How “AI” Technology Can Dramatically Increase Research Speed

While I’m still a bit leery of the art, I think my real problem with most of the stuff we’re calling “AI” is the context in which it exists, same as with other forms of automation. There’s also a reasonable concern about the energy requirements of this technology, but today we’re going to look at one of the was in which it could be a huge benefit to all of us.

The development of computing machines in the 20th century made a lot of things possible, including new avenues and scales of research. The climate models that have, despite what you may have heard, done a surprisingly good job at projecting future warming, needed the capabilities of computers. Like its predecessors, this new AI technology opens up new approaches to research that were previously off the table.

An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific experiments—as many as 10,000 per day—potentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science.

Reported today in Nature Microbiology, the team was led by a professor now at the University of Michigan.

That artificial intelligence platform, dubbed BacterAI, mapped the metabolism of two microbes associated with oral health—with no baseline information to start with. Bacteria consume some combination of the 20 amino acids needed to support life, but each species requires specific nutrients to grow. The U-M team wanted to know what amino acids are needed by the beneficial microbes in our mouths so they can promote their growth.

“We know almost nothing about most of the bacteria that influence our health. Understanding how bacteria grow is the first step toward reengineering our microbiome,” said Paul Jensen, U-M assistant professor of biomedical engineering who was at the University of Illinois when the project started.

Figuring out the combination of amino acids that bacteria like is tricky, however. Those 20 amino acids yield more than a million possible combinations, just based on whether each amino acid is present or not. Yet BacterAI was able to discover the amino acid requirements for the growth of both Streptococcus gordonii and Streptococcus sanguinis.

To find the right formula for each species, BacterAI tested hundreds of combinations of amino acids per day, honing its focus and changing combinations each morning based on the previous day’s results. Within nine days, it was producing accurate predictions 90% of the time.

Unlike conventional approaches that feed labeled data sets into a machine-learning model, BacterAI creates its own data set through a series of experiments. By analyzing the results of previous trials, it comes up with predictions of what new experiments might give it the most information. As a result, it figured out most of the rules for feeding bacteria with fewer than 4,000 experiments.

“When a child learns to walk, they don’t just watch adults walk and then say ‘Ok, I got it,’ stand up, and start walking. They fumble around and do some trial and error first,” Jensen said.

“We wanted our AI agent to take steps and fall down, to come up with its own ideas and make mistakes. Every day, it gets a little better, a little smarter.”

Little to no research has been conducted on roughly 90% of bacteria, and the amount of time and resources needed to learn even basic scientific information about them using conventional methods is daunting. Automated experimentation can drastically speed up these discoveries. The team ran up to 10,000 experiments in a single day.

This is the kind of thing that could, at least in theory, lead to the rapid development of new antibiotics – something we definitely need. I think the odds are good that even without using robots to do experiments, this technology could accelerate a great many fields of research. I’m not looking for some kind of magical tech “solution” to climate change or pollution, but there’s a real possibility that advances due to this tech could enable us to survive conditions in the future, which would destroy us in the present.

Of course, that all depends on who gets to decide what kind of research is prioritized, and what is sidelined. Our technology may give us the ability to do marvelous things, but it will never fix the injustice, inequality, and suffering that are a deliberate outcome of our current political and economic system. Technology won’t ever remove the need for revolution, all it will do is change the landscape in which we fight.

Unequal Protection: Jordan Neely Killing Highlights White Supremacy Ingrained in US Society

A while back, I talked about NY mayor Eric Adams’ plan to round up and forcibly commit unhoused people deemed “mentally ill”. Part of my point was that it’s disturbingly easy for police, mental institutions, and the courts, to label someone who’s perfectly rational as “crazy”, and then force them into situations that are virtually designed to destroy a person’s mental health:

They had the means to verify what she was saying, but instead they dismissed all of it as delusions, forced her to take powerful psychoactive drugs, and demanded that she convincingly lie about herself before she be released:

According to the New York Daily News, a treatment plan for Ms Brock at the hospital states: ‘Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.’

This was torture. They imprisoned a person, and for nine days they told her she was insane. They forcibly drugged her, and denied her reality over, and over and over again for days. And then, one day, they gave her discharge papers, and put her out the back door of the hospital. A few days later, she got a bill for $13,000 worth of “treatment”. The idea of holding anyone criminally responsible for this nightmare was apparently never even on the table, so she went with the option left to her – she sued them.

And lost in 2019.

Brock began sobbing as the verdict was read.

“It’s reasonable for them to diagnose me with bipolar even though I’m telling the truth?” Brock said through tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m crazy because of this verdict.”

In the United States of America, it is apparently legal for police to decide that you’re “in need of medical treatment”, restrain, drug, and imprison you, and for doctors to keep you prisoner, keep you drugged, and demand that you deny reality because they said so. Not only is it legal, it’s apparently barely newsworthy. I could only find two articles online that followed up on Kam Brock’s story, and I needed a VPN to read them because they’re geo-restricted to the U.S., like so much other “local news” that’s not considered worth a larger platform. How can this be?

Well, I suspect that, aside from the ever-present white supremacy in our law enforcement system, it’s because it’s considered perfectly acceptable to do all of that to “crazy” people. Solitary confinement, assault, sexual assault, some of the most powerful psychoactive drugs available – all are just routine parts of how our society deals with mental illness, to the point where all of this can happen, triggered by some cop deciding to hassle the black woman in the expensive car, and it’s barely newsworthy that a court, as Brock said, ruled that she was “crazy”.

It’s even more horrifying when you consider what this means for the rest of Brock’s life. It’s now a legal fact that she’s “crazy”. The torture inflicted on her was ruled by the courts to be just fine. That means that if this, or something like this happens again, there is legal precedent that it’s OK to imprison and torture this woman. Any legal dispute she’s in in the future will have this hanging over it. Any time she has a negligent or vindictive landlord, or a dispute with a neighbor, or is wrongfully fired, it could make that nightmare happen again. Crying seems like a pretty reasonable response.

Remember how we saw, over the last few years, the way white women have been able to weaponize white supremacy to sic cops on black people? Brock now has to deal with that, plus the legal declaration that she’s crazy. Practically anyone has the power to get her locked up at any time, for any reason, because some cop decided to pull her over.

It’s made worse by the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, mental health has always had a political dimension to it, and just as white supremacy didn’t end when the Civil Rights Act was passed, the politicization of sanity and the stigma against people with mental illness – sanism – is also very much alive and well within the systems that govern the people of the United States.

I think any person who’s reasonably well-informed can understand that it’s not possible to honestly discuss the US “justice” system, without also discussing white supremacy. Likewise, the history of mental health, in the US, is also steeped in white supremacy. There’s a quote I like throwing around, from a composer named Frank Wilhoit:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, along side out-groups whom the law binds, but does not protect

When you consider conservative policy and rhetoric, I think it’s important to keep “Wilhoit’s Law” in mind. When we hear about a plan to forcibly commit “mentally ill” unhoused people, it’s important to remember that in the United States, the law is never applied equally. That’s part of why so many well-off white conservatives are happy to draft laws limiting people’s rights – experience has taught them that the “spirit of the law” isn’t really meant to apply to them. They get a scolding for drug use, or a slap on the wrist for rape, while a black kid can be locked up for years, without trial or plea, on suspicion of maybe stealing a backpack.

We are working to change the world, but as we do so, we also have to deal with the world as it is, and in this world, equal protection under the law does not exist.

Race isn’t the only dynamic here, either. We’ve already discussed mental illness, and the way that label can be forced onto people, but I think it’s worth spending a little more time on the consequences of that. There’s stigma associated, of course, and that can be a problem, but it gets much, much worse. Above, we already saw how it’s apparently fine drug, imprison, and torture someone because of a “reasonable belief” that they’re mentally ill. If this feels familiar to the “reasonable belief” of danger that cops use to justify killing, that’s because it is. This extends beyond cops, too – when a white person kills a black person, the same defenses often crop up as when a cop kills a black person. Remember – in-groups whom the law protects, but does not bind. And that’s how you end up with a white man slowly killing a black man while a subway car of people look on, and not only did the NYPD not arrest him, news outlets praised him, while denigrating the murdered man. From the New York Post:

Dramatic new video shows a straphanger taking matters into his own hands, pinning down an unhinged man in a deadly incident at a Manhattan subway station this week.

The 24-year-old passenger stepped in after the vagrant, identified by sources as Jordan Neely, 30, began going on an aggressive rant on a northbound F train Monday afternoon, according to police and a witness who took the video.

Neely was “ranting” about the fact that he was starving, and he was killed for it.

And according to the police, a number of news outlets, and a lot of shitty people on the internet, that’s just fine. You see, in the United States, black lives often don’t matter, and the situation only gets worse when you add in mental illness. Neely apparently had a criminal record, but as illustrated above, that doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot, because cops and the courts can just decide that reality doesn’t matter, and because cops plant evidence, and arrest people for bullshit reasons. Neely was not protected by the law, but he was absolutely bound by it.

But more than that, his criminal record shouldn’t matter because nothing he did justified killing him. The man who killed Neely was, apparently, a Marine vet. According to the articles I’ve read, he held Neely in a chokehold for 15 minutes. At most, it takes 5 minutes to die from that, and I feel like a Marine, more than most people, should be aware of that. That’s why the word “murder” keeps coming to mind – if he’d choked Neely till he stopped struggling, then let go and made sure he was still alive, that would still be assault, but I’d be more inclined to believe that there was no intent to kill. By all accounts, that is not what happened.

I don’t know what was going on in the killer’s head, and at the moment I don’t really care. What matters is that we have a society in which a white man can strangle a black man to death in front of witnesses, and be allowed to walk free – in which a killer like this is not bound by the law. The news about this is going viral, so the killer may face a trial after all, and some news outlets may change the tone of their coverage. I don’t think either of those things entered the realm of possibility until activists made it impossible to ignore.

We can – must – work for change, but to do that, we must be clear about the world as it is.

 

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PSA: Colonoscopies are good, and you should get one

I tend to be a bit picky about what personal information I do or don’t share here. Part of that’s because I don’t feel like the minutiae of my life are particularly interesting, but a lot of it is that I often don’t feel comfortable sharing personal stuff on the internet. That said, I got my first colonoscopy today, and like many before me, I feel the need to “celebrate” by telling other people to do the same.

Happily, my plumbing all seems to be in normal working order. I wanted to state that early on, because a lot of these PSAs come in the context of either catching cancer just in time, or of catching it too late. I’m fine, but if I had not been, literally poking a camera in there to see what’s going on is the best way to catch problems before they become crises. Over the past decade, my digestive system has decided that it cannot cope with an annoyingly wide range of foods, taking away many of my favorites. This means that I’ve had reason to worry that something’s wrong, but with insurance bullshit in the US, an international move, COVID, and a smaller international move, I haven’t managed to actually get the procedure done until now.

It was an interesting, if not particularly pleasant experience. For those who don’t know, there are a couple days of preparation that must be done prior to a colonoscopy. It includes a low-fiber diet, followed by a 24 hour fast, and starting the day before your probing, you have to drink large quantities of a thick, citrus-flavored potion that makes you shit out literally everything in your intestines. This is not a pleasant process, but it’s important if you want the doctors to be able to get a clear view.

Thanks to Ireland’s public health system, my health insurance is cheap, and completely covers hospital procedures, so I didn’t have to worry about cost – just €25 or so for the gut-cleaner. Apparently the default, at least in Ireland, is to get the stomach checked out while you’re in the endoscopy unit, which is a much quicker procedure, though unpleasant in a whole other way. My throat is a bit sore from it, and that’ll probably continue through tomorrow.

Even so, it was interesting to see what the inside of my own stomach looked like, and also interesting to see my own large intestine – I even got to see the entrance to my appendix! I also got to watch them take biopsies of my intestinal and stomach linings, which was… a little unnerving. I’m grateful that there aren’t any nerve endings in there, because while the clipper/grabber they used is tiny, it’s still unnerving to see someone just… snip at my entrails like that. I’ll find out the results of those tests in a few weeks, but the impression I got is that nobody’s expecting to find anything exciting or worrisome.

I’m glad that I got this done. I was pretty sure my own health problems were related to food tolerance/intolerance, but I just couldn’t be sure, you know? I’m also extremely grateful to be in a country with an actual healthcare system. I was starting to seriously consider getting a colonoscopy shortly before we left the US, and my insurance at the time was not only not very good, but it also didn’t seem to work – they kept sending us different cards and contradictory letters, while we kept sending them money. I got a 10 minute check-up shortly before our flight, and had to pay $200 out of pocket for that, because my insurance wasn’t working. In the US, a colonoscopy would have cost me thousands of dollars, possibly even with an insurance plan. Here, I was covered, and if the biopsy results do show any problems that need addressing, I know that I will be able to afford treatment.

For those living in the US, a universal system is worth fighting for. For those outside the US (especially in the UK), keeping your universal system is worth fighting for as well, because there are absolutely those who want to force you into the nightmare of for-profit healthcare.

If you are at all able, especially as you move into your 40s and beyond, get a colonoscopy. I recently turned 39, so I’m a bit early, but I had symptoms that needed investigating. Even without symptoms, it should be routine as you get older, to match your increasing odds of bowel cancer. It’s an uncomfortable process, but the peace of mind is lovely to have, and an early warning that there’s trouble coming down the pipe is even better.

What did Harlan Crow get for his gifts to Clarence Thomas? Power.

As you are no doubt aware, recent reporting has shed a little light on the depths of corruption in the US Supreme Court. While he’s far from alone, Clarence Thomas has received much of the attention recently, over his failure to disclose a whole host of gifts from billionaire weirdo Harlan Crow. After the news broke, there was a veritable stampede of influential people rushing to insist that this was no evidence of corruption, which they knew because they also got gifts from Crow, and also because Crow clearly didn’t get anything in return.

Right?

Well, no. Obviously not. First of all, for a capitalist like Harlan Crow, there are a whole host of benefits to a Supreme Court justice that reliably sides with corporations and capitalists. Second, the claim that Crow had no cases before the court turns out to be false (Clarence Thomas lied? Inconceivable!). Third, Thomas’ vote on Citizens United dramatically increased Crow’s ability to directly use his billions to influence people and politics:

Since Thomas provided a deciding vote in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, the Crow family’s ability to influence federal elections has increased by a factor of almost nine, according to an Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) analysis of campaign finance data.

In Travel Rewards: What the Crow Family May Have Bought by Hosting Those Luxury Trips for Justice Thomas, ATF shows how Thomas’ vote in the 5-4 decision that effectively legalized unlimited political spending has allowed the Crows to increase their average annual campaign contributions by 862%, from $163,241 pre-Citizens United to $1.57 million post-ruling.

The image is a bar graph showing Crow family political contributions by election cycle (every two years) from 1978 to 2022. Until 2002, the annual contributions seem to be less than $250k, with an increase, seemingly following 9/11. Citizens United was decided in 2010, and the big spike comes in 2012, jumping from contributions at around $500k-$1m, up to $4.5 million. 2016 was the family's biggest expenditure, at just under $5 million.

The image is a bar graph showing Crow family political contributions by election cycle (every two years) from 1978 to 2022. Until 2002, the annual contributions seem to be less than $250k, with an increase, seemingly following 9/11. Citizens United was decided in 2010, and the big spike comes in 2012, jumping from contributions at around $500k-$1m, up to $4.5 million. 2016 was the family’s biggest expenditure, at just under $5 million.

While Thomas and Crow have denied any impropriety, recent revelations about their relationship have fueled fresh calls for the conservative justice to resign or face impeachment proceedings.

“The Crows used their fortune to buy access to and curry favor with one of the most powerful officials in Washington, then benefited from his central role in loosening rules meant to limit the influence of money over politics and policy,” said ATF executive director David Kass.

“It’s a vicious cycle that can only be short-circuited by restoring meaningful campaign finance rules and by demanding a much fairer share of taxes from billionaires, which, among other good results, will leave them less money to distort our democratic process,” Kass added.

I would go further. While capping the wealth of the aristocracy is an excellent idea, so long as capitalists retain power through their control over employment (and the government’s efforts to support that power), they will use it to undermine and block democracy, and to eat away at the laws limiting their wealth. How can I be so certain? Because the crisis we’re seeing right now is precisely result of such an effort.

After the labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the passing of the New Deal, the aristocracy of the US put a huge amount of effort into regaining the power they had lost. It took them decades, but they have very nearly completed that project. If we cap their wealth, that will absolutely help, so we should do that, it’s just that that’s not enough. It’s like defunding vs. abolishing the police – The former is good, and a big step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of a class of people having unaccountable power over everyone else.

It’s possible that, in the coming years, the new labor movement will give us something like a Green New Deal, or even a cap on individual wealth, but if we insist on preserving a capitalist class, this will keep happening. That doesn’t mean that we can go through a sort of century-long boom/bust cycle to keep capitalism “under control”, because as I’m sure most of you are aware, there’s no guarantee that we will get that reset. It certainly doesn’t seem within reach at the moment.

That’s why I want us to reach farther! Specifically, I want us to reach for real systemic change.

The Supreme Court has lost its legitimacy, if it ever had any. Capitalism, likewise, has provided ample evidence that it does far more harm than good. Both are standing in the way of workers’ rights, civil rights, and the very survival of humanity. There is no easy or obvious solution, but our best shot at building a better world is through the use of collective power. I think our best shot at real change would be through a real general strike, the way to make that possible is for unions and organized communities to coordinate with each other. That means organizing your workplace and trying to increase community resilience. The game is rigged, but history has shown that there’s cause for hope – the game has been rigged this whole time, but by working together, we’ve made a number of big advances. We can make more, and get back what we’ve lost, and we can change the rules, by working together.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

The only kind of mouse my cat has the energy to pounce on…

This looks like it’s going to be a busy week, but fortunately, His Holiness decided to be weird today, so I have a couple pictures to share. Specifically, he decided that he just had to curl up on my hand and mousepad, and go to sleep. This was very cute, but also not terribly functional, because His Holiness is not the most svelt of cats, and he didn’t really fit very well.

His Holiness is a chonky British shorthair from the streets of Somerville. He's got a nice black and gold-brown stripey pattern on his back and sides, snow white fur on his belly, legs, and throat, and he has the personality of a stuffed animal. He's curled up, facing away from the camera, with his shoulder, neck, and head resting on my hand. You can see that he barely fits on the desk extension.

His Holiness is a chonky British shorthair from the streets of Somerville. He’s got a nice black and gold-brown stripey pattern on his back and sides, snow white fur on his belly, legs, and throat, and he has the personality of a stuffed animal. He’s curled up, facing away from the camera, with his shoulder, neck, and head resting on my hand. You can see that he barely fits on the desk extension.

He ended up staying there for about an hour, occasionally shifting, and sighing because I moved my hand too much.

As you can see (sorry for the photo quality, he had my good hand), this is not a Place for Cats, but he spent about an hour there, generally preventing me from doing any work. It was truly horrible. In this photo, you can see how he has snow-white fur on his muzzle, peaking on his forehead.

As you can see (sorry for the photo quality, he had my good hand), this is not a Place for Cats, but he spent about an hour there, generally preventing me from doing any work. It was truly horrible. In this photo, you can see how he has snow-white fur on his muzzle, peaking on his forehead.

Eventually, though, the novelty wore off, and he made his way to the cubby next to my desk, which has become his default hangout spot when there’s not sun coming in through the living room windows.

His Holiness, Saint Ray the Cat, fast asleep on a green towel, with his snoot firmly planted in the cloth in front of him

His Holiness, Saint Ray the Cat, fast asleep on a green towel, with his snoot firmly planted in the cloth in front of him

For some reason, the forward-facing camera on my phone refuses to focus on anything, so I’m currently taking photos by setting a timer and doing my best to aim the camera at the right place. I’m getting better at it, and we’re actually starting to get warm weather here, so I’ll probably have more pictures up soon, both of His Holiness, and of my sad little shed-top garden. There’s a lot going on in the world right now, much of it bad. I find it helpful to take time to enjoy things like cats.

Homelessness Exists to Make the Rich Richer

The existence of large numbers of unhoused people may be the greatest example of capitalism taking a simple problem with a simple solution, and using propaganda and bureaucracy to convince everyone that it’s actually very complicated, and there are no real solutions. We’re told that it’s an addiction problem, or a mental health problem, as is the danger and suffering of being without shelter wasn’t a cause of mental illness and drug use. We’re told that people just need to get jobs, as though many of them don’t already have jobs, and many others can’t get any because the government deliberately maintains a minimum level of unemployment. To top it all off, getting help, getting paid, having a bank account – a lot of that is a lot easier if you have a safe, reliable mailing address, which most commonly comes from having a house or an apartment. There’s always some convoluted excuse for why, according to capitalists and their supporters, we can’t just provide housing.

The actual reason, as far as I can tell, is threefold. First, capitalism requires the existence of a class of people so poor and desperate that they will agree to extreme levels of exploitation, just to keep from dying. Second, that poverty and desperation make it much, much more dangerous to wield the collective power of unions and organized communities, because refusing to work, when you’re already poor, puts you at risk of losing your home, being unable to eat, and being unable to get medicine. They head off any kind of real democracy by keeping the working class under a constant state of siege. The third is just that the housing market, as it exists, provides a huge amount of wealth to those who are already well off, in exchange for no productive work.

And so, because our leaders want us to remain poor and desperate, they make excuses, and do everything they can to avoid allowing the simple, obvious solution to the problem of people who don’t have adequate shelter:

Provide housing for everyone who doesn’t have it.

Instead of abandoning the homeless, they housed them. And that led to an insight: people tend to function better when they’re not living on the street or under a bridge. Who would have guessed?

It turns out that, given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with addictions and other problems, not to mention handling job applications. So, more than a decade after the launch of the “Housing First” policy, 80 per cent of Finland’s homeless are doing well, still living in the housing they’d been provided with — but now paying the rent on their own.

This not only helps the homeless, it turns out to be cheaper.

That article is about how Canada deals with unhoused people, but it certainly applies to the US fairly well, and given that the example used is from Finland, I think it’s fair to say this applies to the capitalist world in general. It’s a simple fact that we have the resources to guarantee decent housing to everyone, and I’m pretty certain that letting people keep a bunch of the money they’ve had to fork over to landlords would help the economy immeasurably. Even if we didn’t fully decommodify housing, as I would prefer to do, the existence of decent, social housing that’s not rented out for a profit, would force rents down across the market.

The problem is that the people at the top generally don’t want things to get better, because that might make us harder to control. Instead, they continue to blame unhoused people for their situation, pay police to brutalize them, dehumanize them and encourage hate crimes up to and including extermination. We’re all told, year after year, that capitalism provides the best possible life to the most people possible, and that any problems are caused by “big government”. The reality is that the problems caused or supported by the government are almost universally caused in service to capitalists and their greed. It’s the same with taxes – the US government could absolutely just send you forms to check over and amend, rather than making you fill out information that they already have, and punishing you if you get it wrong.

But if they did that, then how would companies like TurboTax or H&R Block make a profit? No, the world must be deliberately made worse, solely because then people will pay for a little relief. To bring it back to unhoused people, they are forced into dangerous conditions, denied rights and dignity, and demonized for it, all so that the rest of us will take whatever work we can get, and pay whatever rent we have to. The cruelty is the point – it’s to make an example of a few members of the population, as a threat to the rest of us.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Video: True Facts about the hippopotamus

Hippos are terrifying. I feel like everyone expects elephants and rhinos to be big and intimidating, but hippos sometimes feel too big, to the point where, if you’re standing on a narrow bridge over a river, and a hippo surfaces under you, it can be genuinely disorienting, and you have to take your brain aside to explain why a whole-ass nuclear submarine just surfaced out of that brown puddle. They also make noises that are… big. They sound like a giant laughing.

I’ll admit, though, that while I’ve seen them in the wild, and even got a plaster cast of a footprint (It’s still at my parents’ place back in the US), I don’t actually know a whole lot about them. Fortunately, Ze Frank is here to educate us, and tell us more than we ever wanted to know about hippos and their poop. One of the facts I didn’t know before, was that they’re actually more closely related to dolphins and whales than to rhinos and elephants. Their common ancestor apparently decided that running around on river bottoms and grazing on land was a better deal than going full aquatic. As always, these videos are not for children or adults who don’t think like children.

Bird feeders aren’t problem-free, but they make a difference when winter comes

Our immune systems are fascinating and complex, I assume, but as with everything else in our bodies, their effectiveness depends on having adequate resources. If we don’t get enough to eat, we’re less able to fight off infection. Obviously, the same holds true for all other animals, including everyone’s favorite feathered bipeds. That means that if we want to help the local bird population thrive, we should put out bird feeders, right?

Well, not to spoil the ending, but yes, probably. There are, however, some legitimate concerns about widespread use of bird feeders. The first one is that by creating a regular, common feeding place for multiple species, you increase the spread of disease. There’s legitimate concern, especially with the current avian flu pandemic (in birds – it’s not a serious problem for humans yet), and it’s recommended that you periodically clean your bird feeders, for the sake of the birds. Nobody likes eating off dirty dishes, especially when everybody in town has been eating off those same dishes.

There’s also another problem, that I hadn’t really considered – by creating a common feeding spot, you’re also forcing inter-species social dynamics into existence, which could in turn alter the ecosystem:

According to Alex Lees, who, with his colleague Jack Shutt, published the paper in the journal Biological Conservation, the issue is that there are a few species that are now habitual feeder users – familiar garden visitors including great tits and blue tits. And they appear to be receiving a boost from feeding.

“We know from historical research that these species are increasing in number,” says Dr Lees. This could, he says, be at the expense of other “subordinate” birds.

“A blue tit is a dominant species – it tends to win in interactions and fighting for food or quarrelling for nest sites,” explains Dr Lees. “Whereas species like willow and marsh tits are subordinate. They tend to lose those in interactions.

“For willow tits, we know that one of the reasons for the decline is that 40% of their nesting attempts fail because blue tits essentially steal their nesting cavities.”

A constant supply of peanuts and seeds that boosts the number of blue tits and great tits could be helping to drive the continuing decline in the willow tit population. It could also throw off a natural, seasonal ebb and flow in species numbers, Dr Lees says.

“Migrant pied flycatchers are in direct competition with great tits for nesting sites,” he explains. “So, again, by boosting the population of great tits in the UK, we may be tipping the balance in favour of these resident species over those summer migrants.”

As Dr. Lees goes on to say, this won’t necessarily be the case in every ecosystem, because not all birds are going to clash like that. It seems like it’s primarily going to be a problem when bird feeder dynamics work to amplify an existing set of behaviors, so you’re not always going to end up with a tit-à-tit conflict like that. Still, between that and the disease risk, are bird feeders doing more harm than good?

Well, I can’t make broad statements, but based on some research from Sweden, if you live somewhere with harsh winters, then the regular food provided by feeders reduces the severity of birds’ immune response.

A small change in body temperature can be fatal for humans. Small birds, meanwhile, lower their body temperature at night by several degrees during the winter. Just like us, the birds attempt to save energy when it is cold. If they are exposed to infection, the body’s first reaction is to raise its temperature, which clashes with the bird’s simultaneous need to save energy by lowering body temperature.

“We investigated how access to food during winter affected the balancing act between maintaining a low body temperature in order to save energy, and the possibility of raising body temperature in order to fight infection,” says Hannah Watson, biologist Lund University.

The study shows that birds who were fed during the winter did not need to lower their body temperature as much at night as birds who did not have access to feeding tables. They had gathered enough energy to survive a winter night in spite of a having higher body temperature.

When the birds were exposed to a simulated infection, all the birds had essentially the same temperature during a fever. Instead of conserving energy to survive the winter, the birds without access to extra food were forced to use more energy in order to raise their body temperature high enough to battle infection.

“We had expected to find that the birds that had access to birdfeeders would have more energy to fight an infection, and that as a result they would exhibit a stronger fever response. Our results, however, show the opposite – birds that did not have access to a reliable source of food had the strongest reaction to infection. This enabled them to reach the same fever temperature as the birds with extra food,” says Hannah Watson.

Basically, a well-fed body has options, when it comes to fighting infection, that a malnourished body does not.

But if you’re like me, you may be wondering what it means to expose a bird to a “simulated infection”. While it did make me wonder about how one would convince a bird it had been exposed to a disease, and must therefor be sick, I figured I’d just go to the actual paper, since it’s freely available, and see what they actually did. Basically, they injected a substance from the cell wall of an E. coli bacteria, which caused the birds’ immune systems to react to the presence of a “disease”, without any actual risk of an infection. I doubt the birds appreciated any of their involvement in this study, but I think it’s a neat trick, and a cool way to study how immune systems work without any actual infection.

I think most people who feed birds do it because they like seeing the birds at the feeder. Growing up, my grandparents had several bird feeders right outside their dining room window, and I have fond memories of watching the birds while I ate breakfast during holiday visits. My parents also have bird feeders, and in the years they’ve been up, the diversity of birds coming by seems to have increased.

I’m not going to make recommendations about how you interact with your local bird community, but for me, at least, the knock-on effects of it are not something I’ve thought about much. All in all, I think the problems caused by bird feeders pale in comparison to what we’re doing to the planet as a whole, and how that is affecting the birds. The lesson I’m gonna close with is that if you ever see birds at your feeder during the harsh weather, and feel good knowing they’ve got something to eat, you can rest assured that your feelings are supported by science, and you really are helping them.

Video: The USA Treats Farm Workers Like Shit

I think I knew a lot of this, but it’s always infuriating to hear it all spelled out. When the US decided to end free migration back and forth across the US/Mexico border, it created a criminal class of people overnight. Migrant workers who formed the backbone of US food production suddenly found themselves completely without legal protections, and their bosses have been happy to take advantage of that ever since. Between body-breaking work at fast paces, conditions so hot that a spray of pesticide brings relief, and employers who make it pretty clear they’d use a whip if they could get away with it, it’s hard to understand why anyone would put up with all of that.

And then you remember how the US has basically been waging an irregular war against every country south of the border, purposefully destabilizing them, and creating conditions that are often even worse than the horrible conditions on USian farms.

Oh, and let’s not forget the child labor. Child labor’s having a bit of a comeback in the US. I would argue that it never really left, both because of legal loopholes allowing children to work in agriculture, and because while we moved some child jobs to other countries, there has never been a point at which children didn’t make up a significant portion of the workforce that supplies the US with its material goods. Farming is just one part of that.

As usual, John Oliver does a good job breaking down the situation, and highlighting the racism and brutality of a situation created and maintained by the US government.