Peter Diamandis: Abundance -- The Future Is Better Than You Think I was in a coffee shop recently and overheard a young couple discussing whether or not it was morally responsible to bring a child into today's world given all of the global challenges we face. What's curious about their question and the dark contemporary mood it represents is that in a very measurable way, the world is better off than its ever been. I'll start with poverty, which has declined more the in the past 50 years than the previous 500. Over the last 50 years, in fact, even while the population on Earth has doubled, the average per capita income globally (adjusted for inflation) has tripled. We're not just richer than ever before, we're healthier as well. As Steven Pinker has lately made clear, since the middle ages, violence on Earth has been in constant decline. So this brings us back to the question of our contemporary mood. Turns out there are about a dozen reasons. For starters, the amygdala. These days, we are saturated with information.
Mobile Inorganic chemists know as a rule of thumb that if a volatile compound is a good ligand for metal ion coordination complexes, it probably smells strongly; this observation has lead to recent advances in artificial olfaction ( 1 ). The only notable exceptions to this rule are CO and NO, which are produced endogenously as neural messengers ( 2 ) and, therefore, elicit no olfactory response. In general, the human olfactory system is extremely sensitive to amines and thiols (good ligands for metal ions) but not to alcohols (which are only weak ligands; ref. 3 ), as shown in Fig. 1 . For example, one can smell methylthiol at less than 1 ppb, methylamine at 18 ppb, but methanol only above 100 ppm, and methane is undetected even at 10 6 ppm. Thus, the most natural explanation to account for this odorant affinity difference is coordination to a metal ion bound in an OR. Figure 2 ( ) Secondary structure prediction of hOR o2d2 using the HMM for the native sequence. Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5