Issue_71

17 articles
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    Viruses Have a Secret, Altruistic Social Life

    Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Social organisms come in all shapes and sizes, from the obviously gregarious ones like mammals and birds down to the more cryptic socializers like bacteria. Evolutionary biologists often puzzle over altruistic behaviors among them, because self-sacrificing individuals would at first seem to be at a severe disadvantage under […]

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    An Astrophysicist on What the Black-Hole Image Reveals

    The great irony of black holes is that, in all the decades that we astrophysicists have talked about them, we never had any direct observational evidence for them. When astronomers said they had “found black holes” in this or that location in a faraway location in the universe, what this really meant was a very […]

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    First Black-Hole Image: It’s Not Looks That Count

    FIRST LOOK: The Event Horizon Telescope measures wavelength in the millimeter regime, too long to be seen by eye, but ideally suited to the task of imaging a black hole: The gas surrounding the black hole is almost transparent at this wavelength and the light travels to Earth almost undisturbed. Since we cannot see light […]

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    The Day Feynman Worked Out Black-Hole Radiation on My Blackboard

    It’s the idea Stephen Hawking would become famous for a year later.

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    In Quantum Games, There’s No Way to Play the Odds

    Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.In the 1950s, four mathematically minded U.S. Army soldiers used primitive electronic calculators to work out the optimal strategy for playing blackjack. Their results, later published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, detailed the best decision a player could make for every situation encountered in the game. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log […]

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    Nassim Taleb’s Case Against Nate Silver Is Bad Math

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb has overplayed his hand this time and is left looking, well, klueless.Photograph by Salzburg Global Seminar / Flickr Since the midterm elections, a feud has been raging on Twitter between Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, hedge-fund-manager-turned-mathematical-philosopher and author of The Black Swan. It began, late last year, with […]