Posts

No one can know everything, but Enrico Fermi might have known everything it was possible to know about physics, writer Schwartz suggests. The Italian-born physicist was a prodigy, unusually gifted at both experimental and theoretical work, and made breakthroughs in particle physics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, and more before his premature death at age 53 in 1954. Best known for his pivotal role on the Manhattan Project, he was prolific in his field....

Join us below at 1 P.M. Eastern time on Tuesday, October 30 for a live 30-minute online chat with climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University, who will discuss Sandy–the tropical cyclone that has caused 20 deaths and left more than seven million people in the U.S. Northeast without power. Diffenbaugh will answer questions about the storm as well as the role of climate change in severe storms and this storm....

In 1950 Alan Turing devised a thought experiment that has since been revered as the ultimate test of machine intelligence. He called it the “imitation game,” but most people know it as the Turing test. Anticipating what we now call chat bots—computer programs that masquerade as humans—Turing envisioned a contest in which a machine tries to trick an interrogator into believing it is human, answering questions about poetry and deliberately making mistakes about arithmetic....

Vast regions of near-empty space in the Universe are growing and shrinking, much as bubbles merge and separate in soapsuds, astronomers have discovered. The cosmic voids, some as large as 50 megaparsecs (163 million light years), are the holes in the spidery network of dark matter and galaxies that forms the backbone of the Universe—the cosmic web. But most astronomers had thought that the near-empty globules were, on average, static with respect to the Universe as a whole....

Editor’s Note (5/25/22): This article is being republished in the wake of a school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., that killed at least 19 children and two teachers. It was the deadliest such attack since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, and occurred less than two weeks after a deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., that killed 10 Black people in an act of domestic terrorism. When Illinois passed a law in 2014 permitting the concealed carrying of firearms—becoming the last of the 50 states to do so—Sam Rannochio opened Check Your 6, Inc....

Comedian Elayne Boosler touched on a great deal of the human experience thusly: “My mother was so proud of her housecleaning. She always said, ‘You could eat off my floor’. You can eat off my floor, too. There’re thousands of things down there.” Homer Simpson, spotting a piece of pie on the floor, said, “Mmmm, floor pie!” And then there was the episode of Friends where Rachel and Chandler are picking at a slab of cheesecake that’s fallen on the hallway floor when Joey walks in—and sits down, pulls a fork out of his pocket and says, “Alright, what are we having?...

1971 How Locusts Control Yaw “Like an airplane, an insect can roll around its longitudinal axis, pitch around a horizontal axis or yaw around a vertical axis. It appears that locusts have two different yaw-correcting strategies: (1) a rapid change in wing twist, abdomen position and leg position controlled by wind-sensitive hairs on the head, and (2) a slower, subtler movement of the same general character evoked by cervical receptors. It seems that the change in wind angle, indicating a yaw, is integrated somewhere in the locust’s central nervous system, and is followed by independent motor commands to the wings, legs, abdomen and head....

In late July, the Trump Administration appointed James DeHart as the first U.S. Coordinator for the Arctic. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, Mr. DeHart has spent much of his 28-year career working to resolve conflict. He led the U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan, directed the State Department’s Office of Afghanistan Affairs, and most recently as the top U.S. negotiator in defense cost-sharing talks with South Korea. While Mr....

Washing your hands with antibacterial soap containing triclosan – the most common microbe-killing ingredient used in these soaps – may be no better than ordinary plain soap, according to South Korean researchers. The work adds weight to previous studies which have reached similar conclusions and could help settle the controversy of triclosan use. Triclosan is widely known for its antimicrobial properties, and was first introduced in hospital scrub soap in the 1970s....

By Daniel Bases NEW YORK, Oct 1 (Reuters) - As Joaquin strengthened into a major Category 4 hurricane near the Bahamas on Thursday, states along the U.S. East Coast hustled to activate emergency plans developed after Superstorm Sandy slammed the region in 2012, aiming to blunt the storm’s potential impact. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whose state took a direct hit from Sandy, declared a state of emergency, warning residents to “be prepared but don’t panic....

Conservationists wrestling with the problem of invasive lionfish have suggested that recreationally and commercially harvesting the predatory species for food could put a big dent in its numbers. New findings bolster that view. In one-day derby events in the Florida Keys and Green Turtle Cay, Bahamas, participants caught 1,400 of the fish, reducing local populations of this invasive species by 60 percent. They also enthusiastically ate much of the catch. Stephanie Green, a research fellow at Oregon State University, reported the derby results to the Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute (GCFI) in Corpus Christi, Texas, in November....

After riding the circular Antarctic air currents for 11 days, the BLAST balloon telescope ran into a slight problem: It failed to detach from its parachute after landing, so it was dragged about 125 miles (200 kilometers) across Antarctica, its pieces flying off along the way, until it was lost and unrecoverable in a crevasse field. Luckily for the researchers, one of the pieces that flew off, a foot-long pressure vessel, still held the experiment’s hard drives....

Falsified videos created by AI—in particular, by deep neural networks (DNNs)—are a recent twist to the disconcerting problem of online disinformation. Although fabrication and manipulation of digital images and videos are not new, the rapid development of AI technology in recent years has made the process to create convincing fake videos much easier and faster. AI generated fake videos first caught the public’s attention in late 2017, when a Reddit account with the name Deepfakes posted pornographic videos generated with a DNN-based face-swapping algorithm....

The first case of polio in the U.S. since 2013 has shaken New York State, particularly because it occurred in an area where many people are not vaccinated against the disease. Rockland County recently announced that a young adult living in the area had been partially paralyzed by polio. The poliovirus has been eliminated in the U.S. and most countries for decades; the infected person is believed to have caught the virus from an international traveler....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony will discussways to keep people’s online data private, which I’m interested in as a privacy scholar. Facebook and other U.S. companies already follow more comprehensive privacy laws in other countries. But without comparable requirements at home, there’s little reason for them to protect U.S. consumers the same way....

Tabulating the U.S. gay and lesbian populations has never been easy. Not only are many people reluctant to discuss intimate matters, but also their sense of identity evolves: today’s gay man may have been straight yesterday. Like past efforts, the 2000 U.S. decennial census undoubtedly undercounted them, but it does provide substantial new information–specifically, on those gays and lesbians who live together as couples. The census form asked respondents to classify any unrelated people in their household as a housemate, boarder, foster child, unmarried partner or other nonrelative....

Norman Cousins, the storied journalist, author and editor, found no pain reliever better than clips of the Marx Brothers. For years, Cousins suffered from inflammatory arthritis, and he swore that 10 minutes of uproarious laughing at the hilarious team bought him two hours of pain-free sleep. In his book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (W. W. Norton, 1979), Cousins described his self-prescribed laughing cure, which seemed to ameliorate his inflammation as well as his pain....

Despite the advances in oncology research and care, cancer remains the world’s second leading cause of death. But Andrew Coop, the global medicines lead of the oncology business unit at AstraZeneca, hopes that his company might help to change that. He and the U.S. oncology team at AstraZeneca realize that bringing about meaningful change in cancer care is only possible when the entire community comes together. The company’s YOUR Cancer program was designed to amplify and celebrate individuals and groups making a real difference in the oncology ecosystem—patients and caregivers, healthcare providers and researchers, advocates and policymakers and all those who are part of the oncology community....

MIRRORS have held a peculiar fascination for people ever since one of our early hominid ancestors looked at her reflection in a pool and noticed an uncanny correlation between her own muscle movements—sensed internally—and the visual feedback. Even more mysterious—and perhaps not unrelated—is our ability to “reflect” on ourselves as the first introspective primates. This ability displays itself in ways as different as the mythical Narcissus looking at his reflection in a lake to Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier’s invention of virtual reality to transport you outside your own body....

Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, will launch rockets and spacecraft from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The company will lease the launchpad and establish a “21st century production facility” to manufacture a reusable fleet of orbital vehicles. Florida Governor Rick Scott praised the venture, which he said will “invest $200 million locally and create 330 jobs.” “As a kid, I was inspired by the giant Saturn V missions that roared to life from these very shores,” Bezos said during the announcement here today (Sept....