Pieces
Albert Einstein’s Brilliant Politics
Albert Einstein, renowned for his scientific theories, also dedicated himself to social transformation and the pursuit of a just society. Drawing on his experiences with Nazi persecution and his ties to the African American community in Princeton, he actively opposed American segregation, visiting historically Black institutions and forging relationships with civil rights leaders like Paul Robeson. He co-chaired the American Crusade to End Lynching and advocated for federal anti-lynching laws, leading to surveillance by the FBI. Einstein's 'critical optimism' extended his scientific quest for a 'unified field theory' to a political project challenging perceived differences. The article highlights his personal acts of solidarity, such as hosting Marian Anderson when she was denied lodging due to segregation, and his passion for sailing, including the story of his first boat being seized by the Gestapo. Ultimately, Einstein's legacy underscores the collective nature of scientific discovery and social change, advocating for a more open and free world.
Meet five new species discovered in 2025
The article highlights five new species discovered in 2025: Salwasiren qatarensis, an ancient sea cow found in Qatar; Marmosa chachapoya, a mouse opossum from the Peruvian Andes; Siskiyu armilla, a brown spider from Northern California; Careproctus colliculi, a bumpy snailfish from the deep sea off Central California; and three new species of live-birthing toads in Tanzania. These discoveries underscore the vast unexplored biodiversity, the importance of these species to their ecosystems (like the sea cow's role in carbon storage), and the threats they face from climate change and human impact.
Experts Explore New Mushroom Which Causes Fairytale-Like Hallucinations
This article explores the newly identified mushroom, Lanmaoa asiatica, known to cause unique "lilliputian hallucinations," where individuals perceive tiny people. The phenomenon has been observed independently across distant cultures, including Papua New Guinea, China (where it's called "Jian shou qing"), and the Philippines ("Sedesdem"). Research at the Natural History Museum of Utah is ongoing to identify the unknown psychoactive compound responsible for these bizarre effects and to map the evolutionary history of Lanmaoa species.
The ‘Profound’ Experience of Seeing a New Color
An article from The Atlantic details the creation and experience of a new color called "olo" at UC Berkeley. Achieved by stimulating specific M cone cells with a laser, the color is described as a "profound" ultra-intense teal. The piece delves into the subjectivity of color, the scientific method used to verify the experience among participants, and potential future applications like gene therapy to enhance human color vision. It also notes the public and artistic interest in this novel color.
Victor Wembanyama and the Freak-Athlete Conundrum
The article explores the author's struggle to connect with Victor Wembanyama, the NBA's most promising young talent. Despite efforts to appreciate the evolution of the game, Wembanyama's 'freak athlete' physique and unique skills make him unrelatable, contrasting with more traditionally built stars like Steph Curry or Michael Jordan, whose appeal lies in a perceived attainable greatness. The author questions if Wembanyama represents a new era of basketball that fans will need time to adjust to, noting his impressive rookie season and a signature Nike shoe featuring an alien logo.
Do Your Parents Have a Screen-Time Problem?
This article explores the growing concern among adult children regarding their elderly parents' excessive screen time, drawing parallels to parental anxieties about children's device use. It highlights research indicating increased online engagement among older adults, often on social media and video platforms, leading to potential issues like digital addiction, susceptibility to scams, and exposure to misinformation. The piece also offers a nuanced perspective, noting that technology can combat isolation and potentially support cognitive function in seniors. The author advocates for open conversations about screen habits rather than immediate judgment, acknowledging the complex role devices play in older adults' lives for connection and entertainment, while also sometimes blurring the lines of reality.
CO2 Batteries That Store Grid Energy Take Off Globally
This article from IEEE Spectrum details the global expansion of CO2 Battery technology for long-duration energy storage, pioneered by Energy Dome. These systems compress and expand carbon dioxide in a closed loop to generate electricity, providing a scalable and cost-effective solution compared to traditional lithium-ion batteries. Major companies like Google are adopting this technology for their data centers to achieve round-the-clock clean energy and decarbonization goals. The piece highlights deployments in India and Wisconsin, alongside a detailed explanation of how the CO2 Battery works and its advantages in the energy transition.
A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics | Quanta Magazine
Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object, called the amplituhedron, which dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions. This discovery challenges the fundamental roles of space and time in reality and could pave the way for a unified theory of quantum gravity by removing traditional concepts like locality and unitarity from its foundational assumptions. The amplituhedron offers a more efficient way to compute scattering amplitudes, a task previously requiring thousands of terms, now achieved through geometry.
The Island Without Time
This article explores the concept of a "time-free zone" in Sommarøy, a Norwegian fishing village above the Arctic Circle, known for its extreme periods of daylight and darkness. While the initial movement to abolish clock-time was a PR stunt, the author delves into the local experience of time, distinguishing between "clock-timers" and "event-timers." The journalist's personal attempt to live without a clock highlights the complexities of human-time interaction and the inherent desire for structure, even amidst the fantasy of a timeless, stress-free existence. The piece touches on the history of timekeeping, the psychological impact of time perception, and how inhabitants adapt to their unique environment.
How a power outage in Colorado caused U.S. official time to be 4.8 microseconds off
A power outage and subsequent generator failure at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) lab in Boulder, Colorado, caused the U.S. official time to be delayed by 4.8 microseconds. While imperceptible to the general public, this minute drift could have implications for critical infrastructure, telecommunications, and GPS signals, prompting NIST to notify high-end users of the disruption.
Dyslexia and the Reading Wars
This article explores dyslexia and the long-standing 'reading wars' in education. It highlights that effective methods for teaching struggling readers have been known for decades, yet many schools fail to implement them. The author discusses the profound personal and societal consequences of untreated dyslexia, the history of different teaching philosophies, and the recent 'science of reading' movement. It emphasizes the importance of early intervention and structured literacy, featuring successful programs and schools like Windward and the new Literacy Academies in New York City.
Why Millennials Love Prenups
This article delves into the increasing acceptance and embrace of prenuptial agreements among the millennial generation. It explores the various factors contributing to this trend, including financial literacy, desire for transparency, and evolving perspectives on marriage and partnership, challenging traditional stigmas associated with prenups.
Measles’ Most Deceptive Trait
This article discusses how the initially mild nature of measles cases has deceptively obscured its potential for severe outcomes, leading to a decline in vaccination rates and a resurgence of outbreaks in the U.S. It highlights the concept of "immune amnesia" caused by measles, the high transmissibility of the virus, and the significant public health and economic costs associated with these outbreaks. The piece argues that the very success of measles vaccination has inadvertently reduced the perceived urgency to maintain high immunization levels, posing a threat to the country's measles elimination status.
‘Everything you need and nothing you don’t’: Here’s why many new Peninsula restaurants are going minimalist
This article explores why many new restaurants on the Peninsula are embracing a minimalist design aesthetic. It delves into how these eateries, including Milli Cafe, Temp & Time, Horsefeather Palo Alto, Yeobo, Darling, and Café Vivant, leverage clean lines, neutral colors, and natural materials to create functional, warm, and focused dining experiences. The minimalist approach is highlighted as a way to prioritize compelling cuisine, reflect hospitality values, and enhance the overall guest experience, often drawing inspiration from various design movements and cultural heritages.
The Three-Step Guide to Fixing Affordability
The article explores the multifaceted affordability crisis in the United States, countering President Trump's dismissal of it. Author Annie Lowrey outlines a three-step approach for policymakers: first, cease policies that exacerbate the problem, such as tariffs and expiring health subsidies; second, offer immediate relief through measures like temporary rent freezes or prescription drug caps; and third, commit to long-term solutions addressing structural market failures in housing, healthcare, and child care. The piece stresses that tackling these fundamental issues is crucial for improving financial security, reducing political instability, and enabling people to achieve major life goals.
The war on disinformation is a losing battle
How the systems that fight misinformation and disinformation became misconstrued and dismantled.
String Theory Inspires a Brilliant, Baffling New Math Proof | Quanta Magazine
In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in algebraic geometry using entirely alien techniques rooted in string theory. The proof, led by Fields medalist Maxim Kontsevich, aims to classify types of polynomial equations previously considered out of reach. While it has generated excitement, its unfamiliar methods have also led to skepticism and calls for widespread deciphering by the mathematical community. This work marks a potential breakthrough for a field that had stalled for decades, bridging algebra, geometry, and physics.
Epic Effort to Ground Physics in Math Opens Up the Secrets of Time | Quanta Magazine
By mathematically proving how individual molecules create the complex motion of fluids, three mathematicians have illuminated why time can’t flow in reverse.
Feeding the machine
Frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic need vast amounts of data in the race to achieve AGI. This comes at a pretty penny — billions of dollars — and little-known companies like Mercor and Handshake are cleaning up in this AI hype cycle.
The New Allowance
Initially introduced in the 1920s to teach kids about money amidst growing consumerism, allowances have evolved significantly. Modern parents, particularly those with higher incomes, now leverage digital platforms and apps like Greenlight and FamZoo to educate their children on complex financial concepts such as investing in ETFs, understanding credit scores, and managing loan payments. While working-class families often use allowances for practical budgeting, the overall effectiveness of allowances in cultivating long-term financial sophistication is debated. Despite mixed research, parents continue to adapt allowances as a tool to equip their children with economic literacy in an unpredictable future marked by challenges like student loan debt and an evolving job market.
No NFL Game Has Ever Ended in a Score of 36–23
The article discusses "Scorigami," a term coined by sportswriter Jon Bois for a final score in an NFL game that has never happened before. It focuses on the elusive score of 36–23, which despite being a statistically likely outcome, has never occurred in an official NFL game, becoming a meme among fans.
Time might not exist – and we're starting to understand why
The article delves into the enigmatic nature of time, highlighting how physics struggles to reconcile different definitions from classical mechanics, Einstein's relativity, and quantum mechanics. It explores concepts like coordinate time, time as a dimension in spacetime, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation which suggests time might be an illusion, and the arrow of time linked to thermodynamics. The author discusses quantum entanglement and its potential role in understanding causality and the flow of time, suggesting that time might be a multi-faceted concept that retains different properties depending on the context, or that our perception is an approximation.
What if Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?
The article discusses historian Rob Boddice's radical approach to the history of emotions and senses, challenging the assumption that human feelings are universal across time and cultures. Boddice argues for 'experiential relativity,' suggesting that the experience of being human, including emotions like pain, is shaped by specific historical and cultural contexts, not fixed biological states. He advocates for an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from neuroscience, art history, theology, and archaeology, to reconstruct past experiences in their full complexity. The article contrasts Boddice's view with more traditional or universalist perspectives, highlighting the implications of his work for understanding human commonality and difference.
How China, not the U.S., became the main climate solution story in 2025
The U.S. has become a "side character" in the global story of renewable energy, experts say. China dominates the sector, with positive implications for the climate and their economy. The article details how China is leading the global renewable energy sector, investing heavily in wind, solar, and battery technologies, which has become a significant driver of its economic growth. In contrast, the Trump administration in the U.S. is reversing federal support for renewable energy, leading to decreased investment and stalled projects like the Humboldt Bay marine terminal. Experts argue that China's consistent policy support makes it the main story in fighting climate change, while the U.S. federal government's policies are undermining its own clean energy industry and climate progress.
Serein - Short Film
A young woman spirals into anxiety and grief in surreal dream-like visions of her world collapsing. Serein was created as a Thesis Film at the School of Visual Arts.
Learn and Test DMARC site
an interactive DMARC and SPF tester. you send them an email and the website walks you through the reception and analysis of the headers, teaching you about DKIM verification, SPF validation and more. all done in a neo matrix terminal style.
Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA's Asteroid Bennu Samples
Scientists have made remarkable discoveries from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx samples of asteroid Bennu, including sugars essential for biology, a unique gum-like substance, and a high abundance of stardust from supernova explosions. Researchers found five-carbon ribose and six-carbon glucose, supporting the 'RNA world' hypothesis and indicating widespread biological building blocks in the early solar system. The mysterious 'space gum,' rich in nitrogen and oxygen, suggests early chemical alterations on Bennu's parent asteroid. Additionally, the presence of six times more supernova dust than previously studied astromaterials indicates Bennu's parent body formed in a dust-enriched region of the protoplanetary disk.
NASA Completes Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Construction - NASA
NASA has completed the construction of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a significant milestone. The telescope, featuring a Wide Field Instrument and a Coronagraph Instrument, is designed to explore dark matter, dark energy, exoplanets, and galaxies. It is expected to uncover over 100,000 distant worlds and billions of galaxies, with a planned launch by May 2027, potentially as early as fall 2026.
2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar
An 18th annual advent calendar presenting daily remarkable images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope, showcasing distant galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters. Each day until December 25, a new image of our universe is revealed, providing a spectacular journey through cosmic wonders. The article features detailed descriptions of images like the 'Cosmic Butterfly' and the 'Einstein Ring', highlighting the ongoing exploration of space.
Restaurant Review: I’m Donut ?
Helen Rosner reviews I’m Donut ?, a popular Japanese bakery chain that recently opened in Times Square. The article focuses on the bakery's specialty, the "nama" doughnut, praised for its impossibly moist and light texture, achieved with kabocha squash. Rosner details various flavors, including New York exclusives and a controversial scrambled-egg doughnut. Despite high prices and long queues, the Times Square location is a sensation, effectively selling an "experience of experience" and "novelty." The review explores why certain international chains succeed in gaining "considerable good will" in New York by transcending their "chain-ness" and becoming a "totemic evocation of culture, or place, or social-media clout."
Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
The article, written by a former NASA engineer and Google employee, strongly argues against building datacenters in space, deeming it an "absolutely terrible idea." It systematically details the severe challenges, including the impracticality of generating sufficient power (solar arrays would need to be massive for even a small number of GPUs), the immense difficulty of thermal regulation in a vacuum, the devastating effects of space radiation on standard electronics requiring costly and low-performance specialized hardware, and the significant limitations of communication bandwidth to Earth. The author concludes that space-based datacenters would be disproportionately expensive, technically formidable, and ultimately yield mediocre performance compared to Earth-based solutions.
Renowned astronomers fight to protect Chile's night sky from industrial project
Renowned astronomers are fighting to protect Chile's Atacama Desert night sky, a prime location for astronomical observations, from a proposed industrial renewable energy complex. Scientists warn that the project, located near the Paranal Observatory, will severely increase light pollution, dust, and atmospheric turbulence, thereby hindering scientific research. The company, AES Chile, asserts its project is compatible with environmental regulations, but experts argue it poses an 'imminent threat' to global astronomy, highlighting a wider conflict between natural darkness and industrial development worldwide.
“I’m Not a Robot” (2025 Academy Award Winner) | The New Yorker Screening Room
In Victoria Warmerdam’s short film, a series of failed Captcha tests plunges a woman into a strange new reality. Winner of the 2025 Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short.
A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life
Life’s fundamental structure is the cell, and so the main things that a cell does — processing biomolecules, growing, replicating its genetic material and producing a new body — are considered hallmarks of life. But earlier this year, scientists discovered a cell so severely stripped of essential functions that it challenges biologists’ definitions of what counts as a living thing. The species is a single-celled organism known only by the mysterious sequence of its genetic code. Its genome is fantastically small: Along the organism’s evolutionary journey, it seems to have gotten rid of most of it. According to the shocked researchers who published the discovery in a preprint uploaded to biorxiv.org in May, the lost genes include those central to cell metabolism, meaning it can neither process nutrients nor grow on its own. Other cells with highly reduced genomes still encode proteins to create amino acids, break down carbohydrates for energy or synthesize vitamins. All this appears to be absent from the cell, which seems to be a parasite entirely dependent on a host or cellular community to meet its nutritional needs. Until now, these genetic pathways were considered fundamental for the survival of any cell. The organism’s “replicative core” — the genetic components needed to reproduce itself — remains, making up more than half of its genome.
In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended
This article explores the enduring mystery and rich archaeological landscape of the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland, focusing on Neolithic sites like the Stones of Stenness, Ring of Brodgar, and Ness of Brodgar. The author describes personal visits and interactions with archaeologists who are unearthing new discoveries and reinterpreting the practices of the ancient societies that flourished between 3800 and 2200 B.C. The piece delves into the cultural significance, Norse heritage, and the unique blend of science and art in understanding these prehistoric monuments, highlighting the tension between their inherent strangeness and modern attempts at comprehension.
Photos: When the Polar Bears Move In
The photographer Vadim Makhorov, while recently cruising on the Chukchi Sea, noticed a group of polar bears that were taking shelter inside an abandoned research station on Russia’s remote Kolyuchin Island.
Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors
Elon Musk's X introduced an "About This Account" feature that unexpectedly revealed many prominent pro-MAGA accounts were based in foreign countries, contradicting their claimed American identity. This triggered widespread confusion, accusations of mislabeling, and highlighted the platform's pervasive issues with foreign actors, misinformation, and "rage-baiting." The author argues that this feature, while intended for transparency, ultimately exposes X as a "worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors," where truth is rendered irrelevant by monetized provocation and inadequate moderation. The article concludes that X inflates culture wars and distorts the original purpose of social media by prioritizing profit over reality, creating a devastating "informational nightmare."
California Is Tired of Letting People Die
California is attempting to address its severe homelessness crisis by implementing S.B. 43, a law designed to expand involuntary treatment for individuals suffering from severe mental illness and addiction. The article highlights the ethical dilemmas and practical challenges faced by outreach workers, paramedics, and mental health professionals in San Francisco, one of the first counties to adopt the law. It explores the tension between upholding individual autonomy and providing life-saving care to those gravely disabled on the streets, detailing the difficulties in securing long-term institutionalization despite the new legislation.