James' World 2

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After more than 15 months of relentless Israeli air and ground assaults on Gaza, many of the tiny Palestinian enclave’s 2 million residents are homeless and scrambling to obtain basic necessities. If last week’s ceasefire holds, experts caution that rebuilding the devastated territory will take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.

The three-phase ceasefire deal places the reconstruction of Gaza as the final phase, following a permanent end to the war. Dima Toukan, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, says it’s important to acknowledge that this last phase could be a long way off — or never happen at all.

“The path forward beyond the first phase of the agreement is fraught with challenges and remains unclear,” she says.

The United Nations estimates that $50 billion will be required to rebuild Gaza, which occupies an area about the size of Philadelphia on the Mediterranean coast between Israel and Egypt. Even the rosiest of estimates project it would take a decade. But other predictions are much more dire. A U.N. report issued in September estimates $18.5 billion worth of damage was done to Gaza’s infrastructure from the war’s start through the end of January 2024, and that once a ceasefire is reached, “a return to the 2007–2022 growth trend would imply that it would take Gaza 350 years just to restore GDP to its level in 2022.”

Here are five questions about the enormous reconstruction challenges faced by Gaza.

What is the scope of the destruction?

“At least a million people won’t have homes to return to,” says Shelly Culbertson, a senior researcher at the think tank RAND. Most utilities, such as electricity, sewage, water, and communications, are not working in Gaza, and the vast majority of hospitals and schools have been destroyed.

Somdeep Sen, an associate professor of international development at Roskilde University in Denmark, says, “What we have witnessed is not just the material destruction of Gaza but also the destruction of the very fabric of Palestinian life in the enclave.”n October, a year after the war began, the U.N. said Gaza’s human development index, a statistical measure that summarizes a country’s average human development, was expected to drop to a level not seen since 1955, “erasing over 69 years of progress” there.

Who will pay?

The biggest issue may be the most fundamental one: Where will the money come from? For obvious reasons, Israel is an unlikely source. Meanwhile, neither Egypt nor Jordan has the resources or political will to add much, Sen says.

Instead, wealthy Gulf states such as Qatar may have to step in, he says. Even so, “without a large cohort of donors committed to the long-term recovery of Gaza, reaching [the $50 billion] mark will be difficult,” he says.

Even without offering funding, Israel does have an important role to play, Sen says. “How Israel chooses to implement and interpret the ceasefire agreement and subsequently the nature/extent of its military control over the Gaza Strip will determine how much and how quickly the enclave can recover.”

As for funding, Culbertson, who has done extensive work on the West Bank and Gaza, says the U.S. and European Union are also likely to provide funds.

One key issue is whether Israel continues its “dual use” import restrictions for Gaza on items it deems could be used either for legitimate civilian purposes or to make weapons, Culbertson says. “The list … is fairly wide. It includes many materials necessary for reconstruction, like concrete, timber, rebar.”

What will be the biggest challenges?

Simply clearing debris will be a monumental task. Not only are there massive amounts of rubble to contend with, but it will have to be carefully handled for such things as unexploded ordnance, says Mark Jarzombek, an architectural history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jarzombek has studied how cities such as Dresden, Germany — which was gutted by Allied bombing in 1945 — were able to recover after World War II.

War-era buildings were mostly made of brick and wood, he says. “When those were bombed, they left big piles of that stuff,” Jarzombek explains. As a result, postwar Dresden witnessed “brigades of women who would have wheelbarrows and go to the brick piles and then dump them in particular places.”

Not so in Gaza, where buildings are made out of steel and concrete, he says. “In other words, you can’t get just local civilians [to] … take the stuff apart. You need special equipment: You need bulldozers. You need cranes,” Jarzombek says.

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For thousands of years, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioners have checked patients’ tongues as part of a full examination, carefully scrutinizing their color, shape, and coating in an attempt to detect illness. TCM considers a tongue’s color especially telling, and now some researchers, encouraged by recent studies pointing toward a measurable association with health factors, are working to adapt this ancient diagnostic approach to today’s AI-based technology.

TCM remains a controversial topic in the global scientific community. The World Health Organization officially added TCM diagnoses to the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, the global standard for health-information classification, in 2022. But most high-profile studies have treated the topic warily. “Despite the expanding TCM usage and the recognition of its therapeutic benefits worldwide, the lack of robust evidence from the EBM [evidence-based medicine] perspective is hindering acceptance of TCM by the Western medicine community and its integration into mainstream healthcare,” wrote the authors of a 2015 review article on TCM’s prospects. Still, pockets of strong academic interest persist.

In TCM, tongue color “is closely linked to the condition of the blood and qi [a Chinese term often translated into English as ‘vital energy’], making it a primary indicator for TCM practitioners in assessing a patient’s overall health,” says Dong Xu, whose research at the University of Missouri focuses on computational biology and bioinformatics and who co-authored a 2022 study on analyzing digital tongue images. But tongue examination can be highly subjective: it relies entirely on an individual practitioner’s color perception and analysis.

Frank Scannapieco, a periodontist, microbiologist, and oral biologist at the University at Buffalo, says that in Western medicine, no standardized clinical system is routinely used to monitor tongue features, although defined lesions on the tongue can serve as indicators for certain cancers, and some studies have linked tongue appearance to particular diseases such as breast cancer and psoriasis. Elizabeth Alpert, a dental health expert at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, adds that tongue examination is often part of a routine screening for oral cancer by dentists and hygienists, but its accuracy depends on providers’ education and experience in clinical settings.

Massive developments in computing technology are causing some TCM-inspired medical researchers to take a new look at the tongue, however. The authors of a 2024 study in Technologies used machine-learning models to classify tongue colors and predict several associated conditions—including diabetes, asthma, COVID, and anemia—with a testing accuracy of 96.6 percent.A major challenge in previous tongue-imaging studies has been perception bias caused by varying light conditions, says the recent study’s co-author, Javaan Chahl, a roboticist and joint chair of sensor systems at the University of South Australia. “There have been studies where people tried to [diagnose via tongue color] without a controlled lighting environment, but the color is very subjective,” Chahl says.

To address this issue, Chahl and his team developed a standardized lighting system within a kiosk setup. Patients placed their heads in a box illuminated by LED lights, which emitted a stable and controllable wavelength of light, and exposed their tongues.

Chahl and his colleagues collected 5,260 images—both real tongue photographs found on the Internet and additional color-gradient images. They used them to train machine-learning models to recognize seven specific colors (red, yellow, green, blue, gray, white, and pink) at different saturation levels and in different light conditions.

The researchers confirmed that a healthy tongue usually appears pink with a thin white film; they found that a whiter-looking tongue may indicate a lack of iron in the blood. Diabetes patients often have a bluish-yellow tongue coating. A purple tongue with a thick, fatty layer could indicate certain cancers. COVID intensity (in people already diagnosed) can also influence overall tongue color, they found, with faint pink seen in mild cases, crimson in moderate infections and deep red in serious cases.

Next, they applied the most accurate of six tested machine-learning models to 60 tongue images, all taken using the team’s standardized kiosk setup at two hospitals in Iraq in 2022 and 2023. They then compared the experimental diagnoses with the patients’ medical records. “The system correctly identified 58 out of 60 images,” says study co-author Ali Al-Naji, now a medical engineering professor at the Middle Technical University in Iraq.

Al-Naji is now working on narrowing the focus for diagnosis to the tongue’s center and tip. His group is also using a new tongue dataset of 750 Internet images to examine tongue shape and oral conditions such as ulcers and cracks with the deep-learning algorithm YOLO. Eventually, Chahl would like to analyze more than just the tongue—perhaps the whole face.

Tongue color may possibly serve as a helpful biological marker of a person’s health state, but Xu cautions that it cannot stand on its own when it comes to making accurate clinical decisions. “The most fundamental limitation of current tongue-imaging systems is that tongue analysis represents only one component of a complete TCM diagnosis,” he says. And because image labeling is not widely standardized for this type of experiment, he adds, it’s harder to reproduce research findings.

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Eve Lu

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I’ve been reviewing smart smart glasses for years, and while many have shown promise, none have truly delivered detailed visual information in a way that feels natural and untethered. Some, like the Rokid Glasses, come close—but they’re consistently held back by technical shortcomings, clunky controls, and a lack of refinement. The new Meta Ray-Ban Display could be the pair to change that. I had the chance to try them out at a demo event in New York, and I came away genuinely impressed. There’s still more testing to do before I can say if they’re worth $799 (especially with the month-plus waitlist just to book a demo), but based on this first hands-on experience, the potential is clear.

Display: A Full-Color AR View

The Meta Ray-Ban Display’s waveguide display is the best of its type I’ve seen yet, for several reasons. To clarify exactly what that means, I should first explain waveguide display technology.

Displays in smart glasses can be separated into two categories: prism and waveguide. Both use tiny projectors to send an image to your eyes, but they differ in terms of how the image actually reaches your eyes. Prism displays use angled lenses, located behind the front lenses, to redirect projected light toward the eyes, much like a prism. These lenses are bulky, and while you can see through them, they can dim and obscure your view even when the display is turned off. The advantage is that they can show high-resolution, full-color images with a wide field of view. 

Waveguide displays use a single lens with special patterns etched into it. They’re far lighter than prism displays and completely transparent when not in use, but the trade-off is that they have significantly lower resolutions and fields of view. They’re also usually monochrome: Other waveguide-equipped models I’ve tested, including the Even Realities G1, Vuzix Z100, and Rokid Glasses, all have green-only displays.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display solves at least one of those problems. It features a full-color waveguide display, and considering the challenges of the technology, it’s truly stunning. When I tried on the glasses, colors looked surprisingly vibrant, and the picture was quite bright in a reasonably well-lit room. Even though the resolution is only 600 by 600 and the field of view is a tiny 20 degrees, to my eye, menus, text, pictures, videos, and even maps were large and sharp enough to read easily. 

I say eye singular, because the display is only built into the right lens. This could be awkward for users with a dominant left eye, but I didn’t have any difficulty reading it. Moreover, I could easily see everything in front of me, both around the projected image and through the other, clear lens. I couldn’t take them outside to see if the display is still visible against a sunny day, a challenge of waveguide displays.

I’ve used prism smart glasses with bigger, sharper, and more colorful displays before; I’m writing this with an XReal One Pro connected to my laptop right now. However, prism displays are bulky and make the glasses difficult to see through. Even if my laptop wasn’t tethered by a cable to the One Pro glasses, I wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing them while walking around. The Meta Ray-Ban Display is a different beast, and while it wouldn’t be my first choice for remote work or movie watching, I can definitely see myself using it on the go.

The waveguide in the right lens is nearly invisible, which might not seem important unless you’ve tried competing smart glasses. The waveguides on every other pair I’ve used have appeared to outside observers as distinct rectangles with weird, colorful reflections. The actual details of what the displays show couldn’t be seen, but they’ve still been invariably distracting to anyone I talked to while wearing them. On the Meta Ray-Ban Display, I didn’t see a hint of the waveguide from the outside. At least, I couldn’t see it in the lighting of the specific room where I had the demo. It might still be visible under different lighting conditions, but from my early testing, it’s the least outwardly recognizable waveguide I’ve seen so far.

Controls: You Use Your Fingers

 

The Meta Neural Band enables gesture controls (Credit: Will Greenwald)

More than the color display, the biggest draw of the Meta Ray-Ban Display is its controller. It uses what Meta calls a Neural Band, a wristband that uses electromyography (EMG) to track hand gestures. Instead of sensors directly on your hand or a camera array constantly watching it like on the Apple Vision Pro, the Neural Band measures tiny movements on your arm to determine what your hand is doing.

In my short demo, the Neural Band controls worked better than I expected. Gestures are simple: Curve your fingers inward and swipe your thumb up, down, left, and right on the side of your index finger to move the cursor in different directions, pinch with thumb and index finger to click, pinch with thumb and middle finger to go back, double-pinch with thumb and middle finger to sleep and wake the display, and double-tap your thumb against the side of your index finger to bring up the AI assistant. There’s also a contextual gesture where you hold your thumb and index finger together and rotate them, as if turning a knob, which can adjust the volume or zoom in and out, depending on the situation. 

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(Credit: Will Greenwald)

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Race is a concept that categorizes people based on the color of their skin or other physical features. Unfortunately, race is often used to justify mistreatment or to suggest that one group is better than another. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that everyone is an equal child of God regardless of race, ethnicity, background, skin color, or nationality. The Book of Mormon teaches that “all are alike unto God.”

God loves all His children. We are equal in His eyes, and He recognizes our divine potential to progress and become like Him. He wants each of us to return to live with Him and receive eternal life. Our differences bring beautiful variety to our lives. While we may judge one another based on outward appearance, “the Lord looketh on the heart.”

Racism has been a challenge throughout history across many cultures. Latter-day Saints are not immune from the tendency toward racist attitudes and actions. President Russell M. Nelson taught: “The Creator of us all calls on each of us to abandon attitudes of prejudice against any group of God’s children. Any of us who has prejudice toward another race needs to repent!”

What do we know about the origins of the priesthood and temple restriction?

Historical records show that a few Black men were ordained to priesthood offices during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. At least one Black man, Elijah Able, participated in the washing and anointing ceremony in the Kirtland Temple. In 1847, Brigham Young spoke approvingly of the priesthood service of Q. Walker Lewis, a Black elder living in Massachusetts.

Five years later, in 1852, in the Utah territorial legislature, Brigham Young announced that Black men of African descent could not be ordained to the priesthood. The restriction also meant that men and women of Black African descent could not participate in the endowment and sealing ordinances in the temple. However, Brigham Young also stated that Black Saints would eventually “have the privilege of all [that other Saints] have the privilege [of] and more.”

Brigham Young’s explanation for the restriction drew on then-common ideas that identified Black people as descendants of the biblical figures Cain and Ham. The Church has since disavowed this justification for the restriction, as well as later justifications that suggested it originated in the pre-earth life.

There is no documented revelation related to the origin of the priesthood and temple restriction. Church Presidents after Brigham Young maintained the restriction, in spite of increasing social pressure, because they felt they needed a revelation from God to end it.

Church leaders today counsel against speculating about the origins of the restriction. For example, President Dallin H. Oaks has taught: “To concern ourselves with what has not been revealed or with past explanations by those who were operating with limited understanding can only result in speculation and frustration. … Let us all look forward in the unity of our faith and trust in the Lord’s promise that ‘he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female’ (2 Nephi 26:33).”

How did the priesthood and temple restriction end?

President Brigham Young and subsequent Church Presidents taught that the priesthood and temple restriction would one day end. Several affirmed that lifting the restriction would require a revelation from God.

During the period when the restriction was in place, Black men and women received witnesses of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ, joined the Church, and served faithfully.

After praying for guidance, Church leaders in the 20th century made changes to the way the restriction was implemented, opening the way for larger numbers of Latter-day Saints to be ordained and participate in temple ordinances. Presidents George Albert Smith and David O. McKay authorized the ordination of previously restricted ethnic groups in the Philippines and Fiji. And President McKay discontinued an earlier policy requiring prospective priesthood holders in racially mixed South Africa to trace their lineage out of Africa.

Several individuals close to President McKay reported that he prayed to know the Lord’s will regarding the restriction, but did not receive the direction to lift it at that time.

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