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So when I was getting dressed today, I very quickly put on a lab coat and some cat ears, not even trying to have something coherent, just wanting to have some kind of costume, and then I used some eyeliner to draw some whiskers on my face, so, yeah, that’s my costume, cat in a lab coat, does it make sense? no. who cares. Still wearing the same skirt and striped knee-high socks from yesterday, but that’s just my work clothes.

But then when I got to my office in the physics department, one of my colleagues was immediately like, “Oh! Schrödinger’s catgirl!”

It both was and was not a coherent costume until someone observed you and collapsed the wave form.

There are any number of personal qualities that make New York mayoral front-runner Zohran Kwame Mamdani's political prominence seem improbable: his youth, his inexperience, his socialism, his terrible rapping, his statements of anti-Israel animus in the world's second-largest Jewish city. But the unlikeliest aspect to the State Assembly member's meteoric rise may be that an electoral pulse-quickener got anywhere near a position of prominence in a one-party polity.

The default Democrat in jurisdictions where Republicans are rare (they're outnumbered six to one in NYC) isn't a social-mediagenic semi-outsider; it's a dull-as-a-doorknob survivor of internal party jockeying. Think Bill de Blasio (not the Long Island one), or former California attorney general (and, gobsmackingly, secretary of health and human services) Xavier Becerra, not a junior Barack Obama wannabe.

The hapless mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, went from South L.A. activist to perpetual 80/20 winner of a safe House of Representatives seat to the final four in Joe Biden's vice-presidential search before being anointed the Democratic mayoral nominee, surviving a close primary, then waltzing into office. The lucky winner of Biden's veepstakes, Bass's fellow female minority Kamala Harris (don't get mad at my descriptors; they were Biden's stated requirements), was a human word-salad generator who had faced all of one competitive general election before failing her way up to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and being gifted with the 2024 Democratic nomination.

So you could almost forgive the media giddiness for Mamdani—Jon Stewart comparing the candidate to Jackie Robinson, the Pod Saves America bros gushing like 12-year-old girls talking about the Beatles in 1964, and so forth. It can be genuinely exciting, after years of unlovable establishmentarians like Biden, Harris, Hillary Clinton, and various vice presidential nominees named Tim, to encounter someone who can send the ol' thrill back up that leg.

Populist insurgencies, ever aided by the cutting edge of online culture, teach us important things about the major political parties they aim to overturn from within. The early rise of Howard Dean in the 2004 Democratic primaries indicated an anti-war fervor that would not be mollified by the milquetoast flip-floppery of John Kerry. (Barack Hussein Obama would be both the ultimate vindicator and decisive extinguisher of that lamented tendency on the left.) Ron Paul's rEVOLutions revealed similar anti-imperial urges on the right; they also helped midwife the initially robust fiscal conservatism of the Tea Party, whose anti-establishment candidates sent not a small number of thrills up the leg of this very magazine.

But the twin rises in 2015 of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as the most consequential—and thrilling!—outsider change-agents on our two 19th century political parties marked a new if by now pretty long era of explicitly anti-libertarian populism, in which apocalyptic rhetoric about America's doom goes hand in hand with magical thinking about policy fixes, and where facility with memes supplants fluency with policy.

There's a reason Mamdani has been raising hands at rallies with Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.): He mixes Sanders's unapologetic socialism with AOC's youthful, multicultural toppling of a weary Democratic lifer. All three—quite unlike, say, New Jersey gubernatorial front-runner Mikie Sherrill, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and even the eternally oleaginous California Gov. Gavin Newsom—are modern-day Democratic rock stars, able to fill at least small stadiums.

Mamdani's chief opponent, the disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, who has run one of the most lackluster campaigns I've seen this side of Cruz Bustamante, would be lucky to fill a Shake Shack. His selling proposition is not just hold-your-nose-while-voting; it's hold-your-nose-to-block-the-smell-of-your-rotting-husband-he-killed. If voting is best understood as a consumer good, you can see why New York Dems are gravitating toward the head-tilter: In a state represented in the U.S. Senate by Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and a city whose last two mayors were the dreary de Blasio and the backlash-against-lefty-excesses Eric Adams, this may be Democrats' first affirmatively pleasurable experience at the ballot box since Obama.

For those of us on the outside of Team Blue, and for the other 332 million U.S. residents who don't live in (and are sick of hearing about) the Big Apple, here is the tell to watch out for in the coming days: Which prospective victory will Democrats be more fired up about Wednesday, Abigail Spanberger flipping the Virginia governorship away from the GOP, or Mamdani flashing his pearly whites in Gotham? The former is by far the more consequential indicator of the next two years in major-party competition; the latter tells you more about what's percolating under the Democratic hood.

If Mamdani wins the intra-Democratic beauty pageant, then hold onto your wallets. Populism, at least as channeled professionally through major-party politics, demands not results but proof of marketable concept. Why, you can win a high-profile election simply by smiling on social media and promising stuff even Saturday Night Live finds laughable? Get ready for a rent-freezing, billionaire-taxing, teachers union–fluffing, restorative justice–loving socialist near you. And keep the local U-Haul on speed dial.

The post The Democratic Thrill for Mamdani Is a Tell appeared first on Reason.com.

You’ll often hear plastic pollution referred to as a problem. But the reality is that it’s multiple problems. Depending on the properties we need, we form plastics out of different polymers, each of which is held together by a distinct type of chemical bond. So the method we use to break down one type of polymer may be incompatible with the chemistry of another.

That problem is why, even though we’ve had success finding enzymes that break down common plastics like polyesters and PET, they’re only partial solutions to plastic waste. However, researchers aren’t sitting back and basking in the triumph of partial solutions, and they now have very sophisticated protein design tools to help them out.

That’s the story behind a completely new enzyme that researchers developed to break down polyurethane, the polymer commonly used to make foam cushioning, among other things. The new enzyme is compatible with an industrial-style recycling process that breaks the polymer down into its basic building blocks, which can be used to form fresh polyurethane.

Breaking down polyurethane

The new paper that describes the development of this enzyme lays out the scale of the problem: In 2024, we made 22 million metric tons of polyurethane. The urethane bond that defines these involves a nitrogen bonded to a carbon that in turn is bonded to two oxygens, one of which links into the rest of the polymer. The rest of the polymer, linked by these bonds, can be fairly complex and often contains ringed structures related to benzene.

Digesting polyurethanes is challenging. Individual polymer chains are often extensively cross-linked, and the bulky structures can make it difficult for enzymes to get at the bonds they can digest. A chemical called diethylene glycol can partially break these molecules down, but only at elevated temperatures. And it leaves behind a complicated mess of chemicals that can’t be fed back into any useful reactions. Instead, it’s typically incinerated as hazardous waste.

To find something that could work better, the research team focused on finding an enzyme that could be integrated into the process with diethylene glycol. To begin, they tested all the enzymes reported in the literature as capable of breaking down polyurethanes. After testing all 15 of them, only three had decent activity against the polymer they were testing with, and they largely failed to break the polymer down to its constituent starting materials.

So, the researchers focused on the enzyme that had the highest activity, searching for related proteins in public databases and using the AlphaFold database of predicted structures to identify more distantly related proteins that folded up into a similar structure. On their own, none of these worked especially well either. But they turned out to be useful because they could be used to train an AI to look for sequences that could fold up into a similar structure.

A new enzyme

The tool the team started working with is called Pythia-Pocket, which is a neural network that specializes in determining whether any given amino acid in a protein is likely to contact whatever chemicals that structure can bind, along with any other functional features. That was combined with plain old Pythia (also a neural network), which predicts whether any given protein is likely to form a stable structure.

The researchers reasoned that a good candidate for breaking down polyurethane would have a number of features. It would look, structurally, like the enzyme they had already been working with. It would also face a trade-off between having a structure that was ordered enough to form a similar binding pocket that would have enzymatic activity, but not so rigid that it couldn’t flexibly fit around different types of polyurethanes. To strike this balance, the team used a message-passing interface that updated amino acid positions with each pass and balanced optimizing the structure and binding pocket. They called the resulting software GRASE, for graph neural network-based recommendation of active and stable enzymes.

The results were pretty spectacular. Of the 24 most highly rated proteins the software evaluated, 21 of them showed some catalytic activity, and eight did better than the best enzyme we had known about previously. The best of these designs had 30 times the activity of that enzyme.

Things got even better when the researchers mixed in the diethylene glycol and heated the mixture up to 50° C. Under those conditions, the newly designed enzyme was over 450 times as active as the best-performing natural enzyme. It took 12 hours, but it could break down 98 percent of the polyurethane in the reaction mixture. And the enzyme was stable enough that it could be given a fresh mixture of polyurethane two additional times before its enzymatic activity started to wear out.

Shifting from lab tests to kilogram-scale digestion showed the same thing: 95 percent or more of the material was broken down into the starting materials the polyurethane was made from.

The researchers highlight the fact that their tools go beyond simply focusing on the structure formed by the protein, but incorporate information about its function, such as its stability and the amino acids that are likely to interact with the material it’s digesting. And they suggest that these approaches may tell us more about how to get functional proteins by focusing on forming a similar 3D structure.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adw4487 (About DOIs).

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I reviewed a new book about coal and its history for The Nation and I share some excerpts with you:

Arguably, no technology freed the world from the drudgery and cold of premodern times more than coal. It fueled the Industrial Revolution and rising standards of living that transformed what a human life meant after 1800. The cost of this freedom soon meant slaughtered workers, rising carbon dioxide levels, and the threat of planetary ecological catastrophe.

Today, arguably no technology dooms the world’s future more than coal, with its environmental destruction, pumping of carbon dioxide into the air, and dangerous working conditions that still kill from work, pollution, and climate change. The environmental journalist Robert Wyss, in his new book Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal, provides readers an often-dramatic episodic overview of coal in American history, the great paradox between power and destruction that we could escape today, but we choose not to because of vested corporate interests and Donald Trump’s nostalgia for an America where coal burned plentifully and white men like himself ruled the world.

A cheap, plentiful energy source that could power factories anywhere provided enormous financial benefits, and coal revolutionized the global economy. Early factories relied on waterpower, clean in terms of what were then unknown carbon emissions, but limited development to waterways. Coal transformed the geography of industrialization, allowing enormous industrial operations wherever a capitalist wanted to build. It fueled steel and railroads. It heated homes—dirtily, but in a 19th-century working-class home, avoiding the cold took precedence for most family over smoke. The idea of fossil fuels raising standards of living powers the ideology of many of Trump’s energy advisers, who not coincidentally often have vested financial interests in the industry. They ignore or lie about the massive human and environmental cost.

As Wyss reminds readers repeatedly, coal’s horrors showed up quickly. An entrepreneur could easily post a hole in the ground and find workers to dig out the coal. Beginning shortly after 1800, mines began shipping coal to eastern cities. In an era without regulations, where the courts consistently ruled that employers owed workers nothing if they died or were injured on the job because no one forced them to take that particular job, it did not take long for the workers to start dying from cave-ins, gas explosions, and employer indifference to their lives. Wyss juxtaposes the Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876 that celebrated the industrial might of an America running on coal with workers going days without seeing daylight, racial tensions in the mines as companies used Black strikebreakers, and death from accidents.

Unsurprisingly, workers began to organize. The nation’s most infamous early labor organization—the Molly Maguires—were an early response to the terrible conditions in the Pennsylvania mines that became associated with terrorism. Men such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick would stop at nothing to keep their coal-fueled steel mills nonunion, and this allows Wyss to tell the story of the Pinkerton invasion at Homestead, Pennsylvania, during the famous 1892 strike at Carnegie Steel. The United Mine Workers would form in 1890 and provide a more respectable sort of unionism. But over time, the UMWA became part of the machine keeping the nation enslaved to coal. Legendary UMWA president John L. Lewis fought like hell for his men, as Wyss explores, with attention to the details of workplace health and safety driving strikes, but he was also a tyrant and a man who believed himself and his union more centrally powerful to the American future than it turned out to be.

Coal also blackened the nation’s collective lungs, both inside the mines and outside where coal smoke blotted out the sun. Wyss tells the story the early 20th century attempts to clean the nation’s filthy city air of coal smoke, a process often led by women who found political space to take on urban reforms based on gendered stereotypes around motherhood, framing this by protecting their children from polluting industry. They struggled to succeed in a world dominated by an ideology of endless industrial growth. Finally, in the 1970s, environmental movements began taming coal, a story Wyss tells by focusing on the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona. As ever, coal divided Americans, in this case the Navajo on whose land the power plant resided and upon which tribal leaders relied for scarce financial resources.

The post Rolling Coal appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.