Putin’s Information War: Winning or Losing?

Remarks for World Talent Economy Forum, March 21,2022

Fred Phillips

 

With war in Ukraine, Europeans are worried a key source of their food, Russia and Ukraine, is at risk.

They are right to be concerned. Food is a strategic resource but European countries chose to embrace higher cost lower yield alternatives to modern agriculture at home because they got cheap food from the east.

If an additional 290,000,000,000 loaves of bread were available, that would ease the strain worldwide. That is how much wheat is lost each year due to pests and diseases that the so-called organic process can't prevent. But science can.

"Live cold, die old" may soon become folk wisdom if a new study holds up in mice is true for people.

Most of us have heard some form of the phrase "live fast, die young" and take it to mean reckless behavior leads to premature death. It certainly does in epidemiology but in science it means that animals with high metabolic rates ("living fast") tend to die sooner than those with slow metabolism. They burn out rather than fade away.

The public are often baffled why environmental journalists attend climate conferences in person, using the rationalization that they do their jobs better if they can talk to people outside formal interviews.

What salesperson doesn't feel the same way? 

Science conferences are also well-attended, groups hosting them even note their high attendance, but the belief that any benefit from flying there and staying in a hotel is meaningful is usually held by people who enjoy going to conferences rather than empirical data. 

A small pilot study has concluded that even one night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation.

In the experiment, 10 people slept for one night in dim light followed by one night with overhead room lighting while another 10 slept for two nights in dim light.

I make macaroni and cheese quite a lot. I like to eat it on Fridays and for friends and family on holidays. I have sampled mac and cheese all across the country. I am no Guy Fieri, but I have gotten around, and I can tell you with a great deal of confidence that most elite - which is to say costly - macaroni and cheese uses Velveeta. Or at least a key chemical in it.

The reason is not flavor. It is science. 

Though often get graphical representations of what an exoplanet that has been discovered might look like, in reality they are statistical wobbles.

And a new study finds that of the some 5,000 planets detected outside our solar system, three are likely not planets, but stars. The new analysis of the data finds that Kepler-854b, Kepler-840b, and Kepler-699b are probably between two and four times the size of Jupiter. So they are likely small stars instead.

The Krebs cycle is named after Hans Krebs, who discovered it in 1937, part of the race to discover the central hub of cellular metabolism. In a cell’s mitochondria, it is a core part of the process by which cells “burn” sugars to make adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the cell’s energy-carrying molecule. 

By coating soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way, scientists could design machines with arms made of flexible materials and robots embedded in their surface.

Coating the surface of nanoparticles in a responsive, active material could mean tailoring the size and shape of drug delivery capsules and have a dramatic effect on how a drug interacts with cells in the body. This ‘active matter’ could mark a turning point in the design of robots and make it possible to determine the shape, movement and behavior of a soft solid not by its natural elasticity but by human-controlled activity on its surface.

How it works

Like the vast majority of readers of this column, I very strongly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing atrocities. War is never an answer to international controversies. And I would like to add: I am in favor of all sanctions that financially hit the aggressor, including cutting Russia from use of international banking circuits and similar impactful actions.

That said, I will say here what I think about this ongoing rush to find ways to hurt a country whose citizens are largely innocent of their leader's crimes. I think most of these creative initiatives are counter-productive, reaching the nonsensical, the irrational, and the plain nuts.