There have been three major eras in the history of science, as Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist and computer scientist Alex Szalay describes it. The first, which lasted for millennia, was empirical, involving mostly the recording of data...
At first blush, the key players in George Friedman’s World War III scenario seem to have been plucked from a random-country generator: Japan, Turkey, and… Poland? But take a step back. First, consider the source. Friedman, 68, has been in the...
Perhaps one day we’ll send a spacecraft to a rocky planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. And perhaps the first images arriving back from across 4.2 light years of space will feature a purple Proxima Centurian peering straight back into the camera. In...
You can drive an electric vehicle powered by rooftop solar panels, replace your old appliances and light bulbs with energy-sipping versions, recycle compulsively, compost, give up meat, eschew air travel, buy used-everything, make your own...
In late March I flew to Phoenix, spent a couple of days with my folks, and then drove their (former) car from Fountain Hills, Ariz. to Denver, Colo. The trip took 11 hours, 10 minutes, the first 822 miles of it done in 11 hours flat. This is...
It’s a bit embarrassing to say, but I attended my first political march just a couple of weeks back — March for Science Denver. Brought along the girls and their good pal Laine. They were surprised that someone as open/occasionally...
The Estonians moved a statue; the Russians launched a new form of warfare. Now, a decade later, the man who was president of Estonia at the time proposes a new sort of alliance to counter a threat that has spread far from his Baltic state. Toomas...
To understand what Marije Vogelzang really does — and she does a lot of things — there’s no better example than a project right here in Budapest in 2011. For her “Eat Love Budapest” exhibit, Vogelzang, the renowned Dutch “eating designer,”...
In late 2016, Albert-Lászlo Barabási and colleagues published a paper aimed at putting empirical heft behind the anecdotal truism that physicists did their best work when they were young. They considered 2,887 of them, all the way back to 1893...
Take a close look at your smartphone for a moment. Unless you’re among the rare Blackberry holdovers or a true clamshell-toting troglodyte, it’s a slab of glass and plastic and/or metal, a plug or two, a couple of camera apertures and a couple of...
For a sense of Mona Chalabi’s work with data, you could do an author search at her employer’s site, The Guardian, where she’s the data editor. But if you wanted some really fascinating, raw insights, you could go to her Instagram page. There...
Toni Schoenleber couldn’t do her job as a stroke clinical coordinator at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital if she didn’t have brains. In fact, it’s because she has brains that she knew just where to go when she needed more...
Todd Neff © 2020
