Category: ideas

“Her life is an endless series of jump cuts. In our age of pinging distractions, people often express a desire to ‘be present,’ but Johnson belies such sentimentality. She is marooned in the present.” A profile of an artist whose hippocampus was completely destroyed in 2007 by a viral infection – and what neuroscientists are learning about the brain from the things she can and cannot now do.

“A recent video by Valspar Paint highlights just how awe-inspiring color really is. In it, they give color blindness-correcting glasses made by EnChroma to color blind people and allow them, for the first time ever, to experience color.”

“The gut is dead. Long live the data, turned out day and night by our myriad computers and smart devices. Not that we trust the data, as we once trusted our guts. Instead, we “optimize” it. We optimize for it. We optimize with it.”

“It can feel like our senses give us direct access to the world as it is now, and our memory to the world as it once was. Commentator Tania Lombrozo challenges these ideas.”

“A heavenly Internet is taking shape above our heads. In the same week this January, the spaceflight companies SpaceX and Virgin Galactic both announced plans for “megaconstellations” of low-Earth orbit, or LEO, satellites delivering broadband to every inch of the inhabited world.”

“As the United States joins with India, Japan, Korea and Vietnam to balance China, the First World War era may offer more positive and negative guidance for the future than the era when the United States was more lopsidedly supreme.”

“A newly published, small-scale study from Greece finds listening to either classical or rock music positively impacts two important predictors of cardiovascular risk. The effects are particularly pronounced for classical music fans, who, in the study, had a more robust physiological response to music of either genre.”

“Humans, with our finite lives, are naturally drawn to grand questions about time, space and the cosmos. But, astrophysicist Adam Frank asks, where does that leave life’s little truths?”

“The glove is outfitted with tiny sensors that track the user’s hand movements. Patients use it to play a Guitar Hero-style game that involves pinching and gripping notes on the screen of a tablet.”