Zack Savitsky in Quanta:
But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.
As physicists have worked to unite seemingly disparate fields over the past century, they have cast entropy in a new light — turning the microscope back on the seer and shifting the notion of disorder to one of ignorance. Entropy is seen not as a property intrinsic to a system but as one that’s relative to an observer who interacts with that system. This modern view illuminates the deep link between information and energy, which is now helping to usher in a mini-industrial revolution on the smallest of scales.
Two hundred years after the seeds of entropy were first sown, what’s emerging is a conception of this quantity that’s more opportunistic than nihilistic. The conceptual evolution is upending the old way of thinking, not just about entropy, but about the purpose of science and our role in the universe.
More here.
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To say that the American health-care system is in less-than-great working order may strike many as a colossal understatement. Yes, it functions well on the heroic-medicine front. It possesses incomparable medical technology and pharmaceuticals, and it can boast an impressive corps of well-educated and compassionate physicians, nurses, and other health-care workers. For all those strengths, however, American health care labors under mighty challenges, including an overstretched and underfunded public-health system, the increasing concentration of hospitals and even medical practices in the hands of for-profit businesses, and a patchwork health-insurance regime that leaves too many people inadequately covered and gives too much control to insurance-company executives and too little to health-care professionals.
A primary byproduct of ore-smelting is the mixture of oxides and silicon dioxide known as slag. Heaped into giant conical mountains alongside industrial sites, these otherworldly piles are known as slag heaps. Appearing as granulated pyramids of blast furnace refuse, slag heaps can include an assortment of copper, nickel, and zinc removed as non-ferrous material during the refinement of what will become steel. For those raised in industrial regions, such as Pittsburgh, slag heaps were once a common site along rivers such as the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio. These sooty remnants of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation or the Carrie Blast Furnaces are the height of the great Indian mounds that dotted this landscape centuries ago, but rather than a verdant green, these heaps are the color of an overcast Western Pennsylvania sky. They are incongruously beautiful and have a way of getting into the lungs and blood of residents—both literally and metaphorically. As 
YOU OPEN BOX 34, take the typescript from its folder. You can see right away that the song is pretty much finished. He’s got the first four verses locked in, save one lingering question about Ma. Should she be forty but say she’s twenty-four, or eighty claiming sixty-four? Or what if she’s twenty but wants you to think she’s sixty-four? Is that better? Nah. But this is small potatoes, a distraction from the real problem, which is the fifth and final verse, which is still stumping him.
Thousands of new genes are hidden inside the “dark matter” of our genome. Previously thought to be noise left over from evolution, 
Though it’s not presented as such in her introduction or conclusion, femicide, as the ne plus ultra of patriarchal logic, is at the core of Chollet’s analysis in Reinventing Love. In a chapter entitled “Real Men,” Chollet argues that intimate partner violence should be thought of not as an aberration but rather as the most logical outcome of gender norms. She quotes feminist therapist Elisende Coladan in suggesting that, instead of calling abusive partners “narcissists,” such men should more readily be called the “healthy children of patriarchy.” Taking this logic further, Chollet spends a large chunk of this chapter analyzing with great curiosity what’s going on with the women who fall in love with known serial killers, from 
It can be argued, with some important caveats and qualifications, that Peter Schjeldahl was the most inventive, entertaining, and self-observing art critic to have ever worked in the English language. For 60 years, give or take, he struck himself like a tuning fork against works of art and attempted to transcribe the way his nerves vibrated to the aesthetic. These transcriptions involved dense, epigrammatic sentences, zany metaphors, and a chatty authority that was both deceptively approachable and disarmingly smart. Although he put himself in the bloodline of poet-critics like Baudelaire and Frank O’Hara, their prose never approaches anything like the constant, look-at-me lexical wizardry of an exhibition review by Schjeldahl. His writing credo: “Concentrated. At least one idea per sentence. Melodious, I hope. With jokes.”
‘F
A hypothesis called “The Silurian hypothesis” wins the title of “most interesting hypothesis most likely to be false” for all of science. In brief, the hypothesis postulates that previously a species different from ours had achieved high intelligence and technological civilization on this planet. The Silurian hypothesis (named after “Silurian” aliens in the brainy British TV series “Doctor Who”) was initially proposed by two astronomers, Gavin A. Schmidt and Adam Frank, as a thought experiment, to see if it would even be feasible to detect the traces of such a hypothetical civilization which had existed many millions of years ago. Would there still be detectable changes in the sedimentation patterns if someone (not human) had built cities and military bases a hundred million years ago? Would ancient trash dumps be conserved somewhere, somehow? Would there be changes in the patterns of radioisotopes in the rocks as a result of an ancient nuclear war?
Mysterious drones have been swarming the night skies above New Jersey and other nearby states for a month. They have been spotted over