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"Needless to say, it is not just the financial crisis that gets reduced to rash hyperbole." A sociologist asks why our political discourse is often reduced to platitudes (it's not because we're dumb).
"Three volunteers running the distributed computing program Einstein@Home have discovered a new pulsar in the data from the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope." Wired Science reports.
"America’s biggest—and only major—jobs program is the U.S. military." Robert Reich says we need a jobs program for public goods like light-rail and renewable energy, not outmoded weapons.
"The search for artificial intelligence modelled on human brains has been a dismal failure. AI based on ant behaviour, though, is having some success." Now engineers study ant collectives.
"The Democratic Party has moved to the left even as its take from financiers has soared," says a new book on politics. Slate replies that a Democratic move to the right better explains the donations.
"So far, so Minority Report." The New Scientist heads to Los Angeles to investigate the development of gesture-based computing, a fun exercise intended for serious number crunchers.
David Adamovich throws knives for a living. Really big knives. With 25 world records under his belt, Adamovich is the world’s fastest and most accurate knife thrower. He also holds […]
"By focusing all our attention on whether we need a bigger stimulus or a smaller deficit, we’re flying blind." TNR says we should concentrate on deeper reforms toward a knowledge based economy.
"Is a strategy of killing off Mexico’s drug kingpins really viable?" 'Yes', says a researcher at the University of Mexico, but only because political will to legalize and regulate drugs is lacking.
Climate change deniers who fault others for not verifying the underlying science set an unachievable standard. We rightly trust the consensus of experts in nearly every aspect of our lives.
Those decrying the death of the intellect, and the book, at the hands of the nefarious Internet would do well to recall that the printed page itself was once called the destroyer of education.
"Many problems which are more prevalent lower down the social ladder are worse in societies with bigger income differences, and second, almost everyone would benefit from reduced inequality."
Ironically, the age of the iPod has made finding new music harder than ever. The Atlantic begins a three part series on going beyond the radio to discover what's new in music town.
For the first time ever, scientists have made an invisibility cloak from silk. Current research focuses on medical applications for diabetics while visions of Harry Potter remain far afield.
"A lack of women during men’s teenage years still haunts their health decades later." The Economist reports on a surprising study that hints at an important formative sexual period.
"The point in prehistory when our early ancestors first picked up a sharp-edged stone to butcher animals has been pushed back one million years with the discovery of ancient bones."
New bilateral free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea are important tools for reviving the economy, boosting American exports and competing with Canada.
“America has always been the country in the world with more protection for speech,” says legendary First Amendment Lawyer Floyd Abrams, adding, “there’s really an astonishing, a breathtaking degree of […]
Salt and Salander flip conventional notions of gender roles. Are they the new models of millennial femininity while sacrificing being "real" women, asks Luisita Lopez Torregrosa.
The efforts of tens of thousands of players in an online game provided a rich, new set of search strategies for the prediction of protein structures. "Nature" explains the implications.