Ed Gent in Singularity Hub: Aviation has proven to be one of the most stubbornly difficult industries to decarbonize. But a new roadmap outlined by University of Cambridge researchers says the sector could reach net zero by 2050 if urgent action is taken. The biggest challenge wh … | Continue reading
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by Rafaël Newman I have always been tall. Or rather, I have been aware of my above-average height since puberty, when freakish physical change kicks in, mischievously, in concert with enhanced self-consciousness. At age 14 I moved with my mother and siblings from the Vancouver su … | Continue reading
by R. Passov Sometimes, when you least expect to, you learn something about your country and the toll it has imposed on certain of its citizens. In ancient times these learnings weren’t so serendipitous. During WWII, for example, you would have known folks on your block who serve … | Continue reading
Tom Zoellner in the Los Angeles Review of Books: The stories that a country tells itself are just as critical to its functioning as its army, its laws, its borders, and its flag. Where did the country emerge from, and where might it be heading? Such questions of national mytholog … | Continue reading
Ethan Siegel at Big Think: When most of us think of AI, we think of chatbots like ChatGPT, of image generators like DALL-E, or of scientific applications like AlphaFold for predicting protein folding structures. Very few of us, however, think about physics as being at the core of … | Continue reading
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Karthik Tadepalli in Asterisk: To many people, “development economics” is synonymous with the randomized controlled trial: randomly assigning some group of people to an intervention, like cash transfers or malaria protection nets, in order to tell if it really makes the recipient … | Continue reading
Alex Barasch at The New Yorker: Bang is portly and good-humored. He was born in Seoul and was a solitary, bookish child until his parents, concerned about his shyness, encouraged him to take up the guitar as a hobby. “I went a little bit further than my parents intended,” he said … | Continue reading
Gary K. Wolfe at the LARB: JONATHAN CARROLL’S The Crow’s Dinner, a 2017 collection of anecdotes, vignettes, and short essays (now republished in ebook form by JABberwocky Literary Agency, along with five other Carroll titles), offers a delightful and generous sampling of the Amer … | Continue reading
Charles Piller in Science: In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort. He took the helm at the agency’s Div … | Continue reading
Buddha I used to sit under trees and meditate on the diamond bright silence of darkness and the bright look of diamonds in space and space that was stiff with lights and diamonds shot through, and silence And when a dog barked I took it for soundwaves and cars passing too, and on … | Continue reading
Jesse Green in The New York Times: Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man … | Continue reading
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by David Kordahl On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, I taught introductory physics students how to set up circuits. They struggled. They tried to connect capacitors one to the next but, upon hooking up the battery, would find that none had charged. Or, if some capacitors had c … | Continue reading
by Eric Feigenbaum Two of the most frightening words in America: Medical Debt. And this nightmare is not just something you hear as an anecdote or cautionary tale. One in three of the people reading these words are likely to have medical debt. In 2022 roughly 100 million American … | Continue reading
A surprisingly strong cube I made out of staples after seeing this video. Yes, I am a nerd! Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Emily Temple at Literary Hub: The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced this Thursday, October 10. Who will win? As ever, no one knows. But everyone likes to guess…and bet. And because money talks, the betting odds can tell you a lot. Or a little. Or, something, anyway … | Continue reading
Lara Feigel in The Guardian: “Signs are taken for wonders,” TS Eliot’s speaker observes soberly in Gerontion. But what is the difference between a wonder and a sign – and which do we prefer? Such questions flow through Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star series of novels, an ongoin … | Continue reading
Georgina Rannard at the BBC: British computer scientist Professor Demis Hassabis has won a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “revolutionary” work on proteins, the building blocks of life. Prof Hassabis, 48, co-founded the artificial intelligence (AI) company that became … | Continue reading
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Jacob Dreyer at Noema: Over the past few years, the flimsy states and territories that cover the Eurasian continent as lightly as gauze have been getting pushed and pulled into a new way of being. In response to volatile oil prices, temperatures creeping ever higher, forests burn … | Continue reading
Carpe Diem Night and day seize the day, also the night — a handful of water to grasp. The moon shines off the mountain snow where grizzlies look for a place for the winter’s sleep and birth. I just ate the year’s last tomato in the year’s fatal whirl. This is mid-October, apple t … | Continue reading
Kamal Nahas in The Scientist: All cells in the body reach a point where they stop dividing, but some get there quicker under the influence of pressures, such as DNA damage or oxidative stress.1 Biologists have long studied how proteins hasten cell senescence in response to such s … | Continue reading
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A O Scott in The New York Times: On Thursday, the Swedish Academy will award the Nobel Prize in Literature, the pre-eminent — perhaps only — global arbiter of literary greatness. What distinguishes the Nobel isn’t that it singles out the best new poems, novels, essays and plays — … | Continue reading
Richard Vinen at Literary Review: It was during the 1930s that Chartwell mattered most. Churchill was out of office. He had a flat in London but no official residence and, for much of the time, no particular reason to be in the capital. Chartwell was not, though, a retreat from t … | Continue reading
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. In the high desert of Nevada, a little wildflower is seen clinging precariously to barren rock. We learn that this is the only place in the world where you can find Tiehm’s buckwheat. And like all rare and understated things, it can pull at a person’s heart … | Continue reading
by Marie Snyder I started reading about burnout when I walked away from teaching earlier than expected. Suddenly, I couldn’t bring myself to open that door after over thirty years of bounding to work. A series of events wiped away any sense of agency, fairness, or shared values. … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Ellena Savage in the Sydney Review of Books: In ‘As a Woman Grows Older’, the second story in J.M. Coetzee’s very funny 2023 book The Pole and Other Stories, Elizabeth Costello complains to her son John: ‘The word that comes back to me from all quarters is bleak. Her message to t … | Continue reading
Rachel Ossip in The Guardian: When faced with a bit of downtime, many of my friends will turn to the same party game. It’s based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, and involves translating brief written descriptions into rapidly made drawings and back again. One group calls … | Continue reading
David Fickling at Bloomberg: To make the solar cells that are projected to become the world’s biggest source of electricity by 2031, you first melt down sand until it looks like chunks of graphite. Next, you refine it until impurities have been reduced to just one atom out of eve … | Continue reading
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Kate Morgan in The New York Times: Marcella Townsend remembers looking around the kitchen in shock. In the silence just after the explosion, before the pain kicked in, she found herself almost in awe of the crushed stove and the caved-in cabinets. “It was like Bigfoot had walked … | Continue reading
From Iqvia: Latest estimates indicate that the number of patients affected by cancer will increase dramatically through the middle of the century across all regions of the world. At the same time, the innovation ecosystem that discovers, develops, and delivers breakthrough therap … | Continue reading
Elias Altman at Lithub: You only meet a few people in your life who, like stars, exert a pull so strong that they alter its trajectory completely. I was lucky enough to enter the orbit of the legendary editor and essayist Lewis Lapham. A week ago, I attended his memorial service. … | Continue reading
This Is Just To Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold by William Carlos Williams from Selected Poems New Directions Paperbooks, 1949 Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help … | Continue reading
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Alex Ross at The New Yorker: Claire Devon, the protagonist of Missy Mazzoli’s seductively nightmarish opera “The Listeners,” is living contentedly as a suburban schoolteacher somewhere in the Southwest when she is beset by an inexplicable, inescapable sound. It is described as a … | Continue reading
Christian Edwards at CNN: The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their “foundational discoveries” that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. “Although computers cannot think, machines can now mimic functions su … | Continue reading
by Mark R. DeLong Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference. ( … | Continue reading
by Monte Davis 12+16+16 = 44. We can all agree on that. 44/12 = 3 2/3. Good so far? That’s all the math needed to ask some pointed questions about CCS. That stands for carbon capture and storage (or “sequestration”), a technology discussed and explored at pilot-project scale for … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Untitled. June, 2014. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Mihika Agarwal at The Walrus: Abrupt policy-inspired breakups are just one socio-ethical dilemma ushered in by the era of artificial intimacy. What are the psychological effects of spending time with AI-powered companions that provide everything from fictionalized character build … | Continue reading
Ben Brubaker in Quanta: How do you prove something is true? For mathematicians, the answer is simple: Start with some basic assumptions and proceed, step by step, to the conclusion. QED, proof complete. If there’s a mistake anywhere, an expert who reads the proof carefully should … | Continue reading
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