Issue_64
14 articles-
A Short History of the Missing Universe
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The cosmos plays hide-and-seek. Sometimes, though, even when astronomers have a hunch for where their prey might hide, it can take them decades of searching to confirm it. The case of the universe’s missing matter—a case that appears to now be closed, as I reported earlier this month—is one such instance. To […] -
How Doctors Use Poetry
A Harvard medical student describes how he is learning to both treat and heal. -
The Fourth Copernican Revolution
Is our universe one island in an archipelago? -
Why Did the Ancients Bury Their Dogs like Family Members?
Man’s best friend was also man’s first buried pet.Photograph by Pavlina Trauskeova / Shutterstock As a kid, when my pet turtle died we had a funeral—of course—and buried him in the backyard. When the family dog passed, his remains were cremated and placed in an urn on the mantle. In today’s society, mortuary rites for […] -
The Heart of Musical Experience Is Expectation
In “Half-Wit,” an episode of House, Gregory House, a brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like doctor (and a decent musician) wheels a piano into a patient’s room. It’s a delightful moment: The patient is a musical savant named Patrick, played by the musician Dave Matthews—a painful muscle contraction in his hand, suffered during a performance, brought him in. […]
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Fine Tuning Is Just Fine
Why it’s not such a problem that the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found new physics.
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The Case for Dancing Astrophysics
Cosmology is the story of the fundamental particles, forces, and energies that shape and govern our universe. And that story is one of rhythm and motion.Screengrab via Paul M. Sutter / YouTube For millennia, cosmological and religious systems of thought were intertwined—and usually indistinguishable. European artwork of, say, the arrangements of planets and stars often […]
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The Strange Numbers That Birthed Modern Algebra
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial position of the hour hand on the plane is multiplied by another constant number. But is a similar trick […]
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Should You Get an AI Nanny for Your Child?
Mattel’s AI nanny, called Aristotle, recently gained the notorious distinction of being subject to a bipartisan protest in the US Congress. Plus, there was a petition against it with over 15,000 signatures. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which organized the petition, argued that Aristotle is a consumerist ploy. It “attempts to replace the care, […] -
The Ethics of Consciousness Hunting
How fMRI has become an ethical obligation. -
The End of Time
In the fundamental physics of the world, there is neither space nor time.
