Summer Reading from the EDGE Archive

Summer Reading from the Archive Sometimes to understand where we are, it is helpful to remember how the future looked from where we were. From the Edge archive this week, we present two conversations with scientists whose work paved the way for understanding and addressing two of this summer's most startling headlines: extreme weather and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2008, climate scientist Stephen Schneider sat down with us to talk about the weather... and how hard it is to predict in the context of a changing climate. His talk, "Modeling The Future," takes us on a deep dive into the science and practice of climate modeling, its triumphs and pitfalls, and how we can best approach the bedeviling problems that arise from limited knowledge. Next is Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for the discovery/invention of the polymerase chain reaction, whose acronym has been made famous world-wide for its use in the COVID PCR test. In his 2010 talk, "Eat Me Before I Eat You! A New Foe For Bad Bugs," Mullis explained his cutting-edge work, which centered on mobilizing the immune system to fight novel bacteria and viruses. —Russell Weinberger, Edge --------------------------------------------------------------- MODELING THE FUTURE A Conversation with Stephen Schneider [March 2008] Warming is unequivocal, that's true. But that's not a sophisticated question. A much more sophisticated question is how much of the climate Ma Earth, a perverse lady, gives us is from her, and how much is caused by us. That's a much more sophisticated, and much more difficult question. [ [Read...]( ] --------------------------------------------------------------- EAT ME BEFORE I EAT YOU! A NEW FOE FOR BAD BUGS A Conversation with Kary Mullis [March 2010] Now we are starting to work with organisms that are more likely to appear in a hospital, like staph and influenza, and we have our sights on Clostridium difficile, Pneumococcus aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumannii, and an alarming number of other bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. We are also working on influenza, which has a convenient little feature called M2e. [ [Read...]( ] [EDGE.ORG]( Copyright (c) 2021 by Edge Foundation, Inc., 260 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10001. All Rights Reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](