It’s safe to use your face cream, as long as you aren’t eating it.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Does humanity have a moral imperative to seed life on lifeless worlds? And should we avoid colonizing a planet if life already exists there?
Within a month of that initial conversation, Peter Singer became a vegetarian.
Einstein’s most famous equation is E = mc², which describes the rest mass energy inherent to particles. But motion matters for energy, too.
Thomas Edison was on to something…
The replication crisis has debunked many of psychology’s fair-haired hypotheses, but for the marshmallow test, things have only become more interesting.
The Shirky Principle states that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Soviet censorship was thorough yet fallible.
Geniuses and prodigies are captivating. But generalists rule the world.
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May 22, 2023
The title of this crossword is a quote from Plutarch. In this puzzle, we include many of the diverse beliefs of mankind and touch on many attempts to explain life and its meaning. Can the human spirit prevail over the barriers to survival? Are the barriers locked inside the mind itself?
A surprising JWST discovery around Fomalhaut has a different, superior explanation: not a great dust cloud, but a mere background object.
George Orwell got it right: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”
If something exists, it is by definition natural.
The first-of-its-kind approval could change how we think about gene-edited foods.
The cycles of life all rely on the dynamism of the Earth’s crust.
Cyberattacks are growing in number and sophistication.
Neuroscience is beginning to provide clues about the emergence of human consciousness.
The classic picture of Jupiter’s great rocky core might be entirely wrong.
This network physicist is mapping the world’s most significant data to create the most beautiful visualizations of information we have ever seen.
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Raw food, paleo, gluten-free, detox, and ketogenic: All of these diet fads withered when subjected to scientific scrutiny.
Massive objects like black holes, stars, and rogue planets routinely pass near our Solar System. An ensuing comet storm could destroy us.
The hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia may be due to a “reality threshold” that is lower than it should be.
Maintain peace of mind during tax season by correctly filling out your W-4.
Claims of a “loneliness epidemic” aren’t based on robust data. Loneliness might be a problem, but it’s not worse than it was in the past.
There may be a symmetrical interdependence between order and chaos.
When the Universe was first born, the ingredients necessary for life were nowhere to be found. Only our “lucky stars” enabled our existence.
We can reasonably say that we understand the history of the Universe within one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. That’s not good enough.
500 sheep were slaughtered to produce the 2,060 pages of the “Codex Amiatinus,” a Latin translation of the Bible.
Large language models are an impressive advance in AI, but we are far away from achieving human-level capabilities.