The New Yorker: Science & Technology

"The molecular machines battling bacteria and is Google lying?"

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 15 June 2024, 1319 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

 

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In today’s newsletter, rationing water in the American West, and then: • The molecular machines battling bacteria • David Sedaris on safari • Is Google lying? The Decline of the Rio Grande When the water runs out, there are no good options. One of the poorest regions in Texas faces an uncertain future. By Rachel Monroe Photograph by Brandon Bell / Getty The smell that comes from a sugar mill operating at full capacity is malty and industrial, something like fermented molasses. “Normal people don’t like it, but, for us, it’s the smell of a sugar mill running. So I love that smell,” Cain Garcia told me last month, with some wistfulness. Three months earlier, Garcia’s employer, the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, Inc., the last remaining sugar mill in Texas, had announced that it was shutting down its operations for good. Texas’s sugar industry, at one time the third biggest in the country, had effectively collapsed, a casualty of the increasingly dire water situation along the Rio Grande. The river’s two main reservoirs in Texas are at historically low levels, and cane farmers, unable to irrigate their water-intensive crops, are plowing them up. Keep reading Dept. of Invention  Brave New World Dept. Rise of the Nanomachines Nanotechnology can already puncture cancer cells and drug-resistant bacteria. What will it do next? By Dhruv Khullar Animal Dept.  Books Should We Kill Some Wild Creatures to Protect Others? Where humans have tilted the game in favor of one species, some believe we should cull predators to save their prey. Others think it’s a mistake to pick sides. By Elizabeth Kolbert Personal History Notes on a Last-Minute Safari We saw every animal that was in “The Lion King” and then some. They were just there, like ants at a picnic, except that they were elephants and giraffes and zebras. By David Sedaris Kyle Chayka Illustration by Ariel Davis When traffic to the Web site HouseFresh, which evaluates and reviews air purifiers, disappeared, its creator, Gisele Navarro, wanted to know why—and why it corresponded with the timing of Google’s algorithm modifications. “There are people who feel that Google is obfuscating the truth,” Navarro told our New Yorker reporter. “It’s lying to our faces, or gaslighting.” Read more » Cartoon by Alexander Andreades More from The New Yorker  Books What COVID Did to Fiction The early pandemic was a painful, lonely, and disorienting era in American life. It was also a chance to get some writing done. By Katy Waldman  Under Review A New Book About Plant Intelligence Highlights the Messiness of Scientific Change In “The Light Eaters,” by Zoë Schlanger, the field of botany itself functions as a character—one in the process of undergoing a potentially radical transformation. By Rachel Riederer  Culture Desk Lying to My Dad I’d become everything to him—a fun-house mirror, constantly contorting to fit his needs. By Bryn Durgin  Brave New World Dept. How CoComelon Captures Our Children’s Attention The animation juggernaut is now streamed for billions of hours each year, including on Netflix and its own YouTube channel. Should we be worried about that? By Jia Tolentino P.S. A sighting of false mermaid-weed has been documented in Vermont, for the first time in more than a century. Evidence of “a world previous to ours” is always exciting, as Elizabeth Kolbert reminds us in her exploration of the man who, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, with “a showman’s flair,” succeeded in establishing extinction as a fact. 🌱

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