Science Archives - Page 4 of 262

You thought HAL was creepy? Meet Sydney

by Rick Snedeker

Feb 19, 2023Feb 20, 2023

Reading Time: 4 minutes We’ve already seen what havoc technology-exploiting evil operators can wreak on people and societies. More than 70 million presumably-sensible Americans voted in 2020 for a presidential candidate whose entire political message was—and continues to be—built on easily-shredded tissues of falsehoods.

Yet considering that advances in AI are currently sprinting at breakneck speed into reality, Trump’s seduction of a huge swath of the American electorate was decidedly low-tech.

Environment

Too many people

by Adam Lee

Feb 18, 2023Feb 20, 2023

Reading Time: 2 minutes Wealthy, well-developed nations are nearing ZPG (zero population growth), which makes life better for everyone.

Leaving Religion

A journey through chronic illness to freethought

by Jonathan MS Pearce

Feb 17, 2023Feb 17, 2023

Reading Time: 17 minutes Take yourself back to the mid-nineties, if you’re able to. We’re in a British Christian evangelical youth meeting, in a long white canvas tent on an agricultural showground a few miles North of the historic Cathedral city of Lincoln in the East of England. It smells of trampled grass and teen sweat. A sweet soaring […]

Technology

Understanding Sen. John Fetterman’s struggle to understand

by Rick Snedeker

Feb 16, 2023Feb 18, 2023

Reading Time: 4 minutes Note to readers: The New York Times reported February 16 that Sen. John Fetterman checked himself into a hospital the week before for treatment of his clinical depression, which has worsened as he adjusted to the rigors of US Senate work after suffering a life-threatening stroke last year. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman isn’t deaf, exactly, […]

Health

Why anti-vaxxers get in more car crashes

by Adam Lee

Feb 16, 2023Feb 22, 2023

Reading Time: 4 minutes People who reject the COVID vaccine also get in more traffic accidents than vaccinated people. What explains the link between these seemingly unrelated events?

Space

Early black holes simplify the question of ‘dark energy’

by M L Clark

Feb 16, 2023Feb 16, 2023

Reading Time: 7 minutes The physics of our universe can be splendidly straightforward at times, even if it takes physicists a while to get there. That’s the current major takeaway from a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on February 15, authored by 17 astronomers in collaboration across nine countries, led by the University of Hawai’i. You’re going to […]

Health

Living and teaching in an unruly body

by Jeana Jorgensen

Feb 13, 2023Feb 22, 2023

Reading Time: 5 minutes I’m not disabled. Not yet. If I had to state it succinctly without referencing any diagnoses: my body is punitively fine-tuned—which doesn’t work well in academia, or anywhere else.

Environment

Your plastic grocery sack is a villain

by Rick Snedeker

Feb 07, 2023Jan 25, 2023

Reading Time: 4 minutes I’ll never forget what I saw in a dirt-poor, dusty Yemeni mountain village more than a decade ago. It was plastic bags—the kind city-dwellers have long toted groceries in—and they virtually covered the steeply sloping mountainsides that fell away from the roadway bisecting the village. I had never before in my life seen such a […]

Education

Draft bill bans everything but ‘scientific fact’ in Montana’s science classes

by Hemant Mehta

Jan 30, 2023Feb 03, 2023

Reading Time: 2 minutes A draft bill in Montana sponsored by first-term Republican State Sen. Daniel Emrich would effectively destroy science classes throughout the state by requiring them to teach “scientific fact”… and nothing else. Which is the sort of thing you’d propose only if you didn’t understand the meaning of scientific “theory.” LC 2215 claims that “a scientific […]

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