The impact of cities

“Cities are 2 per cent of the Earth’s crust but they are 50 per cent of the world’s population,” says Carlo Ratti, the head of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. Cities also consume 75 per cent of the world’s energy, he told CNN.com.

Is your job in peril?

“If you’re taking a break from work to read this article, I’ve got one question for you: Are you crazy?” Farhad Manjoo asks Slate readers. “I know you think no one will notice, and I know that everyone else does it. Perhaps your boss even approves of your Web surfing; maybe she’s one of those new-age managers who believes the studies showing that short breaks improve workers’ focus.” At this moment, he adds, there is someone who doesn’t need breaks training for your job. “I’m referring to a non-human employee – a robot, or some kind of faceless software running on a server. I’ve spent the last few months investigating the ways in which automation and artificial intelligence are infiltrating a range of high-skilled professions. What I found was unsettling. They might not know it yet, but some of the most educated workers in the nation are engaged in a fierce battle with machines. As computers get better at processing and understanding language and at approximating human problem-solving skills, they’re putting a number of professions in peril. Those at risk include doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, scientists and creative professionals – even writers like myself.”

Kicked out of the solar system?

“A computer simulation of our early solar system suggests it once had an extra planet, a U.S. researcher says,” United Press International reports. “Furthermore, David Nesvorny from Colorado’s Southwest Research Institute said, our current solar system could never have happened without the existence of the extra planet. The simulations show Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may not have been the only gas giants in our early solar system. … Simulations with just four giant planets showed them as destroying each other because they were too large, or destroying the rocky planets such as Mars and Venus. … When a fifth large planet was included in the simulations, the odds of our present solar system resulting increased significantly, he said. … Jupiter and Saturn push the lighter planets out farther, then a close encounter with Jupiter ejects the mysterious extra planet out of the solar system, Nesvorny said. A recent discovery of planets floating freely in interstellar space suggests the ejection of planets is not uncommon, astronomers have said.”

Time drags you along

“Let me start by asking you a simple question: What time is it right now?” Adam Frank writes for National Public Radio. “To answer this query you probably looked at the clock on your computer or on your cellphone. It told you something like 9:12 a.m. or 11:22 a.m. or 1:37 p.m. But what is 1:37 p.m.? What is the meaning of such an exact metering of minutes? … [D]id 1:37 p.m. even exist 1,000 years ago for peasants living in the Dark Ages of Europe, Song Dynasty China or the central Persian Empire? Was there such a thing as 1:37 p.m. across the millennia that comprise the vast bulk of human experience? The short answer is “no.” But 1:37 exists for you. … You feel minutes in a way that virtually none of your ancestors did. You feel them pass and you feel them drag on with all the frustration, boredom, anxiety and anger that can entail. For you, those minutes are real.”

Spiders? Try tough love

“Shigeyoshi Osaki can read the minds of spiders,” says The Japan Times. “Or so you would think, if you see the way he handles the eight-legged arthropods.” The Nara Medical University professor is one of the country’s foremost researchers on spiders and especially spider silk. After gently tapping a spider’s belly to stimulate production of a strand, he explains: “The key is to approach them with a mix of tough and gentle. If you are too strict, you will upset them and they won’t produce the silk. They can also pretend that they are dead.”

A fatal meal

“When frogs and toads see Epomis beetle larvae waggling their antennae and jiggling their jaws, they must think ‘Aha! Easy meal,’ ” says MSNBC.com. “But in a freaky turnabout, the little larvae latch onto the bodies of their would-be predators, sucking them dry of fluids, gnawing on their flesh, and leaving behind nothing but a pile of bones. This horror-movie scene is one of the few instances of prey not only confronting its predator, but also devouring it, researchers reported Sept. 21 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. In some cases, the frogs and toads succeeded in swallowing the beetle larvae, only to vomit them up later. Post-regurgitation, the larvae promptly attached themselves to the amphibians and began to eat.”

Thought du jour

“When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backward, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.”

– G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English writer