Don't Start Playing This Absurdly Addictive 8-Bit Statistics Game https://t.co/xKY9bJMMuG

“Spiros, can you explain to me this whole business about time being an illusion?” These were William Shatner’s words to me, minutes after I walked into the green room at Silicon Valley’s Comic Con . The iconic Star Trek actor, best known for his portrayal of James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the…

In 2005, John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, published a paper , “Why most published research findings are false,” mathematically showing that a huge number of published papers must be incorrect. He also looked at a number of well-regarded medical research findings , and…

"I try to stay up with Snowden," said Lawrence "Larry" Wilkerson. "God, has he revealed a lot," he laughed. A retired Army colonel who served as the chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in President George W. Bush's administration, Wilkerson has established himself as a prominent critic…

Recently, I landed the tech-journalism equivalent of a Thomas Pynchon interview: I got someone from Twitter to answer my call. Notorious for keeping its communications department locked up tight, Twitter is not only the psychic bellwether and newswire for the media industry, but also a stingy…

“There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students.” This statement, by homework research guru Harris Cooper, of Duke University, is startling to hear, no matter which side of the homework debate you’re on. Can it be true that the hours of lost…

Photograph by Elinor Carucci Why it’s so hard to run an abortion clinic–And why so many are closing. Hoping to publicize her new nonprofit, last fall Julie Burkhart called her local NPR affiliate, KMUW in Wichita , about buying a day of sponsorship for $480. Station manager Debra Fraser decided…

Most Americans think abortion is less safe, and more rare, than it actually is. https://t.co/vi9sPrL9lH

“My water broke late in the afternoon, around rush hour on Lexington Avenue,” Peggy said. Peggy is my birth mother. She surrendered me for adoption when she was nineteen. When we met, it was 1996 and I was twenty-nine years old; she was forty-eight. We met in New York City, where Peggy had rented a…

Q uesto post nasce da una conversazione con gli studenti del master in giornalismo di Bari. Che, come tutti coloro che in giovane età si appassionano a questa professione, sognano il grande scoop, l’inchiesta da prima pagina. E magari di entrare a far parte di un team investigativo modello Spotlight…

I need to confess something: ‘‘Whuffie’’ would make a terrible cur­rency. In 2003, I published my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , in which all society’s scarcities, even death and energy, have been overcome, and where conflicts over resources – notably, who gets to run Walt Dis­ney…

Although the alienated, impoverished immigrant communities outside Paris are increasingly prone to anti-Semitism, the profiles of French jihadists don’t track closely with class. Many of them have come from bourgeois families. Photograph by Arnau Bach For The New Yorker Fouad Ben Ahmed never paid…

In order to decide where to publish one of the most significant discoveries in the history of physics, the scientists put it to a vote. Last September, before ripples in space-time set off detectors at the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory sites in Louisiana and Washington…

'Physics has lost its fizz'—John Horgan, wrongly. 'This is the best-ever time to be a theorist'—Nima Arkani-Hamed: https://t.co/9wFAJVOQXL

Pls read. A very well written and important piece on the diversity in our show and why its so awesome #TheExpanse 😁 https://t.co/99t3dd7zY7

A #Skeptic Infiltrates a Cruise for #Conspiracy Theorists | WIRED https://t.co/1FL7qGmNVQ

WITH presidential primaries in full steam, with the country wrapped up in concern about the economy, immigration and terrorism, one might wonder why we should care about the news of a minuscule jiggle produced by an event in a far corner of the universe. The answer is simple. While the political…

A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of moving ripples in space and time. Illustration by Aleks Sennwald Note: On October 3, 2017, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics would be awarded to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish,…

When I became a professor, 20 years ago, I received a request from a woman who lived close to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I taught: Could she come and talk to me about a set of interests she was developing, in the area of my own specialty in anthropology, and get my advice on…

Photo: Malcolm Dunbar/Getty Images This week, the Cut brings you True Romance: five days of stories about love as it’s actually lived. Dustin and I got engaged in the fall of 2013, on a mountain in Vermont. He got down on one knee on this big rock in front of a waterfall, out of nowhere. I felt…

The tale of how one researcher has made nearly every scientific paper ever published available for free to anyone, anywhere in the world. On the evening of November 9th, 1989, the Cold War came to a dramatic end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Four years ago another wall began to crumble, a wall…

F or the past few months I have been searching through tweets, emails, Facebook posts, and text messages for a missing person. He isn’t a stranger. He’s my husband and the father of my two children. And he’s not really missing. He’s dead. Often, late at night after I put our kids to bed, I begin my…

Sometime in the not so distant past, one of your kids, or a kid you know, has probably been told that she has a particular learning style. Perhaps she is a visual learner, who absorbs information best through images. Or maybe an auditory one, who needs to hear things to really grasp them. Boys are…

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by Tang Ming Tung/Getty Images. Every time you open Facebook, one of the world’s most influential, controversial, and misunderstood algorithms springs into action. It scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends,…

It’s practically impossible to define “GMOs” https://t.co/pNuVfg8l5h via @grist Another excellent, informative ag article from @SavorTooth

Matteo Nucci, in un articolo pubblicato sul Venerdì di Repubblica nel 2014 , ha messo insieme un bell'elenco di tutto ciò che Jack London fece per sopravvivere prima di trovare il suo Klondike nella letteratura: « Inscatolatore di lattine , rivenditore di giornali, razziatore di ostriche, poliziotto…

(foto: Alice Pace) Soia e colza contro cocco e palma . Non è un gioco di parole, bensì una battaglia. Iniziata negli anni ’80 tra gli oli derivati da questi vegetali, quando né le etichette dei nostri cibi, né la stampa, né la tv locale mostravano alcun interesse a indicare la presenza di uno degli…

In a small apartment in a small town in northeastern Mississippi, Sarah Marshall sits at her computer, clicking bubbles for an online survey, as her 1-year-old son plays nearby. She hasn’t done this exact survey before, but the questions are familiar, and she works fast. That’s because Marshall is…

.@alexrossmusic considers the “Star Wars” composer John Williams's impact on classical music: https://t.co/FwOBtzZ067

Or read about a child's obsession with his Christmas gift, in David Foster Wallace's "All That": https://t.co/gnycLnDHym

Some men have always been wretched. It only took the internet to make it obvious. Women — some women, at least — have always known. For all the sense that we are in a generation finding a new voice, it may be more accurate to say that we are in a generation where an old voice has finally found…

Gli assiomi sono verità su cui basare dei ragionamenti: quando sono veri sono una pacchia, veri e propri mattoncini del pensiero. Il problemino è quando invece di essere auto-evidenti lo sembrano soltanto, quando cioè postulano cose di cui siamo convinti per pigrizia mentale, per abitudine o perché…

One of the curious things about social networks is the way that some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely register at all. The content itself cannot be the source of this difference. Instead, there must be some property of…

Credit: Giulia Forsythe for the Wikipedia Educator Project (creative commons license) Recently at a "campus conversation" about how our strong but not necessarily elite Midwestern US university could improve our international profile, the administrator in charge presented a map of countries colored…

Explaining Deep Learning . . . in Eight Words IEEE Spectrum : We read about Deep Learning in the news a lot these days. What’s your least favorite definition of the term that you see in these stories? Yann LeCun: My least favorite description is, “It works just like the brain.” I don’t like people…

Idea in Brief The Problem Some of the costliest mistakes in negotiations take place before anyone sits down at the bargaining table. That’s because deal makers tend to focus too much on substance—offers, counteroffers, concessions—and not enough on process. The Solution Four strategies can help set…

Can Nespresso’s corporate sustainability program solve environmental challenges posed by its single-serve aluminum pods?Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images The sustainability story at Nespresso, a company that sells coffee machines and single-serve capsules, is a mix of the good, the bad and the…

WAKE UP, academia + @CERN!! Read: https://t.co/ge5TXR5ycv from @HarvardBiz #overwork #MentalHealth #workenvironment #weekend

Why the Tor attack matters https://t.co/Gk0dmKD6ks