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’
How Much Did Jesus Suffer? (& More Patrons’ Questions)
Podcast: Download MYS287: We regularly give Patrons the opportunity to ask Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli their mysterious questions and make them available exclusively to Patrons first and then later to the whole audience. This time the questions cover Jesus’ suffering; demons protecting us; Adam’s wife, Lilith; and more. Get all new episodes automatically and… Continue reading How Much Did Jesus Suffer? (& More Patrons’ Questions)
A Century Later, New Math Smooths Out General Relativity
Dong and Song proved a conjecture that was formulated in 2001 by the mathematicians Gerhard Huisken and Tom Ilmanen. The conjecture states that as the mass of a space approaches zero, so too must its curvature. Huisken and Ilmanen recognized, however, that this scenario is complicated by the presence of bubbles and spikes (which are… Continue reading A Century Later, New Math Smooths Out General Relativity
Many-Mirrored Galaxies Deepen Dark Matter Mystery
If you’re looking for intergalactic eye candy and cosmic bling, it’s hard to beat Abell 3827, a crowded cluster of hundreds of galaxies about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. Hubble Space Telescope images of the cluster show a bright central quartet of merging galaxies shimmering like diamonds and perched on an ethereal azure engagement ring.… Continue reading Many-Mirrored Galaxies Deepen Dark Matter Mystery
Night of the Living Ed: Zombie Public Schools, Drained of Pandemic Lifeblood, Haunt the Land
Call them “zombie” schools. A significant but unknown number of public schools across the U.S., particularly in big cities, have lost so many students in the last half-decade that many of their classrooms sit empty. Gone is the loud clatter of students bursting through crowded hallways and slamming lockers. Marguerite Roza: “Too many schools, not… Continue reading Night of the Living Ed: Zombie Public Schools, Drained of Pandemic Lifeblood, Haunt the Land