There’s something strange going on with the Milky Way. Recent measurements suggest that stars at the outskirts of our galaxy are misbehaving. They’re traveling far slower than similarly situated stars in other galaxies. One possible explanation for the Milky Way’s stellar slowpokes is that our galaxy is extraordinarily deficient in dark matter, the invisible substance… Continue reading The Milky Way May Be Missing a Trillion Suns’ Worth of Mass
Why Women Earn Less Than Men: Economic Historian Wins Nobel for Work on Gender Pay Gap
October 11, 2023 4 min read Claudia Goldin mined 200 years of data to show that greater economic growth did not lead to wage parity or more women in the workplace By Philip Ball & Nature magazine Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, speaks at a press conference after being named this… Continue reading Why Women Earn Less Than Men: Economic Historian Wins Nobel for Work on Gender Pay Gap
Here’s the ‘Jan. 6 Jurisprudence’ About to Be Unleashed on Trump
Defense attorneys have coined the term “January 6 Jurisprudence” to describe the treatment received by the more than 1,200 defendants arrested so far in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021. This carve-out legal system involves the unprecedented and possibly unlawful use of a corporate evidence-tampering statute; excessive prison sentences and indefinite periods of… Continue reading Here’s the ‘Jan. 6 Jurisprudence’ About to Be Unleashed on Trump
A Soggy Mission to Sniff Out a Greenhouse Gas ‘Bomb’ in the High Arctic
Jocie Bentley (tape): PSA: don’t bring hiking boots when walking the tundra. Your feet will get soaked like a wet sponge. Gabriel Hould Gosselin (tape): Almost there. [laughs] About halfway. Well, it’s a lot faster with snowmobiles. Bentley: Hey, I’m Jocie Bentley, and this is the final episode of a three-part Science, Quickly Fascination series from… Continue reading A Soggy Mission to Sniff Out a Greenhouse Gas ‘Bomb’ in the High Arctic
The Buzz on Buzzfeed | RealClearBooks
The following is a condensed version of “The Buzz on Buzzfeed” by Tony Spanakos, published at Law & Liberty. In 2023, Buzzfeed and Vice announced that they were shutting down the news sections of their websites. In its short life, Buzzfeed news made the Steele Dossier available and its reporting on the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang… Continue reading The Buzz on Buzzfeed | RealClearBooks
Monkeys with Transplanted Pig Kidneys Live for Up to Two Years or More
People seeking a kidney transplant often have to wait years for a donor organ to become available—and many die before ever receiving one. Xenotransplantation, in which organs from one species are transplanted into another, could alleviate the organ shortage. But bridging millions of years of evolutionary divergence between two species is a tall order, so… Continue reading Monkeys with Transplanted Pig Kidneys Live for Up to Two Years or More
Evolving Bacteria Can Evade Barriers to ‘Peak’ Fitness
For many decades, exploring fitness landscapes was primarily the reserve of theoreticians working with simulated organisms, or pioneering experimentalists working on a relatively small scale. But with the rise of easy, inexpensive gene editing technology, the team behind the new paper wondered if they could build a very large adaptive landscape using living organisms, said… Continue reading Evolving Bacteria Can Evade Barriers to ‘Peak’ Fitness
The New Quest to Control Evolution
Evolution is a complicated thing. Much of modern evolutionary biology seeks to reconcile the seeming randomness of the forces behind the process — how mutations occur, for example — with the fundamental principles that apply across the biosphere. Generations of biologists have hoped to comprehend evolution’s rhyme and reason enough to be able to predict… Continue reading The New Quest to Control Evolution
Key Biden Climate Pollution Metric Is Safe–For Now
CLIMATEWIRE | The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up a fight by Republican-led states over the federal government’s method of estimating the costs of climate change, in a win for President Joe Biden’s push to address rising emissions. In a short, unexplained order, the justices rejected a challenge led by Missouri Attorney General Andrew… Continue reading Key Biden Climate Pollution Metric Is Safe–For Now
Book Review: Walter Isaacson’s Spellbinding ‘Elon Musk’
At a retreat over the summer, one of the attendees was rather rich and rather famous in the technology space. Having made enormous sums of money in a variety of startups and corporate settings, this entrepreneur had started all over yet again. My question to him was if he still had the energy to pursue… Continue reading Book Review: Walter Isaacson’s Spellbinding ‘Elon Musk’