Berkeley-based startup Profluent has trained an AI to imagine new, never-before-seen CRISPR proteins — opening the door to gene editors with capabilities beyond what we’ve found in the wild. They’re also making a brand new CRISPR system open source, so any scientist can now start … | Continue reading
Atmospheres — do Earth-like alien planets have them or not? This is the killer question currently facing astronomers. In this context, “Earth-like” means terrestrial (i.e. rocky worlds) planets close enough to Earth’s mass and other conditions that we might imagine them hosting t … | Continue reading
I have had a long and “crazy” life. A lot of what I learned from difficult experiences has and can help others. I have put off writing a book about my life because it might upset my 91-year-old mother. I do have a blog, but I could write more for it. Should I be patient or stop w … | Continue reading
It only took three pieces of evidence, together, to completely revolutionize our picture of the Universe in the early 20th century. We had previously assumed that the Universe was static and unchanging, and that the entirety of existence was contained within the Milky Way. The sp … | Continue reading
To a large extent, the search for Earthlike planets is a search for water. Every living thing we know of requires water in some form, so until we find one that doesn’t, it’s reasonable to make water the focus of our exploration. That’s why a recent paper by Amri Wandel from Hebre … | Continue reading
Each of us will clock roughly 84,365 hours at work in our lifetime. But for 1 in 3 of us, those working hours are not happy ones. Fortunately, many leaders are waking up to the fact that solving the crisis in workplace happiness is not only the right thing to do, but one that lea … | Continue reading
When you think about what science actually is, how do you conceive of it? Do you do what most people do, and default to what you learned in our classes in school, with a layer of cynicism and skepticism layered atop it? That’s understandable, as many of us remember being taught “ … | Continue reading
If the emergence of generative AI has prompted a lot of excitement and anxiety about the future of work, that’s because it’s arrived a moment when we’re already asking huge questions about our working lives. Tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Bing Chat have appeared on the heels of … | Continue reading
Learning and development leaders seeking to build a robust leadership pipeline face a two-fold challenge. Not only must they identify and cultivate employees with leadership potential, but they must also understand what attracts or discourages budding leaders from these roles. Wh … | Continue reading
It’s often said that people fear public speaking more than death, but in fact, people fear a great many things more than public speaking. According to the Chapman Survey of American Fears, corrupt government, economic collapse, nuclear weapons, climate change, and high medical bi … | Continue reading
In all of scientific history, no single theory has been tested more robustly — and still stands without a single failure — than the Standard Model of elementary particles and forces. Successfully describing every known species of quantum particle in existence as well as their pro … | Continue reading
It’s well known that narcissists are attracted to positions of power. A new study finds that when they reach the highest tiers of management in the business world, they also tend to attract each other — at least at first. An estimated 18% of chief executive officers (CEOs) score … | Continue reading
Chip Bergh remembers the first pair of Levi’s jeans he bought before that make-or-break first day of middle school. Owning and wearing those jeans—making a good first impression among classmates—was so important to him that, when he could not find the brand in any local store, he … | Continue reading
Here, in the spring of 2024, Earth’s inhabitants are getting quite a show: the greatest, most widespread, and most vibrant auroral display in more than 20 years. This is caused by an increase in solar activity: greater numbers of sunspots, larger sunspot size, greater numbers of … | Continue reading
Imagine it’s 2050 and the old countries of Europe are gone. In their place are entities based not on history, language, or ethnicity, but on the type of renewable energy they’re best at producing. A centralized power grid redistributes these variously sourced types of energy thro … | Continue reading
“Some scientists refer to the immune system as the seventh sense,” says Dr. Hao Jin, a neuroimmunologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). It’s a comparison that anyone who’s ever had a common cold can appreciate. Much like our traditional sens … | Continue reading
What if our minds could live after our bodies have died? What if mortality became obsolete? Steven Kotler, award-winning journalist and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, has studied these seemingly sci-fi ideas, and it turns out that they’re not so fictional, af … | Continue reading
Is your CEO itching to post on LinkedIn or X? Does the thought fill you with glee or dread? Not long ago, the regular use of social platforms by corporate leaders was rare — or even unthinkable. Now, it has become the norm, with companies seeing it as a fresh, immediate and relat … | Continue reading
Unlike the most energetic galaxies, our Milky Way is inactive. Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighboring galaxies. The maps show the total brightness and color of stars (top), the total density of stars (middle), and the interstellar dust that fills the galaxy ( … | Continue reading
DeepMind, Google’s AI lab, has a history of showing off the capabilities of its AI through games — and walloping human opponents in the process. In 2016, AlphaGo defeated Go world champion Lee Sedol. In 2019, AlphaStar constructed enough additional pylons to beat professional Sta … | Continue reading
Few drugs have achieved the stardom that semaglutide, marketed in the United States as Ozempic or Wegovy, has today. A synthetic, injectable version of an intestinal hormone, it is the flagship of a new category of drugs initially developed for diabetes that rose to fame in the m … | Continue reading
Every January, I head to the American Astronomical Society’s big annual meeting with an ulterior motive in mind. Beyond merely uncovering new scientific findings, gathering information for potential stories, and connecting with friends and colleagues, I also look to meet emerging … | Continue reading
Greek philosopher Plato played a huge role in shaping Western thought, particularly around politics, and even though he died more than 2,300 years ago, his “Republic” is still one of the most studied books at top US colleges. Despite Plato’s wide and lasting influence, though, th … | Continue reading
L ike many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And … | Continue reading
There are many reasons to attend a scientific conference. You get to see collaborators and friends who are pushing new projects forward. You get to watch lots of cool talks updating you on the latest cool results in your research domain. And then it happens, every now and then, t … | Continue reading
“Is the popular “Shopping Cart Litmus Test” a measure of a person’s worth?” – Greg, US This question made me feel like a bad philosopher. I had to Google the shopping cart litmus test, and when I did so, I discovered it’s all over the philosophy-leaning internet. It’s a modern mo … | Continue reading
Will is driving along, and he sees a police car up ahead. He puts down his coffee, tenses up, and drives exactly at the speed limit. He puts on the most law-abiding face possible. Mia is at work behind a computer when her boss walks in. She shifts tabs, frantically types, and huf … | Continue reading
For more than 50 years, there’s been a mystery about the Universe that the greatest minds in physics and astronomy have been unable to solve: the fact that, when we map out all of the known matter that we can see and apply the known laws of gravity, it doesn’t add up to match the … | Continue reading
Dyhia Belhabib’s journey to becoming a marine scientist began with war funerals on TV. Her hometown, on the pine-forested slopes of the Atlas Mountains in northern Algeria, lies only 60 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. But a trip to the beach was dangerous. A bitter civil war ra … | Continue reading
Art produced by or with the help of artificial intelligence is more popular than ever, from the record-breaking $432,000 auction of Obvious collective’s Portrait of Edmond Belamy to the overwhelming success of Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised” exhibit at the MoMA. But one art-world f … | Continue reading
I kicked Election Day off by making myself a large glass of rum punch from Martha Washington’s recipe (orange juice, lemon juice, cloves, cinnamon, etc.). I did this because, for one thing, day drinking was the norm in the 1790s. Booze was especially common during election season … | Continue reading
In recent years, many organizations have realized that the journey towards real allyship and lasting societal change is not as simple as hosting one employee celebration and posting about it on social media. It’s a long and complex path, requiring a concerted and sustained effort … | Continue reading
It’s been almost 100 years since humanity first reached a revolutionary conclusion about the nature of our Universe: space itself cannot and does not remain static, but rather evolves with the passage of time. One of the most unsettling predictions of Einstein’s general relativit … | Continue reading
Over 2,500 years ago, Greek philosophers debated whether the nature of reality was impermanence or constant change. Heraclitus was the champion of change, pointing to the march of the seasons and the ebb and flow of the tides. In contrast, Parmenides, a near-contemporary of Herac … | Continue reading
Here on Earth, as well as elsewhere throughout the Universe, a tremendous variety of naturally occurring elements can be found. More than 90 species of atom — from hydrogen up through plutonium — have been detected in various environments, but astrophysically, very few events are … | Continue reading
In Aug. 19, 2021, a humpback whale named Twain whupped back. Specifically, Twain made a series of humpback whale calls known as “whups” in response to playback recordings of whups from a boat of researchers off the coast of Alaska. The whale and the playback exchanged calls 36 ti … | Continue reading
Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden. As usual, the country ranking in the annual World Happiness Report is topped by Nordic countries. This map does something extra: It shows happiness levels in their regional and global context. At a glance, we see that happiness levels are relati … | Continue reading
While curiosity is almost always the right choice, it’s often not the easy one. I find questions most effective when I work through them with another person. However, I’ve noticed some situations when staying curious is particularly hard. Call these curiosity killers. In the expe … | Continue reading
Perhaps the template for the tough manager dates back to the early days of the industrial revolution. The first factory workers had spent their lives working either as artisans or farm workers, where they had some control over either the hours or the pace at which they worked. Fa … | Continue reading
When it comes to the Standard Model of particle physics, most people incorrectly assume that it’s known, it’s correct, and that there are no more open questions about its validity. While the Standard Model has certainly withstood every challenge that’s been thrown at it by way of … | Continue reading
Roughly eight billion humans live on the planet, and each one experiences the 24 hours of the day a little differently. That amounts to 190 billion unique hours of human life lived during each rotation of the Earth. While each of us has a decent conception of how we spend our own … | Continue reading
Joe Betts-LaCroix is co-founder and CEO of longevity tech company Retro Biosciences. Under his leadership, and backed to the tune of $180 million by Sam Altman, Retro built its laboratories, at a fraction of the usual cost, from re-fitted shipping containers. The company mission … | Continue reading
The Horsehead Nebula is an iconic astronomical sight. A dark molecular cloud of neutral gas sits in front of an active star-forming region: IC 434, creating the iconic sight of the Horsehead Nebula. Located about 1300 light-years away in the constellation of Orion, the dark cloud … | Continue reading
Mars is a graveyard for explorers. Many orbiters, landers, rovers, and other mechanical critters that have either been cremated in the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere or fallen silent in the ochre, radiation-smothered sands below, right away or at the end of their technological life … | Continue reading
A recent discovery in Minnesota has unveiled a helium reservoir with astonishingly high concentrations of the gas, surpassing initial estimations and potentially opening doors for commercial extraction. Pulsar Helium, an exploration company, revealed the discovery of helium reser … | Continue reading
French researchers say they have discovered that genetic mutations aren’t necessary for cancer to develop, challenging a long-held assumption about the disease. The cause of cancer: Cancer cells start out as normal, healthy cells, but then something goes wrong — instead of doing … | Continue reading
From the ancient feasts of kings to the modern-day fast-food frenzy, meat has long been a global dietary centerpiece. As a critical source of protein and nutrients, meat (particularly beef) is a necessary staple of diets worldwide. Yet, how it and other ruminant meats such as mut … | Continue reading
In 2023, the ostensibly authoritative World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that non-sugar sweeteners “not be used as a means of achieving weight control or reducing the risk of noncommunicable diseases.” Non-sugar sweeteners are found in diet sodas, yogurts, and snack bars … | Continue reading