Sugar Saves Boron, Pain Reveals Love

RNA is a leading candidate for life's first genetic molecule. One problem with that idea is its backbone sugar, ribose, which is fragile. Heat it and it breaks down into brown goop, the way table sugar turns to caramel. Chemists know one way to protect it: borate, a compound of boron, oxygen and hydrogen, binds to ribose and keeps it stable.

That solution has a weak spot of its own. Lab experiments showing the effect usually use purified ingredients at high boron concentrations, and nature rarely supplies those. Boron minerals dissolve poorly. They tend to crystallise out of water instead of staying in it.

Evidence from the hot springs

Martin Van Kranendonk and colleagues study hot springs at Puga, in the Indian Himalayas, as a modern stand-in for places where life might have begun. The water there is so rich in boron that borate salt crusts crunch underfoot like snow. Even so, it holds only a few percent of the boron concentration used in some purified-ingredient experiments.

In a new Scientific Reports study, the team ran experiments on real minerals, including the Puga crusts. They found that ribose helps borate minerals dissolve and stops solid grains from forming, so more boron stays in solution. The authors describe a two-way relationship: borate protects ribose, and ribose keeps borate available. On this account the sugar helps create the conditions for its own survival.

Sugar from the sky

The ribose itself may have come from space. About four billion years ago, meteorites hitting the young Earth may have delivered around . The Murchison meteorite, which fell in Victoria, Australia, in 1969, smelled strongly of kerosene, and ribose has since been identified in it along with other sugars. With no microbes around to eat them, organic molecules could build up wherever supply outpaced breakdown. Shallow pools concentrated by evaporation are one example.

Nathan Gardels starts with an old issue of New Perspectives Quarterly. About thirty years ago, the magazine he edited asked German thinkers and politicians why nationalism was flaring up again after reunification. Back then, isolated gangs were firebombing immigrants' homes, mostly in the former East. Today, he notes, the same feelings drive parties that win up to 44% of the vote in regional elections, and their strongholds are in the former East.

The diagnosis from the 1990s

Gardels's introduction to that issue called postwar Germany an "alias nation": a country that hid its "soiled soul" inside NATO and the European community and swapped national identity for a rational, liberal order. The filmmaker Hans Jürgen Syberberg pushed the point further. He said intellectuals had favored "the head at the expense of the heart" and that Heimat (homeland) had been forbidden as a subject after the war. When the Wall fell, 15 million East Germans became "orphans" of a state that no longer existed.

The liberal playwright Heiner Müller got to a similar place from the other side. With socialism gone, capitalism "no longer had an alibi" for people who didn't thrive, and the far right took over the role of its harshest critic. Neo-Nazis, he said, follow "the logic of the void." He also predicted that "the decay of the East is only a prelude to the disintegration of the West."

Daniel Cohn-Bendit was then deputy mayor of Frankfurt, a city where 25% of residents were foreign-born. He described East Germans who expected Western living standards overnight, then saw 400,000 refugees arrive and gave their fears "a name and a face." He called for stricter asylum laws, and the old left scorned him for it. Gardels argues that the gap between these grassroots grievances and a European elite that believed "nationalism means war" (Mitterrand's phrase) only grew. Merkel's 2015 decision to admit roughly 900,000 Syrian refugees made it worse.

Maria Popova returns to Martha Nussbaum's 1990 collection Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, which Popova calls the testing ground for Nussbaum's later book on the intelligence of emotions. The question is simple: how do you actually know that you love someone? Nussbaum's starting point is that we deceive ourselves about love, about "who; and how; and when; and whether." She also asks whether looking for a criterion of truth here might itself be a way of deceiving ourselves.

Marcel, Albertine and the surgeon's knife

Her test case comes from Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Marcel has reasoned his way to the conclusion that he no longer loves Albertine. Then he hears that she has died, and the grief that follows shows him at once that he did love her. Nussbaum names the mechanism that fooled him: habit. Habit makes our vulnerability bearable. It hides need, hides how particular a person is (and so how much we stand to lose), and leaves us numb. Marcel thought he was out of love partly because he was used to Albertine.

Nussbaum argues that the intellect can't see past this, because the only comparison it can make is a cost-benefit analysis of the heart. That kind of accounting assumes any loss can be made up with enough of something else. It is a comfort strategy, and it gets in the way of recognising love.

Pain as proof

Danny Kenny's essay starts in a café on the top floor of a music school during his PhD. He was there for a session called Shut Up and Write: eight people working in silence for two or three hours, split into 25-minute blocks with five-minute coffee breaks. He went because he was stuck, and because the coffee was free.

The useful part came during the breaks. Someone asked, "What are you working on?" One woman was three months into rewriting a chapter she hated. Someone else had spent most of the year stuck in the lab. Kenny said he still couldn't narrow down his research question and wasn't sure he could finish the doctorate. Within five minutes people were recommending books and naming colleagues who had done fieldwork on exactly his topic. He says it was more help than he'd had in three months.

The trap and how to break it

Kenny explains the before-and-after with a concept from psychologists Dale Miller and Deborah Prentice: pluralistic ignorance. Everyone in a group privately has the same doubt, and each person reads the others' silence as proof that they alone are struggling. It keeps itself going because nobody says anything. Kenny describes his own version: with only one data point (himself), and with other people's finished chapters set against his drafts, the only explanation he could see was that he wasn't good enough.

To explain why saying it out loud works, he draws on Daniel Coyle's research on groups that outperformed their talent. Coyle says teams get stronger the way bodies do, through repeated "reps" of hard things, including emotional ones like admitting you're stuck. The teams Coyle studied put those moments on the calendar, and over time the reps build .