Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:
On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hang from long stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights in the wind.
The dangling ensembles of eggs are beautiful but also practical: They keep the hatching larvae from immediately eating their unhatched siblings. With sickle-like jaws that pierce their prey and suck them dry, lacewing larvae are “vicious,” said James Truman, a professor emeritus of development, cell and molecular biology at the University of Washington. “It’s like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in one animal.”
This Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy is made possible by metamorphosis, the phenomenon best known for transforming caterpillars into butterflies. In its most extreme version, complete metamorphosis, the juvenile and adult forms look and act like totally different species.
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I’m an adult, but my grandmother makes my shirts. The ones with good wicking properties that I wear on my morning runs. Five days per week she sits behind an industrial sewing machine in a room full of them, all cream-colored with metallic details. The machines, that is. The people, mostly women, have shades of brown, resilient skin that has outlived civil war. They rarely giggle. At times, they laugh, eat, go to the bathroom, flirt with ideas, fan themselves with their hands. But for most of the day, they are taciturn, patiently outlasting the drudgery, anticipating evening mass or a phone call from my mother. They aren’t all awaiting my mother’s call. They each have their own daughters. Their sons, however, are dead — a few daughters, too. Not all of them, but enough to dress in black for years. Some of the calls travel long distances. International calls from the United States, mostly. The lucky ones are in Canada — because of the egalitarian policies. The ones who are luckier still are in Vancouver. They ski. Not the daughters, but their children. Skiing is lovely if you can tolerate the ceremony of it all, and the other skiers. My grandmother, however, doesn’t care much for winter sports, even when she’s sewing useful, sometimes clandestine pockets into climate-resistant attire. She cares only about my mother, neat stitches, and, indirectly, about Jesus. She also thinks Richard Dean Anderson, the actor who played MacGyver in the eponymous 1980s television show that was a primetime darling in El Salvador, is a babe. I agreed, but I never said as much. I was eight and visiting my mother’s motherland for only the second time; an admission of that kind would have been about as well received as an incurable retrovirus.
Suppose you are considering your career choices. You decide you are going to be a world-leading research scientist. You believe that you are as likely to succeed as anyone else. You are also a young woman. Women are statistically underrepresented in higher level science, and you are aware of countless articles describing structural barriers faced by women in the sciences making it harder for them to reach the higher echelons of the profession. There isn’t anything about your skills or upbringing that gives you reason to think that you are less likely to face these barriers than other women. Nonetheless, because you want to believe that you are as likely to succeed as your male counterparts, you focus your attention on the successes of specific high profile woman scientists, and these successes allow you to believe what you want to.
There is a tradition of physicists writing popular books that reflect philosophically on what physics can teach us about the human condition. This book is a contribution to the genre. Hossenfelder is a physicist who works on quantum gravity, with a blog that made her known as a gadfly in her field. A previous book took on one of the sacred cows of theoretical physics – the pursuit of beauty in theorizing – and in this book she says that she is going to bring established science to bear on the kinds of questions that ordinary people ask: “people don’t care much whether quantum mechanics is predictable, they want to know whether their own behavior is predictable; … They don’t care much
Hitler’s skyrocketing rise to power is great data for building our threat models. But Mike Godwin is right: it’s easy to see Hitler everywhere. And if we say “Watch out: this is exactly how Hitler came to power!” once a week, eventually no one will even bother turning their head to look.
I’ll tell you a secret about working in a massage parlour: it’s a lot of waiting around, usually late at night. We’d wait, half a dozen of us, in the dressing room as the evening wore on. On edge and exhausted in equal parts, we perched on the low-slung couch, adjusted the straps of our babydolls, listlessly fluffed our hair, ready to spring into action.
PAUL REUBENS, who died on July 30, aged seventy, was not just an American original, entertainer, actor, mischief-maker, and mensch, but a great artist. His most famous creation was, of course, Pee-wee Herman, the adorably bonkers, puppy-dog-eyed anarchist in red bowtie and gray plaid suit who took TV off into a wild and wonderful dreamscape totally beyond anywhere (or anything!) it had been before. A CalArts alumnus (student of Allan Kaprow; classmate of David Hasselhoff), Reubens said, “I always felt [Pee-wee] was conceptual art but no one knew that except me.” Yup, he got right into the Reagan-era mainstream when things were hideous to the max and created all kinds of hallucinogenic chaos. Behold his masterpiece, Pee-wee’s Playhouse (1986–91): At the height of the AIDS crisis, queer royalty came over every Saturday morning: Little Richard! Sandra Bernhard! Grace Jones! His adventures, lair, and pals were wholly innocent and extremely subversive, an outrageous celebration of imagination and otherness run amok at a time when that was severely endangered. No other show (nominally “for kids”) has ever been louder or more delighted about being Art, a simultaneously freaky and extremely heartwarming carnival high on its own psychedelic rollercoaster aesthetics, full of nonstop chaos. It was a neon gift and a gateway drug for tons of kids who grew up to be artists. Gathered below, a mourning chorus of friends, collaborators, and devotees give just a hint of the magical singularity of his talents and influence—and of how deeply he’ll be missed.
Interethnic violence has grown over the summer in 
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My mother was a private eye. She was petite and elegant, she could shoot and drive, and she was a crack investigator.
The challenge of regulating generative artificial intelligence has been a topic of fierce debate since the technology captured the world’s attention late last year. But when it comes to ensuring that generative AI advances the common good, the who is just as important as the how.
One day in mid-March 2017, I had just finished giving my weekly lecture on film directing at 
Earlier this year Gallup