Credit: CC0 Public Domain One of the United States' most successful anti-poverty measures starts very early in life: Head Start, a preschool program for disadvantaged kids, increased children's educat
The typical suburban backyard of the future? Credit: Retrosuburbia.com Suburban affluence is the defining image of the good life under capitalism, commonly held up as a model to which all humanity sho
In this Dec. 7, 2018 photo Dirk Gratzel walks with his dog at his hunting ground in Stollberg, western Germany. Gratzel counts his carbon emissions. The software entrepreneur from Germany is among a g
Gribbles—coastal, marine organisms that are less than an inch long—may hold the key to a cheaper and more energy-efficient means of unlocking the energy in wood. Pexels The tiny gribble — less than an
Structure and rheological tests of MR fluid in response to applied magnetic fields. (A) Optical image of the MR fluid forming a liquid pool on a planar substrate in the absence of a magnetic field. (B
Pexels SHARE Gaze up at the sky one evening and you’re likely to see the crisp blue sky of the afternoon replaced with a reddish-orange hue stretching for miles. You might be wondering: Why does the c
Credit: energepic.com from Pexels
Of all the books from last century we can turn back to for guidance, Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety is particularly suited for this task. Published in 1951, Watts knew post-World War II America was ramping up at unsustainable…
From the New Yorker Festival, the couples therapist and podcast host discusses infidelity, apologies, and the problem with wedding vows these days. The psychotherapist Esther Perel knows how to work a
" How to Exist OK " is a column that attempts to figure out how to exist OK. In it, writer, artist, and existential Humpty Dumpty Gideon Jacobs sits down with a sage of some sort—monks, ministers, the
Credit: American Chemical Society Hydrogen-powered vehicles emit only water vapor from their tailpipes, offering a cleaner alternative to fossil-fuel-based transportation. But for hydrogen cars to bec
Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A bat? A cockroach? A bacterium? An electron? These questions are all aspects of the ancient “mind-body problem,” which has
On Monday, speaking at a town hall led by Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez framed her chosen climate policy—the Green New Deal—through the lens of gallant American
For decades, I was under the impression that salt is white. Table salt, sea salt, kosher salt, whatever—the sky is blue, the salt is white, and that’s just how things are. Then, about three years ago
In my six decades in public service, I’ve seen many changes in our nation and its institutions. Yet the most profound change I’ve witnessed is also the saddest. It is the complete collapse in respect
I'll never forget "The Junior Mint" episode of Seinfeld , and not because of the absurdly lost piece of candy in the operating theater. That episode is burned into my memory due to the one word allude
The band structure of two-dimensional materials such as tungsten disulfide has ‘valleys’ that provide a way to encode information using an electron. Credit: IOP Publishing Figure 1 from Nano Futures 2
The new iron molecule. Credit: Nils Rosemann For the first time, researchers have succeeded in creating an iron molecule that can function both as a photocatalyst to produce fuel and in solar cells to
When my daughter was growing up, she often wanted to rush off to do fun things with her friends — get into the water at the beach, ride off on her bike — without taking the proper safety precautions f
Drs. Esrafilzadeh and Jalili working on 3D-printed graphene mesh in the lab. Credit: RMIT University New research reveals why the "supermaterial" graphene has not transformed electronics as promised,
Credit: CC0 Public Domain QUT chemistry researchers have discovered cheaper and more efficient materials for producing hydrogen for the storage of renewable energy that could replace current water-spl
Credit: CC0 Public Domain A few years ago, Omeed Badkoobeh was living in China and often traveling to remote locations when he noticed a trend that intrigued him—how often towns were relying on fuel-b
Photo by SwapnIl Dwivedi on Unsplash 2 min read · Nov 27, 2018 -- If you have a fully functional parietal lobe, then you’ll be able to recognize and appreciate faces. Facial recognition in humans func
Being raised indoors might be the reason young Americans struggle in the adult world. Jonathan Haidt Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern
Thoth_Adan/Getty Images Algorithmic decision-making and artificial intelligence (AI) hold enormous potential and are likely to be economic blockbusters, but we worry that the hype has led many people
3 min read · Nov 28, 2018 -- I used to take relationships very personally. If my partner said something that pushed my buttons, initiating a cascade of righteous indignation, then I would engage with
SHARE The thigh bone really is connected to the hip bone. Courtesy of Simon Cherry This image is not a photograph, at least not in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s more like a collection of the sha
Converging exponential technologies will transform media, advertising and the retail world. The world we see, through our digitally-enhanced eyes, will multiply and explode with intelligence, personal
Charles Koch Foundation Charles Koch Foundation Charles Koch Foundation The Charles Koch Foundation seeks to identify programs and scholars working to understand how to move toward a society of equal
Posted Mar 01, 2017
In the 1960s, there was a popular belief – popularised by psychedelic pioneers like Timothy Leary (pictured) – that drugs such as LSD could provide ‘chemical enlightenment’, a way of circumventing the years of arduous spiritual practice which monks and other spiritual put…
5 min read · Nov 20, 2018 -- (This blog started as a tweet thread, and became a blog. It started out as looking at data and why NoSQL is a better fit for serverless applications than RDBMS) One of the
Abstract The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality. At the end of a thoughtful article on thefuture of nuclear war, Wiesner and York () conclude
(a) schematic of the symmetric paper supercapacitor with the structure of GNPs electrodes (b) image of the fabricated supercapacitor (c) image of paper supercapacitor in bend state. Credit: Heliyon DO
Big ideas. Once a week. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter. With his collected letters recently being published, it's time to revisit this extraordinary thinker. Derek Beres 19 November, 2018 Wikimedi
For several generations, the world has been governed by what today we call “the global liberal order”. Behind these lofty words is the idea that all humans share some core experiences, values and inte
Yuval Noah Harari just may know you better than you know yourself. After all, he’s made a career out of studying humans. First, he chronicled the history of mankind in his book Sapiens ; then, he foll
Threader Threader has joined Twitter Threader is now a part of Twitter! Since the beginning of this journey, we have always believed that Twitter hosts some of the best content on the Internet. Today,
We economists are often asked to solve the very problems we created with our policy recommendations. Our recent policy failures are due to our “scientistic” attitude — we’ve tried to treat economics l
I’ve recently had several conversations with projects about software foundations, so I figured I should type up my thoughts here. The term “foundation” is associated with a lot of warm fuzzy things, l
I often scribble half-baked ideas, reactions to things I’ve read, or something useful I’ve heard. Sometimes they turn into longer blog posts or projects, but most of them sit in my notes app, unused.
Why did the scarecrow win a prize? Because he stood alone in his field! He stood there for years, rotting, until he was forgotten. - - - I tell my kids, you’re allowed to watch the TV all you want… Ju