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Evgeny Morozov in The Ideas Letter: There is a certain disorienting thrill in witnessing, over the past few years, the profusion of bold, often baffling, occasionally horrifying ideas pouring from the ranks of America’s tech elite. Consider the heresies of Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, who, in ...

Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University, the basic message of the report has remained the same since its launch in 2012. The happiest countries in the world are in Scandinavia; ...

From Phys.Org: The new study, published in Brain Communications, found that shrinkage in the front and side of the brain (prefrontal, temporal and cingulate cortices, and the hippocampus) was linked to difficulty remembering words. The new discovery highlights how the network that is involved in cre...

The Difference Between Things and Events Things persist in time, events have limited duration. A stone is a thing. We can ask, “Where will it be tomorrow?” Conversely, a kiss is an event. It makes no sense to ask where a kiss will be tomorrow. ……………. The world is made up of a network…

Emma Stoye in Nature: https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-025-00269-y/assets/4JsOv5ttJO/mito-h2b-vasp-rgb-1024x1024.webm Powerhouses of the cell. This video of a human bone-cancer cell shows its three nuclei (blue —probably the result of failed cell divisions), actin cytoskeleton (red) and a net...

Thomas Hochman at The New Atlantis: Ever since Derek Thompson introduced the term “abundance agenda” in his 2022 Atlantic article “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” the idea has spun out into a network of new think tanks, conferences, and newsletters — and of social circles that oft...

by Brooks Riley 1. Reality isn’t what it used to be. Neither is fiction. Years ago, someone who worked for a daily soap opera production company told me that if a storyline included a wedding, the TV network and its stations would be inundated with wedding gifts for the fictional newlyweds—from fans...

Silver Maple, Solstice And still, forty years later, I lean my cheek to your trunk, breathe familiar summer. I imagine the sap pulse running through, what your roots tell the lake, what they told the other two other maples you once knew, network of under earth shared in the black of Michigan soil. S...

Cory Oldweiler at the LARB: ABOUT TWO HOURS south of the grandiose architectural amalgam that is Zagreb lies the equally impressive natural wonder of Plitvice Lakes National Park, a network of waterfalls and lakes serenely carving its way through the lush limestone plain. The park, at the northeaste...

by Steve Szilagyi After eight years writing publicity for a cable television network, I was let go. Just in time. I was hankering to get out of Manhattan, go back to my hometown, and marry a girl I knew in high school. Once I’d gotten all that out of the way, I found myself in…

Silver Maple, Solstice And still, forty years later, I lean my cheek to your trunk, breathe familiar summer. I imagine the sap pulse running through, what your roots tell the lake, what they told the other two other maples you once knew, network of under earth shared in the black of Michigan soil. S...

Art Here is this tree before me whose skin is as fissured and split as the landscape of the Rockies as if a network of rivers had, for centuries, by force of friction, sculpted canyons into its surface; bark beaten by torrents of rain, dried by torch of sun, torn by whip of wind, but…

Michiko Kakutani at Literary Hub: In the mid-1960s, network TV was suddenly awash in what scholars would later call “supernatural sitcoms.” My Favorite Martian featured an anthropologist from Mars who crash-lands in Los Angeles and hides out at a newspaper reporter’s apartment while he tries to repa...

Nora Bradford in Quanta: But is your brain active even when you’re zoning out on the couch? The answer, researchers have found, is yes. Over the past two decades they’ve defined what’s known as the default mode network, a collection of seemingly unrelated areas of the brain that activate when you’re...

Stuart McGurk in The New Statesman: Police officers are often the last to know when someone is being conned. A worried son might spot unusual payments on his elderly father’s bank statement. A concerned friend will do a reverse-image search on a suspiciously good-looking dating-app match. A fraudste...

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta: Breaking down food requires coordination across dozens of cell types and many tissues — from muscle cells and immune cells to blood and lymphatic vessels. Heading this effort is the gut’s very own network of nerve cells, known as the enteric nervous system, which weaves...

Kozlov and Biever in Nature: Scientists have created a neural network with the human-like ability to make generalizations about language1. The artificial intelligence (AI) system performs about as well as humans at folding newly learned words into an existing vocabulary and using them in fresh conte...

Aparna Nathan in The Scientist: Brain development is a carefully choreographed dance. Neurons develop specialized functions and, in small hops, move through the brain to get into the correct position. The chemical signals coursing through the resulting network allow animals to think, feel, and live....

Ewen Callaway in Nature: The protein universe just got a lot brighter. Researchers have mined a database containing the structures of nearly every known protein — more than 200 million entries predicted using Google DeepMind’s revolutionary AlphaFold neural network. The work has uncovered completely...

Harrison Tasoff in Neuroscience News: Researchers, guided by the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), explored the neural basis of morality. They discovered that while a general brain network is involved in judging moral violations, distinct activity patterns arise for different moral issues, supporting ...

by David J. Lobina So, what is the role and place of Bustan Qaraaqa within the community they are based in? What connections have they made there? What volunteering, if any, have they promoted in other farms, or in general in the West Bank? And what is their place within the worldwide permaculture n...

Siddhartha Deb in The Nation: An assassin works from a partial understanding of the world. If not literally a hashishi, as suggested by the word’s etymology, an assassin must nevertheless see the world in tunnel vision, his victim viewed through the lens of a scope. The vast, complex network of huma...

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people are barely aware. One of these is the offshore wealth management network, which wealthy individuals can use both...

John W. Ayers, Adam Poliak, Mark Dredze, et al, at the JAMA Network: Question: Can an artificial intelligence chatbot assistant, provide responses to patient questions that are of comparable quality and empathy to those written by physicians? Findings: In this cross-sectional study of 195 randomly d...

Ingrid Fadelli in Phys.Org: Researchers at University of Oxford have recently created a quantum memory within a trapped-ion quantum network node. Their unique memory design, introduced in a paper in Physical Review Letters, has been found to be extremely robust, meaning that it could store informati...

Sarah Scoles in Undark: SOMETIME THIS COMING March, a network of 10 small satellites winged with solar panels is scheduled to launch into Earth’s low orbit. Though likely invisible to the naked eye, the satellites will be part of a future herd of hundreds that, according to the Space Development Age...

Stephen Kearse at Bookforum: A MONTH BEFORE Atlanta hosted the first hip-hop-focused spinoff of the BET Awards in 2006, an executive at the cable network joked the event would likely not benefit the local economy. He was probably right. Rap dollars already coursed through the Southern city like its ...

Elena Renken in Nautilus: The brain’s lifeline, its network of blood vessels, is like a tree, says Mathieu Pernot, deputy director of the Physics for Medicine Paris Lab. The trunk begins in the neck with the carotid arteries, a pair of broad channels that then split into branches that climb into the...

Erica Klarreich in Quanta: A team of computer scientists has come up with a dramatically faster algorithm for one of the oldest problems in computer science: maximum flow. The problem asks how much material can flow through a network from a source to a destination if the links in the network have ca...

by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In connection with our research and meetings in the MacArthur network we did a considerable amount of international travel. Let me now turn to a whole series of my travel-related stories, some in connection with this network but...

Ewen Callaway in Nature: Researchers have used AlphaFold — the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) network — to predict the structures of more than 200 million proteins from some 1 million species, covering almost every known protein on the planet. The data dump is freely available on a datab...

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: The United States is suffering from an epidemic of tragic gun violence. While a political debate rages around the topic of gun control, it remains important to understand the causes and possible remedies for gun violence within the current system. Andrew Papach...

Anna Blaustein in Scientific American: On February 24 Ukraine’s electric grid operator disconnected the country’s power system from the larger Russian-operated network to which it had always been linked. The long-planned disconnection was meant to be a 72-hour trial proving that Ukraine could operat...

by Joseph Shieber One of the best television comedies of the last decade was The Good Place. Over the course of four seasons, its creator, Michael Schur, and a phenomenal ensemble cast tackled topics that I had thought to be too arcane for network television. The so-called “trolley problem”? Kantian...

Nadia Marzouki in Public Books: On August 20, 2020, the last day of the Democratic National Convention, Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, delivered a prayer to the delegates. Wearing a blouse with blue flower motifs and an optimistic smile, ...

Tyler Irving in Phys.Org: It doesn’t have a brain and survives on rotting vegetable matter—but it could offer valuable insights into city planning, according to a team of University of Toronto researchers. Physarum polycephalum is a slime mold, a single-celled amoeboid organism that grows as a green...

Paris Marx in The Wire: Silicon Valley has no shortage of big ideas for transportation. In their vision of the future, we’ll hail driverless pods to go short distances  – we may even be whisked into a network of underground tunnels that will supposedly get us to our destinations more quickly – and f...

From Phys.org: Countless devices around the world use GPS for wayfinding. It’s possible because atomic clocks, which are known for extremely accurate timekeeping, hold the network of satellites perfectly in sync. But GPS signals can be jammed or spoofed, potentially disabling navigation systems on c...

David P. Barash and Ward Wilson at History News Network: “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” Those of us eager to get rid of nuclear weapons hear this a lot and at first glance it seems true; common sense suggests that neither genies nor nuclear weapons are readily rebottled. But this “com...

Matthew Hutson in The New Yorker: Deep learning, the artificial-intelligence technology that powers voice assistants, autonomous cars, and Go champions, relies on complicated “neural network” software arranged in layers. A deep-learning system can live on a single computer, but the biggest ones are ...

Andre Ye in Analytics Vidhya: The Universal Approximation Theorem is, very literally, the theoretical foundation of why neural networks work. Put simply, it states that a neural network with one hidden layer containing a sufficient but finite number of neurons can approximate any continuous function...

by Tim Sommers In an interesting recent article on Aeon, “You are a Network” (based on her 2019 book, “The Network Self”), Kathleen Wallace argues that anthropological, narrative, feminist, and communitarian views of the self have all converged on the idea that you are a network. But you’re not. At ...

The Center for Land Use Interpretation at Cabinet Magazine: The American Land Museum is a network of landscape exhibition sites being developed across the United States by the Center for Land Use Interpretation and other agencies. The purpose of the museum is to create a dynamic contemporary portrai...

Kelsey Houston-Edwards in Scientific American: When you hit “send” on a text message, it is easy to imagine that the note will travel directly from your phone to your friend’s. In fact, it typically goes on a long journey through a cellular network or the Internet, both of which rely on centralized ...

Lewis Lapham in Lapham’s Quarterly: Released in the two-hundredth-anniversary year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Paddy Chayefsky’s script for the 1976 film Network finds the outraged television news anchor Howard Beale urging his viewers to rise up in revolutionary protest again...

From Medical Device Network: The UK National Health Service (NHS) is set to initiate the trial of Galleri blood test that can potentially detect over 50 types of cancers. Developed by GRAIL, the test is capable of detecting early-stage cancers through a simple blood test. In research on patients wit...

Gilad Edelman in Wired: WE LIVE IN an age of manipulation. An extensive network of commercial surveillance tracks our every move and a fair number of our thoughts. That data is fed into sophisticated artificial intelligence and used by advertisers to hit us with just the right sales pitch, at just t...

From Phys.Org: The human brain’s neuronal network undergoes lifelong changes in order to be able to assimilate information and store it in a suitable manner. This applies in particular to the generation and recall of memories. So-called synapses play a central role in the brain’s ability to adapt. T...