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Davide Castelvecchi in Nature: The medals keep coming for US swimmers at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris — and that’s in part thanks to science. Several of the athletes on Team USA
Continue readingThe Mathematician Who Helps Olympic Swimmers Go Faster
Paul Cooper at Literary Hub: One Sumerian epic poem called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta gives the first known story about the invention of writing, by a king who has to
Continue readingWhat the Epic of Gilgamesh Reveals About Sumerian Society
by Heath Hardage Lee at Air Mail: Mrs. Nixon’s considerable, if quiet, contributions as First Lady were never fully valued in Nixon’s own White House. Chief of staff H. R.
Habib Khan, Quetta: I like the term “picture in picture” not for its function but just for its name as it echoes our “holiday in holiday” –the concept of going
Someone once said that we die twice–First, when we take our very last breath.The flame on our candle goes out as weTransition between life and death. But then comes our
From Aeon Magazine: Most starfish take a rather laissez-faire approach to parenting, releasing millions of sperm and eggs into the water. This somewhat scattershot means of reproduction is known as
Continue readingA Spectacular, Close-up Look at the Starfish With a ‘Hands-on’ Approach to Parenting
By Mairav Zonszein at Time Magazine: On Wednesday morning, as news broke that Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran, the Israeli actress who plays a Mossad agent
Continue readingWhat Haniyeh’s Assassination Means for a Gaza Ceasefire
by Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology: In Deepak Pathak’s telling, nobody is building human-level artificial intelligence with language alone. You could train a large language model on billions of descriptions
Continue readingThis Professor Has a Path Toward Human-Level AI. It Isn’t LLMs.
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance
By Matthew L. Wald at The Breakthrough Journal: Lots of people have high hopes for an energy transition, but they’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Yes, solar
Continue readingClean Energy May be Growing, But It’s Not Replacing Dirty Energy
C. Brandon Ogbunu at The Undark revisits a debate about so-called “research parasites” — scientists who use and reanalyze other people’s data. The large language models used in generative AI
Continue readingRevisiting the ‘Research Parasite’ Debate in the Age of AI
by Tom Jenks at OUP Blog: Reading is good; rereading is better. I can’t say with certainty how many times—forty? fifty?—I’ve read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” only that for more than
Continue readingRacism, Jazz, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny Blues”