Rachel Nuwer writes: On August 24, 1661, Samuel Pepys, an administrator in England’s navy and famous diarist, took a break from work to go see a “strange creature” that had just arrived on a ship from West Africa. Most likely, it was a chimpanzee—the first Pepys had ever seen. As he wrote in his diary, the “great baboon” was so human-like that he wondered if it were not the offspring of a man and a “she-baboon.” “I do believe that…
Reuters reports: Astronomers have detected the early stages of a colossal cosmic collision, observing a pile-up of 14 galaxies 90 percent of the way across the observable universe in a discovery that upends assumptions about the early history of the cosmos. Researchers said on Wednesday the galactic mega-merger observed 12.4 billion light-years away from Earth occurred 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang that gave rise to the universe. Astronomers call the object a galactic protocluster, a precursor to the…
Gaia’s view of our Milky Way and neighbouring galaxies. ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA By George Seabroke, UCL Most of us have looked up at the night sky and wondered how far away the stars are or in what direction they are moving. The truth is, scientists don’t know the exact positions or velocities of the vast majority of the stars in the Milky Way. But now a new tranche of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, aiming to map…
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Robin Wright writes: French President Emmanuel Macron masterfully works Donald Trump, perhaps better than any U.S. ally. By the end of the day Tuesday, it looked like he might—just might—prevent an angry showdown between the United States and Iran. Trump began the day by virtually declaring war on the Islamic Republic if the nuclear deal unravels and Tehran resumes uranium enrichment, a fuel process for both peaceful nuclear energy and bombs. “They’re not going to be restarting anything,” the President…
Pacific Standard reports: In Colombia, a group of 25 children and young people have just made legal history: They successfully put their government on trial for causing climate change and thereby endangering the fundamental rights of its citizens. Colombia’s Supreme Court agreed with the young plaintiffs that the government had done too little to halt deforestation in the Amazon, despite its commitment to achieve net-zero deforestation by 2020. This, the justices decided, amounted to a threat to the plaintiffs’ rights…
The Hill reports: Reporters Without Borders has dropped the United States to No. 45 in its annual ranking of press freedom for 180 countries around the world. In the report released Wednesday, the United States received a “fairly good” rating, which falls below the category of “good,” in which only 9 percent of countries rated were placed. The ranking continues a downward trend for the U.S. in recent years. The country finished No. 43 in 2017 and No. 41 in…
Graham St John writes: Identified in 300 BCE by the Greek physician Herophilos as the brain’s only unpaired organ, the pineal gland has long been a source of mystery and speculation. Galen, another Greek physician and philosopher, discussed its role as a valve regulating the flow of ‘psychic pneuma’. This view informed René Descartes, who in the 17th century situated the soul (for him, the mind) precisely in this tiny mid-brain structure, which he imagined to be something of a…
Science reports: Odysseus, who voyaged across the wine-dark seas of the Mediterranean in Homer’s epic, may have had some astonishingly ancient forerunners. A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals,…
Politico reports: Europe’s most dynamic political leader, Emmanuel Macron, pays a state visit to Washington this week. The French president has struck up a surprisingly cordial relationship with President Donald Trump, especially when you consider that Macron has emerged as the West’s most formidable opponent of the kind of populist nationalism Trump channels here. Speaking last week to the European Parliament, Macron warned of a “European civil war” and urged the European Union to defend liberal democracy against a surging…
Der Spiegel reports: Not even five years have passed since the spate of essays and opinion pieces about Germany’s hegemonic power over the Continent. The cold reality, the Economist wrote, is that “Germany is the power in Europe that counts the most. Top brass in Brussels, or Paris, can talk as much as they like. But until Ms. Merkel agrees, nothing happens.” The danger, it added, is not that Germany will grow too strong, but that it could refuse to…
The New York Times reports: Past the end of a remote mountain road, down a rutted dirt track, in a concrete house that lacked running water but bristled with smartphones, 13 members of an extended family were glued to Facebook. And they were furious. A family member, a truck driver, had died after a beating the month before. It was a traffic dispute that had turned violent, the authorities said. But on Facebook, rumors swirled that his assailants were part…
Patrick Radden Keefe writes: When Donald Trump had a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin on the morning of March 20th, the two were at an excruciatingly delicate juncture. American intelligence officials had concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, with the goal of helping Trump win, and Trump had become the subject of an investigation, by the special counsel Robert Mueller, into allegations of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. On March 4th, a former…
Rowan Williams writes: People still sometimes discuss the question of how you could tell that you were talking to some form of artificial intelligence rather than an actual human being. One of the more persuasive suggested answers is: “Ask them how they feel about dying.” Acknowledging that our lifespan is limited and coming to terms with this are near the heart of anything we could recognise as what it means to be human. Once we discovered that Neanderthals buried their…
David Grann writes: The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness. Every direction he turned, he could see ice stretching to the edge of the Earth: white ice and blue ice, glacial-ice tongues and ice wedges. There were no living creatures in sight. Not a bear or even a bird. Nothing but him. It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his…