The Ed's Up #164

How Trump Could Wage a War on Scientific Expertise

"A Trump administration can easily repeal regulations that were enacted by federal agencies in the final months of the Obama administration. But with the help of a few key new bills that are currently making their way through Congress, he could also thwart the very infrastructure of science-based policy making, transforming it from a process that’s merely frustrating into one that’s also futile. If all this happens, it will be more than just a war on regulation. It will be a war on expertise itself, on the role of science in informing American society." (Image: Mike Segar) 
 

The Woman Who Sees Time as a Hula Hoop

"Emma's calendar is a hula hoop, which stretches horizontally in front of her and touches her chest at one point—always December 31st, no matter the actual time of year. Emma uses her calendar to organize her life, attaching events to the various months and zooming around the hoop to access them. The hoop is anchored to her body; it doesn’t move if she tilts or rotates her head. “Obviously, this is a construct in her head, not a real hula hoop stuck to her chest,” says Ramachandran. But if she turns her head to the right, the left side of the calendar became fuzzier, as it would be if it was an actual physical object. More bizarrely, the memories that she had appended to those months also became indistinct and harder to recall." (Image: Tim Shaffer) 
 

A Wall-Crawling Roomba That Teaches Kids to Code

"Nagpal thought about building a robot that could climb whiteboards with magnetic wheels. It would be an automated eraser, a vertical Roomba. “I would be the coolest professor ever if, while I’m writing on one board, there was a robot erasing the other board for me,” she says. But when Justin Werfel saw the new robot, he saw more than an eraser. “He said: This is the Logo turtle and it’s’ going to draw for me,” says Nagpal. “And I had an epiphany. We realised that we had a single robot that could inspire people to do very different things at very different ages.” (Image: Radhika Nagpal) 
 

Book news

As well as the New York Times' list of 100 Notable books, I Contain Multitudes has also made it onto best-of-the-year lists from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, the Guardian, the Times, Smithsonian, and ScienceFriday. 
 

More good reads on science and tech

• A single dose of magic mushrooms can make people with severe anxiety and depression better for months. Great reporting from Olga Khazan.
• Searching for lost knowledge in the age of machines: Adrienne LaFrance on how humans and computers are becoming partners in exploration. 
• The dark side of the 21^st Century Cures bill—a supposedly groundbreaking health reform act that will have some serious negative consequences. By Julia Belluz
• How Sarah Zhang dialed the wrong number and stumbled into international phone fraud.
• This scientific quest to find “missing” memories is changing the way we think about the brain. By Brian Resnick
• Great story about how studying people with extreme bodies can pinpoint medically important genes. By Pagan Kennedy
• Reading literature won’t give you superpowers. Joseph Frankel on a very widely covered study
• Natural rock bridges can pick up vibrations from distant human activity. Like guitar strings. By Veronique Greenwood
• There are only 35,000 Venus flytraps in the wild, and there's a Venus flytrap crime ring. By Chistopher Mele.
• Now that Trump has endorsed it, the future of the Dakota Access Pipeline rests with Obama. Brad Plumer discusses his options.
• Antibiotic-resistance genes have been found in Beijing smog. What does that mean? By Didi Kirsten Tatlow
• "Scientists tested mongoose vigilance by dropping pieces of predator poop outside their burrows while they slept." By Jason Bittel
• Myriad Genetics is lying about the relative accuracy of its BRCA genetic tests. By Sharon Begley
• The Desert Rock That Feeds the World: A dispute over Western Sahara’s phosphate reserves could disrupt food production around the globe. By Alex Kasprak
• The Running Conversation in Your Head: What a close study of "inner speech" reveals about why humans talk to themselves. By Julie Beck

 

More good reads on politics and society

• This, by David Roberts, is the single best retrospective piece I’ve read on the US election. It’s long, but gets better as it goes; you should read it from start to finish.
• Bored by stories on Trump’s COIs? I don’t blame you, but spare a minute for the excellent graphics in this NYT piece by Larry Buchanan and Karen Yourish. Then follow up with this report, and this list which reads like the shittiest ever season of Friends.
• “Now is the time to talk about what we are actually talking about… Now is the time to discard that carefulness that too closely resembles a lack of conviction." An absolute stormer of a piece by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie
• It’s too simplistic to call Republicans “anti-science.” The real question, as Sarah Zhang says, is: How will Trump use science to further his agenda?
• “My hopelessness is faith in things yet seen and works yet done. Hopelessness is necessary for the hard work of resisting tyranny and fascism.” Tressie McMillan-Cottom on America, racism, and the distinction between hopelessness and nihilism.
• "This was about binding up the wounded." A post by the Texan guy who held a “You Belong” sign outside his local mosque.
• "Asserting the right to protest.. marks the current normal before the new normal has had a chance to set in." Masha Gessen on why protests matter
• Political correctness: how the right corrupted a term of the left, and invented a phantom enemy. By Moira Weigel.
• “Even in the post-truth world, screaming in all caps at 3 in the morning is not going to change the physics" Alleen Brown on the climate skeptic appointed to Trump’s NASA team
• When it comes to international diplomacy, turns out you can’t just wing it, by Uri Friedman. Also, from Mark Landler, “He’s made himself not only a bull in a china shop, but a bull in a nuclear china shop.”
• Two important Twitter threads on why calling out racism is actually effective, and evidence-based.
• No matter the short-term strategy behind Trump's tweets about election fraud, the long game is more voter suppression laws. By David Graham.
• Essential James Fallows on how journalists must cover a President who not only lies, but doesn't care about the truth. Plus two follow-ups.
• “We should not limit ourselves to letting such groups define themselves.” The AP style guide on “alt-right”
• This is the best explanation of gerrymandering you will ever see.
• The American city is a machine that kills fascism, by Dan Savage and Eli Sanders
• And finally… a story of 2016 in three Atlantic headlines

You can also follow me on Twitter or find my writing at The Atlantic. My New York Times-bestselling book, I Contain Multitudes, is out now. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you can sign up yourself.

And that's it. Thanks for reading.

- Ed