science

Bruce Ledewitz
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The rehabilitation of truth

You cannot build a secular civilization into the future without a kind of faith.

M L Clark
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Solarpunk humanism: How we dream bigger than despair

Solarpunk offers a potent narrative space for imagining secular worlds to come, and how to get there.

Jonathan MS Pearce
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Biophysicist: Society will 'eventually accept' designer babies

"Why wait 100,000 years for natural selection to do its job?"

Georgia Michelman
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How much should we worry about asteroids?

Astronomers have found an estimated 40% of the near-Earth asteroids that are 140 m and larger. You do the math.

M L Clark
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Eco-friendly transportation? The good, the bad, and the pipe dreams

The saying about putting a fox in charge of the hen house grossly underestimates human ingenuity. We are not foxes, and so we have the ability to be much cleverer custodians of institutions we’re still destroying.

Adam Lee
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Longtermism: the good, the bad and the ridiculous

Some philosophers stray into religious fantasy when they argue that a far-off utopian scenario supersedes any obligations to the present.

M L Clark
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Reclaiming human agency in how we think about AI

Reading Time: 9 minutes Online panic about AI models like ChatGPT follows a well-travelled path set by impoverished understandings of evolutionary theory. Can we reclaim human agency?

M L Clark
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So this is 90 seconds to midnight

Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock, which for three quarters of a century has been used to depict humanity’s risk of global disaster from nuclear war. When the clock was first

M L Clark
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Broken heat records—and the promise of more

Reading Time: 4 minutes Another set of broken heat records has devastating implications—not only for human thriving in the coming years, but also the inability of consequences from past failings to stir global action to some better end.

M L Clark
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COVID-19 now haunts flu season: What other long term impacts can we expect?

Reading Time: 11 minutes It’s been a rough few days for anyone following flu season data. While China has eased zero-COVID restrictions in the face of protests, despite currently experiencing a surge in case count (along with Japan), North American hospitals face what the American Medical Associatio

Rick Snedeker
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NASA’s Artemis: A big step in sending humans to Mars

Reading Time: 5 minutes When NASA’s ambitious Artemis I project rocket—the agency’s most powerful launch vehicle ever—blasted into space from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on November 16, scarcely more than a century ago automobiles and airplanes were still in their cradles. In a historical blink o

M L Clark
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The Scientist Rebellion: What will it take to get the world’s attention?

Reading Time: 8 minutes The Scientist Rebellion calls for more people “on the inside” to take up the struggle against government inaction. But where does the movement fit into broader climate change activism, and is its degrowth message enough?