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Eternal change for no energy: A time crystal finally made real

Eternal change for no energy: A time crystal finally made real

Natalie Wolchover writes: In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal.” In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond. A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in…

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The Big Money behind Trump’s Big Lie

The Big Money behind Trump’s Big Lie

Jane Mayer writes: It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including…

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Biden’s climate plans are stunted after dejected experts fled Trump administration

Biden’s climate plans are stunted after dejected experts fled Trump administration

The New York Times reports: Juliette Hart quit her job last summer as an oceanographer for the United States Geological Survey, where she used climate models to help coastal communities plan for rising seas. She was demoralized after four years of the Trump administration, she said, in which political appointees pressured her to delete or downplay mentions of climate change. “It’s easy and quick to leave government, not so quick for government to regain the talent,” said Dr. Hart, whose…

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Pro-Trump social network flooded with ISIS propaganda

Pro-Trump social network flooded with ISIS propaganda

Politico reports: Just weeks after its launch, the pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State, according to a POLITICO review of online activity on the fledgling platform. The social network — started a month ago by members of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle — features reams of jihadi-related material, including graphic videos of beheadings, viral memes that promote violence against the West and even memes of a militant executing Trump in…

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Small climate changes can have devastating local consequences – it happened in the Little Ice Age

Small climate changes can have devastating local consequences – it happened in the Little Ice Age

The Little Ice Age brought some bitter extremes. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565 By Dagomar Degroot, Georgetown University In recent weeks, catastrophic floods overwhelmed towns in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, inundated subway tunnels in China, swept through northwestern Africa and triggered deadly landslides in India and Japan. Heat and drought fanned wildfires in the North American West and Siberia, contributed to water shortages in Iran, and worsened famines in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. Extremes like these are increasingly caused…

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Why Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling ice cream in the West Bank rattled Israel

Why Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling ice cream in the West Bank rattled Israel

Israelis have long had a sweet tooth for Ben & Jerry’s. AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov By Ronnie Olesker, St. Lawrence University In 2018, I was living in Israel while researching a book about the country’s fight against groups that challenge its legitimacy. Every Wednesday, a new batch of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream arrived at my local supermarket, and I would snap up as many tubs of vanilla as I could. By Thursday, there’d be none left. Clearly, Israelis love their…

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How a vanished ancient Greek city helps us think about disasters

How a vanished ancient Greek city helps us think about disasters

Guy D Middleton writes: One night nearly 2,500 years ago, the people of Helike, a city in the northern Peloponnese, were in their homes. Perhaps they were winding down with a glass of watered wine or already sleeping after spending the day about their business in the bustling town. Some had been busy at the market, selling or buying the produce from the local farms or purchasing goods from further afield. Some might have visited the famous Temple of Poseidon,…

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When did humans start experimenting with psychoactive drugs?

When did humans start experimenting with psychoactive drugs?

Nicholas Longrich, Author provided By Nicholas R. Longrich, University of Bath Humans constantly alter the world. We fire fields, turn forests into farms, and breed plants and animals. But humans don’t just reshape our external world – we engineer our internal worlds, and reshape our minds. One way we do this is by upgrading our mental “software”, so to speak, with myths, religion, philosophy and psychology. The other is to change our mental hardware – our brains. And we do…

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An uncertain new phase of the pandemic in which cases surge but deaths do not

An uncertain new phase of the pandemic in which cases surge but deaths do not

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: So many things have gone wrong in the American response to the pandemic, but two important things have gone right: scientists have developed a vaccine, and older Americans have got it. Seventy-six per cent of Americans between the ages of fifty and sixty-four have received at least one dose, according to the Mayo Clinic’s vaccination tracker. Between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-four, it’s ninety-one per cent, and among those over the age of seventy-five it’s eighty-seven….

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Who are the unvaccinated in America? There’s no single answer

Who are the unvaccinated in America? There’s no single answer

The New York Times reports: As coronavirus cases rise across the United States, the fight against the pandemic is focused on an estimated 93 million people who are eligible for shots but have chosen not to get them. These are the Americans who are most vulnerable to serious illness from the highly contagious Delta variant and most likely to carry the virus, spreading it further. It turns out, though, that this is not a single set of Americans, but in…

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As Delta spreads, Pfizer and Moderna get set for a booster shot to profits

As Delta spreads, Pfizer and Moderna get set for a booster shot to profits

The Guardian reports: Praised for preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths and allowing a return to more normal life, Covid vaccines will also substantially benefit some pharmaceutical companies. In June, analysts estimated the global market for the vaccines could be worth $70bn (£50bn) this year, but the figure could be even higher as the Delta variant of coronavirus spreads and scientists debate whether people will need booster shots. On Thursday Moderna, which received US government funding to develop its vaccine,…

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Already distorting January 6, GOP now concocts entire counternarrative

Already distorting January 6, GOP now concocts entire counternarrative

The New York Times reports: In the hours and days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, rattled Republican lawmakers knew exactly who was to blame: Donald J. Trump. Loyal allies began turning on him. Top Republicans vowed to make a full break from his divisive tactics and dishonesties. Some even discussed removing him from office. By spring, however, after nearly 200 congressional Republicans had voted to clear Mr. Trump during a second impeachment proceeding, the conservative fringes of…

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Democratic leaders are betraying Black voters

Democratic leaders are betraying Black voters

Adam Serwer writes: Democratic leaders have a plan for overcoming the Republican Party’s attempts to restrict the franchise: Just vote harder. Civil-rights leaders expressed their frustrations to The New York Times last week, telling the outlet that “White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression.’” Following Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, Republican-led states have engaged in a massive campaign to narrow voting access, spurred on by…

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The return of pro-democracy hypocrisy

The return of pro-democracy hypocrisy

Shadi Hamid wrires: Governments, even democratic ones, are often ineffective or simply bad. Elections sometimes produce uninspiring results, particularly when a patchwork of parties forms an unwieldy coalition government that struggles to get much of anything done. This doesn’t mean it should be overthrown. Nor should the United States ignore coup attempts staged in the name of bypassing the messiness of democracy. Yet in Tunisia, this is what the Biden administration appears to be doing, revealing the widening gulf between…

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