Republicans are settling on a strategy for election loses: It was rigged!

Republicans are settling on a strategy for election loses: It was rigged!

Eric Lutz writes: It’s hard to say exactly when Donald Trump started lying about widespread fraud in the 2020 election because he’d never really stopped lying about it in the 2016 election. But if you had to pinpoint when his outlandish, self-serving conspiracy theories really began to accelerate, it was probably around the late spring of last year, when polls indicated that he could lose to Joe Biden and that his desperate attempts to brand his opponent as a “sleepy”…

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The legacy of America’s post-9/11 turn to torture

The legacy of America’s post-9/11 turn to torture

Carol Rosenberg reports: Mohamedou Ould Slahi is almost clinical as he recalls details of the torture he endured in the summer of 2003 at Guantánamo Bay. There were the guards who menaced him with attack dogs and beat him so badly they broke his ribs. The troops who shackled him, blasted him with heavy metal music and strobe lights or drenched him in ice water to deny him sleep for months on end. The mind-numbing isolation in a darkened cell…

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Most people don’t need a Covid vaccine booster, new review says

Most people don’t need a Covid vaccine booster, new review says

The New York Times reports: None of the data on coronavirus vaccines so far provides credible evidence in support of boosters for the general population, according to a review published on Monday by an international group of scientists, including some at the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization. The 18 authors include Dr. Philip Krause and Dr. Marion Gruber, F.D.A. scientists who announced last month that they will be leaving the agency, at least in part because…

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Our most reliable pandemic number is losing meaning

Our most reliable pandemic number is losing meaning

David Zweig writes: At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. It’s even worse in certain places: Some states, including Arkansas and Oregon, recently saw their COVID hospitalizations…

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A new company with a wild mission: Bring back the woolly mammoth

A new company with a wild mission: Bring back the woolly mammoth

Carl Zimmer reports: A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth. The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct. “This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for eight years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the…

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How 9/11 turned America into a half-crazed, fading power

How 9/11 turned America into a half-crazed, fading power

Michelle Goldberg writes: I’ll always remember Sept. 11 as something that happened in the evening. At the time I was living in a town in northern India, and I watched the towers fall on a TV someone had dragged into the street. Because I was so far away, I’ll never know the terror people in New York and Washington felt on that day, the fear that more attacks were coming, that the epic disaster movies so popular during the bored…

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For many American Muslims, the legacy of 9/11 lies in the battle for civil rights

For many American Muslims, the legacy of 9/11 lies in the battle for civil rights

NPR reports: Soon after [the attacks], like so many Muslims in the United States, a different fear set in [for Ali Malik]: that his faith would be associated with the 19 hijackers. What followed were two decades of policies that civil rights advocates say add up to the religious profiling and unlawful surveillance of Muslims in the U.S. under the broad banner of national security. “My life at that time was completely different I would say to my life afterwards,”…

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Why most of the world’s oil needs to stay in the ground

Why most of the world’s oil needs to stay in the ground

The Guardian reports: The vast majority of fossil fuel reserves owned today by countries and companies must remain in the ground if the climate crisis is to be ended, an analysis has found. The research found 90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas reserves could not be extracted if there was to be even a 50% chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C, the temperature beyond which the worst climate impacts hit. The scientific study is the first…

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Can an omnipresent virus be turned into a manageable risk?

Can an omnipresent virus be turned into a manageable risk?

Scott Gottlieb writes: This pandemic will eventually be over, and the Delta surge—in which most of those not yet vaccinated against the coronavirus could become infected—may well be America’s last destructive wave. But just because we’re eager to move past the virus doesn’t mean it’s finished with us. In our large, open, and globally connected society, getting to zero COVID, the goal that Australia and New Zealand have pursued, is as politically unrealistic as it is biologically implausible. Americans are…

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Facebook misinformed misinformation researchers

Facebook misinformed misinformation researchers

The New York Times reports: More than three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook trumpeted a plan to share data with researchers about how people interacted with posts and links on the social network, so that the academics could study misinformation on the site. Researchers have used the data for the past two years for numerous studies examining the spread of false and misleading information. But the information shared by Facebook had a major flaw, according to internal emails and…

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On the evidence for fungal intelligence

On the evidence for fungal intelligence

Nicholas P Money writes: Mushrooms and other kinds of fungi are often associated with witchcraft and are the subjects of longstanding superstitions. Witches dance inside fairy rings of mushrooms according to German folklore, while a French fable warns that anyone foolish enough to step inside these ‘sorcerer’s rings’ will be cursed by enormous toads with bulging eyes. These impressions come from the poisonous and psychoactive peculiarities of some species, as well as the overnight appearance of toadstool ring-formations. Given the…

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The easy part of the hard problem of consciousness

The easy part of the hard problem of consciousness

Tam Hunt writes: How does consciousness arise? What might its relationship to matter be? And why are some things conscious while others apparently aren’t? These sorts of questions, taken together, make up what’s called the “hard problem” of consciousness, coined some years ago by the philosopher David Chalmers. There is no widely accepted solution to this. But, fortunately, we can break the problem down: If we can tackle what you might call the easy part of the hard problem, then…

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The war on terrorism — the greatest failure in American history

The war on terrorism — the greatest failure in American history

Dylan Matthews writes: There have been no 9/11-scale terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, according to the most recent estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, at least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror; at least 38 million people have been displaced due to these wars; and the effort has cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including…

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‘Righteous’ drone strike in Kabul killed aid worker and seven children, investigation finds

‘Righteous’ drone strike in Kabul killed aid worker and seven children, investigation finds

  The New York Times reports: It was the last known missile fired by the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and the military called it a “righteous strike” — a drone attack after hours of surveillance on Aug. 29 against a vehicle that American officials thought contained an ISIS bomb and posed an imminent threat to troops at Kabul’s airport. But a New York Times investigation of video evidence, along with interviews with more than a dozen…

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