Great News From Texas.

All the pots in Pennsylvania.

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1. University of Texas at Austin:

Researchers have discovered an antibody able to neutralize all known variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses that infect other animals.

As part of a new study on hybrid immunity to the virus, the large, multi-institution research team led by The University of Texas at Austin discovered and isolated a broadly neutralizing plasma antibody, called SC27, from a single patient. Using technology developed over several years of research into antibody response, the team led by UT engineers and scientists obtained the exact molecular sequence of the antibody, opening the possibility of manufacturing it on a larger scale for future treatments.

“The discovery of SC27, and other antibodies like it in the future, will help us better protect the population against current and future COVID variants,” said Jason Lavinder, a research assistant professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering and one of the leaders of the new research, which was recently published in Cell Reports Medicine. (Sources: news.utexas.edu, cell.com)

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2. Joshua Rothman:

Arguably, it’s one of the tragedies of humanities education that so much of it occurs between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. We don’t teach people to drive at twelve, when they’re carless; why should we make them read novels about life’s regrets when they have none? Yet there’s a theory behind the assignment of “Middlemarch” to sophomores: it’s that knowledge acquired too early gets stored away. Patterns of thinking established now will be retraced later; ideas encountered first in art will prime us for the rest of life. This sounds chancy and vague, until you reflect on the fact that knowledge almost never arrives at the moment of its application. You take a class in law school today only to argue a complicated case years later; you learn C.P.R. years before saving a drowning man; you read online about how to deter a charging bear, because you never know. In the mid-twentieth century, Toyota pioneered a methodology called just-in-time manufacturing, according to which car parts were constructed and delivered as close as possible to the hour of assembly. This was maximally efficient because it reduced waste and the cost of storage. But the human mind doesn’t work that way. Knowledge must often molder in our mental warehouses for decades until we figure out what to do with it.

Leslie Valiant, an eminent computer scientist who teaches at Harvard, sees this as a strength. He calls our ability to learn over the long term “educability,” and in his new book, “The Importance of Being Educable,” he argues that it’s key to our success. When we think about what makes our minds special, we tend to focus on intelligence. But if we want to grasp reality in all its complexity, Valiant writes, then “cleverness is not enough.” We need to build capacious and flexible theories about the world—theories that will serve us in new, unanticipated, and strange circumstances—and we do that by gathering diverse kinds of knowledge, often in a slow, additive, serendipitous way, and knitting them together. Through this process, we acquire systems of beliefs that are broader and richer than the ones we can create through direct personal experience. This is how, after our first divorce, we find that we can draw on wisdom borrowed from English literature.

Valiant won the 2010 Turing Award, his discipline’s version of the Nobel Prize, for developing ideas that underpin artificial intelligence and distributed computation, in which many computers work together to solve problems. In his book, he contrasts A.I.’s way of learning with ours. An A.I. can be astonishingly smart, and even think intuitively, kind of like a person. But A.I. systems, Valiant argues, are not as flexible as human minds because they are not yet educable. Even the most state-of-the-art A.I.s learn through a rigid process, in which they are trained, at great expense, and don’t really get any smarter after that, no matter how much new information they ingest. It’s as though their minds freeze on graduation day. Yet human beings constantly improve their own minds through an unfolding, open-ended process that connects newly acquired facts and ideas to ones collected long ago. We “combine pieces of knowledge gained years apart” into “theories of considerable complexity that have many and disparate parts.” (Sources: newyorker.com, amazon.com, amturing.acm.org)