An Extinct, Head-Butting Animal May Help Explain Giraffes' Long Necks | Smart News| Smi... - 0 views
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Charles Darwin held up giraffes as a prime example of natural selection, his theory that’s often summarized as “survival of the fittest.” Giraffes with comparably longer necks could reach food high up in trees, which gave them an advantage over other animals and members of their own species with shorter necks. These longer-necked individuals thrived and reproduced more, leading to generations of giraffes with their signature lengthened anatomy.
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Yes, giraffes may have evolved to be able to reach food at higher elevations, but their long necks may also be the result of fierce competition for mates
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For many years, researchers simply called the mysterious animal “guài shòu,” or “strange beast.” Now, scientists have given the mammal a name—Discokeryx xiezhi—and they’ve pieced together a rough outline of how the animal may have lived some 16.9 million years ago.
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German Chancellor accused of comparing climate activists to Nazis - CNN - 0 views
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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was accused Monday of comparing climate activists to Nazis, in allegations that his spokesperson said were "completely absurd."
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"I'll be honest: These black-clad displays at various events by the same people over and over again remind me of a time that is, thank God, long gone by," he said in an exchange captured on camera.
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Scholz was speaking about the phase-out of coal-fired power generation and resulting jobs losses in open cast mining when he was interrupted.
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How an Organized Republican Effort Punishes Companies for Climate Action - The New York... - 0 views
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In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels.
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Conservative lawmakers in 15 other states are promoting similar legislation.
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Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
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Can Stimulating the Vagus Nerve Improve Mental Health? - The New York Times - 0 views
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The term “vagus nerve” is actually shorthand for thousands of fibers. They are organized into two bundles that run from the brain stem down through each side of the neck and into the torso, branching outward to touch our internal organs, said Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, a neurosurgeon and president of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health’s research center in New York.
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Scientists first began examining the vagus nerve in the late 1800s to investigate whether stimulating it could be a potential treatment for epilepsy. They later discovered that a side effect of activating the nerve was an improvement in mood. Today, researchers are examining how the nerve can affect psychiatric disorders, among other conditions.
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Researchers are now recruiting patients for the largest clinical trial to date examining to what degree vagus nerve stimulation may help patients with depression who have been unable to find relief with other treatments.
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You Have Permission to Be a Smartphone Skeptic - The Bulwark - 0 views
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the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet?
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One camp says yes, the kids are fine
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complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation.
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Opinion | What College Students Need Is a Taste of the Monk's Life - The New York Times - 0 views
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When she registered last fall for the seminar known around campus as the monk class, she wasn’t sure what to expect.
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“You give up technology, and you can’t talk for a month,” Ms. Rodriguez told me. “That’s all I’d heard. I didn’t know why.” What she found was a course that challenges students to rethink the purpose of education, especially at a time when machine learning is getting way more press than the human kind.
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Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him.
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Strange things are taking place - at the same time - 0 views
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In February 1973, Dr. Bernard Beitman found himself hunched over a kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking uncontrollably. He wasn’t eating or drinking, so there was nothing to cough up, and yet for several minutes he couldn’t catch his breath or swallow.The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.
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Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.
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“What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”
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Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: “I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.
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The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up
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“You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.”
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How thinking hard makes the brain tired | The Economist - 0 views
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Mental labour can also be exhausting. Even resisting that last glistening chocolate-chip cookie after a long day at a consuming desk job is difficult. Cognitive control, the umbrella term encompassing mental exertion, self-control and willpower, also fades with effort.
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unlike the mechanism of physical fatigue, the cause of cognitive fatigue has been poorly understood.
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It posits that exerting cognitive control uses up energy in the form of glucose. At the end of a day spent intensely cogitating, the brain is metaphorically running on fumes. The problem with this version of events is that the energy cost associated with thinking is minimal.
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Scientists Can No Longer Ignore Ancient Flooding Tales - The Atlantic - 0 views
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It wasn’t long after Henry David Inglis arrived on the island of Jersey, just northwest of France, that he heard the old story. Locals eagerly told the 19th-century Scottish travel writer how, in a bygone age, their island had been much more substantial, and that folks used to walk to the French coast. The only hurdle to their journey was a river—one easily crossed using a short bridge.
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there had been a flood. A big one. Between roughly 15,000 and 6,000 years ago, massive flooding caused by melting glaciers raised sea levels around Europe. That flooding is what eventually turned Jersey into an island.
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Rather than being a ridiculous claim not worthy of examination, perhaps the old story was true—a whisper from ancestors who really did walk through now-vanished lands
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Opinion | The Last Thatcherite - The New York Times - 0 views
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The world has just witnessed one of the most extraordinary political immolations of recent times. Animated by faith in a fantasy version of the free market, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain set off a sequence of events that has forced her to fire her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, and led her to the brink of being ousted by her own party.
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There’s something tragicomic, if not tragic, about capitalist revolutionaries Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng laid low by the mechanisms of capitalism itself. Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng may be the last of the Thatcherites, defeated by the very system they believed they were acting in fidelity to.
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Thatcherism began in the 1970s. Defined early as the belief in “the free economy and the strong state,” Thatcherism condemned the postwar British welfare economy and sought to replace it with virtues of individual enterprise and religious morality.
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Quantum Computing Advance Begins New Era, IBM Says - The New York Times - 0 views
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While researchers at Google in 2019 claimed that they had achieved “quantum supremacy” — a task performed much more quickly on a quantum computer than a conventional one — IBM’s researchers say they have achieved something new and more useful, albeit more modestly named.
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“We’re entering this phase of quantum computing that I call utility,” said Jay Gambetta, a vice president of IBM Quantum. “The era of utility.”
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Present-day computers are called digital, or classical, because they deal with bits of information that are either 1 or 0, on or off. A quantum computer performs calculations on quantum bits, or qubits, that capture a more complex state of information. Just as a thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger postulated that a cat could be in a quantum state that is both dead and alive, a qubit can be both 1 and 0 simultaneously.
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'The Godfather of AI' Quits Google and Warns of Danger Ahead - The New York Times - 0 views
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he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
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Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.
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“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,”
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Opinion | Transgender biology debates should focus on the brain, not the body - The Was... - 0 views
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what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?
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The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender.
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It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.
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Opinion | A New Dark Age Looms - The New York Times - 0 views
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IMAGINE a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.
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as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.
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Until then, farmers will struggle to reliably predict new seasonal patterns and regularly plant the wrong crops. Early signs of major drought will go unrecognized, so costly irrigation will be built in the wrong places. Disruptive societal impacts will be widespread.
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Opinion | How Behavioral Economics Took Over America - The New York Times - 0 views
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Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)
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it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.
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Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing
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How Climate Change Is Changing Therapy - The New York Times - 0 views
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Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”
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That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption
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“We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”
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The Perks of Taking the High Road - The Atlantic - 0 views
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hat is the point of arguing with someone who disagrees with you? Presumably, you would like them to change their mind. But that’s easier said than done
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Research shows that changing minds, especially changing beliefs that are tied strongly to people’s identity, is extremely difficult
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this personal attachment to beliefs encourages “competitive personal contests rather than collaborative searches for the truth.”
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