Nautilus Magazine

Daniel Stein rejected a life and career in the confines of institutions, with their bureaucracies and environmental sins, to operate an award-winning homestead. Cannabis is Stein’s main cash crop, enabling him to diversify his farm's output, growing a variety of vegetables for local restaurants and farmers’ markets. The farm is grounded in the values of “regenerative farming”—“no till,” “living soil”—which lay the foundation for Stein’s mission: to remediate the Earth and sustainably grow food, medicine, and a good high. Stein has managed to sustain his farm by relying on ecological science—and endless hard work. Cannabis is a key component of the ecosystem that allows his farm to flourish. In an irony, growing legal pot has tangled Stein in the red tape he has spent his life avoiding. The regulations that come with selling cannabis from sustainable farms like his constitute the most invasive species in his life. He’s working on a solution. Read more: https://bit.ly/485Z1Gj

Research posts in remote parts of Earth are staffed by dedicated scientists who sacrifice their personal lives in the pursuit of science. What draws people to the edge of the world?

This week John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries in machine learning and neural networks. In 2019, Hopfield helped Nautilus contributing editor George Musser design his own neural network. https://lnkd.in/gwNjvUU7

Paleotempestology, an esoteric subniche of imprecise weather science, promises to uncover patterns of historical hurricanes—to better predict destructive weather of the future. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gr-fhgA7

Quit worrying whether time is money. Start appreciating time’s true value. Behavioral scientist Ashley Williams wants you to stop feeling crushed for time. Read more: https://lnkd.in/giFKKDNS

Why don't we have a hangover cure pill yet? One reason: the exact mechanisms of what causes a hangover still elude scientists. https://lnkd.in/gddwQ3M6

Once there were flowers, there was fruit. Once there was fruit, plants could enlist the help of animals in a kind of trade: sweetness for a lift to a mate, and a new world of warm-blooded mammals came alive. In some poetic sense, flowers invented love.

“The only way to communicate with a creature that is very different from you, and you can make no assumptions at all about how they encode language or meaning, is just killing them.” Artificial life & intelligence expert?Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin that dialogue is to try and kill them.? ? He argues that the only universal basis of communication, the sole feature that all life shares, whatever its form—because it is built into the very definition of life—is that life wants to live. It strives to maintain itself, because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t survive the depredations of the world.?

A team of scientists at Cornell University's Organic Robotics Lab recently developed crawling and rolling robots that are powered by mycelia's bioelectrical signaling. Robert Shepherd, one of the authors of a recently published paper about this project, imagines fungal cyborgs could be used to create a kind of circulatory system inside robots, one that would transmit energy from one component to another—“like a venous network…inside a machine.” Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gJps5mia

If AI could allow us to understand the vocalizations of whales, and possibly even speak back to them, what should we say? Should we say anything at all? ? ? Researchers involved in understanding whale communication stress that it’s still early days. Scientists know some things about whale vocalizations, having recorded their songs, clicks, whistles, and calls for decades. They know that many species, such as humpbacks, differ geographically in their vocalizations—a phenomenon akin to local dialects—sometimes picking up songs from their neighbors.? ? If researchers do manage to get a handle on the meaning of whale vocalizations—with or without using playback experiments—the question remains what we should do with that technology. Read more on Nautilus at the link below.