Autor: rrsm

There are nearly a million known insect species in the world, but most have one of just five common types of mouthparts. Why is this information useful to scientists? Anika Hazra explains how the features of an insect’s mouthparts can help identify which order it belongs to, while also providing clues about how it evolved […]

Computer scientist Alexei Efros suffers from poor eyesight, but this has hardly been a professional setback. It’s helped him understand how computers can learn to see. At the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR), Efros combines massive online data sets with machine learning algorithms to understand, model and re-create the visual world. His work is […]

When you picture an intellectual, who do you see? Professor Zena Hitz says that somewhere along the way, the idea of what an intellectual is and does became distorted. «The real thing is something more extraordinary but also more available to us,» Hitz adds, differentiating between an intellectual life constantly in pursuit of something else, […]

As the most complex organ in your body, your brain changes radically throughout your life. Starting from before birth and continuing even after you’ve died. This is what happens to your brain as you age.

What if we could slow down the hands of our biological clocks? This question underpins much of the research of Morgan Levine, who leads a research team at the life science company Altos Labs. Levine investigates the fascinating intricacies of aging, recognizing that it doesn’t happen at a uniform pace for everyone. Central to her […]

Dr. Morgan Levine, author of «True Age,» explains how the impact of diet on aging and longevity is determined by three factors: quantity, quality, and timing of food intake. First, caloric restriction, typically a 20% reduction in overall calorie intake, has been linked to increased lifespan in several animal models. However, the positive effects may […]

Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, discusses the importance of friendships and the potential “friendship recession.” He notes that loneliness can be as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes per day, but measuring and quantifying friendships is difficult. According to Reeves, an ideal number of close friends is around three or four. But […]

Bo Seo, an author and two-time world debate champion, believes our public conversations are in crisis. To Seo, our arguing skills have collectively atrophied over recent decades, resulting in bad arguments that have caused many people to lose faith in the idea that productive disagreements are even possible. That’s why Seo suggests a framework called […]

SS 433 stands out as one of the most intriguing objects within our Milky Way. At its core, a black hole draws material from a closely orbiting companion star, creating a hot accretion disk. Notably, a pair of oppositely directed beams of plasma («jets») spirals away perpendicularly from the disk’s surface at just over a […]