Anderson Cooper: You were skeptical of– of climate change And I think that’s– that’s interesting, because I think it makes your warnings now all the more powerful.

Sir David Attenborough: Yeah, yeah, certainly so. And if you’re going to make a statement about the world, you better make sure that it isn’t just your own personal reaction. And the only way you can do it, do that, is to see the– the work of scientists around the world who are taking observation as to what’s happening. As to what’s happening to temperature, what’s happening to humidity, what’s happening to radioactivity, and what’s happening ecologically?

Anderson Cooper: You’ve said that– that “climate change is the greatest threat facing the planet for thousands of years.”

Sir David Attenborough: Yes. Even the biggest and most awful things that humanity has done, civili– so-called civilizations have done, pale to significance when you think of what could be around the corner, unless we pull ourselves together.

Read or watch it all.

Legendary wildlife filmmaker Sir David Attenborough tells @andersoncooper why urgent action on climate change is crucial and why we need to save nature in order to save ourselves. https://t.co/tBvS9j4SFC

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) June 6, 2021

The practice of science, for me, is a kind of communion. I realized this one morning in Marquand Chapel, when I joined the Eucharist after a shift in the lab. The whole community held hands and sang and passed around bread and wine.

Wine is 85 percent water. These same drops of H and O have existed since the start of creation, cycling through clouds and oceans and streams and bodies. Bread is made from biomolecules, complex chains of carbohydrates—Cm(H2O)n—and nutrients like calcium, phosphorous, and iron. These molecules are hewn from the earth, cycled from rock to sand to soil to biomass. When you eat, these minerals assimilate into your bones and blood, constantly rebuilding and restructuring your inner architecture. Each bite of bread becomes an affirmation of union. Through the ritual of breaking bread, we teach our bodies that we belong.

Franciscan scholar Cynthia Bour­geault writes, “To see God in others means to realize that the whole and the part live together in mutual, loving reciprocity. . . . We are simply two cells of the one great Life.” It’s one thing to recite “We are all living parts of one body” in the rhythm of eucharistic prayer. It’s another thing to taste and touch this union, through the crumbs in your mouth and the held hands of others, while also glimpsing the entire chain of matter and energy and evolution that led to this moment and the cascade of bonds and interactions that will continue on.

Read it all.

Google has helped create the most detailed map yet of the connections within the human brain. It reveals a staggering amount of detail, including patterns of connections between neurons, as well as what may be a new kind of neuron.

The brain map, which is freely available online, includes 50,000 cells, all rendered in three dimensions. They are joined together by hundreds of millions of spidery tendrils, forming 130 million connections called synapses. The data set measures 1.4 petabytes, roughly 700 times the storage capacity of an average modern computer.

The data set is so large that the researchers haven’t studied it in detail, says Viren Jain at Google Research in Mountain View, California. He compares it to the human genome, which is still being explored 20 years after the first drafts were published.

It is the first time we have seen the real structure of such a large piece of the human brain, says Catherine Dulac at Harvard University, who wasn’t involved in the work. “There’s something just a little emotional about it.”

Read it all.

Another awesome story from @m_c_marshall https://t.co/e7ZADcXCSp

I love this detail – mapping an entire human brain would need a dataset about a million times larger, comparable to the amount of digital content generated in a year by the planet Earth

— Jacob Aron (@jjaron) June 7, 2021

Churches Count on Nature, to run between 5-13 June 2021, is a citizen-science event covering churchyards across the England and Wales.

The project will see communities and visitors making a note of the animals, birds, insects, or fungi in their local churchyard.

Their data will then be collated on the National Biodiversity Network.

One church getting involved is St Pol de Léon’s Church, Paul, in Cornwall.

As part of their nature count the church will be marking Environment Sunday and be holding their morning service outside in their “Celtic Quiet Garden.”

Read it all.

Hundreds of churches are starting a week-long ‘nature count’.

The Churches Count on Nature will encourage communities to visit churchyards and record what they see.

What have you seen in your local churchyard? 🐾#WorldEnvironmentDayhttps://t.co/v7TwdEMapf

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) June 5, 2021

Cells normally only use 20 building blocks, called amino acids, to build all their proteins, but now, scientists can introduce “unnatural amino acids” for use in protein construction, which have the same basic backbone as all amino acids, but novel side chains. In this way, the team prompted their modified microbes to build macrocycles — a class of molecules used in various drugs, including antibiotics — with unnatural amino acids incorporated in their structures. In the future, the same system could potentially be adapted to make plastic-like materials, without the need for crude oil, Robertson said.

“This was unthinkable ten years ago,” said Abhishek Chatterjee, an associate professor of chemistry at Boston College, who was not involved in the study. Assuming the method can be adopted easily by other labs, it could be used for a wide range of purposes, from drug development to the production of never-before-seen materials, he said.

“You can actually create a class of polymers that are completely unheard of,” Chatterjee said. “When this [technology] becomes really efficient and all the kinks are ironed out, it could become an engine for developing new classes of biomaterials,” which could be used in medical devices that get implanted in the human body, for example, he said.

Read it all.

The genetic code of microbes have been re-engineered by researchers in Cambridge to create a synthetic cell with capabilities unlike anything in nature, opening up the possibility of new materials for everything from plastics to antibiotics https://t.co/Qfq8EsgPvp

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) June 3, 2021

Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, UN Messenger of Peace and world-renowned ethologist and conservationist, whose groundbreaking discoveries changed humanity’s understanding of its role in the natural world, was announced today as the winner of the 2021 Templeton Prize. The Templeton Prize, valued at over $1.5 million, is one of the world’s largest annual individual awards. Established by the late global investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton, it is given to honor those who harness the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it. Unlike Goodall’s past accolades, the Templeton Prize specifically celebrates her scientific and spiritual curiosity. The Prize rewards her unrelenting effort to connect humanity to a greater purpose and is the largest single award that Dr. Goodall has ever received.

“We are delighted and honored to award Dr. Jane Goodall this year, as her achievements go beyond the traditional parameters of scientific research to define our perception of what it means to be human,” said Heather Templeton Dill, president of the John Templeton Foundation. “Her discoveries have profoundly altered the world’s view of animal intelligence and enriched our understanding of humanity in a way that is both humbling and exalting. Ultimately, her work exemplifies the kind of humility, spiritual curiosity, and discovery that my grandfather, John Templeton, wrote and spoke about during his life.”

Read it all.

BREAKING: Congratulations to scientist, conservationist, and activist Dr. Jane Goodall on winning the 2021 Templeton Prize! Find out more about Jane, and congratulate her on this incredible achievement: https://t.co/eqNjAUXMRs #TempletonPrize2021 pic.twitter.com/sA8BjxTHt9

— TempletonPrize (@TempletonPrize) May 20, 2021

The most helpful resource I found in understanding the future of the workplace is a whitepaper produced by the folks at Haworth. Haworth is a privately held furniture company focused on building work environments that help people be their best, whether they’re at the office, at home or at their “third place.”

In their whitepaper, Haworth describes the new world of work as “Work from Anywhere.” They point out that employees are often in the driver’s seat and “they’re naturally drawn to places that make them feel comfortable and productive.” The most salient argument from this whitepaper is that there is no one single answer—no one-size-fits-all approach for companies in the post-pandemic workplace.

According to Marta Wassenaar, “Work from Anywhere is the ecosystem that gives organizations and employees choice in when and where work occurs. This autonomy supports creativity and drives innovation. The flexibility serves as a tool for attraction and retention. The work from anywhere ecosystem certainly has an impact on organization culture and workforce wellbeing, too.”

Employees will split their time among these three work locations. When at the office, people will be working with each other—think collaboration and access to equipment and resources that are not available at home. Meeting centers, video studios, and other places for collaboration, play, broadcasting and engaging will replace walled-in offices and individual workstations. Wassenaar from Haworth adds, “Although collaboration can happen virtually, working together on the same task is better done in person. Virtual teams need to put in more effort, time and intentionality toward developing and maintaining social connections.”

Read it all.

What the new world of work will actually look like: https://t.co/qag9PA73Px pic.twitter.com/38H8cdvzpr

— Forbes (@Forbes) May 19, 2021

Before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announcement last week that fully vaccinated people can forgo masks in most settings, the majority of U.S. workers reported doing their jobs remotely during the pandemic, including 51% in April. But this varied widely by job type, including 72% of white-collar workers and 14% of blue-collar workers. These rates have been fairly stable since last fall, after declining from their peaks in April 2020, when most schools and non-essential businesses were shuttered.

Gallup’s remote-worker trend is based on data collected each month via web as part of its COVID-19 tracking poll, a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults aged 18 and older, using the probability-based Gallup Panel. Workers are considered remote if they report working from home at least 10% of the time in the past week.

Given the relative stability of remote work over the second half of the pandemic to date — from October 2020 to April 2021 — it is appropriate to use the combined data to analyze aspects of remote work in greater detail. On average during this period, 52% of all workers, including 72% of those in white-collar occupations and 14% in blue-collar occupations, have performed their job all or part of the time from home.

Gallup’s white-collar job category comprises occupations traditionally performed in offices or behind a computer. The blue-collar category includes jobs mainly involving manual work or physical labor. Three job areas — education, healthcare and sales — primarily involve interaction with clients or the public and are harder to categorize using the blue-collar/white-collar definitions. Their orientation to remote work is unique and is discussed below in the context of other specific occupations.

Read it all.

72% of U.S. white-collar employees worked remotely in April, unchanged from most of the past year. https://t.co/rrnMTKyUEa

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) May 17, 2021

In 1998 a couple of Stanford graduate students published a paper describing a new kind of search engine: “In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems.”

The key innovation was an algorithm called PageRank, which ranked search results by calculating how relevant they were to a user’s query on the basis of their links to other pages on the web. On the back of PageRank, Google became the gateway to the internet, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page built one of the biggest companies in the world.

Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model—a future version of BERT or GPT-3. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly. The approach could change not only how search engines work, but how we interact with them.

Many issues with existing language models will need to be fixed first. For a start, these AIs can sometimes generate biased and toxic responses to queries—a problem that researchers at Google and elsewhere have pointed out.

Read it all.

A team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranked search results approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3. https://t.co/gDsgICFrX8

— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) May 16, 2021

Apple is a prominent victim of the booming business of “ransomware” . In its original incarnation, at the start of the 2010s, this involved spreading malicious software to ordinary people’s computers. The software would encrypt pictures, documents and so forth, transforming them into unreadable gibberish. If the victims paid a ransom, the hackers would provide the decryption key necessary to restore the scrambled files—at least, in theory.

These days the practice is more professional. Hackers increasingly focus on big organisations rather than individuals, since firms are more likely to pay larger ransoms. Hospitals, universities and even police forces have been attacked. Besides Apple, REvil claims to have stolen data from Kajima Corporation, a big Japanese construction firm, the government of Fiji, Pierre Fabre, a French pharmaceutical company, and dozens of smaller businesses. And as big organisations usually store back-ups of valuable data, which makes scrambling attacks less damaging, hackers increasingly threaten their victims with leaks instead.

Working out the size of the problem is tricky. Coalition, a firm which provides insurance against cyber-attacks, says ransomware assaults made up 41% of claims in the first half of 2020. (“Funds transfer fraud”, the second-biggest category, accounted for 27%). According to Palo Alto Networks, a cyber-security company,the average ransom demand rose from $115,000 in 2019 to $312,000 in 2020.

Read it all.

A ransomware attack on Apple shows the future of cybercrime | The Economist https://t.co/20qqXDLseZ

— J L Todd (@albertan48) April 30, 2021

The wider American public was afforded an unwanted glimpse into the Wild West world of ransomware this week, after a cyber attack crippled Colonial Pipeline, causing fuel shortages across the eastern seaboard and states of emergency to be declared in four states.

But experts warn that ransomware attacks – which are part-ransom, part-blackmail, part-invocation of squatters’ rights – are becoming more frequent, while the mostly Russia-based hackers are growing more sophisticated with their methods.

They have hit solar power firms, federal and local government agencies, water treatment plants and even police departments across the US. As the nation’s eyes were focused on the pipeline attack this week, another hacker group was busy targeting Washington DC police – striking at law enforcement in the American capital.

Read it all.

How the Colonial Pipeline hack is part of a growing ransomware trend in the US https://t.co/JZFfKPTzpd

— The Guardian (@guardian) May 14, 2021

“There is no mRNA manufacturing capacity in the world — this is a new technology,” [Moderna CEO Stéphane] Bancel added. “You cannot go hire people who know how to make mRNA. Those people don’t exist. And then even if all those things were available, whoever wants to do mRNA vaccines will have to, you know, buy the machine, invent the manufacturing process, invent creation processes and ethical processes, and then they will have to go run a clinical trial, get the data, get the product approved and scale manufacturing. This doesn’t happen in six or 12 or 18 months.”

Several officials involved in the U.S. coronavirus response said they worried the decision would damage their relationship with the drug industry, noting the Biden administration is relying on it not just to boost vaccine supply but also to devise additional coronavirus treatments and vaccines, particularly given the risk of variants.

“We’re all counting on pharma to come up with vaccine booster shots, and what happens when we try to get to the front of the line?” said one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly comment.

Read it all.

Biden's support for Covid vaccine wavier got a lot of headlines. But it could take months, or longer, for agreement and years for countries to build up capacity.

The result: It's unlikely to boost global supply quickly

Story with @ddiamond/@JStein_WaPo https://t.co/yiqfB9bwDS

— Tyler Pager (@tylerpager) May 7, 2021

China’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 exceeded those of the U.S. and the developed world combined, according to a report published Thursday by research and consulting firm Rhodium Group.

The country’s emissions more than tripled during the past three decades, the report added.

China is now responsible for more than 27% of total global emissions. The U.S., which is the world’s second-highest emitter, accounts for 11% of the global total. India is responsible for 6.6% of global emissions, edging out the 27 nations in the EU, which account for 6.4%, the report said.

The findings come after a climate summit President Joe Biden hosted last month, during which Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his pledge to make sure the nation’s emissions peak by 2030. He also repeated China’s commitment to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury and urged countries to work together to combat the climate crisis.

Read it all.

"China’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 exceeded those of the U.S. and the developed world combined," reports @CNBC.https://t.co/LOSBzkYBoz

— China US Focus (@ChinaUSFocus) May 6, 2021

Around 40,000 sq m of coral reef has been restored as part of a collaboration between local groups, conservation organisation The Nature Conservancy and pet brand Sheba.

Read it all and wtach the whole video report.

Indonesia coral reef partially restored in extensive project https://t.co/PUE0cf3CPC pic.twitter.com/p8MwKWIRKR

— Louise Manning (@foodsafetyljm) May 6, 2021

Campaigners are set to have a review of abortion law relating to Down’s syndrome heard at the High Court.

Heidi Carter, of Coventry, and Máire Lea-Wilson from Brentford, west London, are challenging the government over a clause in the current law which allows abortion for up to birth for a foetus with Down’s syndrome.

Mrs Carter, 25, who has the condition, said the current law is “not fair”.

The case is due to be heard on 6 and 7 July.

Currently, there is a 24-week time limit for abortion, unless “there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped” .

Mrs Carter, who campaigns under her given name of Crowter, previously wrote to Health Secretary Matt Hancock saying all non-fatal disabilities should be subject to the same standard 24-week limit.

Read it all.

Down's syndrome: Abortion case heads to High Court https://t.co/dmEq9EoiJt

— BBC Midlands Today (@bbcmtd) May 4, 2021

4) Young people flock to Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok.
Summarizing the data from the report, Brook Auxier and Monica Anderson write:

Majorities of 18- to 29-year-olds say they use Instagram or Snapchat and about half say they use TikTok, with those on the younger end of this cohort – ages 18 to 24 – being especially likely to report using Instagram (76%), Snapchat (75%) or TikTok (55%).

These shares stand in stark contrast to those in older age groups. For instance, while 65% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they use Snapchat, just 2% of those 65 and older report using the app – a difference of 63 percentage points.

This is probably the least surprising data of the whole study, if I’m being honest, but the stark contrast in age usages of these apps is notable.

5) About 95% of Americans ages 18-29 use YouTube, the highest usage rate of any social media platform by any demographic.
The greatest affinity between any demographic and any social media platform is 18-29-year-olds and YouTube. Check out this table (I’ve circled the stat for you). The darker the boxes on the table, the greater the affinity/usage.

YouTube is television for the youngest American adults, and I hesitate to say that 95% number could ever reach 100%, but it very well could.

Read it all.

Earlier this month, @pewresearch came out with some new social media usage data via @pewinternet. Here are 10 of the most interesting facts I've mined from it: https://t.co/cXNbCRmP8y

— Chris Martin (@ChrisMartin17) April 30, 2021

While there’s plenty that’s ungodly about the vicissitudes of digital culture, it would be foolish to ignore increasingly popular formats. Father Mike Schmitz’s “Bible in a Year” became one of the most downloaded shows in Apple’s podcast app. Tens of thousands of Jews who hadn’t been to a shul in years now tune in weekly to listen to “Unorthodox,” the world’s most popular Jewish podcast. This is as an invitation to every rabbi, priest and minister in America to do as good spiritual shepherds have always done and come meet their flock where they graze.

For some worshipers, these new platforms will be as far as they ever get on their religious journey. That alone would be a significant victory, considering such folks otherwise wouldn’t be engaged. But for others, a new app or podcast might unlock the door to a much more serious, embodied commitment.

Anyone curious about the future of religion should think about how habits changed over the past year—and consider which ones will stick. With Covid-19 forcing people of faith to stay home, religious communities saw a huge uptick in virtual attendance. Many of those routinely tuning in online hadn’t been regular attendees of in-person services. Why would the same folks who stayed away when church was a mere five-minute drive suddenly attend through Zoom? Convenience only counts for so much.

Services offered during the pandemic were just that—religious services. They were not, as so many felt compelled to offer before the pandemic struck, social gatherings with thin religious veneers. For decades houses of worship had flourished with the American suburb, serving as a focal point of communal life. In Jewish circles, this is known as “a shul with a pool,” suggesting that congregants should see the synagogue as the destination for everything, from Sunday school to a quick swim. This model is fading, and organizations that focus on the heart of the matter—the prayers and rituals and rites—are likely to reap the rewards.

Read it all (my emphasis).

Brick-and-mortar religious communities are shrinking, but digital worship is growing, writes @AriLamm https://t.co/qBEz42folg

— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) April 30, 2021

As many as one in five wells worldwide is at risk of running dry if groundwater levels drop by even a few meters, according to a new study appearing Thursday in the journal Science.

Wells supply water for half the world’s irrigated agriculture, as well as drinking water to billions of people. But the aquifers that wells draw from have been imperiled in recent years as intense demand and lack of government management have allowed them to be drained. The scale of the threat has been difficult to calibrate, however, especially at a global level.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara produced their analysis by compiling construction records for almost 39 million groundwater wells in 40 countries, including their locations, depths, purposes, and construction dates. They found that between 6% and 20% are no more than 5 meters deeper than their local water tables, “suggesting that millions of wells are at risk of drying up if groundwater levels decline by only a few meters,” the authors wrote.

One solution when wells run dry is to dig deeper, but that often leads to poor water quality, according to the researchers. Well construction is also expensive, meaning that digging deeper isn’t always an option.

Global warming and sea level rise due to climate change are also contributing to the problem.

Read it all.

As many as one in five wells worldwide is at risk of running dry if groundwater levels drop by even a few meters https://t.co/4Oaqj9sFoc

— Bloomberg (@business) April 22, 2021

We thank you, creator God,
for the goodly heritage you offer us,
from green downland
to the deep salt seas,
and for the abundant world
we share with your creation.
Keep us so mindful of its needs
and those of all with whom we share,
that open to your Spirit
we may discern and practice
all that makes for its wellbeing,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–The Rev. Peter Lippiett courtesy of Xavier Univeristy

“If at some point Earth becomes uninhabitable there’s no way to escape. We are linked to this planet.”

Our world is changing – and it's even more important that we each do our part to help the planet. What are you doing to look after our world?#EarthDay #EarthDay2021 pic.twitter.com/706ZAon7VE

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) April 22, 2021

When the unfamiliar pop-up touting a new feature appeared on Robert P. Jones’ Facebook, the CEO and founder the CEO and founder of PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) posted a screen grab to Twitter.

“Wondering what fb algorithm thinks it knows about me?” Jones mused.

The new Facebook feature? Prayer posts. The function will allow members of Facebook groups to ask for and respond to prayer requests.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Religion News Service that the social media platform is currently testing the prayer post feature.

Read it all.

Facebook is getting into the business of prayer: https://t.co/fjuyIc4nUf

— Yonat Shimron (@YonatShimron) April 21, 2021

I’m a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. So do dozens of my colleagues. How can this be?….

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen.

So if science is not able to adjudicate whether Jesus’ resurrection happened or not, are we completely unable to assess the plausibility of the claim? No. Contrary to increasingly popular opinion, science is not our only means for accessing truth. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, we must consider the historical evidence, and the historical evidence for the resurrection is as good as for almost any event of ancient history. The extraordinary character of the event, and its significance, provide a unique context, and ancient history is necessarily hard to establish. But a bare presumption that science has shown the resurrection to be impossible is an intellectual cop-out. Science shows no such thing.

Hypothesis 3: I was brainwashed as a child. If you’ve read this far and you are still wondering how an MIT professor could seriously believe in the resurrection, you might guess I was brainwashed to believe it as a child. But no, I did not grow up in a home where I was taught to believe in the resurrection. I came to faith in Jesus when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University and was baptized in the chapel of Kings College on my 20th birthday. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are as compelling to me now as then.

Read it all.

Remembering Vincent Van Gogh who died 129 years ago today.

"The Pink Peach Tree". 1888.
Image: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). pic.twitter.com/kQWML0VKwc

— Duille (@DuilleDesign) July 29, 2019

Many causes combined to produce the US Capitol insurrection on January 6. In the immediate aftermath, most of the blame has been assigned to Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. Those inclined to look deeper connect the spark of Trump’s words to the tinder of extreme polarization that accompanied his presidency. Subgroups of Americans increasingly live in entirely different worlds from one another.

This is more than a metaphor. We—in the United States and throughout the world—have actually and quite literally lost the ability to interact and coexist in the common world we once shared.

I’m not just talking about conflicting worldviews, radically differing perspectives, disparate education, or political party polarization. I am talking about a specific, simple, everyday problem that has led to and reinforced all of these broader social and political causes. This is a problem so pervasive, so ubiquitous, so powerful, and so subtle that most of my readers probably have no idea what I’m about to say.

I’m referring to what I call the 50/50 problem: more than 50 percent of Americans spend more than 50 percent of their waking hours living in virtual, artificial worlds rather than the given, created one in which their bodies exist. The 50 percent threshold represents a tipping point that renders dialogue, deliberation, civic friendship, and compromise extraordinarily difficult in any society.

Read it all.

The disembodiment of consciousness that comes with being on technological devices only becomes a problem when it is so frequent as to actually hinder or distort our ability to engage with the real, natural world.

We have reached that point. https://t.co/I5lGE6XUM9

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) March 31, 2021

About six weeks ago, millions of homeowners across Texas suddenly found their water to be possibly contaminated—or lost access to it entirely—when freezing temperatures and the state’s decrepit infrastructure led to widespread blackouts.

Last week, on the other side of the planet, Taiwan cut water supplies to areas including a key hub of semiconductor manufacturing, thanks to the worst drought in decades.

These back-to-back crises are emblematic of a global catastrophe that is only now getting the attention it deserves. And unlike other calamities that may recede over time, this one is only going to get worse. The World Health Organization estimates that in less than four years, half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas.

“These risks are only expected to grow as climate change effects intensify,” said Thomas Schumann, the founder of Thomas Schumann Capital, a firm that’s created investable water indexes for the U.S. and Europe. “Not only that, but the business costs associated with these risks are projected to be $300 billion…or five times greater if left unaddressed.”

Read it all.

The world is in a water crisis, & children’s lives and futures are at risk. Today, over 1.42 billion people – including 450 million children – live in areas of high or extremely high water vulnerability.

New @UNICEF publication address water insecurity 👉https://t.co/uEgjVfGNfO pic.twitter.com/YxIda3hzx0

— UN-Water (@UN_Water) March 29, 2021

This got The Guy to thinking about how much we’re missing on TV and religion. Leave aside fictional entertainment, which when religion turns up in the plot too often causes anybody who knows anything about religion to cringe. And let’s not get into the fare transmitted by paid-time preachers.

Eastertide or Christmas may bring seasonal documentaries, often over the years sensationalized attempts to debunk the church or the Bible. David Gibson’s 2015 archaeology series on CNN, “Finding Jesus,” was an exception.

But what about intelligent treatment throughout the year of news and ideas in the world of religion, which interests masses of today’s viewers just as it has gripped imaginations across human history?

Read it all.

But despite Zoom’s many advantages, no technology can outweigh the fact that Christianity is inescapably physical. It is not just “a message” that can be communicated through social media. It is also about bodily participation, the receiving of bread and wine.

And while the carefully nuanced and endlessly debatable metaphysics of how bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus is a question I have long left to the theological anoraks, I have no doubt that receiving the Eucharist is a physical activity requiring physical participation. The statements “this is my body” and “this is my blood” make Christianity about matter, physically ingested. You can no more do this over Zoom than you can go to the dentist over Zoom.

This is why lockdown has been such a threat – literally – to the lifeblood of the Christian faith. And why the bolted door was such a betrayal of the need of so many of my parishioners for the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist.

This Thursday evening, Maundy Thursday, churches traditionally hold “watch services” where we sit up into the small hours to stay with a terrified man who did not want to be alone on the night before he was to die. This year it will be hard not to think of all those who have died without the physical presence of their loved ones beside them.
Saying goodbye over Zoom, unable to reach out to hold someone’s hand, has to be among the most appalling things that some families will ever go through. And Last Rites are really not for Skype.

Read it all.

Christian faith can’t be sustained on Zoom https://t.co/9DCdtsRWai

— Simon Sarmiento (@simonsarmiento) March 29, 2021

Check it out.

The Database of Religious History is an open-access database containing information about more than 200 religions, indexed to both time & space.

The DRH is currently recruiting experts in relevant areas of expertise (PhD students & above).

Learn more: https://t.co/PwIjloQ2N7 pic.twitter.com/qBPghpexoY

— Templeton Religion Trust (@TempletonRelig) March 26, 2021

More and more cities are embracing a doughnut-shaped economic model to help recover from the coronavirus crisis and reduce exposure to future shocks.

British economist and author of “Doughnut Economics” Kate Raworth believes it is simply a matter of time before the concept is adopted at a national level.

The Dutch capital of Amsterdam became the first city worldwide to formally implement doughnut economics in early April last year, choosing to launch the initiative at a time when the country had one of the world’s highest mortality rates from the coronavirus pandemic.

Amsterdam’s city government said at the time that it hoped to recover from the crisis and avoid future crises by embracing a city portrait of the doughnut theory.

As outlined in Raworth’s 2017 book, doughnut economics aims to “act as a compass for human progress,” turning last century’s degenerative economy into this century’s regenerative one.

“The compass is a doughnut, the kind with a hole in the middle. Ridiculous though that sounds, it is the only doughnut that actually turns out to be good for us,” Raworth told CNBC via telephone.

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🍩 More & more cities are embracing a doughnut-shaped economic model to help recover from the Covid crisis and avoid future shocks.

➡️ @KateRaworth believes it is a matter of time before the concept is adopted at a national level.

👇 Here's the story:https://t.co/r6zCqBQxnh

— Sam Meredith (@smeredith19) March 25, 2021

HawkEye’s satellites are so-called smallsats, about the size of a large microwave oven. They are therefore cheap to build and launch. HawkEye deployed its first cluster, of three of them, in 2018. They are now in an orbit that takes them over both of Earth’s poles. This means that, as the planet revolves beneath them, every point on its surface can be monitored at regular intervals.

Initially, the data the satellites collected were downloaded to a tracking station on Svalbard, a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean. But business has since boomed. HawkEye now counts a dozen governments among its customers, as well as private clients. The firm has therefore recruited the services of a second ground station, in Antarctica, and it put a second cluster into orbit on January 24th. It plans three more such launches this year, and also intends to widen its network of ground stations yet further.

Given this success, it is hardly surprising that at least six other companies are operating or developing similar systems. Quilty Analytics, a research firm in Florida, expects the number of radio-frequency (rf) intelligence satellites of this sort in orbit to multiply from a dozen at the beginning of January to more than 60 by the end of next year.

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Small, cheap spy satellites mean there’s no hiding place https://t.co/xwv754t1YB

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 23, 2021

Theologically, while John held a very orthodox Christian position, he had a capacity to engage with people from across the broad Christian spectrum. Another rare gift. In my opinion his book that expresses that orthodoxy most eloquently is Science & Christian Belief: Theological Reflections of a Bottom-up Thinker based on his 1993–1994 Gifford Lectures. Here John reflects on the Nicene Creed both theologically and scientifically in the light of the best of modern science. As well, he placed much emphasis on the centrality of the resurrection as a strong basis for hope. Aspects of his thought here may be found in Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope.

John was also able to engage with other faiths without compromising Christian faith. He often reminded us that different faith traditions actually make rather different truth claims. But for him that was a reason to keep dialogue open.

John’s other books are all, of course, excellent in their own way. They are all deliberately relatively short and address one or more specific issues. This makes them readable and accessible resources.

After 1979, John focussed on encouraging and enabling good conversation and dialogue amongst and between scientists and theologians. Establishment of the ISSR was consistent with this and he served as its first President.

John certainly believed in the the unity of knowledge and one reality: the world of our experience that we seek to describe scientifically. Further, he was a critical realist believing that truth, whether scientific or theological, needs to be carefully assessed. This is a big theme and there is not space to deal with it in any detail here.

In the following we get a taste of some of his key insights.

If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn’t fear the truth. … The doctrine of creation of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths profess is such that it encourages the expectation that there will be a deep order in the world, expressive of the Mind and Purpose of that world’s Creator. It also asserts that the character of this order has been freely chosen by God, since it was not determined beforehand by some kind of pre-existing blueprint … As a consequence, the nature of cosmic order cannot be discovered just by taking thought … but the pattern of the world has to be discerned through the observations and experiments that are necessary in order to determine what form the divine choice has actually taken. (Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship, 2007).

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The remarkable life of the Anglican priest who bridged the gap between science and faith, from one who knew him.https://t.co/UeARKPe8RN

— Eternity News (@EternityNews) March 16, 2021

Two months earlier, Hinton and his students had changed the way machines saw the world. They built what was called a neural network, a mathematical system modeled on the web of neurons in the brain, and it could identify common objects—like flowers, dogs, and cars—with an accuracy that had previously seemed impossible. As Hinton and his students showed, a neural network could learn this very human skill by analyzing vast amounts of data. He called this “deep learning,” and its potential was enormous. It promised to transform not just computer vision but everything from talking digital assistants to driverless cars to drug discovery.

The idea of a neural network dated back to the 1950s, but the early pioneers had never gotten it working as well as they’d hoped. By the new millennium, most researchers had given up on the idea, convinced it was a technological dead end and bewildered by the 50-​year-​old conceit that these mathematical systems somehow mimicked the human brain. When submitting research papers to academic journals, those who still explored the technology would often disguise it as something else, replacing the words “neural network” with language less likely to offend their fellow scientists.

Hinton remained one of the few who believed it would one day fulfill its promise, delivering machines that could not only recognize objects but identify spoken words, understand natural language, carry on a conversation, and maybe even solve problems humans couldn’t solve on their own, providing new and more incisive ways of exploring the mysteries of biology, medicine, geology, and other sciences. It was an eccentric stance even inside his own university, which spent years denying his standing request to hire another professor who could work alongside him in this long and winding struggle to build machines that learned on their own. “One crazy person working on this was enough,” he imagined their thinking went. But with a nine-​page paper that Hinton and his students unveiled in the fall of 2012, detailing their breakthrough, they announced to the world that neural networks were indeed as powerful as Hinton had long claimed they would be.

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An amazing account of the events that shaped deep learning as we know it. https://t.co/6LMWRmwCgW

— Georgios Voulgaris (@GeorgiosVoulga1) March 17, 2021