Author: robert.adlington

while our solar system hosts an equal number of rocky and giant planets, rocky planets appear to be more common in the universe. Researchers have also found a range of planets entirely different from those in our solar system. There are Jupiter-size planets that orbit closer to their parent star than Mercury orbits the Sun;…

Dr. Crockford and other researchers have also confirmed that chimpanzees communicate with a wealth of calls and gestures. Their work has recently raised the possibility that some of the fundamental parts of language might have been present in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans. Jill Pruetz, a primatologist at Texas State University, said that…

in 1999, a Russian paleontologist named Kirill Yeskov wrote The Last Ringbearer, a version of The Lord of the Rings from the perspective of Sauron. — Read on nowiknow.com/the-tale-of-the-ring-according-to-sauron/

Here’s the million billion trillion dollar question: what is going to matter more in the long run, text or video? Sure, Google would like to dominate everything, but if it had to choose, is it better to dominate video or dominate text? The history of social networking that I documented above suggests that video is,…

Perception, modeling, and manipulation all integrate to tackle visual reasoning. While language models manipulate human-invented symbols, video models can apply changes across the dimensions of the real world: time and space. Since these changes are applied frame-by-frame in a generated video, this parallels chain-of-thought in LLMs and could therefore be called chain-of-frames, or CoF for…

Nonviolence didn’t mean passivity. It was a strategy, intended to reveal the brutal contrast between the tactics of the oppressor and the experiences of the oppressed. Nonviolent, civil protest was met with rank incivility, which is to say that the hypocritical way in which we presently understand civility and incivility is nothing new. Calling for…

We might find definitive proof that stars are older than black holes, just as cosmologists had long supposed. But even so, black holes would still retain some claim to ontological primacy, because they last so much longer. From their perspective, a star is just a transitory stage, a chrysalis. If the universe continues to expand…

It starts with a safe virus that has been altered to contain a specially designed sequence of DNA. This is infused deep into the brain using real-time MRI scanning to guide a microcatheter to two brain regions – the caudate nucleus and the putamen. This takes 12 to 18 hours of neurosurgery. The virus then…

TABARROK: Here’s a quote from the book, “Art and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles.” COWEN: So much of democratic politics is based on consensus. So much of wonderful art, especially new art, is based on overturning consensus, maybe sometimes offending people. All this came to a head in the 1990s, disputes over…

“WE BELIEVE,” the manifesto read, “we must cease writing the same book again and again.” Books for children should be “fresh, honest, piquant, and beautiful,” and unafraid to be odd: “Even books meant to put kids to sleep should give them strange dreams.” — Read on slate.com/culture/2025/09/best-kids-books-2025-picture-read-aloud-new.html