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Issues

Volume 5, Issue 1

December 13, 2019

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December 13, 2019

Critical Essays

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Good Eats
Vaclav Smil
[short_description] Affluent countries currently produce far more food than they need, or could ever hope to consume. Vaclav Smil examines the enormity of this waste and its effects on health.
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The Director’s Cut
David Berlinski
[short_description] One of the twentieth century’s great intellectual achievements is Kurt Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. For many mathematicians, Gödel’s work remains difficult, uncanny in its power.

Review Essays

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Reading Seawater
Marcia Bjornerud
[short_description] Parsing the composition of seawater has been an age-old effort. Marcia Bjornerud reviews seawater’s history and its effects on the earth’s health, from ancient beliefs to modern research.
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Central Saharan Rock Art
Jean-Loïc Le Quellec
[short_description] On the sunburnt rocks of the central Sahara, ancient peoples inscribed testimony of their way of life. Jean-Loïc Le Quellec reviews the field of research into ancient central Saharan rupestrian art.

Book Reviews

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Inequality and Human Rights
Katharine Young
[short_description] Samuel Moyn argues that the human rights movement has done little to address economic inequality. Not so, according to Katharine Young. Good work promoting equality has been done, if not in the US.
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Divine Medicine
George Scialabba
[short_description] In reviewing A Natural History of Beer by Rob DeSalle & Ian Tattersall, George Scialabba summarizes beer’s story, including its major historical moments, the science of its components, and its future.
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A Means to an End
Alberto Prieto
[short_description] Can scientific and data-driven approaches help researchers reconstruct Roman history? Alberto Prieto reviews The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, and the Future of the Past.
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The Yin and Yang of the Genome
Tyler Hampton
[short_description] If viruses have killed their millions, they have blessed their millions, too. Tyler Hampton reviews Discovering Retroviruses: Beacons in the Biosphere, by Anna Marie Skalka.
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Only Connect
Daniel Kleitman
[short_description] Fibonacci numbers, cellular automata, and an extension of the Erdős–Ko–Rado theorem: Daniel Kleitman reviews highlights from a volume honoring the mathematician Ron Graham on his eightieth birthday.
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The Rise of the Architectural Cult
Nikos Salingaros
[short_description] In Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, James Stevens Curl argues that modernist architecture is ill-adapted to human needs.

Experiment Reviews

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High Temperature Superconductivity
Andrew Jordan
[short_description] Are lossless power transmission and magnetically levitated trains in our future? Only after we understand high-temperature superconductivity. Andrew Jordan reviews results by Sven Badoux et al.

Biographies

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Lise Meitner
The Discovery of Nuclear Fission
Jeremy Bernstein
[short_description] When a Nobel Prize was awarded in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear fission, Lise Meitner should have been among the winners. Jeremy Bernstein reflects on Meitner’s life and accomplishments.
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Willi Hennig
A Quiet Revolutionary
Andrew Brower
[short_description] How do researchers determine evolutionary ancestry among species? The early twentieth-century German biologist Willi Hennig articulated revolutionary principles that remain entirely relevant today.
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Kary Mullis
A Personal Recollection
Richard Roberts
[short_description] The biochemist Kary Mullis will be remembered as the inventor of the polymerase chain reaction, a revolutionary method for copying segments of DNA. Richard Roberts fondly recalls time spent together.

Special Reports

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The Physiology and Biophysics of Respiratory Therapy
J. Scott Turner
[short_description] Though carrying a suite of risks, high-frequency ventilation may be a safer and more effective treatment than the positive-pressure ventilation that is most commonly used in severe COVID-19 cases.
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Cytokine Storms
Tyler Hampton
[short_description] Cytokine storms may be fatal and can occur as a result of many different triggers. A growing body of literature suggests a connection between SARS-CoV-2 infection and the induction of cytokine storms.
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The Virus
Marc Henry
[short_description] The coronaviruses: what they are and what phylogenetic analyses reveal about the relationships between SARS-CoV-2 and bat and pangolin coronaviruses.
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Antimalarial Drugs as COVID-19 Therapy
J. Scott Turner
[short_description] Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine—a history of their uses, and how they work in the very different cases of the malaria parasite and viral infections, such as SARS-CoV-2.
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An End to Globalization
Michael O’Sullivan
[short_description] The coronavirus crisis marks a transition to a new order in politics, economics, finance, and geopolitics. A contested century is in prospect, driven by a battle of emerging philosophies.
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Enter the Coronavirus
Henri Lepage
[short_description] The world is experiencing a telescoping of two events: a pandemic and a recession. The latter is generated at the level of the global wholesale money market by a growing scarcity of collateral assets.
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History and Risk
Vaclav Smil
[short_description] The 1918–1919 flu pandemic is not the best point of reference as the world deals with the COVID-19 outbreaks. And the West will likely not make adequate provisions for the next pandemic.
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The Cell Biology of SARS-CoV-2
Anthony Futerman
[short_description] A biochemist describes the distinct biological features of SARS-CoV-2, including its method of entering host cells, which is the critical point in the life cycle of any virus.
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COVID-19 and the Global Economy
John Feffer
[short_description] COVID-19 is exposing the global economy’s fragility. Fundamental changes are afoot. The global economy post-COVID-19 will necessarily need to look different, says John Feffer.
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Therapeutic Options for COVID-19
John Hewitt
[short_description] A critical analysis of the currently available options for combating the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19. These include testing, oxygenation, and drugs.
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SARS-CoV-2: Research Guide
The Editors
[short_description] A curated selection of abstracts and links to research papers and articles pertaining to SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and the current worldwide crisis. (108 articles, updated May 11, 2020.)
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The Chemistry, Molecular Biology, or Virology of SARS⁠-⁠CoV⁠-⁠2
The Editors
[short_description] A curated selection of abstracts and links to research papers and articles pertaining to SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and the current worldwide crisis. (Updated May 11, 2020.)
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The Epidemiology of COVID-19 Transmission
The Editors
[short_description] A curated selection of abstracts and links to research papers and articles pertaining to SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and the current worldwide crisis. (Updated May 11, 2020.)
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The Political, Economic, and Social Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Editors
[short_description] A curated selection of abstracts and links to research papers and articles pertaining to SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and the current worldwide crisis. (Updated May 11, 2020.)
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Therapeutic Options for the Treatment of COVID-19
The Editors
[short_description] A curated selection of abstracts and links to research papers and articles pertaining to SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and the current worldwide crisis. (Updated May 11, 2020.)

Letters to the Editors

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Donald Walker
[short_description] Achieving more relevancy for general equilibrium theory is desirable, and would require more work on modeling the features and interrelationships of economic variables, as described in this letter.
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Andrew Jordan & Sreenath Manikandan
[short_description] Rather than it being a hot mess, Landauer’s principle is easily understood, easily derivable from basic principles of thermodynamics and statistical physics, and in accordance with experimental tests.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Norton’s No-Go Result
G. Barış Bağcı
[short_description] Physicists in particular should pay close attention: John Norton’s no-go result refers to a process that Rolf Landauer took for granted in his formulation of the thermodynamics of computation.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Louis Bachelier
Jeremy Bernstein
[short_description] Since Louis Bachelier’s only lasting contribution to mathematics seems to have been his thesis, it is not clear what one would say in a full-length biography. It is a curious and rather sad story...
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James Stevens Curl
[short_description] For most of his life, James Stevens Curl has studied what he calls “the ruination of towns and cities” through the effects of a global and celebrity-driven cult of modernist architecture.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Misunderstanding a Crisis
Richard Wagner
[short_description] Modern macroeconomic theory has few answers to offer its practitioners. Its theories focus on aggregate spending when they should instead focus on the plans of economizing agents.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### More Views from Below
Yves Montenay
[short_description] An economist in the micro sense of the term, Yves Montenay pulls from his experience working in commercial industry and offers his own ideas to the debate on data methodology and measurement.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Money for an Open Global Economy
Jean-Pierre Chamoux
[short_description] Statistical data about the American economy have been compiled since the late 1800s. The same cannot be said of European economies, where GDP has only been reliably calculated since the 1930s.
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Bruno Tertrais
[short_description] A political scientist warns against an exceedingly theoretical, partly obsolete, overly pessimistic, and ultimately incomplete view of nuclear deterrence and the risks associated with nuclear weapons.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### The Route to Nuclear War
David Omand
[short_description] Between nuclear powers, no-first-use declarations are built on sand. Even if a declaration is signed in good faith during peacetime, no aggressor can count on it being maintained in the stress of war.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### The Irrelevance of Deterrence
M. V. Ramana
[short_description] Nuclear deterrence is indeed a key part of many nuclear discussions, but it is merely theoretical and seems to have little utility for the people responsible for managing nuclear arsenals.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Managing Doomsday
Thomas Shea
[short_description] How to avoid nuclear catastrophe? The correct course of action involves managing the risks associated with nuclear arsenals and aiming for synchronized arms reductions among adversaries.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Deterrence Lost
Jacek Kugler
[short_description] The threat of nuclear retaliation preserves peace. This is nuclear deterrence. It is a policy that Daniel Ellsberg should have explored in The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Unresolved Anomalies
Pierandrea Lo Nostro
[short_description] Water is the chemical most familiar to us, used to wash, cook, heat, and cool. Despite being essential for daily life, water remains mysterious, exhibiting almost 40 anomalous properties.
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