David Gelernter, a pioneering computer scientist, foresaw the modern internet but thinks computers are still too hard to use
Making progress on family planning will require not only principles and commitments, but successful implementation, which must include four crucial elements, says John May of the US-based think tank Centre for Global Development. Millions of women, particularly in developing countries, lack information on — and access to — family planning services. This not only jeopardizes…
The whole point of an explanation is to reduce something you don’t know to something you do. By that standard, you don’t gain much by explaining anything in terms of black holes. Appealing to the most mysterious objects known to science as an explanation sounds like using one mystery to explain another. Yet this is…
Journalism is filled with examples of erroneous reporting turning into received opinion when reporters, editors, and the public take a story at face value after it came from a generally trusted source. Consider, for example, the claims of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or the various public and corporate scandals where authorities ranging from government…
In the course of exploring the properties of a strange subatomic particle, physicists may have stumbled upon something even stranger: a mysterious and exotic new form of matter. The intriguing discovery was made more or less simultaneously by two collaborations: the Belle experiment at the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and BESIII experiment…
The Internet has become an integral part of people’s lives around the globe, but could the Web exist in space? Researchers at NASA, not content to remain fixed to an Earth-bound system, are pushing the boundaries of network communications by testing what could one day amount to an interplanetary Internet. Working in tandem with the…
Scientists at Europe’s CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. “We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering…