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Could asteroids have supplied enough water to fill Earth’s oceans?

Could asteroids have supplied enough water to fill Earth’s oceans?

Physics Today reports: Three-quarters of the asteroids orbiting the Sun are of the carbon-rich C-type, whose significant freight of hydrated minerals has a similar ratio of deuterium to hydrogen as the water in Earth’s oceans. Asteroids of all types were far more abundant when Earth’s oceans formed around 4.6 billion years ago. Unsurprisingly, asteroids are a leading contender for the source of Earth’s water. But how many of those ancient asteroids could have found themselves in orbits that sent them…

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Inside Facebook’s data wars

Inside Facebook’s data wars

Kevin Roose reports: One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits. Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network’s integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate…

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Facebook staffers felt like ‘we were part of a cover-up’

Facebook staffers felt like ‘we were part of a cover-up’

Business Insider reports: Early drafts of a 2017 Facebook white paper on security concerns included mentions about Russia’s role before company executives decided it was “politically unwise” and told them to remove it, a new book says. The first draft of the white paper from Facebook’s then-chief security officer, Alex Stamos, and his team had “an entire section devoted to activity by state-backed Russian hackers,” according to an advance copy of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination that…

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Top U.S. general said Trump preached ‘gospel of the Führer’

Top U.S. general said Trump preached ‘gospel of the Führer’

New York Magazine reports: General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likened Donald Trump’s effort to hold on to power after the 2020 election to Adolf Hitler, saying the president was preaching “the gospel of the Führer” with his lies about the election being stolen, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters. As chronicled in I Alone Can Fix It, by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, the Pentagon’s top general said shortly before…

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DNA has four nucleotide bases. Some viruses swap in a fifth

DNA has four nucleotide bases. Some viruses swap in a fifth

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: All life on Earth rests on the same foundation: a four-letter genetic alphabet spelling out a repertoire of three-letter words that specify 20 amino acids. These basic building blocks — the components of DNA and their molecular interpreters — lie at biology’s core. “It’s hard to imagine something more fundamental,” said Floyd Romesberg, a synthetic biologist at the pharmaceutical company Sanofi. Yet life’s foundational biochemistry can be full of surprises. A few decades ago, researchers found viruses…

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Is the universe open-ended?

Is the universe open-ended?

Caleb Scharf writes: One of my favorite albeit heavily paraphrased quotes from Albert Einstein is his assertion that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. (What he actually said, in his 1936 work “Physics and Reality,” is more longwinded, and includes a digression into Immanuel Kant and the meaning of “comprehensibility,” but he does write “… the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”) In truth, this statement holds back a little. The greater…

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Why Facebook really, really doesn’t want to discourage extremism

Why Facebook really, really doesn’t want to discourage extremism

Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden write: Our findings may reflect the fact that, more and more, political identities are driven by hating the opposition more than loving one’s own party. Out-party hate has been increasing steadily over the past few decades, researchers find, and is at the highest level seen in 40 years. Out-group hate is also more strongly related to whom we vote for than in-party love. In much the same way, who we…

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What Arizona’s 2010 ban on ethnic studies could mean for the fight over critical race theory

What Arizona’s 2010 ban on ethnic studies could mean for the fight over critical race theory

Hank Stephenson writes: Despite a few pockets of wealth, Tucson Unified School District is a largely poor district that serves a majority-Latino population. White students make up only about 20 percent of the district, and the vast majority of students qualify for free and reduced-priced lunches. TUSD’s students fall behind their peers around the state in standardized testing, and students of color fall even further behind their white peers. [Augustine] Romero and other Mexican American studies founders hoped that by…

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Tennessee abandons vaccine outreach to children

Tennessee abandons vaccine outreach to children

The Tennessean reports: The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not just for coronavirus, but all diseases – amid pressure from Republican state lawmakers, according to an internal report and agency emails obtained by the Tennessean. If the health department must issue any information about vaccines, staff are instructed to strip the agency logo off the documents. The health department will also stop all COVID-19 vaccine events on school property, despite holding at least one…

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America only punishes rebels who threaten the status quo

America only punishes rebels who threaten the status quo

Jamelle Bouie writes: The United States has never struggled to punish those radicals who stood against hierarchy and domination. Whether you were a labor radical, Black revolutionary or left-wing militant, to attempt to upset existing class and social relations — or, at times, to even associate with people who held those ideas — was to court state repression. The two Red Scares of the 20th century are evidence enough of this fact. When a perceived internal enemy is a threat…

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China’s extreme weather warnings avoid talk of climate change

China’s extreme weather warnings avoid talk of climate change

Bloomberg reports: As unprecedented heatwaves sweep across large parts of the Northern Hemisphere, China is telling its people to brace for another summer of dangerous floods and droughts. China’s National Climate Center this month predicted “generally poor weather conditions” for the rest of the summer and warned that the country will face more extreme weather events than usual. In some areas, precipitation is estimated to be 20% to 50% higher than normal. Some major rivers, including the Yellow River that…

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The left needs free speech

The left needs free speech

Katha Pollitt writes: When W.W. Norton decided to cease distributing Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth after several women accused Bailey of rape and other outrages, I called up my local bookstore and reserved a copy. When Amazon stopped selling When Harry Became Sally, which argues from a conservative point of view that it is not possible to change your sex, I went to Alibris.com and bought a used one. I would have bought the Dr. Seuss books withdrawn from…

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Will Covid-19 change science? Past pandemics offer clues

Will Covid-19 change science? Past pandemics offer clues

Science reports: Although the past may not presage the future, epidemic history illuminates how change unfolds. “Historians often say that what an epidemic will do is expose underlying fault lines,” says Erica Charters, a historian of medicine at the University of Oxford who is studying how epidemics end. But how we respond is up to us. “When we ask, ‘How does the epidemic change society?’ it suggests there’s something in the disease that will guide us. But the disease doesn’t…

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