Identical Twins Aren't That Identical

Stuart Ritchie | Science Fictions | 4th December 2022

The University of South Carolina accused identical twins of colluding in an exam, and now the twins have won a $6.5 million lawsuit by arguing that their papers were similar because their minds were "connected". Is there any good science in this claim? Probably not. But if there were, it would have interesting implications for debates about how far genetic endowment determines behaviour (2,800 words)

Dismantling Sellafield

Samanth Subramanian | Guardian | 15th December 2022

Superb reporting from Sellafield in northern England, where Britain's first big nuclear plant is winding down. Sellafield produced plutonium for nuclear weapons in the 1950s, and electricity until 2003. Until this year it reprocessed spent fuel. Now it is the world's most toxic storage depot, holding tonnes of plutonium and lakes of liquid waste that will need guarding for thousands of years (6,070 words)

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The Rise And Fall Of Peer Review

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 13th December 2022

Peer review is "the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades" and it has failed. It is expensive and detrimental to research productivity. Plus, studies in which errors are deliberately added to papers have demonstrated that reviewers don't catch the mistakes before publication the majority of the time. So what now? What science does best: move on to a new experiment and try again (3,618 words)

Books Of The Year

The White Review | 8th December 2022

Many lists of "best" books are published at this time of year. Few are this wide-ranging or surprising. Suggestions of the best Sri Lankan fiction sit alongside memoirs by Paul Theroux, Laurie Lee and Simone de Beauvoir. Works in translation, whether from 18C Irish or classical Chinese, are well represented. Hard to peruse without adding new volumes to one's to be read list (15,260 words)

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Becoming A Chatbot

Laura Preston | Guardian | 13th December 2022

Account of a year working as the "human backup" for a conversational AI named Brenda, which answers basic questions about real estate listings. The company deliberately hired poets and writers with MFAs or PhDs. The work was mostly a "game of reflexes", editing and improving the AI's responses against the clock. Brenda was never allowed to say "I don't know" or "I'm not a bot" (5,509 words)

Scientists Can't Give Up On Alien Life

Ethan Siegel | Big Think | 13th December 2022

Efforts to discover life elsewhere in the universe have so far yielded no results, but continuing the hunt is still a valuable endeavour. Facing the "end of our scientific certainty" and designing methods of inquiry that attempt to go beyond the limits of our capabilities into the philosophical realm is worthwhile in and of itself. "The odds are unknown, but the payoff could be unfathomable" (2,938 words)

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All Souls Politics Exam

All Souls College, Oxford | 2016-2022 | PDF

Past paper for the last six years of the All Souls prize fellowship exam. Candidates sit four three-hour papers, only two of which can be in their own subject. In each, they must answer three questions with as much originality as possible. Questions on this politics paper include: "Has the Cold War ended?", "Why not anarchism?", "What explains civil wars?", and "Is populism an ideology?" (2,354 words)

Searching For Zarahemla

Emily Fox Kaplan | Pipe Wrench | 6th December 2022

Some Mormons believe that the events described in their holy book took place in northern Guatemala and southern Mexico. This journalist joined a package tour revealing the region to the faithful. "I think I find Mormons so compelling because Jews don’t have any certainty about anything... 16 million-plus Mormons, one set of very specific answers to pretty much every question imaginable" (8,012 words)

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History In The Making

Stephen Davies | Work In Progress | 8th December

The study of history is meant to help us understand our present and our future. But a conception of history dominated by wars and revolutions will not get us very far. It is new ideas and new technologies that do most to shape the world over time. Better to understand how Newton's Principia changed science, and how the Model-T changed America, than how 1066 changed Britain (3,100 words)

The Brilliant Hackwork Of P.G. Wodehouse

Dan Brooks | Gawker | 7th December 2022

P.G. Wodehouse found a recipe for writing comic novels, and very wisely stuck to it. In innumerable novels and short stories Bertie Wooster gets into some scrape after shunning Jeeves's advice, and Jeeves, after a huff, engineers a happy ending. The formulaic quality of the stories is part of their charm. It allows for a seemingly effortless style of writing, and the levity transmits itself to the reader (1,500 words)

Clinical Trials And Biotech Innovation

Matthew Herper | STAT | 3rd November 2022

This ought to be a great century for biology. The combination of gene editing and AI is opening up vast new prospects for understanding and optimising our bodies. But how much of this life-science will get out of the labs and into production if the law requires the safety and efficacy of every product to be proven in clinical trials? Ensuring safety is vital — but is there a better way of doing it? (5,400 words)

The Weirdness Of Beavers

Leila Philip | Literary Hub | 8th December 2022

A brief history of beavers in art, history, scholarship and religion. A million years ago, beavers "the size of bears" roamed North America. The evolution of beavers remains something of a mystery: To look at, they are "part bear, part bird, part monkey, part lizard". Nobody knows when they started building dams. They seem to have a capacity for collective intelligence, like ants or bees (2,900 words)

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Why Is Everything So Ugly?

The Editors | n+1 | 7th December 2022

You can walk for hours across New York City without seeing anything that is both new and beautiful. We have at our disposal the most advanced design and manufacturing technologies in human history, yet the environment we make for ourselves is a "drab sublime" of flat-pack furniture, municipal infrastructure, home electronics and commercial graphic design. Who asked for all this? (4,100 words)

Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?

Keith Holyoak | MIT Press Reader | 7th December 2022

There is plenty of fun to be had seeding GPT-3 to write prose and make pictures, then laughing at the off-kilter weirdness of the results, which have strayed of late deep into the uncanny valley. But what of poetry, which abolished all conventions a century ago, and now strives for unusual effects? Might AI poetry be equal or superior to that of humans? The short answer is, "Yes, but ..." (3,400 words)

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Finding Language In The Brain

Giosuè Baggio | MIT Press Reader | 25th November 2022

Mathematical systems are useful for understanding language, but perhaps language is itself also a system for computation. If so, then it would follow that language is the "software" being run by human "hardware" — that is, the brain. "The language-as-calculus idea may well be the best model of language in the brain we currently have — or perhaps the worst, except for all the others" (1,495 words)

I Don’t Want To Be An Internet Person

Ginevra Davis | Palladium | 4th November 2022

Reflections on online vs "real" life, told via an encounter with someone who is "cool on a certain corner of the internet". "The internet people are in charge. They make the memes and coin the neologisms that will become mainstream discourse in five years. To define the internet is to form the base layer upon which all culture is built. In the long run, these people will win" (4,176 words)

How To Speak Honeybee

Karen Bakker | Noema | 2nd November 2022

Bees communicate mainly by dance, but they also have a vocabulary of sounds and vibrations. They have excellent eyesight and can recognise faces. They can rob and cheat. They get happy and sad. When a swarm needs to split or move on, the bees will argue and vote about where to go next. To better observe them, humans are now building a bee-sized robot which will pass as a bee among bees (4,700 words)

Beware Of The Perfect Gentleman

R.F. Jurjevics | Vice | 28th November 2022

Let's say you are a man with an "open face". You seem strong, gentle, trustworthy. You have got "the look". That's the good news. The bad news is that fraudsters and catfishers seek out faces like yours for use in "romance scams". Your pirated photo may be used to defraud dozens, even hundreds, of people. And, thanks to Google's reverse-image search, those victims may then come looking for you (4,600 words)

52 Things I Learned In 2022

Tom Whitwell | Magnetic Notes | 1st December 2022

Tom Whitwell's annual assemblage of unexpected facts and claims maintains its usual high standard. "A bolt of lightning contains about ¼ of a kilowatt-hour of power. Even with recent energy price rises, it’s only worth about 9 pence". "In the UK people tend to turn left when entering a building, in the US they turn right — important to remember if you are booking a trade show booth" (1,500 words)

J. Edgar Hoover: Head Of The State

Charles Trueheart | American Scholar | 1st December 2022

“There probably will never be anybody like Mr. Hoover again — nor should there be”, says Beverley Gage in her "subtle and discerning" new biography. Hoover turned the FBI into his private deep state, pandering to presidents while collecting "scandalous dossiers" on them. He died "just in time to avoid witnessing the public repudiation of his life’s work and the destruction of his reputation” (1,320 words)

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When You Can Taste Everything You See

Julia Skinner | Atlanta | 2nd November 2022

A food critic with synesthesia explains what it is like to navigate a world in which everything she sees has a flavour. A particular stretch of road "tastes" like blueberry pop rocks, while a nearby building's facade is "caramelly". Sometimes her sense associations produce surprisingly delicious invented recipes, but often not: chocolate cake with raw tomatoes was not a hit (967 words)

Two Conspiracy Theories About Cola

Dynomight | 20th October 2021

Debunking of two ideas about cola beverages. The first states that the classic cola recipe contains enough sugar to make the drinker vomit, but this effect is offset by an anti-nausea drug. The second claims that because Mexican coke is made from "pure sugar" rather than corn syrup, it is healthier. The evidence does not support either theory, and we shouldn't be drinking sugary drinks anyway (2,596 words)