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the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy

I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.

Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has hired my group, Yale University Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review.

Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all.

As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence.

Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again.

When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write

By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. The activation was significantly weaker.

We’ve always lied; new technologies are merely changing the ways and the reasons we lie. Witness the “butler lie,”

Of 5,396 texts examined, 10.7 percent were deceptive. Of those, 30 percent were butler lies, compared with less than 20 percent of lies by instant message.

Yet technology is already laying siege to the butler lie

Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise "Rest Room's" or "Puppy's For Sale." People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won. Enlarge ImageClose Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.

How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely. But we can see harbingers of such change: editorial austerity with commas, the newsroom preference for the period over all other marks, and the taste for visual crispness. Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang , which signals excited disbelief. Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.

Defenders of the apostrophe insist that it minimizes ambiguity, but there are few situations in which its omission can lead to real misunderstanding.

Because America never had kings or lords, it sometimes seems less inclined to worry about signs that its elite is calcifying.

Thomas Jefferson drew a distinction between a natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented, which was a blessing to a nation, and an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, which would slowly strangle it.

When the robber barons accumulated fortunes that made European princes envious, the combination of their own philanthropy, their children’s extravagance and federal trust-busting meant that Americans never discovered what it would be like to live in a country where the elite could reliably reproduce themselves.

I imagine that physicists are similarly deluged with revelations about how to build a perpetual-motion machine or about the hitherto secret truth behind relativity. And so I didn’t view the arrival of “A New History of Life” with great enthusiasm.

subtitle breathlessly promises “radical new discoveries about the origins and evolution of life on earth,” while the jacket copy avers that “our current paradigm for understanding the history of life on Earth dates back to Charles Darwin’s time, yet scientific advances of the last few decades have radically reshaped that aging picture.”

authors Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink are genuine scientists—paleontologists, to be exact. And they can write.

“We watched for a period of a few months and the tumours just disappeared,”

“There had been no doubt about her diagnosis,” he says. “But now there was nothing in the biopsies, or the scans.”

After 20 weeks, the patient was cancer-free.

How did experts get it so wrong?

the primary problem is that nutrition policy has long relied on a very weak kind of science: epidemiological, or “observational,” studies in which researchers follow large groups of people over many years. But even the most rigorous epidemiological studies suffer from a fundamental limitation. At best they can show only association, not causation.

Instead of accepting that this evidence was inadequate to give sound advice, strong-willed scientists overstated the significance of their studies.

What I hope to make explicit today is how much California – the place, the concept, “the dream machine” – shapes (wants to shape) the future of technology and the future of education.

In an announcement on Facebook – of course – Zuckerberg argued that “connectivity is a human right.”

As Zuckerberg frames it at least, the “human right” in this case is participation in the global economy

A 2010 study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found that the percentage of college students exhibiting narcissistic personality traits, based on their scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a widely used diagnostic test, has increased by more than half since the early 1980s, to 30 percent. In their book “Narcissism Epidemic,” the psychology professors Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell show that narcissism has increased as quickly as obesity has since the 1980s. Even our egos are getting fat.

This is a costly problem. While full-blown narcissists often report high levels of personal satisfaction, they create havoc and misery around them. There is overwhelming evidence linking narcissism with lower honesty and raised aggression.

narcissism isn’t an either-or characteristic. It’s more of a set of progressive symptoms (like alcoholism) than an identifiable state (like diabetes). Millions of Americans exhibit symptoms, but still have a conscience and a hunger for moral improvement. At the very least, they really don’t want to be terrible people.

The now-discredited study got headlines because it offered hope. It seemed to prove that our sense of empathy, our basic humanity, could overcome prejudice and bridge seemingly irreconcilable differences. It was heartwarming, and it was utter bunkum. The good news is that this particular case of scientific fraud isn't going to do much damage to anyone but the people who concocted and published the study. The bad news is that the alleged deception is a symptom of a weakness at the heart of the scientific establishment.

When it was published in Science magazine last December, the research attracted academic as well as media attention; it seemed to provide solid evidence that increasing contact between minority and majority groups could reduce prejudice.

But in May, other researchers tried to reproduce the study using the same methods, and failed. Upon closer examination, they uncovered a number of devastating "irregularities" - statistical quirks and troubling patterns - that strongly implied that the whole LaCour/Green study was based upon made-up data.

If I were writing the dietary guidelines, I would give them a radical overhaul. I’d go so far as to radically overhaul the way we evaluate diet. Here’s why and how.

Lately, as scientists try, and fail, to reproduce results, all of science is taking a hard look at funding biases, statistical shenanigans and groupthink. All that criticism, and then some, applies to nutrition.

Prominent in the charge to change the way we do science is John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford University. In 2005, he published “Why Most Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLOS Medicin

growing body of research has highlighted scientists’ inability to reproduce one another’s results, including a 2012 study that found only 11 percent of “landmark” cancer studies investigated could be independently confirmed.

“Some communities have standards requiring raw data to be deposited at or before publication, but the computer code is generally not made available, typically due to the time it takes to prepare it for release,”

Sage’s solution? An open-source computational platform, called Synapse, which enables seamless collaboration among geographically dispersed scientific teams—providing them with the tools to share data, source code, and analysis methods on specific research projects or on any of the 10,000 datasets in the organization’s massive data corpus. Key to these collaborations are tools embedded in Synapse that allow for everything from data “freezing” and versioning controls to graphical provenance records—delineating who did what to which dataset, for example.

a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough.

With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.”

On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.

Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence

Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 (although the idea dates back as far as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes). In a paper titled “Are You Living In a Simulation?”, Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced “posthuman” civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe.

If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,

The Sars-CoV-2 virus almost certainly originated in bats, which have evolved fierce immune responses to viruses, researchers have discovered. These defences drive viruses to replicate faster so that they can get past bats’ immune defences. In turn, that transforms the bat into a reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly transmissible viruses

“This virus probably jumped from a bat into another animal, and that other animal was probably near a human, maybe in a market,

Virus-ridden particles are inhaled by others and come into contact with cells lining the throat and larynx. These cells have large numbers of receptors – known as Ace-2 receptors – on their surfaces. (Cell receptors play a key role in passing chemicals into cells and in triggering signals between cells.

I’m a Scholar of Religion. Here’s What I See in the Atlanta Shootings.

Did racism or theology or gender motivate the shootings in Georgia? All of the above.

I saw in Korean sources first that six of the dead were Asian women, four of Korean descent

At least a tenth of the world's mature giant sequoia trees were destroyed by a single California wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada last year,

a copy of the report that describes catastrophic destruction from the Castle Fire, which charred 273 square miles (707 square km) of timber in Sequoia National Park.

Researchers used satellite imagery and modeling from previous fires to determine that between 7,500 and 10,000 of the towering species perished in the fire. That equates to 10% to 14% of the world's mature giant sequoia population, the newspaper said.