#mikhail shapiro

[rrrauschen]

Nadezhda Kosheverova & Mikhail Shapiro, {1947} Золушка (Cinderella)

[sometimesigif]

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[jcmarchi]

Ultrasound Enables Less-Invasive Brain–Machine Interfaces - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/ultrasound-enables-less-invasive-brain-machine-interfaces-technology-org/

Ultrasound Enables Less-Invasive Brain–Machine Interfaces - Technology Org

Brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) can read brain activity and translate that activity to control an electronic device like a prosthetic arm or computer cursor. They promise to enable people with paralysis to move prosthetic devices with their thoughts.

Ultrasound is used to image two-dimensional sheets of the brain, which can then be stacked together to create a 3-D image. Image Credit: Courtesy of W. Griggs

Many BMIs require invasive surgeries to implant electrodes into the brain in order to read neural activity. However, in 2021, Caltech researchers developed a way to read brain activity using functional ultrasound (fUS), a much less invasive technique.

Now, a new study is a proof-of-concept that fUS technology can be the basis for an “online” BMI—one that reads brain activity, deciphers its meaning with decoders programmed with machine learning, and consequently controls a computer that can accurately predict movement with very minimal delay time.

The study was conducted in the Caltech laboratories of Richard Andersen, James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience and director and leadership chair of the T&C Chen Brain–Machine Interface Center; and Mikhail Shapiro, Max Delbrück Professor of Chemical Engineering and Medical Engineering and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

The work was a collaboration with the laboratory of Mickael Tanter, director of physics for medicine at INSERM in Paris, France.

[embedded content]

“Functional ultrasound is a completely new modality to add to the toolbox of brain–machine interfaces that can assist people with paralysis,” says Andersen. “It offers attractive options of being less invasive than brain implants and does not require constant recalibration. This technology was developed as a collaborative effort that one lab could not accomplish alone.”

“In general, all tools for measuring brain activity have benefits and drawbacks,” says Sumner Norman, former senior postdoctoral scholar research associate at Caltech and a co-first author.

“While electrodes can very precisely measure the activity of single neurons, they require implantation into the brain itself and are difficult to scale to more than a few small brain regions. Non-invasive techniques also come with tradeoffs. Functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI] provides whole-brain access but is restricted by limited sensitivity and resolution. Portable methods, like electroencephalography [EEG], are hampered by poor signal quality and an inability to localize deep brain function.”

Ultrasound imaging works by emitting pulses of high-frequency sound and measuring how those sound vibrations echo throughout a substance, such as various human body tissues.

Sound waves travel at different speeds through these tissue types and reflect at the boundaries between them. This technique is commonly used to take images of a fetus in utero, and for other diagnostic imaging.

A brain 3D model – illustrative photo. Image credit: Lisa Yount via Unsplash, free license

Because the skull itself is not permeable to sound waves, ultrasound for brain imaging requires a transparent “window” to be installed into the skull. “Importantly, ultrasound technology does not need to be implanted into the brain itself,” says Whitney Griggs (PhD ’23), a co-first author on the study.

“This significantly reduces the chance for infection and leaves the brain tissue and its protective dura perfectly intact.”

“As neurons’ activity changes, so does their use of metabolic resources like oxygen,” says Norman. “Those resources are resupplied through the blood stream, which is the key to functional ultrasound.”

In this study, the researchers used ultrasound to measure changes in blood flow to specific brain regions. In the same way that the sound of an ambulance siren changes in pitch as it moves closer and then farther away from you, red blood cells will increase the pitch of the reflected ultrasound waves as they approach the source and decrease the pitch as they flow away.

Measuring this Doppler-effect phenomenon allowed the researchers to record tiny changes in the brain’s blood flow down to spatial regions just 100 micrometers wide, about the width of a human hair. This enabled them to measure the activity of tiny neural populations simultaneously, some as small as just 60 neurons, widely throughout the brain.

The researchers used functional ultrasound to measure brain activity from the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) of non-human primates. This region governs the planning of movements and contributes to their execution. The Andersen lab has studied the region for decades using other techniques.

The animals were taught two tasks, requiring them to either plan to move their hand to direct a cursor on a screen, or plan to move their eyes to look at a specific part of the screen. They only needed to think about performing the task, not actually move their eyes or hands, as the BMI read the planning activity in their PPC.

“I remember how impressive it was when this kind of predictive decoding worked with electrodes two decades ago, and it’s amazing now to see it work with a much less invasive method like ultrasound,” says Shapiro.

The ultrasound data was sent in real-time to a decoder (previously trained to decode the meaning of that data using machine learning), and subsequently generated control signals to move a cursor to where the animal intended it to go. The BMI successfully did this to eight radial targets with mean errors of less than 40 degrees.

“Significantly, the technique does not require the BMI to be recalibrated each day, unlike other BMIs,” says Griggs. “As an analogy, imagine needing to recalibrate your computer mouse for up to 15 minutes daily before use.”

Next, the team plans to study how BMIs based on ultrasound technology perform in humans, and to develop the fUS technology further to enable three-dimensional imaging for improved accuracy.

Written by Lori Dajose

Source: Caltech

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

[sasquapossum]

This looks like amazing news.

Hey @afeelgoodblog what do you think?

[infosnack]

STAT: A yogurt drink instead of a colonoscopy? Study uses engineered bacteria to detect cancer

STAT+: A yogurt drink instead of a colonoscopy? Study uses engineered bacteria to detect cancer https://www.statnews.com/2023/08/10/colon-cancer-test-engineered-bacteria/?utm_campaign=rss Dan Worthley, a gastroenterologist and cancer scientist at Colonoscopy Clinic in Brisbane, Australia, does thousands of colonoscopies a year, seeking and destroying precancerous polyps. It’s a practically surefire way to prevent colorectal cancer, but an unpleasant experience for patients. The future, Worthley hopes, will be much less onerous — and he’s developing a technology that, if it works one day, might make the experience more of a piece of cake. Or, rather, a cup of yogurt — containing engineered bacteria that can detect and deliver a treatment for colorectal polyps or cancer. Worthley and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Adelaide published results in Science on Thursday that show they are one step closer to that far-off dream. In their paper, the researchers show a proof-of-concept engineered bacterium that can detect cancer DNA in the guts of mice and react to it by turning on certain cellular circuitry. “I think it’s really cool. It introduces a new concept for how you can use cells as a sensor for something happening inside other cells,” said Mikhail Shapiro, a chemical and medical engineer at the California Institute of Technology who did not work on the study. “That can flip a switch inside those cells. In this case, it’s used for diagnostic output, but in principle it could be used for other things.” Continue to STAT+ to read the full story… via STAT Health - Science and medicine news https://www.statnews.com/category/health/ August 10, 2023 at 02:00PM

[dailykino]

Cinderella | Золушка (1947) dir. Nadezhda Kosheverova, Mikhail Shapiro

[solonocturne]

On the set of Cinderella, 1947, dir. Nadezhda Kosheverova and Mikhail Shapiro

[warningsine]

for the film ask: 1, 10, 11, 15, 21, 71

1. Favorite action film?

"A Touch of Zen" by King Hu

"New Dragon Gate Inn" by Raymond Lee

"Hero" & "House of Flying Daggers" by Yimou Zhang

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" by Ang Lee

10. Favorite animated movie?

Oh, too many.

"Persepolis" by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi

"The Triplets of Belleville" by Sylvain Chomet

"Waltz with Bashir" by Ari Folman

"Millennium Actress" and "Perfect Blue" by Satoshi Kon

"The Red Turtle" by Michaël Dudok de Wit

"Josep" by Aurel

"Thumbelina" by Lotte Reiniger

"Chico & Rita" by Tono Errando, Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal

"The Secret of Kells" by Tomm Moore

"The Swallows of Kabul" by Zabou Breitman and Eléa Gobé Mévellec

"Tale of Tales" by Yuri Norstein

"Belladonna of Sadness" by Eiichi Yamamoto

"Metropolis" by Rintaro

"Miss Hokusai" by Hinako Sugiura

11. Favorite musical?

Oh, boy. Musicals give me life so the list is gonna be long.

Obviously, you'll often hear me singing the classics ('cause I adore them wholeheartedly):

"Fiddler on the Roof"

"My Fair Lady"

"Victor/Victoria"

"Cabaret"

"All About Jazz"

"West Side Story"

"Oliver!"

"A Star Is Born"

"Singin’ in the Rain"

"Young Girls of Rochefort"

"Umbrellas of Cherbourg"

but I also love:

"8 women" by François Ozon

"Fado: The Story of a Singer" by Perdigão Queiroga

"Victimas del Pecado" by Emilio Fernandez

"Alla en el Rancho Grande" by Fernando de Fuentes

"Tangos, the Exile of Gardel" by Fernando Solanas

"Blood Wedding" by Carlos Saura

"El Gran Casino" by Luis Buñuel

"Princess Raccoon" by Seijun Suzuki

"Le Million" by René Clair

"Sholay" by Ramesh Sippy

"Perhaps Love" by Peter Chan

"Orfeu" by Carlos Diegues

"Cinderella" by Nadezhda Kosheverova & Mikhail Shapiro

"The Congress Dances" by Erik Charell

"Fatmah" by Umm Kulthum

"The Happiness of the Katakuris" by Takashi Miike

"Black Orpheus" by Marcel Camus

"Where Do We Go Now?" by Nadine Labaki

"Zouzou" by Marc Allégret

"Ay Carmela!" by Carlos Saura

"Singing Lovebirds" by Masahiro Makino

"French Cancan" by Jean Renoir

"Days and Nights" by Henry Barakat

"Window Shopping" by Chantal Akerman

"No One Knows About Persian Cats" by Bahman Ghobadi

"A Good Lad" by Boris Barnet

"Mother India" by Mehboob Khan

"The Beloved" by Christophe Honoré

"Opera Jawa" by Garin Nugroho

"Same Old Song" by Alain Resnais

"Karmen Gei" by Joseph Gaï Ramaka

"La France" by Serge Bozon

"Destiny" by Youssef Chahine

"Hipsters by Valery Todorovsky

"Las Cosas del Querer" by Jaime Chávarri

"My voice" by Flora Gomes

"Black Cat, White Cat" by Emir Kusturica

15. Favorite chick flick?

I have beef with the term "chick flick," but "The Devil Wears Prada" will do, I guess. Also, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Mamma Mia."

(Does "Thelma and Louise" even count as a chick flick? If yes, that is my favorite one.)

21. Favorite kids movie?

"Inside Out" by Pete Docter 

71. A move that made you ache for love.

"In the mood for love" by Wong Kar-Wai

"Brief Encounter" by David Lean

among others.

[softcallofdutyimagines]

Not Smokey, but here's a few Makarov replacement cast options. I did give a few of these to Smokey, so you might recognize the names if you haven't seen media with them.

Yuriy Borisov

Serafim Ionov in the movie T-34 (he's the first guy that speaks in this clip)

Mikhail Kalashnikov in the movie AK-47: Kalashnikov (it's the trailer for the movie, he'll introduce himself)

Interview (English auto-translate exists but are horrendous)

Pavel Priluchnyy

My personal favorite recasting of Makarov but only because I like the Netflix show Silver Spoon/Mazhor that he's in

Mikhail Devyatayev in the movie V2. Escape From Hell (he's the pilot. Don't trust English auto-translation here)

Lie to Me the Truth Movie (no translation option)

Interview (I don't think I need to say more about the auto-generated English)

Zack Sayenko

Alexander from Into the Silent Sea short film (22 minutes ENG subs, 4 minute segment in case you're short on time. Roman Varshavsky is also in here as Kaminin)

Vlad Lukov/Busboy from NCIS: LA

Never Say Nyet promo/discussion (can't find a regular interview)

Oleg Mirochnikov

Metro 2033 Artyom's diary entries (No English subs)

A Warsaw Melody Play interview (actually pretty fascinating)

Honorable Mentions:

Stitch and Adler's Russian dub (whom I can't find the names to)

None of them can replace Roman Varshavsky, of course, but maybe you'll find one of them interesting or hear Makarov's voice in a different style. And rid the Ben Shapiro.

Hmmmm, time to dive into this absolute FEAST 😩🙏🏻

Ok, first guy:

This man passed the ancestry.com test for 100% slav, so I do like that lmao. I think with the black hair and some stubble he'd actually be pretty damn close for Makarov. His voice is also not too bad, I feel like it's a little too sexy for Makarov 😅😅😅 It's moderately deep and strong, I feel like Makarov needs a hissy type voice

Pavel:

Honestly, I also like this choice a lot 👀👀👌🏻 His voice is actually really, good and close to what I imagined. He has the ssss at the end of his words but he has just the right amount of deep and sexy that it still works 😳👀 His face is just throwing me off a little 😅 He's got this ultra baby face, and it's just not working. Maybe some stubble would help cover it up tho, so I wouldn't count him out

Zack:

Oof, not feeling this one 😪 He sounds and looks like a really big kid, and unfortunately it's just not working 😭 He is cute tho 💖

Oleg:

Ok, this man just has a perfect villain voice in general 😩 Unfortunately it is way too deep for our 5'9 king 😭😭 Low key feel like he would make a good stitch 👀

Honorable mention:

Same as above tbh, but not as deep

Overall, I really actually kind of like the idea of him having an "annoying" voice, like it doesn't have to be deep and silky you know? I'm just looking for an accent and a little intimidating edge to the voice.

Honestly, I can't really choose between the first two which I like best, but maybe I'd have to go with Pavel 😩🙏🏻🙏🏻 Thank you for your service Broccoli 🙏🏻

[sovietpostcards]

Faina Ranevskaya as stepmother in Cinderella, Soviet film directed by Nadezhda Kosheverova and Mikhail Shapiro (1947)

[natashaivanov]

Natasha’s phone was pressed close to her ear, her full lips twisted into a hard line. “No -- no. Mikhail’s interview was supposed to be pushed until Friday, not Thursday. Call the station and tell them he’ll be in a meeting with Mayor Shapiro, and if they try to tell you they can’t do it, remind them that they’re the ones who begged him to come in.” The person on the other line started chattering away, causing the blonde to scowl. “I don’t care if they’ve already booked him for Thursday. He’s on Friday, or not at all.”

With that, she hung up with a sharp click of the end call button. “I swear, I have to do everything myself,” She grumbled, pushing out of the revolving door of her office, only to knock shoulders with someone on the way out. “Oh, really?” Natasha gasped, her briefcase spilling open on the concrete. 

[berniesrevolution]

WARNING: LONG ARTICLE! (It’s worth it, though)

It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” So declared the headline of a Washington Post column in March; one imagines Katharine Graham spitting out her martini. The article, by a twenty-seven-year-old columnist named Elizabeth Bruenig, drew more than 3,000 comments (a typical column gets a few hundred); a follow-up piece, urging a “good-faith argument about socialism,” received nearly as much attention.

By now, the rebirth of socialism in American politics needs little elaboration. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primary, and his continued popularity, upset just about everyone’s intuition that the term remains taboo. Donald Trump’s victory, meanwhile, made all political truisms seem up for grabs. Polls show that young people in particular view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been around since 1982, has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since November 2016, and dozens of DSA candidates are running for office around the country. In June, one of them, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, upset New York City Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, knocking off a ten-term incumbent and one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

The meaning of socialism has always been maddeningly slippery, in part because it has always meant different things to different people. Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete. Karl Marx himself spent more time critiquing capitalism than describing communism, a habit that subsequent generations of leftists inherited. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that, while he couldn’t define it, “I know it when I see it.” Socialism sometimes feels like the inverse: socialists know it when they don’t see it. Bernie has only made things murkier by defining his brand of socialism in terms hardly indistinguishable from New Deal liberalism. “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production,” he declared in the fall of 2015, at a speech at Georgetown University, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” But while the meaning of American socialism in 2018 begins with Bernie, it doesn’t end there. Every political movement needs an intellectual movement, and when it comes to today’s brand of socialism, it’s the thirty-five-and-under crowd doing much of the heavy lifting.

The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

Bruenig, the Post columnist, is perhaps the most prominently placed of a small but increasingly visible group of young writers unabashedly advocating for democratic socialism. In writing her attention-grabbing article, she helped elevate a discussion that has long taken place on Twitter. Of course, the relative merits of socialism—and Marxism, Maoism, anarcho-syndicalism, you name it—have been debated in lefty journals and academic circles for a century or more. Members of this new generation, however, aren’t just talking among themselves; they’re trying to take socialism mainstream. And unlike their predecessors, they have reason to think Americans will take their ideas seriously.

They’ve got a double challenge. The first is to convince skeptical Americans that, despite what they may have learned in high school, socialism doesn’t have to mean Stalinism, and it doesn’t lead inexorably to the gulags of Soviet Russia or the starvation of Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela. The second may be even trickier. They must explain how their version of socialism fits, or doesn’t, into the American political system while showing how, specifically, it is distinct from traditional Democratic Party liberalism. In other words, they must not only defend socialism in the twenty-first century; they must define it.

Nathan Robinson hated Bernie Sanders before he loved him.

It was the fall of 2015. Robinson, a doctoral candidate at Harvard and, at the time, a recent law school graduate, had been steeped in socialist thought since high school, when he discovered the writings of anarchistic socialists like Mikhail Bakunin and Noam Chomsky. Socialism has always been dogged by the question of whether it’s possible to participate in electoral politics while remaining truly radical. Like many leftists, Robinson initially saw Sanders as an example of intolerable compromise.

“Based on Senator Bernie Sanders’s public statements, one of the following things must be true,” he declared on his blog in October 2015. “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it.” Sanders, he explained in a follow-up post, was “not asking for public ownership of the major sectors of the economy,” but merely calling for expanded welfare and regulations. “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.”

(Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, sees socialism not as an economic platform, but as a strong commitment to certain principles.)

Those turned out to be among Robinson’s last blog posts. In January 2016, he launched Current Affairs, a deeply irreverent leftist magazine, with backing from a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Despite being essentially a one-man operation, Current Affairs quickly developed a substantial following on the left thanks to Robinson’s extraordinary writing talent—especially his knack for composing viral takedowns of conservative intellectual hucksters like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

By 2017, Robinson seemed to have fully shed his earlier hostility toward Sandersian socialism. Here he was, last summer, writing on the difference between leftism and liberalism: “As Nancy Pelosi said of the present Democratic party: ‘We’re capitalist.’ When Bernie Sanders is asked if he is a capitalist, he answers flatly: ‘No.’ Sanders is a socialist, and socialism is not capitalism, and there is no possibility of healing the ideological rift between the two.”

That’s a long way from calling Sanders an ignoramus or a liar. What happened?

Much has been made of how Sanders has pulled the Democratic mainstream to the left. Presumptive 2020 presidential candidates are racing to capture the Bernie vote by declaring their support for policies—single-payer health care, free college—that once seemed impossibly radical. But Robinson’s evolution on Sanders is representative of a complementary phenomenon that has received less notice: Sanders seems to have also pulled the far left closer to the mainstream. The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

“Those of us who consider ourselves on the more radical left were kind of disdainful of the political system,” said Robinson. “It was a real minority within Occupy saying you should even contest elections.” Sanders’s tantalizingly strong primary run—roughly equivalent to the MIT basketball team making the Final Four—made some lefties reconsider. For the first time, it seemed as though they could actually win. But winning requires engaging in politics, and politics requires some degree of pragmatism—a recognition that the achievable will always fall short of the ideal. That, in turn, requires giving up the ideological purity of the fringe.

Consider Jacobin magazine, the leading publication of the Millennial far left. It’s a magazine that wears its Marxist affections on its sleeve, with the tagline “Reason in Revolt.” Across the first seventeen issues, by my count, the word “Marx” or its derivations appeared an average of about forty times. But, since then—that is, beginning in summer 2015, when people started feeling the Bern—that’s fallen to only about twelve times on average.

Bhaskar Sunkara founded Jacobin in 2011, while an undergraduate at George Washington University—which now makes him, at age twenty-nine, something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists. The magazine doesn’t have a strict party line. In May 2015, its website ran dueling pieces on Sanders’s candidacy. One, by Ashley Smith, called Sanders’s campaign an “obstacle” to the formation of a new left. But the other, by Sunkara, argued that the left should welcome Bernie’s run, “even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough.”

Since then, while Sunkara continues to distinguish in theory between Sandersism and full-blown socialism, Bernie has practically become the magazine’s mascot. A Jacobin Facebook ad, which reads, “It’s not you, it’s capitalism,” features an image of Sanders superimposed over the Jacobin logo. The winter 2016 issue featured a cartoon of Sanders on its cover, alongside Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party. And a health care–focused issue from earlier this year reads as an extended brief in favor of Medicare for All, Bernie’s single-payer plan, featuring a fawning Q&A with Sanders. The editor’s note that opens the issue begins, “When future historians chronicle how Medicare for All was finally won . . .” To cast Medicare for All—not even fully socialized medicine, since it would nationalize insurance, but not providers—in such grandiose terms is a striking shift of the socialist goalposts.

(Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, is at age twenty-nine something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists.)

“We push for social democratic reforms in the here and now,” Sunkara told me, though he insisted that his long-term vision remained as radical as ever. “There’s a need to at least dabble a little bit more with strategy and some more policy-oriented stuff, instead of just merely trying to build an opposition movement and mainly talk about theory.”

Not everyone on the left is happy about it. Socialists, the leftist writer Fredrik deBoer wrote last year for Current Affairs, “seem to be falling into the models of the welfare state without really knowing we’re doing it, sliding rightward as we talk about a reinvigorated left, slouching towards liberalism.” At its core, he argued, socialism means moving sectors of the economy into communal ownership—not merely expanding the welfare state, which is social democracy, or perhaps social insurance, but not democratic socialism. Taking issue with an op-ed by Sunkara in the New York Times, deBoer worried that the Jacobin editor’s “alternative” vision “does not look very different from a more humane, more nurturing liberal capitalist state.”

Nathan Robinson, who published deBoer’s piece, and is currently at work on a book about what socialism means to young people, doesn’t deny that his own thinking has become less doctrinaire. “I’ve sort of come around to the idea that ‘socialism,’ the word, should less be used to describe a state-owned or collectively owned economy, and more used to describe a very strong commitment to a certain fundamental set of principles,” he said. “It should be used to describe the position that is horrified by solvable economic depravations, rather than a very specific and narrow way of ordering the economic system.”

For Robinson, the heart of socialism is not this or that policy, but rather the fundamental values that should drive our politics. During the election, Hillary Clinton bragged about having the support of “real billionaires” like Mark Cuban and Michael Bloomberg, in a shot at Trump’s refusal to disclose his finances. Obama, after he left office, was promptly seen vacationing on Richard Branson’s private island and partying with celebrities on billionaire David Geffen’s yacht. That makes someone like Robinson skeptical that the Democratic Party is actually committed to reducing inequality—which, after all, would require taking back some of the wealth of people like David Geffen.

A socialist, in other words, is hungry for a little class warfare. Sunkara, in the intro to his Sanders interview in Jacobin, wrote that while Sanders “may share some of the same policy goals as progressives like Elizabeth Warren,” the difference is his “confrontational vision of social change,” which involves calling out “the millionaires and billionaires” who are hoarding too much wealth.

Or, as Robinson put it in a Current Affairs essay (published under a pen name, a habit he has since dropped) titled “It’s Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich,”

After all, there are plenty of people on this earth who die—or who watch their loved ones die—because they cannot afford to pay for medical care. There are elderly people who become homeless because they cannot afford rent. There are children living on streets and in cars, there are mothers who can’t afford diapers for their babies. All of this is beyond dispute. And all of it could be ameliorated if people who had lots of money simply gave those other people their money. It’s therefore deeply shameful to be rich. It’s not a morally defensible thing to be.

If Sanders and the prospect of political power have made some preexisting radical leftists start talking more like New Deal liberals, the even bigger effect of his prominence has been compositional: by defining socialism in an especially capacious and inviting way, he pulled in people who might otherwise still identify as liberal or progressive. “What Roosevelt was stating in 1944, what Martin Luther King Jr. stated in similar terms twenty years later, and what I believe today, is that true freedom does not occur without economic security,” he said in his Georgetown speech in November 2015. “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.”

This kind of talk is enough to make a certain kind of liberal’s eyes roll clean out of her head. What Democrat doesn’t believe in those things? But Sanders couldn’t have claimed this ideological real estate if his overwhelmingly Millennial supporters didn’t feel that mainstream liberals—embodied by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment that lined up behind her—had abandoned it.

Briahna Gray, a contributing editor at Current Affairs who was recently hired as a politics editor at the Intercept, told me she probably wouldn’t have identified as a socialist in 2015. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said. Gray, a Harvard Law School–educated lawyer, has made a name for herself by embodying an intersection of identities that’s rare in media: a leftist, Sanders-supporting black woman. That has given her credibility to puncture the “Bernie bro” stereotype and take on Sanders critics who dismiss his movement as insufficiently attuned to racial or gender issues.

(Briahna Gray, an editor at the Intercept, came to socialism more recently. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said.)

“The most disappointing part of the 2016 primary was centrist candidates convincing Americans that policies that are implemented in wealthy nations all over the world, much less wealthy than ours, are completely a fantasy world,” she said. (Clinton declared during a primary debate that single-payer health care would “never, ever come to pass,” and later ridiculed Sanders in her campaign memoir for essentially promising Americans free ponies.) This was a recurring theme in conversations with young socialists. To their ears, the term “liberal” has come to represent an intolerably unimaginative posture toward politics: less “Yes we can” than “Not so fast.”

Still, the worldview Gray sketched out—“where socialism is used to mitigate the negative effects of capitalism”—sounded like good old Keynesian liberalism. If you’re someone who believes a word should have a fixed meaning over time, or who believes in the importance of the liberal tradition, then this approach—socialism as liberalism, just more liberal—can be deeply exasperating. Sean Wilentz, a historian and longtime friend of the Clintons, captured some of this frustration in a recent essay in the Democracy journal. “[T]here is something essentially dishonest about trying to assimilate the New Deal legacy as ‘socialism,’ ” he wrote, referring to the speech in which Sanders tied himself to Franklin Roosevelt.

There’s no denying that much of what today’s socialists are demanding fits within the liberal tradition of a Ted Kennedy or Paul Wellstone. Advocating something like single-payer health care, but calling yourself a socialist, can look like mere positioning. In fact, the socialist writers I spoke with didn’t really have a problem with that. “Part of it is just a rhetorical claim,” said Ryan Cooper, an opinion writer at the Week who identifies as a democratic socialist. He said that the core aspects of his political agenda are creating a “complete welfare state” and reducing inequality by democratizing ownership of capital. Why use a term as loaded as socialism to describe those ideals? “The point is to say, ‘Here’s a left,’ in a way that just could not possibly be co-opted by Andrew Cuomo types.”

Nathan Robinson echoed the sentiment. “I used to call myself ‘progressive,’ and then the term became used by everybody, and now it doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “If you’re trying to say, ‘I’m further to the left than Obama and the Clintons,’ you’re stuck!” (Disclosure: I’m friendly with Cooper, who is a former Washington Monthly web editor, and Robinson.)

The divide may owe as much to differences in memory as to ideology. If you’re old enough to remember Democrats getting absolutely creamed in three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s, then you’re old enough to remember them seemingly needing to pivot to the center to regain power in 1992. They didn’t compromise their core values (they would love a complete welfare state, if only it were possible), they just did what they had to do to win votes from what looked like an overwhelmingly conservative electorate. That included getting cozier with Wall Street and members of the plutocracy to ensure a stream of campaign funding that could rival the right’s.

But if the 1980s are when you were born, that’s not your experience. You remember that the Bill Clinton years were pretty good—but yielded George W. Bush. We got eight years of Obama—then Trump. If cautious, corporate-friendly liberalism gives way time after time to revanchist Republican administrations, is it really doing its job? If liberal figureheads stop even talking about a truly ambitious social safety net, how long should we keep assuming that’s what they want, deep down? Someone under thirty-five years old has no memory of a Democratic presidential nominee, let alone president, to the ideological left of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, that young person is broke: a report by the St. Louis Federal Reserve recently warned that households headed by ’80s babies have 34 percent less wealth than expected based on earlier generations at that age, and are thus “at greatest risk of becoming a ‘lost generation’ for wealth accumulation.”

Telling a young radical that, despite all their sharp disagreements with the liberal mainstream, they’re really a part of it, is a bit like telling a football fan that the Cleveland Browns are actually good because they won some championships in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s fair to wonder how many years a political movement can distance itself from certain principles before it runs the risk of a rival movement claiming them for its own.

(It must be said, too, that “liberal” is an unfortunate term. It belongs to that category of words—like “sanction” or“oversight”—that mean both a thing and its opposite; thus a “classical liberal” is really a free-market conservative. An acute instance of this problem is the even more awful “neoliberal,” which itself has two meanings: one is simply Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire capitalism; the other, elaborated in the pages of this magazine in the 1980s, is more akin to the “New Democrat” philosophy of Bill Clinton. But these definitions overlap, because Clinton added financial deregulation to the agenda.)

It’s a bit unfair to ask the term “liberal” to cover every political position to the left of conservative and to the right of seizing the factories. The socialist label might be annoying, but it’s useful. Of course, the policies Bernie Sanders and many of his followers are calling for fit within the American liberal tradition, if you go back far enough. But to insist that they therefore owe loyalty to liberalism itself is to get the point of political movements backward. Ask not what you can do for your ideology; ask what your ideology can do for you. If young people increasingly feel like liberalism as it exists today doesn’t represent their values, then perhaps it’s up to liberalism to win them back.

If you think the Millennial socialist movement is only about protesting Clintonism, however, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.

The tricky part of advancing ideas under the banner of “socialism” is threading the needle between two contradictory critiques. The first is an evergreen: that real-world socialism inevitably leads to catastrophe and dictatorship, and only someone totally ignorant of history could deny this. (A representative headline in the National Review: “Despite Venezuela, Socialism Is Still Popular in the U.S.”) The second critique, as we’ve seen, is that self-identified socialists actually aren’t socialists. (David Brooks managed to make both these points at once in a recent column. The idea that capitalism is inherently flawed, he wrote, has “been rejected by most on the left.” Nonetheless, today’s progressive left, drunk on populism and identity politics, “seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.”)

Few people seem to be working harder to tackle that challenge than Matt Bruenig, the twenty-nine-year-old founder of the People’s Policy Project, a one-man socialist think tank—and the husband and intellectual teammate of Liz Bruenig, the Washington Post columnist. I met them for lunch near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., in April. Former high school sweethearts who met on the debate team in Arlington, Texas, they’re an odd couple, by which I mean both that they are different from each other and that they are individually odd. Matt is tall and scruffy, with a paunch and a patchy beard. Liz is barely five feet tall and had her hair pulled into a tidy bun the day we met. He is hyper-analytical and obsessed with economic policy. She is a religious Catholic—her pro-life views have made her enemies on the left, whereas Matt, she joked, “loves abortion”—and more concerned with philosophical questions than policy specifics. “I make a much more romantic case for socialism than Matt does,” she said.

(Matt Bruenig’s one-man think tank, the People’s Policy Project, specializes in left-wing policy wonkery.)

Matt gained some notoriety in 2016 when he was fired from his part-time blogging gig at Demos, a liberal think tank, after directing a stream of Twitter insults at the head of a different liberal think tank. At the time, Liz was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with their daughter, Jane. I asked what happened after the kerfuffle.

“We went to Twitter boot camp,” Liz said.

“Who was the drill sergeant?”

“Me.”

In 2017, Matt launched his crowd-funded think tank, which immediately began being noticed in liberal policy circles. His work, which in its faith in winning arguments by marshaling the right facts calls to mind a socialist Ezra Klein, is often cited in places like the Atlantic and Vox, and he has been quoted as an expert by CBS News and elsewhere. Even among prominent young lefties, his Twitter presence, even post–boot camp, stands out—277,000 followers as of June.

(Elizabeth Bruenig, a twenty-seven-year-old columnist at the Washington Post, has devoted columns to making the case for socialism.)

The Bruenigs argue, as Liz has written in the Post, that “it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or.” Much of Matt’s work revolves around making the case that real socialist policies have been implemented successfully in other countries, particularly Nordic nations like Norway and Sweden. The question of how to describe the governance of these places has become quite contentious, because if these healthy, happy, rich nations are meaningfully socialist in some way, it’s hard to argue that socialism always ends in disaster. Conservatives protest the most loudly, but liberals, too, deny that socialism is afoot in Scandinavia. These countries are, we’re told, “mixed economies” or “social democracies”—bigger welfare states, sure, but fundamentally capitalist systems.

But in a post last summer, Matt used data from the OECD library and the International Labour Organization to show that a strong welfare state is only one part of the story. Most strikingly, at least some of the Nordics come out ahead on that textbook aspect of socialism, state ownership. In Norway and Finland, he wrote, the government owns “financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP,” compared to 26 percent in the U.S. Norway’s government owns around 60 percent of the nation’s wealth—nearly double the level for the Chinese government—including a third of its domestic stock market. “There is little doubt that, in terms of state ownership at least, Norway is the most socialist country in the developed world,” Bruenig wrote a few months later—“and, not coincidentally, the happiest country in the world according to the UN’s 2017 World Happiness Report.”

The Norwegian example figures prominently in what is probably Matt’s most interesting policy proposal. In a New York Times op-ed last November, he argued that the easiest way to combat American inequality would be a “social wealth fund,” which he described as akin to an index or mutual fund, “but one owned collectively by society as a whole.”

Norway has such a fund, he pointed out, which is valued at over $1 trillion and is used to pay for its generous welfare state. Alaska has one, too, paying its citizens cash dividends from the proceeds of a diversified investment fund that, like Norway’s, started with oil money. Under Bruenig’s idea, the federal government would create an investment portfolio—perhaps by selling federal assets, or through “taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy,” or by redirecting recession spending by the Federal Reserve—and distribute a regular cash dividend to every American, or every American adult, each of whom would have one equal share in the fund. If the fund came to own a third of the nation’s wealth, he calculated, that would have meant an $8,000 payout to everyone between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four in 2016.

In addition to arguing for a social wealth fund, Bruenig published a long paper authored by Ryan Cooper, the writer at the Week, and Peter Gowan, a Dublin-based researcher, arguing that the best response to the problem of housing affordability would be a massive new “social housing” project, in which the federal government would pay to build ten million homes over the next ten years. Unlike traditional American public housing, this would be “designed to cater to people of various income levels, rather than just serving the ‘deserving poor.’ ” Again, they point to Europe for proof of concept: in the 1960s, facing a housing crisis, Sweden built one million social-housing units over the course of a decade, increasing its housing stock by a third. In Vienna, Austria, they report, “3 in 5 residents live in housing built, owned, or managed by the municipal government.”

(Continue Reading)

[currentsinbiology]

The ultimate goal is to be able to inject therapeutic bacteria into a patient's body—for example, as probiotics to help treat diseases of the gut or as targeted tumor treatments—and then use ultrasound machines to hit the engineered bacteria with sound waves to generate images that reveal the locations of the microbes. The pictures would let doctors know if the treatments made it to the right place in the body and were working properly.

"We are engineering the bacterial cells so they can bounce sound waves back to us and let us know their location the way a ship or submarine scatters sonar when another ship is looking for it," says Mikhail Shapiro, assistant professor of chemical engineering, Schlinger Scholar, and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator. "We want to be able to ask the bacteria, 'Where are you and how are you doing?' The first step is to learn to visualize and locate the cells, and the next step is to communicate with them."

The results will be published in the January 4 issue of the journal Nature.

Acoustic reporter genes for noninvasive imaging of microorganisms in mammalian hosts, Nature (2018). nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature25021

Transmission electron micrograph (TEM) image of a single commensal bacterium, E. coli Nissle 1917, which has been genetically engineered to express gas-filled protein nanostructures known as gas vesicles. The cell is approximately 2 micrometers in length, and the lighter-colored structures contained inside of it are individual gas vesicles. Credit: Anupama Lakshmanan/Caltech

[solonocturne]

Cinderella, 1947, dir. Nadezhda Kosheverova and Mikhail Shapiro