Up until the 16th century, China was the most technologically advanced region in the world. While aristocrats ruled Europe, China’s meritocratic literati made exquisite scientific discoveries: gunpowder, the compass, papermaking and printing, among others. Now, China hopes to return to …
The Big Air Con
Airport world is a parallel dimension. No matter where they are geographically, all airports are essentially the same place, with a simplified “international English” and a time zone only loosely tethered to its location. Airport world even has its own …
The trouble with political Christianity
In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus condemns those who “(either) love the tree and hate its fruit (or) love the fruit and hate the tree”. A regular critique of the nominally religious is that they claim to believe in, …
Trust the (Computer-Generated Gobbledygook) Science!
What do you get when you mix AI-generated nonsense with AI-driven peer review? A story that undermines the Trust The Science! injunction of the technocratic tyrants once and for all, that’s what!
Source: The Corbett Report Read the original article …
The danger of trial by statistics
Sally Clark had two sons. Both died within weeks of birth, a year apart, apparently of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), sometimes called cot death. SIDS is — mercifully — rare; in England, at the time, it struck roughly one …
The arrogance of scientific history
In the Fifties, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov published perhaps the most optimistic vision ever of history as an exact science. In his Foundation series (recently adapted for television), he imagined a distant future in which a cadre of …
Why China is winning the weapons race
In 1949, Chinese-born scientist Qian Xuesen (1911-2009) drew a diagram on a blackboard at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that would change the course of military history. It showed the path of a projectile rising elliptically up into the …
Will humans survive the rise of the machines?
If the American futurist R. Buckminster Fuller was right, as he always was, then the boundaries of human knowledge are forever expanding. In 1982, Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”, which showed that up until the year 1900, human knowledge …
The Alzheimer’s industry
In a leafy London suburb, there’s a smart little clinic that promises miracles. Run by Dr Andrew Greenland, an NHS consultant in emergency medicine, the Greenland Centre claims to be able to do something that the drug industry has failed …
The civil war in the biohacking movement
As a tenured professor of biology and genetics at Harvard Medical School, David Sinclair has long been the world’s most qualified “biohacker”. The term refers to a broad community that attempts to enhance bodily performance, sometimes through simple treatments like …
The liberal lessons of the Cass Report
Pity poor Dr Hilary Cass, the eminent paediatrician charged with managing an independent review of NHS gender services for young people, whose final report was published this week. Given the hair-trigger sensibilities of interested parties, she seems to have been …
Climate science is making you miserable
There’s a thing in movie franchises called a crossover, where a character from one franchise appears in another. You know the sort of thing: Alien vs. Predator; Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The entire and seemingly interminable Marvel Cinematic …
Your boss doesn’t care about your feelings
You’re at work one day when your company’s “wellness” department begins handing out “emoji” stickers with words like “frustrated”, “overwhelmed”, and “stressed” printed below their creepy yellow faces. No one uses them, of course. But the message is clear: “[Insert …
The assisted-dying lobby has already won
What counts as a “dignified death”? On Monday, we got an intimation of what one looks like for Guardian readers, as journalist Renate van der Zee wrote about her elderly mother’s “completely calm, almost cheerful” legal demise at the hands …
The truth about antipsychotics
The discovery of antipsychotics was an accidental revolution, the result not of systematic research, but of random observations. In the early Fifties, an obscure French naval surgeon was trying out chlorpromazine as a potential anaesthetic; he noticed that it calmed …