Ancient bacteria have communications structures like human ones
This unexpected finding is difficult to square with as purely random origin of life. The researchers seem to sense that.
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Researchers: Cave paintings are much better seen by torchlight
Diego Garate got a chance to test this when he found some modern graffiti in a cave near a crowded beach in Basque country.
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Social media is not an apocalypse; it’s a printing press cubed
At The Eternally Radical Idea, academic freedom fighter Greg Lukianoff reminds us of how the printing press changed history, inviting comparison with the internet
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Changing world: Associated Press accepts cash from interest groups
To survive the toll the internet is taking, historic news agency AP has been accepting cash from climate action groups for climate news coverage.
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For evolution, math prof says, the burden of proof is on materialists
In a short video, Granville Sewell explains why the Second Law of Thermodynamics shifts the burden of proof
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No, we aren’t really creating life in a test tube yet
The much ballyhooed SpudCell is impressive but does not live up to the media coverage in a number of important ways.
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What might a pioneer computer programmer say about AI today?
What would Ada Lovelace think of AI-generated music, videos, and text – or slop?
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Steve Meyer on why New Atheism collapsed
Also some intriguing stats on how religion is doing generally today.
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AI briefs overwhelm a British court: A tragedy of the commons?
Perhaps Britain will need to consider AI judges for non-criminal cases as well …
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Did you know there is a typeface that prevents AI data theft?
It’s a sound and welcome response to the current mass appropriation of everybody’s work without consent or compensation.
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What happens to your brain and mind under anesthesia?
Researchers are trying to develop better ways of preventing post-operative cognitive issues, a common problem in older patients.
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Why do taxi drivers suffer low rates of late-life dementia?
Driving, as such, did not offer protection from the dread dementia; needing to constantly map place coordinates quickly in real time seems to enlarge the hippocampus.
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Could the Fermi Paradox — where are the aliens? — get worse?
Ivliev contends that aliens would be machine-mediated and low-noise so we should not expect to find them easily.
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Culture change: Darwin’s rival Lamarck is back
Despite longstanding ridicule, many recent papers show evidence of Lamarckism in many life forms.
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The prof who argues against intellectual diversity is at least honest
But why should taxpayers be compelled to support universities if their attitude to diversity of opinion — as outlined by Saraganian — is that of a strict church?
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Legacy media struggle to keep Fauci legend alive
For many media people, the revelations from Fauci’s papers are just something that needs explaining away. That is pretty much what they will continue to try to do.
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Yes, Hollywood’s on the way out but not for the reason many think
Hollywood has always been left of center. If that’s now affecting the bottom line, it’s because something else has changed in the meantime.
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No, we haven’t hit the Singularity. We’re not even sure what it is
If what the Singularity means depends on who we talk to, we can probably decide we are there whenever we want to be there.
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AI scores 100% in math contest?: Robert J. Marks explains
Marks: The questions on these exams are drawn from domains that already exist in the corpus of material used to train modern generative AI systems so their success is not surprising.
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Hate the media? Elon Musk interview touches a nerve
People can afford to loathe traditional media for its missteps because they have alternatives in social media now.
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