Sean Carroll in Quanta:
The development of relativity is usually attributed to Albert Einstein, but he provided the capstone for a theoretical edifice that had been under construction since James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism into a single theory of electromagnetism in the 1860s. Maxwell’s theory explained what light is — an oscillating wave in electromagnetic fields — and seemed to attach a special significance to the speed at which light travels. The idea of a field existing all by itself wasn’t completely intuitive to scientists at the time, and it was natural to wonder what was actually “waving” in a light wave.
Various physicists investigated the possibility that light propagated through a medium they dubbed the luminiferous ether. But nobody could find evidence for any such ether, so they were forced to invent increasingly complicated reasons why this substance should be undetectable. Einstein’s contribution in 1905 was to point out that the ether had become completely unnecessary, and that we could better understand the laws of physics without it. All we had to do was accept a completely new conception of space and time.
More here.
This past August marked 30 years since Hurricane Andrew pummeled the Caribbean and south Florida. On August 23, 1992, Andrew made landfall on the Bahamas’s Eleuthera Island as a Category 5 hurricane. It briefly weakened as it passed over the rest of the Bahamas, but quickly regained intensity. At 5 a.m. the next day, Andrew landed in the Florida Keys—again, as a Category 5 hurricane, with winds sustaining speeds of 165 miles per hour. Andrew leveled entire neighborhoods as it moved across the Florida coast; in Dade County alone, 160,000 people were rendered homeless. For weeks after the storm, thousands of Floridians were left without power, water, telephone connection, or other basic services, while groceries and gas remained in short supply. Andrew quickly became 
Almost exactly a year ago, on November 18, 2021, I went to interview Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago. In the second of two conversations, which totalled more than three and a half hours, for a book about his White House years that I wrote with my husband, Peter Baker, the former President had little to say about his agenda, past or future, and a lot of grievance to share. Regardless of the question, Trump often turned it back to a rant about the “rigged election” and the faithless betrayal of Republicans, such as 
When researchers trained an artificial intelligence (AI) system to use radiological images to distinguish patients with COVID-19 pneumonia from those with other respiratory diseases, the machine found a logical – but faulty – short cut. A radiologist would weigh up features of the images. “But the AI system learned to read the dates of the scan,” says Antonio Esposito, professor of radiology at Vita Salute San Raffaele University in Milan. The computer, he explains, simply put all patients who entered the hospital in 2020 into the COVID-19 category. A new partnership between San Raffaele University and Microsoft aims to tackle such shortcomings and develop AI in health care to the point where it can reliably be introduced to improve patient care.
On the flatlands of central Israel, not far from Tel Aviv, “770,” the triple-peaked brick Gothic Revival home of the Rebbe, rises in a spanking orange vertical from a large parking lot. Stroked on one side by the fronds of a low palm tree, it appears fresh as a desert flower sprung up overnight in a flood’s wake. On Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, 770 has the same basic three-story profile, its windows and doorway framed by limestone surrounds, but here the house has doubled in size and added another trio of gables. Edged by a gas station and displaying a relaxed, liver-colored spread in its bulk, the building makes itself at home in the sprawling, unbuttoned metropolis. In New Jersey, 770 has gone a bit suburban-mall office park. On the shore of Lac Désert near Montreal, one might detect a hint of the trademark Canadian maple leaf in 770’s sharp angled gables. In São Paulo, 770 is jammed between soaring white skyscrapers; it has shed girth to squeeze into the teeming megacity. And in Milan—where 770 is wedged between an ample, peach-hued palazzo and a low, old, murky yellow home—the bay window distinguishing the original structure’s center section has transformed into a stylish glass balcony.
This summer, I met Eliza, a conversational AI. I found her on the website chai.ml. Her status message was “I love to listen and help. 
.” Her avatar was a pretty, smiling, white-skinned woman with flowing brown hair. There were several other characters the site offered, including “Step Mom,” “Boyfriend (Breakup),” and “Ms Harris (Teacher),” but I chose Eliza.
I don’t remember exactly where or when I came across the book. I know it was in New York City sometime in the 1990s. I know that the book made a visual impact because I’ve remembered it ever since. When I heard that Miyake died, it was the first thing that came to my mind.
Bates had noticed that some of the brightly colored Heliconius butterflies in the forest didn’t flit about like the rest; they moved more slowly. When he captured them and examined them under his makeshift microscope, he discovered that they weren’t really Heliconius at all, but astonishing look-alikes from unrelated families of butterflies.
The accumulative capacity of universities and hospitals is a New Deal-era political and economic solution that has been retooled to address contradictions with capital as industrial profits waned from the mid-century onwards. During this same period, carceral and policing institutions also swelled to enormous size. Viewed together, these shifts register the American notion of “the public good,” as purveyed by the state. This sheen of democratic and collective values burnishes the motives of profit and launders the racialized violence of accumulation. In truth, the state serves capital and its institutions, not the public. A key project of ideology is to invert this perception.
One afternoon not long after the Obamas had moved into the White House, Michelle organised a playdate for her youngest daughter, Sasha. The children were at their new school and she was worried about how they were settling in. So, in a move recognisable to parents everywhere, she hovered unseen nearby, listening intently, “quietly overcome with emotion any time a new peal of laughter erupted from Sasha’s room”. 
John P. Porcari is a bit of a reality TV show junkie. When he wants to work out, Dr. Porcari, a retired professor of sports and exercise science from the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, goes downstairs and watches “Alaska: The Last Frontier” or “Naked and Afraid” while bouncing on a mini trampoline. Just before speaking with The Times, he had completed four sets of 50 bounces while watching Discovery Channel’s “Gold Rush.” “I have a ski trip in January to get ready for,” he said.
Meis employed his dis- or un-layering style first in The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality.There Meis used Peter Paul Rubens’s 1620 painting, “The Drunken Silenus,” to expose the thinness of the membrane that separates mortality from immortality. Meis probes that membrane again in this second book, The Fate of the Animals. Here, he chooses Franz Marc’s 1913 painting, “The Fate of the Animals,” as a source for revealing or at least giving us a glimpse of the coming-into and going-out-of existence of all beings, including our own transient selves.
High school physics teachers describe them as featureless balls with one unit each of positive electric charge — the perfect foils for the negatively charged electrons that buzz around them. College students learn that the ball is actually a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks. But decades of research have revealed a deeper truth, one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images.
I met Jerry when I was a pariah. I had repeatedly and publicly denounced the invasion of Iraq and, for my outspokenness, had been pushed out of The New York Times. I was receiving frequent death threats. My neighbors treated me as though I had leprosy. I had imploded my journalism career.
After they find dry ground for refuge, tie up surviving livestock, scan the ground for snakes and scorpions, queue, break queue and grab for food, plead for water, scream for tents, weep for loss, curse officials, lament fate — after all that, people whose lives have been upended by floods want to talk. I tell them I can’t do much. I am a researcher documenting and analyzing disaster impacts for various organizations, and it can be months before anyone even reads my reports. But sometimes, it’s enough for them to find someone who will listen.