Nora Bradford in Quanta Magazine:
Such moments of insight are written across history. According to the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius, in the third century BCE the Greek mathematician Archimedes suddenly exclaimed “Eureka!” after he slid into a bathtub and saw the water level rise by an amount equal to his submerged volume (although this tale may be apocryphal(opens a new tab)). In the 17th century, according to lore, Sir Isaac Newton had a breakthrough in understanding gravity after an apple fell on his head. In the early 1900s, Einstein came to a sudden realization that “if a man falls freely, he would not feel his weight,” which led him to his theory of relativity, as he later described in a lecture.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
The drone is increasingly regarded as the infantryman’s basic weapon. The U.S. Army is 
I
Jack Kerouac’s only child, Jan Kerouac, lived hard and died young. She was 44 when she succumbed to complications of liver failure in Albuquerque in 1996. She met her famous father, the author of “On the Road” and the avatar of the Beat generation, only twice.
Now 82, Crumb is America’s greatest cartoonist. Inimitable and inventive as Herriman and Gould were, neither had his range, nor his independence. Crumb, who developed a rounded, cuddly style reminiscent of Depression-era cartoons, is also a great draughtsman, with a capacity to render fastidiously detailed naturalistic drawings. Technique alone cannot account for his eminence, however. Crumb is both an observant satirist and a self-aware student of his own drives. His grasp of American vernacular and his sardonic humour suggest a comparison with Mark Twain as well as with Twain’s admirer, the proudly prejudiced social critic 
We are at that strange stage in the adoption curve of a revolutionary technology at which two seemingly contradictory things are true at the same time: It has become clear that artificial intelligence will transform the world. And the technology’s immediate impact is still sufficiently small that it just about remains possible to pretend that this won’t be the case.
Since the 1800s, cancer surgeons have known that tumours can spread along the nerves. Today, the burgeoning field of cancer neuroscience is starting to reveal the true impact of the disease’s interaction with the nervous system. The phenomenon, known as perineural invasion, is common in certain types of cancer. “When treating patients with head and neck cancers, I see invasion into nerves in about half of cases,” says Moran Amit, professor of head and neck surgery at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “It’s an ominous feature. It puts patients in a higher risk category and requires us to escalate treatment.”
“The Poems of Seamus Heaney” amplifies a reader’s understanding of the poet’s accomplishment by putting the meticulous grandeur of each book into the context of uncollected and unpublished poems, many of them excellent and all of them illuminating. With a lucid, chronological format for the Contents page, the volume’s editors invite readers to sample the honorable outtakes and preliminaries, the range-finding preparatory studies, that underlie for instance the haunted vision of “North” (1975) or the magisterial yet intimate scope of “Station Island” (1984).
The ice of the Himalayas is wasting away. Glacier-draped slopes are going bare. The ground atop the mountain range, which sprawls across five Asian countries, is slumping and sliding as the ice beneath it — ice that held the land together — disappears. Meltwater is puddling in the valleys below, forming deep lakes.
These programs share a common origin: a Cold War-era desire in the West to demonstrate technological superiority over the Soviet Union. Apollo was, of course, championed at the highest levels of the U.S. government and consumed 
It started with the memes. People in the online know were all reading the tweets of Bronze Age Pervert. Quoting from neo-Nietzschean joke-manifesto Bronze Age Mindset was a sign, on what was still in 2016 called the alt-right, that you not only valued strength and masculine vigor and the annihilation of all liberal and feminizing impulses from the sclerosis of the liberal-bureaucratic-democratic establishment but also that you could speak the cant of the scene. It was the first Trump administration, and half the alt-right was high on the promise of meme magic—the tantalizing notion that a group of posters on 4chan had, implausibly, harnessed the latent energies of the universe and the powers of Internet vibes to meme Donald Trump into office. Neopagan vitalism was as sexy, in the recesses of the Internet characterized by avatars of cartoon frogs, as the mirror-image figure of the “resistance witch” on the anti-Trump left.