February 7, 2017

A puzzle drawn from Reddit to start your Tuesday: Do you want an invisibilty cloak? A key to open all doors? / reddit.com

“When I brought up these halcyon days to Alex at the café, his eyes lit up. ‘There were very few people’ like me, he said, about whom he could write unkindly and who then would ‘want to talk about it in an unemotional way.’” A former Berkeley classmate and sparring partner of Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow profiles him, trying to reconcile the friendly rival he knew with the neo-Nazi political flamethrower of now. / San Francisco

Lovely photographs and a brief write-up from the “Olivetti: Beyond Form and Function” show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. / We Made This, ica.org.uk

“Making music was Prince’s way of being in the world. If he was awake, we were making music. If we weren’t on tour, he was recording in the studio constantly. Every day, even on the movie set.” A long conversation with Dr. Susan Rogers, Prince’s longtime producer and engineer, who’s also a psychologist. / TapeOp

“I would like to sound one note of warning. Penicillin is to all intents and purposes non-poisonous so there is no need to worry about giving an overdose and poisoning the patient. There may be a danger, though, in underdosage. It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body” The scientist who discovered penicillin used his Nobel speech to warn us of antibiotic resistance. / Nobel Prize

“Convenience, laziness, perverse financial incentives and sheer bad luck have conspired to nullify almost every attempt to stop the emergence of resistance.” We never came up with a system to correct the dangerous misalignment between those who misuse drugs and those who pay the cost. / Economist

Constant stress from low levels of antibiotics in water and environment probably induced a higher gear of hyper-evolution, breaking against several factors scientists previously believed would constrain the rate of evolution. / quantamagazine.org

Ten million people could die per year by 2050 from antibiotic-resistant diseases. / Ars Technica

Antibiotics don’t have to be ingested to cause bacteria to evolve. As this mini doc shows, the water near Hyderabad, India is so saturated with antibiotics from a pharmaceutical facility, it causes deathly infections to bloom. / YouTube

Modifying existing antibiotics may add a new generation of antibiotics, but bacteria will eventually evolve to resist them, too. Soap won’t stop antibiotic-resistant infections, but scientists are looking to a variety of more advanced technologies that could slow their advance: / The Independent

—CRISPR-based therapies could use manipulated bacteria to neuter resistance. / Nautilus

—Machine learning to generate novel antibiotics. (Technical paper here.) / techonomy.com, arxiv.org

—“Phage therapy”—which is where you get injected with viruses from pond water—can combine with antibiotics to checkmate bacteria. / Nautilus

Implementing any of these strategies, as well as shorter term tactics, requires more cooperation between doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and governments than has previously gathered. The only sure thing? Prescribing fewer antibiotics was found to be a key strategy to curb C. Difficile outbreaks in the United Kingdom. / pewtrusts.org, webmd.com

A study of Cambodian doctors found they prescribed antibiotics far too often and without evidence that the malady was even bacterial. / phnompenhpost.com

One percent of e. coli and Kleibsella pneumoniae in China has developed resistance, mainly because of overuse of colistin to speed livestock growth. / Scientific American

Vice co-founder and general piece of trash Gavin McInnes’s latest career move is to found a DC-based neo-Nazi group called “Proud Boys,” the activities of which seem to mostly consist of trying to get into fights with antifascist protesters, punching each other, recording bad pop songs, and enforcing weird masturbation rules. / advocate.com, Medium

In January, Australian scientists came up with a theory as to why whales go to all the trouble of throwing themselves up out of the water: the resounding slap when they hit the surface sends a message a very long way. / Quartz

Nina Manadhar’s portraits of Mexico City street newspaper vendors focus on the bold, eye-catching uniforms. / Nina Manadhar

In 1998, workers in Britain needed three years to save enough money to make a down payment on a house. Now it takes them, on average, about two decades, according to this study. / Business Insider, resolutionfoundation.org

“The men and women who reportedly handcuffed small children and the elderly, separated a child from his mother and held others without food for 20 hours, are undoubtedly ‘ordinary’ people.” Your Tuesday afternoon op-ed: “Ordinary” Americans, i.e., federal workers, are already following through on orders from on high to commit inhumane acts. Ask yourself: What will you do? / The Baltimore Sun