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An ‘historic event’: First malaria vaccine approved by WHO

An ‘historic event’: First malaria vaccine approved by WHO

The New York Times reports: The world has gained a new weapon in the war on malaria, among the oldest known and deadliest of infectious diseases: the first vaccine shown to help prevent the disease. By one estimate, it will save tens of thousands of children each year. Malaria kills about half a million people each year, nearly all of them in sub-Saharan Africa — including 260,000 children under 5. The new vaccine, made by GlaxoSmithKline, rouses a child’s immune…

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AI is no match for the quirks of human intelligence

AI is no match for the quirks of human intelligence

Herbert Roitblat writes: At least since the 1950s, the idea that it would be possible to soon create a machine that was capable of matching the full scope and level of achievement of human intelligence has been greeted with equal amounts of hype and hysteria. We’ve now succeeded in creating machines that can solve specific fairly narrow problems — “smart” machines that can diagnose disease, drive cars, understand speech, and beat us at chess — but general intelligence remains elusive….

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Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for ‘blue’

Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for ‘blue’

Cathleen O’Grady writes: Color is a spectrum: Red fades from orange to yellow, whereas green merges to turquoise, then blue. Languages treat this spectrum in different ways: Some have separate words for “green” and “blue,” others lump the two together. Some barely bother with color terms at all. “The question is, why?” says Dan Dediu, an evolutionary linguist at Lumière University Lyon 2. Now, he and his colleagues have found evidence for an unexpected answer: People with more exposure to…

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Facebook is to our minds as Exxon is to our air

Facebook is to our minds as Exxon is to our air

Bill McKibben writes: What Exxon is to our air, Facebook is to our minds: an unparalleled source of pollution. Both are giant companies with deep political power whose products at one point offered a certain kind of liberation and now threaten whatever well-being we still enjoy. Both have lied and covered-up their evil: the Wall Street Journal’s accounts of the Facebook files (artfully reprised in the New Yorker and last night on 60 Minutes) remind me of nothing as much…

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Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded

Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded

MIT Technology Review reports: One of the last messages that Vaiva Bezhan sent on Facebook Messenger on Monday afternoon, Central European Time, was a bit of a cliffhanger—and incredibly time sensitive. The Lithuanian photojournalist is co-organizer of the Afghan Support Group, one of many volunteer initiatives trying by any means possible to help evacuate vulnerable Afghans in the wake of the Taliban takeover. She was writing to ask if she could add someone to a flight manifest for one of…

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As the U.S. hurtles toward a debt crisis, what does McConnell want?

As the U.S. hurtles toward a debt crisis, what does McConnell want?

The New York Times reports: In March 2006, as the government veered dangerously close to a default, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the No. 2 Republican, let the Bush White House know he was two votes short of what he needed to raise the legal limit on federal borrowing. Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, began working the phones. He soon found two Democrats willing to break ranks and vote to put the legislation over…

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Deluge in Italy sets European record: 29 inches of rain in 12 hours

Deluge in Italy sets European record: 29 inches of rain in 12 hours

The Washington Post reports: An intense complex of thunderstorms stalled over northwestern Italy on Monday, unleashing a 12-hour torrent unrivaled in the history of European weather observations. It’s the latest extreme rain event supercharged by climate change that follows a summer of historic deluges in the Northern Hemisphere. In just 12 hours, 29.2 inches of rain fell in Rossiglione in Italy’s Genoa province, roughly 65 miles south-southwest of Milan and 10 miles north of the Mediterranean coastline. It marked the…

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Urban heat is getting more dangerous

Urban heat is getting more dangerous

Gizmodo reports: Urban heat is more dangerous—and even deadly—than ever. That’s true for two reasons: Globally, more people are flocking to cities, and cities themselves are getting hotter due to the climate crisis. Those are the findings of a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. In it, researchers examined heat exposure in 13,115 global cities from 1983 to 2016. The findings are a warning to cities as the climate crisis turns up…

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‘Everyone here hated the Americans’: Rural Afghans live with the Taliban and a painful U.S. legacy

‘Everyone here hated the Americans’: Rural Afghans live with the Taliban and a painful U.S. legacy

The Washington Post reports: The white flags flutter in the apple orchards of this serene hamlet ringed by oatmeal-colored mountains. They mark the precise spots where U.S. airstrikes killed Afghans. In the village center lies the destroyed shell of a building that once housed shops; down the road is a mangled, rusted car. There are white flags there, too. Together, they’re reminders of the legacy the United States has left in many rural areas across Afghanistan. “Everyone here hated the…

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Is your brain hardwired for numbers?

Is your brain hardwired for numbers?

Catherine Offord writes: Earlier this year, Brian Butterworth decided to figure out how many numbers the average person encounters in a day. He picked a Saturday for his self-experiment—as a cognitive neuroscientist and professor emeritus at University College London, Butterworth works with numbers, so a typical weekday wouldn’t have been fair. He went about his day as usual, but kept track of how frequently he saw or heard a number, whether that was a symbol, such as 4 or 5,…

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Facebook: The decline of a dying company

Facebook: The decline of a dying company

Kevin Roose writes: One possible way to read “The Facebook Files,” The Wall Street Journal’s excellent series of reports based on leaked internal Facebook research, is as a story about an unstoppable juggernaut bulldozing society on its way to the bank. The series has exposed damning evidence that Facebook has a two-tier justice system, that it knew Instagram was worsening body-image issues among girls and that it had a bigger vaccine misinformation problem than it let on, among other issues….

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Facebook’s outage shows we need antitrust action now

Facebook’s outage shows we need antitrust action now

Edward Ongweso Jr writes: On Monday, a global service outage hit Facebook and took down the world’s ubiquitous social network , along with Instagram and WhatsApp. The outage, which affects billions of people, occurred just as Facebook filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s amended antitrust complaint against the company accusing it of acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to consolidate anti-competitive market power. The day before the outage, on Sunday, the Facebook whistleblower behind devastating leaks that have…

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The Supreme Court has gone off the rails

The Supreme Court has gone off the rails

Donald Ayer writes: The Supreme Court has final authority to make difficult judgment calls articulating the powers of government and the limits and constraints upon them. To merit the public trust, these judgments must not appear simply as assertions of individual value choices by the justices or willy-nilly discard long-established court precedents that profoundly affect people’s lives. Nor should they actively undermine the ability of governments to advance public purposes as established by a fair democratic process. As the court…

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