Category Science

These bubbles kill cancer

2023-10-06 Jim Lynch The process [of histotripsy] uses a transducer—which converts electricity into sound—to deliver ultrasound waves to a malignant mass at a precise location. When the waves hit gasses inside cancerous cells, they generate clouds of tiny bubbles through…

What Are Dreams For?

2023-08-31 Amanda Gefter In a series of papers, Blumberg articulated his theory that the brain uses REM sleep to “learn” the body. You wouldn’t think that the body is something a brain needs to learn, but we aren’t born with…

DEEP DIVE: The Covid “Fudge Factor”

2022-08-30 Maxim Lott Instead of trusting governments to correctly classify and report Covid deaths, take total deaths (all deaths from all causes, not just from Covid) in 2020/2021 and compare that to total death pre-Covid, in 2018 The difference is…

Most surgeries are ineffective

2021-01-21 Paras Chopra surgery is different than medicine. All new pharmaceutical molecules are subjected to rigorous clinical trials where they’re tested against placebo or doing nothing. In many countries, there’s no such procedure for surgical treatments. If there is a…

Things You Should Never Do, Part I

2000-04-06 Joel Spolsky Netscape … [made] the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a…

The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End

2020-10-29 George Musser In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years. Information, they now say with confidence, does escape…