Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 4, 2019

An argument to find out what happened with the world's first CRISPR babies; Commentary on the relationship between organizational dysfunction and technology safety; Workers uncover a century old message in a bottle; New black hole research is consistent with previous findings; and a Steem essay discussing the phrase, blockchain interoperability

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1. Opinion: We need to know what happened to CRISPR twins Lulu and Nana - The University of Pennsylvania's Kiran Musunuru argues that the facts around the world's first CRISPR babies, Lulu and Nana, need to be revealed to the general public. The article says that a year ago, He Jiankui announced that the twins had been born and were gene-edited for resistance to the HIV virus. The researcher, however, has made only one public appearance since then. In that appearance, Musunru says that He presented only superficial information, and claimed to have submitted a paper for publication. A year later, however, the alleged paper remains unpublished. Musunru says that he read a manuscript from He's public presentation, and observed a number of problems, including the fact that the twins may not be resistant to HIV, and could be susceptible to other illnesses such as cancer, because of a phenomenon called, mosaicism where some genes were edited one way, but others were edited differently, or not edited at all. Because He is under house arrest, and because of ethical and safety implications, Musunru doubts if the work will ever be published in a respectable scientific journal, so he says that it's up to the rest of the scientific community to figure out what happened and to take steps to ensure safety and ethical protections for potential subjects of future research.


2. How Can Leadership Best 'Mind the Gap' in Large Organizations? - Harvard's James Heskett notes a recurring problem in business, when factions in an enterprise have contrasting goals, and it results in safety issues for consumers. Starting with the Boeing 737 Max, Heskett points out that the sales organization did a great job at selling the plane, but a whistle blower alleges that the agreed prices led management to put pressure on the engineering group to prioritize cost-cutting, and even to reject a safety device that was proposed by the engineers. Heskett also points out that this doesn't seem to be an isolated incident, because similar allegations have recently lodged against Volkswagen. Speculating that this problem may be endemic in large organizations, Heskett wonders whether Toyota's management principle, Jidoka - which is the principle that any employee can stop the production line out of safety concerns, could be applied at the corporate scale to mitigate this phenomenon.


3. MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE - On July 3, 1907, workers who were constructing a wall at New Jersey's Montclair State University slipped a note into a bottle, and nestled it into a gap between bricks. 112 years later, other workers found the note. It said, "“This is to certify that this wall was built by two bricklayers from Newark, N.J., by the names of William Hanly and James Lennon, members of No. 3 of the B.M.I.U. of America.”" The bottle that contained the message was made for ale or porter, and manufactured by the Consolidated Bottling Co. According to census records, the workers who left the message were probably first generation Irish immigrants. The school plans to keep the note, the bottle, and other artifacts on exhibit, and also hopes to find descendants of Hanley and Lennon, presumably to inform them of the find. h/t archaeology.org


4. Black Hole Singularities Are as Inescapable as Expected - Describing the "singularity" within a black hole as the place where general relativity breaks down, and a deeper quantum theory needs to be discovered, this article describes two papers by Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative (BHI) exploring the mathematics to describe black holes in a quasi-realistic model of a black hole. It was already known that the black hole model had outer and inner horizons, boundaries from which matter and light cannot mistake, but the team wanted to learn if the model would exhibit a central singularity. If so, they also wanted to know if it was a spacelike singularity, where time seems to break down, or a timelike singularity, where space seems to break down. They found that the blackholes they examined did, in fact, contain central singularities, and that the singularity was spacelike, which is consistent with previous assumptions that matter and light cannot escape from the singularity. Team members on the Black Hole Initiative include Paul Chesler, Ramesh Narayan, and Erik Curiel.


5. STEEM ADSactly Crypto: What Is Blockchain Interoperability? - In this post through the @adsactly account, @chekohler writes that the jargon in the blockchain world can be overwhelming, and discusses the term, blockchain interoperability. The post notes that this term is rising in prominence as the Ethereum istanbul upgrade approaches. At present, most blockchains exist in complete isolation from the others, but if the blockchains could all be aware of each other, that would lead to a new degree of increased decentralization. The post defines blockchain interoperability as, "having a language that all chains can understand which would result in the free exchange of information or value across all blockchain networks without the need for intermediaries". This would be valuable, it says, because it would enable the peer to peer exchange of information and value on a much wider scale, and it would also open the door for better decentralized exchange networks. (5% beneficiary settings have been applied to this post for @chekohler and @adsactly.)

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