Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:
The cellular biology of reproduction is often depicted as an epic journey, in which millions of intrepid sperm fight to be the first to claim the ultimate prize: the chance to fertilize the egg, which has been passively waiting for the sperm to arrive. But is this an accurate picture? In a 1991 paper, New York University anthropologist Emily Martin argued that this notion was, in fact, “a scientific fairy tale.”1 Instead of representing absolute unbiased truths, she asserted that, “The picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female.”
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For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris.
I begin with some questions. What is the difference between writing and drawing? What distinguishes seeing from reading? Can a painting be illegible? Can you write a drawing? In what ways can writing resist erasure and yet also be a mode of erasure? These are the dilemmas that haunt me when I think of the work of Cy Twombly, one of the United States’ most enigmatic artists.
Google wasn’t around for the advent of the World Wide Web, but it successfully remade the web on its own terms. Today, any website that wants to be findable has to play by Google’s rules, and after years of search dominance, the company has 
A man with a severe speech disability is able to speak expressively and sing using a brain implant that translates his neural activity into words almost instantly. The device conveys changes of tone when he asks questions, emphasizes the words of his choice and allows him to hum a string of notes in three pitches.
If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal?
There is a certain privilege in looking at a group of novels-in-translation from a single country originally written and published across almost a century. What appears at first glance to be a disparate assortment of texts gathered solely by the date of their reissue in a new language reveals an unexpected coherence. That the following five short Japanese novels-in-translation are being made available to a wider audience now, in the middle of the 2020s, feels timely.
One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time capsules from an era before even trains, gas lights, or telegraphs—the first in a stampede of inventions that transformed nineteenth-century life and are vividly present in the work of many novelists emblematic of that century. Born in 1775, a year before American Independence, Austen has preserved for us an epoch when indoor illumination required candles, remote communication took place by messenger or mail, and locomotion meant walking or engaging at least one horse—more if, like Emma’s protagonist and namesake (and indeed every woman in that novel), you didn’t ride, and needed a carriage to travel any distance.
Sometimes it pays to spend more time in the detours of art history—leaving behind the rigor mortis of the canon to follow new pathways—not necessarily toward an alternative canon, but to discover forgotten artists deserving of more attention.
In less than five years, we will have access to an error-free quantum supercomputer – so says IBM. The firm has presented a roadmap for building this machine, called Starling, slated to be available to researchers across academia and industry in 2029.
Consider the lessons of the Ukraine war so far. First, the impact of drones goes far beyond legacy weapons. Drones have indeed rendered tanks and armored personnel carriers extremely vulnerable, so Russian ground assaults now frequently use troops on foot, motorcycles, or all-terrain vehicles. But this hasn’t helped, because drones are terrifyingly effective against people as well. Casualties are as high as ever – but now, drones inflict 
Condensing the history of Marxist thought
The Wall is a story of an unnamed woman in her 40s who finds herself cut off from the rest of the world by the sudden appearance of the wall made of unknow material that separates a part of the forest from the rest of the world. This occurrence takes place during the narrator’s visit to her cousin, Luise’s and her husband, Hugo’s lodge in the Austrian Alps. She was unable to find an explanation for the appearance of the wall and was not sure if only the valley or the whole country had been affected by this disaster. Thanks to Hugo the narrator had provisions that would keep her through some time, and a lifetime’s supply of wood. that allowed her to survive. She also had their dog, Lynx who became an integral part of her new life along with two cats and the cow. They became her new family. At the time when the wall appeared the narrator was widowed for two years, and her two daughters were almost grown up.