Podcast: Download MYS294: In 1982, 7 people suddenly died in Chicago, having taken Extra Strength Tylenol just before, and police learned the pills had been tampered with. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss what happened, who was responsible, and how these events changed American permanently. Get all new episodes automatically and for free: Follow by… Continue reading 1982 Chicago Tylenol Murders
How to Choose an Environmentally Friendly Christmas Tree
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Every year, Americans buy somewhere between 35 million and 50 million Christmas trees, and many more pull an artificial tree out of storage for the season. In all, about three-quarters of U.S. households typically have some kind of Christmas… Continue reading How to Choose an Environmentally Friendly Christmas Tree
Exposed: Moderna’s Vaccine Against Vaccine Dissent
Finances at the vaccine manufacturer Moderna began to fall almost as quickly as they had risen, as most Americans resisted getting yet another COVID booster shot. The pharmaceutical company, whose pioneering mRNA vaccine had turned it from small startup to biotech giant worth more than $100 billion in just a few years, reported a third-quarter… Continue reading Exposed: Moderna’s Vaccine Against Vaccine Dissent
‘Magical’ Error Correction Scheme Proved Inherently Inefficient
Unfortunately, the Reed-Muller code has a serious drawback: The number of bits required to encode a message increases exponentially with the number of variables. If you want a highly local code that corrects errors with just a handful of queries, you’ll need a lot of variables for long messages, and the Reed-Muller code will quickly… Continue reading ‘Magical’ Error Correction Scheme Proved Inherently Inefficient
Religious Liberty Is Fundamental to Diversity
When people complain about polarization in America, religious freedom sometimes takes the blame. How can people who disagree about such fundamental questions of life form one nation? Actually, Americans have been finding ways to live with disagreements for centuries—since before we were a nation. And the religious liberty protections of our First Amendment have… Continue reading Religious Liberty Is Fundamental to Diversity
Thunderstorm Damage Keeps Rising
December 8, 2023 2 min read Increasingly frequent thunderstorms caused insurers to pay $60 billion in claims in 2023 By Thomas Frank & E&E News Lightning strikes over Albuquerque, New Mexico. CLIMATEWIRE | Despite a small number of weather catastrophes this year, property insurers are facing huge losses and weak finances, partly from climate change, according… Continue reading Thunderstorm Damage Keeps Rising
With Higher Education on Trial, Policy Changes May Be the Only Path to a Winning Case
In the court of public opinion, higher education is on trial. Enrollment has been declining for a decade, and the trend cannot be explained entirely by demographic shifts. More than half of Americans now say they don’t believe college is worth the cost. People from disadvantaged backgrounds are growing especially skeptical, with just 45 percent of students from low-income,… Continue reading With Higher Education on Trial, Policy Changes May Be the Only Path to a Winning Case
New Kind of Magnetism Spotted in an Engineered Material
All the magnets you have ever interacted with, such as the tchotchkes stuck to your refrigerator door, are magnetic for the same reason. But what if there were another, stranger way to make a material magnetic? In 1966, the Japanese physicist Yosuke Nagaoka conceived of a type of magnetism produced by a seemingly unnatural dance… Continue reading New Kind of Magnetism Spotted in an Engineered Material
AI Can Now Read Your Cat’s Pain
Sophie Bushwick: Can you tell what a cat is thinking, just from looking at it? Tulika Bose: Probably not! Cats evolved to be solitary hunters stalking their prey, not social animals like us humans. Bushwick: And that poker face might be handy while you’re out stalking prey, but it’s a real problem if humans are… Continue reading AI Can Now Read Your Cat’s Pain
The Theorist Who Sees Math in Art, Music and Writing
After a while, my set of pictures started to look like a particular set of graphs that were listed in a book about Coxeter groups that was in my office, and I began to hope that it was this exact set of graphs. If it was, then that would fill in the hole in my… Continue reading The Theorist Who Sees Math in Art, Music and Writing