Mosby
Mosby's JournalWHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID
What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:
Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
Engineering armour for good gut bacteria against all-conquering antibiotics
Researchers of synthetic biology based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US have devised a system to protect the gut microbiome from the effects of antibiotics.
The new study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, reports on the successful use in mice of a “live biotherapeutic” – a genetically engineered bacterium that produces an enzyme which breaks down antibiotics in the gut.
“This work shows that synthetic biology can be harnessed to create a new class of engineered therapeutics for reducing the adverse effects of antibiotics,” says MIT professor James Collins, the paper’s senior author.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/medicine/protect-gut-bacteria-antibiotics/
Eta this is a big deal because people who have to take a lot of antibiotics over time can develop life threatening growths of a bacteria called c. diff which can take over the gut biome and kill you. This new therapy prevents that.
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