“Wang quickly figured out that you should plant the trees in the shape of an equilateral triangle, with a tree at each corner, a tree at the midpoint of each side, and the seventh tree in the center…She got the answer faster than her father, a math teacher. She was 6.”

Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · 2w ago

Hong Wang, who proved the three-dimensional Kakeya set conjecture, has just won the Fields Medal, making her the third woman in the award’s 90-year history to receive math’s highest honor. Read our profile: www.quantamagazine.org/hong-wang-wi...

And this is where all the consumer spending is coming from. h/t @adamtooze.bsky.social

Hard to imagine...and to Michelob? 🤭

Because we just can’t fill our streets fast enough with cars…🙄 China’s new 10,800‑car carriers just set a Shanghai export record. 7,738 Teslas in one ship (≈36 km of cars, 9.5 football fields). Europe, here they come. 🚢⚡🚗 H/T @adamtooze.bsky.social via www.scmp.com/economy/chin...

A mature spruce stores carbon — but also decades of growth, fungal partnerships, and a history of fire and recovery. When fire returns too soon, the forest loses not just biomass, but time. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

The dialog around the fires in France and Spain (everywhere) certainly pull from a ‘crisis epistemology’.

Brad Weed@bradweed.bsky.social · 2w ago

Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte warns of a 'crisis epistemology' that treats every disruption as unprecedented and urgent — erasing Indigenous histories of survival, and justifying top-down action that bypasses consent. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Much of the attention put towards the fires in Europe tend toward ‘catastrophic gaze’

Brad Weed@bradweed.bsky.social · 2w ago

A 'catastrophic gaze' can paralyze us — waiting for collapse or a tech rescue. The alternative is situated action: real work in your watershed, neighborhood, coalition. Preserve the intervals that let living systems adapt. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Bickerstaff warns of 'cruel optimism' — leaning on grand promises like geoengineering so we never have to change our politics or hold powerful actors to account. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

A 'catastrophic gaze' can paralyze us — waiting for collapse or a tech rescue. The alternative is situated action: real work in your watershed, neighborhood, coalition. Preserve the intervals that let living systems adapt. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

A spruce recovers when it has time to seed. A cell copes when it can anticipate. A community adapts by remembering, taking responsibility, and keeping relationships. Resilience isn't innate — it's built. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

A forest isn't a Bayesian agent. Indigenous knowledge isn't simple conditioning. But spruce, single cells, and human communities share one principle: adaptation relies on patterns linking past experience to future conditions. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Flexibility has a cost. When the environment turned unpredictable, learning stopped paying off — and simpler, fixed strategies won. Anticipation only helps when the future still rhymes with the past. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

In the cell study's model, a 'blind' agent could only adapt through mutation across generations. A learning agent could revise its strategy within a single lifetime — trying new responses when old ones failed. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Fire isn't just heat moving through trees. It depends on tree age, soil moisture, seeds, past fires, weather, and human law. What a forest becomes after a fire depends on which relationships are still around. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Memory may run deeper into life than we think. Single cells given a reliable cue before heat stress died at 12% — vs 27% for cells with random cues. They didn't just endure the heat; they learned to anticipate it. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Memory isn't just a record of what happened. It's infrastructure for adaptation — carrying knowledge of past disturbances, failed fixes, and obligations that reach beyond the present generation. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Kyle Whyte offers an alternative to crisis thinking: an 'epistemology of coordination.' It starts not with novelty but with constant change — and asks whether the relationships we need to respond are still intact. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte warns of a 'crisis epistemology' that treats every disruption as unprecedented and urgent — erasing Indigenous histories of survival, and justifying top-down action that bypasses consent. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

What institutions call 'unprecedented' may look different from within Indigenous histories: another imposed transformation, after generations of forced displacement and altered fire and water regimes. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Earth has always changed. That doesn't make today's disruption ordinary — but it also isn't the first time people have faced the collapse of an expected order. Many didn't survive the Little Ice Age. Many did. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Black spruce didn't just tolerate fire — it evolved with it. Its cones are little seed bombs that open in the heat. But that only works if fires are far enough apart. Too soon, and the forest becomes something else entirely. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

After a too-soon fire, the land may stay green and productive — but it isn't the same forest. It stores carbon differently, holds moisture differently, and carries the next fire differently. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

I’m totally on board with the notion literacy is not purely passive or superficial — it is deeply embodied in cognition. 💯 AND I get haunted by Plato who might reply… a brain rewired by reading might become dependent on external symbols. Can they reason through them and defend them in real time?!

Ricard Solé@ricardsole.bsky.social · 3w ago

Why is reading so fundamental to the human mind? In this fascinating paper, @standehaene.bsky.social & Co show how literacy reshapes and connects the brain’s visual and language systems. A timely reminder of what education could lose if LLMs replace reading & writing. www.unicog.org/publications...

When fires come too close together, black spruce often can't come back. Plots with short intervals were far more likely to stay open and treeless rather than regenerate as forest. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Don’t forget! 🐝’s aren’t the only pollinators!

🌴 Scott Zona, Ph.D. 🌴@scottzona.bsky.social · 3w ago

We mustn’t overlook the little guys, the microlepidoptera. These are settling moths that land on the flower to feed. They are hugely important pollinators. 📷: Scoparia biplagialis on Solidago sp. by Jeanette Jaskula CCBYNC4. #pollination #MothWeek #TeamMoth #Botany 🌾🧪🌱

Europe’s car industry is facing China shock 2.0 — but @adamtooze.bsky.social (via @somoamsterdam.bsky.social) points out that this is not just a story about China. It is also a story about Europe’s own industrial choices, especially greedflation, financialization, and a high-price strategy.

We usually hear climate change as rising averages. But in a forest it's also felt as time — too little of it between one fire and the next. Alaska's boreal fires once returned every 70–130 yrs. Now some burn again in under 30. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Charting new depths.

Across 555 plots and 31 fires, researchers found recently burned land starts with a smaller carbon pool — so each new fire takes a bigger bite of what's left. The loss compounds. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...

Fire doesn't just release carbon today. In Alaska's boreal forests, repeated burning eats into 'legacy carbon' — the carbon banked in old vegetation and soils over centuries — and weakens the land's ability to store carbon in the future. interplace.io/p/burning-bo...