Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Why humans have more voice control than any other primates

Why humans have more voice control than any other primates

Science News reports: A crying baby, a screaming adult, a teenager whose voice cracks — people could have sounded this shrill all the time, a new study suggests, if not for a crucial step in human evolution. It’s what we’re missing that makes the difference. Humans have vocal cords, muscles in our larynx, or voice box, that vibrate to produce sound. But unlike all other studied primates, humans don’t have small bits of tissue above the vocal cords called vocal…

Read More Read More

This animal’s behavior is mechanically programmed

This animal’s behavior is mechanically programmed

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: The biophysicist Manu Prakash vividly remembers the moment, late one night in a colleague’s laboratory a dozen years ago, when he peered into a microscope and met his new obsession. The animal beneath the lenses wasn’t much to look at, resembling an amoeba more than anything else: a flattened multicellular blob, only 20 microns thick and a few millimeters across, with neither head nor tail. It moved on thousands of cilia that blanketed its underside to form…

Read More Read More

Why the Trump search warrant is nothing like Hillary’s emails

Why the Trump search warrant is nothing like Hillary’s emails

Politico reports: The Justice Department official who oversaw the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified records says there’s simply no comparing the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to the case against the former secretary of State. “People sling these cases around to suit their political agenda but every case has to stand on its own circumstances,” said David Laufman, who led the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section until 2018 and is now a partner at the firm Wiggin and…

Read More Read More

An informer told the FBI what docs Trump was hiding, and where

An informer told the FBI what docs Trump was hiding, and where

William M Arkin reports: The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents, two senior government officials told Newsweek. The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur…

Read More Read More

Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea

Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea

Politico reports: Blasts that rocked a Russian military airfield in forcibly annexed Crimea signal the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south and a critical new phase of the war that could shape its ultimate outcome, two Ukrainian officials told POLITICO. The series of explosions Tuesday sent huge fireballs and mushroom clouds of black smoke into the sky, scattering terrified Russian vacationers who were seen in videos shared on social media scrambling for safety on a beach and fleeing by…

Read More Read More

Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

The Daily Mail reports: Germany’s most-important river is running dry as Europe suffers through a drought that is on course to become its worst in 500 years, with terrifying wildfires burning once again in France. Water levels in the Rhine – which carries 80 per cent of all goods transported by water in Germany, from its industrial heartlands to Dutch ports – are now so low that it could become impassable to barges later this week, threatening vital supplies of…

Read More Read More

Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Naomi Oreskes writes: At last year’s Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we don’t yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry’s optimism comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may…

Read More Read More

Israel and Gaza keep up their precarious dance

Israel and Gaza keep up their precarious dance

Neri Zilber reports: One week before the latest round of fighting over the weekend between Israel and the Gaza-based militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a senior Israeli security official had some prescient words. Unlike Hamas, which is the bigger and stronger group that actually rules Gaza, the PIJ “was an outlier … with no governing responsibility, which would require special treatment” if it chose to escalate, he told me. That “special treatment” came in the form of a three-day…

Read More Read More

How the physics of nothing underlies everything

How the physics of nothing underlies everything

Charlie Wood writes: Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, declaring that God could do anything, even create a vacuum. Then a mere scientist pulled it off. Otto von Guericke invented a pump to suck the air from within a hollow copper sphere, establishing perhaps the first high-quality vacuum on Earth. In a theatrical demonstration in 1654,…

Read More Read More

What the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago could mean for Trump

What the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago could mean for Trump

Isaac Chotiner writes: On Monday, F.B.I. agents searched the Florida home of former President Donald Trump, possibly commencing a new phase in the legal scrutiny that he has faced since leaving office. According to the Times, the search concerned classified material that Trump removed from the White House and took to Mar-a-Lago. What remains unclear is whether they found any information related to attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. To understand…

Read More Read More

China’s Taiwan aggression has backfired in Tokyo

China’s Taiwan aggression has backfired in Tokyo

William Sposato writes: China’s four days of military exercises encircling Taiwan in response to a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week has clear ramifications for Japan. The show of military muscle just 70 miles from Japanese territory and the firing of ballistic missiles into waters controlled by Japan were clearly meant as a warning that the country risks being dragged into any future conflict in the region. While China’s motives in indirectly targeting Japan are not known,…

Read More Read More

Bolsonaro is justifiably afraid of going to prison

Bolsonaro is justifiably afraid of going to prison

Vanessa Barbara writes: “I’m letting the scoundrels know,” President Jair Bolsonaro told supporters last year, “I’ll never be imprisoned!” He was shouting. But then, Mr. Bolsonaro tends to become animated when talking about the prospect of prison. “By God above,” he declared to an audience of businesspeople in May, “I’ll never be arrested.” As he spends “more than half” of his time dealing with lawsuits, he surely feels well armed against arrest. But there’s desperation in his defiance. The fate…

Read More Read More

How Sen. Kyrsten Sinema serves Wall Street

How Sen. Kyrsten Sinema serves Wall Street

CNBC reports: Long before Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., held up a massive spending bill that promised to create jobs, invest in clean energy and tax the rich — delivering on some of President Joe Biden’s and the Democratic party’s top campaign promises — those working at Wall Street investment firms had donated millions to the freshman senator’s campaign. One of her main objections was the bill’s so-called carried interest tax provision — which would have closed an arcane loophole in…

Read More Read More

Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

William MacAskill writes: Humanity, today, is in its adolescence. Most of a teenager’s life is still ahead of them, and their decisions can have lifelong effects. Similarly, most of humanity’s life lies ahead – an estimated 118 billion people have already lived, but vastly more people, perhaps thousands or even millions of times that number, are yet to be born. And some of the decisions we make this century will impact the entire course of humanity’s future. Contemporary society does…

Read More Read More