#From Brain Pickings

Buddhist Economics: How to Start Prioritizing People Over Products and Creativity Over Consumption

“Work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

Much has been said about the difference between money and wealth and how we, as individuals, can make more of the latter, but the divergence between the two is arguably even more important on the larger scale of nations and the global economy. What does it really mean to create wealth for people — for humanity — as opposed to money for governments and corporations?

That’s precisely what the influential German-born British economist, statistician, Rhodes Scholar, and economic theorist E. F. Schumacher explores in his seminal 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (public library) — a magnificent collection of essays at the intersection of economics, ethics, and environmental awareness, which earned Schumacher the prestigious Prix Européen de l’Essai Charles Veillon award and was deemed by The Times Literary Supplement one of the 100 most important books published since WWII. Sharing an ideological kinship with such influential minds as Tolstoy and Gandhi, Schumacher’s is a masterwork of intelligent counterculture, applying history’s deepest, most timeless wisdom to the most pressing issues of modern life in an effort to educate, elevate and enlighten./.../

#From:NATURE

Mapping the Universe’s dark matter

A survey of the southern sky has reconstructed how mass is spread across space and time in the biggest study of its kind. Cosmologists observed the sky between 2013 and 2019 using a 570-megapixel camera at the Víctor M. Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The resulting 3D cosmic map provides a record of the Universe’s history. By tracking how galaxies spread out over time, researchers can measure the forces at play. These include the gravitational pull of dark matter — the invisible stuff that constitutes some 80% of the Universe’s mass — and dark energy, the mysterious force that appears to be pushing the Universe to accelerate its expansion.

‘Entire’ human genome sequence unveiled

(Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo Library)

An international team of scientists claims to have sequenced the entirety of the human genome, including parts that were missed in the first sequencing of the human genome 20 years ago. That historic draft, and subsequent sequences, have all missed about 8% of the genome. The most recent effort fills in these gaps using new sequencing technologies. It has different limitations, however, including the type of cell line used. The work is described in a preprint, and has not yet been peer reviewed.

STAT | 6 min read
Reference: bioRxiv preprint

Podcast: On the origin of numbers

Archaeologists, linguists and a host of other researchers worldwide are trying to answer some big questions — when, and how, did humans learn to count? Hear from some of the scientists at the forefront of this effort on this week’s Nature Podcast.

Nature Podcast | 18 min listen
Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify.

Image of the week

Researchers at Cornell University broke their own record for the highest-resolution image of atoms. They used a technique called ptychography to capture this close-up of atoms in a praseodymium orthoscandate crystal. (New Scientist | 2 min read) (Cornell University)

#From Quanta Magazine

GEOMETRY | ALL TOPICS

Mathematicians Identify Threshold at Which Shapes Give Way

By MORDECHAI RORVIG

A new proof establishes the boundary at which a shape becomes so corrugated, it can be crushed.

Read the article

Nature | 5 min read#From:

Wednesday 2 June 2021

Let’s say you love your horses, your buggy and your traditional woodworking, you just don’t believe in God anymore. Could you become an ‘Amish atheist’? This week’s acclaimed Film follows the journey of Kenneth Copp as he describes losing one faith, and finding another – not religious, but equally inspiring. In Ideas, we explore the ‘dopamine myth’. Language, in the crystalline form of the literary aphorism and in the mystery of how we make meaning from words, figures too. Our popular Psyche writer Xenia Hanusiak returns with more on music, this time reflecting on what it takes to stop striving, and start loving your practice. Finally, we bring back a popular Guide from last year: ‘How to Save Money’, which takes a psychological and practical approach to a goal in life that can be unhelpfully clouded by guilt and moralising.