CRISPR Will Likely Not Solve Bird Flu New research shows that CRISPR, the gene editing technique, could make chickens more resistant to bird flu. But its use raises many ethical and scientific issues By Carol Cardona & Michelle Kromm Alexey Rezvykh/Alamy Stock Photo Recently, a group of scientists announced a breakthrough approach to combat Highly… Continue reading CRISPR Will Likely Not Solve Bird Flu
Why Is This Shape So Terrible to Pack?
Mathematicians initially believed that it’s a circle. Then, in 1934, a German mathematician named Karl Reinhardt found something worse: an octagon with rounded edges. When those arcs in the corners are drawn using hyperbolas, the total coverage is about 90.24%. The difference between this and the circle’s 90.69% is tiny, but it’s mathematically vital. Reinhardt… Continue reading Why Is This Shape So Terrible to Pack?
How Is Science Even Possible?
The universe seems like it should be unfathomably complex. How then is science able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? Scientists and philosophers alike have often commented on the “unreasonable” success of mathematics at describing the universe. That success has helped science probe some profound mysteries — but as the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld… Continue reading How Is Science Even Possible?
America’s Suez Moment | RealClearWorld
History, as the familiar saying goes, does not repeat, but often rhymes. Do the crises in Gaza and Ukraine impose a “Suez Moment” on the United States – the events of 2022-24, a refrain to 1956-57? October 1956 featured two major international crises. In that month, Israel launched an assault on Egypt to reopen the… Continue reading America’s Suez Moment | RealClearWorld
How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number
The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But this aspiration was undermined when they considered a square with sides of length 1, only to find that the length of… Continue reading How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number
The Politics of Life | RealClearBooks
The following excerpt is adapted from The Politics of Life: My Road to the Middle of a Hostile and Adversarial World (Regan Arts.) by Douglas E. Schoen Penn, Schoen & Berland had been a successful consulting firm for almost 20 years, but we were still waiting for the ultimate invitation – to work on a… Continue reading The Politics of Life | RealClearBooks
Deathbed Visions (Afterlife Research)
Podcast: Download MYS318: A deathbed vision is a vision that someone has just before they die and they’ve been reported throughout history. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss how they’re just being scientifically studied only recently, what they are, what happens in them, and what they might tell us about the afterlife. Get all new… Continue reading Deathbed Visions (Afterlife Research)
This Computer Scientist Seeks a Future Where AI Development Values Copyright
Using a powerful text- or image-generating artificial intelligence can feel like witnessing the mythical birth of Athena as she strides, fully formed and dressed in armor, out of Zeus’ forehead. Write a short prompt, and an instant later, lucid paragraphs or realistic images appear on the screen (joined, possibly soon, by convincing video). Those first… Continue reading This Computer Scientist Seeks a Future Where AI Development Values Copyright
Greenwashing Kamala Harris: How the Veep Casts Herself as an Environmental Justice Crusader
SAN FRANCISCO—Vice President Kamala Harris has long cast herself as a fearless pioneer of efforts to fight for social and environmental justice. “When I was elected DA of San Francisco,” Harris told a gathering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta last year, “I started the first environmental justice unit of any DA’s office… Continue reading Greenwashing Kamala Harris: How the Veep Casts Herself as an Environmental Justice Crusader
The Question of What’s Fair Illuminates the Question of What’s Hard
The trio ended up establishing a kind of dictionary translating between fairness tools and ideas in complexity theory. They showed that any population — whether it’s days to be forecast or applicants awaiting loans — could be translated into a landscape of possible inputs for a computational problem. With the connections established, the researchers showed… Continue reading The Question of What’s Fair Illuminates the Question of What’s Hard