Will Journalism Be a Crime in a Second Trump Administration?
Journalism is not a crime. It’s not a crime if it offends the powerful. It’s not a crime if it doesn’t offend them enough to suit you. Yes, journalists make mistakes. Yes, you should take a break from doomscrolling for your mental health. But the First Amendment freedom of the press is crucial to democracy.…
NASA reconnects with Voyager 1 (after months of confusion)
NASA says it is once again able to get meaningful information back from the Voyager 1 probe, after months of troubleshooting a glitch that had this venerable spacecraft sending home messages that made no sense. The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched in 1977 on a mission to study Jupiter and Saturn but…
“Save the date for the 2024 eclipse,” the young teacher told his students back in 1978. Decades later…
NASA Communicates with Ailing Voyager 1 Spacecraft
I remember staying up well past my bedtime in the late 70s and early 80s, watching the local PBS station where experts sat around a table, poring through freshly-printed glossy photos of mountain ranges, rings, and craters. I remember them holding up one photo and discussing whether they were looking at the disk of a…
What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living
This is not only powerful material for thought, it’s also compelling storytelling. At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and they largely relied on secondhand reports from doctors and other caregivers rather than accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study…
Can you melt eggs? Quora’s AI says “yes,” and Google is sharing the result
Google Search is already well-known for having gone dramatically downhill in terms of the quality of the results it provides over the past decade. In fact, Google’s deteriorating quality has resulted in techniques like adding “Reddit” to a query to reduce SEO-seeking spam sites and has also increased the popularity of AI chatbots, which apparently provide answers without…
Why We’ll Never Live in Space
As much as I love escapist science fiction, the way to get to the future for real is to avoid killing each other and ourselves in the present. We can’t count on capitalist techbros selling joyrides to billionaire tourists. People tend to liken space exploration to expansion on Earth—pushing the frontier. But on the edge…
In October, 2002, I was blogging about stupid space explosions, the superiority complex, why whitespace matters, usability testing, and Krispy Kreme
In October, 2002, I was blogging about The stupidity of explosions in space movies The Chronicle of Higher Education rescues the briefly defunct Arts & Letters Daily The superiority complex An anti-telemarketing script An “I Love Lucy: bible study Why whitespace matters when creating a sign The coming air age of 1955 (as envisioned in…
My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon
Amy Silverstein writes a stunningly powerful guest essay in the NYTimes: Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she — well, we — will die. I slide my hand across my chest and speak aloud, palm to my heart’s crisp beating.…
Exodus From an Elsevier Neuroscience Journal
One of the world’s largest scientific publishers refused to reduce its $3,450 fee to publish in NeuroImage. […] On Monday, every editor at NeuroImage and the NeuroImage: Reports companion journal—over 40 people—resigned. “It’s a pretty big exodus,” said Cindy Lustig, a University of Michigan at Ann Arbor psychology professor and one of the eight now former senior editors of…
In September, 2002, I was blogging about science writing, satire, ebonics, Google News, owl callers, astronaut Buzz Aldrin punching a moon landing denier, and an email from a former student (who thanked me)
In September, 2002, I was blogging about “The Science of Scientific Writing” (1990) from ‘pong’ to ‘pac man’ Michigan Police fall for The Onion satire about terrorist telemarketers “Ebonics” (ebony + phonics) Silly alarmist story about recessive blonde genes A scientist undone by plagiarism Google News (when it was new) Mel Gibson’s plan to film…
Time lapse movie shows exoplanets orbiting star HR8799, 133 light years away. (Published in a Northwestern University press release yesterday.)
People Thought an AI Was Brilliantly Analyzing Their Personalities, But It Was Actually Giving Out Feedback Randomly
“To begin our hoax scenario, we intended to build participants’ trust in the machine by pretending that it could decode their preferences and attitudes,” the study authors wrote. “The system included a sham MRI scanner and an EEG system, that supposedly used neural decoding driven by artificial intelligence (AI).” […] In other words, participants were…
Fun with Geometry — Biological and Theoretical
For some reason today I was thinking of the 3D shape scientists recently discovered in our cells — I had to look it up just now to refresh my memory. Not being an expert in geometry, I would describe the “scutoid” as an irregular prism-like shape with a hexagon on one end and a pentagon…
By the way, humans sent a robot to another planet, and the robot sent us the sound of a dust devil. On. Another. Planet.
Mars rover captures first sound of dust devil on red planet.
The White House’s plan to colonize the moon, briefly explained: Putting humans on the moon is more political than you might think.
Political tensions alone could be a major source of conflict, according to Michelle Hanlon, the co-director of the Air and Space Law Center at the University of Mississippi law school. For one, there still isn’t a globally shared vision for what the future of the moon should entail. Just over 20 countries have signed the US-led Artemis…
Filmmakers Find Section of Destroyed Space Shuttle Challenger on Ocean Floor
Instead of World War II-era plane debris, the team discovered a modern-looking aviation structure. After consulting with an outside expert and completing a second dive in May 2022, the TV film crew presented the evidence to former NASA astronaut Bruce Melnick, who suspected it was a piece of the Challenger. Based on that information, the…
Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives
Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average…
