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“They speed up and slow down, rock their north pole towards the planet and back again and maybe even reverse direction,” said Hamilton. “It would be a pretty confusing system to be in.”

The findings, published in the journal Nature, were based on ten years of observations of Pluto from the Hubble space telescope, which the researchers re-analysed after the relatively recent discovery of the four small moons

Climate presents more complicated issues than getting to the moon did, said John M. Logsdon, historian of the space program and founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

“The Decision to Go to the Moon,” that laid out four conditions that made Apollo possible. In the case of the space program, the stimulus was the first human spaceflight of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin, which filled Americans with dread of losing the space race. In an interview, Dr. Logsdon said it has to be “a singular act that would force action, that you couldn’t ignore.”

Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.

“We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”

by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.

Moon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more.

These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell

Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.

“Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings.

I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch.

The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another

I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,”

Moon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s

In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles.

Peers called her Punky Boobster.

“It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,”

What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?

She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery.

A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance

I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on

There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one.

What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?

Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me

But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in.

The four RS-25s can generate 1.6 million lbs (7 Meganewtons) of thrust

This will make it 15% more powerful than the giant Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s.

researchers analyzed water molecules in oceans for indicators of their ancient past.

“heavy water.” Water, as you know, is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. But some water molecules contain hydrogen’s chunky twin, deuterium. (It contains a neutron in its nucleus, whereas regular hydrogen does not.)

They concluded that remnants of that ancient ice remain scattered across the solar system: on the moon, in comets, at Mercury’s poles, in the remains of Mars’ melts, on Jupiter’s moon Europa — and even in your water bottle.

Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.

Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy.

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s what science is for.

“Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt,

“Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”

The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow.

We don’t believe you.

Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth’s climate.

we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions

Shtulman’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They lurk in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.

Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics.

We have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning.

we can deceive ourselves.

Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. Like the rest of us, they’re vulnerable to what they call confirmation bias—the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them

other scientists will try to reproduce them

Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.

Many people in the United States—a far greater percentage than in other countries—retain doubts about that consensus or believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free market and industrial society generally.

news media give abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists, and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses

science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research.

But industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why only 40 percent of Americans, according to the most recent poll from the Pew Research Center, accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming.

“science communication problem,”

yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe—and why they so often don’t accept the scientific consensus.

higher literacy was associated with stronger views—at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.

“egalitarian” and “communitarian” mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see the risks of climate change.

“hierarchical” and “individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to—some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.

For a hierarchical individualist, Kahan says, it’s not irrational to reject established climate science: Accepting it wouldn’t change the world, but it might get him thrown out of his tribe.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers.

organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.

Internet makes it easier than ever for climate skeptics and doubters of all kinds to find their own information and experts

Internet has democratized information, which is a good thing. But along with cable TV, it has made it possible to live in a “filter bubble” that lets in only the information with which you already agree.

How to convert climate skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn’t help.

people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values.

We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community.

“Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.”

evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences.

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming.

“That line between science communication and advocacy is very hard to step back from,”

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app.

that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science.

not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it.

for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method.

Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is.

“Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.”

science has made us the dominant organisms,

incredibly rapid change, and it’s scary sometimes. It’s not all progress.

An exact plan moving forward, which could mean a second test and delay before transport to Florida, had not yet been released by Saturday evening.

NASA said the RS-25 engines have been upgraded and refurbished since their last missions and the agency has placed an order with Aerojet Rocketdyne, recently acquired by Northrop Grumman, for 24 brand new versions.

In 1609, Galileo learned about the device and developed one of his own, significantly improving its design. That fall, he pointed it at the moon and discovered it had craters and mountains, debunking the common belief that the moon’s surface was smooth.

Galileo soon went on to make other findings with his telescope, including that there were four moons orbiting Jupiter and that Venus went through a complete set of phases (indicating the planet traveled around the sun).

Galileo had three children with a woman named Marina Gamba, who he never married. In 1613, he placed his two daughters, Virginia, born in 1600, and Livia, born in 1601, in a convent near Florence, where they remained for the rest of their lives, despite their father’s eventual troubles with the Catholic Church

Copernicus’ heliocentric theory about the way the universe works challenged the widely accepted belief, espoused by the astronomer Ptolemy in the second century, that put the Earth at the center of the solar system.

Galileo received permission from the Church to continue investigating Copernicus’ ideas, as long as he didn’t hold or defend them.

As a result, the following year Galileo was ordered to stand trial before the Inquisition in Rome

After being found guilty of heresy, Galileo was forced to publicly repent and sentenced to life in prison.

Although Galileo was given life behind bars, his sentence soon was changed to house arrest. He lived out his final years at Villa Il Gioiello (“the Jewel”), his home in the town of Arcetri, near Florence

In 1979, Pope John Paul II initiated an investigation into the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Galileo.

Thirteen years later, and 359 years after Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, the pope officially closed the investigation and issued a formal apology in the case, acknowledging that errors were made by the judges during the trial.

Regime ChangeThe Soviet space program faced interesting times as Union began to crumble in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Instead of the Soviet space agency, Mir and its Soviet cosmonauts (who became Russian citizens when the country changed) came under the aegis of Roscosmos, the newly formed Russian space agency. Many of the design bureaus that had dominated space and aerospace design were either shut down or reconstituted as private corporations. The Russian economy went through major crises, which affected the space program. Eventually, things stabilized and the country moved ahead with plans to participate in the International Space Station, plus resume launches of weather and communications satellites.

It was about a widespread culture of killing. It was about prominent white citizens who paid for killings, doctors who administered poisons, morticians who ignored evidence of bullet wounds, lawmen and prosecutors who were on the take and many others who remained complicit in their silence — all because they were profiting from what they referred to openly as the “Indian business.” The real death toll was undoubtedly higher than 24. One bureau agent admitted: “There are so many of these murder cases. There are hundreds and hundreds.”

The movement to suppress elements of American history extends well beyond Oklahoma. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, more than two dozen states have adopted laws that make it easier to remove books from school libraries and to prevent certain teaching on race, gender and sexuality

In 2023, PEN America, which defends freedom of speech, reported that book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries had surged 33 percent over the previous school year, with more than 3,000 recorded removals; among them are classics by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (banned in 30 school districts) and Margaret Atwood (banned in 34). School curriculums are being revised to mask discomfiting truths — so much so that in Florida students will now be taught that some African Americans benefited from slavery because it gave them “skills.”

unmanned space exploration seems to me much more exciting and scientifically worthwhile than human spaceflight, especially at a time of restricted budgets and nascent technology.

human geologist could do in a few days what Curiosity may do in a year or two. But we aren’t likely to send geologists there anytime soon — and if we did, they wouldn’t be able to stay much longer than a few days, while Curiosity can silently and gently move about the planet for a decade or more, powered by its plutonium generator. Moreover, by the time we might get around to sending humans, in two to three decades at best, robots will have advanced to the point where they might easily compete in real time.

Over the coming decades we may send more robotic explorers to even harsher climes, maybe to explore deep oceans on Jupiter’s moon Europa, or to search on comets for telltale signs of life’s origins.

Some Turks still view the Armenians as having been a threat to the Ottoman Empire in a time of war, and say many people of various ethnicities -- including Turks -- were killed in the chaos of war.

The Ottoman Turks, having recently entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were worried that Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire would offer wartime assistance to Russia. Russia had long coveted control of Constantinople (now Istanbul), which controlled access to the Black Sea -- and therefore access to Russia's only year-round seaports.

How many Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the mass killings?Many historians agree that the number was about 2 million. However, victims of the mass killings also included some of the 1.8 million Armenians living in the Caucasus under Russian rule, some of whom were massacred by Ottoman forces in 1918 as they marched through East Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million deaths between 1914 and 1923, with not all of the victims in the Ottoman Empire

Some show Ottoman soldiers posing with severed heads, others with them standing amid skulls in the dirt.The victims are reported to have died in mass burnings and by drowning, torture, gas, poison, disease and starvation. Children were reported to have been loaded into boats, taken out to sea and thrown overboard. Rape, too, was frequently reported.

One common strategy for thinking about this is to suggest that what we used to call the whole universe is just a small part of everything there is, and that we live in a kind of bubble universe, a small region of something much larger

Newton realized there had to be some force holding the moon in its orbit around the earth, to keep it from wandering off, and he knew also there was a force that was pulling the apple down to the earth. And so what suddenly struck him was that those could be one and the same thing, the same force

That was a physical discovery, a physical discovery of momentous importance, as important as anything you could ever imagine because it knit together the terrestrial realm and the celestial realm into one common physical picture. It was also a philosophical discovery in the sense that philosophy is interested in the fundamental natures of things.

There are other ideas, for instance that maybe there might be special sorts of laws, or special sorts of explanatory principles, that would apply uniquely to the initial state of the universe.

The basic philosophical question, going back to Plato, is "What is x?" What is virtue? What is justice? What is matter? What is time? You can ask that about dark energy - what is it? And it's a perfectly good question.

right now there are just way too many freely adjustable parameters in physics. Everybody agrees about that. There seem to be many things we call constants of nature that you could imagine setting at different values, and most physicists think there shouldn't be that many, that many of them are related to one another. Physicists think that at the end of the day there should be one complete equation to describe all physics, because any two physical systems interact and physics has to tell them what to do. And physicists generally like to have only a few constants, or parameters of nature. This is what Einstein meant when he famously said he wanted to understand what kind of choices God had --using his metaphor-- how free his choices were in creating the universe, which is just asking how many freely adjustable parameters there are. Physicists tend to prefer theories that reduce that number

You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn't really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don't change -- which is perfectly true -- and then you're always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn't change, because your representations of it don't.

physicists for almost a hundred years have been dissuaded from trying to think about fundamental questions. I think most physicists would quite rightly say "I don't have the tools to answer a question like 'what is time?' - I have the tools to solve a differential equation." The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore.

The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

designer of the test-taking program, noted that even a simple task for children, like understanding the meaning of an arrow in the context of a test diagram, was not yet something the most advanced A.I. programs could do reliably.

scientific workshops intended to develop more accurate methods than the Turing test for measuring the capabilities of artificial intelligence programs.

Researchers in the field are now developing a wide range of gauges to measure intelligence — including the Allen Institute’s standardized-test approach and a task that Dr. Marcus proposed, which he called the “Ikea construction challenge.” That test would provide an A.I. program with a bag of parts and an instruction sheet and require it to assemble a piece of furniture.

First proposed in 2011 by Hector Levesque, a University of Toronto computer scientist, the Winograd Schema Challenge would pose questions that require real-world logic to A.I. programs. A question might be: “The trophy would not fit in the brown suitcase because it was too big. What was too big, A: the trophy or B: the suitcase?” Answering this question would require a program to reason spatially and have specific knowledge about the size of objects.

Within the A.I. community, discussions about software programs that can reason in a humanlike way are significant because recent progress in the field has been more focused on improving perception, not reasoning.

GeoSolver, or GeoS, was described at the Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing in Lisbon this weekend. It operates by separately generating a series of logical equations, which serve as components of possible answers, from the text and the diagram in the question. It then weighs the accuracy of the equations and tries to discern whether its interpretation of the diagram and text is strong enough to select one of the multiple-choice answers.

Ultimately, Dr. Marcus said, he believed that progress in artificial intelligence would require multiple tests, just as multiple tests are used to assess human performance.

“There is no one measure of human intelligence,” he said. “Why should there be just one A.I. test?”

In the 1960s, Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, expressed this skepticism most clearly when he wrote, “Believing that writing these types of programs will bring us closer to real artificial intelligence is like believing that someone climbing a tree is making progress toward reaching the moon.”