Podcast appearances and mentions of Philip Ball

“Eventually, my dream would be to simulate a virtual cell.”—Demis HassabisThe aspiration to build the virtual cell is considered to be equivalent to a moonshot for digital biology. Recently, 42 leading life scientists published a paper in Cell on why this is so vital, and how it may ultimately be accomplished. This conversation is with 2 of the authors, Charlotte Bunne, now at EPFL and Steve Quake, a Professor at Stanford University, who heads up science at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative The audio (above) is available on iTunes and Spotify. The full video is linked here, at the top, and also can be found on YouTube.TRANSCRIPT WITH LINKS TO AUDIO Eric Topol (00:06):Hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths and we've got a really hot topic today, the virtual cell. And what I think is extraordinarily important futuristic paper that recently appeared in the journal Cell and the first author, Charlotte Bunne from EPFL, previously at Stanford's Computer Science. And Steve Quake, a young friend of mine for many years who heads up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) as well as a professor at Stanford. So welcome, Charlotte and Steve.Steve Quake (00:42):Thanks, Eric. It's great to be here.Charlotte Bunne:Thanks for having me.Eric Topol (00:45):Yeah. So you wrote this article that Charlotte, the first author, and Steve, one of the senior authors, appeared in Cell in December and it just grabbed me, “How to build the virtual cell with artificial intelligence: Priorities and opportunities.” It's the holy grail of biology. We're in this era of digital biology and as you point out in the paper, it's a convergence of what's happening in AI, which is just moving at a velocity that's just so extraordinary and what's happening in biology. So maybe we can start off by, you had some 42 authors that I assume they congregated for a conference or something or how did you get 42 people to agree to the words in this paper?Steve Quake (01:33):We did. We had a meeting at CZI to bring community members together from many different parts of the community, from computer science to bioinformatics, AI experts, biologists who don't trust any of this. We wanted to have some real contrarians in the mix as well and have them have a conversation together about is there an opportunity here? What's the shape of it? What's realistic to expect? And that was sort of the genesis of the article.Eric Topol (02:02):And Charlotte, how did you get to be drafting the paper?Charlotte Bunne (02:09):So I did my postdoc with Aviv Regev at Genentech and Jure Leskovec at CZI and Jure was part of the residency program of CZI. And so, this is how we got involved and you had also prior work with Steve on the universal cell embedding. So this is how everything got started.Eric Topol (02:29):And it's actually amazing because it's a who's who of people who work in life science, AI and digital biology and omics. I mean it's pretty darn impressive. So I thought I'd start off with a quote in the article because it kind of tells a story of where this could go. So the quote was in the paper, “AIVC (artificial intelligence virtual cell) has the potential to revolutionize the scientific process, leading to future breakthroughs in biomedical research, personalized medicine, drug discovery, cell engineering, and programmable biology.” That's a pretty big statement. So maybe we can just kind of toss that around a bit and maybe give it a little more thoughts and color as to what you were positing there.Steve Quake (03:19):Yeah, Charlotte, you want me to take the first shot at that? Okay. So Eric, it is a bold claim and we have a really bold ambition here. We view that over the course of a decade, AI is going to provide the ability to make a transformative computational tool for biology. Right now, cell biology is 90% experimental and 10% computational, roughly speaking. And you've got to do just all kinds of tedious, expensive, challenging lab work to get to the answer. And I don't think AI is going to replace that, but it can invert the ratio. So within 10 years I think we can get to biology being 90% computational and 10% experimental. And the goal of the virtual cell is to build a tool that'll do that.Eric Topol (04:09):And I think a lot of people may not understand why it is considered the holy grail because it is the fundamental unit of life and it's incredibly complex. It's not just all the things happening in the cell with atoms and molecules and organelles and everything inside, but then there's also the interactions the cell to other cells in the outside tissue and world. So I mean it's really quite extraordinary challenge that you've taken on here. And I guess there's some debate, do we have the right foundation? We're going to get into foundation models in a second. A good friend of mine and part of this whole I think process that you got together, Eran Segal from Israel, he said, “We're at this tipping point…All the stars are aligned, and we have all the different components: the data, the compute, the modeling.” And in the paper you describe how we have over the last couple of decades have so many different data sets that are rich that are global initiatives. But then there's also questions. Do we really have the data? I think Bo Wang especially asked about that. Maybe Charlotte, what are your thoughts about data deficiency? There's a lot of data, but do you really have what we need before we bring them all together for this kind of single model that will get us some to the virtual cell?Charlotte Bunne (05:41):So I think, I mean one core idea of building this AIVC is that we basically can leverage all experimental data that is overall collected. So this also goes back to the point Steve just made. So meaning that we basically can integrate across many different studies data because we have AI algorithms or the architectures that power such an AIVC are able to integrate basically data sets on many different scales. So we are going a bit away from this dogma. I'm designing one algorithm from one dataset to this idea of I have an architecture that can take in multiple dataset on multiple scales. So this will help us a bit in being somewhat efficient with the type of experiments that we need to make and the type of experiments we need to conduct. And again, what Steve just said, ultimately, we can very much steer which data sets we need to collect.Charlotte Bunne (06:34):Currently, of course we don't have all the data that is sufficient. I mean in particular, I think most of the tissues we have, they are healthy tissues. We don't have all the disease phenotypes that we would like to measure, having patient data is always a very tricky case. We have mostly non-interventional data, meaning we have very limited understanding of somehow the effect of different perturbations. Perturbations that happen on many different scales in many different environments. So we need to collect a lot here. I think the overall journey that we are going with is that we take the data that we have, we make clever decisions on the data that we will collect in the future, and we have this also self-improving entity that is aware of what it doesn't know. So we need to be able to understand how well can I predict something on this somewhat regime. If I cannot, then we should focus our data collection effort into this. So I think that's not a present state, but this will basically also guide the future collection.Eric Topol (07:41):Speaking of data, one of the things I think that's fascinating is we saw how AlphaFold2 really revolutionized predicting proteins. But remember that was based on this extraordinary resource that had been built, the Protein Data Bank that enabled that. And for the virtual cell there's no such thing as a protein data bank. It's so much more as you emphasize Charlotte, it's so much dynamic and these perturbations that are just all across the board as you emphasize. Now the human cell atlas, which currently some tens of millions, but going into a billion cells, we learned that it used to be 200 cell types. Now I guess it's well over 5,000 and that we have 37 trillion cells approximately in the average person adult's body is a formidable map that's being made now. And I guess the idea that you're advancing is that we used to, and this goes back to a statement you made earlier, Steve, everything we did in science was hypothesis driven. But if we could get computational model of the virtual cell, then we can have AI exploration of the whole field. Is that really the nuts of this?Steve Quake (09:06):Yes. A couple thoughts on that, maybe Theo Karaletsos, our lead AI person at CZI says machine learning is the formalism through which we understand high dimensional data and I think that's a very deep statement. And biological systems are intrinsically very high dimensional. You've got 20,000 genes in the human genome in these cell atlases. You're measuring all of them at the same time in each single cell. And there's a lot of structure in the relationships of their gene expression there that is just not evident to the human eye. And for example, CELL by GENE, our database that collects all the aggregates, all of the single cell transcriptomic data is now over a hundred million cells. And as you mentioned, we're seeing ways to increase that by an order of magnitude in the near future. The project that Jure Leskovec and I worked on together that Charlotte referenced earlier was like a first attempt to build a foundational model on that data to discover some of the correlations and structure that was there.Steve Quake (10:14):And so, with a subset, I think it was the 20 or 30 million cells, we built a large language model and began asking it, what do you understand about the structure of this data? And it kind of discovered lineage relationships without us teaching it. We trained on a matrix of numbers, no biological information there, and it learned a lot about the relationships between cell type and lineage. And that emerged from that high dimensional structure, which was super pleasing to us and really, I mean for me personally gave me the confidence to say this stuff is going to work out. There is a future for the virtual cell. It's not some made up thing. There is real substance there and this is worth investing an enormous amount of CZIs resources in going forward and trying to rally the community around as a project.Eric Topol (11:04):Well yeah, the premise here is that there is a language of life, and you just made a good case that there is if you can predict, if you can query, if you can generate like that. It is reminiscent of the famous Go game of Lee Sedol, that world champion and how the machine came up with a move (Move 37) many, many years ago that no human would've anticipated and I think that's what you're getting at. And the ability for inference and reason now to add to this. So Charlotte, one of the things of course is about, well there's two terms in here that are unfamiliar to many of the listeners or viewers of this podcast, universal representations (UR) and virtual instrument (VIs) that you make a pretty significant part of how you are going about this virtual cell model. So could you describe that and also the embeddings as part of the universal representation (UR) because I think embeddings, or these meaningful relationships are key to what Steve was just talking about.Charlotte Bunne (12:25):Yes. So in order to somewhat leverage very different modalities in order to leverage basically modalities that will take measurements across different scales, like the idea is that we have large, may it be transformer models that might be very different. If I have imaging data, I have a vision transformer, if I have a text data, I have large language models that are designed of course for DNA then they have a very wide context and so on and so forth. But the idea is somewhat that we have models that are connected through the scales of biology because those scales we know. We know which components are somewhat involved or in measurements that are happening upstream. So we have the somewhat interconnection or very large model that will be trained on many different data and we have this internal model representation that somewhat capture everything they've seen. And so, this is what we call those universal representation (UR) that will exist across the scales of biology.Charlotte Bunne (13:22):And what is great about AI, and so I think this is a bit like a history of AI in short is the ability to predict the last years, the ability to generate, we can generate new hypothesis, we can generate modalities that we are missing. We can potentially generate certain cellular state, molecular state have a certain property, but I think what's really coming is this ability to reason. So we see this in those very large language models, the ability to reason about a hypothesis, how we can test it. So this is what those instruments ultimately need to do. So we need to be able to simulate the change of a perturbation on a cellular phenotype. So on the internal representation, the universal representation of a cell state, we need to simulate the fact the mutation has downstream and how this would propagate in our representations upstream. And we need to build many different type of virtual instruments that allow us to basically design and build all those capabilities that ultimately the AI virtual cell needs to possess that will then allow us to reason, to generate hypothesis, to basically predict the next experiment to conduct to predict the outcome of a perturbation experiment to in silico design, cellular states, molecular states, things like that. And this is why we make the separation between internal representation as well as those instruments that operate on those representations.Eric Topol (14:47):Yeah, that's what I really liked is that you basically described the architecture, how you're going to do this. By putting these URs into the VIs, having a decoder and a manipulator and you basically got the idea if you can bring all these different integrations about which of course is pending. Now there are obviously many naysayers here that this is impossible. One of them is this guy, Philip Ball. I don't know if you read the language, How Life Works. Now he's a science journalist and he's a prolific writer. He says, “Comparing life to a machine, a robot, a computer, sells it short. Life is a cascade of processes, each with a distinct integrity and autonomy, the logic of which has no parallel outside the living world.” Is he right? There's no way to model this. It's silly, it's too complex.Steve Quake (15:50):We don't know, alright. And it's great that there's naysayers. If everyone agreed this was doable, would it be worth doing? I mean the whole point is to take risks and get out and do something really challenging in the frontier where you don't know the answer. If we knew that it was doable, I wouldn't be interested in doing it. So I personally am happy that there's not a consensus.Eric Topol (16:16):Well, I mean to capture people's imagination here, if you're successful and you marshal a global effort, I don't know who's going to pay for it because it's a lot of work coming here going forward. But if you can do it, the question here is right today we talk about, oh let's make an organoid so we can figure out how to treat this person's cancer or understand this person's rare disease or whatever. And instead of having to wait weeks for this culture and all the expense and whatnot, you could just do it in a computer and in silico and you have this virtual twin of a person's cells and their tissue and whatnot. So the opportunity here is, I don't know if people get, this is just extraordinary and quick and cheap if you can get there. And it's such a bold initiative idea, who will pay for this do you think?Steve Quake (17:08):Well, CZI is putting an enormous amount of resources into it and it's a major project for us. We have been laying the groundwork for it. We recently put together what I think is if not the largest, one of the largest GPU supercomputer clusters for nonprofit basic science research that came online at the end of last year. And in fact in December we put out an RFA for the scientific community to propose using it to build models. And so we're sharing that resource within the scientific community as I think you appreciate, one of the real challenges in the field has been access to compute resources and industry has it academia at a much lower level. We are able to be somewhere in between, not quite at the level of a private company but the tech company but at a level beyond what most universities are being able to do and we're trying to use that to drive the field forward. We're also planning on launching RFAs we this year to help drive this project forward and funding people globally on that. And we are building a substantial internal effort within CZI to help drive this project forward.Eric Topol (18:17):I think it has the looks of the human genome project, which at time as you know when it was originally launched that people thought, oh, this is impossible. And then look what happened. It got done. And now the sequence of genome is just a commodity, very relatively, very inexpensive compared to what it used to be.Steve Quake (18:36):I think a lot about those parallels. And I will say one thing, Philip Ball, I will concede him the point, the cells are very complicated. The genome project, I mean the sort of genius there was to turn it from a biology problem to a chemistry problem, there is a test tube with a chemical and it work out the structure of that chemical. And if you can do that, the problem is solved. I think what it means to have the virtual cell is much more complex and ambiguous in terms of defining what it's going to do and when you're done. And so, we have our work cut out for us there to try to do that. And that's why a little bit, I established our North Star and CZI for the next decade as understanding the mysteries of the cell and that word mystery is very important to me. I think the molecules, as you pointed out earlier are understood, genome sequenced, protein structure solved or predicted, we know a lot about the molecules. Those are if not solved problems, pretty close to being solved. And the real mystery is how do they work together to create life in the cell? And that's what we're trying to answer with this virtual cell project.Eric Topol (19:43):Yeah, I think another thing that of course is happening concurrently to add the likelihood that you'll be successful is we've never seen the foundation models coming out in life science as they have in recent weeks and months. Never. I mean, I have a paper in Science tomorrow coming out summarizing the progress about not just RNA, DNA, ligands. I mean the whole idea, AlphaFold3, but now Boltz and so many others. It's just amazing how fast the torrent of new foundation models. So Charlotte, what do you think accounts for this? This is unprecedented in life science to see foundation models coming out at this clip on evolution on, I mean you name it, design of every different molecule of life or of course in cells included in that. What do you think is going on here?Charlotte Bunne (20:47):So on the one hand, of course we benefit profits and inherit from all the tremendous efforts that have been made in the last decades on assembling those data sets that are very, very standardized. CELLxGENE is very somehow AI friendly, as you can say, it is somewhat a platform that is easy to feed into algorithms, but at the same time we actually also see really new building mechanisms, design principles of AI algorithms in itself. So I think we have understood that in order to really make progress, build those systems that work well, we need to build AI tools that are designed for biological data. So to give you an easy example, if I use a large language model on text, it's not going to work out of the box for DNA because we have different reading directions, different context lens and many, many, many, many more.Charlotte Bunne (21:40):And if I look at standard computer vision where we can say AI really excels and I'm applying standard computer vision, vision transformers on multiplex images, they're not going to work because normal computer vision architectures, they always expect the same three inputs, RGB, right? In multiplex images, I'm measuring up to 150 proteins potentially in a single experiment, but every study will measure different proteins. So I deal with many different scales like larger scales and I used to attention mechanisms that we have in usual computer vision. Transformers are not going to work anymore, they're not going to scale. And at the same time, I need to be completely flexible in whatever input combination of channel I'm just going to face in this experiment. So this is what we right now did for example, in our very first work, inheriting the design principle that we laid out in the paper AI virtual cell and then come up with new AI architectures that are dealing with these very special requirements that biological data have.Charlotte Bunne (22:46):So we have now a lot of computer scientists that work very, very closely have a very good understanding of biologists. Biologists that are getting much and much more into the computer science. So people who are fluent in both languages somewhat, that are able to now build models that are adopted and designed for biological data. And we don't just take basically computer vision architectures that work well on street scenes and try to apply them on biological data. So it's just a very different way of thinking about it, starting constructing basically specialized architectures, besides of course the tremendous data efforts that have happened in the past.Eric Topol (23:24):Yeah, and we're not even talking about just sequence because we've also got imaging which has gone through a revolution, be able to image subcellular without having to use any types of stains that would disrupt cells. That's another part of the deep learning era that came along. One thing I thought was fascinating in the paper in Cell you wrote, “For instance, the Short Read Archive of biological sequence data holds over 14 petabytes of information, which is 1,000 times larger than the dataset used to train ChatGPT.” I mean that's a lot of tokens, that's a lot of stuff, compute resources. It's almost like you're going to need a DeepSeek type of way to get this. I mean not that DeepSeek as its claim to be so much more economical, but there's a data challenge here in terms of working with that massive amount that is different than the human language. That is our language, wouldn't you say?Steve Quake (24:35):So Eric, that brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from Sydney Brenner who is such a wit. And in 2000 at the sort of early first flush of success in genomics, he said, biology is drowning in a sea of data and starving for knowledge. A very deep statement, right? And that's a little bit what the motivation was for putting the Short Read Archive statistic into the paper there. And again, for me, part of the value of this endeavor of creating a virtual cell is it's a tool to help us translate data into knowledge.Eric Topol (25:14):Yeah, well there's two, I think phenomenal figures in your Cell paper. The first one that kicks across the capabilities of the virtual cell and the second that compares the virtual cell to the real or the physical cell. And we'll link that with this in the transcript. And the other thing we'll link is there's a nice Atlantic article, “A Virtual Cell Is a ‘Holy Grail' of Science. It's Getting Closer.” That might not be quite close as next week or year, but it's getting close and that's good for people who are not well grounded in this because it's much more taken out of the technical realm. This is really exciting. I mean what you're onto here and what's interesting, Steve, since I've known you for so many years earlier in your career you really worked on omics that is being DNA and RNA and in recent times you've made this switch to cells. Is that just because you're trying to anticipate the field or tell us a little bit about your migration.Steve Quake (26:23):Yeah, so a big part of my career has been trying to develop new measurement technologies that'll provide insight into biology. And decades ago that was understanding molecules. Now it's understanding more complex biological things like cells and it was like a natural progression. I mean we built the sequencers, sequenced the genomes, done. And it was clear that people were just going to do that at scale then and create lots of data. Hopefully knowledge would get out of that. But for me as an academic, I never thought I'd be in the position I'm in now was put it that way. I just wanted to keep running a small research group. So I realized I would have to get out of the genome thing and find the next frontier and it became this intersection of microfluidics and genomics, which as you know, I spent a lot of time developing microfluidic tools to analyze cells and try to do single cell biology to understand their heterogeneity. And that through a winding path led me to all these cell atlases and to where we are now.Eric Topol (27:26):Well, we're fortunate for that and also with your work with CZI to help propel that forward and I think it sounds like we're going to need a lot of help to get this thing done. Now Charlotte, as a computer scientist now at EPFL, what are you going to do to keep working on this and what's your career advice for people in computer science who have an interest in digital biology?Charlotte Bunne (27:51):So I work in particular on the prospect of using this to build diagnostic tools and to make diagnostics in the clinic easier because ultimately we have somewhat limited capabilities in the hospital to run deep omics, but the idea of being able to somewhat map with a cheaper and lighter modality or somewhat diagnostic test into something much richer because a model has been seeing all those different data and can basically contextualize it. It's very interesting. We've seen all those pathology foundation models. If I can always run an H&E, but then decide when to run deeper diagnostics to have a better or more accurate prediction, that is very powerful and it's ultimately reducing the costs, but the precision that we have in hospitals. So my faculty position right now is co-located between the School of Life Sciences, School of Computer Science. So I have a dual affiliation and I'm affiliated to the hospitals to actually make this possible and as a career advice, I think don't be shy and stick to your discipline.Charlotte Bunne (28:56):I have a bachelor's in biology, but I never only did biology. I have a PhD in computer science, which you would think a bachelor in biology not necessarily qualifies you through. So I think this interdisciplinarity also requires you to be very fluent, very comfortable in reading many different styles of papers and publications because a publication in a computer science venue will be very, very different from the way we write in biology. So don't stick to your study program, but just be free in selecting whatever course gets you closer to the knowledge you need in order to do the research or whatever task you are building and working on.Eric Topol (29:39):Well, Charlotte, the way you're set up there with this coalescence of life science and computer science is so ideal and so unusual here in the US, so that's fantastic. That's what we need and that's really the underpinning of how you're going to get to the virtual cells, getting these two communities together. And Steve, likewise, you were an engineer and somehow you became one of the pioneers of digital biology way back before it had that term, this interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary. We need so much of that in order for you all to be successful, right?Steve Quake (30:20):Absolutely. I mean there's so much great discovery to be done on the boundary between fields. I trained as a physicist and kind of made my career this boundary between physics and biology and technology development and it's just sort of been a gift that keeps on giving. You've got a new way to measure something, you discover something new scientifically and it just all suggests new things to measure. It's very self-reinforcing.Eric Topol (30:50):Now, a couple of people who you know well have made some pretty big statements about this whole era of digital biology and I think the virtual cell is perhaps the biggest initiative of all the digital biology ongoing efforts, but Jensen Huang wrote, “for the first time in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not science.” And Demis Hassabis wrote or said, ‘we're seeing engineering science, you have to build the artifact of interest first, and then once you have it, you can use the scientific method to reduce it down and understand its components.' Well here there's a lot to do to understand its components and if we can do that, for example, right now as both of AI drug discoveries and high gear and there's umpteen numbers of companies working on it, but it doesn't account for the cell. I mean it basically is protein, protein ligand interactions. What if we had drug discovery that was cell based? Could you comment about that? Because that doesn't even exist right now.Steve Quake (32:02):Yeah, I mean I can say something first, Charlotte, if you've got thoughts, I'm curious to hear them. So I do think AI approaches are going to be very useful designing molecules. And so, from the perspective of designing new therapeutics, whether they're small molecules or antibodies, yeah, I mean there's a ton of investment in that area that is a near term fruit, perfect thing for venture people to invest in and there's opportunity there. There's been enough proof of principle. However, I do agree with you that if you want to really understand what happens when you drug a target, you're going to want to have some model of the cell and maybe not just the cell, but all the different cell types of the body to understand where toxicity will come from if you have on-target toxicity and whether you get efficacy on the thing you're trying to do.Steve Quake (32:55):And so, we really hope that people will use the virtual cell models we're going to build as part of the drug discovery development process, I agree with you in a little of a blind spot and we think if we make something useful, people will be using it. The other thing I'll say on that point is I'm very enthusiastic about the future of cellular therapies and one of our big bets at CZI has been starting the New York Biohub, which is aimed at really being very ambitious about establishing the engineering and scientific foundations of how to engineer completely, radically more powerful cellular therapies. And the virtual cell is going to help them do that, right? It's going to be essential for them to achieve that mission.Eric Topol (33:39):I think you're pointing out one of the most important things going on in medicine today is how we didn't anticipate that live cell therapy, engineered cells and ideally off the shelf or in vivo, not just having to take them out and work on them outside the body, is a revolution ongoing, and it's not just in cancer, it's in autoimmune diseases and many others. So it's part of the virtual cell need. We need this. One of the things that's a misnomer, I want you both to comment on, we keep talking about single cell, single cell. And there's a paper spatial multi-omics this week, five different single cell scales all integrated. It's great, but we don't get to single cell. We're basically looking at 50 cells, 100 cells. We're not doing single cell because we're not going deep enough. Is that just a matter of time when we actually are doing, and of course the more we do get down to the single or a few cells, the more insights we're going to get. Would you comment about that? Because we have all this literature on single cell comes out every day, but we're not really there yet.Steve Quake (34:53):Charlotte, do you want to take a first pass at that and then I can say something?Charlotte Bunne (34:56):Yes. So it depends. So I think if we look at certain spatial proteomics, we still have subcellular resolutions. So of course, we always measure many different cells, but we are able to somewhat get down to resolution where we can look at certain colocalization of proteins. This also goes back to the point just made before having this very good environment to study drugs. If I want to build a new drug, if I want to build a new protein, the idea of building this multiscale model allows us to actually simulate different, somehow binding changes and binding because we simulate the effect of a drug. Ultimately, the redouts we have they are subcellular. So of course, we often in the spatial biology, we often have a bit like methods that are rather coarse they have a spot that averages over certain some cells like hundreds of cells or few cells.Charlotte Bunne (35:50):But I think we also have more and more technologies that are zooming in that are subcellular where we can actually tag or have those probe-based methods that allow us to zoom in. There's microscopy of individual cells to really capture them in 3D. They are of course not very high throughput yet, but it gives us also an idea of the morphology and how ultimately morphology determine certain somehow cellular properties or cellular phenotype. So I think there's lots of progress also on the experimental and that ultimately will back feed into the AI virtual cell, those models that will be fed by those data. Similarly, looking at dynamics, right, looking at live imaging of individual cells of their morphological changes. Also, this ultimately is data that we'll need to get a better understanding of disease mechanisms, cellular phenotypes functions, perturbation responses.Eric Topol (36:47):Right. Yes, Steve, you can comment on that and the amazing progress that we have made with space and time, spatial temporal resolution, spatial omics over these years, but that we still could go deeper in terms of getting to individual cells, right?Steve Quake (37:06):So, what can we do with a single cell? I'd say we are very mature in our ability to amplify and sequence the genome of a single cell, amplify and sequence the transcriptome of a single cell. You can ask is one cell enough to make a biological conclusion? And maybe I think what you're referring to is people want to see replicates and so you can ask how many cells do you need to see to have confidence in any given biological conclusion, which is a reasonable thing. It's a statistical question in good science. I think I've been very impressed with how the mass spec people have been doing recently. I think they've finally cracked the ability to look at proteins from single cells and they can look at a couple thousand proteins. That was I think one of these Nature method of the year things at the end of last year and deep visual proteomics.Eric Topol (37:59):Deep visual proteomics, yes.Steve Quake (38:00):Yeah, they are over the hump. Yeah, they are over the hump with single cell measurements. Part of what's missing right now I think is the ability to reliably do all of that on the same cell. So this is what Charlotte was referring to be able to do sort of multi-modal measurements on single cells. That's kind of in its infancy and there's a few examples, but there's a lot more work to be done on that. And I think also the fact that these measurements are all destructive right now, and so you're losing the ability to look how the cells evolve over time. You've got to say this time point, I'm going to dissect this thing and look at a state and I don't get to see what happens further down the road. So that's another future I think measurement challenge to be addressed.Eric Topol (38:42):And I think I'm just trying to identify some of the multitude of challenges in this extraordinarily bold initiative because there are no shortage and that's good about it. It is given people lots of work to do to overcome, override some of these challenges. Now before we wrap up, besides the fact that you point out that all the work has to be done and be validated in real experiments, not just live in a virtual AI world, but you also comment about the safety and ethics of this work and assuming you're going to gradually get there and be successful. So could either or both of you comment about that because it's very thoughtful that you're thinking already about that.Steve Quake (41:10):As scientists and members of the larger community, we want to be careful and ensure that we're interacting with people who said policy in a way that ensures that these tools are being used to advance the cause of science and not do things that are detrimental to human health and are used in a way that respects patient privacy. And so, the ethics around how you use all this with respect to individuals is going to be important to be thoughtful about from the beginning. And I also think there's an ethical question around what it means to be publishing papers and you don't want people to be forging papers using data from the virtual cell without being clear about where that came from and pretending that it was a real experiment. So there's issues around those sorts of ethics as well that need to be considered.Eric Topol (42:07):And of those 40 some authors, do you around the world, do you have the sense that you all work together to achieve this goal? Is there kind of a global bonding here that's going to collaborate?Steve Quake (42:23):I think this effort is going to go way beyond those 40 authors. It's going to include a much larger set of people and I'm really excited to see that evolve with time.Eric Topol (42:31):Yeah, no, it's really quite extraordinary how you kick this thing off and the paper is the blueprint for something that we are all going to anticipate that could change a lot of science and medicine. I mean we saw, as you mentioned, Steve, how that deep visual proteomics (DVP) saved lives. It was what I wrote a spatial medicine, no longer spatial biology. And so, the way that this can change the future of medicine, I think a lot of people just have to have a little bit of imagination that once we get there with this AIVC, that there's a lot in store that's really quite exciting. Well, I think this has been an invigorating review of that paper and some of the issues surrounding it. I couldn't be more enthusiastic for your success and ultimately where this could take us. Did I miss anything during the discussion that we should touch on before we wrap up?Steve Quake (43:31):Not from my perspective. It was a pleasure as always Eric, and a fun discussion.Charlotte Bunne (43:38):Thanks so much.Eric Topol (43:39):Well thank you both and all the co-authors of this paper. We're going to be following this with the great interest, and I think for most people listening, they may not know that this is in store for the future. Someday we will get there. I think one of the things to point out right now is the models we have today that large language models based on transformer architecture, they're going to continue to evolve. We're already seeing so much in inference and ability for reasoning to be exploited and not asking for prompts with immediate answers, but waiting for days to get back. A lot more work from a lot more computing resources. But we're going to get models in the future to fold this together. I think that's one of the things that you've touched on the paper so that whatever we have today in concert with what you've laid out, AI is just going to keep getting better.Eric Topol (44:39):The biology that these foundation models are going to get broader and more compelling as to their use cases. So that's why I believe in this. I don't see this as a static situation right now. I just think that you're anticipating the future, and we will have better models to be able to integrate this massive amount of what some people would consider disparate data sources. So thank you both and all your colleagues for writing this paper. I don't know how you got the 42 authors to agree to it all, which is great, and it's just a beginning of something that's a new frontier. So thanks very much.Steve Quake (45:19):Thank you, Eric.**********************************************Thanks for listening, watching or reading Ground Truths. Your subscription is greatly appreciated.If you found this podcast interesting please share it!That makes the work involved in putting these together especially worthwhile.All content on Ground Truths—newsletters, analyses, and podcasts—is free, open-access, with no ads..Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. And such support is becoming more vital In light of current changes of funding by US biomedical research at NIH and other governmental agencies.Thanks to my producer Jessica Nguyen and to Sinjun Balabanoff for audio and video support at Scripps Research. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

*Sigla di Andrea Marchi* ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrea_marchi_aka_marchiza/⁠Il bianco è il protagonista di questo episodio, un colore che porta con sé simboli e significati profondi attraverso le epoche. Dai riti preistorici all'arte rinascimentale, dalla luna come divinità alla purezza della fede cristiana, esploriamo come questo colore abbia plasmato culture e tradizioni. Scoprirete curiosità sulla lavorazione di pigmenti come il bianco di piombo, la porcellana cinese e l'uso simbolico del bianco nella società medievale e moderna. È un viaggio nella chimica, nell'arte e nel linguaggio, che sfata miti come quello della "Grecia bianca" e approfondisce il ruolo del bianco nella storia dei colori. Bibliografia e approfondimenti:  -Michael Pastoureau, Bianco, storia di un colore, trad. Guido Calza, Ponte alle Grazie, 2016-Philip Ball, Colore, una biografia, trad. Lorenza Lanza e Patrizia Vicentini, BUR Rizzoli, 2001  -Riley, Charles A., Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England.  -James Fox, Il mondo dei colori, trad. Federica Pe', Bollati Borgheri, 2023  -Riccardo Falcinelli, Cromorama, Einaudi, 2017  -Adriano Zecchina, Alchimie nell'arte, Zanichelli, 2012  -Kelly Grovier, L'arte del colore, 24ore cultura, 2023  Social: Eva: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chimica_in_pillole/⁠ Daniela: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/lastoriaperted/

Welcome to The Spark—your weekly creative pick-me-up from The Creative Boom Podcast. Every Thursday, we bring you a shorter, snappier episode filled with inspiration, creative news, and practical tips to carry you through the week. Whether you need motivation or insights, we've got you covered! This week on the podcast, we had the absolute pleasure of hosting Christopher Doyle, who brightened up the winter gloom with his Aussie warmth and charm. He opened up about something we don't talk about enough in the creative industry: The Great Unknown. What is it, exactly? If you haven't tuned in yet, make sure you do. But to give you a taste—it's that constant barrage of brilliant design work online. You're having a great day, feeling good about your work, and then bam, you see something that's so good it stops you in your tracks. Sometimes, it inspires, but other times, it chips away at your confidence. In our chat, Chris offers some great advice to help combat that common feeling. Now, let's move on to this week's creative news. First up, Oxford University Press has announced its Word of the Year for 2024: brain rot. It captures the collective unease over endless scrolling and its impact on mental well-being. Defined as the decline of intellectual sharpness due to an overconsumption of trivial online content, it struck a chord, particularly with younger generations navigating the highs and lows of digital life. In tech news, wearable devices like smartwatches and health rings are making waves in personal health tracking, with proposals for integrating them into NHS care. While they've been praised for encouraging healthier habits, doctors caution against overreliance on these gadgets, reminding us that no device can replace professional diagnostics. Still, the shift towards at-home care keeps the debate alive. Over on LinkedIn, AI-generated writing has quietly become the norm, with more than half of long-form English posts now likely written by AI. While these tools make polished posts a breeze, critics worry about the loss of authenticity. On a platform often dominated by corporate speak, though, it seems the line between human and machine-generated content is getting blurrier—and perhaps, for some, that's okay. In our Spotlight segment, Creative Boom celebrates the resilience and growth of its community in 2024. Illustrator Marloes Devries shared how saying no to misaligned projects led to her best financial year yet while also helping other artists by passing on opportunities. It's a reminder that success isn't just about output; it's about making thoughtful choices and leaning into the support of your community. For our Book of the Week, we're recommending How Life Works by Philip Ball. This fascinating read explores the cutting-edge world of modern biology, from reprogramming cells to redesigning living systems in ways evolution never imagined. It's an inspiring look at how these scientific leaps are reshaping what we know about life—and hinting at what might be possible in the future. Now for our Tip of the Week: as the festive season approaches, managing the end-of-year chaos is key. Ruthless prioritisation is your best friend—focus on what must get done, communicate clear boundaries to clients, and let go of the rest. A little self-care doesn't hurt either. Wrap up strong, and you'll be set to start 2025 on the right foot. Looking ahead, we've got Joseph Parsons joining us on Monday. By day, he's a graphic designer; by night, he's a stand-up comedian about to go on tour with his new gig, Re-designed. Don't miss it—it's bound to be a riot. After Joe, we'll chat with Jessi Brattengeier from The New York Times, and then we'll round off the season with our festive Christmas Special featuring some familiar faces. Until Monday!

*Sigla di Andrea Marchi* https://www.instagram.com/andrea_marchi_aka_marchiza/*Master di Lorenzo Cimino* https://www.instagram.com/prod__cimins/Donazioni &supporto: https://ko-fi.com/cromatica Il rosso è un colore che ha attraversato millenni, intrecciandosi con la storia dell'umanità. Simbolo di potere, passione e ribellione, il rosso ha accompagnato le prime civiltà. Dalle prime tracce di arte rupestre, dove l'ocra rossa tracciava la storia degli uomini primitivi, fino agli dei egizi, come Seth, il rosso ha incarnato sia la vita che la morte, il caos e la creazione. È stato il colore della rivoluzione, dal sangue versato sulle barricate della Rivoluzione Francese, fino alle bandiere dei movimenti comunisti. Rosso è il colore del fuoco che ha forgiato il destino delle civiltà e, ancora oggi, brilla come simbolo di pericolo, amore e attrazione, intrecciando ogni cultura e ogni tempo con la sua vibrante intensità.Bibliografia e approfondimenti: -Michael Pastoureau, Rosso, storia di un colore, trad. Guido Calza, Ponte alle Grazie, 2016-Philip Ball, Colore, una biografia, trad. Lorenza Lanza e Patrizia Vicentini, BUR Rizzoli, 2001 -Riley, Charles A., Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England. -James Fox, Il mondo dei colori, trad. Federica Pe', Bollati Borgheri, 2023 -Riccardo Falcinelli, Cromorama, Einaudi, 2017 -Adriano Zecchina, Alchimie nell'arte, Zanichelli, 2012 -Kelly Grovier, L'arte del colore, 24ore cultura, 2023 Social: Eva: https://www.instagram.com/chimica_in_pillole/Daniela: https://www.instagram.com/lastoriaperted/

Sign Up for our LA Listener Meet Up Philip Ball is an award-winning science writer who has penned over 30 books on a dizzying variety of subjects. Holding degrees in chemistry from Oxford and physics from the University of Bristol, Ball's multidisciplinary background underpins his versatility. As a former editor at Nature for two decades and a regular contributor to a range of publications and broadcast outlets, Ball's work exemplifies the rare combination of scientific depth and accessibility, cementing his reputation as a premier science communicator. Tyler and Philip discuss how well scientists have stood up to power historically, the problematic pressures scientists feel within academia today, artificial wombs and the fertility crisis, the price of invisibility, the terrifying nature of outer space and Gothic cathedrals, the role Christianity played in the Scientific Revolution, what current myths may stick around forever, whether cells can be thought of as doing computation, the limitations of The Selfish Gene, whether the free energy principle can be usefully applied, the problem of microplastics gathering in testicles and other places, progress in science, his favorite science fiction, how to follow in his footsteps, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded May 22nd, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Philip on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

*Sigla di Andrea Marchi* https://www.instagram.com/andrea_marchi_aka_marchiza *Master di Lorenzo Cimino* https://www.instagram.com/prod__cimins/  Donazioni &supporto: https://ko-fi.com/cromatica  Il viola oggi è considerato un colore sfortunato, ma non è sempre stato così: ai tempi dei Fenici e dei Romani era il colore più prezioso che si potesse desiderare, il colore degli imperatori e delle persone più ricche.  Il viola era un colore molto raro e difficile da ottenere, ma i fenici avevano scoperto che un piccolo animaletto marino, il murice, permetteva di ottenere il viola più bello e stabile: la famosa porpora di Tiro, il cui costo al grammo superava quello dell'oro. Il significato del viola è cambiato molto nel tempo: dall'essere simbolo di nobiltà ed esclusività, a colore dell'inquinamento, della malvagità e del veleno...  Bibliografia e approfondimenti: -Philip Ball, Colore, una biografia, trad. Lorenza Lanza e Patrizia Vicentini, BUR Rizzoli, 2001 -Riley, Charles A., Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England. -James Fox, Il mondo dei colori, trad. Federica Pe', Bollati Borgheri, 2023 -Riccardo Falcinelli, Cromorama, Einaudi, 2017 -Adriano Zecchina, Alchimie nell'arte, Zanichelli, 2012 -Kelly Grovier, L'arte del colore, 24ore cultura, 2023  Social:  Daniela: https://www.instagram.com/lastoriaperted/ Eva: https://www.instagram.com/chimica_in_pillole/

******Support the channel****** Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao   ******Follow me on****** Website: https://www.thedissenter.net/ The Dissenter Goodreads list: https://shorturl.at/7BMoB Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT   This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/   Dr. Philip Ball is a freelance science writer, with a BA in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol. He was an editor at Nature for over 20 years. He is the author of many popular books on science, the latest one being How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology. In this episode, we focus on How Life Works. We start by discussing what life is, the metaphors people use to talk about it, and living things as generators of meaning. We explore the role of genes and how they work, why context matters, the relationship between genes and traits, and genetic transcription and translation. We discuss the role of proteins, and networks of interaction in organisms. We talk about the cell in the context of organisms and in evolution, and how cells replicate and tissues grow. We discuss what agency is. Finally, we talk about the current paradigm in medicine, and how we can redesign life. -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, BERNARDO SEIXAS, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, ERIK ENGMAN, LUCY, MANVIR SINGH, PETRA WEIMANN, CAROLA FEEST, STARRY, MAURO JÚNIOR, 航 豊川, TONY BARRETT, BENJAMIN GELBART, AND NIKOLAI VISHNEVSKY! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, NICK GOLDEN, CHRISTINE GLASS, AND KOMOMO! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!

This week, Philip Ball assesses the anxiety about AI - and provides some reassurance; and Jane Robinson on Emily Davies, the woman who founded Girton College, Cambridge.'Moral AI: And how we get there', by Jana Schaich Borg, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Vincent Conitzer'The AI Mirror: How to reclaim our humanity in an age of machine thinking', by Shannon Vallor'Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to our humanity in an age of social robots', by Eve Herold'The Atomic Human: Understanding ourselves in the Age of AI', by Neil D. Lawrence'Emily Davies and the Mid-Victorian Women's Movement', by John HendryProduced by Charlotte Pardy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital. In this episode, Samuel speaks with Philip Ball, a science writer, and formerly a longtime editor at the science journal Nature. Philip is the author of the fantastic new book “How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology.” Samuel wanted to talk to Philip because he loved this book. It's fascinating and deeply provocative, even for someone with a PhD in computational biology—though Samuel's might be a bit worn and out of date—and yet he still learned so much. The book examines how new advances in our understanding of biology have led scientists to understand that life is far less deterministic than we might imagine. For example, cells are not really machines, as some might have thought, but complex and messy yet robust systems. And while DNA and genes are important, there is so much more going on, from the processes that give rise to the shape of our limbs and our bodies, to how all of this can have implications for rethinking medicine and disease.

*Sigla di Andrea Marchi* https://www.instagram.com/andrea_marchi_aka_marchiza*Master di Lorenzo Cimino* https://www.instagram.com/prod__cimins/ Donazioni &supporto: https://ko-fi.com/cromatica Avreste mai detto che un tempo le star della TV indossavano rossetto e fard verde? Questo perché le telecamere del passato non riconoscevano le sfumature rosate della pelle umana, e questo tipo di trucco aiutava a rendere naturale il loro aspetto. I cosmetici verdi risalgono all'antichità: in Egitto si usavano trucchi verde malachite, oppure i Romani ricavavano una pomata medicamentosa dal Verderame. Ma difficilmente ci si vestiva di verde, un colore complicato da fissare sui tessuti e probabilmente, proprio perché raro, ritenuto decisamente eccentrico. Dopo l'anno Mille il verde iniziò a essere più comune e ricco di significati, generalmente positivi; iniziò a simboleggiare la speranza, e così le donne iniziarono a indossarlo nell'attesa di qualcosa: un buon marito, un figlio… Ma esisteva un'altra faccia della medaglia: quella dei significati malvagi. Il verde era anche il colore del diavolo, dei serpenti, delle streghe. E del resto sin dall'antichità le persone dagli occhi verdi erano guardate con sospetto… Bibliografia e approfondimenti: -Michel Pastoureau, Verde, storia di un colore, trad. Guido Calza, Ponte alle Grazie, (2° edizione) 2018 -Philip Ball, Colore, una biografia, trad. Lorenza Lanza e Patrizia Vicentini, BUR Rizzoli, 2001 -Riley, Charles A., Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England. -James Fox, Il mondo dei colori, trad. Federica Pe', Bollati Borgheri, 2023 -Riccardo Falcinelli, Cromorama, Einaudi, 2017 -Adriano Zecchina, Alchimie nell'arte, Zanichelli, 2012 -Kelly Grovier, L'arte del colore, 24ore cultura, 2023 Social: Daniela:  https://www.instagram.com/lastoriaperted/ Eva: https://www.instagram.com/chimica_in_pillole/

*Sigla di Andrea Marchi* https://www.instagram.com/andrea_marchi_aka_marchizaDonazioni &supporto:https://ko-fi.com/cromaticaLe matite gialle vendono più delle altre e questo perché la nostra mente ha associato colore e oggetto. Il colore non è solo un mero attributo delle cose, molto spesso rappresenta un'idea. Ovvero, certe tinte diventano un tutt'uno con gli oggetti al punto che è difficile immaginarli altrimenti. È come se le matite gialle fossero “più matite” rispetto alle altre e rappresentassero quasi l'archetipo della matita, il modello mentale a cui tutti pensano sentendo questa parola. Il giallo nella storia è stato un colore ambivalente: associato tanto all'oro e agli dei, quanto all'urina, alla bile e al tradimento. Si tratta di uno dei pigmenti più antichi che abbiamo utilizzato e uno di quelli più controversi. Il giallo ha tormentato anche Van Gogh, ossessionato da questo colore a tal punto da mangiare la vernice dai tubetti...Bibliografia e approfondimenti:-Michel Pastoureau, Giallo, storia di un colore, trad. Fabrizio Ascari, Ponte alle Grazie, 2002-Philip Ball, Colore, una biografia, trad. Lorenza Lanza e Patrizia Vicentini, BUR Rizzoli, 2001-Riley, Charles A., Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England.-James Fox, Il mondo dei colori, trad. Federica Pe', Bollati Borgheri, 2023-Riccardo Falcinelli, Cromosoma, Einaudi, 2017-Adriano Zecchina, Alchimie nell'arte, Zanichelli, 2012-Kelly Grovier, L'arte del colore, 24ore cultura, 2023Social:Daniela: https://www.instagram.com/lastoriaperted/Eva: https://www.instagram.com/chimica_in_pillole/

The long-awaited Oxide and Friends bookclub! Bryan and Adam were joined by special guest--and real life biologist--Greg Cost to discuss Philip Ball's terrific book, How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology. Spoiler: Alan Turing makes a very expected appearance!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Greg Cost.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:The Turing patternRNA as a precursor to DNAXenopus frogXenobotsAnton computerBryan's reading notesCentral themesPower and limitations of metaphor – especially mechanical onesThe fundamental, diametrical opposition between life and machines. (Nature does not use simulations!)Rejecting the neo-Darwinian paradigmPassages of note:p. 91: “of the common SNPs seen in human populations, fully 62 percent are associated with height” … “the most common genomic associations for complex traits like this are in the noncoding regions” What is cognition? p. 137: “Life is, as biologist Michael Levin Jeremy Gunawardenaand philosopher Daniel Dennet have argued, ‘cognition all the way down'” AlphaFold2 p. 148 “AlphaFold does not so much solve the infamously difficult protein-folding problem as sidestep it. The algorithm makes no predictions about how a polypeptide chain folds, but simply predicts the end result based on the sequence.”p. 156: allostery refers to how a

*Sigla di Andrea Marchi* https://www.instagram.com/andrea_marchi_aka_marchizaIl blu è il colore più raro, sfuggente e misterioso. In natura, solo il 10% dei fiori che ci appaiono blu lo sono realmente e solo l'1% degli animali blu possiede effettivamente un pigmento blu. Per secoli non è stato considerato, non aveva un nome e non faceva parte degli arcobaleni che dipingevano gli antichi, tanto che alcuni studiosi avevano concluso che i nostri antenati non vedessero il blu. Fonti e approfondimenti: -Michel Pastoureau, Blu, storia di un colore, trad. Fabrizio Ascari, Ponte alle Grazie, 2002-Philip Ball, Colore, una biografia, trad. Lorenza Lanza e Patrizia Vicentini, BUR Rizzoli, 2001-Riley, Charles A., Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England.-James Fox, Il mondo dei colori, trad. Federica Pe', Bollati Borgheri, 2023Social:Daniela: https://www.instagram.com/lastoriaperted/Eva: https://www.instagram.com/chimica_in_pillole/Donazioni &supporto:https://ko-fi.com/cromatica

For too long, the ‘science and religion' debate has fixated on creation, evolution, cosmology, miracles and quantum theory, and not enough on the essence of what it means to be human. But this is a mistake argues one of our guests today, Christian academic Nick Spencer, Senior Fellow at Theos, in his new book ‘Playing God: science, religion and the future of humanity.' Back on the show is Emily Qureshi-Hurst expert on the philosophy of time. Emily is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Oriel College, University of Oxford and together Nick and Emily sort out the role of science and belief when it comes to questions of personhood and the future of humanity. Ably led by host Andy Kind, Unbelievable? digs back into that perennial question, ‘can science and religion come together - furiously or fruitfully - over the status and nature of what it means to be human'? #ai #eugenics #whatisahuman #scienceandreligion SOCIAL LINKS: Twitter: / unbelievablefe Facebook:  / premierunbelievable Instagram:  / premierunbelievable Tik Tok: / premierunbelievable • Subscribe to the Unbelievable? podcast: https://pod.link/267142101 • Support us: https://www.premierunbelievable.com/donate FOR NICK: Read Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite's book Playing God: Science, Religion and the Future of Humanity Theos: https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/ ⬇️ Follow Nick on Social Media X: @theosnick FOR EMIlY: Read Emily Qureshi-Hurst's book God, Salvation and the Problem of Spacetime Online: https://www.emilyqureshihurst.com/ At Oxford: https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/people/emily-qureshi-hurst ⬇️ Follow Emily on Social Media X: @equreshihurst For more on on this and related topics check out:

Philip Ball returns to the How To Academy Podcast to share the extraordinary revelations of contemporary science and make us think again about what we think we know about how life works. Illuminating what we now know about structures as small as RNA and forces as vast as evolution, to show how both the minuscule and the massive have shaped the world we know. Probing ever-pertinent questions around individual agency, purpose, and whether we can deduce meaning from the cosmos itself, Philip invites us to ponder the wonder of life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Homer Simpson Vitruvian Man T-shirt https://www.depop.com/products/joeyb_z-homer-simpson-vitruvian-man-t-shirt/ The lies that sell fast fashion https://youtu.be/VaS-iVwaOLw?si=ujpgNaF1FEdG6ibk Peter Higgs obituary: the shy man who changed our understanding of the Universe https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68774853 AULA 16 | O IMPERADOR DA LÍNGUA PORTUGUESA (Estilo de Época) | PROF. JORGE MIGUEL https://youtu.be/Q-q1ZlfK7Kk?si=nWzyRQX1cgzgonT1 What is life and how does it work? – with Philip Ball ... Read more

Dr. Philip Ball is a freelance science writer. He just wrote a book called "How Life Works", discussing the how the science of Biology has advanced in the last 20 years. We focus on the concept of Agency in particular. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford, and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He worked previously at Nature for over 20 years, first as an editor for physical sciences and then as a consultant editor. His writings on science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from cosmology to the future of molecular biology. YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6nxUiqiz9I Transcript link on YT description Philip is the author of many popular books on science, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books, while Serving the Reich was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Science Book Prize in 2014. This is one of Tim's personal favourite MLST shows, so we have designated it a special edition. Enjoy! Buy Philip's book "How Life Works" here: https://amzn.to/3vSmNqp Support MLST: Please support us on Patreon. We are entirely funded from Patreon donations right now. Patreon supports get private discord access, biweekly calls, early-access + exclusive content and lots more. https://patreon.com/mlst Donate: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted... If you would like to sponsor us, so we can tell your story - reach out on mlstreettalk at gmail

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the German physicist who, at the age of 23 and while still a student, effectively created quantum mechanics for which he later won the Nobel Prize. Werner Heisenberg made this breakthrough in a paper in 1925 when, rather than starting with an idea of where atomic particles were at any one time, he worked backwards from what he observed of atoms and their particles and the light they emitted, doing away with the idea of their continuous orbit of the nucleus and replacing this with equations. This was momentous and from this flowed what's known as his Uncertainty Principle, the idea that, for example, you can accurately measure the position of an atomic particle or its momentum, but not both.With Fay Dowker Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College LondonHarry Cliff Research Fellow in Particle Physics at the University of CambridgeAnd Frank Close Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College at the University of OxfordProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Philip Ball, Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different (Vintage, 2018)John Bell, ‘Against 'measurement'' (Physics World, Vol 3, No 8, 1990)Mara Beller, Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2001)David C. Cassidy, Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, And The Bomb (Bellevue Literary Press, 2010) Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (first published 1958; Penguin Classics, 2000)Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics (Penguin, 2022)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the German physicist who, at the age of 23 and while still a student, effectively created quantum mechanics for which he later won the Nobel Prize. Werner Heisenberg made this breakthrough in a paper in 1925 when, rather than starting with an idea of where atomic particles were at any one time, he worked backwards from what he observed of atoms and their particles and the light they emitted, doing away with the idea of their continuous orbit of the nucleus and replacing this with equations. This was momentous and from this flowed what's known as his Uncertainty Principle, the idea that, for example, you can accurately measure the position of an atomic particle or its momentum, but not both.With Fay Dowker Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College LondonHarry Cliff Research Fellow in Particle Physics at the University of CambridgeAnd Frank Close Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College at the University of OxfordProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Philip Ball, Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different (Vintage, 2018)John Bell, ‘Against 'measurement'' (Physics World, Vol 3, No 8, 1990)Mara Beller, Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2001)David C. Cassidy, Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, And The Bomb (Bellevue Literary Press, 2010) Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (first published 1958; Penguin Classics, 2000)Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics (Penguin, 2022)

Featuring two hundred color plates, this history of the craft of scientific inquiry is as exquisite as the experiments whose stories it shares. This illustrated history of experimental science is more than just a celebration of the ingenuity that scientists and natural philosophers have used throughout the ages to study—and to change—the world. Here we see in intricate detail experiments that have, in some way or another, exhibited elegance and beauty: in their design, their conception, and their execution. Celebrated science writer Philip Ball invites readers to marvel at and admire the craftsmanship of scientific instruments and apparatus on display, from the earliest microscopes to the giant particle colliders of today. With Ball as our expert guide, we are encouraged to think carefully about what experiments are, what they mean, and how they are used. Ranging across millennia and geographies, Beautiful Experiments demonstrates why “experiment” remains a contested notion in science, while also exploring how we came to understand the way the world functions, what it contains, and where the pursuit of that understanding has brought us today.Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water and The Music Instinct. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society's Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy, or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol, and he was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He lives in London.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9780226825823

Philip Ball is a science writer based in the UK. With a degree in chemistry and a doctorate in physics, he served as an editor of the journal Nature for over 20 years. He has authored nearly 30 books on a wide range of scientific and historical subjects, including H2O: A Biography of Water, How to Grow a Human, and The Book of Minds. His newest book is entitled How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology. Philip Ball joins the podcast to discuss his 30-year journey of science writing. In his new book How Life Works, he refutes the popular metaphors that DNA is like a blueprint or instruction manual, and he contends that even the simplest organisms construct meaning from their complex environments. What did you think of this episode? Let us know with a rating and a review! Still curious? https://www.templeton.org/news is where you can find the latest stories from our grantees, our staff, and contributing writers from around the world.   Join the conversation on social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao   ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT   This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/   Dr. Philip Ball is a freelance science writer, with a BA in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol. He was an editor at Nature for over 20 years. He is the author of many popular books on science, including The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens.   In this episode, we focus on The Book of Minds. We start by discussing the solipsist position, what a mind is, the idea of the “space of possible minds”, and the relationship between the mind and the brain. We talk about human evolved psychology, the relationship between reason and emotion, and neurodiversity. We discuss how we think about the minds of other beings, whether we can know what it is like to be another animal, and whether plants might have minds. We also talk about the possible minds of AI systems, the value of imagining the minds of possible aliens, and how discussions surrounding free will inform how we think about the mind. -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, LIAM DUNAWAY, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, ERIK ENGMAN, LUCY, AND YHONATAN SHEMESH! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!

Chapter 1 What's Bright Earth Book by Philip BallThe Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color is a book written by Philip Ball. In this book, Ball explores the history and significance of color in art, science, and culture. He traces the use and creation of pigments throughout history, from ancient societies to modern times, and discusses their influence on artistic movements, trade, and technological advancements. The book delves into the chemistry, symbolism, and cultural contexts of various pigments, highlighting their role in shaping artistic expression and human perception of color. It offers a comprehensive exploration of the relationship between art, science, and color, presenting a fascinating journey through the history of pigments and their impact on our world.Chapter 2 Is Bright Earth Book A Good BookOpinions on books can vary, so it is subjective to say whether "Bright Earth" by Philip Ball is a good book or not. However, it has generally received positive feedback and critical acclaim. It explores the history, science, and cultural impact of color throughout the world. The book is well-researched, engaging, and informative, combining science, art, and history to offer a comprehensive view on the topic. If you are interested in colors, their origins, and their significance in various cultures, it is likely that you would find this book enjoyable and informative.Chapter 3 Bright Earth Book by Philip Ball Summary"Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color" is a book written by Philip Ball that explores the history, science, and cultural significance of colors in art. In this book, Ball takes readers on a journey through the ages, explaining how artists and scientists over time have developed and understood color.The book starts by examining the ancient world and the limited palette of colors available to artists at that time. It then moves on to discuss the development of pigments in the Renaissance, with a focus on the groundbreaking work of painters such as Titian and his use of vibrant reds and blues.Ball also delves into the scientific side of the story, exploring the chemistry and physics behind color perception and the development of artificial pigments. He explains how scientists and artists have worked together to create new shades and hues, such as the invention of mauve in the 19th century.Throughout the book, Ball weaves in anecdotes and historical narratives to bring the story of color to life. He explores how color has influenced different cultures and societies, reflecting on its symbolism and cultural significance in different periods of history.Furthermore, Ball discusses the social impact of color, highlighting how it has been used as a signifier of wealth, power, and identity. He examines the relationship between color and gender, race, and class, shedding light on how certain colors have been associated with specific social groups throughout history.Overall, "Bright Earth" is a comprehensive and engaging exploration of the history and science of color in art. It combines historical research, scientific knowledge, and cultural analysis to provide readers with a deeper understanding of the role color has played in human civilization. Chapter 4 Bright Earth Book AuthorPhilip Ball is a British science writer and author. His book "Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color" was first published in 2001. The book explores the history and science behind artists' pigments and their role in shaping art and culture. It examines various pigments and their impact on different artistic movements.Apart from...

A paper recently published in the journal Nature claimed that assembly theory could help explain and quantify selection and evolution. But what exactly is assembly theory? In this episode Marnie Chesterton speaks to science writer Philip Ball and zoologist and writer Professor Matthew Cobb. They dig into the science behind this tricky concept and figure out why it makes people so angry. A sample recovered by NASA from the Bennu asteroid hurtled back to earth recently. This week we saw what's been retrieved from 200 million miles away. Studies on the dust and rock are just getting underway. Professor Tom Zega, one of the mission scientists, reveals why this sample will be important for many years to come. We also hear from Ed Yong who has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. He tells us about his book, An Immense World, where he encourages us to think beyond the confines of our fleshy bodies. People experience the world in many different ways. It all comes down to perception. We speak to Professor Fiona Macpherson who, along with neuroscientist Professor Anil Seth, are co-leads of The Perception Census which aims to document the differences. Fiona reveals how this could help shine a light on consciousness and what it means to be human. The census closes at the end of the month and everyone's welcome. You can take part here: https://perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world   Presenter:  Marnie Chesterton Producers: Harrison Lewis and Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth BBC Inside Science is produced in collaboration with the Open University.

The medical field has been pretty successful in creating insulin pumps, dialysis machines, pacemakers and other instruments to assist organs with their natural functions. Philip Ball is a science writer and former editor of the journal Nature, and he joins host Krys Boyd to talk about the next frontier: organic matter designed to help faulty organs while living in the body. His article “Synthetic Morphology Lets Scientists Create New Life-Forms” appears in Scientific American.

You have a mind, right? At least, that's what you and those who know you will think. But would you say the same of your pet? What about creatures like dolphins or octopus? Aliens (assuming they exist)? Robots and AI? God? What does it mean to 'have a mind'? Are all minds the same? Why should such a costly thing appear in evolution? And if we understand our minds, does that mean we have finally understood ourselves? In this week's episode, Nick Spencer speaks to science writer Philip Ball about his book The Book of Minds: Understanding Ourselves and Other Beings, From Animals to Aliens.

In this week's episode, managing editor Alex Dean speaks to science writer Philip Ball on artificial intelligence: what it is, how it works and how it might even change our perception of what it means to have a mind. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's one thing to talk about the science and physics behind the notion of invisibility, it's another thing to examine the cultural place that idea occupies in media and philosophy. Science writer Philip Ball wants to do both, and not just with things unseen. He's written numerous books spanning a multitude of topics like the invention of color, how music works in the brain, and scientific rules of society. His latest book is The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens. Philip and Greg discuss the perks and pitfalls of interdisciplinary work, whether curiosity is a virtue or a vice, and different perspectives on the mind and consciousness. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Embodiment is a crucial aspect of the mind45:15: You can't expect a mind that is just computing in some abstract space to develop the kinds of resources and capabilities that the human mind has. The human mind is part of us as an evolved being. And the mind didn't evolve by itself. It involved in the body, for the body as part of the body. In fact, it's an organ. The brain is an organ. And so, we understand the world as embodied beings. And partly what I mean by that is that we have a sense of things that we can do and things that we can't do that are predicated on the kinds of bodies we have.Having a computer isn't enough to understand the nature of human minds47:07: The idea of the brain as a computer, sitting in a room somewhere doing computation, is not enough to understand the nature of our minds, let alone others.The importance of fluency in scientific Research33:18: That fluency, that ability to put on different lenses and to remain open to different ways of thinking about a problem, is not just a great thing to have in life in general, but it's a really valuable thing to be able to do in scientific research.Bridging Physics and Social Science through Critical Mass18:26: Critical Mass was a book that was looking at how ideas that were developed in physics, condensed metaphysics, in statistical physics for understanding things like gasses and liquids and how they switch between the two forms, the things called phase transitions, how those ideas are now proving useful for social scientists because we can find some situations where people en masse, taken in large enough body and large enough numbers, show the same kinds of behaviorsShow Links:Recommended Resources:Ring of GygesThe Invisible Man by H.G. Wells Thomas Hobbes Richard Feynman clipDan Wagner Christof KochMurray Shanahan The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience by Matthew CobbEpisode 283: Matthew CobbGuest Profile:Philip Ball's WebsiteHis Work:The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to AliensShapes: Nature's Patterns: A Tapestry in Three PartsInvisible: The Dangerous Allure of the UnseenThe Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without ItCuriosity: How Science Became Interested in EverythingBright Earth: Art and the Invention of ColorCritical Mass: How One Thing Leads to AnotherBeyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is DifferentThe Water Kingdom: A Secret History of ChinaHow Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology

On Tuesday, the United Nations reported that the breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River in Ukraine will impact heavily on global food security, causing a rise in food prices and leaving many without access to clean drinking water. Nine days after the disaster Gaia looks to the future alongside Kira Rudyk, Ukrainian MP who is also leader of the opposition party Golos and Laura Wellesley, senior research fellow in the Environment and Society Programme at Chatham House. Earlier this week the three-year inquiry into COVID began, seeking ‘to examine the UK's response to and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and learn lessons for the future.' Eyes are on the inquiry from many angles. Inside Science looks at what scientists hope to contribute and learn from it, with author and broadcaster Philip Ball. Also, a spike in North Atlantic sea temperatures has sparked concern among scientists. Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the Met Office, talks through the factors that have coincided to form the anomaly. Presenter: Gaia Vince Producer: Harrison Lewis Assistant producer: Robbie Wojciechowski Editor: Richard Collings

The Big Conversation - Episode 3 | Season 5 It's a widely held view that science and religion are in conflict, including and perhaps especially over how they approach one of life's most fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human? But is that really the case, and do we need to rethink how we've been seeking the answer, at a time when we seemingly need more clarity over humanity's identity than ever before? Atheist science writer and broadcaster Philip Ball, author of The Book of Minds: Understanding Ourselves and Other Beings, From Animals to Aliens, engages with Christian academic Nick Spencer, Senior Fellow at Theos and author of Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion. • For bonus content, updates and more shows sign up at: http://www.thebigconversation.show • Take our survey! https://survey-star.co.uk/ballandspencer The Big Conversation is a video series from Premier Unbelievable? featuring world-class thinkers across the religious and non-religious community. Exploring science, faith, philosophy and what it means to be human. The Big Conversation is produced by Premier Unbelievable? in partnership with John Templeton Foundation. • For Philip Ball: https://www.philipball.co.uk • For Philip Ball's "second brain" project: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/40960/why-im-growing-a-second-brain • For Nick Spencer: https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2023/03/02/magisteria-the-entangled-histories-of-science-and-religion • Subscribe to the Unbelievable? podcast: https://pod.link/267142101 • More shows, free eBook & newsletter: https://premierunbelievable.com • For live events: http://www.unbelievable.live • For online learning: https://www.premierunbelievable.com/training-and-events • Support us in the USA: http://www.premierinsight.org/unbelievableshow • Support us in the rest of the world: https://www.premierunbelievable.com/donate

Science writer Philip Ball discusses his writing life and his work on diverse kinds of minds and on the biological studies of agency in nature.

Nicholas Spencer, Emily Qureshi-Hurst and Philip Ball join Christopher Harding for a conversation about the nature of reality – as science reveals it, as religion reveals it, and how the world might look if we treat science and religion not as competitors but as collaborators; a cosmic dynamic duo. Magesteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion by Nicholas Spencer is out now. Producer: Ruth Watts

In this episode of Stories of Impact, we're listening to a session from the Templeton World Charity Foundation's Global Scientific Conference on Human Flourishing, which took place last fall. The conference aimed to showcase the latest and most meaningful scientific advances in understanding how humans flourish across cultures and alongside innovative new tools and strategies. Today's session is a remarkable discussion on the human need for beauty and purpose in order to flourish, featuring a presentation by Dr. Dacher Keltner, musician ELEW discussing his approach to his art and performing for us on piano, and a panel with Dr. Frank Wilczek and Dr. Katherine Cotter, moderated by Dr. Philip Ball. Read the transcript of this episode Subscribe to Stories of Impact wherever you listen to podcasts Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube Share your comments, questions and suggestions at info@storiesofimpact.org Supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation

Science writer Philip Ball has followed the relationship between government and its scientific advisors throughout the pandemic. He discusses the role of scientific advisors in the light of conflicting information following the leak of a number of former Health Minister Matt Hancock's WhatsApp messages. Phil tells us why he believes greater transpearency is needed around the advice offered to government. The head of the US FBI has suggested the Covid 19 pandemic may have been started through a leak from a laboratory. No evidence has been offered. The ‘lab leak ‘ theory is the counter idea to Covid having a natural origin. We hear from three scientists who have been to China to investigate different aspects of the virus origins story. Journalist and microbiologist Jane Qui visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology – the lab at the centre of the lab leak theory. Marion Koopmans from Erasmus University in Rotterdam was a member of the WHO mission to China to investigate the origins of Covid 19. And Eddie Holmes from the University of Sydney visited the market in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak. Besides inflating party balloons helium gas has a vast range of industrial uses, particularly as a coolant. There's a world shortage, and helium is only extracted with fossil fuels such as coal and methane gas. Earth scientist Anran Cheng at the University of Oxford has developed a method to look for helium deposits without the fossil fuel connection. And ever wondered how heavy all the animals in the world might be ? We have the answer thanks to Ron Milo and Lior Greenspoon from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. BBC Inside Science is produced in partnership with the Open University. Presenter: Victoria Gill Producer: Julian Siddle

In this episode of Stories of Impact, we're listening to a session from the Templeton World Charity Foundation's Global Scientific Conference on Human Flourishing, which took place last fall. The conference aimed to showcase the latest and most meaningful scientific advances in understanding how humans flourish across cultures and alongside innovative new tools and strategies. Today's session is a discussion on climate change and other global challenges to human flourishing, featuring moderator Dr. Philip Ball, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, Dr. David DeSteno and Dekila Chungyalpa.     Read the transcript of this episode Subscribe to Stories of Impact wherever you listen to podcasts Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube Share your comments, questions and suggestions at info@storiesofimpact.org Supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation

John Thorne answers the call and helpfully shares how he approaches challenging texts. We discuss John's newest book (http://tiny.cc/d270vz), a 300+ page interpretive review of “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017), and even non-viewers of Twin Peaks will find value in John's mindset and approach to analysis. It was a true pleasure talking with one of my favorite writers! (Initially published Oct 19, 2022) Highlights include: 0:26 - “Wrapped in Plastic” at 30 4:06 - the development & expansion of John's analytical skillset 7:55 - writing enjoyable-to-read academic essays 10:21 - how has John's new book been received? 12:22 - analysis, personal development, & self-knowledge 14:18 - “reading and writing my way toward the truth” 17:50 - disciplining oneself as a writer 19:55 - this thing of “feel-thinking” (intuition and “feel-thinking”) 23:28 - creating one's own “writing prompt” 27:30 - challenges of analysis 31:02 - Chatman's “covert narrator” and the use of POV 40:10 - stories within stories (puzzle pieces coming together) 45:03 - when research is invigorating (Rourke's “overlapping deliria”) 52:08 - these would be fun to read (some “missing pieces”) 57:50 - thoughts on the legacy of The Return 1:02:19 - when diversity works well (Lynch/Frost: syncs & clashes) 1:04:00 - “doing it for the doing” 1:07:00 - helpers and inspirations 1:14:11 - contributions to the Twin Peaks “interpretive canon” 1:16:52 - helpful (and non-helpful) critics 1:23:10 - what does “Lynchian” mean? How about “Thornean”? Resources & References: John's latest book: http://tiny.cc/d270vz John's current journalism: https://www.bluerosemag.com/ John's former magazine: https://wrappedinplasticmagazine.com/ John's social media: http://tiny.cc/p270vz John's podcast: http://tiny.cc/q270vz Seymour Chatman's “Story and Discourse”: http://tiny.cc/g270vz Brian Rourke's “Inland Empire” essay: http://tiny.cc/i270vz Philip Ball's “Beyond Weird”: http://tiny.cc/7270vz Amrutur Srinivasan's “Hinduism for Dummies”: http://tiny.cc/w270vz My grammar course: http://tiny.cc/l270vz

As parts of England enter drought conditions we ask what are the drivers for drought and what can we do about it? With Dr Jess Neumann, Hydrologist at Reading University, Aidan McGivern meteorologist at the Met Office and Professor Richard Betts, Chair in Climate Impacts at University of Exeter. What influence do Scientific Advisors really have on government? We explore the tricky issue with science writer Philip Ball. Are there just too many satellites now orbiting the earth? Astronomers are increasingly finding their presence is interfering with astronomical observations. Jane Chambers reports from Chile. And what is mucus actually for and how did it evolve? Omer Gokcumen, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and Stefan Ruhl, Professor of Oral Biology at the University at Buffalo reveal its origins in our aquatic ancestors and its vital role in mouth hygiene. Presented by Alex Lathbridge Produced by Julian Siddle Assistant Producer Emily Bird

David McAllister hosts a quick-fire roundup of some of the most interesting books of the month with the writers who reviewed them in Prospect. Sarah Collins discusses Elizabeth's Strout's pandemic novel, Lucy by the Sea while Lucy Thynne tells us about Shehan Karunatilaka's latest book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Peter Forbes reviews Prospect science writer Philip Ball's The Book of Minds, while David reviews Murray Pittock's new history Scotland. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Philip Ball discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster and worked previously for over 20 years as an editor for Nature. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has authored many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and the wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Philip is a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science, and is the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society's Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy or social functions of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford, and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. His latest book is The Book of Minds (2022), a survey of the varieties of mind that do and might exist. Find out more at www.philipball.co.uk. Our genome is not a blueprint for us https://aeon.co/essays/our-genome-is-not-a-blueprint-for-making-humans-at-all Emmy Noether https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxmDphojQUU Glenn Branca https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/14/glenn-branca-dead-guitarist-composer The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/07/17/paradise-in-a-dream/ What mercury feels like https://www.quora.com/What-does-mercury-feel-like The deceptive cadence https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/beatles-blog/the-beatles-use-of-deceptive-cadences This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Why do we talk about sentience and artificial intelligence? And why do we constantly compare the robots we build to human beings? Science writer Philip Ball and philosopher Julian Baggini join Sameer Rahim to discuss the new frontiers in artificial intelligence—including a project from DeepMind predicting the shape of every protein known to science—and what they mean for us. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acclaimed science writer Philip Ball joins us to explore the rich diversity of thinking minds – from human to other mammals, insects, computers and plants. In conversation with filmmaker David Malone, he illuminates how many different ways there are to think and engage with the world. Science has begun to have something to say about the properties of mind. And the more we learn about the minds of other creatures, from octopuses to chimpanzees, to imagine the potential minds of computers and alien intelligences, the more we can begin to see our own.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Jonathan Bate leads us a merry dance in search of fresh woods and pastures new; and Philip Ball explains the importance of the mysterious Higgs Boson.‘A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature: Volume 1: Earlier Renaissance; Volume 2: Later Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassicism' by Paul Holberton‘Elusive: How Peter Higgs solved the mystery of mass' by Frank Close.Produced by Charlotte Pardy See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Wonder at the natural world has inspired people and fuelled curiosity for millennia. The ancient Greek Theophrastus had interests that spread far and wide, from biology and physics to ethics and metaphysics. But although he was Aristotle's friend and collaborator, and his notes on botany inspired Linnaeus, his name has mostly been forgotten. The writer Laura Beatty's new book, Looking for Theophrastus, aims to rescue him from obscurity. The scientist, Suzie Sheehy, still feels a childlike wonder at the way physics seems to be able to describe everything – from the smallest subatomic particle to the scale of the Universe. In The Matter of Everything: Twelve Experiments That Changed Our World, she looks back at the people who engineered ground-breaking experiments, and the human ingenuity, creativity and curiosity, as well as luck and serendipity that propelled them forward. While physicists attempt to describe and define the universe, the workings of the human mind still remain a challenge to scientists and philosophers. In The Book of Minds, the science writer Philip Ball looks at what we know about the minds of other creatures, from octopuses to chimpanzees, and of the workings of computers and alien intelligences. By understanding how minds differ, he argues, the better we can understand our own. Producer: Katy Hickman

Alexander Mikaberidze, Kenton White and Philip Ball join me to talk about their contributions to an exciting volume on the armies and enemies of Napoleon. Buy the book: Armies and Enemies of Napoleon, 1789-1815 | From Reason to Revolution 1721-1815 | Helion & Company Twitter: @zwhitehistory | @AMikaberidze | @whitey_boy | @Hindu_Stan You can support this content & get exclusive perks at: www.patreon.com/thenapoleonicist Tips also appreciated: www.ko-fi.com/napoleonicist

If the term quantum computing has you uttering "Oofda", this episode is for you.  Tim Bornholdt chats with Alexander Braun, Professor of Physics at Duesseldorf University of Applied Sciences, about how to understand current and future capabilities of quantum computers.   **SHOW LINKS** Beyond Weird by Philip Ball | https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07H9HNDYL&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_FC3BQ0HG9PB0C6KT2FZ1  Factfulness by Hans Rosling | https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814  Alex Braun on LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/profdralexanderbraun/ Rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts | https://constantvariables.co/review  Connect with The Jed Mahonis Group on LinkedIn | https://linkedin.com/company/the-jed-mahonis-group  Show notes | https://constantvariables.co Chat with The Jed Mahonis Group about your app dev questions | https://jmg.mn Are you an iOS, Android or Rails developer? Connect with us | careers@jmg.mn 

1796. January. February. March. Three months in which the British take Ceylon thanks to some daring – or perhaps that should be dairy-ing – exploits… Napoleon Bonaparte takes command of the Army of Italy… And the new French government, the Directory, struggles to find its way. This is episode 17 of the Napoleonic Quarterly – covering three months in which it feels like the (E)dam is about to break over this conflict. [15:54] - Military historian and author Philip Ball describes the British capture of Ceylon's Trincomalee and Colombo, which is unexpectedly aided by the unorthodox use of dairy products. [36:01] - Professor Biancamaria Fontana of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland discusses and deliberates on the dynamics and dilemmas of the Directory, the five-man executive now taking over the reins of the Revolution. [53:04] - Rafe Blaufarb, Professor of History at Florida State University, sizes up the state of the French military machine as Napoleon Bonaparte takes command of the Army of Italy. Plus Professor Emeritus Charles Esdaile of the University of Liverpool and Professor Alexander Mikaberidze of Louisiana State University-Shreveport lock horns over British imperialism and the merits of "all this liberty, equality and stupidity nonsense", providing their expert analysis and opinions throughout.

1795. January. February. March. Three months in which the French complete their conquest of the Netherlands… The British miss a chance to bring the French fleet to battle in the Med… And the French Revolution comes to terms with religion. This is episode 13 of the Napoleonic Quarterly – covering three months in which this initial tussle for the Low Countries ends in defeat for the Allies as the Netherlands falls to the arms of the Revolution. [07:11] - Philip Ball on the Netherlands falling to the French - and the cavalry charge across the Texel that never was [21:42] - Rachel Blackman-Rogers on a doomed French attempt to retake Corsica [38:24] - Mary Robinson on the Law of Religious Toleration and its implications for the restive Vendee. Plus Charles Esdaile and Alexander Mikaberidze offer perspectives from across the European continent - and nearly manage to avoid arguing until an excellent mini-spat from around [1:01:00]...

1794. April. May. June. Three months in which the French and British fight their first major fleet action of these wars… as France is gripped by the Great Terror, the man at its centre is going through a personal crisis… And on the frontline the French scrape major victories at Tourcoing and Fleurus – thanks in part to the Austrians letting down the British. This is episode ten of the Napoleonic Quarterly – covering three months in which infighting and the French foil the Allied Plan of Destruction. [09:13] - Rachel Blackman-Rogers describes how the Royal Navy won the Glorious First of June - but the French have a good claim to success too. [29:00] - Marisa Linton on the Great Terror and Robespierre's mental breakdown [47:02] - Philip Ball updates on the latest proceedings in the Low Countries, where the French continue to make progress. Plus Charles Esdaile and Alexander Mikaberidze offer their inimitable analysis as usual throughout.

Military historian and author Philip Ball discusses his experience researching and writing his book Neither Up Nor Down: The British Army and the Flanders Campaign 1793-1795 (2020), as well as his reflections on the odd vagaries - and odd personalities - of the period. Link: https://www.helion.co.uk/military-history-books/neither-up-nor-down-the-british-army-and-the-flanders-campaign-1793-1795.php?sid=92ffb898ebcf3de91cb88867ffdd748a

1793. October, November, December. Three months in which Napoleon Bonaparte helps the French retake Toulon… the Austrians set themselves up for a fall at Wattingnies… and in the Caribbean the situation on Saint Domingue descends further into the mire. This is episode eight of the Napoleonic Quarterly – covering three months in which the French revolutionaries crush their enemies within and without through the merciless use of brute force. [4:15] – An extended opening section in which Charles Esdaile tells the story of the horror of the Vendee during this quarter [15:15] – Alexander Mikaberidze on the recapture of Toulon [29:20] – Philip Ball on the Austrian siege of Mauberge and the Battle of Wattingnies [46:25] – Christy Pichichero on Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Slave Revolt up to the end of 1793 Plus from [1:05:43] Charles Esdaile and Alex Mikaberidze sum up not just this three months but the entire two years covered by season one. Also, keep on listening for the final three minutes! It's got lots of thunder!