The Shirky Principle states that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
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Soviet censorship was thorough yet fallible.
May 22, 2023
The title of this crossword is a quote from Plutarch. In this puzzle, we include many of the diverse beliefs of mankind and touch on many attempts to explain life and its meaning. Can the human spirit prevail over the barriers to survival? Are the barriers locked inside the mind itself?
A surprising JWST discovery around Fomalhaut has a different, superior explanation: not a great dust cloud, but a mere background object.
George Orwell got it right: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”
If something exists, it is by definition natural.
The first-of-its-kind approval could change how we think about gene-edited foods.
The cycles of life all rely on the dynamism of the Earth’s crust.
But make sure you bring the fossegrim the proper offering—or else.
Cyberattacks are growing in number and sophistication.
Neuroscience is beginning to provide clues about the emergence of human consciousness.
If you think everyone around you is terrible, the joke may be on you.
The classic picture of Jupiter’s great rocky core might be entirely wrong.
Raw food, paleo, gluten-free, detox, and ketogenic: All of these diet fads withered when subjected to scientific scrutiny.
Massive objects like black holes, stars, and rogue planets routinely pass near our Solar System. An ensuing comet storm could destroy us.
The hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia may be due to a “reality threshold” that is lower than it should be.
Maintain peace of mind during tax season by correctly filling out your W-4.
A next-generation instrument on a delayed rover may be the key to answering the question of life on Mars.
Claims of a “loneliness epidemic” aren’t based on robust data. Loneliness might be a problem, but it’s not worse than it was in the past.
There may be a symmetrical interdependence between order and chaos.
When the Universe was first born, the ingredients necessary for life were nowhere to be found. Only our “lucky stars” enabled our existence.
We can reasonably say that we understand the history of the Universe within one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. That’s not good enough.
Scenario-based learning makes employees active participants in their own learning process, better preparing them for the real issues they may face at work.
500 sheep were slaughtered to produce the 2,060 pages of the “Codex Amiatinus,” a Latin translation of the Bible.
Large language models are an impressive advance in AI, but we are far away from achieving human-level capabilities.
Take a hint from Einstein and Mozart — unplug and make peace with some degree of failure.
Some say that the Sun is a green-yellow color, but our human eyes see it as white, or yellow-to-red during sunset. What color is it really?
Archaeologists can learn how societies lived by studying what they left behind when they died. Astronomers are doing much the same thing.
The researchers rebuked writers, scholars, and public figures for lazily perpetuating the notion of widespread gender bias in academic science.
Intelligence is not fixed but fluid. A growth mindset allows our brains to flourish while lowering our stress levels.