Month: June 2014
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Psychology, Materialism, Assumptions, Dogmatism.
IMAGINE you are a doctor before the advent of modern medical tests and your patient is gasping for breath. Is it asthma, a chest injury, or are they having a heart-attack? You don’t know and have no idea how best to help them. Some would argue that’s what it’s like for doctors trying to…
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Sand castles, dirt, God, “creation”…
For billions of years, the history of life has been written with just four letters — A, T, C and G, the labels given to the DNA subunits contained in all organisms. That alphabet has just grown longer, researchers announce, with the creation of a living cell that has two ‘foreign’ DNA building blocks in…
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IBM, Watson, non-thinking…
IBM’s Watson supercomputer has already mastered Jeopardy! and can even whip up an innovative recipe. Next step: it’ll be elected to the presidency after dominating against humans in a series of debates. The computer’s new Debater function is what it sounds like: after being given a topic, Watson will mine millions of Wikipedia articles until it…
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Excitons… Parmenidions… Exciting!
Getting excited can kick a person’s energy to a higher level. At the nanoscale, strange almost-particles called excitons do the same trick. In a crystal, thin film or even some liquids, an incoming particle of light can slam into an electron, bumping it to a higher energy level and leaving a hole at the energy…
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Death penalty – We are all inmates…
Terminally ill people who want to die can take drugs to end their lives peacefully. Ailing pets are put down humanely every day. Clearly, the technology exists to bring about a quick and painless death. Why, then, do executions by lethal injection sometimes become troubling spectacles? The death in Oklahomaof Clayton D. Lockett, amid struggling…
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