NEW HUMANIST MAGAZINE – WINTER 2023 ISSUE: The new issue features Pavan Amara on the new technologies revolutionising reproduction, Gabriele Di Donfrancesco on Europe’s battle over “family values” and Rachael Lennon on a decade of same-sex marriage, and a new column from Shaparak Khorsandi…
Cheap and fast algorithms are matching—and surpassing—the world’s top models
NuScale Power’s small modular reactors promised cheaper nuclear power, but costs soared and utilities balked
Verve Therapeutics says its base-editing approach may help prevent heart disease in many people
What his victory in America’s election would mean
Ashadow looms over the world. In this week’s edition we publish The World Ahead 2024, our 38th annual predictive guide to the coming year, and in all that time no single person has ever eclipsed our analysis as much as Donald Trump eclipses 2024. That a Trump victory next November is a coin-toss probability is beginning to sink in.
Rising prices and animal spirits give it a long-awaited opportunity
Global investors are giddy about Japan again. Warren Buffett made his first visit to Tokyo in more than a decade this spring; he has built up big holdings in five trading houses that offer exposure to a cross-section of Japan Inc. Last month Larry Fink, ceo of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, joined the pilgrimage to Japan’s capital. “History is repeating itself,” he told Kishida Fumio, the prime minister. He likened the moment to Japan’s “economic miracle” of the 1980s. Even disappointing gdp figures released on November 15th will not dent investors’ optimism.
Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.
The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty by Ha Jin
This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting method brought her to the pinnacle of China’s theatrical world during the Mao years. Her beauty and effervescent personality attracted powerful men—not only Zhou, who doted on her, but also Lin Biao, the Chinese Communist Party’s leading general, who divorced his wife in order to propose marriage to her (unsuccessfully), and Mao, who apparently raped her during a long rail trip. She had several other suitors and eventually married the film star Jin Shan.
Recent books about the importance of the microbiome have driven many patients to fixate on the idea of “gut health.” Are they right to do so?
Reviewed:
A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet, and Disease by Shilpa Ravella
Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure by Bryn Nelson
The Anti-Viral Gut: Tackling Pathogens from the Inside Out by Robynne Chutkan
Right before their colonoscopies, with the stress of a bowel prep still rumbling in their bellies and a mental image of the procedure beginning to sharpen, some patients will ask me why I chose a career in gastroenterology: “What made you interested in this?” The reason I usually give is that you could go all your life without a heart problem, or a lung problem, or a kidney problem, but not without a bit of nausea, constipation, or abdominal pain. The work of digestion is part of the rhythm of our daily lives, I tell them, which helps my work feel similarly immediate.
A play of past and present
The Atlantic revisits Reconstruction
.By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
No one should fear a history that asks a country to live up to its highest ideals.
The federal government abandoned Reconstruction in 1877, but Black people didn’t give up on the moment’s promise.
Times Literary Supplement (November 17, 2023): The new issue #TheTLS features Revenge of the grown-ups – The downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried; 2023 Books of the Year; the elusive Shakespeare; Simone Weil; Philosophers and public affairs – and more…
A quarter of a century after detecting dark energy, scientists are still trying to figure out what it is
One afternoon in early 1994 a couple of astronomers sitting in an air-conditioned computer room at an observatory headquarters in the coastal town of La Serena, Chile, got to talking. Nicholas Suntzeff, an associate astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and Brian Schmidt, who had recently completed his doctoral thesis at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, were specialists in supernovae—exploding stars. Suntzeff and Schmidt decided that the time had finally come to use their expertise to tackle one of the fundamental questions in cosmology: What is the fate of the universe?
A road trip through the communities shouldering the U.S.’s nuclear missile revival
BY ABE STREEP
The point of the thing was to forever change our concept of power. When the U.S. military assembled a team of scientists, led by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, to build a nuclear bomb during World War II with the hope of beating the Nazis to such a terrible creation, many of those involved saw their efforts as a strange kind of civic destiny. The Manhattan Project, wrote Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, was “compelled from the beginning not by malice or hatred but by hope for a better world.” Oppenheimer himself once said, “The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.”
Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.
In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade. This process goes on all the time—it’s happening now, as you read these words—and its scale is beyond imagining. You have some eighty billion neurons sharing a hundred trillion connections or more. Your skull contains a galaxy’s worth of constellations, always shifting.
Too often, a facial-recognition search represents virtually the entirety of a police investigation.
By Eyal Press
On March 26, 2022, at around 8:20 a.m., a man in light-blue Nike sweatpants boarded a bus near a shopping plaza in Timonium, outside Baltimore. After the bus driver ordered him to observe a rule requiring passengers to wear face masks, he approached the fare box and began arguing with her. “I hit bitches,” he said, leaning over a plastic shield that the driver was sitting behind. When she pulled out her iPhone to call the police, he reached around the shield, snatched the device, and raced off. The bus driver followed the man outside, where he punched her in the face repeatedly. He then stood by the curb, laughing, as his victim wiped blood from her nose.
Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.
By James Somers
At 60 years old, Doctor Who, the BBC show following the adventures of the regenerating Time Lord, continues to be highly enjoyable fiction. But it’s science fiction. The Gallifreyan takes science seriously… so we take a closer look at some of the science of Doctor Who, from time travel and the TARDIS to invading Cybermen and rogue planets.
The expense and prestige involved in sending landers and rovers to the Moon means you can’t afford for them not to work when they get there. But the lunar landscape is like nothing here on Earth. So how, and where do you test equipment that’s bound for the Moon?
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (November 10, 2023): The latest issue features A Beginner’s Guide to Looking at the Universe; What Does the U.S. Space Force Actually Do? – Inside the highly secretive military branch responsible for protecting American interests in a vulnerable new domain; Their Final Wish? A Burial in Space. – Why some people decide to send their remains into orbit.
A stunning advancement in a long history of stargazing, the James Webb telescope reveals light where once we saw only darkness. Our view of the universe will never be the same.
By KATE LARUE
Boomers Daily 