How to Dispel Your Illusions
Freeman Dyson reviews Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux).
Freeman Dyson reviews Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux).
The rogue proteins behind variant CJD, the human form of mad cow disease, have revealed their benign side. Prions, it seems, lie at the heart of a newly discovered form of near-instant evolution that provides life with a third way to adapt to potentially lethal environments. Crucially, it involves neither genetic nor epigenetic changes to…
Recently, one of the four 8.2-metre telescopes that make up the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope captured the brief but brilliant light of a distant explosion, a gamma-ray burst. The light from the burst passed through its host galaxy and another nearby galaxy before reaching Earth, providing Sandra Savaglio of the Max-Planck Institute for…
A devastating hurricane has made it possible to test a rarely observed effect of evolution in the wild for the first time. Scientists transported forest lizards to a group of Caribbean islands stripped bare of vegetation by Hurricane Frances in 2004. They collected pairs of brown anole lizards from a large forested island near Great…
Fish species are expected to shrink in size by up to 24% because of global warming, say scientists. Researchers modeled the impact of rising temperatures on more than 600 species between 2001 and 2050. Warmer waters could decrease ocean oxygen levels and significantly reduce fish body weight. The scientists argue that failure to control greenhouse…
There are certain laws of nature everyone accepts. The surest way to bring about rain on an overcast day is to leave your umbrella at home. Is your line at the grocery store moving too slowly? Switch lines. That will definitely speed it up (minus you). And if you’ve hit a series of green traffic…
Scientists have finally cracked a decades-old spaceflight riddle, figuring out why NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 probes began to slow mysteriously as they sped far from the sun. The cause of the so-called “Pioneer Anomaly,” it turns out, is heat coming from the electrical current flowing through the probes’ instrument and power systems. This heat…