The Wild World of Threats - Issue 112: Inspiration
Nautilus
by David P. Barash
2y ago
You’re confronting a spider, up close, womano-a-womano. The tiny creature rears back on its hindmost legs and assumes a threatening posture, ridiculous given that you could easily squash it with your shoe. Yet everyone understands the gesture, even though to locate the most recent common ancestor shared by the two of you, you’d have to go back roughly half a billion years. The basic language of threat is nearly as old as that other basic language, DNA. Threats between living things have long been grist for the evolutionary mill. And human beings aren’t immune. As I write this, Russia’s Vladim ..read more
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E.O. Wilson Saw the World in a Wholly New Way - Issue 112: Inspiration
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by David Sloan Wilson
2y ago
I first met Edward O. Wilson in 1971 when I was a student in an ecology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Wilson, a famous Harvard professor, was sitting in on the student project reports. After I reported my experiments on food size selection in zooplankton, Wilson remarked, “That’s new, isn’t it?” I was so proud to have impressed the great E.O. Wilson that I have remembered his comment ever since! Our next personal interaction came near the end of my graduate career at Michigan State University. I had constructed a mathematical model that provided supp ..read more
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Readers Love Curious George. I Fell in Love with the Author’s Astronomy Books. - Issue 112: Inspiration
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by Dan Falk
2y ago
He is without a doubt the most famous little monkey in all of fiction. Curious George, known for letting his inquisitiveness get him into trouble and then using his ingenuity to get him out of it, has been entertaining children and their parents since 1941, when the first book of his adventures, simply titled Curious George, by the husband-and-wife team of Margret and H.A. Rey, was published. It was followed by six more books; the last one, Curious George Goes to the Hospital, appeared in 1966. George has also starred in six animated feature films, and, since 2006, a PBS television series. So ..read more
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What Makes Group Decisions Go Wrong. And Right. - Issue 112: Inspiration
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by Joshua Holden
2y ago
In the 1970s, psychologist Irving Janis pioneered research into a phenomenon that goes by a name most people know, probably understand intuitively, and perhaps have experienced personally. I’m talking about “groupthink.” Janis saw the symptoms of groupthink in a host of bad collective decisions he studied. He was particularly intrigued by White House fiascos, like the Bay of Pigs invasion and the escalation of the Vietnam War, but also detected groupthink in the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Janis called it “a deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgements as a ..read more
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You Can Save More Animals by Donating $100 Than Going Vegan - Facts So Romantic
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by Jim Davies
2y ago
The animals killed or saved by altering your diet is pretty small compared to the good you can do for animals with a small donation.Photograph by alexkatkov / Shutterstock By now everybody’s heard about the terrible treatment that pigs and chickens get in factory farms. For many, the solution seems obvious: eat less meat. But let’s look at that solution in terms of how effective it is. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American eats about 30 farm animals per year, not including seafood. But on top of that, more other animals die in the process of getting t ..read more
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The Country Gentleman of Physics - Issue 111: Spotlight
Nautilus
by Michael Brooks
2y ago
Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Outsiders” issue in May, 2021. Julian Barbour’s obsession with time began on Oct. 18, 1963. The 26-year-old Cambridge graduate in mathematics was on a train to the Bavarian alps, where he and a friend planned to climb the Watzmann, Germany’s third highest peak. The newspaper in his hand contained a summary of a Scientific American article by British physicist Paul Dirac. “He questioned whether four-dimensional symmetries are a fundamental feature of the physical ..read more
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Our Little Life Is Rounded with Possibility - Issue 111: Spotlight
Nautilus
by Chiara Marletto
2y ago
Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Hidden Truths” issue in June, 2021. If you could soar high in the sky, as red kites often do in search of prey, and look down at the domain of all things known and yet to be known, you would see something very curious: a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. These things are central to our understanding of physical reality, both at the everyday level and at the level of the most fundamental phenomena in physics—yet they have tra ..read more
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The Joy of Condensed Matter - Issue 111: Spotlight
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by John Baez
2y ago
Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Wonder” issue in February, 2021. Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, and Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math leap to mind, and they have started a wider conversation. But is all of physics really in trouble, or just some of it? If you actually read these books, you’ll see they’re about so-called “fundamental” physics. Some other parts of physics are doing just fine ..read more
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Planets Are Born from Dust Trap Rings - Facts So Romantic
Nautilus
by Sean Raymond, Andre Izidoro & Rajdeep Dasgupta
2y ago
The ALMA telescope, in Chile, sensitive to millimeter-sized dust, took these images of planet-forming disks.ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), S. Andrews et al.; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello All we are is dust in the wind, man. The same goes for the planets and asteroids and comets. Starting from our dusty beginnings, gravity and a mess of other forces conspired to build our solar system. There’s a venerable tradition of trying to figure out what that grand and hectic process must have looked like. Today, with the aid of sophisticated simulations, scientists can meticulously tinker with models that might sho ..read more
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Gaia, the Scientist - Issue 111: Spotlight
Nautilus
by Hope Jahren
2y ago
Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Universality” issue in April, 2021. There exists a social hierarchy within science that strikes people who are not mixed up in it as ridiculous. It goes like this: Mathematicians are superior to Physicists, who are, in turn, superior to Chemists, who are of course, superior to Biologists. There’s also a pecking order within each of these disciplines. Take biology, for example: Geneticists are superior to Biochemists, who are superior to Ecologists. The system br ..read more
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