The upshot, Andrews said, is that “we might not need nearly as much equipment as we thought we did” to achieve consciousness. She noted, for example, that even a cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the mammalian brain, which is believed to play a role in attention, perception, memory and other key aspects of… Continue reading Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare
Continuing a Tradition of Civics Excellence
With new institutes emerging at colleges and universities in Florida, Ohio, Utah, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere, civics education may be seeing a rebirth. “We need these civics centers at every institution of higher education in America,” says political theory professor Richard Avramenko. Avramenko, a Jack Miller Center faculty fellow, will be taking over… Continue reading Continuing a Tradition of Civics Excellence
Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions
Back in the 1990s, Mrowka and Kronheimer investigated what happens when you excise a two-dimensional surface from a four-dimensional manifold. If the manifold itself is simply connected, what conditions must surfaces meet to guarantee that their complements must also be simply connected? Kronheimer and Mrowka knew that some kinds of surfaces could have complements that… Continue reading Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions
Adam, Eve, and Early Humans (& More Weird Questions)
Podcast: Download MYS309: It’s a fifth Friday, so Cy Kellett of Catholic Answers Live is asking Jimmy Akin weird questions from listeners, about topics like how Adam and Eve relate to other early human ancestors; could dark matter and energy be angelic or demonic; can you pray for souls in hell; and more weird questions.… Continue reading Adam, Eve, and Early Humans (& More Weird Questions)
AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities
Ruehle and collaborators took up the old problem of approximating Calabi-Yau metrics. Anderson and others also revitalized their earlier attempts to overcome step 2. The physicists found that neural networks provided the speed and flexibility that earlier techniques had lacked. The algorithms were able to guess a metric, check the curvature at many thousands of… Continue reading AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities
‘Grading for Equity’: Promoting Students by Banning Grades of Zero and Leaving No Class Cut-Ups Behind
Joe Feldman has faced many tough crowds in the course of successfully selling his “Grading for Equity” program to school districts across the nation. During the consultant’s presentations, teachers concerned that his approach lowers standards have rolled their eyes, questioned his understanding of students, and worse. Joe Feldman, equity-grading booster: Teachers and parents can be… Continue reading ‘Grading for Equity’: Promoting Students by Banning Grades of Zero and Leaving No Class Cut-Ups Behind
Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’
In that sense, in microbial communities, the keystone species concept is context-dependent. A keystone in one microbiome might not be a keystone in another. “I feel that this aspect has not been highly appreciated by ecologists,” Liu said. Ecologists are now grappling with this contextual nature of keystone species beyond microbes and pondering whether, and how,… Continue reading Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’
How Catholics Can Save American Education
I was a teacher and then worked in test prep before starting the Classic Learning Test. Before and especially since then, I’ve reviewed a lot of high school curricula, particularly from Catholic and/or classical high schools, which tend to get some flak for their focus on things like Latin, rhetoric, and philosophy. When people argue… Continue reading How Catholics Can Save American Education
Does Pi Contain All of Shakespeare?
All circles, from onion rings to Saturn’s rings, share a magnificent property: their circumferences stretch about three times longer than their diameters. To be more precise (though still not exact), the circumferences are 3.14159, or pi, times longer. Circles are such fundamental shapes that pi, the number that governs them, stamps its signature across the… Continue reading Does Pi Contain All of Shakespeare?
My Fantastic Voyage at Quanta Magazine
In 2016, I joined Natalie, Siobhan Roberts and Emily Singer in profiling four master science and math teachers as part of an education series that included video vignettes produced by my former New York Times colleague Lisa Iaboni, an interactive survey of readers’ experiences with math and science built by Emily Fuhrman, my interview with… Continue reading My Fantastic Voyage at Quanta Magazine