Tag: politics

• A Weird, Wonderful Conversation With Kim Stanley Robinson

  July 24, 2022

  Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the great living science fiction writers and one of the most astute observers of how planets look, feel and work. We discuss why Robinson… more ›

• Panama Papers Whistleblower Speaks Out: “Shell Companies are Putin’s Best Friend”

  July 23, 2022

  The anonymous whistleblower behind the bombshell leak known as the Panama Papers has emerged anew to warn how offshore companies are enabling Russia’s war machine. John Doe issued a manifesto weeks… more ›

• Why Computers Can’t Generate Randomness

  July 20, 2022

  True randomness is a slippery thing: It is a property not of things in themselves, like individual numbers, but of their relationship to one another. One number is not random;… more ›

• MBS’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder

  July 16, 2022

  Neom, the Saudi crown prince’s urban megaproject, is supposed to have a ski resort, swim lanes for commuters, and “smart” everything. It’s going great—for the consultants. The chosen site in… more ›

• Making buildings, cars and planes from materials based on plant fibres

  July 10, 2022

  USING carrots to create concrete, turning wood into plastic, or even compressing it into a “super wood” that is as light and strong as titanium might sound like a series… more ›

• Human-centred mechanism design with Democratic AI

  July 10, 2022

  Building artificial intelligence (AI) that aligns with human values is an unsolved problem. Here we developed a human-in-the-loop research pipeline called Democratic AI, in which reinforcement learning is used to… more ›

• Project Drawdown updates world’s leading set of climate solutions—adding 11 new solutions for addressing the climate crisis

  July 10, 2022

  Five years ago Project Drawdown published a collection of “drawdown solutions,” technologies and practices that, if ambitiously implemented together, can achieve drawdown—the point in the future when levels of greenhouse… more ›

• Amazon wild west: where drugs, fish and logging are big money but life is cheap

  July 1, 2022

  Near a sharp bend on the Itaquaí River, perched on a steep muddy bank, a lone wooden structure marks the last outpost of a fragile resistance. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/01/amazon-brazil-drugs-fish-logging-dom-phillips-bruno-pereira more ›

• Cryptocurrency Titan Coinbase Providing “Geo Tracking Data” to ICE

  June 30, 2022

  Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is selling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement a suite of features used to track and identify cryptocurrency users, according to contract documents… more ›

• The Many Uses of CRISPR: Scientists Tell All

  June 28, 2022

  Smartphones, superglue, electric cars, video chat. When does the wonder of a new technology wear off? When you get so used to its presence that you don’t think of it… more ›