How Does Language Begin in the Womb?
by Darshana Narayanan at Aeon: Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus
Not Yet Panicking About AI? You Should Be
Daniel Kehlmann in The Guardian: I do not want to demonise the revolution we are experiencing. I believe nothing as fascinating has happened in the realm of the human mind
Strategically Minting New Citizens: lessons from Rome & the US
Razib Khan at Unsupervised Learning: Part 1 of 2 Ours is an age of flux and flow, trade and transfer. The species’ newest ideas, goods and indeed citizens shuttle ceaselessly
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Could We Turn Mars Into Another Earth? Here’s What It Would Take to Terraform the Red Planet
By Sven Bilén at Singularity Hub: When I was in middle school, my biology teacher showed our class the sci-fi movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The plot
What Game Theory Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything
“Cooperation” is the most unexpected phenomena in nature, the mechanics of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ game theory reveals. More in this video:
The Ecology of Collective Behavior
Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist: This is the third of a trio of reviews in which I take a brief detour into ants and collective behavior more generally. I
Inside Project 2025
James Goodwin in the Boston Review: The week after taking office in 2017, Donald Trump announced his administration’s signature policy on the administrative state—the constellation of agencies, institutions, and procedures
Tackling the Riddle of Free Will
Emily Cataneo in Undark: IT’S 1922. You’re a scientist presented with a hundred youths who, you’re told, will grow up to lead conventional adult lives — with one exception. In 40 years,
Explosion in AI-driven Data Centres is Putting Pressure on the Grid
Eric Smalley at The Conversation: Asking ChatGPT a question is quite a bit different from searching on Google. This is for a number of reasons. But one that can be
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The Magical Thinking That Sustains Our Humanness
by Anna Badkhen at Aeon Magazine: Amadou is always tapping into a global knowledge of what keeps us alive, a people’s pharmacopoeia honed over millennia. When we first met, in
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Philosophy Was Once Alive
Pranay Sanklecha at Aeon: ‘Why did you decide to study philosophy?’ asked the Harvard professor, sitting in the park in his cream linen suit. ‘Because I want to find out
Dog Vision is a Trendy Topic, But What Can We really Know About How They See?
From Aeon: Between camera filters and clickbait, the digital world is rife with misleading information about how, exactly, dogs see the world. In this short from the YouTube series Howtown,
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