Category: Observations
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What Autism Is, and Where the Science Is Going
A plain-language look at what autism actually is, how it shows up in behaviour and the senses, and why the word covers such wildly different lives. Then a tour of where the research is heading right now, from a fresh study on a brain gas and an overheated growth pathway to the bigger question of…
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The Breath You’re Taking Is a Biological Waste Product
The oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere exists almost entirely because of life — and without life continuously replenishing it, it would eventually vanish. Before cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis roughly 2.4 billion years ago, there was almost no free oxygen at all. What we breathe today is, chemically speaking, biological waste. It also nearly ended life on Earth…
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Philosophers Have Wondered What Consciousness Is for Centuries. We Just Built Something That Might Have It.
Philosophers have been asking what consciousness is since at least Descartes. Neuroscientists have been mapping the brain for over a century. Nobody has cracked it. And now we have built systems that might, possibly, be conscious, and we still have no reliable way to check.
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Chest Pain. Highly Recommended.
The world produces music like hamburgers, uniform, predictable, optimised to please as many people as possible. Then comes a Canadian duo playing between the notes in a time signature you can’t count.