Category: Science
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Big in 2025
Here is a list of scientific and engineering news of 2025, ranked by potential impact. I like the idea of considering both the probability that a finding holds up and how important it’d be. If it turns out to be true. My biggest criticism is that some of the findings aren’t…
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Edge.org
For more than a decade, John Brockman’s Edge was one of my favorite websites. I’d visit every few days to check for new posts by eminent scientists discussing their ideas. This 2012 interview in the Guardian captures the intent and spirit of the website well. No other part of the…
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The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research
This article was recommended to me by the PhD advisor of my PhD advisor’s PhD advisor, or, as I like to think of him, my PhD great-grandfather. He was prominent in my chosen field, old and wise. Scientists at English research labs like ours didn’t and still don’t make much…
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Aristocracy and Ability
We’re not smart. We don’t work hard. We’re just posh. President of a Viennese private bank catering to the aristocracy I dislike of the concept of aristocracy, but is it possible that having an aristocracy is beneficial to a society? If we assume that it’s a good idea to put…
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Photo of an Exoplanet
Initially, it was only possible to infer the presence from exoplanets indirectly from the way they made their star wobble, or when they transited in front of the star, dimming it slightly. Direct imaging has only become feasible recently. As Paul Gilster writes on Centauri Dreams, we now have an…
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From Ole Worm to Christian Vibe
Slime Mold Time Mold, on their blog, mentions Ole Worm, a Danish Renaissance naturalist. In 1638, he was one of the first to recognize that the horns previously thought to originate from unicorns actually came from narwhals. With that name and a research interest in horns I’m sure there’s a…
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The Malleability of Intuition
Something within me takes control of my right hand and writes down the solution to the problem I have been thinking about. I don’t understand the solution as I’m writing it down, and only later, after having thought about it for some time, do I understand it in some nebulous…
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Isotopes, Fast or Strong
Dynomight has a list of things to be thankful for. My favorite: That radioactive atoms either release a ton of energy but also quickly stop existing—a gram of Rubidium-90 scattered around your kitchen emits as much energy as ~200,000 incandescent lightbulbs but after an hour only 0.000000113g is left—or don’t…
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Unedited
Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.” Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek
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Genome Counter
The Human Genome project took 13 years and cost $3 billion. It was completed in 2003, although some gaps took until 2022 to be filled. We have since sequenced the genomes of many other species. GOLD, the database that tracks this, reports 108,358 eukaryotic genomes. This number will keep going…
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Causation Does Not Imply Variation
As everyone knows in the abstract but sometimes forgets in the heat of the moment, correlation does not imply causation. John Cochrane reminds us that in addition, causation does not imply variation. Just because something is causative doesn’t mean it’s particularly important. In my field of genetics, genome-wide association studies…
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Kári Stefánsson
None of the encounters I’ve had with Kári Stefánsson have been pleasant. I remember taking a walk with him in Heidelberg many years ago, when I was a PhD student. The weather was foul. He was grumpier than the drizzle and my questions about the talk he had just given…
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Wrangel Island Mammoths
For hundreds of years after the pyramids of Giza had been completed, mammoths still roamed Wrangel Island off the northern coast of Siberia. Around the time the last ones died, the palace of Minos in Crete was being built. The cause of the extinction of the Wrangel Island mammoths is…
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Disappearing Polymorphs
Some chemical substances assemble in different crystal structures without changing their composition. Those alternative structures are called polymorphs. Polymorphs can act as seed crystals, causing subsequent batches of the substance to assume the same crystal structure. A tiny amount of the polymorph can be enough to cause all subsequent batches…
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One Argument is Better than Two
People have to eat, and some of what they eat is meat. As with everything, there’s a tradeoff, in this case between animal welfare and meat prices. Liv Boeree in Palladium magazine makes a convincing case that current law prioritizes low meat prices too much and animal welfare too little.…
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The Evolution of Everything
The Evolution of Everything isn’t Matt Ridley’s best book, but it has sections that are among the most thought-provoking writing I’ve come across. The theme is the insight that a lot of good things aren’t created but evolve. For example, is education important for economic growth? According to Ridley, not…
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The Funny Side of Cancer
He – literally – dove into danger to study life’s mysteries, from the depths of the sea to the edge of the stars. His mind unraveled the secret code of evolution while his heart laughed at fear. He once said: The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but…
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Things Don’t Happen For A Reason
We want to know why. My career is built around finding the causes for rare diseases. Human genetics, the field I trained and work in, is well suited for this. Germline mutations cause traits and diseases, but never the other way round, which means that human genetics can disentangle correlation…
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Birds, Sex & Beauty
We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing […] If the lyric is simply “mine mine mine,” then why the extravagance of the score? Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Natural selection, defined by genes that benefit survival becoming more frequent,…
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Mammals are Prose; Birds are Poetry
It dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like the birds do and other dinosaurs did. They have been experimenting with bright colors for a hundred million years. I’m a mammal and mammals don’t do beauty much. We mammals…
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The Algernon Argument
If there were an intervention that would result in enhanced intelligence, why have we not already evolved that way? The answer is the Algernon argument. Either there’s no simple improvement that’s possible, or there are trade-offs that make such improvements a bad idea. It’s a long blog post but it’s…
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Great Argus
Charles Darwin included an illustration of the feathers of the great argus pheasant in The Descent of Man. The pattern on great argus feathers seem to depict three-dimensional “pebbles“, showing the extent to which sexual selection will go.
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Selective Breeding for Longevity
In his Science Fiction novel Methuselah’s Children, Robert Heinlein described a clan whose members become unusually old without showing signs of frailty. They arrived there by selective breeding for old age. What would it take to actually breed a population to maximize its life span? Doing this in humans isn’t…
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Free Energy
The 1990s were the golden age of free energy: Technologies that, through new or underappreciated physics, generated abundant and clean electricity. It wasn’t about boring old ideas like wind or solar, but about exciting new inventions like zero-point energy and cold fusion. There were books that described how Nikola Tesla…
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The Soviet Space Shuttle
The Soviet Union had its own space shuttle program called Buran. It looked and operated similarly to the U.S. Space Shuttle. One Buran shuttle was completed and reached orbit in 1988, nine years after the first Space Shuttle. Even though that initial test flight was a success, it never flew…
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Personality Transplants
A spooky phenomenon: People who receive heart transplants sometimes change in a way that makes them resemble the donor. In some cases, they seem to acquire memories of events that happened to the donor. I’m skeptical, but it’s interesting to think about ways in which this could happen if it…
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Life on Mars
In 1996, Bill Clinton announced that we had found signs pointing to life on Mars. A meteorite called Allan Hills 84001, originating from Mars, contained structures that looked like small fossils. It later turned out that they probably weren’t. This week, something similar happened: The Perseverance rover found geological features…
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Terminal Lucidity
People experiencing terminal lucidity have typically suffered from dementia for a long time. Often they are gone so far they can’t talk or recognize their family any more. Yet a few hours before their death, they regain the ability to speak for a few hours and may even be able…
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More on Assembly Theory
I recently posted on Assembly Theory. I’ve read up on it some more since then and found this review of the theory by philosopher Johannes Jäger helpful. Recursivity makes the dynamics of the model historically contingent. In the end, the kinds of objects that you actually can assemble are not…
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Amber Inclusions
Seeing a perfectly preserved insect that flew around some long-gone forest tens of millions years ago right in front of your eyes, right now in 2025, is an interesting experience. Most fossils, somewhere between bone and rock, are too different from the original animal or the plant to fully engage…
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Assembly Theory
In April, Sara Imari Walker gave a talk (video, essay) at the Long Now Foundation. It was about Assembly theory, developed by chemist Lee Cronin and extended by Walker and others. I still struggle to decide if she and Cronin are on to something. A combination of causal depth (did…
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Scientists are Weird
Derek Lowe on his blog, In the Pipeline, on the scientific worldview: [It] is not a mindset that most people naturally find comfortable. Or comforting. You get used to it, you even learn to like it, but I think it’s important to never lose sight of its fundamental strangeness. We’re…
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Spinning Sun-Powered Space Catapult
For years now, I’ve been following what’s happening in the field of interstellar travel. Not closely, but close enough to know what kinds of technology are out there. Paul Gilster’s blog Centauri Dreams is a good resource. Because of the large distances involved, and because of the energy needed to…
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All That Is Earth Has Once Been Sky
Among the hills a meteorite Lies huge; and moss has overgrown, And wind and rain with touches light Made soft, the contours of the stone. Thus easily can Earth digest A cinder of sidereal fire, And make her translunary guest The native of an English shire. Nor is it strange…
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The Moon Landing as Signaling
Signaling, as in virtue signaling, has a bad reputation. This essay by Malmesbury on Telescopic Turnip makes the point that signaling can also involve great things, like the moon landing.
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Meadows
This is a mountain meadow in Lower Austria. Comparable meadows in the Sierra Nevada have fewer wildflowers and fewer insects, both in terms of absolute count and in terms of the number of species. The advantage Sierra Nevada meadows have is their wilderness, especially those that have never been grazed…
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Drafts
According to a pervasive belief in the German-speaking world, it’s essential to avoid drafts. They cause all kinds of diseases, including muscle stiffness and colds. This is why houses and especially sleeping areas must be kept draft free. I have not encountered this belief elsewhere and there is next to…
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Visual Thinking
This is one of the books that influenced me as a kid but that I had forgotten about since. I only re-discovered it because I went through some old books of mine on a trip back home. Visual Thinking by Marco Meirovitz and Paul I. Jacobs introduces mathematical concepts and…
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Gabonionta
The Natural History Museum in Vienna has an exhibit on the Gabonionta, also known as Francevillian biota. They were multicellular organisms that appeared 2.1 billion years ago but then died out due to decreasing atmospheric oxygen levels. The current form of multicellular life didn’t take off until the Cambrian explosion…
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Doubting Twin Studies
As a statistical geneticist, I used to think that the heritability estimates from twin studies are broadly correct. They suggest that variance in traits like height and intelligence is mostly due to genetic variation between individuals. The limitations of twin studies have been studied extensively for decades, and no flaws…
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Unfathomable Intricacy
Creation is so much more complex than it needs to be. The universe doesn’t just appear to be fine-tuned to support life but fine-tuned to maximize possibilities. This is the Anthropic Principle, but even more so. Here is Annie Dillard’s in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: That there are so many…
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Bigger Brains
To a first approximation, bigger brains = more neurons = smarter. Dig deeper, and it turns out to be more complicated than that. Honeybees have ten times fewer neurons than zebrasfish, yet by some measures are just as smart. Even discounting species-specific differences, the relationship between neuron count and intelligence…
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Ineffective Alternatives
I don’t get anything out of cold medications. By the time my symptoms are severe enough that I take something, it’s already too late. The only thing that has ever works for me is rest and giving it time. You may be luckier. If you have a stuffy nose, you…
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Bees and Fish
Insects, for all their evolutionary success, aren’t smart. Take dragonflies for example. There are 3,000 extant species, so they’re doing alright, but they’re not geniuses: [Insects’] failure to adapt, however, are dazzling. Howard Ensign Evans tells of dragonflies trying to lay eggs on the shining hoods of cars. Other dragonflies…
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Information Content of the Genome
On Asimov Press, Dynomight asks how information there is in DNA. How should we define the “information content” of DNA? I propose a definition I call the “phenotypic Kolmogorov complexity”. Roughly speaking, this is how short you could make DNA and still get a “human” […] So what would this number be? My guess is that you…
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AI Rationalizations
AIs like ChatGPT’s o3 take time to think before they answer. While doing so, o3 provides some commentary on its thinking process. For example, it mentions the websites it consults to find an answer. The strange thing is that much of the commentary may not at all be related to…
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Bad Advice to a Young Scientist
Freeman Dyson, in 2007: Sixty years ago, when I was a young and arrogant physicist, I tried to predict the future of physics and biology. My prediction was an extreme example of wrongness, perhaps a world record in the category of wrong predictions. I was giving advice about future employment…
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The Hero-Jackass Continuum
The thing with self-experimentation is that, depending on the observer’s vantage point, your daredevilry makes you look either like a hero or like a jackass. Here are some men who fall on that continuum: As always, Wikipedia has a more complete list.
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Intelligence and Race
It’s hard to have a good faith discussion about human intelligence with anyone, especially about the genetics of intelligence. This 2019 blog post by Ewan Birney and others is the best I’ve come across on the subject so far. For most traits, including IQ, it is not only unclear that…
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Questions about Intelligence
Do we understand intelligence enough to formalize it in mathematical or computer science terms? We don’t, because otherwise there’d be no need for AI benchmarking. In fact, the concept of intelligence is remarkably fuzzy. More questions about: Cave art | Domestication | Appearance
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X and Y
It’s a remarkable coincidence that the X and Y chromosomes, named that way because those are the only letters that describe their shapes, sit together in man’s cells, defining their maleness, just as they sit next to each other in the alphabet, and that those two letters are also the…
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Of p Values and Effect Sizes
Scientists are obsessed with p values, and since I work in a particularly quantitative field, I’m more obsessed than most. When you run a statistical analysis on noisy data, there are several ways to get a statistically significant p value. You could increase your sample size to improve the statistical…
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Biosignature
Paul Gister on Centauri Dreams and Eric Hoel on The Intrinsic Perspective have good posts about the new data strengthening the case for a biosignature on K2-18b. As Hoel writes, Alien life is no longer about waiting for evidence, but debating the surprisingly not-crazy evidence we do have.
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Questions about Appearance
Observing someone, watching them smile or frown or hesitate or eat or walk, we can’t help form an opinion about them. Doing so may be an indispensable part of interacting with others. Even so, I’d love to know how accurate those opinions tend to be.
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We Invented Ourselves
We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention. Neither fire, the wheel, steam power, nor anti-biotics or AI is the greatest invention of humankind. Our greatest invention is our humanity. And we are not done inventing ourselves yet. This is Kevin Kelly, writing on the blog of the…
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AI Benchmarking
A month ago, I observed that out of three big magazines dedicated to literature, none had a recent discussion of AI and what it means for writers. Since then, Paul Taylor has published a piece on DeepSeek in the London Review of Books. He mentions how the performance of AIs…
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Why We Die
In Why We Die, Venki Ramakrishnan looks at longevity, and whether there may be a way to extend it. I’ve talked with Ramakrishnan a few times when I did my PhD at the same Institute where he solved the structure of the ribosome. Remembering those conversations, it occurs to me…
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Genetic Drift on Generation Ships
On Centauri Dreams, Alex Tolley writes about the challenges a generation ship would face. He mentions one potential problem that I find particularly interesting, even though I’m not convinced of its seriousness: Genetic drift. Over the quarter millennium voyage, there will be evolution as the organisms adapt to the ship’s…
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When Being Smart is Not Enough
What kinds of problems can be solved with more intelligence, and for which is intelligence not sufficient? Dynomight speculates that a superintelligent AI could solve most problems in philosophy and maths, only improve on forecasting a little, and not solve physics or cure cancer. This is in line with my…
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Coalescence
Coalescent theory is a population genetics approach to reconstructing the history of populations. This paper by Trevor Cousins, Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin applies an advanced coalescent model to humans to infer our demographic history. We already knew that Neanderthals and non-African modern humans interbred 45,000 to 49,000 years ago,…
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Terraforming
Getting to Mars is hard and may take longer than we anticipate. Terraforming it in any meaningful way is going to be even harder and would take centuries. The challenges are outlined here. Proponents of terraforming often focus on changing a planet’s environment to make it friendlier to humans and…
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Decimal Time
For anyone like me who is familiar with both inches and centimeters, it’s obvious that the metric system is superior. I have done anything from large DIY projects and cooking using both systems. As a scientist, I also think about how to measure things a lot professionally. The metric system…
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Why are More Neurons Better?
This is an excellent question whose answer is only obvious at first glance, asked by Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten. The correlation between the number of neurons and intelligence holds for biological brains and for AI, if we take the number of parameters to be equivalent to the number…
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Placebo Controlled Self-Experimentation
I have previously thought about how I’d do a placebo-controlled trial on myself. How could I create identical-looking pills – some with the substance I want to test and others as placebos – while still being able to identify them later when I analyze the results? Well, Dynomight actually did…
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Questions about Domestication
There are 3,900 species of mammals outside of rodents, yet we have only domesticated 15-20. Similarly, there are 12,000 species of grass, yet we have only domesticated 50-60, including wheat, rice and corn. Here are some questions about the choices we have made about domestication:
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Neanderthal News
Stone Age Herbalist lists what we have recently learned about Neanderthals. Here are the most interesting developments:
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AI in Biology
AI will soon design effective and safe drugs for any ailment. At least that’s commonly assumed, and on the surface it’s a reasonable prediction. After all, AI can already predict protein structures and sometimes even the effects of genetic variants. Having worked in drug development for a decade and having…
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The Game of Life
The board game Go is famous for having extremely simple rules yet having an almost unlimited number of ways to play it. The mathematician John Horton Conway was good at coming up with simple games that resemble Go in that they have simple rules and complex outcomes. This includes games…
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Kraken
Colossal squids are probably the world’s largest invertebrates and we know next to nothing about them. We have only ever caught about a dozen complete specimen, although the beaks of several more have been found in sperm whale stomachs, indicating that the two species fight. There is no image or…
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A Great Time to Be Large
I’d have loved to see Pleistocene megafauna like the mammoth with my own eyes, and maybe one day I will. In the meantime, I am happy in the knowledge that right now, I share the planet with both the largest animal and the largest plant that ever existed.
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The Sorcerer II
Around the time I was doing my PhD, J. Craig Venter was one of the most talked about scientists on the planet. At some point, he came to give a talk at my research lab and the lecture theatre was packed. Everyone knew about him, but not everyone liked him.…
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Optical Illusions
Akiyoshi Kitaoka‘s collection of optical Illusions. He’s added to the site since 2002, so there’s a lot.
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Life Prefers Ice
Robert Frost holds with those who say the world will end in fire. Freeman Dyson was agnostic on whether the world will end in fire or ice, but he thought that ice would be preferable. Cold environments are fundamentally more hospitable to complex forms of life than hot environments. Life…
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Recurring Dreams
Did you ever have this dream: You have to take an exam that you forgot to prepare for. How about this one: You’re late for a flight because you didn’t arrange transport to the airport. These fear-filled dreams are quite common, and on Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander offers a…
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Infinite in All Directions
The universe seems to be designed not just to allow live, but to favor interesting, diverse live, with plants and animals and minds and cultures. It didn’t have to be this way. There seem to be safeguards built into the universe to prevent one lifeform taking over, resulting in bland…
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Our Biotech Future that Didn’t Happen
I once attended a week-long meeting in Heidelberg. The topic was Science and Society and the organizer was Sheila Jasanoff, an academic whose work focuses on the social and political influences on scientific research. Most of the attendants were academics in the life sciences from the U.S. and Europe, and…
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Shotgun Seminars
In Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson describes a way to organize that I have not encountered before. It seems ideally suited to journal clubs to make sure that everyone has read the paper and can express their thoughts on it without the help of PowerPoint: At our institute in…
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The Coffee Ban
Swedes drink a lot of coffee, and at all times of the day. One of the few fragments of Swedish I remember from my time there is ingår påtår?, which means, are refills included? It’s important to know if the café you’re considering is going to give you free coffee…
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The Major System
Anyone with sufficient motivation can remember almost anything. There is an ancient technique to remember hundreds of random numbers in a short amount of time by breaking down the number, then linking each component to an image and forming an easy to remember story from those images. For example, the…
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Moon Diagrams
Bartosz Ciechanowski has created a wonderful page explaining a lot of what there is to know about the moon using animated diagrams. Also look at his past work, including on sound, watches, the internal combustion engine, curves and surfaces and the earth and sun system. Here‘s more on the Apollo…
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California: Great for Trees
Why does California have the tallest, biggest and oldest trees? Coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are the tallest trees on Earth, reaching 116 meters. Their range is coastal Northern California. Giant redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum) are the most massive trees on Earth, reaching 1,487 cubic meters. Their range is the Western slope…
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Life Without Stars
In a recent blog post, Julian Gough argues not only that planets without stars (“Stanets”) may harbor life, but that most of the life in our universe exists without stars. Two recent observations make this plausible. The first is that many of the moons of the outer solar system have…
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Give Chance a Chance
Heart disease, kidney disease and diabetes kill many of us and are highly heritable, yet identical twins rarely die of the same cause, even though they share the same genetics. How can that be? One reason is that there are a lot of causes of death, and while cumulatively their…
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Stigma
Common sense dictates that there’s an optimum level of introspection, and it’s possible that many of us do too much soul-searching. A related idea is that increasing awareness of mental health struggles may be counterproductive. This hypothesis is further explored in this article: We propose that awareness efforts are leading…
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Scaling up the Pioneer Plaques
The Voyager Golden Records and the Pioneer plaques will remain legible for billions of years. Where they travel, they’re protected from the destructive powers of Earth’s elements. This together with their simplicity – diagrams and records etched into metal plates – make it possible that they will be the last…
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Optimum Introspection
I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul;…
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The Mind is Flat
Our subconscious minds analyze vast amounts of information, and once they reach a conclusion, the conscious part of our mind is notified. At least that’s what I used to think before reading Nick Chater’s The mind is flat, which proposes a radical and well-argued departure from the way most people assume…
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Where Is It Like to Be an Octopus?
Octopuses are the only smart invertebrate animals. Their brains are quite different from that of vertebrates like us: Rather than being centralised and profoundly integrated, the octopus nervous system is distributed into components with considerable functional autonomy from each other. Of particular note is the arm nervous system: when severed,…
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Other Minds
My five-year-old daughter said that spiders are insects and I was almost sure that they weren’t until she showed me a worksheet her kindergarten teacher had given her that claims not only spiders but also centipedes, scorpions and snails for the insect class. Anyway, this is about a science book…
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Railguns
In Jules Verne’s 1865 science fiction novel From the Earth to the Moon, three men travel to the moon aboard a projectile launched from a huge cannon. In reality, launching crews this way is impossible because of the acceleration required to reach Earth’s escape velocity of 11.2 km/s. Even using…
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Not Transferable
As a scientist, a common lament I hear from my colleagues is that there aren’t enough scientists in politics. Although there are some who’ve made it to the top – Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Claudia Sheinbaum – we’re underrepresented compared to other professions like lawyers or businesspeople. Personally, I don’t…
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Fermi Calculations
Many years ago and on a different continent, I used to work for a management consulting firm with offices in all of the world’s major cities. Part of the job was interviewing candidates for entry level consulting positions, and one of the things I liked to ask them was to…
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Ice Cream for Lunch
In the 1999 movie Ghost Dog, there’s a scene where an ice cream vendor hears that ice cream isn’t all that bad after all and can’t wait to pass the news on to his customers. “They say ice cream is really good for your health. Rich in calcium!”, he announces…
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Arsenic for Longevity
In an essay first published in 1877 in Waldheimat, Austrian writer Peter Rosegger describes his encounter with peasants in Styria using arsenic as an anti-aging drug. This is a translation by Copilot, with some editing for readability: On one of the trips I took as I student, I stopped at…
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Alien Artifacts
As a kid, before I knew better, I liked to read Erich von Däniken. In Chariots of the Gods, he explained that the pyramids were built by aliens and that evidence of extraterrestrial development aid is evident in the artifacts of other ancient civilizations too. More recently, additional outlets such…
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Alien Oceans
2030 is going to be a big year for those curious about life in the solar system. The Europa Clipper spacecraft that just launched is going to arrive in the orbit of Jupiter and begin the exploration of its moon Europa. The following year, a second spacecraft, the Jupiter Icy…
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Wanted: Time
So much universe, and so little time Terry Pratchett Here are three observations that’d I’d love to spend a few weeks to investigate further, spending a few weeks on each, but can’t because I have a family and a job:
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Against Epigenetics
In the 1960s, biologist James McConnell conditioned worms to respond to light flashes, then ground them up and fed them to other worms. He reported that those cannibalistic worms learned to respond to flashes faster than non-cannibalistic control worms, suggesting that memory transfer had taken place. Others couldn’t fully replicate…
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In Praise of Mystery
In a few days, the Europa Clipper spacecraft is going to launch towards Jupiter. After a journey of six years, it will arrive at Jupiter’s moon Europa, surveying it for signs of habitability. Europa is one of the few places in the solar system with liquid water and the most…