school” than high school was. If I could do it again, I’d probably join a commune.

I’m kind of lucky in that the college I went to was in some ways like a commune.

I’m going there this fall! You have me excited.

It’s changed a lot since I first got there (Fall of 2005). I can’t vouch for what it is now. And I was never really fully part of the New College “community” because I come from Sarasota.

11:00 pm  •  8 February 2010

10:21 pm  •  8 February 2010

heythatismybike:

spiritguide:

goldensilence:

kickinkristin:

(via spoilthequiet)

It’s not all that different from high school.

That’s severely true. I like the more in-depth learning, but it’s almost “more high school” than high school was. If I could do it again, I’d probably join a commune.

I’m kind of lucky in that the college I went to was in some ways like a commune.

9:41 pm  •  8 February 2010

laughoutlife asked: So are you in college? If so where?
I'm just a senior in high school, and yeah, i guess I'm just amazed at your tumblr page. You definitly find great things to post about. I love it.

Already graduated from New College of Florida. And thanks! I apprecicate it.

9:35 pm  •  8 February 2010

The Theme of 2009: Corporatism

Looking back through the year’s Weekly Sifts, one theme pulls everything together: the dark influence of corporations. I’ve never been a big fan of corporate power and its ability to set our country’s agenda, but as the year went on I got more and more radicalized. (The radical turn begins with Pioneers of Corporate Liberation in August.) At the beginning of the year I saw issues through a partisan political lens: I was a liberal and my goal was to battle the distortions that conservatives brought into the national debate. I saw this split as mostly economic: Conservatives represent the rich; liberals represent ordinary people.

Now I think that’s only approximately true. The more important split is that liberals represent people while conservatives represent corporations. The rich tend to side with corporations against the rest of us, but that’s just one of many human fault lines that corporations have managed to exploit. They also take advantage of our racial, religious, and social divisions. Corporations, for example, care not at all about abortion or gay rights — but if politicians who stand for corporate power can use those issues get votes, that’s wonderful for them.

That insight explains so many of the asymmetries in our political debate. Compared to people, corporations are few in number and their interests are simpler, so they are much easier to organize. We the people can only organize in public, through public institutions. So we need a trustworthy and reliable news media. We need that media to report the findings of an unbiased community of scientists and other experts. We need a transparent political process that identifies our common interests, empowers leaders to take action on our behalf, and holds those leaders accountable for their actions. Otherwise, collectively we have a very hard time figuring out what is true and what we can or should do about it.

Corporations don’t need any of that. They hire their own experts to find out the information they need. They strategize behind closed doors. They hire lobbyists to deal directly with politicians and bureaucrats. The more secrecy, the better.

And so corporations don’t need to control public institutions, they just need to make them unreliable. If politics becomes one gang of sleazeballs against another gang of sleazeballs — that’s good for them. If the scientific community obfuscates issues instead of clarifying them — that’s good for them. If the news media just repeats the competing lies of each side, without any attempt to find the truth — that’s good for them. If you wouldn’t trust the media even if it did tell you the truth — that’s even better.

5:50 pm  •  8 February 2010

laughoutlife asked: I just found your tumblr, and I'm intriqued. Who are you? Haha more speciffically, how old?

I’m 22. And I’m just a reader and a leftist who likes this platform and likes sharing information (and music, and other random things) with others. How about you?

5:48 pm  •  8 February 2010

The Limits of Anti-Racism

Antiracism is a favorite concept on the American left these days. Of course, all good sorts want to be against racism, but what does the word mean exactly?

The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation.

This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South. The 1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed against specific targets, like employment discrimination in defense production. Black Power era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly focused on combating specific inequalities and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of voting rights and specific programs of redistribution.

Whether or not one considers those goals correct or appropriate, they were clear and strategic in a way that “antiracism” simply is not. Sure, those earlier struggles relied on a discourse of racial justice, but their targets were concrete and strategic. It is only in a period of political demobilization that the historical specificities of those struggles have become smoothed out of sight in a romantic idealism that homogenizes them into timeless abstractions like “the black liberation movement”—an entity that, like Brigadoon, sporadically appears and returns impelled by its own logic.

6:05 pm  •  7 February 2010

How dictators watch us on the web: The internet is meant to help activists, enable democratic protest and weaken the grip of authoritarian regimes. But it doesn’t — in fact, the web is a boon for bullies

Enthusiasm for the idea of digital revolution abounds. In October, I was invited to testify to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Washington DC—a hotchpotch of US congressmen, diplomats and military officials. The group was holding a hearing titled: “Twitter Against Tyrants: New Media in Authoritarian Regimes.” I would once have happily accepted the premise, but recently my thinking has changed. From 2006-08 I worked on western-funded internet projects in the former Soviet Union—most with a “let’s-promote-democracy-through-blogs” angle. But last year I quit. Our mission to use the internet to nudge citizens of authoritarian regimes to challenge the status quo had so many unexpected consequences that, at times, it seemed to be hurting the very causes we were trying to promote.

At the hearing, I was the lonely voice of dissent in a sea of optimism. In one speech, Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican known for his conservative Christian views, implored us to “tear down the new walls of the 21st century, the cyber-walls and electronic censorship technology used by tyrants.”

Jon Stewart, host of the satirical programme The Daily Show, recently poked fun at a similar suggestion from a congressman that the web was freeing the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran: “What, we could have liberated them over the internet? Why did we send an army when we could do it the same way we buy shoes?” Unfortunately, critical voices like his are rare. The majority of the media, so cranky when reporting the internet’s impact on their industry, keep producing tear-jerking examples of the marriage of political protest and social media. And what a list it is: Burmese monks defying an evil junta with digital cameras; Filipino teenagers using SMS to create a “textual revolution;” Egyptian activists using encryption to hide from the all-seeing-eye of the Mukhabarat; even Brazilian ecologists using Google maps to show deforestation in the Amazon delta. And did I mention Moldova, China and Iran? These cyber-dissidents, we are told, now take their struggles online, swapping leaflets for Twitter updates and ditching fax machines for iPhones.

But that isn’t what happened in Belarus. After the first flash mob, the authorities began monitoring By_mob, the LiveJournal community where the activities were announced. The police started to show up at the events, often before the flashmobbers did. Not only did they detain participants, but they too took photos. These—along with the protesters’ own online images—were used to identify troublemakers, many of whom were then interrogated by the KGB, threatened with suspension from university, or worse. This intimidation didn’t go unnoticed. Soon, only hardcore activists would show up. Social media created a digital panopticon that thwarted the revolution: its networks, transmitting public fear, were infiltrated and hopelessly outgunned by the power of the state.

6:01 pm  •  6 February 2010