Culture
Posted by Jim Davies on January 15, 2021
Did you ever have an imaginary friend? If you didn’t, chances are you know someone who did. Imaginary companions, as scholars call them, are quite common, and aren’t strictly associated…
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Matter
Posted by Subodh Patil on January 08, 2021
In a recent experiment done at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, in Germany, physicist Alexey Grinin and his colleagues came a step closer to resolving one of the more significant…
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Matter
Posted by Sean Raymond on January 05, 2021
Is Earth unique? Once a grand philosophical question, it has, over the past two decades, become, with the discovery of thousands of planets around other stars—our cosmic cousins—a scientific…
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Matter
Posted by Brian Gallagher on January 01, 2021
The other night I was out on our street with the neighbors for a socially distanced hang. My two-year-old daughter, mistaking the only street light on the road for the moon, pointed at…
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Biology
Posted by Stuart Firestein on December 29, 2020
In the late 1650’s, the French polymath and renowned scientist Blaise Pascal, having undergone a religious experience that transformed him into something of a zealot, suggested the following…
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Matter
Posted by Sean Raymond & Sebastiaan Krijt on December 21, 2020
Today, December 21, Jupiter and Saturn will appear extremely close to each other in the sky, less than a tenth of a degree apart, about one fifth the width of the full Moon.1 “Conjunctions”…
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Ideas
Posted by Brian Gallagher on December 16, 2020
In a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode from 2007, Larry David and his wife Cheryl and their friends attend a ceremony to celebrate his public donation to the National Resources Defense Council,…
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Matter
Posted by Natalie Wolchover on December 08, 2020
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.As fundamental constants go, the speed of light, c, enjoys all the fame, yet c’s numerical value says nothing about…
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Culture
Posted by Aubrey Clayton on December 02, 2020
The increasing visibility of women in leadership roles is one of the few success stories in the struggle for equality in science. But a new study, which connects how often scientists’…
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Ideas
Posted by Brian Gallagher on November 25, 2020
Not long ago, I heard an echo of Albert Einstein’s religious views in the words of Elon Musk. Asked, at the close of a conversation with Axios, whether he believed in God, the CEO of…
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