In 1944 Harvard installed Mark I, a computerized calculator, to aid physics professor John von Neumann’s work on the Manhattan Project. The one-of-a-kind machine took up most of a room. Today, for $500, you can keep an exponentially more rapid and versatile smartphone in your pocket. Imagine what similarly rapid technological growth might look like…
A group of blogs and Internet forums, led by blogger Steve Sailer, have come together to embrace a successor to the pseudoscientific racist movements of the 20th century. “Human biodiversity” (HBD) is the term they have used to give their particular theories a policy-wonk zing. (Read an in-depth explanation of the human biodiversity phenomenon here.)…
There’s a piece of the “alt-right” puzzle of bigotry you need to know more about: “human biodiversity.” An ideological successor to eugenics, human biodiversity (HBD) is, like eugenics (from the Greek words for “good” and “breeding”) primarily a euphemism. Ostensibly, HBD refers to the scientifically proven (and therefore apolitical) genetic differences between groups of humans….
Two summers ago, thousands of people poured buckets of icy water on themselves and posted videos of it on social media in the name of a disease most had barely heard of — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), somewhat better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Although ALS, a neurodegenerative disorder that leads to permanent paralysis of…
Public health officials trying to fight breast cancer in Australia find the country’s Jewish population especially challenging. That’s because Australia’s Jewish community of 112,000 is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, or of European origin, and counts a high number of descendents of Holocaust survivors, said Lesley Andrews, a doctor at Prince of Whales hospital in Randwick, Australia. Andrews…
Irving Gottesman, a professor of psychology and modern pioneer in the study of the genetics of schizophrenia who died on June 29 at age 85, exemplified the saying attributed to Albert Einstein: “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.” Accepting complexities and contradictions in research without losing his unruffled good humor, the Cleveland-born…
“You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who co-discovered DNA’s double strand architecture, wrote in his 1994 book on consciousness, “The Astonishing Hypothesis.”…
Having grown up within the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Midwood in Brooklyn, Rifky Tkatch, a social psychologist, knew that many in her community did not like to talk about cancer. Yet it wasn’t until she conducted focus group interviews with Orthodox Jewish women in Detroit in 2011 that she uncovered barriers to screening that stunned…
