Tag Archives: hitting the books

Hitting the books: How China uses AI to influence its 1.4 billion citizens

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The battle for international hegemony didn’t stop with the fall of the Reichstag in 1945, or of the Soviet Union in 1991 — it has simply moved online. Today, states and their actors are waging a digital cold war with artificial intelligence systems a...

Hitting the Books: Lessons learned from gaming with the King of Sweden

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Video games have come a long way from their dim arcade origins. No longer a mere niche diversion for pasty, maladjusted youth, gaming is now an integral part of modern pop culture standing shoulder to shoulder with “classical” forms of media like fil...

Hitting the Books: This $80 prosthetic has helped millions walk again

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The modern world around us — from the spaces we inhabit to the furniture we perch upon to the gadgets, tools and devices we hold in our hands — is implicitly designed for humans that fit within a specific bell curve of shape and ability. If you happe...

Hitting the Books: Volcanoes, mortal enemy of the mighty telescope

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Humans are, as a species, hardwired to explore. We conquered the planet thanks to untold generations of people needing to see what lay over the next hill or around the next river bend and our infatuation with the stars is no different — we’ve wondere...

Hitting the Books: Why we’ll never see the edge of the universe

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Death comes for us all, even on the cosmological scale. Our universe started off with a bang, and a rather large one at that, but how it will end remains a mystery. Will entropic effects cause it to cool and sputter out like a guttering flame or will...

Hitting the Books: Why women make better astronauts

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Kate Greene knows better than most what it’s like to live on Mars. As a member of NASA’s inaugural 2013 HI-SEAS project, she spent four months in a simulated Martian environment on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa. In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Greene exami...

Hitting the Books: America needs a new public data system

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Earlier this month the Trump administration stripped the CDC of its control over the nation’s Coronavirus data. By insisting that all case reporting be funneled through the White House, the administration further undermined public trust in its pandem...