- Human brain cells in a dish learned to play the game Pong faster than an AI.
- American scientists gave 1000 doses of Ecstasy to Soviet scientists and military personnel before nuclear negotiations with Ronald Reagan in 1985.
- Could acid-neutralising life-forms make habitable pockets in Venus’ clouds?
- Alien antimatter crashes into Earth.
- Scientists used CRISPR gene editing to choose the sex of mouse pups.
- Human lifespan may have no limit, analysis of supercentenarians suggests.
- The Matrix‘s real-world legacy – from red pill incels to conspiracies and deepfakes.
- The U.S. Army has created a single vaccine protecting against all COVID and SARS variants, researchers say.
- Greek discovery of Iceland supported by linguistic evidence.
- ‘Extraordinary’ restoration of Roman rock crystal jar from Galloway hoard.
- Breathtaking fossil of baby dinosaur tucked in its egg yields new evolutionary clues.
- Millipedes ‘as big as cars’ once roamed Northern England, fossil find reveals.
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Quote of the Day:
If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves.
Milton Sanford Mayer (in ‘They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45’)
