ARDD 2020: from aging mechanisms to interventions

Aging is emerging as a druggable target with growing interest from academia, industry and investors. New technologies such as artificial intelligence and advanced screening techniques, as well as a strong influence from the industry sector may lead to novel discoveries to treat age-related diseases. The present review summarizes presentations from the 7th Annual Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD) meeting, held online on the 1st to 4th of September 2020. The meeting covered topics related to new methodologies to study aging, knowledge about basic mechanisms of longevity, latest interventional strategies to target the aging process as well as discussions about the impact of aging research on society and economy. More than 2000 participants and 65 speakers joined the meeting and we already look forward to an even larger meeting next year. Please mark your calendars for the 8th ARDD meeting that is scheduled for the 31st of August to 3rd of September, 2021, at Columbia University, USA

Katrina and the Waves: Bad Organization, Natural Evil or The State

REJECTED - publisher's policy states that PDF cannot be archivedThis paper considers Deleuze and Guattari's notions of the smooth and the striated as a basis for rethinking the events of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans in September 2005. It is argued here that popular narratives of Katrina, and perspectives on disaster from the field of organization studies, have tended to be conditioned by a long-standing and restrictive dualism between 'man' (organization) and 'nature' (disorganization), and an associated, anthropocentric moral framework. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari are seen to offer a set of concepts relating to spatial and material patterns of organization which allow us to move beyond such a conceptual dualism towards other ways of thinking the events of Katrina. Furthermore, they are also understood to have provided the basis for some radical reflections on the role of the State in the reproduction of a particular material and conceptual logic of disaster management and planning. According to an application of their concepts of the smooth and the striated, Katrina is described here, not according to notions of natural disorder, but as a Deleuzo-Guattarian 'war machine', operating according to an alien mode of organization to that of the State. It is this encounter, between two irreducibly different modes of organization, which is seen to account for both its extreme 'catastrophic' effects, and for some of the unusual organizational phenomena occurring in its aftermath. In contrast to some recent papers in the field of organization studies that have tended to treat Deleuze and Guattari's work in abstract and theoretical terms, this paper proposes to make a distinctive contribution to this Deleuzo-Guattarian 'turn' by situating, or putting to work, their thought in the context of Katrina as an empirical event

The social psychology of "pseudoscience": A brief history.

The word 'pseudoscience' is a marker of changing worries about science and being a scientist. It played an important role in the philosophical debate on demarcating science from other activities, and was used in popular writings to distance science from cranky theories with scientific pretensions. These uses consolidated a comforting unity in science, a communal space from which pseudoscience is excluded, and the user's right to belong is asserted. The urgency of this process dwindled when attempts to find a formal demarcation petered out, and the growth of social constructionism denied science any special access to truth. The reaction to this led to the science wars, which ushered in a new anxiety in the use of 'pseudoscience', especially from the least secure branches. But recent writings on the disunity of science reveal how the sense of support drawn from it may be based on an illusion, creating a disunity of pseudoscience as well as of science