Category Archives: Evolution

Before an asteroid lit the world on fire 66 million years ago, massive dinosaurs barged through tropical South American forests with airy, open canopies that were dominated by conifers and other seed-bearing gymnospermsa group of plants that dont flower or bear fruit. Flowering plants or angiosperms, which make up roughly 80 percent of our modern flora, were there, too, but existed mainly in the margins.

After the impact, three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth went extinct. But new research suggests that out of the ashes of this destruction, sprang the closed-canopy, flower-packed South American rainforests that now host the greatest diversity of plants and animals on Earth. The study, published today in the journal Science, uses thousands of fossilized remnants of South American flora from before and after the world-changing asteroid impact to reveal two very different forests on either side of a fracture in the history of life.

What makes this paper so dramatic and elegant is that theyre addressing two questions that nobody could ever solve and solving them simultaneously, says Peter Wilf, a paleobotanist from Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the research.

Those two questions, says Wilf, are what happened in the tropics at the time the dinosaurs went extinct, and when did modern neotropical rainforests first appear.

Until now, scant fossil records have obscured what effects the cataclysm had on the rainforests of South America. The oldest traces of the neotropics as scientists know them todaywith closed canopies dominated by flowering angiospermsdate to roughly 60 million years ago, which still leaves millions of years of evolution unaccounted for. But the fact that a modern-looking rainforest was apparently thriving just six million years after the asteroid, only begged the second question of when these ecosystems first originated.

To fill in the six million year gap in the fossil record, paleobiologist Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the co-authors of the new study assembled a massive database of fossilized pollen grains that spanned both sides of the asteroid impact and paired the pollen with a trove of new and old leaf fossils from sites in Colombia.

Leaf fossils are hugely informative but relatively rare. They can usually be identified to the species level and reveal other things such as which plants lived in a particular area, how much sunlight a plant got or which types of insects ate its leaves. Pollen, on the other hand, can often only be identified to the family level and might have blown in from a long way off, making it less reliable as a localized census. But what pollen lacks in biological detail it more than makes up for with its ubiquity.

Fossil pollen grains are abundant and easy to find in an array of different sediment types spanning nearly all time periods. Collecting tens of thousands of fossil pollen grains from 39 different sites allowed Jaramillo and his team to fill in the missing millions of years right around the mass extinction.

Over more than a decade, Jaramillo worked with his collaborators and trained several crops of South American researchers to excavate and catalog the ancient flora of their home continent, amassing more than 6,000 fossil leaves and more than 50,000 grains of fossilized pollen.

The scientists dated the pollen and leaf fossils using the previously established ages of the geological strata they were found in. Then, the scientists identified the specimens to the extent possible by comparing them to a huge library of living and previously studied extinct plant species.

Identifying the plants represented in the fossils was a massive labor of taxonomy that Jaramillo says eventually allowed the team to determine which species were lost and gained following the asteroid impact. But to get at the question of how these fossil forests were structured, the researchers studied the fossil leaves using three newer techniques.

In the first method, the scientists measured the density of the small veins that the leaves once used to transport nutrients to and from the rest of the plant. In living rainforest plants, canopy leaves have a high density of veins to make the most of the sunlight, while leaves from the understory, even on the same plant, have a lower density of veins. So, if an assortment of a forests leaves sports a big range of leaf venation densities, it suggests that the forest has a dense, stratified canopy. By contrast, forest leaf litter that exhibits relatively consistent vein densities typically comes from an ecosystem with an open canopy.

For the second method, the researchers checked the ratio of a pair of carbon isotopescarbon-13 and carbon-12to infer how much sun beat down on a leaf when it was alive. If a collection of a forests leaves has roughly consistent ratios of carbon-12 to carbon-13 isotopes, then the forest probably had an open canopy. But if the forests leaves display a big range of carbon isotope ratios, that suggests a closed canopy where some leaves got blasted by solar radiation and others lived in near-darkness.

Finally, the team also inspected each fossil leaf for signs of insect damage. Different insects damage leaves in different ways and so the researchers could use these tell-tale chomps and piercings to approximate the diversity of insects supported by the forest.

The researchers used all these methods across thousands of samples from more than 40 sites in Colombia to establish a broad, regional picture of how the neotropics looked before and after the asteroid impact.

All individual components of our analysis told us the same story, says Jaramillo.

In the time of the dinosaurs, the rainforests of South America had open canopies dominated by conifers and other seed-bearing gymnosperms. Members of the Araucariaceae genus, ancestors of todays Kauri pine and Norfolk Island pine, were common.

Following the asteroids blast, the study finds roughly 45 percent of all plant diversity disappeared, particularly the gymnosperms. Amid the roughly six-million-year recovery, the flowering plants that reign supreme in todays neotropics quickly came to account for 85 to 90 percent of plant diversity, says Jaramillo.

The leaves of the fossilized angiosperms that repopulated South American rainforests exhibited wide ranges of leaf vein density and disparate ratios of stable carbon isotopes, suggesting the new forests had thick canopies that created a tiered hierarchy of access to sunlight. Though these early iterations of the modern neotropics were similar in structure and in the plant families that dominated their ranks compared to today, the overall diversity of species remained low until roughly six million years after the impact.

This gives us a whole new window on where these hyper-diverse tropical rainforests in South America came from, says Bonnie Jacobs, a paleobotanist at Southern Methodist University who co-authored a commentary on the new paper for Science. With this paper you can kind of visualize the most amazing plant communities on Earth recovering and going down this deviated path after a mass extinction.

Jaramillo and his team propose three potential explanations for why flowering plants rose to prominence after the asteroid that put a period on the age of the dinosaurs.

The first explanation draws on a hypothesis that has been kicking around for decades, positing that the big-bodied dinosaurs maintained the forests open floor plan simply by trampling the space between the large conifer trees and eating or snapping any saplings that sprang up. Then, once the dinosaurs were gone, the angiosperms closed ranks and filled in the forests gaps.

A second explanation has to do with a change in soil nutrients. Some researchers think the asteroid impact might have dramatically increased the availability of nutrients in the soil, perhaps by raining down particulate and through the ashes of incinerated life. This would have given angiosperms a competitive advantage because they tend to grow faster than gymnosperms and outperform them in nutrient-rich soils.

The third explanation is that before the extinction event, conifers specialized in being the biggest trees around. This narrow life strategy might have made conifers more vulnerable to dying out, and if the group had no shrubby understory representatives to fill the ecological gap via evolution, the door would have been wide open for angiosperms to step in.

Jaramillo says these explanations arent mutually exclusive, and it could have easily been some combination of all three that allowed flowering plants to become the dominant group in todays South American rainforests.

But even as these findings highlight how a mass extinction gave rise to the modern pinnacle of biodiversity, researchers say it should also be a cause for reflection as humans cause what many call a sixth mass extinction event.

This asteroid impact and the mass extinction it caused is actually a good analog for whats happening today, says Wilf. The asteroid and what humans are doing in terms of driving extinctions are instantaneous in geological time. This work shows how an ecosystem evolved and recovered after catastrophe, but it took millions of years, he says. That should really give us pause because we cant wait that long.

View post:

How the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Spurred the Evolution of the Modern Rainforest - Smithsonian Magazine

By studying the fossilized remains of ancient fish, scientists have uncovered a turning point in the development of one of the most important parts of humans and other animals: bone. While bones primarily provide a structure to support the body, these hard tissues are always changing and provide other benefits to vertebrate bodies. Bone maintains itself, repairs injuries, and provides key nutrients to the bloodstream.

The earliest bones, however, were very different from human skeletons today. In the prehistoric past, bone was more like concrete, growing on the exterior of fish to provide a protective shell. But according to a new study in the journal Science Advances, the first bones with living cellslike those found in humansevolved about 400 million years ago and acted as skeletal batteries: They supplied prehistoric fish with minerals needed to travel over greater distances.

The fossilized creatures in the analysis are known as osteostracans. I affectionately call them beetle mermaids, says Yara Haridy, a doctoral candidate at the Berlin Museum of Nature and lead author of the study. These fish had a hard, armor-encased front end and a flexible tail growing out the back. They had no jaws, and their bone tissue encased their bodies. These kinds of fish are critical to understanding the origins of the hard parts that shaped vertebrate evolution.

Haridys research focuses on osteocytes, the cells that become walled-in by the hard, mineral part of bone as part of skeletal growth. The earliest animals with bone didnt have osteocytes, however, and some modern fish also dont have these cells, leading paleontologists to wonder when and why these bone cells first developed.

I basically started to become obsessed with the question: Why osteocytes? Haridy says.

Solving the mystery of bone cells has proven challenging for paleontologists. Traditionally, Haridy explains, researchers study the microscopic structures of bone by slicing off thin sections and examining them on two-dimensional slides. But this method doesnt provide a full, three-dimensional picture of what bone cells really look like.

A method developed for materials science and other engineering applications allowed Haridy and colleagues to reveal bone structures that scientists have not previously been able to study. I saw one of my colleagues posters in the hallway with amazing images of pores in batteries, and they looked like cells, Hariday recalls. The method used to make those images was called focused ion beam milling and scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM), which creates detailed, three-dimensional scans. Haridy asked what objects the technique could be applied to, and when she learned that a stable, dry object is best, she says she basically screamed, Whats more stable than rock?

The resulting scans of osteostracan fish fossils were beyond Haridys expectations. My amazing co-author Markus Osenberg nonchalantly sent me an email of early images, she recalls, and I called him to make sure it wasnt a model but our actual data, thats how unbelievable it was.

The scans did not show the actual bone cellswhich decayed long agobut they did reveal the cavities where bone cells lived inside the ancient fish. I was looking at a space where a little cell lived over 400 million years ago, Haridy says.

While reviewing the scans, Haridy and her team noticed that the bone tissue around the cell cavities was eaten away. These little divots were not the sign of a disease or injury, however. The bone cells had dissolved some of the tissue so that the calcium, phosphorous, and other minerals inside could be sent into the ancient fishs bloodstream.

The cells turned bone tissue into a kind of battery, releasing stored minerals needed for bodily processes such as nourishing the muscles needed to swim. In turn, the need for additional minerals helped drive the evolution of cellular bones, a change that influenced the trajectory of vertebrates.

This hypothesis has been around for a while, but has lacked corroboration, says Imperial College London paleontologist Martin Brazeau, who was not involved with the study. The research provides fresh evidence that early bone cells repurposed the armor of osteostracans to provide an extra boost of energy. Haridy and colleagues found that the margins around osteocytes were a lower density than the surrounding bone and make a strong case for this being evidence of mineral metabolism, adds University of Birmingham paleontologist Sam Giles, who also was not involved in the study.

Unfortunately, the FIB-SEM process used to create the high-definition bone images can only look at bone tissue near the surface of the fossil, and it destroys that part of the specimen during the process, so it is not always the ideal method for studying fossil bones. Even so, using the technique on a select few fossilized bones can lead to discoveries about the evolutionary function of skeletons.

In addition to revealing the bone cavities that cells once occupied, the study was able to uncover the shape and connections of cells between bones, which has not been done before. This approach is very promising, says Sophie Sanchez, an anatomist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved with the study. She says it could be especially useful if combined with other techniques look deeper than the outer surface of fossil bone.

The fact that ancient fish were able to draw on the mineral stores of their own skeletons in times of need had major consequences for life on Earth. Without developing cellular bones, fish probably wouldnt have been able to undertake long migrations, Haridy notes, because they wouldnt have had the need minerals to nourish their muscles.

Vertebrates may never have made it onto land without osteocytes, she adds, given that bone batteries supply calcium for egg laying and lactation. Evolution might have gone down a different avenue, one that wouldnt have included creatures like dinosaurs or mammals.

What the team gleaned from the ancient fish bones is only the beginning, Haridy says. Revealing bone cells in detail, hundreds of millions of years after the cells themselves have died, has the potential to uncover all sorts of osteological secrets that could not be detected before. Much like the first CT scans opened up the paleontological field and bore new methodologies, Haridy says, I predict this method will continue to surprise us in the future.

Continued here:

Bones evolved to act like batteries, 400-million-year-old fish suggest - National Geographic

Text Size:A- A+

The Kalahari is a huge expanse of desert in southern Africa, stretching across Botswana and into the northernmost part of South Africas Northern Cape province.

Its in the Northern Cape that we studied and described a new archaeological site, Ga-Mohana Hill, for research just published in Nature.

Our international team, made up of researchers from South Africa, Canada, the UK, Australia and Austria, has found evidence for complex symbolic behaviours 105,000 years ago.

Humans use symbols as a shortcut to communicate important ideas. Identifying the ancient roots of symbolism is limited to what preserves over time. Large calcite crystals from several kilometres away were found in the cave alongside stone tools. Why the crystals were brought there is unknown; they are not modified and do not seem to have a functional purpose. They may have been collected for their aesthetic properties, or included in ritual activities.

Crystals are collected by many people around the world to this day for ritual purposes. Early humans bringing crystals into Ga-Mohana suggests innovation in how people interacted with each other and their environment.

But such ancient innovation didnt occur in a bubble: there is context to when and where innovation occurs. What brought people there in the first place, at that time, to begin using those tools and collecting those crystals?

Reconstructing past environments allows us to understand this context. And so, a major part of our research centred on working out what the areas climate was like 105,000 years ago. To do so, we looked at Ga-Mohanas rocks.

The southern Kalahari is often considered too arid to be important for human evolution. Our work contradicts the idea of an arid and empty interior. At some points, Ga-Mohana was much wetter than today, with pools of standing water and waterfalls tumbling down the hillside. The fact that the climate was very different then opens up possibilities about why this previously under-appreciated region must have played an important role in our species evolutionary history.

Also read: Botswana was the ancestral homeland of all humans, says study

Some kinds of rocks preserve traces of the past environment. The Ga-Mohana hillside is draped in deposits called tufa; these form from water leaking out of cracks in the bedrock. This occurs when underground aquifers are recharged with rain water and begin to overflow. Over time, these waters precipitate calcium carbonate and form tufa.

The tufa system is no longer active, apart from small drips during the rainy season. But the fossil tufas represent periods in the past when there was more water available. Similar structures are growing today at places like Sitting Bull Falls, New Mexico in the US. Knowing when the tufas formed at Ga-Mohana tells us when it was wetter there.

To find out how old the tufas are and when these wet periods occurred, we used a method called uranium-thorium dating. Uranium is radioactive, meaning that it decays at a constant rate over time and produces daughter elements; thorium is one of them. When tufa forms, uranium is locked into the crystal structure and begins to decay to produce thorium.

The uranium-thorium system acts like a clock that starts when the tufa is formed. By precisely measuring how much uranium and thorium is in the tufa today, we use the known decay rate to calculate when the clock started. This method is routinely applied to cave deposits like stalagmites and flowstones but has not been used very much on tufa.

This is because dating tufas is not straightforward. Unlike protected caves, tufa forms in the open where sunlight, dust, and debris can contaminate the ages. It took several years of dedicated work to get around these problems: we chose the tufa samples in the field with care and used a sensitive laser to make images of the layers with the most uranium present. We could then target these layers for dating. This provided a real breakthrough.

In the end, we dated two layers from an ancient tufa waterfall to between 110,000 and 100,000 years old. This means that fresh water was flowing down the hillside at exactly the same time that people were living at the shelter. Such wet conditions at this time were unexpected, so we wanted to know what caused such a large increase in water to begin with.

To understand the reasons for the region being much wetter 105,000 years ago than it is today, we looked at how climate processes influence modern rainfall there.

We did this by comparing historical rainfall records to current major climate drivers. We then looked back into the past and used data from an ocean core (deep sea sediments drilled out of the ocean floor which record changes in the earths ocean and climate). These data show that parts of the Indian Ocean were warmer around 105,000 years ago. Climate systems are complex, but basically this would have increased the amount of rain in the southern Kalahari, filling the aquifer, and causing the build up of the tufa during this time period.

People were drawn to Ga-Mohana for many reasons. Surface water would have been one. The many ostrich eggshell fragments we also found were probably used as water carriers 105,000 years ago. Perhaps these were being filled with water as it flowed down the hillside. One possibility is that water carriers allowed our ancestors to travel further distances.

There is still more to be learned from Ga-Mohana, its artefacts and its rocks. This will allow scientists to understand the role this space played in human evolutionary history better.

Benjamin Schoville, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, The University of Queensland; Jessica von der Meden, PhD candidate, University of Cape Town; Robyn Pickering, Senior lecturer, University of Cape Town, and Wendy Khumalo, Student, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Cape Town

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Also read: More Dead Sea Scrolls, second oldest Hebrew Bible manuscript, found after 60 years

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube & Telegram

Why news media is in crisis & How you can fix it

India needs free, fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism even more as it faces multiple crises.

But the news media is in a crisis of its own. There have been brutal layoffs and pay-cuts. The best of journalism is shrinking, yielding to crude prime-time spectacle.

ThePrint has the finest young reporters, columnists and editors working for it. Sustaining journalism of this quality needs smart and thinking people like you to pay for it. Whether you live in India or overseas, you can do it here.

Support Our Journalism

See the original post:

New study shows dry Kalahari was more important to human evolution than previously thought - ThePrint

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Im Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

So over the past couple of years, theres been this worry stalking my own work. What if Im just wasting my time covering taxes and public options and Donald Trump and filibuster reform? What if the thing, the only thing that really matters right now is CRISPR, that everything else comparatively is just a sideshow CRISPR. Over the past few decades, scientists have studied this enzyme bacteria used to recognize viruses and just cut them apart. It is wild how this works. So bacteria, they fight off viruses by snatching fragments of the viruss own DNA and then loading these sequences into these enzymes. And these sequences they then program the enzymes to patrol the cell looking for a viral match, like looking for that virus again. And when it finds it, the enzyme cuts the viral DNA and saves a cell from infection. But heres the thing that won Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020. They figured out, along with many, many other scientists, how to code these enzymes with whatever genetic sequence we want, and then we can make these incredibly precise cuts wherever that sequence is located, and we can actually replace that sequence. We can replace it with new genetic information of our choice. We can make these very precise edits in genetic code and not just our code but the code of mice, of plants, of pigs, of mosquitoes. Were learning how to take control of not just human evolution but arguably every species evolution with a precision we have never had before. Weve had the ability to shape genetics by breeding plants together, dogs together, doing this very crude genetic editing in recent decades, but nothing like this. Whats becoming possible now is everything from carrying genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia and Huntingtons all the way up to imbuing humans with characteristics weve never had before making us stronger, faster, smarter, giving us better memories, allowing us to see in new light spectrums. We really dont know whats possible here, but it seems like the answer is a lot a lot a lot. There are still technical problems. Its expensive, and there are issues to work out. But we are talking when, not if, for all of this. And so for years now theres been this part of me that thought, I just need to drop everything and try to understand CRISPR and its moral and political and human and economic, I guess, implications. Short story, I didnt do that, but luckily Walter Isaacson did do that. Isaacson is the former editor of Time magazine, the former head of CNN, one of the great living biographers. Hes written biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein and Steve Jobs, and his new one is called The Codebreaker Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, which sounds like a biography of Jennifer Doudna, who Ive had on an older iteration of the show before, but this is really a biography of the scientific process that led to CRISPR and the people trying to answer the questions it poses. So now I get to ask him all the questions Ive wanted to spend the time to answer myself. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Heres Walter Isaacson.

Ive heard you talk about there being three technological revolutions, atoms, bits, and genes. Tell me what those were and why I should see genes on that list.

These are the three fundamental kernels of our existence, the atom, the bit which are binary digits that can encode information and the gene. So you get the first half of the 20th century, its a revolution driven by the atom and Einsteins theories. Everything from the atom bomb to space travel to semiconductors come out of that. Second half of the 20th century I grew up in was the digital revolution where computers, the internet, and the microchip all combine so that we can process anything in digital bits. And now were about to enter the age of the genetic revolution where the code of life, the genetic code will replace the digital code as being the core thing were going to program, and well be programming molecules, not just microchips. And I think this is going to have even more of an impact than being able to get an iPhone or a personal computer. Its going to allow us to rewrite our own genes and certainly cure genetic diseases.

How well do we understand the coding language here? When were coding software on a computer, weve created these languages. We have a sense of what the computers can do. Obviously coding requires solving some hard problems, but its within a universe we understand pretty well. How well do we understand the coding instructions we might want to give something like CRISPR or some of these other technologies?

As you know, we have about 3 billion pairs of letters that make up our DNA. And beginning in the late 1990s, groups of scientists, including the US government, decided, all right, lets sequence the entire human genome. Now, that didnt get us too much. You needed another step to say, all right, each three-letter sequence usually has some meaning to it. Lets try to map, out of the 3 billion letters, what each of these sequences might do. Like one might help make a hormone or a neuron or make your hair blonde and mine brown or something. We can map the human genome pretty well now. This is particularly easy for single-gene properties or, for that matter, mutations like sickle cell. Sickle cells just one letter off, and we know exactly where that letter is in the human genome. And if it switches from one letter to another, youve got a real bug in the system, not just a bug but a very dangerous and deadly bug in the system. Likewise, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis. Those are pretty easy to spot the little flaws in the 3 billion base pairs we have. If you want to get to something more complicated, you can just move up the gradation. Muscle mass is pretty easy to regulate. Height is pretty well determined. But those are multiple sequences that do it, and we dont understand those very well. And then you get to the most complex of all where things like schizophrenia, bipolar disease. What predisposes us to that? What predisposes us to have a high IQ? Is that mainly genetic or mainly environmental? So those are the parts of the genome we dont fully understand.

So it sounds to me theres almost a ladder of programming complexity here. Theres, as you say, a set of conditions that we understand. There is a mistake in the code, and we can look at it. We can look at normal code. We can look at code that has this error in it, and then you say, OK, were going to just change that little mistake. Then there are things where we pretty well understand how it works, like, say, muscle mass. We know there are certain things we can turn on and off because weve watched it happen in people. Then there are things we know people currently have like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or high IQ, but we dont really know how it works. And then I assume there are things that people dont currently have. You bring this up in the book. Like one can imagine in the future us understanding how to give people capabilities they dont currently have through genomic editing. But because we cant currently look at people and see that, we dont know how to do that, that coding. Is that a reasonable way of framing the ladder?

Absolutely, and the interesting thing about the ladder is we could create new things for human capabilities, maybe even to hear different frequencies or be able to see colors that are off the normal visible spectrum. But the important thing you put your finger on is we say its not in the wild. In other words, nobody really has it. And so its far safer to edit the human genome to create a genome that already exists in other people in the wild form. But if youre going to edit something thats never existed before, I think weve got a few decades before were going to try to cross that line.

So as you gesture towards, weve had the capacity to do some level of genetic editing or changing for some decades now. What did CRISPR add to our capabilities here? What made CRISPR different?

What made CRISPR different is its not just recombining DNA or even using the old, clunky tools we used to have that could try to cut DNA and make an edit known as ZFNs or TALENs and things like that. What made it different is that its easily reprogrammed. You can say, OK, I want to do it right here at this sequence. And so you have this guide RNA, and the guide RNA can just be much more precise, and it can be done much more quickly. Its like the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is a really great one, but thats an engineered virus that carries a gene to help do it. I got the Pfizer. That meant it just used messenger RNA. And if the spike protein continues to mutate in ways, it is much quicker to just reprogram that messenger RNA to build a fragment of the new shape of the spike protein when youre using something thats an RNA-programmed device, whether it be a CRISPR tool or a vaccine.

And tell me if this is wrong, because it probably is going to be, but I think its actually good to use the vaccines here because people have a lot of familiarity. One of the issues is the way the Johnson & Johnson vaccine works is you really have to grow this sort of semi-inert virus to do it, whereas the mRNA vaccines are much more of a programming challenge. I mean, very famously I think Moderna made theirs in like a weekend. And so theres this capacity really not just to treat this as life but to treat it as programming. Is that fair or is that an unbelievably poor way of putting it?

No, its exactly fair, and the fact that you can do it over a weekend makes it a lot better than growing or doing genetic engineering or recombinant DNA or growing a virus or a whole bunch of viruses. Those are the type of vaccines weve had in the past. With the genetic vaccines, as you say, it was done by Moderna over a weekend. Once they got the sequence from China, what the spike protein looked like, it was pretty fast to do it.

So whenever I have a conversation with anybody who knows anything about CRISPR, I will hear them explain it, and it will sound like we can do absolutely anything we want. And then youll ask them if we can do these amazing things. Theyll say, well, no. Its not safe. It makes mistakes. Its very expensive to do something like, say, curing sickle cell anemia in somebody. So what makes using CRISPR hard? What are the difficulties? What can go wrong?

Well, the hardest thing is the delivery system. Now, you talk about sickle cell. It actually has been done. It was done finally five or six months ago in a woman named Victoria Gray from Mississippi. She becomes the first patient where they used CRISPR to edit her genes so she no longer is producing sickled cells, and shes now producing healthy blood cells. What made it difficult was not the editing of her cells but you have to take the stem cells and take it out of the blood and some bone marrow, and then you have to put it back into her system. So thats what cost a whole lot, just as any stem-cell transplants would do. What Jennifer Doudna, the hero of my book, is doing is gathering a group of people saying, well, how can we do it much faster and easier? Well, the first, simplest way to do it much faster and easier is dont take the cells out of the body and then have to reinsert them in the body. Lets do it instead of in vitro, as its called when you do it out of the body, do it in vivo, which means make the edits in the body. Now, thats a year or two down the road, but that brings the cost down exponentially. But as you can see, the editing weve done it. A Chinese doctor did it in embryos. Take out the receptor for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Weve done it now in clinical trials in Portland to do it in eye cells for people who have congenital blindness, to reverse those. So the actual editing is not only easy. It has been done. The difficult for medicine is you got to get it in the right cell. For example, CRISPR comes from a system that bacteria used to kill viruses. Well, thats something we would love to have. And so you could say instead of having an immune system or the human immune system be jacked up and kicked into orbit by vaccines, which is a tricky thing to do, why dont we just have pills or inhalers or something that say whenever that virus comes in, chop it up and kill it? That would be a simpler, safer way to do it, and we will have that in a couple of years. But the difficulty is not doing that through CRISPR. The difficulty is getting it into the right cells in the lungs or the right cells in the body where the virus may exist. So thats the less exciting frontier, but the important frontier is delivery systems.

You talk in the book about this biohacker who on a live YouTube stream or something injects himself with the CRISPR edit that would allow for radical increases in muscle mass, but it doesnt really work, and you didnt expect it to work because youd have to be doing that over a long period of time. Why would you have to be doing that repeatedly? Why cant you just hit yourself with that injection and all of a sudden youre The Rock?

Because our cells in our body tend to replenish themselves. They tend to regenerate. And if you get new ones that havent been edited, that means the treatment wears off. Now, some cells in the body arent that way, including our eye cells. We dont make new eye cells. So once you edit the eye cells for congenital blindness, its once and done, like your Johnson & Johnson phrase. When it comes to sickle cell, now if you do it in STEM cells, that may work, and it may be permanent in the sense that once the stem cells are edited, the new blood cells will all be sickle free. The only way to make it permanent and Im about to cross an ethical line here is to do it in all the cells of the human body, which means doing it in early-stage embryos is the easiest way to do that or in reproductive cells, like sperm or eggs, at which point all cells in the body have the edit and you dont have to worry about refresher courses.

And just to ping on this for another second this is going to become real important in our conversation later on this is the germline-somatic distinction.

Bingo. Germline means youve done it so that its in reproductive cells. Youve done it before a patient is born. Youve edited the eggs of the sperm or very early-stage embryos. And that means not only will it be every cell in the body will carry the edit, if you do it right, it means that children will have those edits, and all descendants will have those edits. So once you cross the germline, meaning the line of inheritable edit, youve edited the human species. Somatic simply means in the body, like Victoria Gray down in Mississippi. It was done in her body, but it wasnt done for reproductive purposes. Now with sickle cell, were already talking about, well, lets edit it out. Lets say Victoria Gray wants to have more children. You could edit it out of her fertilized eggs or reproductive cells, and so her children would have inheritable, good blood cells rather than sickle cells.

Lets say you had unlimited money and few ethical strictures. What could CRISPR actually probably do right now?

Right now, its best at single-gene mutations. But if you really had a doctor in a clinic somewhere with no ethical guidelines, certainly there are things that clearly predispose height, for example, or muscle mass, as we talked about with our friend the biohacker. Thats just a myostatin regulator. And certainly, by the way, if we can make cells so that they arent sickled in the blood and carry more oxygen, that might make muscle mass or blood or endurance much better. And then obviously the type of diseases we have Tay Sachs, muscular dystrophy youd edit those out of your children if you wanted to.

What are you pretty sure then that we will be able to do at a price point available to, say, non-billionaires in the next 25 years?

Oh, in the next 25 years we could certainly do things like hair color, eye color, skin color. You could probably enhance memory, and you could get perilously close to things like neurons that give you faster mental processing power which, combined with better memory, may get you close to what we call intelligence. Those are the things that I think would be simple enough if youre giving a 25-year horizon.

It is at least plausible that in the next 25 years we will face a question of if you could make an edit so your children would have lets just call it photographic memory should you?

Yeah, you could, and the answer would be no. One of the joys of my life is I dont have a photographic memory, so I dont remember if youve ever written anything bad about me in your life. In fact, theres a wonderful book I just read about the joys of not having perfect memories. But I say that not just jokingly. I think its a be careful of what you wish for phenomenon. For example, muscle mass is pretty easy, as we said, and its already been done in cattle and in mice and double muscling and stuff. So you could do that for kids, and then youd have athletes who had better muscle mass and better twitch movement, and would that destroy athletics where, instead of admiring the athlete, were admiring their genetic engineer? Likewise, if you decide on height, I mean, thats an interesting one to think about because lets suppose and it wouldnt be that hard genetically to do it that you get edit a gene so somebody could be taller, eight inches taller. That would be really good if your kid, instead of being 5 foot 8, was 6 foot 4 or something and youd say, all right, I got a basketball player in the family. But suppose everybody did that. Its actually only a positional benefit or relative benefit because if everybody, if every kid in 40 years starts being eight inches taller, thats not going to help anybody. And given the size of airline seats, its really not going to be good for anybody. It would just help carpenters who have to raise doorjambs. So you have to decide, what is good for all of society? such as maybe editing out receptors for viruses. That could be good for all of society. You could even argue making people have better memory or better mental processing power, that could be good for all of society even if not everybody gets it. But there are certain things that if the rich can buy it and the poor cant, it gives a positional advantage. But if everybody can get it, it doesnt help society as a whole.

There are ways of thinking about CRISPR, which is that it is a frightening but remarkable new technology, and we want to put the strictures on it for it to be rare. And then theres another way of thinking about it, which is that it is a remarkable new technology which can do all these things and we want to wrap it in a politics, a distributional politics such that it could be common because what were afraid of is that the people who have wealth and privilege now will use it to create a genetic elite. And those are really, really quite different approaches, and I hear a lot more of the first, being afraid people are going to get out ahead of their skis on it, but I dont see too many people wrestling with the second and trying to think of this question of, OK, we want this, but what we want is for it to be widely available so the children of the rich and poor alike can be taller, can have better memory, or whatever it might be.

Yes, you should have George Church on your podcast because

I would love to have George Church on my podcast.

Yeah, we will work on this. I will call George. Hes been very helpful since the book came out because hes one of the main characters in the book and was at Harvard when Jennifer Doudna was a young student there. And George Church will say, excuse me, whats wrong with adding some IQ points or adding some strength or muscle mass or enhancement so that you can see infrared light if you want to? And then he would agree that the main ethical problem is the distribution problem in the sense that if its unequally distributed, you get to Brave New World, that science fiction. You get to the time machine. You get to the movie Gattaca if theres a genetic elite that can afford to have their kids enhanced and a subspecies thats not genetically enhanced. But thats not a problem with the technology. Thats a problem with our policy and our politics. [MUSIC PLAYING]

So I just did a podcast with the science-fiction writer Ted Chiang, and we were talking about artificial intelligence and the attraction to the question of itll take all the jobs or it will kill us all. And I was asking him what he thinks of this, and he said that one of the problems when people discuss technology is that they often speak as if theyre afraid of technology when what theyre afraid of is capitalism. And I actually dont think thats a great argument on A.I., but I think its a very good argument on CRISPR, which is to say that a lot of the questions on CRISPR are a little bit less about CRISPR or at least what some of the ones I worry about most than they are about capitalism, which is to say how it will be distributed.

Yeah. In the book I dont use capitalism because both its a loaded word and a more complex world, but I talk about state eugenics creating the master race where the governments were doing it. And this is the Nazis and, for that matter, at Cold Spring Harbor in the early 1900s in the US. And I say thats not the big fear now. I mean, were not going to have government-mandated child editing like in Brave New World. The fear is what I would call a free-market eugenics, and thats probably what youre calling the capitalist eugenics. And by free market, I mean as Robert Nozick writes about this, everybody can go to the genetic supermarket, and they can buy what they can afford. And companies will market cool things that you can get if you go to your fertility clinic and youre given the shopping list from the genetic supermarket. And in the privacy of that genetic clinic and they shut the door. They promise not to tell people what you chose. They say, what skin color do you want? What sexual orientation do you want? What height? What eye color? What IQ? And youd be a good moral person, Ezra, and so would I. I would make sure Id check off no bad genetic diseases, and Id wrestle with maybe congenital deafness because I would consider that a disability. But Id pause and think, well, people in the deaf community dont consider it a disability. Maybe its an interesting thing for our species. And as we go down the list, I wouldnt dare choose some of the things that other people might choose. But as it got more and more private and its a free-market choice, you may have more and more people saying heres the sexual orientation I want my kids. Heres the gender I want. Heres the height I want, the skin color I want, and these sort of things. And they wont be free, and so the rich would be able to buy taller children and whatever other types of things they would want. So we would do two things that would be bad if you had free-market gene editing, or as you might call it, capitalist gene editing. A, we would let the rich not only get better genes but they would encode it into their families so that you would have families with a genetic elite and families without it. And the second thing you might do if you had a free-market eugenics like this is you might edit out diversity. You might find there would be a lot fewer deaf people or fewer people who are short or fat, and you could go down the list where people may not want to go where you just let the free market edit out the diversity of our society. And as I sit here in New Orleans Im sitting on the balcony overlooking Royal Street. I look at all the diversity. I see people gay and straight and trans and tall and short and fat and skinny and Black and white and Creole and caf au lait colored. And people from Gallaudet University were by, and they were sign languaging. And I think, well, the diversity of the human species makes it really creative. Its really the wonderful, colorful thing about our species. And by the way, not being emotional about it, its also a good thing for the safety of our species, the health of our species that we have a lot of genetic diversity. And so you could march down a path of free-market choice and free-market eugenics with gene editing that would give us a genetically encoded elite and edit out the diversity of our species. Those are the two things I most worry about in the future of gene editing, both of which could be solved by policy. Its not something you need to solve by shunning the technology.

Well, theres so much here. So one concern here that the I think gesturing towards is you get into like a human monoculture, right? Weve done this with agriculture many, many times where we begin to select for, say, a kind of potato thats very good at growing in a particular condition, and weve gone now from hundreds of kinds of potatoes to one. And then a particular kind of blight comes, and it turns out that weve edited out the genes that we didnt think were doing anything but that gave us potatoes that were resistant to this blight. But I also want to touch on this question not just of diversity but of what we think of as disabilities. While preparing to chat with you, I read this editorial by Sandy Sufian and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who are two scholars who live with conditions of a sort that many would be excited to use CRISPR to eliminate. And they write and I want to quote this. Our genetic conditions are not simply entities that can be clipped away from us as if they were some kind of misspelled word or an awkward sentence in a document. We are whole beings with our genetic conditions forming a fundamental part of who we are. Still, many Americans, including medical providers and even some people with genetic differences, consider lives such as ours as not worth living as they are. Thats the end of the quote. And so this gets into really tricky territory of who is the deciding agent. The choice a parent may make on behalf of an unborn child may not be the same choice that a child would make for themselves.

Absolutely, and I quote them in the book and use them in the book because thats really an important thing about what we as a society or we as parents at the genetic supermarket with free markets would choose as disabilities. One of the most interesting ethical philosophers in my book is a kid named David Sanchez. Now, hes only 17 years old, and he loves playing basketball, but hes got sickle cell. And so out at Stanford where hes being treated they say, all right, we can edit this in you and fix it. And then they tell him, and by the way, we can edit it probably so that by the time you have children, we can make sure weve edited it out of your reproductive cells and your children will not have sickle cell anemia. And he first says, oh wow, thats wonderful. That would be great. Then he has a second thought. And he says, maybe it should be up to the kid later on after the kid is born to decide that. And you say, well, what do you mean? Would you want your kid to have sickle cell? And he says, well, probably not, but sickle cell forged me. It forged who I am. Its part of who I am. It made me empathetic more than most of my friends are. It made me resilient. I know how to get up off the floor. So Im not sure we should edit it out of my children before they decide whether they want that or not. And Im going, whoa, holy cow. Hes as good as the professional bioethicist you just quoted. And I talked to him later. Months later I get back to him, and I ask him again. Youd really want to not edit it out so that your kids might be born with sickle cell? He said no, and its like on third thought. I dont want him to have sickle cell. So yeah, Id do that. I said, well, what about the empathy? Well, he said, Id try to teach them empathy, but I dont want them to have to suffer the pain Ive suffered. And my point here is that we have first thoughts and second thoughts and maybe third thoughts. And so we have to figure out, what is it that we call disabilities? and do those forge our characters in ways that we want to keep? and who makes that decision? Is it the parent? Is it society? Can you wait until the kids already born? Well, no, not really if its a bad genetic disease. And so I hate to tell you Im going to spoil my book sales here. I dont have a last chapter that says heres the seven easy answers. We go with David Sanchez and other people hand in hand and I hope have first, second, and third thoughts, especially when it comes to making inheritable edits about things we call disabilities.

I want to bring up, say, an obvious objection even maybe a charge of hypocrisy here against myself. So Im pro-choice, within reasonable boundaries, and isnt there something odd about worrying over giving parents control of genetic questions that are marginal compared to the question of whether a child exists or not? And then one step beyond that, people now do a lot of genetic testing. And I mean, theres been lots of reporting on this. People often abort children who show up with Down syndrome on the testing. So arent we doing a lot of this in broader, cruder ways already?

Yeah, were doing it in broader, cruder ways like aborting kids that might have Down syndrome or even preimplantation genetic diagnosis, meaning you create in an IV clinic fertilized eggs and then you can sort of screen them to say which ones dont have Huntingtons or something and implant the ones that are healthy. Thats very crude, and its very if youre trying to produce a whole lot of fertilized eggs and you have multiple characteristics, its almost impossible to do. But yeah, we faced these types of things before, and youre right. Our default when I say our I mean yours and mine and probably 70 percent of your listeners. Our default is choice, parental choice, individual choice. Abortion, that should be a matter of the mothers choice. And so when it comes to reproductive decisions, we generally, especially in this society and especially after the eugenic horrors of the 20th century, we say lets leave that to individual families to make their own reproductive choices. But then you get to the point where you say, oh, and lets hand them this shopping list at the genetic supermarket and see what choices they might be able to afford. Does that take us into a brave new world, or is that just the same as weve had before but just a little bit more than weve had before? I think were getting into a brave new world now that we can make a whole lot of edits rather than just abort or not implant Down syndrome.

But I think choice rapidly becomes I dont want to say its irrelevant, but it is not free. So life is positional, and life for your children is really positional. And so if the other parents are making their kids taller and smarter and able to run further and you dont, you are setting your kid up for a much harder life. I also think about this in terms of international competition. If China decides that as part of their national destiny they want to begin enhancing Chinese children and they want that to be something that is encouraged, theres going to be pressure on other countries simply to keep up as a geopolitical stratagem. I mean, imagine if this was going on during the USSR-America competition of the Cold War. And so I dont know that choice is going to be as relevant here as what other people are doing. Our choices are very structured by the context in which they happen and the people and countries were trying to compete with.

Well, we see it all the time like college-admissions scandals. All right, well, I dont necessarily want to fake my kid as a lacrosse player, but other parents are doing it, and Ive got to get her into Princeton or something. So yeah, if you look at what parents will go through in order to get their kids into what they think are elite universities, imagine what theyll do if theyre handed a shopping list at a genetic supermarket and societal pressure is, hey, youve got to keep up. You cant let your neighbor have a kid whos six inches taller without buying your kids the genes to be six inches taller. Now, you could also then say, well, maybe societal pressure can work the other way, which is we dont allow this type of genetic enhancement. We allow it for fighting diseases only. And lets say that we can make this into an international accord, just like we might do on athletic doping. Say, OK, were going to have international rules that say these are the things that society just doesnt want to have happen. And some people are going to sneak off to clinics in the Cayman Islands and try to do it, but generally its like smuggling of elephant tusks or shoplifting at the corner store. We have a whole lot of restrictions against it, and well keep it in check. Those are the things I think we can decide as a society as a whole because when you get to the question of choice, as you pointed out, at a certain point, youre pressured to make every possible choice you can for your children. Now, let me give the counterargument, which is every species on this planet for a million years at least, great and small, have done whatever they could to make sure that their offspring survive and carry on genetically. So why should we be any different? Why shouldnt we produce super kids that will end up taking over our species? Well, Im uncomfortable with that, and I think we should try to keep these genes or genie in the bottle.

Yeah, I want to play with the flip now. I want to take the super-kid-advocate position because, Walter, how dare you? How dare you tell me that if my child has the capacity to not grow up with, on the one hand, maybe just like the level of anxiety that I and many of the people in my family have been wracked with thats an almost I dont want to say an easy one. But then why shouldnt the human race get smarter such that it can do more to invent renewable energy yeah, the George Church argument and the argument of many ethicists. I mean, we have big problems. We have made the human race smarter again and again and again. If you dont think putting kids in school every single day in ways that are pushing on their analytical intelligence and then putting them in a context where that changes which genes express themselves I mean, were way better at solving abstract problems and way better at knowing which direction were walking in than we used to be or then sort of hunter-gatherer societies that we see even in existence now are. We are changing gene expression all the time. We are changing humanitys capabilities over time all the time. And this idea that we should stop or that we should tell families or tell the race that weve come this far and no further, theres an argument that thats a crazy decision to make.

I agree that things that can make the human race better and smarter and healthier, thats a good thing. We should move forward on it. I think what we have to guard against is what we get back to the free-market-eugenics part, which is it helps the human race if everybody gets a bit smarter. It might help if everybody got a bit taller, although thats more of a positional advantage than a societal advantage. But certainly it would be societally good if everybody were a little bit smarter. Wed solve climate change and do some good things. The problem comes if you say a genetic elite of 10 percent of the privileged families on Earth get to have children that are twice as smart as the rest of the species. You get to exactly where we got in Brave New World or in the movie Gattaca, and do we really want to have subspecies that are genetically inferior?

Yeah, but this speaks to this idea that then what were afraid of is not CRISPR but capitalism.

And same is true. Yeah, I agree that my fear is not on CRISPR once we make it safe. I think you got a lot of unintended consequences. You start making somebody have better memory and God knows whats going to happen. But let us say weve determined that these genes are in the wild, that the people who have these genes are doing just fine. Therefore well try to give everybody the gene to have intelligence. And certainly you might start by saying, all right, instead of making everybody taller, lets make people who have the disadvantage of being very short, give them the eight inches first. In other words, if youre going to be born at 4 foot 4 inches tall, OK, we can give you the height. And then we give it to positional advantages for people who want to be taller. Likewise IQ. Certainly most people would say if youve got a birth defect or genetic defect thats going to affect your mental processing power, it would be great for all of society if we could fix those in a way that was healthy and safe. Then if you say maybe we can make all of society a little bit smarter, that becomes, as you said, a distributive-justice question, not a is this technology good? question.

One of the other kinds of competition here, or at least questions here, comes from the other kind of code were editing. I kept reading your book thinking theres always something poignant that we were learning how to edit genetic code at the same time as were getting pretty close to creating if not life than intelligence through code with A.I. And whenever I tap into that conversation for five minutes, people are worried that humanity is going to become more and more occupationally obsolete. But so that might then create this pressure to augment humanity because were almost creating our own competition at the same time.

Well, Im one of those people who believes that artificial intelligence will not actually succeed as fast as augmented human intelligence, which is sort of the Ada Lovelace, Doug Engelbart, Steve Jobs school is that if you combine our computational power and our enhanced mental processing powers that the combination of machines and humans with good interfaces so that they can share information and interact as seamlessly as possible, that will always do better than trying to invent machines that off on their own develop artificial intelligence and leave us behind. So I think the second half of the 21st century and this book is only about the first half of the 21st century will be about augmented intelligence in which the symbiosis between the A.I. of our machines and the augmented intelligence of ourselves try to get integrated seamlessly by a continuous process of better human-computer interfaces, which now were looking at graphical point and clicks on a screen. But if it can all be done by voice and telepathy or whatever, we can meld more seamlessly with our machines. But youve now taken me on a path thats far beyond either my pay grade or my imagination. [MUSIC PLAYING]

One of the things that is implicit in the conversation were having here, though weve questioned it a few times in a to-be-sure way, is whether or not we will understand what it is were doing. And there are no massive technological leaps humanity has made without tremendous unintended consequences, and thats particularly true when were dealing with things as complex as genetics, as our own brains. And so one thing that seems true to me here is that it may be real fun to be part of the humanity that exists on the other side of the long period of CRISPR trial and error, but it may really not be fun to be part of the humanity that exists in the middle of it when were trying things and we think we understand them. Like lets say we turn down the genes for anxiety, and it turns out people in that class not that anxious but really unmotivated, like really unmotivated and lethargic. Theres a real chance for CRISPR screwups that we thought things were doing one thing and we didnt understand as you say with memory, that its actually a really important part of creating a psychologically coherent person that you can reshape your memories to fit a cohesive story about your own life in which you are the hero and not just the villain. Thats a pretty scary piece of all this to me.

I think the unintended consequences is the good Pause button we should have each step of the way down this slippery slope because youre right. When you start editing out anxiety, how many fewer podcasters will there be on the planet? Or if you edit out depression, how many fewer Hemingways will there be on the planet? We dont want to go marching in a direction unless we think through and even test out what are some of the consequences going to be. And so that, to me, argues for the cautious and go slow approach, which is first lets do things that we truly know are health issues that are legitimate like sickle cell or Huntingtons. And lets do them carefully so we dont mess around with other genes. And as we go step by step, preferably hand in hand, we can avoid doing a massive cock up like an invention of a Facebook, something thats supposed to connect us but turns out to divide us, and has some genetic unintended consequence.

But I think theres another step there that we need to think about societally. So lets take the vaccines that were all dealing with now. Were not in a free-market vaccine world. I mean, theres no doubt that rich people who understand how to game systems and have people like clicking on the Refresh button, that richer people are getting vaccinated at a somewhat faster rate than poor people. That is happening. But nevertheless, we did not do this such that you can just walk in and if youre willing to pay 10x the vaccine cost or 200x the vaccine cost, you get it. Instead, its being apportioned out to state governments, and they are apportioning it out according to some criteria, and people are arguing over the criteria. But broadly, thats creating some curbs on the system. I mean, does this argue for a world where these sorts of advances come out more like that? If, for instance, if we dont have enough supply, if the price is too large, then maybe this doesnt get accepted by the FDA. Or if we do have it, it gets rolled out to certain people in certain cases. In California right now, they are apportioning double the vaccine allotment to counties that are lower on their Healthy Places Index. Maybe you actually have some level of reverse distribution. If were going to come out with something here that seems like it has a potential to increase inequality, you actually roll it out in a way where more disadvantaged communities get more access to the treatment. Now, obviously this would be easier within a nationalized or a single-payer health-care system, but I feel like this actually forces you into questions like that, much more structural questions than even just safety and cost questions.

Yes, absolutely, and the good thing about this vaccine rollout is weve been able to wrestle with these questions. And I think in some ways its been very good because despite the fact that you say maybe some rich people can get it first I just talked to one of the richest people I know yesterday, David Rubenstein, and he lives in Maryland. He said, I finally got my first dose of the vaccine, and hes chair of the board of more hospitals and colleges than you can imagine. So generally we have made it so that fewer people have jumped the queue by greasing the palms and spending money than you might have expected if you had guessed six months ago how is this going to happen? We can do these things by policy. Weve just learned if we decide we have the political will to have distribution of the societys goods done not simply by bidding it up and then eBay of a free market but doing it by some sense of distributive justice that we decide politically to do. Our problem is not that it cant be done. Our problem is our politics doesnt always allow it to be done this way, which is why I push back against what I call the free-market genetic supermarket of getting enhancements. Its no, lets have society decide how were going to allocate these resources when it comes to something so basic as the capabilities of life.

This actually brings me to something bigger Ive been reflecting on and struggling with. There are a series of technologies that we can see coming right now. CRISPR is one of them. A.I. is one of them. I think a lot about lab and clean-based meats. I think a lot about some of the climate and transportation technologies. And it seems to me we have to have political ideologies that are a little more oriented to how we want to think about these. And so let me ask the question this way. Youre a broadly progressive guy, but youve spent years now writing biographies of technologists and scientists, going back to da Vinci but also to people in the modern era like Steve Jobs and Jennifer Doudna too. How would you characterize the way todays liberalism thinks about technology and technologists?

I think unfortunately, whether its on the left or on the right, theres been a few things happening. One is a knee-jerk antiscience sometimes or antiexpert thing. Secondly, we dont revere the scientific method as much. Its something why I admire you and your work in your podcast is you say, OK, lets actually analyze the evidence and revise our theories rather than have an ideology that gives us our theory and then we cherry pick evidence, which is the way its been happening so much now. And when we get into a world in which even wearing a mask or using a vaccine or climate change becomes an ideological issue rather than something that should be assessed using the scientific method of having a theory, gathering evidence, revising the theory when the evidence tells you to, thats a huge problem of our society. And then we get to the problem sometimes of modern liberalism. Theres either the neoliberal problem, which is lets let the market figure out some of these issues such as what genetic enhancements which kids can have. Theres also the antimarket sentiment that can say we dont want companies and corporations to have patents and to advance these things, at which point you really crush the advancement of turning basic science discoveries into inventions and products that could improve our lives. So it comes to me to be more of an argument for a nonideological infusion into our body politic where we all pause a little bit from our positions and say lets be guided by some evidence before we decide that Florida is doing something wrong or right or California is or New York is or whatever. Lets gather more evidence and have some more theories.

I agree with you on the examples you just gave, but Im going to shatter your nice conception of me. I think Ive moved to wanting a more ideological infusion in the body politic when it comes to politics, and I mean that in this way. I am at least circling the theory that progressivism has become a little bit antitechnic because it isnt imaginative enough about changing the context in which technologies are driven and funded but then also rolled out and distributed. And so when people see the story of technology being that some founder, usually like a young white guy, makes a bazillion dollars and rolls something out, and then their incentive is always to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then the world has more concentration of power, and you have people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey making these tremendously consequential decisions about who can speak and who cannot. It drives a kind of turning away from technology, not just from technologists. But at the same time, almost everything I care about from health-care quality and access to climate change to animal suffering to economic dignity, the politics get a lot easier if we really get the right technological advances and we get them quickly and we distribute them well. And so one of my concerns is I think you want a kind of techno-optimistic progressivism but one that really thinks then about the distribution and the regulation, and instead what youre getting is a kind of techno-pessimistic progressivism because there have been such disappointments on the distribution and the regulation.

And I think the reason is people have become convinced that government is the problem, that it screws things up at all times. And my hope, my fervent hope, is not just Joe Biden but its in Jeff Zients and Ron Klain and whoever he may be bringing in that might actually say were going to actually triple the amount of vaccines we have out by next month. Were actually going to deliver it in ways that are fair. And if people see that government and politics can work again I think government and politics is just as important as technology. We should celebrate them both. We should be techno optimists, but we should also be political optimists. Meaning if we have the will as a society, we should have the political tools to implement what we do, and thats been knocked out of us since the age of Reagan, not just on the right but on the left. And so Im looking for us to believe that our politics can work again to solve the big issues youre talking about, which mainly are issues of equity and climate change and justice and distribution of societys goods.

Lets do some book recommendations before I lose you here. You, I think, have become one of the great biographers of our time. What is your favorite biography?

Favorite biography out now is The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which I dipped into again because I find that Teddy Roosevelts progressivism and trying to do a Square Deal for the American people and making into a bully pulpit and then the schisms youre having in the Republican Party of how to fight it seem so timely now.

How about your favorite book about your hometown, New Orleans?

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, which is a gentle little fable talking about a man in the neighborhood I grew up who is on a search and looking for clues not a search for great scientific discoveries or the next stock tip but a search for why are we here? and what are we doing? and what is our role in this cosmos?

Whats the book you read with the most professional envy?

Not too envious because the person is no longer with us, but when I read Horace Freeland Judsons The Eighth Day of Creation, I almost paused in writing the book that I just finished because it was so damn good as a journey of discovery in which he inserts himself a little into the tale but not in a bad way. And I say, man, that was a great style he wrote in.

And then finally, always our final question, what is your favorite childrens book?

Oh, by far its Winnie-the-Pooh, and Im still very nostalgic about the last one when Christopher Robin decides he has to put the teddy bear, Winnie the Pooh, away forever, and he holds his paw and tries to explain. I even get choked up thinking about it now. And you always think that somewhere on that enchanted forest a boy and his teddy bear will always be playing.

Walter Isaacson, what a pleasure.

Ezra, thank you so much. [MUSIC PLAYING]

The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roge Karma and Jeff Geld, fact checked by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones, and mixing by Jeff Geld.

See original here:

Opinion | Humanitys Awesome, Terrifying Takeover of Evolution - The New York Times

Exercise does more than build a beach body or help shed post-winter quarantine pounds. It is an integral building block of a healthy life and focused, intentional lifestyle. At the new Evolution and Creation Wellness Studio in Olympia, one-on-one training in fitness, nutrition and overall wellness builds a stronger, happier and healthier you.

During the long months of COVID captivity and winter blahs, most of us have been trapped indoors more than wed like. But when it comes to starting an exercise routine, there are so many questions. When should I begin? Whats the best exercise for my body type or medical background? Why bother at all? The answers to all of these can be found through speaking with a personal trainer. Locally, Brian Evans wants to help.

Evans opened the Wellness Studio in October 2020 as a hub for private one-on-one training. A certified personal trainer for more than 15 years, he fell in love with all types of exercise at a very young age. To date, he has participated in numerous 5K events, marathons and Iron Man competitions. At Evolution and Creation Wellness Studio, he lovingly developed a career that doesnt feel like a job.

Evans caters to young athletes wanting to advance in their sport, clients with special needs, the actively aging and those interested in overall health and wellness, says wife Trista Nesbit-Evans.

Located at 4419 Harrison Avenue on Olympias west side, the Wellness Studio operates by appointment only. A benefit of the appointment only service is the ability to maintain careful Coronavirus protection. A private studio is ideal for people concerned about COVID and safety precautions, says Evans. Evolution and Creation is a controlled environment that is sanitized in between each client and we are able to screen individuals upon their arrival.

And yes, both agree that launching a new small business during such uncertain times is just that. Opening the fitness studio during a pandemic may seem like a risky decision, admits Evans, But we saw it as an opportunity to do something unique in a space we love. Sometimes adverse situations are an opportunity to pursue another path. The stars aligned and our dream location became available. With time off during the shutdown, there was time to make it happen.

At their Wellness Studio, its more than just learning how to use equipment. Evans focuses on food choices, lifestyle changes and ways to improve day-to-day living. New clients can receive a complimentary consultation by emailing evolutioncreation@yahoo.com, messaging them through Facebook or by calling 360.888.9424.

This area is a perfect fit for their growing clientele. Olympia is a very active community of people who run, bike, ski, snowboard, water ski and more, says Evans. People are health-conscious and like to stay in shape so that they can do what they love. Gyms and private studios are a big part of our community that offer yoga, Pilates and personal training.

Getting fit is more than about losing weight. Exercise helps us maintain mobility and balance and does wonders for our mental health as well. Doctors explain that: People who exercise regularly tend to do so because it gives them an enormous sense of well-being. They feel more energetic throughout the day, sleep better at night, have sharper memories, and feel more relaxed and positive about themselves and their lives.

The doctors also agree that: Regular exerciserelieves stress, improves memory, helps you sleep better, and boosts your overall mood. And you dont have to be a fitness fanatic to reap the benefits. Research indicates that modest amounts of exercise can make a real difference. No matter your age or fitness level, you can learn to use exercise as a powerful tool to deal with mental health problems, improve your energy and outlook, and get more out of life.

All of which echoes the Evans familys dedication. We believe that health and wellness are key to achieving your goals and the life you want! Its time to make your way back into the gym; self-care is the best investment in yourself.

When youre ready to face the outside world once again, start by calling 360.888.9424. Then dust off your gym bag, dig out a water bottle and head over for a 30- or 45-minute individualized session tailored to your needs, hopes, ability and desires. Whether starting out (creation) or refining (evolution), theyre the Wellness Studio for you.

Excerpt from:

Evolution and Creation Wellness Studio in Olympia Develops a New You - ThurstonTalk

Over the last year, the decentralized finance space has been making waves in the financial sector, building on blockchain technology to decentralize a multitude of banking services. The adoption of DeFi services has been steadily on the rise, and all kinds of assets are making their way onto the blockchain.

With nonfungible tokens popularizing digital art ownership representations, blockchain technology is creeping into the most unexpected places, and DeFi is fuelling its expansion. These unique and sometimes quite valuable tokens are especially relevant today, with art galleries closed due to restrictions pertaining to the global pandemic and cultural experiences now taking place online more than ever before.

During 2020, DeFi saw an explosion in the kinds of ways liquidity can be generated, with marketplaces for financial products, community-based social and governance tokens, and unique art pieces. Today, a significant amount of Bitcoin (BTC) is used as a store of value, but that isnt what it was created for. Slow transaction times, high fees and a history of rising value hinder Bitcoins use as a payments system, but that hasnt stopped the blockchain industry from creating others.

The advent of programmable smart contracts catalyzed the formation of our modern decentralized finance ecosystem, making financial services accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The expensive overheads of centralized banks have made international transfers slow and uneconomical for most use cases. However, by implementing a set of interweaving protocols, decentralized finance delivers alternative ways of distributing value to different communities across the world.

The traditional financial system works for most, but it could be doing a lot better. While blockchain isnt quite ready to take the mantle from it, todays decentralized networks have big ambitions, and as access to digital assets continues to improve, people around the world are increasingly engaging with the global economy sans trusted intermediaries, banks or lawyers. With more development resources allocated to DeFi systems than ever before, blockchain is the next frontier for any financial services company worldwide.

The internet has changed how data and information flow across the world, and this evolution of communication channels has had a profound effect on the banking system. As the world begins to shift to platforms that offer quicker registrations, faster service and more reliable products, the ways of centralized banking stick out in stark contrast.

Smart contract platforms allow people to interact with several decentralized applications using a single financial identity. With nearly 2 billion people on the planet not having access to financial services, lowering the barrier for entry is in everyones best interests.

In fact, even some centralized banks have started offering cryptocurrency custodial services, allowing users to store their cryptocurrencies in a secure manner with a party that can be held responsible for its security. While this might seem like it goes against the ethos of decentralization and blockchain, centralized custodial services might actually be beneficial for the broader industry.

Brian Kerr, CEO of the Kava DeFi platform, told Cointelegraph: To me, having a bank use Kava on the back end to deliver loans and great APYs safely to their users is a natural progression of banks, finance and the evolution of fintech services.

According to Kerr, holding cryptocurrencies is much scarier for the average citizen than fiat, since transfers cannot be reversed, making errors all the more costly. I believe banks supporting digital asset custody is a great step to making crypto available to mainstream users, he said.

However, as fintech companies continue to improve their products and services to provide better experiences to the end-user, the current schema for development hasnt been altered much in the last few decades. Furthermore, as pointed out by Anton Bukov, co-founder of the 1inch decentralized exchange aggregator, as banks start to provide huge amounts of stablecoin liquidity to DeFi platforms, APY for lending and borrowing will decrease in the future.

Over time, networks have evolved to cater to different needs, and with Web 3.0, blockchain isnt just decentralizing power in financial systems; its redefining value. In the near future, these systems are likely set to grow stronger and will eventually be seen as a valuable proposition for all kinds of businesses.

The introduction of automated market makers was a critical factor contributing to both decentralized finance and blockchains overall growth during 2020. Before AMMs, decentralized exchanges werent nearly as popular as they are currently. Instead of using order books to match trades in a decentralized manner, AMMs make users trade with a smart contract, improving liquidity and removing counter-party risk.

With decentralized exchanges like Uniswap occasionally reporting volumes higher than Coinbase Pro, theres talk of whether centralized exchanges are sustainable in the long run. However, while DEXs have certainly improved over the last couple of years, replacing order-book exchanges doesnt appear to be on its agenda.

Centralized exchanges will always have a leg up in terms of user experience, creativity and trust with their user base, said Kerr, noting how centralized exchanges offer services that are essential to the space, such as fiat on-ramps, regulatory compliance and better mobile app user experiences.

While trading fees have become increasingly competitive, so too have the services offered by cryptocurrency exchanges. From initial exchange offerings and staking to lending and borrowing services, exchanges could begin to defend their positions by increasing margins from other lines of business and face competition from their decentralized counterparts. Just as banks dont earn on deposits, they earn on the back-end services and cross-selling of other financial products so too will centralized exchanges as the industry advances, Kerr said. Bukov added:

In a nutshell, an AMM consists of token pair pools, where their ratio in the pool determines the price of the individual tokens. Uniswap is currently the most popular AMM DEX, allowing anyone to join liquidity pools for any token pair. This provides liquidity to the pools while pushing some risk to participants for a share of returns.

As AMMs become more and more complex, some platforms have even incorporated features such as multi-token liquidity pools and more efficient algorithms for calculating asset prices. Unlike IEOs, there are no gatekeepers preventing someone from launching a token or platform, and while this can be exploited by users with malicious intent, it could lead to some very interesting projects over the years to come.

While most DeFi applications currently run on Ethereum, interoperability is slowly becoming a reality. This will give developers the freedom to choose different platforms to best suit their individual decentralized applications. With platforms like Cosmos and the Substrate-based Polkadot, developers can now even create interoperable blockchains tailored to their applications requirements.

Today, developers rely on monolithic layer-one blockchains that provide open smart contracting platforms. These platforms try to do everything well and nothing great, said the Kava CEO. In the future with interoperability, these platforms will remain useful for prototyping, but developers will select the most specialized and optimized services for their app and use cases.

One of the biggest trends of late 2020 was the heightened demand for access to Ethereums liquidity and economic activity on other blockchain-based protocols. From wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) to blockchain-based data storage, the space has seen a surge in activity on cross-chain platforms.

For example, Kava built with the Cosmos framework has seen significant growth, offering collateralized loans and staking opportunities for various cryptocurrencies. The platform uses its Kava token for governance and to secure the network through staking.

Such governance tokens enable network participants to vote on critical parameters such as the systems global debt limit, collateral ratio and savings rate. In cases where the system is undercollateralized, the Kava token even acts as a reserve currency to be minted and sold until the system is recollateralized.

Related:Ethereum network in a fee spin: Can the Berlin upgrade save the day?

Both Ethereum and Cosmos require a significantly higher number of validators per chain than Polkadot. Compared to Ethereums 111 validators per shard, Polkadots claim of offering equivalent security at a minimum of five validators per chain requires more analysis.

Polkadots low minimum number more easily allows for collusion between validators for individual parachains, and the DOT slashed from malicious validators is slashed from nominators as well. Along with the lack of a minimum stake requirement, this could lead to some risky situations from a nominators perspective.

Decentralized finances growth has been unprecedented and overwhelming. Monthly DEX volumes have crossed $55 billion, which is also how much the total stablecoin market capitalization currently is. DeFi outstanding debt is over $9 billion, but decentralized finance is still a toddler against the broader financial services industry.

With fresh innovation constantly around the corner, theres good reason to believe accessibility and variability among DeFi applications will improve with time. As gas costs on Ethereum continue to fluctuate, at times to prohibitive levels, blockchain projects are racing to create better scalability solutions such as layer-two protocols. Ethereum 2.0 promises to solve many of the issues currently faced by its predecessor, but how well the network will perform in practice will only be known in time.

Furthermore, as long as gas costs keep fluctuating, DeFi protocols will continue to attempt to poach users and, in turn, liquidity from Ethereum. Another problem the DeFi space faces as an infant industry is its reliance on an experienced user base. Todays applications are usually designed for traders familiar with DeFi systems in mind and offer services that arent always useful to the average consumer, such as auditing tools and on-chain data oracles.

As the industry continues to extend its functions, projects are continually creating better utilities for DeFi tokens. Some platforms now even allow using nonfungible tokens as collateral for peer-to-peer loans, increasing the liquidity of these digital collectibles to the level of any other monetized asset.

I believe strongly in the future of NFTs as a primitive or financial construct. However, NFTs today are mostly stupid, said Kerr. While NFTs are incredibly powerful as a concept and despite bringing the power of blockchain technology to fields such as real estate and intellectual property, DeFi needs deep, liquid markets to consider a collateral asset useful. It will be a long time before NFTs are useful as collateral in DeFi. By definition, NFT markets are very illiquid and thus make for horrible collateral, he added.

According to 1inch co-founder Bukov: Decentralized Finance projects should issue NFTs, sell them at auctions, and donate a significant part of profits to charity. DeFis progress over the last few years shows promise for its future, but while DeFi has accomplished a lot in its brief ongoing lifespan, its best years are likely yet to come.

See more here:

ReDeFining growth: Innovative trends impact evolution of blockchain tech - Cointelegraph

Wisconsin grad transfer quarterback Jack Coan (No. 17) looks to be Ian Book's successor as Notre Dame's No. 1 quarterback.(Photo: Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

SOUTH BEND On a day when presumptive No. 1 quarterback Jack Coan opened up about the transfer process that brought him to Notre Dame, presumptive prodigy Tyler Buchner splashed enough promise and precision to get Irish head coach Brian Kellys attention.

Today we started to see some of the rust come off of Tyler Buchner, Kelly said of the early enrolled freshman via Zoom on Saturday after Notre Dame completed practice No. 4 of the 15 scheduled for this spring.

He was much more comfortable out there, threw the ball with a lot more confidence. And I say this in that he hadnt played football for a year. So it was nice to see him out there. He had a smile on his face. He had some confidence.

Its reason for the ND fan base to smile, too, especially if there are more days like Saturday for the 6-2, 215-pound Californian, who transferred high schools to La Mesa Helix for his senior season and a big step up in competition, only to have the state health officials punt on fall competition due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Buchners development this spring and beyond is both perceptually and pragmatically critical to Kelly and offensive coordinator/QBs coach Tommy Rees. That doesnt necessitate an immediate depth chart climb, just an eventual one even if that happens after Coans expected one-year stopover in South Bend.

More significant, though, is the process to which Kelly and Rees have committed, not only pushing Buchner forward, but Coan and sophomore-to-be Drew Pyne, too.

Pyne is splitting No. 1 reps these days with Coan, the Wisconsin grad transfer who verbally committed to play lacrosse for the Irish as a high school sophomore and would have done so for football as well, he said, had ND shown any interest in him in the 2017 football recruiting cycle.

I grew up a Notre Dame fan watching Brady Quinn, Jimmy Clausen and Golden Tate, the Long Island product said Saturday in his first virtual meeting with the ND media.

The rooting interest this spring inside the Guglielmino Athletics Complex as well as from the outside looking in is that Coan or one of his challengers will be playing in a modernized offensive structure that mimics that of the other three teams in this past Januarys College Football Playoff.

Make no mistake, Notre Dames ball-control, clock-control, limited-pyrotechnical scheme was a prudent path to get to the 2020 CFP, especially in an offseason compressed by COVID protocols and hiatuses.

But the next step in the programs desired evolution is winning a game or games on the CFP stage, and that necessitated a reformulation with which Kelly is fully on board.

This is about scoring, Kelly said. And so were going to use this spring and preseason to kind of put that together.

Notre Dame was a respectable 30th nationally in scoring, at 30.3 points per game, in 2020 but labored to scratch out 14 points in a 17-point CFP semifinal loss to Alabama on Jan. 1.

The two teams that handed the Irish (10-2) their two losses last season ranked second (Alabama, 48.5 ppg) and third (Clemson, 43.5), respectively, nationally in scoring offense. Ohio State, the fourth playoff team, ranked 11th (41.0).

When we went into last year, we knew we had established a returning offensive line, Kelly said. So we were going to build (the offensive structure) with a returning offensive line and a (returning) quarterback.

And we felt like, with the certainty of the offensive line and the quarterback and not knowing what we had at the wide receiver corps, we were going to commit ourselves to being a team that was going to exert its physicality on the offensive line.

Now we move into 21 with less certainty on the offensive line, less certainty at the quarterback position. And now we know that weve got to score points. So were going to go into this spring and were going to kind of find out where this offense will operate most efficiently.

The quarterbacks wont do that unilaterally. Theyll need help from a wide receiving corps, whose standout so far this spring is the quarterback ND took in Coans 2017 cycle instead of him, Avery Davis, before converting Davis to a non-QB.

Prolific tight end Michael Mayer needs a sidekick in his position group. The offensive line needs to sift through some new options to replace four starters bound for the NFL.

The perceptual piece in how successful, or not, the offense initiative turns out to be goes well beyond curbing the troll population on message boards and Twitter. The only two scholarship offers Notre Dame has extended to QB prospects in the 2023 class so far are two of the most elite Arch Manning of Isidore Newman School in New Orleans and Dante Moore of Detroit King High.

Theres enough mutual interest from both at this juncture that theyll be watching closely how NDs new offensive direction unfolds.

For Coans part in it, hes so far navigated coming in and leading a group of strangers he didnt know in winter workouts and embraced a facet of the game he hadnt had to tap into since his senior season at Sayville (N.Y.) High.

Running the football.

From a passing standpoint, Coan finished 19th nationally in passing efficiency (151.8 rating) at Wisconsin in 2019, the last season in which he and NDs departed three-year starter Ian Book were both healthy and starting.

Book was five spots behind in 24th place (149.1).

But Book rushed for 546 yards that season and 485 more in 2020 with more than 110 carries each of those years. Coan, who missed the 2020 season with a foot injury, left Wisconsin with 71 career carries, good for a net ofminus-11yards.

That after rushing for 2,533 yards and 33 TDs in three seasons as a starter at Sayville.

When I was at Wisconsin, Id rather hand the ball off to (two-time unanimous All American) Jonathan Taylor than me run the ball, the 6-3, 220-pound Coan said. But Im excited to maybe use my legs a little bit here. I feel like Im more athletic than a lot of people think, and Im excited for it.

Added Kelly: Hes big. Hes strong. So running him is certainly going to be a part of our offense and what we ask him to do.

Buchner, incidentally, is perceived to be the best runner of the five QBs on the roster, a group that also includes early enrolled freshman Ron Powlus III and convalescing junior-to-be Brendon Clark (knee surgery).

Hes also the most curiosity-stoking of the five, but not yet the most relevant. And if that never happens in 2021, he and Notre Dame will both be fine.

Thats not to minimize the critical juncture the program finds itself at in terms of quarterback development and offensive evolution. Its real and palpable.

But so is the makeover Kelly has committed to. So are the aspirations hes giving a voice to about getting back to the CFP sooner than later.

The next 11 Irish spring practices wont come close to solving all the questions that need answers before the 2021 season kicks off with a Sept. 5 road date at Florida State.

But offensive progress, even amidst some growing pains, matters. Innovation matters. Baby steps matter.

Even big days by the current No. 3 quarterback on the depth chart matter. For the moment and for where they could lead.

Go here to read the rest:

Analysis: Look beyond the QB derby to the process driving Notre Dame's offensive evolution - IndyStar

PHOTO:SwapnIl Dwivedi | unsplash

Theres no way were going back to the working practices and working environments of the pre-COVID era. Every survey conducted shows the vast majority of employees want to spend at least some time at home each week, with many preferring to work entirely at home.

We all pulled together to make work productive in 2020, with the clear understanding that it meant the difference between survival and extinction for businesses, and therefore for our jobs. As we progress into 2021, these new working practices are being formalized under the banner of the hybrid workplace (or hybrid workforce).

Digital tools and online working practices will be crucial elements in the hybrid workplace, and as digital workplace practitioners, we have an important opportunity to shape how all this evolves.

The starting point is to understand whats involved in shifting to the hybrid workplace.

The Hybrid Workplace Framework developed by my firm, Step Two, provides a top-down structure to the many changes and decisions involved in the shifts currently underway.

The framework combines four elements stance, leadership, management, enablement to create a clear vision of the desired end state for the hybrid workplace. More than just aspirational statements, it gives concrete guidance on the overall approach that will be taken.

For example, a business may have this overall objective: We will be providing the vast majority of our workforce the opportunity to work flexibly between the office and home, with the exception of those business areas that must operate on-site. That must be backed up with clear guidance on how common challenges and needs will be addressed, such as: All employees must have a safe and productive work environment. If for any reason thats not at home, then come into one of our offices.

The leadership team must spearhead the hybrid workspace, with each leader addressing aspects that fall into their area of responsibility. Leaders will need to communicate early and often about hybrid working directions, as they did during the pandemic itself.

Leaders will also need to shift their personal working practices to visibly match the changes happening in the workforce as a whole. This will allow them to work productively with others in the new hybrid workplace.

Management of employees will be more challenging in the hybrid workplace, as we will have to move away from the entrenched beliefs that affected remote employees in the past, such as "out of sight, out of mind."

HR policies and procedures as well as other management practices will need substantial changes. Managers themselves will also need training and support to be most effective in working digitally with their team.

Lastly, further enablement will be needed to provide a smooth evolution to a productive hybrid workplace. This includes a much greater focus on digital literacy, beyond the basic change management work that was done when new platforms were rolled out.

Leaders will also need to put in work to further streamline how both digital and physical spaces are designed for on-site and remote workers. Many rough edges and overlapping systems remain that were the products of rapid change in 2020, and these will need to be refined in both employee experience and functionality.

Related Article: 4 Ways HR and Digital Workplace Teams Should Work With Corporate Facilities

The hybrid workplace framework is primarily a model for senior leaders and strategic taskforces, to bring together the many decisions and directions required into one model. So where do we, as digital workplace practitioners, fit in?

As digital workplace practitioners, intranet managers, internal communicators, HR managers, knowledge managers and IT leaders, weve already been deeply involved throughout 2020 in how businesses work both flexibly and digitally.

The opportunity now is to connect up with the more strategic and less reactive activities around the hybrid workplace. We can add value at every level of the framework outlined above.

For example:

While top-level decisions about who gets to work where may be above our paygrade, theres no question that digital considerations now need to pervade all decisions, even those made by senior leaders.

This is a chance for practitioners to build on the kudos we gained during 2020 to accelerate the strategic transformations happening in 2021, and in the process get a little bit closer to the ideal digital workplace weve been striving for.

Related Article: Year One AC: How the Digital Workplace Is Evolving Post Coronavirus

Read more:

How Digital Workplace Practitioners Can Shape the Evolution of the Hybrid Workplace - CMSWire

SCRAM Systems has launched Pattern of Life (POL) mapping with SCRAM GPS location monitoring.

"We knew we had to figure out a way to help our partners in community corrections make the process of decarcerationand tracking this influx of clients with SCRAM GPS in real timeeasier," said Lou Sugo, SCRAM Systems VP of Sales and Marketing. "That's why we developed Pattern of Life mapping."

SCRAM Systems created the client stop pattern report, allowing officers to quickly analyze days' or weeks' worth of data points quickly by consolidating clusters and identifying locations that a client visited. POL puts each GPS point into one of ten mapping categories(home, education, work, travel, services, social, shopping, worship, recreation, and other), summarizing where clients spend their time.

Categories help officers review stops and potential diversions from a client's typical travel pattern. And mapping views give officers access to a variety of mapping options such as daily, weekly, or monthly viewing, helping consolidate client travel behavior over time. This critical information can even help officers identify areas that multiple clients are congregating frequentlyintel that can then be analyzed to determine if that location may warrant additional investigation.

"We found this was a tool that not only helped us establish accurate client daily activities, but really reduced the time we spent reviewing data," said Sam Banks with Pioneer Human Services, a SCRAM GPS service provider in Seattle.

SCRAM GPS provides superior location monitoring forsex and violent offendersanddomestic violencecaseloads. Additionally, GPS location monitoring is an effective alternative to incarceration forcommunity corrections, helping officers more effectively supervise clients while enhancing community safety. Pattern of Life mapping is now available for all SCRAM GPS customers.

About SCRAM SystemsSCRAM Systems is a leading provider of electronic monitoring and software solutions for the criminal justice industry. The company's flagship SCRAM Continuous Alcohol Monitoring (SCRAM CAM) technology, launched in 2003 and revolutionized the way courts, agencies and treatment providers monitor and manage alcohol-involved offenders. In 2013 the company launched the industry's most comprehensive suite of electronic monitoring technologies, which includes SCRAM Remote Breath, SCRAM GPSand SCRAM House Arrest. The company has since launched software solutions including SCRAM Nexus to support the adoption and deployment of Evidence-Based Practices, a mobile client engagement tool called SCRAM TouchPoint, and the first license-based software platform, SCRAM 24/7 to support probation and sobriety programs. SCRAM Systems employs 280 people worldwide and is a privately held company with headquarters in Littleton, Colorado.

SOURCE SCRAM Systems

Home

Continue reading here:

Introducing the Evolution of GPS Location Monitoring - PRNewswire

Subscribe to The Financial Brand via email for FREE!

The banking industry and the world around us has changed faster in the past year than at any time in our collective lives, and will most likely continue to evolve even faster in the future. What was once considered business as usual no longer exists, with the pandemic creating a period of unprecedented turmoil and opportunity.

Financial institutions need to prioritize between short-term and long-term business objectives during a time of economic uncertainty, increased competition, changing consumer expectations, and new technological advances that are opening doors to a complete transformation of the banking ecosystem. The underpinnings of most traditional banking organizations present a challenge due to heavy operating costs, outdated core systems, cumbersome back-office operations and processes, and legacy leadership and culture.

The good news is that traditional banks and credit unions often benefit from strong capital and liquidity positions, scale of existing customer bases, inherit loyalty and trust, management experience and community involvement. The question becomes, can organizations leverage the benefits they have to position themselves for the evolution of banking in 2021 and beyond? Based on research done by the Digital Banking Report, the path to digital transformation may not be the same for small, mid-sized and regional financial institutions as it will be for the largest banks.

Read More:

( sponsored content )

As financial institutions focus on top-line growth during a period of low interest rates, slim margins and diminished demand for credit, many have focused on traditional short-term strategies like cutting costs across the entire organization. In addition to reducing and restructuring investment in new technology and innovation, many organizations also scaled back workforces, eliminated product lines, stopped serving certain segments and geographies, and closed branches.

Recently, financial institutions globally have pursued mergers and acquisitions to create greater scale for future growth while eliminating duplicative costs. In many instances in the U.S. and abroad, the biggest initial benefit from consolidation is the ability to close or repurpose branches, merge back-office functions, and reduce technology spending as a percentage of assets. One of the negative impacts of cost-cutting has been the shift away from less profitable businesses and populations, including less wealthy segments and geographies.

With the onset of the pandemic, financial institutions needed to provide access to virtually all financial services via digital channels. With the restrictions on in-person branches, banks and credit unions needed to transform all processes from account opening and loan applications, to account servicing and sales to digital alternatives. The vast majority of financial institutions globally were unprepared for this shift, Digital Banking Report research found. In many instances, while the ability to conduct banking via digital channels was made possible, the experiences were far from optimal.

According to the World Retail Banking Report 2021, sponsored by Capgemini and Efma, 42% of bank executives polled said that they were not sure how to integrate and streamline mid-, back- and front-office functions effectively, and 46% said they are unsure how to embrace open banking, orchestrate the ecosystem or become a truly data-driven organization. At the same time, consumers adjusted to the lock-down reality by embracing digital experiences that saved them time and money in every industry.

The disparity between the expectations of the consumer and priorities of the banking industry are stark and revealing. The World Banking Report found that, despite being vocal about improving the customer experience, the banking industrys delivery of the key components of a strong customer experience, such as improving transparency and social responsibility, improving customer support and reducing the cost of services falls far short of customer expectations.

To remain competitive, legacy financial institutions will need to increase investment in areas that the consumers value the most. This ranges from improving the speed and simplicity of digital engagement, using data and analytics to provide proactive real-time recommendations, creating new ways of engagement and customer care and exploring value-added ways to make a consumers life easier even beyond financial services. Moving from a product-centric perspective to being customer-centric needs to become part of an organizations culture.

REGISTER FOR THIS FREE WEBINAR

Virtual Financial Coaching Automation: The New Killer Application for AI

How do you deliver quality financial advice cost-effectively and at scale, while complying with regulations and not coming across as a product pusher?

Wednesday, April 21st at 2pm (ET)

The vast majority of traditional financial institutions are not structured for a new digital paradigm shift. As consumers became aware of the possibilities created when data, advanced analytics, new technology and digital communication were leveraged by big tech and fintech firms, expectations rose. And they continue to rise. No longer are institutions able to process data fast enough, due to siloed organizational structures and antiquated analysis tools. Quickly, remote workforces have to collaborate and rethink legacy product alignment, repositioning the offering of services and the commitment of resources around the customer.

According to Capgemini, Banking-as-usual is evolving into a digital-first, seamlessly integrated banking experience via coexisting digital channels and modernized branches. A shift to enhance the customer journey by enriching the last-mile delivery will also occur, with product-centric innovation giving way to customer-centric intelligent transformation.

The expansion of the Banking-as-a-Service model across the entire financial services industry is facilitating value creation as well as value exchange between both financial and non-financial entities, with the consumer being the primary beneficiary. BaaS platforms are democratizing the offering and delivery of products and services, accelerating the innovation process, allowing for faster iterations as consumer behavior changes.

The World Retail Banking Report found that two-thirds of financial institutions are currently using a BaaS platform, with 25% stating that a BaaS platform is in the planning or development stage. This has greatly increased the number of incumbent financial institutions that are collaborating with fintech, big tech and other non-banking entities to increase scale, expand distribution options, create new products/services, reduce costs, diversify revenue streams and gather greater consumer insights.

The ultimate objective of a BaaS model is to increase engagement by the customer beyond checking daily balances. Loyalty and overall customer value can be enhanced as financial institutions move more toward embedded finance that is part of a consumers everyday life. Combining financial services with social media, retail, transportation, hospitality, investment and advisory services increases the potential to provide incremental value to retail consumer segments or even on an individualized basis. Part of this value can also include improved engagement and back-office processes, new products and even new ways of monetizing customer relationships.

From Apple, Google, PayPal and Amazon to retailers, telecom companies, fintech firms and old school providers like Goldman Sachs, the number of organizations entering the banking ecosystem continues to expand. Supported by a massive influx of capital through external investments, partnerships inside and outside financial services are leveraging established name recognition, trust and timely niche offerings to meet the consumers lifestyle needs. What must be realized is that digital engagement is at the core of all of these super app combos.

When consumers were asked what banking services they would use from non-traditional providers, the array of responses were far broader than in any previous research. This indicates increased comfort by consumers to expand their financial relationships beyond the traditional banking system.

The impact of this shift is not readily apparent in research around switching of banking providers. In fact, immediately before the pandemic and since, the percentage of consumers switching primary banking providers has remained at an historic low. This is not an indicator of customer satisfaction, but the reality that consumers do not need to close an account to shift (or expand) a relationship. In fact, even the definition of primary financial institution (PFI) should be reconsidered as many Millennial consumers would not consider their PFI to be their checking account bank, but more likely their payments provider (Venmo, Square, PayPal, etc.).

After years of hesitation around the adoption of cloud computing for a variety of reasons, the realization of the benefits of cloud technology are bringing cloud implementations to the forefront. Part of this acceptance has been because major providers have addressed concerns around security, implementation timelines, costs and ROI rationale. In fact, the World Retail Banking Report found that 32% of banking executives were ready to pilot cloud computing, with 56% saying they would implement cloud at scale by 2022.

The benefits most stated for moving data processing to the cloud include faster innovation, reduced costs, improved productivity, scalability and flexibility and robust continuity management (up-time). For most organizations, the move to cloud computing is only a preliminary step towards complete cloud transformation. As the importance of personalization of the customer experience becomes a business requirement, the need to process data and create actionable insights in real-time will require a strong cloud architecture.

Data sources will only become more prevalent in a digital world where the collection, processing and use of data insights for the consumers benefit becomes imperative. The good news is that, if value is provided to the consumer for the use of their private information, the consumer will share more in the future, making relationships even stronger.

As banking becomes more ubiquitous and embedded in customers lives, legacy financial institutions will be challenged to be at the center of that ecosystem. There will be more organizations vying for that position than ever with many not even being traditional financial organizations. The key will be to use data and insights to provide value in exchange for trust and loyalty. This will also require collaboration with players outside of traditional banking that will provide the reason for consumers to be even more engaged with their banking app than they are today. This will require a robust digital CX layer that makes engagement intuitive and easy.

Read the original post:

The Evolution of Banking: 2021 and Beyond - The Financial Brand