Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
• Too Much Time on Their Hands: In an October profile of tech developer and startup savant Sam Altman, The New Yorker disclosed that "many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis" -- that "what we experience as reality" is just some dark force's computer simulation (as in the movie "The Matrix"). "Two tech billionaires," the magazine reported, are "secretly engag(ing) scientists" to break us out of this alternative universe we might be trapped in. (One prominent member of the tech elite remarked at a Vox Media conference in June on how the "simulation hypothesis" seems to dominate all conversation whenever the elites gather.) [Business Insider, 10-3-2016] [The New Yorker, 10-10-2016]
• Scientists from England's Bath University, publishing in a September issue of Nature Communications, report success in creating enduring live mice without use of a fertilized egg. The researchers showed it possible that a sperm cell can "trick" an egg into becoming a full-featured embryo without a "fertilization" process (in which distinct genomes from sperm and egg were thought to be required, at least in mammals). The scientists were thus able to "challenge nearly two centuries of conventional wisdom." [Science Daily, 9-13-2016]