A new prescription
AIs will make health care safer and better, reports Natasha Loder. It may even get cheaper too
Technology Quarterly: ‘Health And AI’ (April 2024)
Tag Archives: Artificial Intelligence
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 8, 2024
So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit
What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.
When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”
Black Holes Are Even Weirder Than You Imagined
It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.
Black holes are, of course, awesome. But, for scientists, they are more awesome. If a rainbow is marvellous, then understanding how all the colors of the rainbow are present, unified, in ordinary white light—that’s more marvellous. (Though, famously, in his poem “Lamia,” John Keats disagreed, blaming “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow.) In recent years, the amount of data that scientists have discovered about black holes has grown exponentially. In January, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had observed the oldest black hole yet—one present when the universe was a mere four hundred million years old. (It’s estimated that it’s now 13.8 billion years old.) Recently, two supermassive black holes, with a combined mass of twenty-eight billion suns, were measured and shown to have been rotating tightly around each other, but not colliding, for the past three billion years. And those are just the examples that are easiest for the public to make some sense of. To me, a supermassive black hole sounds sublime; to a scientist, it can also be a test of wild hypotheses. “Astrophysics is an exercise in incredible experiments not runnable on Earth,” Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and at the Perimeter Institute, told me. “And black holes are an ideal laboratory.”
The Economist Magazine – March 30, 2024 Preview
The AI doctor will see you…eventually
Artificial intelligence holds huge promise in health care. But it also faces massive barriers
Better diagnoses. Personalised support for patients. Faster drug discovery. Greater efficiency. Artificial intelligence (ai) is generating excitement and hyperbole everywhere, but in the field of health care it has the potential to be transformational. In Europe analysts predict that deploying ai could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year; in America, they say, it could also save money, shaving $200bn-360bn from overall annual medical spending, now $4.5trn a year (or 17% of gdp). From smart stethoscopes and robot surgeons to the analysis of large data sets or the ability to chat to a medical ai with a human face, opportunities abound.
The triple shock facing Europe’s economy
After the energy crisis, Europe faces surging Chinese imports and the threat of Trump tariffs
Russia is gearing up for a big new push along a long front line
Ukraine must prepare
Antarctica needs a lot more attention
Melting ice sheets do more than raise sea levels
Research Preview: Nature Magazine – March 28, 2024
How the body’s cholesterol factory avoids producing too much
Scientists identify a molecule that halts cholesterol production in the liver when dietary consumption is high. Research Highlight
A view of wind turbines drives down home values — but only briefly
House prices drop by 1% if wind turbines are close and visible, but they rebound quickly. Research Highlight
A supercollider glimpses a gathering of three particles never seen together before
Data from billions of proton collisions reveal that subatomic particles called W+ and W− bosons keep company with a photon .Research Highlight
Squeeze, freeze, bake: how to make 3D-printed wood that mimics the real thing
Scientists turn waste wood into an ‘ink’ that can be printed into a variety of structures.
Previews: Country Life Magazine – March 27, 2024
Country Life Magazine – March 27, 2024: The latest issue features:
A prickly subject
Marianne Taylor examines how we can help to halt the worrying decline of the humble hedgehog, Britain’s favourite mammal
Country Life International
- John Lewis-Stempel reflects on an old way of life in rural France
- Russell Higham visits Mozart’s Italian muse
- Arabella Youens hails Mondrian’s De Stijl movement
- Tom Parker Bowles celebrates Greek cuisine
- Holly Kirkwood selects the best Iberian properties for sale
- Eileen Reid explores love and logic in Paris
Bold and beautiful
Charles Quest-Ritson is wowed by the woodland garden created during the past two decades at Broughton Grange, Oxfordshire
Home is where the art is
Iron-man Sir Antony Gormley is taking over Houghton Hall in Norfolk with 100 life-size figures, as Charlotte Mullins discovers
The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle’s favourite painting
The Dean of Westminster picks a striking work that is all about looking — and then looking again
A silent witness
In the first of two articles, John Goodall visits Lancing College Chapel, West Sussex, a masterpiece 154 years in the making
The legacy: Roy Plomley
Kate Green tunes in for Roy Plomley’s Desert Island Discs
A real nest egg
John Lewis-Stempel marvels at one of the smallest, yet mightiest miracles in the natural world
Room with a pew
Your seat in church once told a lot about your status in the parish, reveals Andrew Green
Once more into the abyss
It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it: John Lewis-Stempel hauls an errant heifer from a ditch
The Editor’s Easter quiz
Spring has sprung — how many native wildflowers can you name?
Luxury
Hetty Lintell explores exquisite gilets, bespoke tailoring and sparkling aquamarine jewellery
Interiors
Giles Kime is armed with a crystal ball for his latest building project
Kitchen garden cook
Melanie Johnson on spinach
Don’t mock them
Plant a Philadelphus, says John Hoyland, and enjoy an explosion of blooms and scent this summer
And much more
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement-March 29, 2024
Times Literary Supplement (March 27, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Illustrating Ray Bradbury’ – Michael Caines on a writer who transcended genre; Fifteen French Kings; Spy stories; Neel Mukherjee’s art and artifice; Space colonization and Andrew O’Hagan on the Cally Road….
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 1, 2024
Bryan Stevenson Reclaims the Monument, in the Heart of the Deep South
The civil-rights attorney has created a museum, a memorial, and, now, a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade and the cradle of the Confederacy.
The National Monument to Freedom, in Montgomery, Alabama, is a giant book, standing forty-three feet high and a hundred and fifty feet wide. The book is propped wide open, and engraved on its surface are the names of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Black people, documented in the 1870 census, who were emancipated after the Civil War. On the spine of the book is a credo written for the dead:
A Dutch Architect’s Vision of Cities That Float on Water
Your children love you.
The country you built must honor you.
We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement.
We commit to advancing freedom in your name.
What if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land?
By Kyle Chayka
In a corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a seventeenth-century cityscape by the Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Berckheyde, “View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht,” which depicts the construction of Baroque mansions along one of Amsterdam’s main canals. Handsome double-wide brick buildings line the Herengracht’s banks, their corniced façades reflected on the water’s surface. Interspersed among the new homes are spaces, like gaps in a young child’s smile, where vacant lots have yet to be developed.
The New York Times Book Review – March 24, 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 23, 2024):
In Téa Obreht’s Latest, a Refugee Seeks Home in a Ruined World
“The Morningside” reckons with climate change and its fallout while finding hope in the stories we preserve.
By Jessamine Chan
THE MORNINGSIDE, by Téa Obreht
The elegant, effortless world-building in Téa Obreht’s haunting new novel, “The Morningside,” begins with a map. Island City resembles Manhattan, but alarmingly smaller, the borders of the city redrawn by the rising water. There’s the River to the east, the Bay to the west. Here, hurricanes and tides have made building collapse a constant danger, the freeway is visible only on low-tide days, food is government rations, the wealthy have fled “upriver to scattered little freshwater townships,” and gigantic birds called rook cranes are everywhere.
An Exquisite Biography of a Gilded Age Legend
In Natalie Dykstra’s hands, the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner is a tribute to the power of art.
CHASING BEAUTY: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Natalie Dykstra
Bright, impetuous and obsessed with beautiful things, Isabella Stewart Gardner led a life out of a Gilded Age novel. Born into a wealthy New York family, she married into an even wealthier Boston one when she wed John Lowell Gardner in 1860, only to be ostracized by her adopted city’s more conservative denizens, who found her self-assurance and penchant for “jollification” a bit much.
Luminous Fables in a Land of Loss
Téa Obreht’s stunning debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” is a hugely ambitious, audaciously written work that provides an indelible picture of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war. At the same time it explores the very essence of storytelling and the role it plays in people’s lives, especially when they are “confounded by the extremes” of war and social upheaval and need to somehow “stitch together unconnected events in order to understand” what is happening around them.
Opinion & Politics: Reason Magazine – May 2024
REASON MAGAZINE (March 21, 2024) – The latest issue features ‘What If America Runs Out Of Bombs?’ – Due to overzealous interventionism, the U.S. is dispensing munitions faster than they can be replaced…
What if America Runs Out of Bombs?
The U.S. is dispensing munitions to Ukraine and Israel faster than they can be replaced.
How Capitalism Beat Communism in Vietnam
It only took a generation to go from ration cards to exporting electronics.
Anti-Chinese Xenophobia Fueled America’s First Drug War
Opium dens in San Francisco were patronized “by the vicious and the depraved,” politicians of the 1800s claimed.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – March 22, 2024
Mars rover probes ancient shoreline for signs of life
Plans for Perseverance to explore past crater rim may be in jeopardy
More math, less “math war”
A false “equity versus excellence” debate over mathematics curricula has long disrupted education in the United States
A genetic cause of male mate preference
A gene for mate preference has been shared between hybridizing butterfly species
Collateral impacts of organic farming
Clustering organic cropland can reduce pesticide use on nearby conventional farms
Boomers Daily 