A comforting and filling mix of Korean and Italian flavours and textures that’s ideal for weeknight dinner Share your questions for Meera Sodha, Tim Dowling and Stuart Heritage for a special Guardian Live event on Wednesday 26 November. I am a ragu-fancier and akheema fanatic. Unlike with most foods, however, it doesn’t do to rationalise this love for ragu, because it is a mash of things chopped up so small that they all lose their texture. This might sound a bit woo-woo, but the joy of ragu comes from feeling your way through it, from the chopping and standing with your thoughts, to stirring a bubbling pot and the smell creeping under the door. A ragu isn’t just a ragu, it’s a coming-together of good things: thoughts, feelings, ingredients, time and effort. Join Meera Sodha at a special event celebrating the best of Guardian culture on Wednesday 26 November, hosted by Nish Kumar and alongside writers Stuart Heritage and Tim Dowling, with Georgina Lawton hosting You Be The Judge live. Live in London or via livestream, book tickets here. Continue reading...  ( 16 min )

City officials previously said it would not be safe to allow events that block off the north end of Telegraph Avenue. It isn’t clear why their stance changed.  ( 26 min )

The University of California defended its decades-old in-state tuition policy as "consistent with current legal standards."  ( 24 min )

In a districtwide survey, most students and teachers agreed that mobile devices are a big distraction.  ( 27 min )

In yet another blow to East Bay beer-focused businesses, the bar is closing in part due to slowing business and high rent.  ( 23 min )

Card readers on only one side, gates that are slow to open — an accessibility task force raised multiple concerns as the plan rolled out, but members say BART didn’t always listen.  ( 26 min )

Trained as a librarian, the North Berkeley resident wrote extensively about the history of bookbinding.  ( 22 min )

The post Address ‘Affordability’ By Spreading AI Wealth Around appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 15 min )

Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms. The post A New Bridge Links the Strange Math of Infinity to Computer Science first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 15 min )

Rebecca (R.F.) Kuang sold the rights to her first novel, The Poppy War, on her 20th birthday. Even more impressive is her string of critical and commercial successes since. So far, all six of her novels have become New York Times bestsellers, and she has won numerous literary awards. Her professional career has developed alongside, and frequently drawn inspiration from, her academic studies. She conceived of The Poppy War trilogy, an epic fantasy series modeled after the Second Sino-Japanese War, while studying Chinese history at Georgetown University. Babel, a story about a Chinese orphan who discovers arcane magic while at Oxford, came together while she was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford and Cambridge. Her most recent novel, Katabasis, which follows two PhD students venturing into hell à …  ( 10 min )

Everything ever seen — every star, every planet, every person — is part of less than 5 percent of the known universe. The rest exists as dark matter and dark energy: invisible forces that shape everything, yet remain beyond our reach. In this talk from Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation’s A Night of Awe and Wonder, astrophysicist Janna Levin explores how this cosmic mystery reframes our sense of existence. She describes how dark energy drives the expansion of space, how dark matter sculpts galaxies, and how our luminous world of atoms and light drifts through this vast, unseen sea. Rather than despair, Levin finds in this realization a profound humility. “You are not a drop in the ocean,” Rumi wrote. “You are the entire ocean in a drop.” To understand our smallness is to glimpse the beauty of belonging: a fleeting brilliance in an immense, invisible cosmos. This video 95% of the universe is invisible. Here’s why that should fill us with wonder is featured on Big Think.  ( 9 min )

Soy curl “chicken,” tempeh bacon, and a zesty lettuce slaw make this Vegan Grinder Sandwich taste just like the kind you’d order from your favourite sandwich shop. With 31 grams of protein per serving, it’s hearty and satisfying! Lately I’ve been trying to work more protein into my day, but relying on protein powders and […]  ( 21 min )

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For nearly all of human history, there was a mystery that showed up, recurrently, on a nearly nightly basis. The Moon, visible during at least some portion of the night except during the once-per-month “new moon” phase, always shows its same face to us: the face of its near side. The opposite side of the Moon — the far side — surely must have existed, but because we’re stuck here on Earth and the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth, we’ve never been able to view it. Many, in poetic fashion, have called it the dark side of the Moon: a phrase that still occasionally shows up in popular culture, including in songs from Pink Floyd and Disney’s Mulan, for example. But is there really a “dark side” of the Moon, or is that just a flowery expression that doesn’t actually apply in reality?…  ( 15 min )

What if we could use automation not just as a tool, but as a mirror for our own human behaviors?  From the limits of rationalism to the rise of neural networks, Dan Shipper, CEO and co-founder of Every, traces a history of knowledge that spans Socrates, the Enlightenment, and modern machine learning.  Shipper explains why “if/then” rules break in messy reality, and how large language models actually see the world through context and pattern. He explores how AI can work with our own creativity and why these tools are unlikely to steal our humanity. This video How large language models view our world is featured on Big Think.  ( 35 min )

They say the Goatman prowls the woods at night near my home in Maryland. He was once a biologist named Stephen Fletcher at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. That was before the accident with goat DNA transformed him into a half-­human, half-­goat monster who devours victims that he slays with an axe. It’s been decades since I first heard of the Goatman. Honestly, I’m fairly certain that the carnivorous goat–­human hybrid isn’t real. It’s hard to prove something doesn’t exist, though. There are things you don’t believe in because they’re at odds with what you’re confident is true. Perpetual motion machines and alchemists’ stones that turn lead into gold don’t exist. If they did, lots of established science would need to be wrong. Then, there are other things you might not belie…  ( 11 min )

A couple weeks ago I wandered into a digression about toxic workplaces. Consider this week’s Nightcrawler another small detour into the forgotten value of boredom. Last Saturday, our four-year-old didn’t sleep well. So on Sunday morning, I did what many semi-desperate parents have done for generations: I loaded her into her carseat, and set out for a long, pointless drive to get her to fall asleep. Thankfully, the ruse worked. As we wound our way toward the Oregon coast, she nodded off after a promised donut. I reached for my headphones, ready to salvage my odyssey with a podcast or something vaguely productive. And then: disaster. I realized I’d forgotten them. At first, I was bored. My brain, conditioned by a decade of smartphone use, kept reaching for the familiar dopamine drip of const…  ( 10 min )

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Also: Berkeley will stop giving a property tax break to residents for work they do restoring their historic homes.  ( 23 min )

The city is tightening its contracting rules amid threats of a lawsuit if it doesn’t cut ties with the controversial vendor Flock Safety.  ( 30 min )

The Mediterranean cafe from Jennie and Benji Smith named after a Borges short story offers a menu centered on seasonal, California produce and proteins.  ( 27 min )

His firm Farnsworth, Saperstein and Dennison became the largest private plaintiff civil rights law firm in American history.  ( 25 min )

Hasta este miércoles no se conocen mayores informes sobre el nombre del joven de 19 años ni cuándo exactamente falleció. La policía “no sospecha que se trate de un crimen”. Cientos de personas asistieron a la fiesta de la fraternidad Alpha Delta Phi.  ( 24 min )

The Tony-winning actor talks about his one-man performance of the Dickens classic.  ( 26 min )

Other events include a burlesque Nutcracker show, a Thanksgiving country dance and an exhibition about the evolution of books.  ( 27 min )

The post The Case For AI ‘Datarails’ appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 22 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

A curated list of 100+ essays about biology and science.

When we look out into deep space, beyond the confines of the Milky Way, we find that the Universe isn’t quite so empty. An enormous variety of galaxies fill the abyss of space: small and large, near and far, in rich clusters and in near-total isolation. The Milky Way itself represents just one of at least two trillion such galaxies (and probably several times as many) within the observable Universe. Galaxies are collections of both dark matter and normal matter, where the latter includes plasmas, gas, dust, planets, black holes, and — most prominently — stars. After all, it’s through the examination of that starlight that we’ve learned the most about the physical properties of galaxies, and been able to reconstruct how they came to be. In general, there are four classes of galaxies that we…  ( 15 min )

Instead of treating belief as a private preference, philosopher Alex O’Connor examines how our moral positions shape institutions, obligations, and the ways we justify our choices.  His arguments invite a closer look at why we hold certain principles, and whether those principles survive contact with their real-world consequences. This video The strongest arguments for and against the existence of God is featured on Big Think.  ( 4 min )

In philosophy, physicalism is the idea that everything can be explained in physical terms. Whether through atoms, electrons, quarks, fields, or other physical processes, physicalism holds that every phenomenon ultimately depends on the physical world. In the philosophy of mind, this means that everything about the mind can, in principle, be explained by the physical processes of the brain. We don’t yet know all the details, but physicalism maintains that a complete explanation is possible. In September 2025, I interviewed neuroscientist and bestselling author of Being You, Anil Seth, about the mystery of consciousness. Seth is a physicalist, and so I asked him this question: “With the current state of consciousness science at the moment, if we were to give everybody in this room here some…  ( 7 min )

We have been promised a future of effortless mobility, a world of flying cars and autonomous pods whisking us through gleaming cityscapes. But as we sit in gridlocked traffic, that future feels perpetually out of reach. As we wait for new bridges and tunnels to provide moderate relief, we have been looking to the skies for a better solution when the answer has been at our feet all along: the water. Our earliest civilizations were born on the water. Rivers and coastlines were our first highways, the lifeblood of trade, exploration, and connection. Yet over the past century, we abandoned this vast open infrastructure, paving over our landscapes as cars grew efficient. We allowed highways to replace our waterways. Today, our world is overwhelmingly coastal: 40% of the global population lives …  ( 13 min )

Exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.  ( 6 min )

“Progress” is a broad concept. That’s both a challenge and a strength — especially when you put on a Progress Conference for almost 400 people. The challenge is this: what, exactly, do we all have in common? Does a YIMBY advocate who writes about single-stair reform in Austin have anything to say to a biomedical researcher experimenting with transcription factors at a longevity startup? Would an AI researcher who believes the Singularity is coming this decade and a farmer who writes about ag tech sit down for a chat? What about the founder of a new city in California and the climate team launching calcite particles into the stratosphere via balloons? Or the econ professor who teaches at the University of Toronto and the guy who wants to build the next World’s Fair? When the crowd contains …  ( 5 min )

This might surprise some in the tech community, but regulators are people, too.  Regulators are accused daily of both incompetence and malice, painted as one homogenous block of stalwarts who wake up and choose to stifle innovation and entrench incumbents. But in my job at Astranis, a company building dedicated satellite networks, I’ve talked to dozens of regulators around the world — from the United States to the United Nations, across the Americas, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and beyond — and I can say from experience that regulators are not a monolith.  The regulators I work with differ widely in their level of technical knowledge, approach to incumbents, degree of belief in isolationism, and openness to change. Some would prefer that nothing change, ever, but such stalwarts are in…  ( 12 min )

When Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online.  Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era, with some claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustria…  ( 12 min )

Billions of dollars are currently being poured into a technology that doesn’t actually exist. Governments are drafting regulations for it. Universities are reorganizing research priorities around it. Think tanks are hosting roundtables about it. No one can say exactly when, or even if, this technology — artificial general intelligence (AGI) — will arrive. Yet the idea of it is already shaping budgets, careers, and policy. The story of AGI is acting like infrastructure for the tech, inspiring the systems and structures needed to actually bring it to fruition. This is not an anomaly. Progress in steel and silicon has long been preceded by progress in imagination. Jules Verne’s novels prepared readers for submarines and space travel. Star Trek’s communicator device inspired engineers to creat…  ( 12 min )

Free enterprise is at the core of the American experiment. As President Calvin Coolidge famously proclaimed in 1925, “The chief business of the American people is business.”  Yet in the early days of the American Republic, it was not clear that competition as we understand it today was even legal. Corporate law, such as it was, primarily contemplated state-granted charters of monopoly for infrastructural projects, such as canals and turnpikes. These charters could be enforced against new entrants in a field.  In the British common law system that the United States inherited, competition could be policed through tort liability — the legal system by which those harmed by the actions of another person or entity can be compensated — even when a state-granted monopoly did not exist. There was l…  ( 11 min )

“Books are solitudes in which we meet,” author and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote in The Faraway Nearby (2013). Taken literally, the statement introduces a paradox — meeting in solitude — but that very tension is what makes books so powerful. We experience them alone, yet they facilitate conversations with others, with new ideas, and with ourselves.  In that way, books have always helped drive progress. Some introduce new technologies, philosophies, or political ideas. Others synthesize history to reveal patterns and introduce lessons from the past. Still others tell stories, real or invented, that remind us of essential human truths. All have the power to inspire readers to think differently, use their imagination, and ask new questions. We asked five experts who attended Progress Conferen…  ( 8 min )

To leave our solar system, a spacecraft must endure the termination shock, a region of space where the fiery solar winds of our Sun clash against the glacial currents of deep outer space. The termination shock can tear apart the most sophisticated and well-crafted probes and vessels, but overcoming it is the only way to explore the universe beyond our planets and Sun. In October, I found myself at the second annual Progress Conference in Berkeley, California. Based on what I learned through its high-profile artificial intelligence (AI) track, AI progress, too, could be headed for a termination shock as it leaves the fast-paced environment of San Francisco and its tech industry and crosses the boundary into the real world of slow and thorny institutions.  Crossing the threshold Spirits at P…  ( 9 min )

Progress studies is a diverse space, bringing together people with varied interests, priorities, and areas of expertise. What has united this bunch intellectually, though, has been the shared belief that the world is not as it could (read: should) be, and we have both the ability and the responsibility to rewire its systems to create a materially abundant, culturally optimistic future.  At Progress Conference 2025, though, I noticed something new in the progress community. In the past, its discourse was solidly grounded in specific problems (e.g., outdated policies, technical challenges) and their potential solutions (e.g., policy reform, technological innovations). But I’m now noticing more conversations about the meta-problem of implementation or, as we call it in the YIMBY (“yes in my b…  ( 11 min )

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A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

Details like the 19-year-old’s name and when he died were not immediately available Wednesday. Police “do not suspect foul play.” Hundreds of people were attending the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity’s party.  ( 24 min )

The UC student association strongly opposes it, saying it will subject future generations of students to higher tuition at a time when students are already struggling with cost-of-living expenses.  ( 24 min )

Visits have risen since the pandemic, but without a long-term lease from the East Bay park district, the Redwood Valley Railway says it’s considering packing up its trains and track and moving elsewhere.  ( 27 min )

Selective enforcement of an optional state fire code rule has harmed street fairs and farmers markets. If applied uniformly, many streets would lose half their parking. A policy better tailored to Berkeley's narrow roads is needed.  ( 24 min )

Encouraged by successes in understanding black holes, theoretical physicists are applying what they’ve learned to whole universes. What they’re finding has them questioning fundamental assumptions about how physics ought to be done. The post Cosmic Paradox Reveals the Awful Consequence of an Observer-Free Universe first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 11 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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When we measure an object that’s nearby — on Earth, in our Solar System, or elsewhere within the Milky Way — the information we get from the light that arrives is relatively straightforward. An object like the Sun, 150 million kilometers away, will have its light arrive after a journey of 500 seconds: the amount of time it takes light to travel across that distance of space. A star that’s 10 light-years away will have its emitted light arrive after a journey of 10 years; a star on the opposite edge of the galaxy a full 80,000 light-years away will require 80,000 years for its emitted light to arrive. For all of these objects, they’re at a redshift of 0, the temperature of the Big Bang is a cool 2.725 K, and their distance (in light-years) and how long ago we’re seeing them (in years) are t…  ( 14 min )

That certain concerns about technology are, for lack of a better word, universal, should be evident to any historian. Early Daoists cautioned against technologies that sully the spirit and ignite chaos. The Zhuangzi [one of the foundational texts of Daoism] warns against the use of “clever machines” and suggests that they are better left alone by those walking the righteous path. This is not unlike the apprehension that many European intellectuals harbored toward the technologies of their respective times, whether that be the early widespread resistance in Western Europe to Hindu-Arab numerals, the reluctance of the Catholic Church to embrace perspectival painting and scientific method in the early Renaissance, or the anxiety that swept over the European continent during the introduction o…  ( 7 min )

The oldest written language in the world is generally now agreed to be Sumerian, forged in the kingdom of Sumer in what is now southeastern Iraq, the origins of which date back to around 3100 BCE —­ 5,000 years ago, during the Bronze Age. The writing is in cuneiform script, patterns of largely wedge-­shaped lines that were impressed with a sharpened reed onto tablets of softened and leather-­hard clay, eventually baked to ensure their preservation. A word for wind exists in Sumerian —­ it is lil. The lexical story of this particular word is a little more complicated, however, since Sumerians, as far as we know, may well have been aware of wind and its effects, yet did not fully understand what caused the air —­ which was also invisible, of course —­ to move. There are Sumerian words for ot…  ( 9 min )

Across every measure, from health to economic productivity to civic trust, America’s social fabric is fraying. Nearly half of U.S. adults report feeling lonely; only one in five employees say they have a close friend at work; and according to the Pew Research Center declining trust costs the economy an estimated 1–2% of GDP each year through friction and inefficiency. The U.S. Surgeon General has warned that loneliness now rivals smoking in its impact on health. At the 2025 Volunteering Reconnected Summit in Silicon Valley — hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Connection and co-sponsored by Big Think — leaders from business, government, academia, and the social sector gathered to discuss community service, and its untapped potential to rebuild human connection at scale. A new consensus emerged. …  ( 8 min )

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Construction unions argue hard-won local worker protections are being illegally dismantled. Developers say they’re following state law. What will the City Council do?  ( 29 min )

Berkeley-based Kamu Siapa Kitchen, which also holds cooking classes and works with other food entrepreneurs, will host a benefit for SNAP recipients on Nov. 30.  ( 28 min )

The federal government has awarded the company funding and put it on a fast track for FDA approval.  ( 27 min )

P.E. will be mandatory for 9th and 10th graders starting in '27. The change is expected to increase demand for gym and field space, and raise staffing costs.  ( 25 min )

baked in dishes with walls, tend to excel at holding up to resting times, reheat well, and stay warm longer. Plus, if you’re feeling a little fearless, dishes like this are also a friend to those with one oven (hi!) and many things to reheat at once. My approach? I Jenga them. I stack rectangular and oval dishes two or three high in the oven, turning each so it steadies on the one below. Just don’t bump anything, okay? Read more »  ( 17 min )

The post Journalism In An Age Of Authoritarianism appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 25 min )

Not one, not two, but THREE plant-based cheeses make this 3 Cheese Vegan Mac and Cheese extra delicious! It’s rich, creamy, and it all comes together in a single skillet. Don’t skip that crispy panko topping! Growing up, I was that rare kid who just wasn’t that into boxed macaroni and cheese. It was homemade […]  ( 23 min )

Even though the Universe looks like it’s full of tiny islands of light — luminous, star-filled galaxies with only the blank darkness of empty space between them — the reality is that the space between galaxies isn’t empty at all. An isolated galaxy still moves through the abyss of deep space: where a rarified, sparsely populated sea of ions (mostly protons and electrons) still persists. There may only be about one particle per cubic meter populating the intergalactic medium, on average, but considering that galaxies are frequently 100,000 light-years across or even more, they do encounter large numbers of particles, particularly at higher speeds. This effect gets more and more severe for galaxies that move at faster speeds through the intergalactic medium, and also for environments where t…  ( 15 min )

Humanity’s progress is neither automatic nor inevitable – from the printing press to the Industrial Revolution, and today’s digital age, every leap in technology has reshaped what’s possible for our civilization.  Jason Crawford traces the history and philosophy behind these breakthroughs, revealing the forces that drive innovation and the risks that come with unchecked advancement. This video How innovation reshaped human life in just a few generations is featured on Big Think.  ( 29 min )

Narcissistic traits are pretty common — most of us enjoy a little admiration or praise, feel stung by criticism sometimes, and spend our adolescence nursing a secret belief that maybe we might be special, actually. In moderation, these personality traits bolster the self-regard we need to function in the world. They don’t necessarily make you a “narcissist” — someone with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a rare condition marked by grandiosity, preoccupation with power and status, lack of empathy, arrogance, and a pattern of exploitation. Feeling mistreated after your annual performance review or forgetting to message your friend back are not grounds for a clinical diagnosis. They’re just ordinary human experiences. “Narcissist” once clearly referred explicitly to this clinical cate…  ( 7 min )

There are moments in our lives when progress cannot be forced. No strategy will suffice, no clarity will emerge on demand. We feel clueless about how to influence the behaviors of a group of people with whom we interact; our colleagues, the market, our family, our friends. We have no idea what happened within our organization, or within the ecosystem of our community. But everything around us seems to be in flux. Confusing. Unsteady. Separated from any sense of equilibrium. We’ve tried everything we know to make changes. We’ve developed positive habits: eating less, exercising more, giving ourselves more downtime, being patient with our parents, more understanding with our partners. But nothing we do seems to affect the situation. We cannot find our way forward. If anything, we are regress…  ( 7 min )

University, fraternity and city police officials have so far been tight-lipped about what exactly happened at the Alpha Delta Phi pool Friday night.  ( 23 min )

A reader and a connecter, she saw patients and taught clinical psychology. She served for many years on the board of Berkeley's Psychotherapy Institute, helping it buy its Carleton Street headquarters.  ( 25 min )

John Edward Muller, 65, was pronounced dead at a local hospital shortly after the crash, which happened shortly before 3 p.m. near Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street.  ( 23 min )

The 18-year-old nonprofit in Aquatic Park has lost a pair of major funders and seen declines in bike sales. It’s launching a new gardening and cooking job training program as part of a “fiscal readjustment.”  ( 27 min )

Several performing arts organizations have closed, and more are struggling to hang on, in the wake of the pandemic, backers of the tax say.  ( 26 min )

La organización sin fines de lucro con 18 años en Aquatic Park perdió a dos importantes financiadores y tuvo una disminución en las ventas de bicicletas. Lanzará un nuevo programa de capacitación laboral en jardinería y cocina como parte de un “reajuste fiscal.”  ( 27 min )

Apple iPod generation 2 webpage, Aug-Sep 2002; via Wayback Machine. After the iPod’s launch in October 2001 — “1,000 songs in your pocket" — Apple sold 125,000 units of the new device by the end of the year. In March 2002, Apple introduced a version with 10GB of storage (approximately 2,000 songs). But it wasn’t until August 2002, with the second generation iPod, that the real growth began. That was when Windows support was added, via software called MusicMatch Jukebox. iPod 2 also doubled the maximum storage capacity, from 10GB to 20GB — enough to hold 35-40 albums, which felt like a proper record collection. iPod generation 2; photo by Paul Mayne, taken October 2002. Perhaps the most significant new feature of iPod 2, though, was its touch-sensitive scroll wheel. The first generation ha…  ( 5 min )

A retinal implant designer must decide if translating mourning into light is progress or a refusal to let go.

Has the secret to understanding gravity been hiding in plain sight for nearly 40 years? The post Old ‘Ghost’ Theory of Quantum Gravity Makes a Comeback first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 14 min )

Warm spices mingle with tender vegetables, sweet golden raisins, briny olives, and chickpeas to make this Moroccan Cauliflower Tagine a flavourful and satisfying vegan dinner! Moroccan food is known for its warmth—both in terms of actual heat (hello, harissa!) and also cozy spices like cinnamon and coriander. This Moroccan cauliflower tagine has both, making it […]  ( 20 min )

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Today, our Universe is illuminated, lit up primarily by stars. This low-resolution image shows the full field of the COSMOS-Web survey conducted with JWST. Spanning 0.54 square degrees in the sky, or nearly three full Moons’ worth of area, this represents the largest, deepest wide-field view of the Universe ever acquired. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Gozaliasl, A. Koekemoer, M. Franco, and the COSMOS-Web team But it wasn’t born with any stars; they needed the right conditions to form. The overdense regions that the Universe was born with grow and grow over time, but are limited in their growth by the initial small magnitudes of the overdensities, the cosmic scale on which the overdensities are found (and the time it takes the gravitational force to traverse them), and also by the …  ( 10 min )

According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan, every medium is an extension of our physical or mental faculties. The hammer extends our fist, the spear our teeth, the hut our skin, the wheel our feet — and electronic media extend our central nervous system to all of humankind.  Extended abilities give us new powers but disrupt previous sensory, cognitive, and social settings. As humankind switched to the internet, printing no longer defines the protocols humans live by. Print-based culture is collapsing.  The era of printing was, in fact, very short by historical standards — about 550 years. Some call this period the Gutenberg Parenthesis — a metaphor popularized by Jeff Jarvis. Within this Parenthesis, communication was centered around fixed, authored, linear, and stable texts.  Things wer…  ( 9 min )

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It’s basically a mushroom omelette, but cooked Chinese-style and served on buttered rice Share your questions for Meera Sodha, Tim Dowling and Stuart Heritage for a special Guardian Live event on Wednesday 26 November. Egg foo yung is a type of omelette that perhaps began life as a type of egg dish in Guangdong province, but has since the early 1900s been a staple on American and British Chinese takeaway menus. I like to order it at Yau’s in Broughton near Scunthorpe or Chi’s in Kenton in Devon, where it arrives as a small, fluffy, delicate omelette, barely able to hold itself together for the amount of vegetables woven into it. Over rice, it is a form of heaven on a Saturday night. I haven’t tried to replicate that specific joy here, but this is a homespun version, for those Saturdays when neither Chi’s nor Yau’s are within range. Join Meera Sodha at a special event celebrating the best of Guardian culture on Wednesday 26 November, hosted by Nish Kumar and alongside writers Stuart Heritage and Tim Dowling, with Georgina Lawton hosting You be the judge live. Live in London or via livestream, book tickets here. Continue reading...  ( 16 min )

Labor unions and others representing faculty, students and workers argue in a lawsuit that the administration is using funding cuts, and the threat of cuts, to silence opposing viewpoints.  ( 24 min )

StopWaste's RE:Source guide helps you repair treasures, share surplus and donate essentials where they’re needed most.  ( 24 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

Schools are still scrambling to get food to families for the nearly 2 million children statewide who rely on food aid.  ( 26 min )

Many students in the county's youth facility, Butler Academic Center, read below the third grade level. An innovative program is now offering one-on-one support.  ( 25 min )

The post From Cinema To The Noematograph appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 8 min )

Have we begun to lose faith in the future? The idea of ‘progress’ didn’t truly exist throughout the majority of human history. Most ages didn’t see history as an upward curve – they saw history as cyclical, full of ups and downs. This belief only shifted around the 1500s, says Jason Crawford, founder of The Roots of Progress and the author of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. The idea that progress would automatically continue became widespread, until the first World War shattered the illusion that technology would bring peace and cooperation. Out of this rose a counterculture concern that modernity was a mistake, that progress itself was the problem. But was it? Are we now moving backwards? How can we regain trust in pushing forward? This video The moment every civilization fears: the growth plateau is featured on Big Think.  ( 12 min )

Every now and then, if you’re lucky, you’ll encounter a book that changes your life. History’s great novels have earned a reputation in this regard. While the stories of Homer, Virginia Woolf, Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Jane Austen may not be for everyone all the time, an education in the classics can change people in profound ways and give our minds a meeting place in the world of ideas. Some books take a more direct approach: They explicitly aim to change how readers live their lives. They may be shelved in philosophy, psychology, or self-help, but their goal is to help you find perspective, search for meaning, or guide you to find your purpose so that when the end inevitably comes, you can look back on your life with gratitude and contentment. Here are five books that have helped millions of…  ( 10 min )

The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ripple across an ecosystem. The post Mixing Is the Heartbeat of Deep Lakes. At Crater Lake, It’s Slowing Down. first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 18 min )

With a rich vegan custard, tender bread, and a caramel drizzle over the top, this Creme Brûlée French Toast has the flavour of the classic dessert, but in the form of a crowd-pleasing breakfast! The only thing better than shattering the crisp sugary topping on creme brûlée is digging past those sweet caramelised shards and […]  ( 22 min )

Our physical universe, to the best of our understanding, can only be made sense of because it always obeys the same fundamental laws: everywhere and at all times. It isn’t just the underlying laws of nature that apply to all physical systems, but a series of fundamental constants as well. Chief among these constants are h, Planck’s constant that governs quantum physics, c, the speed of light in a vacuum that’s the same for all observers, and G, the gravitational constant that was introduced by Newton and that remains, even today, as an inseparable part of Einstein’s field equations in General Relativity. Even though Newton introduced G in the late 1600s, it wasn’t until 1798 that we were first able to measure it. 200 years later, we realized that many of our claimed refinements were in err…  ( 15 min )

We may think that trauma leaves irreversible scars, reshaping our brain and emotional regulation permanently. The science, however, shows the opposite, says psychologist George Bonnano. Our biology is much more resilient than we give it credit for. Bonanno dismantles common myths surrounding trauma and PTSD, and shares a practical mindset shift to navigate difficult experiences. This video Why forcing positivity after trauma doesn’t build resilience is featured on Big Think.  ( 51 min )

“While I breathe, I hope,” the most well-known of South Carolina’s two mottos, must have resonated deeply in the hearts and minds of enslaved Blacks as the first bombs exploded over Charleston Harbor. It was here, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, that the Civil War began. Until then, the enslaved, who made up most of Charleston’s population, had found little reason for hope. They were held in bondage, forced to labor long hours with no pay, provided inadequate food and shelter, and under threat of physical abuse or even death at the slightest provocation. The blasts that lit up the night sky represented the first real chance for them to realize their collective dream to breathe free. Among them was Robert Smalls, an intelligent young man who would not be willing to simply wait. If not for t…  ( 11 min )

Here are two things I believe. One: we’re living through a period of enormous technological and social change. Two: there is no greater piece of technology than a simple spiral notebook and a couple of hours to be alone with your thoughts. The ease with which we can fabricate content and eve A favorite writer of mine, Cal Newport, suggested as much in a new essay this week, which is well worth the (quick) read. “There’s a deeply human satisfaction to retreating to an exotic location and wrestling with your own mind, scratching a record of your battle on paper,” Cal writes. “The innovations and insights produced by this long thinking are deeper and more subversive than the artificially cheery bullet points of a chatbot.” He continues: Key quote: “The problem facing knowledge work in our cur…  ( 9 min )

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Also: A new study shows a major earthquake could nearly wipe out the county's hospital beds. And a Berkley man has been charged with attempted murder after stabbing his father.  ( 23 min )

Most of the major closures will affect foot, bike and vehicle traffic Sunday morning as thousands of runners race 5k, 10k and 13.1-mile distances.  ( 24 min )

Father and son Hossein and Amir Razavi took over the Middle East Market a decade ago, and recently expanded to open an adjacent restaurant.  ( 27 min )

As audience engagement editor, Armstrong ensures reaching and serving readers is always top of mind. An Oaklandside interview with Pamela Price was also recognized with an award.  ( 25 min )

Berkeley’s Juneteenth Festival and a popular holiday market on Telegraph Avenue must move from their longtime homes, as the city mulls big fee increases and steps up fire code enforcement.  ( 30 min )

Some countries offer residency, and path to citizenship, with an investment in real estate or business.  ( 25 min )

Other events include a guided listening of centuries-old Persian music, a pain management workshop and a chance to test new board games.  ( 26 min )

The post The Progress Paradox appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 35 min )

Advances in cryo-electron microscopy are revealing the molecular intricacies of cell movement.

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There’s an important rule in relativity that — as far as we know — all objects must obey. If you have no rest mass as you travel through the vacuum of space, you absolutely are compelled to travel exactly at the speed of light. This is exactly true for all massless particles, like photons and gluons, approximately true for particles whose mass is tiny compared to their kinetic energy, like neutrinos, and should also be exactly true for the massless ripples in spacetime created by purely gravitational effects: gravitational waves. Irrespective of whether gravity itself is inherently quantum in nature, the speed of gravity must be exactly equal to the speed of light. At least, that’s a necessity if we assume that our current laws of physics are correct. And yet, when we saw the first neutron…  ( 13 min )

Philosophers often like to talk about “emergence,” a process where various discrete items come together to form something entirely new. It’s when a new property, a new object, or a new perspective emerges from the sum of the parts. We often talk differently about the emergent property than the individual elements. For example, we talk about a traffic jam differently than the cars that make it up. One key question is: To what extent should we view society as an emergent property? In some ways, “society” has its own flow. It can create money, make laws, and shape collective behavior. When people compare a state’s budget to a household, it’s disingenuous — the state is not a parent with a credit card. Talking about society is often different from talking about individuals. In this week’s Mini…  ( 7 min )

Life on Earth has made several “great leaps” in its evolutionary history: from unicellularity to multicellularity, from sea to land, and from land into the skies.  What if the next one lies beyond our planet? That’s the question behind Caleb Scharf’s latest book, The Great Leap: Why Space Is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life, which explores how cosmic evolution and human technology are shaping the next phase of life’s story.  Scharf is an astrophysicist, astrobiologist, and author whose work bridges science, philosophy, and the future of humanity. He serves as Senior Scientist for Astrobiology at NASA’s Ames Research Center and is a recipient of the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society. I’ve known and collaborated with Caleb for a while, and I’m always inspired …  ( 9 min )

To choose the ideal brand name for change at IBM, we needed to identify a name strong enough to travel the globe with a minimum amount of unwanted baggage. We needed a name that would encompass everything important about our change initiative, so we ruled out including words such as design or design thinking. We were more than that, and the name needed to reflect as much. We had to take stock of the values we would want that name to represent. Initially, I considered the potential benefits of a name that might confer a sense of company continuity and familiarity. Perhaps it should invoke IBM’s nickname, and we could call our project teams Big Blue teams. But the risk would be that while dropping the baggage associated with “design,” we’d be taking on some new Blue-colored baggage instead. …  ( 8 min )

We now take it for granted that America is divided: rising political violence, a paralyzed Congress, and collapsing trust in institutions are among the signs. After decades studying conflict-affected societies, I’ve seen how some find a way through while others fall apart. The question that haunts me now is why the United States, with all its advantages, seems stuck in a cycle of polarization. My research shows that real change happens not in viral TikToks but in drab meeting rooms — the phones-down, notebooks-out work of local governance. Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, PhD Here’s where I’ve landed: America’s passion for change as a concept has outpaced our understanding of how change actually happens in practice. We’ve mistaken expression for impact, conflating social media dust-ups with…  ( 8 min )

Atul Gawande has spent his career studying how professionals improve, and why most eventually hit a plateau. At this point, even the most skilled experts need a coach to reveal their blind spots, as true expertise hinges on having the humility to keep learning once success arrives. Gawande explores the paradox of mastery: the point at which experience becomes limitation, and the only path forward is to let someone else see what you can’t. This video Why skill plateaus are inevitable – and how to push past them is featured on Big Think.  ( 8 min )

David Eagleman, PhD, Brian Greene, PhD, and Dean Buonomano, PhD, explore one of science’s strangest questions: what is time? From Einstein’s spacetime theory to the brain’s internal clock, they examine whether time is an external property of the universe or a mental construct. By connecting physics and neuroscience, they unpack the idea that how we experience time may differ entirely from how it actually works. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video What’s more real: time itself, or your perception of it? is featured on Big Think.  ( 6 min )

A modest mathematical framing of language  ( 28 min )

The East Bay will deal with winds gusting over 40 mph Thursday, which could bring down tree limbs and power lines, according to the National Weather Service.  ( 23 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 23 min )

Anti-fascist protesters fought with attendees at the event, held two months after founder Charlie Kirk's assassination, and four people were arrested. Berkeley's mayor said police handled incidents "quickly and appropriately."  ( 29 min )

Crown Heating and Sheet Metal, a Berkeley fabrication shop that dates back seven decades, is closing within months of the Walter Mork Company — which is calling it quits after over a century.  ( 25 min )

The response has been overwhelmingly positive since Berkeleyside retired its comments section last week.  ( 25 min )

She helped grow the broadcast track of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, influencing many in the field.  ( 25 min )

Mathematicians have broken through a long-standing barrier in the study of “minimizing surfaces,” which play an important role in both math and physics. The post New Proofs Probe Soap-Film Singularities first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 11 min )

Meet my very favourite veggie burger: Beet Burgers! These vegan patties are smoky, flavourful, and absolutely satisfying, perfect for piling onto a bun with your go-to toppings. The best veggie burger I’ve ever sunk my teeth into was at J. Alexander’s. I ordered my burger, ready to be underwhelmed, and I panicked: “I think you […]  ( 24 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

It happens all over the internet and news media every day: a new scientific study, making an extraordinary-if-true claim, gets elevated to prominence. You’ve probably seen many just over the past month, including: claims that classical gravity produces quantum entanglement, claims that interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is likely evidence for aliens, and claims that the supernova data has been misinterpreted and the Universe is slowing down, not accelerating. None of these things are true, of course, despite the assertions of the researchers who originated these claims. But unless you’re a scientist yourself — and, in particular, a scientist well-versed in these aspects of physics and astronomy — it’s not readily apparent where these claims have gone wrong. In fact, there’s actually a simple form…  ( 15 min )

Evolution doesn’t create with intent: it begins with error. Random mutations, filtered through time and circumstance, give rise to the astonishing order of the natural world. Evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll explains how chance and chaos operate as life’s quiet architects. This video How chance and error shaped every living being on Earth is featured on Big Think.  ( 11 min )

Nearly 50 years ago, Klaus Biemann, a principal investigator for NASA’s Viking Mars landing mission, announced that, after careful study of data collected by the landers’ onboard instruments, they had detected no organic compounds on the Martian surface. The Viking science team issued a broad conclusion: Mars was lifeless. But data from the life-detection experiments was ambiguous. In fact, three different Viking instruments — the Labelled Release experiment to test for metabolic processes; the Pyrolytic Release experiment to test for organic synthesis reactions, and the Gas Exchange experiment to measure exchange of gases that might be biological in origin — returned data that were hard for scientists to interpret at the time. Gil Levin, principal investigator for the first of these, ins…  ( 6 min )

There is often a thin line between drive and self-destruction. Scott Britton’s new book argues that true success is built on self-awareness, presence, and the courage to slow down. The other morning, I was on a Zoom call with a CEO, trying to sound composed, when my four-year-old burst into the room demanding to know where her princess dress was. I glanced down at my to-do list — which never seems to get shorter — and noticed I still needed to book a trip to San Francisco. In that moment, surrounded by chaos, I thought: I write a column called The Long Game. I’m supposed to be the guy who thinks in decades. In all candor, I’m usually just trying to make it to lunchtime. And maybe that’s why my conversation with Scott Britton hit home. A former tech founder turned spiritual adventurer, Scot…  ( 13 min )

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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Enter your vote for 10 categories covering East Bay restaurants, bars, bakeries, cafes and more.  ( 23 min )

Towards a Theory of Bulk Orchestration It’s a key feature of living systems, perhaps even in some ways the key feature: that even right down to a molecular scale, things are orchestrated. Molecules (or at least large ones) don’t just move around randomly, like in a liquid or a gel. Instead, what molecular biology has […]  ( 40 min )

The post The Push To Get Invasive Crabs On The Menu In Maine appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 22 min )

Here in our Universe, one thing we could have been certain of, even before we began to examine or even detect worlds beyond our own, is that the Universe does have a mechanism for creating planets and planetary systems in orbit around stars. We have some supremely strong evidence that indicates there must be a pathway for that to occur: the existence of Earth and the other planets orbiting our own Sun. Because we exist, and our planet and the other planets in the Solar System exist, then the Universe must have some way of creating these planets. So how is it, exactly, that planets actually form within our Universe? To answer that question, we need to look to the Universe itself. Sure, we have theories that detail how planets could form, and by combining two fields of astronomy that might s…  ( 14 min )

Mark Klarzynski is the Chief Strategy Officer, CTO, and founder of PEAK:AIO, a data storage company “designed from the ground up” for the age of AI. His global client list includes Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Zoological Society of London, the British government, and a host of prestigious universities.  Remarkably, Klarzynski is not a resident of San Francisco. He’s not even based in the US. PEAK:AIO is headquartered in a city better known for internecine soccer rivalries and rock ‘n’ roll siblings Noel and Liam Gallagher: Manchester in the north-west of England. This proto-Silicon Oasis is a long way from Silicon Valley, but business is looking good. Following a recent chunk of $6.8 million in seed funding, Klarzynski is preparing scale up internationally. “Most AI is…  ( 9 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Skirmishes led to at least three arrests, as protesters traded jeers with those attending the event — held two months after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.  ( 30 min )

Critics say development opponents have used landmark applications to tie up housing projects. Preservationists say a proposed fix goes too far.  ( 27 min )

Sabrina Landreth resigned last week, claiming EBRPD's board demanded she violate open government and personnel laws.  ( 25 min )

The West Berkeley institution makes a classic version of the South Indian dish that is worth returning to time and again.  ( 24 min )

BUSD is reviewing plans for a campus expansion on Milvia Street, which may or may not include two floors of parking for school staff.  ( 26 min )

Shelly and Deepak Ajmani and their two children have taken over the South Asian clothing boutique on University Avenue from relatives. The store recently made news when ICE deported its former seamstress.  ( 27 min )

The “No Crumbs” collective created a 2026 calendar and puzzle showcasing local businesses with proceeds benefitting Centro Legal de la Raza.  ( 26 min )

Aproximadamente el 30% de los estudiantes del Distrito Escolar Unificado de Berkeley dependen de comidas gratuitas o a precio reducido. El distrito se asoció con bancos de alimentos y movilizó voluntarios para dar alimentos a los estudiantes y sus familias.  ( 28 min )

Last.fm circa 2003; via Last.fm Flickr account. What we now know as the “social web” — or Web 2.0 — didn’t arrive until around 2004. But the first inklings of it were emerging a couple of years before. As usual, music was the harbinger. Last.fm was founded in 2002 by a group of four Austrian and German students from Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London. It was fashioned as an internet radio station that allowed a user to build a listening profile and share it with others. The year of its launch, Last.fm won a young talent award at the Europrix, a multimedia awards show based in Vienna. This was how the product was described in a showcase video (embedded below) leading up to the awards ceremony: “After repeated use, the system builds a listening profile that increasing…  ( 5 min )

A beautiful experiment is not just a reflection of human ingenuity but also efficient science.

Marijn Heule turns mathematical statements into something like Sudoku puzzles, then has computers go to work on them. His proofs have been called “disgusting,” but they go beyond what any human can do. The post To Have Machines Make Math Proofs, Turn Them Into a Puzzle first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 11 min )

This is just like your favourite old-fashioned Apple Fritters recipe, with one big difference: it’s vegan! Tender apples, a sticky glaze, and dough that’s crisp on the outside and pillowy soft in the middle make these the BEST fall treat. There’s nothing like homemade Classic Vegan Donuts—nothing! It’s a recipe I make as a special […]  ( 20 min )

Measurement standards are needed for knowing “how much” exists. A teacher giving rulers to children of the second grade (8 years old) in a primary school in Vaasa, on their second day of school in Finland. The ability to measure, quantitatively, “how much” of something you have is a key aspect at the foundation of all quantitative endeavors. Credit: Olivier Morin / Getty Images Early distance standards, like “cubits” or “feet,” were based on body parts. This Ancient Egyptian artifact shows a fragment of a cubit measuring rod. Note the markings at the bottom of the rod showing various fractions of a cubit: forerunners of divisions like inches, centimeters, and millimeters. Credit: Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Thomas H. Foulds, 1925/Metropolitan Museum of Art A single “pace” was often used: …  ( 8 min )

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A federal appeals court left an order in place Friday that requires the Trump administration to provide full SNAP food assistance for November. Many payments went out — and then the Supreme Court issued a stay.  ( 24 min )

One of the great discoveries to be made out there in the grand scheme of things is alien life: the first detection of life that originated, survives, and continues to live beyond our own home planet of Earth. An even grander goal that many of us have, including scientists and laypersons alike, is to find not just life, but an example of intelligent extraterrestrials: aliens that are capable of interstellar communication, interstellar travel, or even of meeting us, physically, on our own planet. It’s a fascinating dream that has been with humanity since we first began contemplating the stars and planets beyond our own world. Most of us, including me, personally, have assumed that this latter type of alien would not only be more technologically advanced than we are, but would also be far more scientifically advanced as well. That not only would they understand everything we presently do about the fundamental laws of physics, but far more: that they’d be a potential source of new knowledge for us, having equaled or exceeded everything we’d already gleaned from our investigative endeavors. And that assumption, as compelling as it might be, could be completely in error, argues physicist and author Dr. Daniel Whiteson. That’s why I’m so pleased to bring you this latest episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast, where Daniel and I meet to discuss this very topic, with me taking the side of my own human-centered assumptions and Daniel taking a far more broad, philosophical, and cosmic approach: the same approach he takes in his new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions About Science and the Nature of Reality. Have a listen to this fascinating conversation, see which set of arguments you find more compelling, and check out his book. You won’t be disappointed! This article Starts With A Bang podcast #123 – Alien physics is featured on Big Think.  ( 5 min )

Cut corners, but not flavour, with this updated take on a hearty, vegan-friendly curry A confession: I have already written a recipe for massaman curry. But since that was published in 2018, I have had a baby, a breakdown, travelled back to Thailand and eaten more massaman curries, all events that have contributed to this new recipe. The old dish is delicious, but in 2025 I didn’t want to make a paste from scratch. Instead, I wanted the funk and soul that a ready-made curry paste could give me and to use that as a springboard to fly into dinner time. A shortcut on time and ingredients, yes, but not on fun and flavour. Join Meera Sodha at a special event celebrating the best of Guardian culture on Wednesday 26 November, hosted by Nish Kumar and alongside writers Stuart Heritage and Tim Dowling, with Georgina Lawton hosting You Be The Judge live. Live in London or via livestream, book tickets here. Continue reading...  ( 16 min )

A majority of council members signaled support for taller height limits in the Elmwood District and parts of North Berkeley, even as opponents charged they would "destroy" popular neighborhoods.  ( 29 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 23 min )

Oakland’s lauded queer bar, Friends and Family, is set to close on Dec. 30. It's an immeasurable loss for Nosh columnist Cecilia Seiter.  ( 26 min )

For 27 hours straight, a team of four scammers posing as Oakland police kept her on the phone and isolated, manipulating the John Muir elementary teacher into delivering nearly $70,000.  ( 29 min )

What does it mean to be conscious, and why does it feel like something to be you? Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues that consciousness isn’t a mysterious spark but a deeply biological process, one that depends on prediction, perception, and the body’s constant negotiation with the world.  In this conversation with philosopher Jonny Thomson, he explores how our brains don’t passively observe reality, but rather actively construct it. This video The science of consciousness is solving the biggest illusion in our universe is featured on Big Think.  ( 44 min )

What makes something sacred? According to actor and author Rainn Wilson, it depends on how we look at it.  At A Night of Awe and Wonder, hosted by Freethink Media and the John Templeton Foundation, Rainn Wilson recalls the most holy night of his life: when his wife and newborn survived a near-fatal birth. Looking into his son’s eyes for the first time, he describes feeling God, the universe, and life in a way he never had before, or since.  This brought him to a greater conclusion, that true sacred experience can be found beyond religion and ritual. In fact, it is our ability to experience awe and wonder that can unite us. It lives in acts of courage and kindness, and it’s our shared capacity for awe in the face of that beauty, Wilson suggests, that can bring us closer together. This video How Rainn Wilson discovered sacredness is featured on Big Think.  ( 10 min )

The post The Infrastructure Of Planetary Sapience appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 10 min )

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of the theory into a new era of inquiry. The post Physicists Take the Imaginary Numbers Out of Quantum Mechanics first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 min )

This hearty Stuffed Pepper Soup makes for a filling vegan meal, with walnut “meat,” green bell peppers, rice, and veggies in a rich tomato broth. Total comfort food! I love Vegan Stuffed Peppers, but sometimes I don’t have time for the stuffing and waiting around for all that cooking time. And for those days, this […]  ( 20 min )

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Here in our Universe, we have many different species of energy populating the spacetime we inhabit. There’s matter: both normal matter and dark matter, in all the forms they can take, from plasmas to stars to black holes to diffuse, fluffy haloes. There’s dark energy: a mysterious form of energy that appears to be inherent to the fabric of space itself, consistent with Einstein’s cosmological constant. And there’s also radiation: like photons of all different wavelengths and neutrinos when they move nearly at the speed of light. But gravitational waves, even though they aren’t represented by any component of the Standard Model of elementary particles, also exist in our Universe, and also behave as a form of radiation: an inherently gravitational one. Originally theorized by Einstein way ba…  ( 15 min )

Albert Einstein altered the way we think about reality itself, and we often think of him as the most important physicist. But even his breakthroughs were part of a larger, tangled conversation among scientists stretching from Aristotle to Maxwell to Minkowski.  Sean Carroll, physicist and philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, traces how the universe emerged not from solitary genius, but from centuries of dialogue, error, and correction. This video Why general relativity would’ve been discovered without Einstein is featured on Big Think.  ( 13 min )

Some idealists set out to build a new community from scratch. They saw themselves as unusually clear-headed and logical — people determined to build a society based on reason rather than on the accidents of tradition. If there was a better way to do something, they wanted to find it. At first, the experiment went smoothly. They shared work, rotated responsibilities, and debated policy late into the night. But before long, they started to complain about English. It’s irrational, they said. Silent letters everywhere, no phonetic consistency, spelling rules that dissolve the moment you learn them. Why do “though,” “through,” and “tough” all look the same but sound nothing alike? And the idioms! Why should “kick the bucket” mean “die”? Surely a truly rational society can do better, they though…  ( 15 min )

For the latest edition of The Long Game, I spoke with Andrew Markell, a conversation based on several interviews over the past few months. Earlier this year, Andrew and I were introduced through a mutual friend. We first met in person on a trail in Forest Park in Portland, Oregon, where we hiked for two hours, talking about how societies — and people — fracture under pressure. A couple of weeks later, I found myself in his driveway, sweat pouring down my back as we practiced yiquan, the martial art he’s mastered, and a technique that trains the nervous system to stay coherent under stress. Andrew is part philosopher, part fighter — a trauma specialist and co-founder of The Dawn Collective — and he’s spent decades teaching everyone from special forces veterans to investors to CEOs how to fi…  ( 10 min )

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Also: A UC Berkeley college access program serving 1,500 students is in jeopardy after a major federal grant was canceled over a reference to “equity and inclusion” in a grant application.  ( 23 min )

CJ Rudolph joined the Internal Revenue Service in 2019, just after the last federal shutdown. Now he’s surviving with gig work and a credit union loan.  ( 26 min )

The Federal Aviation Administration is forcing airlines to cut 10% of their flights at 40 airports starting Friday, Nov. 7. SFO and OAK are on the list; San Jose is not.  ( 24 min )

Your guide to Berkeley, Oakland and Richmond cafes serving ceremonial-grade tea, matcha lattes and green desserts, despite a global shortage.  ( 29 min )

About 30% of Berkeley Unified students rely on free or reduced-cost meals. The school district has been partnering with food pantries and mobilizing volunteers to feed students and their families.  ( 27 min )

Other events include a book talk with Hayley Kiyoko, the Korean Experimental Music Festival and a community limpia circle.  ( 27 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

The post Humanity’s Endgame appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 48 min )

To make things better, first prove how good they can possibly be.

No matter how advanced our civilization here on Earth becomes, there’s a sobering fact we have no choice but to reckon with: Earth’s resources are finite. That not only includes the resources we typically think of, like minerals, clean water, and breathable air, but also something even more fundamental and restrictive: land area. No matter how thoroughly we develop, there’s only a finite amount of land area to even potentially inhabit on our planet. Even if we built cities atop our existing cities, beneath them in subterranean passages, or floating atop the oceans, the fact is we’re living on a planet with a finite area and a finite volume, fundamentally limiting our ability to expand. Even if we develop floating cities, the finite surface area of planet Earth ensures that, beyond a certa…  ( 13 min )

There are many kinds of laughter. You can laugh cheerfully, mirthlessly, dryly, cruelly, drunkenly, unexpectedly, and pointedly. Laughter is a noun with many possible adverbs. This raises a problem for anyone wanting to tell a joke. Because a joke, at its most basic, is something that is intended to make someone laugh. And so, given the sheer variety of laughter, it makes sense that there’s an equally sheer variety of jokes. A joke might be good-natured or mean. It might be childish or intellectual. It might be universal or niche. It might be about a social norm or about a specific person. Different jokes for different laughter. The philosophy of humor is such an ill-defined and borderless discipline that a writer would be foolish to try to say anything meaningful at all. Well, hello, I’m …  ( 7 min )

I remember working on my book and catching myself mid-paragraph. I’d just finished a sentence that felt particularly satisfying to write and paused to ask: Why does this feel so good? The answer wasn’t flattering. What I’d written sounded smart, but it wasn’t clear. I realized I’d been unconsciously filtering ideas through “does this make me look clever?” instead of “will this help the reader?” Once I noticed I was optimizing for the wrong outcome, I could change it. I started asking different questions: Is this clear? Will this example actually land? What am I assuming the reader already knows? That shift — becoming aware of how I was evaluating my own work — changed how I approached the rest of the book. This kind of self-observation is what researchers call metacognition, and it’s usefu…  ( 6 min )

We like to believe that everything happens for a reason. But what if that belief is a comforting illusion? Political scientist Brian Klaas argues that randomness, not reason, drives much of human life. The stories we tell ourselves about cause and effect aren’t reflections of truth, rather, they’re coping mechanisms to make chaos feel like order. This video How the myth of destiny distorts our decisions is featured on Big Think.  ( 4 min )

In 1202, having spent years learning the secrets of Saracen magic from the traders of Bejaia and witnessing algebra in commercial action on the docks of Messina, Leonardo of Pisa — the man who we know as Fibonacci — published the book that would transform commerce in Europe. It was called Liber Abaci, The Book of Calculations, and in it Fibonacci set out algebraic principles that, essentially, enabled merchants to make money. He had the journalistic gift of making the strange seem commonplace and the tangential seem relevant. By posing real-life examples of conundrums faced by traders, Fibonacci brought maths to life. Had he written in the language of the academy, the book would have had limited relevance. But because he wrote it for the merchants, Fibonacci revealed the true genius of the…  ( 8 min )

For much of the past century, science seemed to be winning the story of reality. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of people with no religious affiliation grew by more than 270 million — nearly a quarter of humanity, according to Pew Research Center. Many of these so-called “nones” look to science alone to tell them what is real. They’re four times more likely than believers to say “the natural world is all there is,” and far less likely to think science has limits. But lately, something seems to be shifting. Across the U.S., more people describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” In the U.K., Gen Z church attendance is ticking up. Meditation retreats sell out, ayahuasca is a household name, and “energy work” has its own subreddit. Is science enough to explain who we are and why …  ( 8 min )

Writer Oliver Burkeman, psychologist Laurie Santos, and organizational psychologist Melanie Katzman discuss the illusion of perfectionism, the signs of burnout, and the limits of productivity. According to their research, the constant drive to improve often leaves people more exhausted and less productive – even if their intentions were to grow, improve, or achieve bigger goals.    Together, they explain how accepting “good enough” and finding value beyond work can lead to greater balance and lasting happiness. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video Want to be more productive? Start by doing less is featured on Big Think.  ( 6 min )

None of it is important or all of it is  ( 22 min )

The Telepathy Tapes claims that autistic children have the ability to read minds. It's also one of the most popular podcasts in America, with a surprisingly robust audience in tech. Where do their claims come from — and why do so many people believe them?  ( 24 min )

Forced to file subpoenas for information, watching key recommendations go ignored and mired in years-long negotiations over their powers, the city’s top police accountability officials are finding it hard to fulfill their mission.  ( 28 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 23 min )

Berkeley first made history as a sanctuary city during the Vietnam War. Advocates today are building on that legacy to protect asylum seekers from around the world.  ( 39 min )

Pay-what-you-can previews start Nov. 15 at the Ashby Stage.  ( 24 min )

Prosecutors allege that the truck was used as a deadly weapon when it accelerated backward toward federal officers at Coast Guard Island.  ( 25 min )

Berkeley hizo historia por primera vez como ciudad santuario durante la guerra de Vietnam. Más tarde, cinco iglesias de Berkeley que acogieron a refugiados salvadoreños impulsaron un movimiento a nivel nacional. En la actualidad, activistas y organizaciones se sustentan en este legado para liderar la protección de solicitantes de asilo de todo el mundo.  ( 41 min )

A sudden flash of insight is a product of your brain. Neuroscientists track the neural activity underlying an “aha” and how it might boost memory. The post How Your Brain Creates ‘Aha’ Moments and Why They Stick first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

This Chili Mac and Cheese recipe is the most satisfying mac and cheese you’ll ever eat! Loaded with vegan ground beef, beans, and lots of plant-based cheese, it’s a kid-friendly comfort food dinner. This chili mac and cheese is exactly what it advertises itself as: a combination of Creamy Vegan Mac and Cheese and Vegan […]  ( 20 min )

The post The Ark-Builders Saving Fragile Bits Of Our World appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 35 min )

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120 years ago, a revolution took place in physics that — to an outsider — might seem like an inconsequential matter. 120 years ago, Einstein put forth his Special theory of Relativity, asserting that neither space nor time were absolute quantities, but rather the answers you’d get for measuring distances, positions, and durations would be dependent on your location and relative motion. The only absolute, Einstein contended, was the speed of light in a vacuum. This was indeed a revolutionary statement, but the formulas for working out how distances and durations changed in a velocity-dependent way, especially as you approached the speed of light, had already been worked out over a decade prior: the Lorentz transformations. And yet, Einstein’s key insights, and the profundity of Special Rela…  ( 15 min )

Given the role symbols play in representing concepts in the wider world, a fundamental question for AI is straightforward. How do we manipulate symbols in meaningful ways? This naturally brings us to one of the six ideas central to AI today. It’s an idea for manipulating symbols, and it is ridiculously simple: You can reduce many problems to searching for an answer. This sounds not just simple but self-­evident, so let me make it a little more complex. You can reduce many problems in AI to the computer searching its internal representation of the world from the symbol representing the starting state to the symbol representing the goal state. This is not a new idea. It’s called navigation. You search a map for the route from your starting position to your desired end position. We do this al…  ( 9 min )

We track age by the number of birthdays we’ve had, but scientists are arguing that our cells tell a different, more truthful story. Our biological age reveals how our bodies are actually aging, from our muscle strength to the condition of our DNA.  The gap between these two numbers may hold the key to treating aging – which could help save 100,000 lives per day and win us $38 trillion dollars. This video We doubled human lifespans in the last 200 years. Can we do it again? is featured on Big Think.  ( 14 min )

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Apple iTunes, the Rip Mix Burn advert, 2001; via YouTube (video embedded below). The year 2001 began with optimism — in January, Wikipedia debuted and Apple launched iTunes. But by year’s end the mood had shifted. The dot-com crash had drained Silicon Valley’s exuberance, Napster was being dismantled in court, and the new wave of post-9/11 “warblogs” made the internet feel solemn and overly serious. Meanwhile, Microsoft continued its dominance over the web with the release of Internet Explorer 6. Despite the doom and gloom, 2001 was also a year in which the web continued to mature. It gained a memory through Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine, discovered new voices through blogs and communities like MetaFilter, and began to legitmately shake up the cultural industries with iTunes and the iP…  ( 6 min )

Born in a Jingletown backyard and featured in The New York Times, Elvira Valera's restaurant has built a following for its tostadas raspadas. Now, it’s ready for its own brick-and-mortar.  ( 25 min )

The East Bay restaurant closures in October included multiple business that had been open for decades.  ( 24 min )

La respuesta violenta a una protesta en Oakland plantea las mismas cuestiones legales que enfrentan otros estados a medida que se intensifica la represión migratoria de Trump.  ( 36 min )

Under court order, FEMA stopped requiring security grantees to collaborate with immigration enforcement on Oct. 21. But AC Transit will not apply, after facing community pressure to protect riders.  ( 26 min )

Enter your vote for 10 categories covering East Bay restaurants, bars, bakeries, cafes and more.  ( 23 min )

Tuesday is the final day for California voters to weigh in on whether to approve Newsom’s plan to redistrict congressional lines to favor Democrats.  ( 24 min )

Leaders of groups like East Bay Sanctuary Covenant and Oasis Legal Services told us how their networks sprang into action — and what they learned from an “unfortunate test.”  ( 27 min )

He raised five kids and a dog in South Berkeley and was known for his wit, writing and lamb-shaped meatloaves.  ( 25 min )

Back on June 23, 2025, the “first look observations” from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory were released, highlighting the power of the United States’s and the National Science Foundation’s newest telescope. Designed to survey a large portion of the entire sky over and over, more deeply and in a speedier fashion than ever before, its science goals are stupendous. Armed with capabilities that no other observatory can match, it hopes to: discover enormous numbers of new objects within our Solar System, look for transient events, or changes in distant stars, galaxies, and nebulae, to greater precision than ever before, to find new novae, supernovae, tidal disruption events, plus flares and eruptions, and to measure variable objects in distant galaxies, helping to resolve the Hubble tension, alon…  ( 15 min )

Innovation. That’s what Steve Jobs drove for thirty-five years, from 1976 until his death in 2011. Spotting the potential of the computer mouse, digital animation, and the smartphone, he helped launch Apple’s Macintosh, Pixar’s Toy Story, and the iPhone, inspiring millions to follow his vision for the future: Think Different. How did Jobs do it? How did he revolutionize tech, not once but continually? To find out, I visit engineering teams at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. Snooping nosily around their sunny offices, I ask if they can share Jobs’s secret to innovation. In response, they laugh. They tell me that Apple has lost the secret. If I want to find it, I should go read a biography of Jobs. The most useful one, they tell me, is by Walter Isaacson. Leaving Cupertino, I …  ( 7 min )

A fundraiser last month at the Starry Plough aimed to help families switch from gas to electric stoves. Organizers hope it will be the first of many events fueling climate justice through art.  ( 24 min )

UC Berkeley officials won’t divulge security plans but say they're prepared to host the conservative organization Turning Point USA on Nov. 10 — two months after Kirk's assassination.  ( 28 min )

Sideshow Express, Starter Bakery, Headlands on Campus, and Tommy's Burger Co. are among the recent restaurant openings.  ( 25 min )

La base militar cerca de Oakland fue lugar de protestas la semana pasada contra el “despliegue” de agentes federales que luego se canceló. También sirvió como centro de retención durante las redadas de 1982 en la administración Reagan contra trabajadores indocumentados que ganaran más de 3.35 dólares la hora.  ( 31 min )

A disproportionate amount of our editors’ time is spent serving a small group of readers. We now offer other ways for readers to engage with our newsroom.  ( 25 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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A series of quantitative metaphors on the sizes and shapes of biomolecules and organisms.

In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics. The post What Is a Manifold? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

Baked oatmeal is kind of like a cake you can eat for breakfast! This recipe is hearty and wholesome, with juicy blueberries and crunchy walnuts in every bite. A while back, Baked Oats were a TikTok trend, but in that version, the oats were blitzed in a blender or food processor to make them into […]  ( 19 min )

All throughout the cosmos, planetary nebulae appear. When lower-mass, Sun-like stars run out of fuel, they blow off their outer layers in a planetary nebula, but the center contracts down to form a white dwarf, which takes a very long time to fade to darkness. Some white dwarfs will shine for trillions of years; others are on their way to an inevitable supernova when they collide with another white dwarf or accumulate enough mass to detonate. Credit: NASA/ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI) Displaying many different shapes, they all have the same cause. After its formation some 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun has grown in radius by approximately 14%. It will continue to grow, doubling in size when it becomes a subgiant, but it will increase in size by more than 100-fold when …  ( 9 min )

Every time someone said 'democracy' in Congress.  ( 9 min )

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Store-cupboard staples magically transform themselves into a warming autumnal meal I’ve been decluttering lately: throwing away or organising old cards, letters and photos, placing them in zipped folders and zapping them with labels made on my beloved Dymo. It’s given me such a great sense of freedom and clarity that I was thinking: I should do the same for my recipes. This one, for example, I would file under “magic”, because it comes together (mostly) from the store-cupboard, both in that easy way in which you throw things into a pot until they alchemise, but also because tahini and beans, together with a lemon, can, magically, become the most soothing antidote to cold weather. Join Meera Sodha at a special event celebrating the best of Guardian culture on Wednesday 26 November, hosted by Nish Kumar and alongside writers Stuart Heritage and Tim Dowling, with Georgina Lawton hosting You be the judge live. Live in London or via livestream, book tickets here. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

On Friday, neighbors of all ages gathered to paint a colorful Halloween and sanctuary city-themed artwork on the 1700 block of Virginia Street.  ( 23 min )

Residents and officials are waiting anxiously to find out whether two judicial rulings Friday mean SNAP benefits will be released for November.  ( 24 min )

Congressional Republicans killed health exchange subsidies, which now expire at the end of 2025. Program administrators “expect many people to go uninsured” in the Bay Area if they aren’t restored.  ( 23 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 23 min )

The base off Oakland was ground zero in protests of last week’s planned-then-abandoned “surge” of feds. It was also a holding place during the Reagan administration’s 1982 raids on undocumented workers earning over $3.35 per hour.  ( 29 min )

She co-managed the Gilbert and Sullivan Troupe, in which over 1,000 fifth and sixth grade students performed operettas in Berkeley and well beyond.  ( 23 min )

The post ‘Only God Can Save Us’ appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 14 min )

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities? The post In a First, AI Models Analyze Language As Well As a Human Expert first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

These tender, moist Apple Cider Donuts are baked instead of fried, which makes them super easy! Dusting them in cinnamon sugar adds the perfect finishing touch. There’s nothing in this world like a warm apple cider donut! While I do love Air Fryer Donuts and my Classic Vegan Donuts too, if you’re looking for a […]  ( 20 min )

We’ve inherited the history of Ancient Rome through movies, ruins, and shallow stories. The truth is far messier, says classicist Mary Beard. The hidden side of Roman life that screens rarely capture is chaotic; crowded streets teeming with Romans whose everyday lives were shaped by social hierarchies and  familial obligations.  Mary Beard unpacks what archaeology, literature, and even shoes tell us about the Romans’ daily lives. From the role of slaves in dressing elites to the rowdy crowds at chariot races, she shows how we’ve underestimated their complexity. This video The truth of Ancient Rome hides under its myth of decadence is featured on Big Think.  ( 38 min )

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Back in the 1920s, the first pieces of crucial evidence came in that indicated a truth about our reality that we’ve been stuck with ever since: the Universe is expanding. This simple fact has led to an enormous suite of subsequent discoveries: the hot Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background, the growth of the large-scale structure of the Universe over cosmic time, and much more. It’s also led to a profound existential question: how will the Universe end? If it’s expanding, which it is, and the expansion rate has decreased over time, which the evidence also supports, then what will happen in the far future? Will the expansion continue forever? Will it continue to decrease, or will it increase again? And if it does decrease, will it ever drop to zero and then, afterwards, reverse itself? T…  ( 16 min )

In the spring of 1988, on a Sunday night in our last days escaped out of the courtyard by chewing apart the bottom of the fence’s rotted wood and then crawling underneath it, and at sunrise on Monday morning when the alarm rang throughout the buildings, the guards discovered that Matthew had disappeared, too. Only then were the rest of us allowed to search deep into the woods without using butcher knives to cut through the thick brush and twigs, as the drill sergeants had proposed, and without a Thermos of water or fruit to keep us hydrated, as the cooks had suggested, because all we really needed was one another. The guards and staff and drill sergeants, who weren’t concerned with finding the dogs, claimed they would call the police and began searching in the more open areas down the hill…  ( 8 min )

I’m going to take a quick digression from the usual Nightcrawler recaps this week to talk about something that’s been on my mind lately. Everywhere I turn — podcasts, research calls, dinner conversations — people are talking about “toxic workplaces.” The phrase has become ubiquitous; almost unavoidable. So I did what most researchers do when they’re curious (or procrastinating): I Googled it. That led me to a chart showing the term’s meteoric rise beginning in the early 2010s. The curve shoots upward like a fever. This is the chart: How the Google Books Ngram Viewer displays the phrase “toxic workplace” Now, a few caveats before I get carried away. Google’s Ngram Viewer isn’t a perfect mirror of reality. It measures the frequency of words in books — not the lived experience of people hun…  ( 10 min )

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Also: Major bicycle and pedestrian improvements have been completed at the North Berkeley BART Station.  ( 23 min )

Elected officials and food pantries are scrambling to meet the moment. Food is still available for those in need, they say.  ( 28 min )

Millions of Californians are preparing to go without food benefits in November. Here's our guide to shopping at Berkeley food banks and how best to support them.  ( 31 min )

Nora Haron's popular Kopi Bar is ready for its Berkeley debut after the original Walnut Creek location closed mid-year.  ( 27 min )

She could now face up to four and a half years in prison for her role in the 2023 heist of four birds she named Poppy, Ivy, Aster and Azalea.  ( 26 min )

Other events include a community clean up, an urban cycling workshop and a talk by Berkeleyside's editor-in-chief.  ( 26 min )

A violent response to an Oakland protest raises the same legal questions other states are grappling with as Trump’s immigration crackdown intensifies.  ( 36 min )

Read more »  ( 17 min )

The post The Future Of Space Is More Than Human appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 28 min )

It’s often said that the great arc of science always bends towards the truth, but sometimes it takes an awfully long time to get there. Around 500 years ago, there was really only one scientific phenomenon that was, without controversy, extremely well-understood: the motion of the celestial objects in the sky. The Sun rose in the east and set in the west with a regular, 24 hour period. Its path in the sky rose higher and the days grew longer until the summer solstice, while its path was the lowest and shortest on the winter solstice: part of the annual cycle. The motions of the stars also exhibited a similar 24 hour period, as though the heavenly canopy rotated throughout the night. The Moon migrated night-to-night relative to the other objects by about 12° as it changed its phases, while …  ( 16 min )

Imagine bullfights in Beijing, Chinese conquistadors capturing Constantinople for Spain, and a Habsburg Empire that completely encircled the globe. Spain’s King Philip II certainly did. His fever dream of world domination was called “la Empresa de China,” or “the Chinese Job.” And yes, it was as unhinged as this map suggests. The plan to turn Ming-dynasty China into an outpost of Habsburg-era Spain didn’t come out of nowhere, though. It was hatched toward the end of the 16th century, when Spain had been on a century-long winning streak of divine luck and ruthless efficiency. Soon after Columbus stumbled across the Americas (in 1492), Cortés toppled the Aztec Empire (in 1521), and Pizarro did the same with the Inca one (in 1533). Those quick victories seemed nothing less than providential. …  ( 7 min )

On a tiny atoll in the Indian Ocean, there lives a flightless bird called the Aldabra rail. It looks unassuming enough — brown feathers, chicken-sized, and incapable of flying. Roughly 136,000 years ago, its ancestors — white-throated rails from Madagascar — flew to Aldabra and found a predator-free paradise; no sharp-toothed prowlers or featherless bipeds with pointy sticks. And so, the rails evolved into flightless versions. Why waste effort and energy on flying when there’s no point? Then came a catastrophic flood. The island went underwater. The rails couldn’t fly, and they couldn’t swim. They went extinct. And then, after the seas receded, something eerie happened. More rails flew back — their distant ancestors, still strong in Madagascar, made the same flight again. And the story rep…  ( 7 min )

I first met Andrew Markell in the dense rainforest outside Portland, Oregon. We hiked for two hours through dripping cedars and hemlocks, talking about the fractures in modern society — and what it might take to mend them. Andrew moved through the forest like someone entirely at home in dissonance: steady, alert, unhurried. Andrew is part philosopher, part fighter — a man who defies easy categorization, bridging worlds that rarely meet. A trauma specialist and co-founder of The Dawn Collective (“healing solutions for service members”), he’s also a martial artist trained in yiquan, a discipline that trains through the nervous system to develop speed and power. In recent years, he’s trained some of the world’s most accomplished investors, entrepreneurs, special forces veterans, and CEOs in t…  ( 14 min )

Most of us are quietly waiting for our life’s problems to subside. We feel that after “solving” them, everything will be perfect, and we’ll achieve complete happiness.  In actuality, learning to live in the problems that come our way can make us happier, and expecting a frictionless life actually causes more strife for us. Journalist Oliver Burkeman reframes challenges as the path to a more meaningful life. This video How facing adversity can help you live a deeper, more meaningful life is featured on Big Think.  ( 9 min )

Want to know if someone is compassionate? It’s identifiable in more ways than one.  Philosopher Meghan Sullivan, PhD, Buddhist scholar and former monk Thupten Jinpa, PhD, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg explore love through neuroscience, philosophy, and lived practice. They discuss society’s flaw in mistaking kindness for weakness, how neuroscience has proven to identify compassion in brain scans, and how expanding Aristotle’s Love Ethic can change our society for the better. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video Can you measure love? 3 experts discuss is featured on Big Think.  ( 6 min )

How programmers' struggles are everyone's mental struggles  ( 26 min )

BPD Chief Jen Louis has stated her agency’s “commitment to transparency remains strong.” Before Wednesday it had not responded to a single Berkeleyside inquiry for three weeks.  ( 26 min )

The City Council ordered staff to inventory all the property Berkeley owns, then figure out how to keep federal agents off of it, as tensions mount nationally between the feds and blue cities.  ( 24 min )

The pharmaceutical company gave some camp residents a 28-day hotel stay; others living on the formerly public West Berkeley street weren’t offered shelter.  ( 27 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 23 min )

The closure, which has been done during the newts’ seasonal migration since the 1980s, allows the salamanders to seek out the higher air moisture levels they favor for breeding.  ( 24 min )

Critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and adaptability are nurtured at the TK-8 school in Oakland.  ( 23 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 8 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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A new broad-coverage antivenom, made by mixing eight different nanobodies, protects mice against snakebites from 17 of 18 deadly species in Africa.

The theoretical physicist and best-selling author finds inspiration in politics and philosophy for rethinking space and time. The post Carlo Rovelli’s Radical Perspective on Reality first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

Beet Chips are a brightly coloured, sweet-and-salty, crunchy snack you only need 3 simple ingredients to make. No frying and no food dehydrator needed—bake them right in your oven! Here’s the thing with me and beets. When I was younger, I had beet juice almost every single morning, made fresh by my amazing mother. And to this day, […]  ( 19 min )

One of the mightiest facts we’ve uncovered about the Universe is this: that no matter when we look at it, near or far, we observe and measure it playing by the same laws, rules, and being made of the same ingredients that we see here in our own backyard. It takes the Copernican principle — the notion that we, here on Earth, don’t occupy a special, privileged location — to the most general form imaginable. Copernicus famously recognized that the Earth wasn’t a privileged location, and was just an ordinary planet orbiting the Sun like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were. Similarly, our cosmic location, including our time after the Big Bang and place in the Local Group, have nothing “special” about them. It’s a generally accepted principle, and one that’s consistent with the full s…  ( 35 min )

Imagine you’re shopping for your next read. You scan the bookstore shelves, registering the promising titles and colorful covers as you go. Among them are several older classics you promised yourself you’d read one day, and you feel a familiar pang of guilt over having not picked them up yet. Is today the day? No, you decide, and opt for a newer book that is currently trending on social media. Sound familiar? It’s a typical dilemma among readers, and one that makes sense. Readers understandably want to read books that explore today’s pressing issues, keep their knowledge fresh, and support the living writers whose works they enjoy — all of which require reading contemporary books. And with more than a quarter of a million books published each year, in the U.S. alone, it can be challenging …  ( 9 min )

Most of us feel we have miles to go with self improvement. That we want to become calmer, wiser, more finished. What if this pursuit actually keeps us trapped from that becoming? Zen teacher and psychiatrist Robert Waldinger argues that enlightenment isn’t a destination or a rare mystical state. Rather, its the ever-shifting recognition of the present moment. This quiet noticing, Waldinger says, can be extremely liberating, freeing us from the pressure of becoming. This video How accepting impermanence can end the struggle to “fix” your life is featured on Big Think.  ( 14 min )

I didn’t set out to build boats.  My career began in high-energy physics, searching for the hidden patterns of the universe. I then transitioned to aerospace, working on autonomous aircraft at NASA. At MIT, I turned my attention underwater, developing drones that combined guidance, sensor fusion, and autonomy to probe the hostile interiors of nuclear reactors. Looking back, the through line was learning to understand unseen systems and building machines that could navigate them. Then, in 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished. I followed the search closely, and it left me unsettled. In an age when we could locate a smartphone in seconds, how could a modern jetliner simply disappear into the ocean? It was a reminder that the world’s largest geographic frontier remained the least mapped…  ( 11 min )

Everyone falls victim to trends.  Big blue aliens convinced the movie industry that 3D movies were here to stay. Colored rubber bracelets hung on our wrists to remind us of the cause du jour. Wide-legged jeans are back in again, and we must never forget the frosted tips of the early aughts (many of us still regret that one).  All trends have one thing in common: they sure seemed like a good idea at the time and ostensibly serve some purpose, despite looking silly in hindsight. My junior high school yearbook picture drives that truth home.  The same goes for business trends and the beliefs they accompany. Trickle-down economics seemed like a viable answer for a bit, but it has done its share of harm. A trend that keeps coming around is an overreliance on cold data in a vacuum (quantitative …  ( 8 min )

Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American internet entrepreneur and former financial trader.  That opening sentence was lifted wholesale from Wikipedia, the revolutionary online encyclopedia that elevated Wales into cultural legend. As he details in his new book The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last, the ascent was anything but smooth. Wikipedia launched on January 15, 2001, and by 2006 was being roundly mocked on The Colbert Report as a disinformation train primed for derailment by the meddling demons of human nature — but the “pathological optimist” in Wales refused to concede that his venture, and by extension the entire concept, was doomed.  His instincts were, to say the least, solid. The English Wikipedia is now r…  ( 8 min )

A few years ago, I was scheduled to present an important keynote in Canada—one of my first large speaking opportunities. It came after weeks of travel, intensive client work, and nonstop video editing. In short, I was burned out before I even stepped onstage. After rushing to the venue from my international flight, I stood in the green room, my hands sweaty from nerves. I hadn’t slept well in days while juggling a massive client fire, and though I had rehearsed the talk several times, I was still consumed with thoughts like “What if it all falls apart?” When I walked onstage, I realized I’d forgotten to bring the clicker for the slides. I had to greet the audience and then casually return offstage to get it. About five slides in, I felt an unpleasant energy change. Standing on that massi…  ( 8 min )

When life feels overwhelming, Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner turns to one emotion he believes can transform everything: Awe. Through his research into vocal bursts, Keltner discovered that awe even sounds the same across cultures, including in some of the most remote regions of the world. He and his team collected stories of awe from 26 countries, identifying eight universal sources of this emotion shared across humanity, from moral beauty to collective effervescence. Even one minute of awe per day, he explains, can help us heal loneliness, grief, and even physical ailments.  At A Night of Awe & Wonder, hosted by Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation, Keltner invites all of us to rediscover awe, a force for connection and healing in our modern lives. This video Why Einstein called awe the fundamental emotion is featured on Big Think.  ( 9 min )

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Blogdex, a system launched in 2001 to track weblogs. At the beginning of 2001, most popular weblogs were a combination of personal journal and linkblog — a format encouraged by early blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal and Diaryland. But by the end of the year, blogging had become a real-time reporting tool too; most notably in the form of the “warblogs” that became popular after 9/11, like Talking Points Memo, Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish. The October launch of Movable Type was also a key moment in the professionalisation of blogging. But let's start in January 2001, with the first annual Weblog Awards. This was a hobby site run by Nikolai Nolan, a University of Michigan student, who defined a weblog as “a page with dated entries that frequently have off-site link…  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

La Loulou, which opened in Oakland in May, is a bright, colorful setting for wine and small bites.  ( 24 min )

Here's what students, teachers and families think as the district works toward implementing a new California law cracking down on mobile devices in classrooms.  ( 29 min )

Sunday morning a two-hour disruption caused delays for flights between OAK and Los Angeles. Air traffic controllers will receive their first $0 paycheck on Tuesday.  ( 23 min )

The post The Healing Power Of Social Friction appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 24 min )

Here in the 21st century, there’s a lot that we’ve uncovered about our Universe that, a mere century ago, would have been mind boggling. Sure, we already knew about General Relativity, the existence of subatomic particles, knowledge of radioactivity, and the beginnings of quantum mechanics. But we had yet to discover the expanding Universe and reveal the Big Bang, to recognize that the fields as well as the particles composing the Universe quantum in nature, or to learn that protons were composed of still smaller, more fundamental entities: the quarks and gluons. The big puzzles of today, including dark matter, dark energy, and the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry, could hardly have been fathomed at the time. But as we continued to investigate the nature of reality through many d…  ( 15 min )

In 2020, during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, many people had a deeply emotional, intensely personal, and perhaps somewhat obsessive relationship with a macroscope. Even if you were unfamiliar with the concept, each day — perhaps several times a day — you might have peered anxiously through the lens of your macroscope of choice, and what you saw determined whether your day would be one marked by anxiety or relief, hope or despair. It’s likely that your macroscope was one of the many web-based COVID-19 dashboard tools that tracked the spread of the virus. Depending on your interest, you may have chosen a global tracker, such as the one from the World Health Organization; a national model, such as those from Johns Hopkins or the CDC; or a more local tracker like the one produced by your state dep…  ( 9 min )

Over the past decade, I’ve worked with U.S. and allied military forces across 45 countries to help develop a new kind of leader — not just more adaptive, but more imaginative. In the process, I’ve watched warfighters, technologists, and commanders at every level grapple with a new operational reality: one where centralized command must coexist with decentralized execution; where emerging technologies live beside legacy systems; and where speed and stability must be pursued simultaneously. It’s not just complexity. It’s contradiction. And oddly enough, it’s where creativity begins. We often think of innovation as the product of big ideas hatched by disruptors, visionaries, lone geniuses. But in military settings, where the stakes are life and death and the bureaucracy is immovable, big idea…  ( 7 min )

We’re letting the public know that losing access to Berkeley’s police scanner would make it harder to report on shootings, chases, protests, fires and other breaking news.  ( 26 min )

As CalFresh runs out of money and the federal shutdown nears its one-month mark, the county board agreed last week to spend more on food banks and meals.  ( 26 min )

The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge bike lane will only be open Thursday afternoons, weekends and select holidays starting Monday.  ( 24 min )

Despite their wide variety of sizes, niches and shapes, sharks scale geometrically, pointing to possible fundamental constraints on evolution. The post Shark Data Suggests Animals Scale Like Geometric Objects first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

This Harry Potter Cake is a replica of Harry’s birthday cake from the movie! Underneath that iconic pink and green frosting is my famous moist vegan chocolate cake.  If you are a fan of the wizarding world of Harry Potter, then you are already familiar with this cake! This is the chocolate cake that Hagrid […]  ( 21 min )

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For nearly 100 years, we’ve known our Universe is expanding. Possible fates of the expanding Universe. Notice the differences between models in the past; only a Universe with dark energy matches our observations, and the dark energy-dominated solution came from de Sitter all the way back in 1917. By observing the expansion rate today and measuring the components present in the Universe, we can determine both its future and past histories. Credit: NASA & ESA Einstein’s equations forbid static, stable, uniform solutions. A photo of Ethan Siegel at the American Astronomical Society’s hyperwall in 2017, along with the first Friedmann equation at right. The first Friedmann equation, an exact solution in general relativity, details the Hubble expansion rate squared on the left hand side, wh…  ( 11 min )

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Five editions on, the DSM shoulders more responsibilities than it was ever intended for. How did we get here?  ( 19 min )

In a little over a century, the electron microscope evolved from a tool barely capable of resolving virus particles into one able to capture atomic detail.

When people talk about computer vision, they usually think of OpenCV or deep neural networks like YOLO. But in most cases, doing computer vision implies understanding of the core algorithms, so you can use or adapt them for your own needs. I wanted to see how far I could go by stripping computer vision down to the bare minimum: only grayscale 8-bit images, no fancy data structures, plain old C, some byte arrays and a single header file.  ( 15 min )

Community members “just don’t feel safe,” an organizer said. The event was set for Saturday, Oct. 25.  ( 23 min )

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: The Blue Book Burglar appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.  ( 5 min )

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: The Blue Book Burglar appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.  ( 5 min )

Let curry cubes do the heavy lifting while the egg brings a splash of rich colour to this easy midweek meal Back in 2020, I put some curry cubes in my husband Hugh’s Christmas stocking, and our life (particularly his) was cleaved in two: before curry cubes, and after. He took them camping and on cycling trips, and he raved about them to friends. Slowly, they became a pantry staple for us. When I have the time, I like to batch-cook my own curry sauce and freeze it, but when there isn’t time, we love this meal. It feels embarrassingly easy to make, because the cubes bring all the flavour, and also quite fancy at the same time thanks to the egg yolk. We love it, and I hope you will, too. Join Meera Sodha at a special event celebrating the best of Guardian culture on Wednesday 26 November, hosted by Nish Kumar and alongside writers Stuart Heritage and Tim Dowling, with Georgina Lawton hosting You Be The Judge live. Live in London or via livestream – book tickets here. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

Early voting begins Saturday for California’s Nov. 4 special election on a ballot measure to redraw Congressional district maps. Gov. Newsom pitched Prop 50 in response to partisan Republican redistricting in Texas.  ( 23 min )

Also: Free speech advocates, journalists and traffic safety activists are pushing back against Berkeley police's plan to close all their radio transmissions to the public.  ( 23 min )

The Alameda County Sheriff's Office confirmed that it's been told federal officials have paused operations in the whole Bay Area.  ( 23 min )

District Attorney Ursula Jones Dickson also urged the public not to physically engage with federal law enforcement.  ( 23 min )

When the Lakeshore branch of Top Dog shutters, only the original in Berkeley will remain.  ( 21 min )

Shark Stewards, the organizer of Berkeley’s largest protest last weekend, opposes the Trump administration’s opening of commercial fishing in protected areas of the ocean.  ( 24 min )

Federal authorities say they opened fire on a vehicle that drove toward them at the entrance to Coast Guard Island, where federal agents were supposed to stage for an immigration crackdown.  ( 24 min )

After more than three centuries, a geometry problem that originated with a royal bet has been solved. The post First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 11 min )

If you’re looking for a savoury vegan brunch option, this Overnight Breakfast Strata Recipe is it! Loaded with sautéed veggies, hearty bread, plant-based cheese, and veggie bacon, all baked in a silky tofu egg base, it’s a total crowd-pleaser. Tofu is definitely my favourite egg substitute for breakfast recipes. I’ve tried the store-bought substitutes in […]  ( 21 min )

In June 2023, just seven months after OpenAI first invited curious tech fans to try a “research preview” of its now-ubiquitous ChatGPT tool, a lesser-known chatbot called WormGPT officially launched with a much different target audience: hackers.  Its creator offered would-be customers access to a large language model (LLM) with no built-in guardrails — one that wouldn’t push back when asked to do something nefarious, like craft a scam email, write code for malware, or help with a phishing scheme. He later claimed that more than 200 users paid upwards of €500 (around $540) per month for the tool, with some shelling out as much as €5,000 ($5,400) for a full-featured private installation. WormGPT officially shut down just months after its launch, around the same time that security researcher…  ( 9 min )

You probably think investing is about markets and strategy, but Barry Rithotz argues that it’s actually about biology.  Our brains evolved to spot danger, not to manage portfolios, and the instincts that once kept us alive now push us towards panic and greed. That same wiring that told our ancestors to run from predators now tells modern investors to sell at the bottom. This video How your cognitive biases lead to terrible investing behaviors is featured on Big Think.  ( 34 min )

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In many ways, our modern picture of the Universe got its start in the 1920s. In that one decade, we discovered that the spiral and elliptical nebulae in the sky were actually galaxies, far beyond the extent of our own Milky Way. We measured the distance to these galaxies, determining that the farther away they were, on average, the faster they appeared to be speeding away from us. And we calculated that a Universe that was uniformly filled with “stuff” — whether matter, radiation, a cosmological constant, or any other form of energy — would be unable to be static and stable; it must either expand or contract. From these revolutionary realizations, the notion of the expanding Universe was born. Over the past century, we’ve learned much more about the history and properties of our Universe. …  ( 14 min )

This article very nearly didn’t exist. For several weeks, it made a conspicuous effort not to. It began, or rather did not begin, when I was invited to pitch a second article for Big Think about virtually any topic in neuroscience.  Triumph. I had freedom and unlimited time. What could be easier? A lot, it turns out. Weeks went by, and I did not write. My inbox began to fill with cheerful nudges from Stephen, my editor. Still keen to write something? The first time around had been cleaner. I’d been assigned a slot in Big Think’s consciousness issue on a tight deadline. That forced me to write about the neuroscience behind sleep, a relevant topic I knew well enough to write cold. There was no dithering, just a window of opportunity narrowing by the minute. This time, the window was wide ope…  ( 9 min )

Drop me off in a city without a compass and a destination, and I will eventually find my way. For whatever reason, I’ve always had an intuitive sense of how to navigate urban environments. Maybe it has to do with being my father’s shotgun-seat navigator on road trips, but honestly, it probably has more to do with my spending too much of my youth navigating the video game environments of Hyrule and Vice City. But drop me off in the middle of the woods with a destination, and you’d better tell the park rangers what you did, or I’m in trouble. Give me a compass if you want; the only difference will be the false sense of confidence I’ll take with me while getting lost. I have always found this to be disappointing. I want to be more of an outdoorsman, to explore the natural world with more conf…  ( 12 min )

For Eliezer Yudkowsky, the day OpenAI launched, the world ended. “That was the day I realized that humanity probably wasn’t going to survive this,” he said on a recent podcast with Ezra Klein. For the uninitiated, Yudkowsky is no fringe voice. He founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He helped define the “alignment problem” — how to make sure superintelligent systems share human values. Wherever you land on the AI spectrum — doomer, accelerationist, or just uneasily curious — his words, I think, are worth reading. Yes, technology has lifted billions and reshaped civilization. But humans have a terrible record when it comes to hubris. I don’t share his certainty that we’re doomed. But I do share his suspicion that history is, once again, repeating — brilliant people, good int…  ( 9 min )

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Officials reaffirmed their support for immigrants after Trump called off a crackdown in San Francisco.  ( 26 min )

The school district reminded families that schools are closed to the public and federal immigration agents aren’t allowed on campus without a judicial warrant. UC Berkeley also offered support to undocumented students.  ( 25 min )

In the past two years the Emeryville commercial complex has revamped its dining roster to offer an eclectic mix that should serve a range of palates.  ( 26 min )

In a Truth Social post, the president said calls with San Francisco’s mayor and some tech titans convinced him to wait, for now.  ( 24 min )

At least 150 protesters are at Coast Guard Island as Customs and Border Protection agents arrive. President Trump says he's called off federal deployment to San Francisco.  ( 28 min )

The private high school in Oakland offers a robust selection of STEM classes, and 33 AP and honors courses.  ( 25 min )

Essential background information about the arrival of federal Customs and Border Protection agents in the East Bay.  ( 27 min )

Other events include a Fall Legal Festival at La Peña Cultural Center, a class on food waste prevention and a spooky game night at Victory Point Cafe.  ( 27 min )

He cherished his retirement years in Berkeley, visiting the city's art galleries, restaurants and theaters.  ( 22 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Genetically modified crops are finding a foothold in the Global South, producing some unlikely leaders in agritech.

The post Investing In The Ecosystems That Sustain Us appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 27 min )

Every so often, advocates of a fringe theory — one that doesn’t fit the evidence as well as the mainstream theory — do what they can to breathe life back into it. Sometimes new evidence has come to light, legitimately challenging the mainstream theory and demanding that previously discarded alternatives be re-evaluated. Sometimes, a surprising set of observations supports a once-discredited theory, bringing it back into prominence. And at other times, it isn’t new data that elevates a contrarian viewpoint, but rather a false narrative is the culprit, as disingenuous arguments that have been rightfully dismissed by mainstream professionals suddenly take hold among either a new generation of inexperienced individuals, or outsiders who haven’t been exposed to the wide array of mainstream fact…  ( 15 min )

People really like Japanese philosophy. If you ever see a list of “untranslatable words” or “beautiful words from around the world,” then you will notice how Japanese ideas are often overrepresented. Whenever I explore a Japanese concept on the Mini Philosophy social media pages — wabi–sabi, mono no aware, ikigai — they outperform almost everything else. Part of this, no doubt, is a kind of exoticism. For much of its history, Japan remained ethnically and culturally distinct from both its Asian neighbors and the wider world. Buddhism drifted over from China and Korea, but it fused with Shinto and indigenous animism to become something uniquely Japanese. Western industrialism arrived in the 19th century under the Meiji Restoration, but even then, Japan found a way to absorb foreign ideas wi…  ( 8 min )

There have been those who thought broadly about play and recognized its importance for adults. One of the first was the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. In 1938, when he published his seminal book on play, Homo ludens, it was quite radical to argue that play was a central organizing force in human culture. But that’s what Huizinga did.  “For many years the conviction has grown upon me, that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play,” he wrote.  Huizinga saw play permeating language, myth, and ritual, all of which he considered root forces guiding human societies. He also developed one of the first important and lasting definitions of play. He pointed out that play is fun, it is voluntary, it’s a freedom.  “We might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ l…  ( 7 min )

When Anastasia Marchenkova hears a founder claim they’re building a million-qubit quantum computer, she doesn’t roll her eyes or dismiss the claim outright. Instead, she runs through a series of questions: “What needs to be true for that to happen? Is it a physics problem? Or a manufacturing one?” Her no-nonsense “bullshit” test has made her a trusted advisor to venture capitalists and founders alike.  Right now, Marchenkova’s pragmatism feels especially prescient. After several years of contracting funding, quantum technology is entering a renewed wave of investment. Funding in Q1 of 2025 for quantum companies reached $1.25 billion, roughly double that of the year before, and according to McKinsey, the total quantum market is predicted to be worth about $198 billion by 2040. In cities as …  ( 7 min )

Do you actually control your own mind? Three experts in philosophy and neuroscience explain: It’s not so simple. Uri Maoz, PhD, Daniel C. Dennett, PhD, and Sam Harris, PhD explore how unconscious processes shape decisions we believe are conscious. From brain experiments that reveal the illusion of control, to mindfulness practices that reframe perception, they show how philosophy and neuroscience together unpack the truth about free will. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video Is free will a fallacy? Science and philosophy explain. is featured on Big Think.  ( 6 min )

What to say to ICE agents at home, at work and on the street. How to find a lawyer and someone who's been detained.  ( 35 min )

Customs and Border Protection agents are headed to an island used as a base by the Coast Guard, located between Oakland and Alameda.  ( 24 min )

Plus, new smash burger, noodle soup, and breakfast spots land in the East Bay.  ( 25 min )

Stefan Schuch’s latest brand aims to enlist canines in the “fight against fascism” and a president who’s “full of shit.” Also: Paisley Vintage closes and a new business teaches mahjongg.  ( 27 min )

These vegan Buffalo cauliflower meatballs will be a hit at your next party, but they’re excellent for weekday dinners and meal prep too! Spicy, tender, and full of flavour, you’ll think of endless ways to put them to use. Consider this Buffalo cauliflower meatball recipe the happy marriage of my Vegan Meatballs and Buffalo Cauliflower […]  ( 19 min )

Recent findings reveal that even simple pricing algorithms can make things more expensive. The post The Game Theory of How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

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In many ways, the Big Bang was the biggest idea to ever come out of Einstein’s General theory of Relativity. This tremendously successful theory gave us everything from gravitational waves to black holes based on one profound insight: that the fabric of spacetime itself would evolve, curve, and even ripple based on the properties and behavior of the matter and energy within it. When we applied Einstein’s equations to the entire Universe as a whole, along with the idea that the Universe was filled nearly uniformly with matter and energy on the largest scales, we wound up with an expanding Universe. Extrapolating back in time, we arrived at a very hot, dense, and uniform early state, where all of the Universe’s matter and energy was concentrated into a tiny, minuscule volume. And yet, if we …  ( 15 min )

A sharp border separating the physical and the mental is intuitively obvious. It is the reason why most cultures believe in a soul of some kind — an entity distinct from the body that experiences its sensations and beliefs. Science, too, has generally seen this border as impenetrable. The great German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz used the famous “mill argument”: If there was, he wrote in 1714, “a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions,” then you could imagine enlarging it to a size of a mill and walking into it — but all you’d be able to see is parts that push one another, and no amount of detail could explain how all of that converts into actual thinking and perceiving. In the mid-20th century, this wisdom was considered so unshakeable that an entire tradit…  ( 9 min )

Behind every cruise, every smile, every unexpected thrill, there’s a world of non-ship-related innovation making it all possible. These innovations create new destinations, streamline the guest experience with technology, design for a more sustainable future, or otherwise enhance the experience. These efforts aren’t sexy, but they are powerful. While my suggestion of Project Archimedes was considered too difficult for a project name, ETDBW (which is even harder to remember or pronounce) turned into one of our best. It was not just a name but a rallying cry — something that sparked real alignment across Royal Caribbean.  It all started back in the early 1990s at a meeting with our travel agent advisory board. This was a group of about a dozen standout travel advisors from across the country…  ( 7 min )

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And voilà!  ( 18 min )

what is this! What is this god-like aroma of buttery baked cinnamon sugar warmth that has permeated your senses? Is it a scented candle, i.e. the idea, but not the substance of a thing you love? No, it’s snickerdoodles. And you’re about to eat a warm one, which feels like climbing inside It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown while also, simultaneously, getting to be this dog. I’m not saying you cannot experience this sensory transcendency on a day in January or June, but it hits on a different, worldview-shifting, level when cold air is still a novel thing. Read more »  ( 19 min )

The school was vacated in 2020 after a study found it was vulnerable to earthquakes and unsafe.  ( 25 min )

The new cafe from the owners of the acclaimed Rose Pizzeria mixes Italian influences with the Jewish breakfast classic.  ( 27 min )

The Nosh Awards are bigger than ever this year, with four new categories celebrating the best in East Bay food and drinks.  ( 24 min )

Church for Today, founded in 1957 by the Rev. William Hazaiah Williams, Jr., built a reputation as a multiracial hub known for its concert series showcasing Black opera stars and classical musicians. Its future's uncertain.  ( 26 min )

The post The Abundance Movement’s Blind Spot appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 22 min )

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Here on Earth, life began very early on after our planet’s formation: at least 3.8 billion years ago and possibly even earlier. By 2.7 billion years ago, it had developed photosynthesis. A little later, aerobic respiration developed, followed by eukaryotic cells, multicellularity, and sexual reproduction. More than half a million years ago, the first fungi, plants, and animals appeared, leading to a planet whose continents and oceans were overrun with large, complex, differentiated organisms. With the arrival of human beings, Earth has become a planet dominated by an intelligent, technologically advanced, on the cusp of even being a spacefaring species. With so many other planets out there in the Universe, it seems like an inevitability that there would be other worlds where similar succes…  ( 15 min )

For most of human history, we could only imagine what made us who we are. Then, just over two decades ago, the Human Genome Project — the international scientific effort to decode the three billion letters of human DNA — changed everything.  Critics at the time called it too expensive, too ambitious, too abstract. And they weren’t wrong. It was the largest biology project ever proposed, and scientists hadn’t even managed to sequence the smallest bacterial genome yet. But the organizers knew that big plans — moonshots — inspire people and attract funding.  Today, nearly every advance in modern medicine rests on its foundation. The project transformed biology into an information science, spawning ancestry testing, virus tracking, precision cancer therapies, the first personalized medicines, …  ( 9 min )

It’s time for Macy to move home. She’s scored a promotion and she’s tired of hearing the man in the apartment above play his French horn. So, she books a few viewings with her real estate agent and starts looking at houses. After looking at three places, she falls in love: It’s a house with a huge backyard and a nice open-plan kitchen. What’s more, the school down the road has a great reputation. She’s all set to put in an offer. But that night a question pops into her head: What if the next house is better? She can’t shake the thought. What if the next house has a bigger backyard, or maybe a double garage? What if it’s cheaper?! We’ve all found ourselves in this situation, whether we’re considering job offers, buying a new car, or dating new people. When it comes to love, how many people …  ( 7 min )

Our search for work-life balance reflects a very real desire: to feel less consumed by obligations, less stressed, and more fulfilled. In my book, The Visual Detox, I explore how the images we’re exposed to shape our inner balance, for better or worse — and I demonstrate how art can gently tip the scales back toward harmony. Think of visual art as a toolkit to soothe the mind and spirit. Every day, we are inundated with imagery urging us to work harder, buy more … and never stop. Art offers the exact opposite. It slows and calms us down, sharpens our critical thinking, nurtures happiness, and helps us resist the endless cycle of consumption. In contrast to the ever-present commercial visuals found on our streets and screens, in train stations and airports, engaging with art gives us a brea…  ( 7 min )

In 1924, while imprisoned at Landsberg Prison following the failed Beer Hall Putsch, a 35-year-old political agitator named Adolf Hitler began writing his manifesto, Mein Kampf. In it, he called for the destruction of the Treaty of Versailles, the creation of a new German Reich through territorial expansion, and the removal of Jews from German life.  Fourteen years later, on September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to cheering crowds after concluding a meeting with the same Hitler. Waving a signed piece of paper, he assured his audience that “peace for our time” had been secured. Chamberlain, an experienced diplomat, believed he had persuaded Hitler to abandon the very ambitions he had once gone to prison for attempting to achieve.  In less than a…  ( 10 min )

We are living through the collapse of the old world, and the quiet construction of a new one. From artificial intelligence and clean energy to bioengineering and digital governance, the core systems that defined the last century are rapidly being dismantled and replaced. But this isn’t just about technology. According to futurist Peter Leyden, we’re at a historic turning point: One of the rare moments in American and global history when everything gets reimagined at once. This video Why 2025 is the single most pivotal year in our lifetime is featured on Big Think.  ( 4 min )

What happens when the technology mediating nearly all our information begins to decide what speech is acceptable?  Free speech scholar Jacob Mchangama warns that AI’s growing role in search, email, and word processing means its hidden biases could shape freedom of thought itself. With his team at the Future of Free Speech, Mchangama ran an experiment that tested 268 prompts against popular LLMs and found that the results often reflected inconsistent standards. According to Mchangama, this shows why ownership of AI models matters, since their values, incentives, and pressures ultimately shape public access to information. This video Even AI is self-censoring. Here’s why that matters. is featured on Big Think.  ( 5 min )

Internet Archive website after the launch of Wayback Machine in October 2001. If the future is going to devolve into chaos, then the present ought to be preserved somehow, online. That was part of the thinking behind the Wayback Machine, a public archive of web pages that was launched on October 24, 2001, at a library at the University of California at Berkeley. At the event, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle demonstrated the new time machine by pulling up a web page from the White House website from September 10, 1996, featuring President Clinton declaring the prevention of hijacking and terrorist attacks in the air a priority. Kahle then showed a special collection of archived websites about 9/11 (still, of course, fresh in the collective memory). September 11 archive in the Wayba…  ( 5 min )

After years of blight and uncertainty, a Los Angeles real estate firm closed on the 2200 block of Shattuck Avenue this month.  ( 26 min )

The measure would adopt new congressional lines that favor Democrats for the next three election cycles in an effort to offset partisan gerrymandering in other states. Oct. 20 is the last day to register to vote online.  ( 25 min )

Other new Berkeley books: Jeff Chang’s biography of Bruce Lee, exploring the making of Asian America, and Yvonne Martinez’s novel about labor leaders acting badly.  ( 30 min )

Bioengineers commonly view microbes as reprogrammable “cellular factories” for manufacturing high-value molecules. But what are we throwing away?

The uniquely vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet holds enough water to raise global sea levels by 5 meters. But when that will happen — and how fast — is anything but settled. The post How Soon Will the Seas Rise? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

Moist and tender with a spicy kick, these vegan cornbread muffins are easy to make and have a simple gluten-free option, which means everyone at the table can enjoy them! Whether it’s Jalapeño Cornbread Waffles or Cornbread Pudding, cornbread is total comfort food for me. I love the subtle sweetness combined with that moist, tender […]  ( 22 min )

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To discover what’s out there in the Universe, you simply have to look. This image shows the full COSMOS (Cosmic Evolution Survey) from the Hubble Space Telescope: its largest ever survey of the Universe. Hubble photographed 575 adjacent and slightly overlapping views of the universe using the Advanced Camera for Surveys’ (ACS) Wide Field Camera onboard Hubble, requiring nearly 1000 hours of observations. At full resolution the image would be 100,800 x 100,800 pixels. Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Koekemoer (STScI) But only by looking in the right ways can you uncover all that’s present. The Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS Survey) broke the record for largest deep-field image taken by JWST and held it for several months in 2022, a record that was previously held by the …  ( 10 min )

A visually-aided journal of a very long walk home.  ( 23 min )

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How does the paideía of the Chinese tech elite differ from their counterparts in Silicon Valley?  ( 14 min )

A large "No Kings" march is planned for Oakland in the early afternoon and three protests are scheduled for Berkeley.  ( 25 min )

Swap in, swap out and, above all, enjoy this punchy, filling and thrifty dish No-waste cooking comes in many forms. It doesn’t have to mean cooking banana peel. To me, it means finishing a bag of potatoes before they grow eyes, and making the most of that last awkward bit of cabbage. Even finding a cheeky new way with the sauces and condiments already in the fridge. Using ingredients you’ve already got to make a new recipe is, in my opinion, the most “no waste” of them all. So here’s permission from me to make substitutes – herb for herb, veg for veg, or anything you’ve already got – to make this recipe work for you. Join Meera Sodha at a special event celebrating the best of Guardian culture on Wednesday 26 November, hosted by Nish Kumar and alongside writers Stuart Heritage and Tim Dowling, with Georgina Lawton hosting You Be The Judge live. Live in London or via livestream – book tickets here. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

When military historians attempt to make sense of a conflict like the Second World War, they tend to examine the external conditions of battles, such as which army possessed the most advanced weapons, experienced generals, favorable terrain, and reliable supply lines. Nicholas Wright, a neuroscientist and longtime national security adviser for the British and American militaries, prefers to focus on the internal conditions: What’s happening inside people’s brains. How do people respond to fear and stress? How do soldiers assess risk or make life-or-death decisions? As he notes in the introduction of his new book, Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain, common explanations for why the Allies managed to defeat the Axis often boil down to some combination of “Russian manpo…  ( 12 min )

Astronomer David Kipping explores humanity’s oldest question: If the universe is vast and ancient, why haven’t we found anyone else in it? He argues that our longing to discover another Earth often clouds our reasoning, and that the greatest challenge in the search for life isn’t technology, but temptation. This video Are we blinded by our desire to find extraterrestrial life? is featured on Big Think.  ( 20 min )

Tomas Pueyo is the author of Uncharted Territories, a newsletter helping readers understand deeply how the world works today to navigate the world of tomorrow. You can subscribe to it here. Do you like the Mediterranean? Should we make more seas like it? Today, the Mediterranean region is one of the best places in the world to live, with an amazing climate, developed economies, and some of the best beaches on Earth — but it wasn’t always like this. Roughly six million years ago, shifting tectonic plates closed the Strait of Gibraltar — a narrow body of water connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean — turning the area into a desertic wasteland. About 700,000 years later, the strait burst open again, and a brutal megaflood filled the Mediterranean in a matter of months.  Witho…  ( 12 min )

From the beginning of humanity, cultures and societies vary in tradition, religion, art, philosophy, and customs. One constant that remains unchanging? The essential need for love and partnership.  Dr. Helen Fisher explains the drive for love from an anthropological perspective, exploring the science of attraction, heartbreak, rejection, and how our dopamine factories send us on lifelong quests to find “the one.” This video The ancient origins of partnering and romantic love is featured on Big Think.  ( 13 min )

How to make a plan for attending a political rally, and what you should know about your rights and the possible consequences of protesting.  ( 30 min )

State assessment results brought mostly good news for Berkeley Unified; Black and Latino students made gains, but not across the board.  ( 24 min )

The bakery with two locations will sell its last pastries and breads on Halloween.  ( 22 min )

From No Kings Day to defending day laborers, a broad range of Bay Area groups are pushing back on creeping authoritarianism — and preparing in case the National Guard arrives.  ( 31 min )

The post Creative Disruption In The Order Of The World appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 12 min )

Neuroscientists probing the boundary between sleep and awareness are finding many types of liminal states, which help explain the sleep disorders that can result when sleep transitions go wrong. The post How the Brain Moves From Waking Life to Sleep (and Back Again) first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 15 min )

With crisp apples, protein-packed quinoa, and a sweet-and-tangy orange vinaigrette, this Shaved Brussels Sprouts Salad works as a light meal or as a holiday side dish! Brussels sprouts are so fabulous when they’re roasted (ahem: Maple Roasted Brussels Sprouts, Onions and Apples) that I forgot they also make a stellar base for a salad. Evidence? […]  ( 21 min )

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For a long time throughout the 20th century, the main goal of cosmology was twofold: to measure the expansion rate of the Universe today, known as the Hubble constant, and to measure how the expansion rate was changing over time, then known as the deceleration parameter. After all, we had a law of gravity — Einstein’s General Relativity — that allowed us to calculate how the Universe would evolve based on the amount, density, and distribution of matter and energy within it. We observed the Universe to be roughly uniform in all locations and all directions, and we learned back in the 1920s and 1930s that the Universe was expanding. If we could just measure those two parameters, we thought, we’d know it all: the age, history, composition, and even the fate of our Universe. Oh, if only we rea…  ( 16 min )

There’s a statement that one can make that would have been completely non-controversial at the end of the 19th century, but many people both in and out of science would argue against it today. Consider for yourself how you feel about it: “The fundamental laws that govern the smallest constituents of matter and energy, when applied to the Universe over long enough cosmic timescales, can explain everything that will ever emerge.” This means that the formation of literally everything in our Universe, from atomic nuclei to atoms to simple molecules to complex molecules to life to intelligence to consciousness and beyond, can all be understood as something that emerges directly from the fundamental laws underpinning reality, with no additional laws, forces, or interactions required. This simple…  ( 14 min )

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Alex Morris over the last few years. He’s one of the most thoughtful investors I know: measured, patient, and relentlessly focused on quality over noise. This week, for my Long Game column in Big Think, I spoke with him about his recent book — Buffett and Munger Unscripted — which draws entirely from primary sources: decades of Berkshire Hathaway transcripts and letters. Many books have been written about Berkshire Hathaway’s architects, but Alex’s stands out for its clarity. He distills decades of Buffett and Munger’s wisdom into something timeless. “Optimism without discipline is dangerous,” Alex says. “But discipline without optimism is paralyzing. Buffett and Munger managed to hold both.” We talked about many themes, including restraint, scale, …  ( 10 min )

What if the universe is a machine, and every moment in our past, present, and future is already encoded in the positions of its particles? Physicist Sean Carroll explores the unsettling implications of classical mechanics, from Newton’s laws to Laplace’s thought experiment, showing how determinism challenges the very idea of free will. This video Sean Carroll: Can we ever escape the logic of a clockwork universe? is featured on Big Think.  ( 9 min )

A stolen attempt  ( 23 min )

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Also: Six Berkeley restaurants were hit by smash-and-grab burglaries early Thursday.  ( 23 min )

Berkeley’s police are the last in Alameda County who still communicate on unencrypted channels. Now they're asking the City Council to change that.  ( 25 min )

The Walter Mork Company, now owned by the founder's grandson, has struggled to compete in the age of computer-aided metal fabrication.  ( 27 min )

Demiya and Alma y Sazon are serving menus influenced by family recipes and classic comfort food to the Emeryville Public Market.  ( 26 min )

A judge recently decided District Attorney Jones Dickson’s decision to withdraw a resentencing wasn’t politically motivated. Defense attorneys say the new DA has abandoned efforts to confront prosecutorial misconduct.  ( 35 min )

The epicenter of the quake, which was reported at 9:23 a.m., was in the center of campus, according to preliminary information from the U.S. Geological Survey.  ( 23 min )

Other events this week include the Berkeley Bird Festival, a Fix-It Fest and a community dance party at La Peña Cultural Center.  ( 26 min )

Asterisk Magazine covers science, emerging technologies, economics, politics, culture, global health, threats to human development and flourishing.  ( 6 min )

The post Welcome To The New Warring States appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 43 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

The Bay Area could see significant new investments in public transit if voters approve the measure in November 2026.  ( 23 min )

The measure follows a 500% spike in calls to ACILEP, a county hotline. It will expand the hotline hours and fund more legal aid for immigrants.  ( 24 min )

Come by Brix Factory Brewing Oct. 22 from 5 to 7 p.m. to cast your nominations and meet fellow East Bay foodies.  ( 22 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 23 min )

Berkeley Unified administrators, teachers and families have been bracing for federal immigration activity since school started in August.  ( 25 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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Gnudi literally means “naked” in Italian — consider them spinach and ricotta ravioli without the pasta wrapper. I think they’re better in every way because you get all of the soft, cheesy filling, none of the pasta fuss that can feel leaden together. Typically, gnudi are made with fresh greens that have been blanched and finely chopped but I’ve been on a mission over the last year to give frozen spinach (reliable! economical! seasonless!) more love, especially when all I’d planned to do with the fresh stuff was cook it down and feel bereft when it vanished. Frozen spinach saves me this heartache, and here we’re using a whole box, saving us a math headache too. Read more »  ( 17 min )

Viewed from orbit, Jackass Flats — situated in southern Nevada about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas — could easily be confused for Mars. The alluvial basin is full of tan and gray regolith, hued slightly red, and almost completely surrounded by carved, rocky hills. It was here, a half-century ago, that NASA engineers tested nuclear rockets intended to get us to the Red Planet by 1978. Officials had even grander hopes for the descendants of those rockets. They were planned to be mules for a permanent lunar base by 1981, propulsion systems for deep space probes to Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets, and engines for “space tugs” and shuttles ferrying payloads and people from low Earth orbit (LEO) to space stations around the Earth and the Moon. NASA even envisioned a “Grand Tour” of the …  ( 9 min )

“The classic example of a hijack is masturbation,” Edward Slingerland tells me. We’re talking about all the evolutionary quirks that humans tend to exploit — the cases where we’re “built” for one purpose, but decide to put that structure to other uses. And masturbation is a classic example. In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Slingerland about his book Drunk, in which he outlines his “intoxication thesis.” Slingerland argues it’s quite common to think that getting drunk is an evolutionary mistake. Some early Homo sapiens drank too much fermented fruit juice and discovered it was pretty fun. So they told their mates and, altogether, they clinked their frothy ciders and sang bawdy songs about hunting and gathering. But the human brain and body were not built to get drunk. …  ( 7 min )

Why are bad habits so hard to break?  Neuroscientist Carl Hart, PhD, journalist Charles Duhigg, and psychologist Adam Alter, PhD explain how your brain wires habits as cue-routine-reward loops that control nearly half of your daily life. They show why willpower alone rarely works, why technology fuels new forms of addiction, and why habits can only be replaced, not erased. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video Addictions and habits, explained by a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and a journalist is featured on Big Think.  ( 8 min )

How aquaporin and potassium channels filter hundreds of millions of water molecules or ions each second, by positioning the correct amino acid in the perfect place.

The math of even the simplest ocean waves is notoriously uncooperative. A team of Italian mathematicians has made major advances toward understanding it. The post The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves Crashes Into View first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

Biscoff lovers, don’t miss this vegan Biscoff Cheesecake recipe! With a buttery Biscoff crust, creamy Biscoff cheesecake filling, and Biscoff in the topping, it’s got triple the cookie butter goodness in every bite. Whoever discovered that you could turn Biscoff cookies into a creamy cookie-flavoured spread deserves some kind of award. I could eat this […]  ( 22 min )

Here on Earth, humanity’s global energy needs only seem to increase over time. A combination of increasing populations, the widespread development of heating and cooling, a reliance on modern electronics, and the introduction of new energy-intensive technologies (such as the blockchain, smart technology, and artificial intelligence) are among the factors driving our rising energy needs. Sure, we can always build more power plants, but what about the simple solution of increasing the efficiency and production of already-existing plants, particularly the ones that only see part-time usage: wind and solar. Wind power doesn’t work when the air is still, and solar doesn’t work during the night. Or can it? That’s something that the US-based startup, Reflect Orbital, wants to change. The idea is …  ( 14 min )

Hutch, who had taught Julia the art of visualization, had told her that the nature of anything, including cognition, was best understood in the doing. She missed his wisdom. Instead of struggling against the infected artificial brain in its frozen state, she had to reanimate it. First, she needed space. In the same way writers always wanted bigger desks and programmers craved bigger monitors, she had to find a canvas large enough to visualize the living neuromesh. Mixed reality was the only answer. Pushing her coffee table to the wall and stacking the chairs, she cleared the center of her apartment as much as possible. Talos would just have to do its best to map whatever debris was left into the visualization. Next, she needed a “brain jar.” Digging through her crates of salvaged hardware …  ( 7 min )

On a busy day, over 25,000 people visit the Vatican Museum in Vatican City, the world’s smallest country at 0.17 square miles, tucked in the middle of Rome. While the museum boasts one of the greatest collections of art in the world, the main attraction for many people (including me on my first-ever trip abroad) is the Sistine Chapel, with its massive ceiling frescoes painted by Michelangelo at the start of the 16th century. Getting into the chapel, though, requires a substantial time commitment. The relatively low entrance price of twenty euros means that many more people want to see the chapel than the 5,800 square feet (or 540 square meters) of space can accommodate. If you have not pre-purchased premium tickets to enter the museum, you must wait in a physical line to buy one. That wait…  ( 10 min )

The best horror stories are those that don’t rely on jump scares or bloodied campground killers to frighten. The scariest part of The Wicker Man isn’t its eponymous effigy; it’s realizing what the natives of Summerisle will do to placate their gods. And while the ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel may unnerve readers of The Shining, it is Jack Torrance’s maniacal relapse that truly grips the spine. Tales that rely on cheap tricks can be fun, but the ones that exhume their horrors from within powerful ideas endure. For that reason, we’re taking a look at five horror stories that double as philosophy lessons. Each one rests on a foundation of great ideas that can wrap around your mind like a tentacle and force you to really think about what has frightened you. Cover of a 2025 edition of Mar…  ( 10 min )

Brands that stand the test of time innovate to stay relevant and build upon the product imagery that first captured customers’ hearts. So-­called legacy brands and their associated images include Timberland boots, the Burberry raincoat, Tiffany diamonds, and Levi’s jeans. Even Disney, whose fantasy characters remain central to the customer experience. Each consumer-­facing brand expanded its appeal while staying true to its foundational equities. Conservative Burberry got sexy by putting its tartan pattern on bikinis. Tiffany signed Elsa Peretti to design more accessibly priced silver and gold jewelry that was still distinctively elegant. Traditional Disney acquired Pixar’s more modern storytelling. By definition, legacy brands can also survive a spate of bad management, bad economies, eve…  ( 6 min )

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The Oakland-based health care giant's five-day strike began Tuesday and spans 500 medical centers. Pharmacists, midwives and rehab therapists are among those striking.  ( 23 min )

Shedding the Bear's Lair name, Headlands Brewing hopes to find success with a refresh of the south campus location that has gone through five owners since 2015.  ( 28 min )

From farmers markets to trivia nights, we put together a roundup of events and activities held regularly in Berkeley.  ( 35 min )

In the 1920s, we first measured the distances to objects beyond our own Milky Way, and swiftly discovered that the Universe was expanding: consistent with how Einstein’s General Relativity tells us the Universe would evolve. If the Universe was expanding today, that implies it was smaller — and hotter, and denser, and more uniform — in the past, leading to the idea of the hot Big Bang. Starting in the 1960s, the Big Bang’s greatest predictions were confirmed, leading to widespread acceptance of the theory. However, a few unexplained puzzles remained, leading scientists to question whether the most extreme predictions of the Big Bang, including arbitrarily high temperatures and an origin from a singularity, were actually correct. In the early 1980s, a revolutionary new theory was proposed, …  ( 16 min )

In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated.  It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told…  ( 8 min )

During the late 19th and early 20th century, coal miners in Europe and North America used canaries as living carbon monoxide alarms. Due to their high metabolism and sensitive respiratory system, these small, yellow songbirds succumbed to the invisible, odorless gas much faster than humans. As soon as the small cages strapped to their tool belts stopped chirping and chattering, the miners knew it was time to head back up. Several lifetimes and technological revolutions later, this unconventional safety measure has resurfaced in the title of a monumental study — one concerned with a different potential hazard: artificial intelligence. Published in late August by the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University, Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artifi…  ( 10 min )

Gratitude connects us, but how we express it might matter more than we think. Baylor professor of psychology and neuroscience Sarah Schnitker explores how practicing gratitude can lead to stronger relationships and greater well-being. Her lab found that gratitude expressed through prayer may offer even more benefits than journaling or speaking it aloud, and that feeling connected to something larger may help combat today’s growing loneliness. This video This research team studies gratitude. Here’s what they’ve found. is featured on Big Think.  ( 5 min )

Steve Jobs introducing the 'digital hub' concept, Macworld SF, January 2001; via Stefano Paris. When Steve Jobs opened Macworld on January 9, 2001, he boasted that in addition to the live audience in San Francisco, “we're streaming all the way up to a megabit per second all around the world.” Although he only mentioned streaming a couple more times during the event, it was a hint of what was to come. At around the 40-minute mark, Jobs began talking about what Apple’s vision was in 2001, especially now that the economy was mired in a post-dot-com depression. He referenced some media reports that the PC had become boring and that its impact was waning. He talked about two “golden ages” for the PC: from 1980-1994, based around productivity applications, and 1995-2000, “the age of the Internet…  ( 5 min )

The post Rescuing Democracy From The Quiet Rule Of AI appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 24 min )

Seoul Hotdog and Roasted and Raw were among the restaurants to shutter recently.  ( 24 min )

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better. The post Researchers Discover the Optimal Way To Optimize first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

Whether you serve this protein-packed Edamame Salad as a side dish or make it a light meal, it’s sure to be a hit! Crisp veggies and avocado pair with edamame and white beans, and it’s all tossed in an Asian-inspired ginger garlic dressing. Edamame isn’t just for snacking on at your favourite sushi restaurant! It […]  ( 17 min )

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Every year, the same meteor showers recur once again. This comet, imaged in 2015 and known as C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy, brightened sufficiently to become as bright as magnitude +4: visible to the naked human eye even under fairly light-polluted conditions. When Comet Halley returns, it will only be about 5-6 times brighter than this, but when Comet Swift-Tuttle next returns, it will be about 20 times brighter. Swift-Tuttle is far more massive and dangerous than the other known periodic comets. Although comets have been recorded for thousands of years, their periodic nature was only uncovered in the 18th century, by Edmond Halley. Credit: John Vermette / MIT News As Earth revolves around the Sun, it periodically crosses cometary and asteroidal orbits. Each year, Earth passes through the debri…  ( 8 min )

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Apollo Quiboloy — according to his followers — is the appointed son of God. He’s also at the center of a criminal empire, an explosive rift in the government of the Philippines, and a shift in the makeup of global Christianity.  ( 16 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

How a liver goes from a brain-dead donor to a living recipient.

It’s no secret that the Universe and the objects present within it, as we see them all today, have changed over time as the Universe has grown up over the past 13.8 billion years. Galaxies are larger, more massive, more evolved, and are richer in stars but fewer in number than they were back in the early stages of cosmic history. By looking farther and farther away, we can see the Universe as it was at earlier times, but we’re going to be limited in many ways: by how deep our telescopes can see, by what wavelengths they’re capable of seeing, and by what small fraction of the sky they’re capable of observing. That’s why an observing program like COSMOS-Web, the largest, widest-field JWST observing program to date, is so important. It isn’t just revealing galaxies as they are nearby (at late times), at a variety of intermediate distances (and earlier times), and at ultra-large distances (and the earliest times of all), but due to its wide-field nature, is revealing galaxy types of varying abundances: the common-type galaxies, galaxies that are representative of more uncommon varieties, and even significant numbers of rare galaxies. And it’s this aspect of galaxy evolution that makes me so proud and lucky to welcome Dr. Olivia Cooper to the podcast. Olivia is a recently-minted PhD who works as part of the COSMOS-Web team, specializing in galaxy evolution and using JWST data — along with data from other world-class observatories — to investigate how the galaxies in our Universe grew up, and what that can teach us about our own cosmic past. It truly is a banger of an episode that you’ll want to listen to every minute of, so tune in and dive deep into the depths of the distant Universe on our latest adventure of the Starts With A Bang podcast! This article Starts With A Bang podcast #122 – Galaxy evolution and JWST is featured on Big Think.  ( 5 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Toss spiced roast veg with creamy butter beans, fresh mint and zesty lemon, then pile it all high on a big platter This year, I bought three oval platters: a small, silver-plated one from a local charity shop on which I serve crisps to make them look fancy; a medium-sized splattered enamel one for everyday everything; and a very large, stainless-steel one for dinner parties. I’m not sure why this happened, but I can tell you that I love the energy that platters give to a table, and the gentle sense of pomp and ceremony they lend even the simplest of meals. My love for the platter has dictated today’s recipe, a final fling with the very last of the summer vegetables served over whipped feta. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 23 min )

It’s not yet clear how SB 79, which Newsom signed Friday, will affect what gets built in Berkeley, where the flatlands were rezoned for denser construction earlier this year.  ( 29 min )

An advertising firm said each of its “smart kiosk” devices would generate more than $26,000 in revenue for the city. They actually made less than $5,000.  ( 28 min )

Rachel Richardson’s third book of poems is set amid the pandemic and California wildfires. After it went to press, she decided she wanted to “take actual action” and become a firefighter.  ( 26 min )

The post ‘Constitutional Patriotism’ appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 10 min )

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1816 letter — when the United States turned 40 years old, and the War of Independence was slowly starting to fade from living memory into history. “They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.” Jefferson couldn’t disagree more with the sentiment. Convinced that American democracy would survive only if the government could be repaired and updated, he and the other Founding Fathers made sure the Constitution came with a built-in provision for amending its own contents. Unfortunately, the conditions for pushing through such an amendment — a two-thirds majorit…  ( 9 min )

This video The alarm bells are sounding for young men. Will we listen? is featured on Big Think.  ( 16 min )

The same pulling force that causes “tears” in a glass of wine also shapes embryos. It’s another example of how genes exploit mechanical forces for growth and development. The post Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Help Grow Living Things first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

My vegan Million Dollar Spaghetti recipe is meaty, creamy, and cheesy—all without meat, cream, or cheese! Simple plant-based swaps make this baked pasta unbelievably delicious. Million dollar spaghetti is one of those recipes that’s been floating around the internet for a while, but the traditional version is made with meat sauce and cheese. I’ve been […]  ( 22 min )

Here in our modern Universe, even in just our own Milky Way, we observe stars in all different stages of life: molecular gas clouds that are contracting and fragmenting, leading to protostars and young stellar objects, becoming full-fledged stars with protoplanetary disks around them, conventional stars burning through their fuel with their own fully-formed planetary systems, stars evolving into subgiants, giants, and even supergiants, stars dying in planetary nebulae, supernovae, and other life-ending events, and stellar remnants of now-extinct stars like white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. We can trace back the history of our Universe a full 13.8 billion years, to the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, measuring the star-formation rate all throughout our cosmic history. It wa…  ( 16 min )

If the U.S. were only 100 people, this is what they’d believe: 63 are Christian, 30 are religiously unaffiliated, and 7 have a non-Christian faith. This graph maps those differences out into more specific categories, bringing blink-of-an-eye clarity to a complex topic. But it does not show changes over time. And those changes add critical context. Credit: Ryan Burge on X) The graph is based on the third of Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Studies. Taken together, they reveal a dramatic drop in the number of Americans self-identifying as Christian: from 78% in 2007, 71% in 2014, and down to 63% in its latest survey (2023-24). That last figure, however, seems to be holding steady since 2019. In other words, the decline of Christianity in America appears to have stabilized. Here’…  ( 6 min )

An important fact of life is that it’s often difficult to know what will make you happy, but quite easy to identify what will make you miserable. When faced with a difficult problem — and how to spend money in a way that will improve your life certainly is — it can help to work backward, reducing and excluding what doesn’t work until what’s left over is a decent approximation of favorable traits. Evolution works in similar ways, so thoroughly destroying what doesn’t work that what’s left over tends to work quite well. Or think about health: What foods are good for you is an endless debate, and no one who’s honest with the evidence can say they know the perfect diet. But what’s bad for you is much more settled. I have no idea if a glass of red wine is good for me. I am 100% sure that cigare…  ( 8 min )

I recently returned from two weeks in Europe, where many conversations circled a similar theme: Europe’s struggle to keep pace in the AI era. In Lisbon, the former Portuguese finance minister Paulo Portas put it bluntly: “If Europe doesn’t innovate, it will become the museum of the world.” This week’s Noema essay by Nathan Gardels captures that tension perfectly — the growing divide between America’s accelerationism and Europe’s caution. In the U.S., billions are pouring into AI infrastructure; in Europe, the focus remains on ethics, transparency, and control. Gardels argues that both approaches are necessary: America’s restless innovation pushes humanity forward, while Europe’s restraint ensures progress remains humane. “AI differs from nuclear weapons because it is a foundational technol…  ( 10 min )

What can fiction reveal that history and journalism leave hidden? Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lawrence Wright turns to the novel to explore the lives caught in conflict in Israel and Palestine. His book The Human Scale uses narrative to confront the unequal ways lives are valued in this region, asking whether storytelling can expose truths that politics can obscure. This video Lawrence Wright: Fiction goes where reporting cannot follow is featured on Big Think.  ( 12 min )

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Plus: Kaiser and Sutter workers are preparing to strike, and a UC Berkeley vision scientist has won a MacArthur "genius award."  ( 22 min )

Host Mychal Threets, a librarian who grew famous on TikTok, has done events at Berkeley libraries before, including leading a day last year celebrating Black hair.  ( 25 min )

Two-thirds of dispatcher positions were vacant at one point earlier this year. A top police official called staffing in the 911 center an “ongoing crisis.”  ( 27 min )

Entering its eighth decade, the Richmond institution is a late night oasis with a menu that has expanded far beyond donuts.  ( 27 min )

Es la primera vez que comunidades chicanas, mexicanas y latinas de la ciudad son protagonistas en importante muestra de la Sociedad Histórica de Berkeley.  ( 28 min )

Other events include the Sound Tracks Jazz Festival at Norh Berkeley BART and a book talk with Booker Prize finalist Brandon Taylor.  ( 26 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

The post The Surprisingly Lifelike Behavior Of Mindless Material appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 23 min )

Of all the planets visible in the night sky, either with the naked eye or the aid of a powerful telescope, none is more recognizable or iconic than Saturn. With its giant system of rings, Saturn’s appearance is immediately discernible, setting it apart from all the other known planets. First observed as “ears” by Galileo in 1609, a sharper view reveals that Saturn doesn’t have a shape like an amphibian’s eyes, but rather an expansive set of rings, detached and separated from the planet it surrounds. Over time, gaps, moons, moonlets, and a plethora of other features have been found above, below, inside, outside, and even within Saturn’s rings. None of the rocky planets, asteroids, or known Kuiper belt objects have a system of rings. Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune possess them, but they’re all…  ( 16 min )

Anxiety doesn’t vanish with practice. In fact, in actor Jesse Eisenberg’s experience, it can grow even sharper even after repetition. Eisenberg’s stories from stage and film sets reveal what performance anxiety teaches us about how the brain works, and how we can rewire it to work better for us. Rather than treating panic as a flaw, the actor argues it can be redirected into focus and authenticity. This video Jesse Eisenberg: How to rewire your anxiety into authenticity is featured on Big Think.  ( 11 min )

Artificial intelligence is trained on data. It will process billions of words of human text, countless images, and the inane, ridiculous questions of its human users. It will learn to write in the active voice most of the time, and to keep sentences under 200 characters. It will learn that dogs have four legs and the Sun is normally yellow. And it might learn that Lorraine Woodward of Ontario wants to know how to prevent the buildup of ear wax. Most of what we feed into AI has been made by a human — human art, human text, human prompts. And so, it’s clear that AI will inherit the biases and prejudices of human intelligence. For example, a lot has been written about how “racist” and “sexist” AI is. “Draw a picture of a doctor,” we might prompt. AI whirrs through its stock catalogue, where …  ( 7 min )

When we are born, our brains are only about 40% of the size they will reach by adulthood. As we grow, our environments, experiences, and cultures shape both our understanding of the world and the way our brains develop. This is why language is so important: it gives us a tool for growth, thought, and cultural expansion. Daniel Dennett, PhD, Ethan Kross, PhD, and Agustín Fuentes, PhD explain how belief, language, inner chatter, and rituals work together to make us distinctively human. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video How humans create reality through language and beliefs is featured on Big Think.  ( 6 min )

Over half of East Bay workers were not paid enough to support a four-person household, UC Berkeley researchers found.  ( 24 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 22 min )

The musical, based on the "Little Orphan Annie" comic strip, won multiple Tony Awards in 1977.  ( 22 min )

UC Berkeley's Omar M. Yaghi was one of three to win the chemistry prize on Wednesday, a day after John Clarke won the prize for physics.  ( 25 min )

It’s the first time the city’s Chicano, Mexican and Latinx communities have been spotlit in a major show at the Berkeley Historical Society.  ( 26 min )

And how you can help write it.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

This Chocolate Avocado Pudding is ultra-rich and decadent, with the creamiest texture and deepest chocolate flavour. Best of all, you only need 10 minutes to make it! If you’re used to using your avocados for Guacamole, you may be skeptical about the idea of this chocolate avocado pudding. But one taste and you’ll be a believer! […]  ( 20 min )

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been an early evolutionary development. The post Loops of DNA Equipped Ancient Life To Become Complex first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 14 min )

Here in the classical world, if you throw a ball against a solid wall, that wall will be impenetrable, and the ball will bounce right back. Do it a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times, and the result will always be the same. As long as the wall remains intact, the ball will always remain on that same, initial side of the wall. Things are a little different in the quantum world, however. If you fire a subatomic particle, like an electron, at a barrier — whether that’s a solid barrier made of atoms or merely an energy barrier, where the particle doesn’t have enough energy, itself, to get to the other side — most of the electrons will bounce back. But there’s a chance, dependent on the: speed and energy of the electron, the height and thickness of the (physical or energy) barrier…  ( 14 min )

Companies are pouring staggering amounts of money into artificial intelligence. IDC projects global spending will surpass half a trillion dollars within the next two years. Boardrooms are talking about it, tech vendors are promising it, and learning and development teams are feeling the pressure to show they’re ‘doing something with AI.’ And yet, the results are almost invisible. MIT recently reported that 95 percent of AI projects fail to deliver measurable outcomes. Despite the unprecedented investment, productivity gains are elusive, employee adoption is shaky, and the business case often collapses under scrutiny. How can we surround ourselves with the most powerful technology in human history, spend billions deploying it, and still struggle to prove it makes us better? The answer isn’t…  ( 7 min )

I’ve known Alex Morris for about five years. From the beginning, I’ve admired his work — his writing, his investment research, and perhaps most of all, his ability to stay relentlessly focused in a field that too often rewards distraction. Alex has always struck me as someone who plays the long game: careful in his thinking, measured in his conclusions, and deeply committed to extracting durable lessons from markets. That’s why I was thrilled when he set out to write a book, Buffett and Munger Unscripted, about Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, arguably the two greatest investors of our time. Plenty of books have been written about them — volumes on their deals, their financial acumen, even their quirks of personality. But Alex’s approach is different. Rather than layering on his own theo…  ( 13 min )

The new era of generative AI constitutes an extraordinary moment given the growth of new technologies that, for the first time, are beginning to provide the kind of scale and supple understanding of human language and communication that could be adequate to the size of the problems on global platforms. These technologies remain flawed at present, but they are clearly rapidly improving in some cases. Some industry experts who have spent years tackling seemingly insurmountable problems are beginning to see real promise in using generative AI for content moderation. Machine-learning technologies have been used for years now in content moderation, but they mostly have been doing complex pattern matching. In effect, generative AI allows for an approach to interpreting user-generated messages th…  ( 10 min )

I first saw China a little more than 35 years ago during a train trip from Hong Kong to Chengdu, a city deep in the interior of the country near the mountains that rise up into Tibet. The train was powered by steam, and the trip took four days and nights, winding through the hills and small mountains.  The China I saw out of that train’s window was the same one a traveler could have seen 100 or more years prior. At the time of my visit, China was a nation of close to a billion rural peasants living in small villages and mostly growing rice in paddies as far as you could see. For an American like me, it was like traveling back in time. I took that same train route a month ago, and instead of four days, the trip took just eight hours. The train was one of the new fully electric, high-speed o…  ( 18 min )

Some experiences in life simply can’t be prepared for. You can imagine how you might feel and what you might do, but you can never actually know how you will respond in a situation until it happens. Falling in love, becoming a parent, and facing one’s mortality all fit into this category. In the workplace, your first interview, first day on the job, and the first time you’re given the responsibility of managing others fall into this category. For a select few who successfully climb the corporate ladder, becoming CEO also lands there. Oliver Bäte, CEO of European financial services company Allianz, puts it starkly: “You don’t really know what happens on the job until the day you have it.”  What makes the top job so different from the leadership roles that come before it? To start with, new …  ( 8 min )

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Still from a 2000 Homestar Runner Flash toon; via Internet Archive. After the hype and fear of Y2K (a.k.a. the Millenium bug) quickly faded in January 2000, the internet continued its mostly joyful rise in the culture. Sure, the dot-com bubble got pricked in March and then slowly deflated, but the web itself didn't stop growing. Over 2000, "the Net" became an even more colorful, and increasingly social, place to hang out. Animated Flash pages were everywhere, bloggers were discovering and connecting to each other, social news sites like Slashdot and MetaFilter were rising in prominence. So despite the flagging economy, creativity in web design plus community in blogs and social news came to define the year 2000. The Web Keeps Growing, Even as the Bubble Bursts We have to start, though, wit…  ( 5 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

It’s the first time the transit agency’s Sound Tracks concert series will throw an outdoor party in partnership with SFJAZZ.  ( 25 min )

The grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture will allow Saba to create a Food Hub at the Oakland produce terminal and offer its services across Alameda County.  ( 26 min )

Cal physicist John Clarke and two other scientists won the prize for research on the weird world of sub-atomic quantum tunneling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.  ( 25 min )

The pharmaceutical company's campus in West Berkeley is in Phase 3 trials for a new kind of treatment.  ( 24 min )

They’re fun, they’re green, they’re cheaper than ever. From 1 to 81, Berkeley residents of all ages and abilities are taking to e-bikes — used for commutes, school drop-offs, grocery trips and joy rides.  ( 33 min )

The post Editing Nature To Fix Our Failures appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 30 min )

Here on Earth, at least 3.8 billion years ago and perhaps even earlier in our planet’s history, life emerged on our world, and has persisted ever since. We’ve had photosynthetic life for at least the last 2.7 billion years. We’ve had eukaryotic life, with differentiated organelles inside its cells, for more than 2 billion years. Multicellular life and sexual reproduction have been around for over a billion years. And plants, animals, and fungi all emerged more than 500 million years ago. More recently, our own species emerged on Earth: not only intelligent, but technologically advanced, transforming our world and having taken our first steps into space beginning in the 20th century. Uncovering this story, coupled with the recognition that the raw ingredients that led to life on Earth are f…  ( 15 min )

Is AI in a bubble? That’s the basic yet seismic question on a lot of people’s minds. But here’s the thing: It’s oversimplified, attempting to color an unprecedentedly gray moment either black or white. And what does the query even mean? If you’re asking about whether or not the valuations of certain AI startups and the companies that supply them are overvalued relative to their current financials, there’s a strong case for answering in the affirmative. If you’re asking whether the hype over AI has raced ahead of the technological landscape in regards to it attaining artificial general intelligence or rapidly destroying the labor market — the answer might be “probably.” But if you’re asking whether AI will ultimately fizzle out and go down in history as the fever dream of a science-fiction…  ( 10 min )

To sell or not to sell — that’s the question many entrepreneurs ask themselves when their startups manage to beat the imposing odds and achieve financial success. Sell too soon, and you may lose out on growth that’s yet to come. Wait too long, and you risk cashing out after your business has already peaked. At one point, Andrew Gazdecki belonged to the second of these two cohorts. “I held on because I was attached,” he says of his first company, Bizness Apps, which he sold in 2017. The company, a publishing platform that helps businesses develop mobile apps, began life in 2010, riding the smartphone revolution kickstarted by Apple. When, years later, Bizness Apps began losing customers, and continued losing customers, part of Gazdecki knew it was time to sell. And yet he waited. Although, …  ( 9 min )

Historian and free speech advocate Jacob Mchangama explains how suppressing voices often has the opposite effect. From the crucifixion of Jesus fueling Christianity to Barbra Streisand accidentally amplifying photos of her Malibu mansion, attempts at censorship often strengthen what they aim to silence. Mchangama argues that while free speech can be messy and ugly, it remains essential to preserve its many benefits. This video How censorship turns ordinary men into martyrs is featured on Big Think.  ( 5 min )

New restaurant openings include Campus Burger, Cafe Brusco and Yard Milkshake Bar.  ( 26 min )

Supervisors want more time to consider rules that would limit county investments in fossil fuels, guns, tobacco, and human rights violators.  ( 26 min )

His achievement is made possible by Incarceration to College, an initiative supporting system-impacted youth in accessing higher education.  ( 25 min )

Strawberry Summer Cake in Smitten Kitchen Keepers. The second is the Opera Cake (Gâteau Opéra), a stacked and striped dessert with thin almond cake layers soaked in espresso syrup, chocolate ganache, and a rich espresso buttercream. The difference between the first cake and the second is that the second recipe was never going to happen. In the nearly two decades of Smitten Kitchen’s existence, I’ve again and again begun researching what a homemade opera cake would entail and every time, slammed the proverbial book shut because it was just too much. A joconde! French buttercream! Soaking syrup! Chocolate layer! Many separated eggs! And what about all of that espresso? There are children present! And elderly people (me) who probably shouldn’t drink coffee after 4pm! If I could barely talk myself into it, how would I convince you? Maybe some things are best left to the professionals, I concluded. Read more »  ( 21 min )

There has been a push toward animal-free alternatives in scientific research. But the success of such alternatives hinges upon whether and where they can outperform standard animal models.

The amplituhedron, a shape at the heart of particle physics, appears to be deeply connected to the mathematics of paper folding. The post Origami Patterns Solve a Major Physics Riddle first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

This vegan Caesar Pasta Salad is savoury, tangy, and garlicky, with a fantastic combination of textures, from crunchy baked chickpeas to crisp romaine and tender pasta. Delicious! What happens when you combine the savoury, garlicky, crisp-and-crunchy goodness of a Vegan Caesar Salad with pasta salad? You get this Caesar pasta salad recipe, of course! This […]  ( 19 min )

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The JWST era continues to show us the Universe as never before. This highly unusual object was spotted with JWST: a background spiral galaxy heavily distorted by the gravitational lensing effects of a foreground elliptical galaxy. This data was part of the Strong Lensing and Cluster Evolution (SLICE) survey, which targets galaxy cluster evolution; an independent complement to the gravitational lenses found as part of the wider-field COSMOS-Web survey. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Mahler; Acknowledgement: M. A. McDonald Its recently completed COSMOS-Web survey provides our deepest wide-field views ever. This image composite shows the full-field of a large galaxy cluster within the COSMOS-Web survey, using a combination of JWST NIRCam and Hubble infrared data, with X-ray data from t…  ( 9 min )

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Criminal networks throughout Southeast Asia are demonstrating the dangers of making “the ultimate exit.”  ( 10 min )

A breakfast (or lunch, or brunch) all-in-one tortilla treat Imagine a world full of all-in-one options. One type of lightbulb! A single charger for all the gadgets! One battery size! One remote control! One type of Tupperware! Universal buttons! One insurance policy for life, death and everything in between! One pan lid for all the pans! Wouldn’t that be great? That’s what the burrito, with its multiple ingredients swaddled in tortilla, promises. Except that I haven’t always loved the heft of them and the way the flavours merge too readily. So I’ve written my own recipe. For me, this is the one. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

Peyrin Kao, a Cal lecturer, says he’s lost 15 pounds since he started his hunger in solidarity with residents of Gaza enduring famine.  ( 28 min )

A group sued Berkeley over three City Council meetings that were moved to a private conference room after protesters interrupted them.  ( 25 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 22 min )

The Berkeley Federation of Teachers and BUSD began the school year with an expired labor agreement.  ( 26 min )

Author of over 20 books, including "Pornography and Silence" and "A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War," Griffin's influential work both named injury and opened a door toward repair.  ( 24 min )

The post AI Acceleration Vs. Precaution appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 16 min )

This vegan Banh Mi Bowl recipe is colourful, flavourful, and loaded with textures! Chewy rice noodles are topped with crispy tofu and veggies, then drizzled with a sweet-and-savoury sauce and creamy sriracha mayo. You might say I’ve been on a banh mi kick lately. My Air Fryer Tofu inspired me to make a Crispy Tofu […]  ( 18 min )

The V-JEPA system uses ordinary videos to understand the physics of the real world. The post How One AI Model Creates a Physical Intuition of Its Environment first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

Trauma doesn’t vanish when danger does. According to psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, the body acts as an archive, holding fear, pain, and survival instincts long after the moment passes.  Van der Kolk explains why conventional treatments for trauma fall short, and the promising new pathways to healing that science is revealing. This video Bessel van der Kolk: Trauma isn’t the event, it’s the response is featured on Big Think.  ( 35 min )

Going all the way back to ancient times — sometimes attributed to Persia, other times to King Solomon, and still at other times to far eastern sources — one of the most important reminders of the transient nature of all things, good and bad, is encapsulated in the simple saying, “this too shall pass.” Both joy and sorrow are temporary, as is life itself. The stars, shining brightly throughout the sky, will all someday burn out; the galaxies will someday turn dark. Even if the timescales for some of these phenomena are barely fathomable to the human mind, the fact remains that everything within the Universe, and even the Universe itself, will someday cease to exist as we know it. But has science truly learned enough to declare what the nature of our ultimate cosmic demise will be? Can we sp…  ( 15 min )

I have made a habit of standing on as many points along the New England coastline as possible and one can simply inhabit, in a moment, the moody, treacherous, rocky Gothic settings that gave rise to Lovecraftian imagery and weird, witchy, haunted tales. The atmosphere of a Gothic novel creeps over you; encroaching mist along the outcroppings. Nowhere felt as immersive to me as the coast I’ve described in southern Maine. Into that atmosphere, a ghost ship was born after it never came home. Along Casco Bay and around the Harpswell-Freeport region, repeated, spectral sightings of a schooner named the Dash have been seen along the irregular, rocky coastlines for over two centuries. The Dash, at any moment, may try in vain to dock again to change her fate. She might be an omen of inclement weat…  ( 9 min )

One of my favorite parts of writing publicly is that it acts like a beacon, attracting unexpected and fascinating conversations. Case in point: a few weeks ago, Dr. Susan Schneider — the philosopher, author, and cognitive scientist — emailed me in response to a recent newsletter I had written. Her message turned into a phone call, which then developed into a deep and unexpected exchange about the real risks of AI. Susan and I ended up shaping that conversation into a recent Long Game column for Big Think, where Susan introduced me to some of her latest work, focusing on the “megasystem problem”: networks of AI systems colluding in ways we can’t anticipate. Her perspective is fascinating, and it’s exactly the kind of conversation I hope this newsletter continues to spark. Key quote: “The de…  ( 10 min )

Black holes sit at the crossroads of the two most powerful ideas in physics: relativity and quantum theory. Physicist Brian Cox explains why the mysterious giants force us to confront the deepest questions about space, time, and the structure of reality itself. Cox traces the unlikely history of black hole thought, from the 18th-century notion of “dark stars” to Stephen Hawking’s breakthroughs. This video Brian Cox: The bizarre history of black holes is featured on Big Think.  ( 6 min )

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Also: A 24/7 UC Berkeley hotline for survivors of sexual violence and sexual harassment has been discontinued. And three traffic collisions in four days on Rose Street.  ( 24 min )

A $16.5 million project in the neighborhood bordering UC Berkeley has replaced room for cars with new infrastructure for pedestrians, bikes and buses.  ( 27 min )

Diversify your diet, spice up home meals, and support Bay Area growers, ranchers and fishermen with a subscription to a community supported agriculture program.  ( 29 min )

Some UC Berkeley post docs and grad students might see an interruption in their pay, though they may be eligible for emergency grants from campus.  ( 28 min )

Medicaid, Medicare, Affordable Care Act, and Social Security service should remain steady. But national parks are closed and courts could see impacts.  ( 28 min )

The home is both rooted in history and updated for contemporary living and sustainability.  ( 24 min )

Other events include a talk by a Berkeley author on his new Bruce Lee book and Erwin Chemerinsky lecturing on the Supreme Court's norm-breaking last term.  ( 26 min )

The post Reclaiming Europe’s Digital Sovereignty appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 28 min )

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When you view anything at all in the Universe, you’re not seeing it precisely as it is right now: at the moment you experience seeing it. The speed of light, even though it’s the fastest speed that any signal can travel throughout the Universe, is still finite. No matter how close or distant an object is, you’re only seeing it as it was a particular amount of time ago: at the moment the now-arriving light was emitted from the object you’re observing. The fact that light has to travel through space, from the emitted object to the observer that sees it, explains why there’s a gap that we have to fill in through inference alone. Every observer in the Universe, so long as they haven’t spent a large amount of time traveling close to the speed of light (or in an extraordinarily large gravitation…  ( 15 min )

Not all conversations are the same. Sometimes, you can be talking to someone for hours, and it feels like only a few minutes. You natter and natter without ever having to think of what to say or cringe through any awkward silence. There’s a gentle sway to things — you listen, they speak, they listen, you speak. The chat dances to the easy and comfortable rhythm of the conversational tide. At other times, a conversation can feel like medieval torture. One-word answers litter the path toward your desperate, fumbling attempt to get away. You’ve already used the toilet excuse, you’ve got a full drink, so you’re stuck in your chatless hell with Captain Boring. “So, how often do you feed your dog?” you ask. “It depends.” Silence. In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, the neuroscientist Ben R…  ( 6 min )

Sleep helps us recharge, but research suggests its impact is far larger than recharging our physical and mental batteries.  According to Patrick McNamara PhD, Shelby Harris PsyD, DBSM, and Dave Asprey, sleep is imperative to restoring cells, regulating metabolism, consolidating memory, and synchronizing the body’s internal clocks. REM in particular aided human cultural evolution, allowing our ancestors to make creative leaps by connecting disparate ideas. With this powerful ability, humanity was able to advance past lives of pure survival and into ones filled with art, science, and culture. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video How REM sleep unlocks human function is featured on Big Think.  ( 6 min )

Six assorted examples  ( 21 min )

I’ve begun a new archiving project: republishing articles I wrote a long time ago, but that have since disappeared from the web or been mangled in some way (for example, the page design is outdated or the content is out of place with its new surroundings). I’m calling this activity “replanting” — because it feels like moving a neglected plant, perhaps crowded by weeds and eaten by bugs, into a new garden, where it will be cared for and nurtured again. Of course, I’m borrowing from the digital garden approach to personal publishing advocated by Maggie Appleton and others. Maggie even uses the term “plant” to mean posting an item (and “tend” to edit). That’s probably where the similarities end, because Maggie defines a digital garden as a collection of notes — “evolving ideas that aren’t st…  ( 3 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

Gifted to the city by a wealthy banker in 1919, the steeply wooded park at the base of the Berkeley Hills is a draw for Shakespeare troupes and families.  ( 29 min )

For refusing to sign a loyalty oath, she was barred from practicing law and targeted by the FBI. Founder of Berkeley's Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, she pioneered the field of "peace law," defended Angela Davis and wrote the resolution establishing Berkeley as a Human Rights City.  ( 27 min )

Biotechnology needs more and better transducers.

“Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it. The post A Thermometer for Measuring Quantumness first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

This spooky Monster Breakfast Sandwich is a scarily delicious way to kick off Halloween! Buttery vegan croissants are filled with savoury tofu scramble, mashed avocado slime, and veggies, forming a fun monster face! While I’ve always loved holidays, now that I’m a mom, I totally feel that need to make those fun holiday memories and […]  ( 18 min )

For the past 60+ years, the name NASA has been synonymous with humanity’s vision to dream about horizons far beyond the bounds of our terrestrial worries. NASA was the first agency in history to not only bring humans to the Moon, but to: send rovers to Mars, reveal the distant galaxies lurking in the depths of deep space, send orbiting missions directly to the outer planets, to land a probe on a moon of Saturn, to fly past Pluto, to send spacecraft beyond the limits of our own Solar System and into interstellar space, to have a spacecraft touch the Sun, along with so many other accomplishments. Perhaps most importantly, NASA gave hope to the entire world. In addition to its endeavors in spaceflight, NASA brought to us the idea of space exploration, and using a presence in space to better u…  ( 14 min )

Here’s a curious fact that often slips by unnoticed: Philosophers rarely change their minds. Across the history of the discipline, you could count on two hands those who openly revised their positions on major questions.  This is surprising, given philosophy’s very nature. It thrives on debate, supplying endless reasons to question one’s stance. Philosopher Will Buckingham once remarked that, if reasoned dialogue worked as we might expect, philosophers would be shifting their views “with a quicksilver frequency that would put the rest of us to shame.” After all, in a world teeming with critical colleagues and formidable counterarguments, one might imagine minds constantly turning over. The ideal philosopher, we assume, would be supple, guided by evidence, and willing to follow arguments wh…  ( 14 min )

It should not be surprising at this point in the history of management to hear that people are much more willing to accept and be engaged in changes where they participated in making them. We should not expect employees to be asked to endorse management’s idea that we need to come back to the office, but helping to lay out the case as to how it is done, whether and how exceptions should be made, and crucially, what did we learn from remote work that we can carry over requires employee involvement. Even something as simple as adding evidence from employee poll results to support some aspect of the change would help. Only 24% of employers surveyed their employees about their return to office plans in 2022. Whether that figure has increased is not clear.  There are ways for organizations to…  ( 5 min )

In 2010, early in my time as CDC director, I visited Nigeria to strengthen our collaboration on disease control. Doctors told me of a terrible outbreak. In villages of the Anka area of Zamfara, a state in northern Nigeria, dozens of severe abdominal pain, headache, and seizures. It was a tragedy; it was also a mystery. The most likely cause of an increase in childhood deaths is malaria, which kills more than 400,000 children a year and can cause seizures. But there was no report of the spiking fevers that characterize malaria. Lack of fever also made pneumonia, the most common cause of childhood death, less likely. The absence of diarrhea and dehydration ruled out cholera and other intestinal infections, the third most common cause of death. Seizures can be a symptom of meningitis, which a…  ( 10 min )

Being happy and positive at work can be a win-­win for employees and organizations. According to University of Oxford research, an extensive study showed that employees are 13% more productive when happy. According to Shawn Achor, the author of The Happiness Advantage, positivity in the workplace, grounded in gratitude and appreciation, can lead to three times more creativity, 23% fewer fatigue symptoms, and 37% greater sales. And finally Better Up, one of the largest mental health and coaching startups, offers that having a positive mind- set can lead individuals to better problem-­solve, have a greater ability to adapt to change, and have stronger leadership skills. But what happens when your boss decides to weaponize positivity in the workplace?  Over the course of my career, I have see…  ( 7 min )

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Shawn Fanning from Napster wearing a Metallica shirt to the 2000 MTV Awards; via Reddit. In May 2000, Napster’s poster boy, Shawn Fanning, was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek magazine in a suit and bowtie, alongside four other “most influential people in electronic business.” Three of the four other companies represented — Yahoo, eBay and Amazon — were well established and successful dot-com businesses, and all would survive the internet economy downturn. The other company, Softbank, was a renowned investment bank. Fanning was much younger than the other executives pictured (who included Jeff Bezos) and he was the only one on the cover not smiling. Perhaps Fanning’s grim visage was due to Napster’s legal issues — including the case brought by the Recording Industry Association of Ame…  ( 8 min )

Coast live oaks around the campus have dropped their leaves and turned gray and brown, even though they’re evergreens. Experts say the trees should recover soon.  ( 24 min )

Coracao Chocolate specializes in gluten-free, dairy-free and peanut-free treats made from scratch.  ( 29 min )

He won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for finding the background radiation that finally pinned down the Big Bang theory of the universe’s beginning.  ( 24 min )

Medicaid, Medicare, Affordable Care Act, and Social Security service should remain steady. But national parks and courts could see impacts.  ( 26 min )

Holton Studio Frame-Makers and Stained Glass Garden are among the two dozen makers giving tours Oct. 3-9.  ( 25 min )

The post Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily. appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 45 min )

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Here on planet Earth, everything that we see, feel, or interact with is composed of atoms. There are approximately 90 naturally occurring species of atom that we can find on Earth, and approximately 30 more that we can synthesize under laboratory conditions. We’ve learned, thanks to the power of modern science, that atoms themselves are not fundamental, but rather can be divided into smaller chunks: electrons and an atomic nucleus, where the nucleus in turn can be further decomposed into protons and neutrons, which themselves are each made up of quarks and gluons. Only when we reach that deep of a level — the level of electrons, quarks, and gluons — do we encounter particles that are truly fundamental. But the word atom itself, derived from the Greek word ατομός, literally means uncuttable…  ( 14 min )

When I was finishing university, I was so anxious about what came next that I started applying for jobs an entire year before graduation. When I left a big tech job, I threw myself straight into a startup. I rushed into new relationships after breakups, or into the next project as soon as the previous one ended. I’ve often filled the gaps too quickly, because the in-between felt impossible to sit with. And I know I’m not the only one. Maybe you just left a job without knowing what’s next. Maybe you’ve left a job without knowing what’s next, moved to a new city, or found yourself in that strange territory after a relationship ends. These moments are destabilizing. You’re standing in the hallway between who you were and who you’re becoming. Your brain screams for certainty, for solid ground,…  ( 6 min )

It was 1943. And the US Army had a plan to create the future faster. The plan began with ENIAC [Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer]. Commissioned by the Army Ordinance Corps at the midpoint of World War II, ENIAC was the world’s first electronic general-purpose computer. Built of metal cabinets packed with 17,468 vacuum tubes (descendants of the lightbulb that would, in later decades, be superseded by transistors), it could dash through five-thousand additions a second — at the cost of enough kilowatts to power your modern household for three years. ENIAC’s thirty-ton bulk can now be replicated by microgram circuits. But its infallible logic gates were proof of concept for artificialintelligence, hailed by 1940s futurists like John von Neumann as a replacement for the human brain…  ( 8 min )

Popular media has made loneliness look bad, but is it really? Author and psychologist Ethan Kross explains his study of loneliness, finding that it is actually our response to loneliness – rather than the act of being alone itself – that has negative effects. If we reframe loneliness as an opportunity instead of a threat, it can have surprising benefits for our creativity, well-being, and relationships with ourselves. This video So you spend a lot of time alone. Here’s why that’s not a bad thing. is featured on Big Think.  ( 5 min )

BART's lost and found has processed everything from a backpack full of cash to mountains of car keys, phones and even two ukuleles.  ( 26 min )

Berkeley’s council once toyed with trying to ban drones entirely. Now some council members want police and others to have them for chases, standoffs, rescues and disaster response.  ( 25 min )

Also: Adeline Yoga moves next door to its former space in the Lorin and a new candle refill program launches at Jiā Home on San Pablo.  ( 25 min )

A healthy brain maintains a harmony of neurons that excite or inhibit other neurons, but the lines between different types of cells are blurrier than researchers once thought. The post How the Brain Balances Excitation and Inhibition first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 9 min )

In 4,000 years, cataract surgery went from a crude procedure involving thorn instruments to a 20-minute operation with a 95 percent clinical success rate. The next step is broadening access.

These Jalapeño Cornbread Waffles are the ultimate savoury waffles! They’re made with roasted garlic for extra flavour, and the crispy edges make them irresistible. Perfect for brunch or breakfast for dinner! Friends, these jalapeño cornbread waffles absolutely deserve a place in your breakfast, brunch, or breakfast-for-dinner routine. If you love waffles, but you also love a […]  ( 21 min )

Over the last 100 years, we’ve discovered where our Universe came from. A period of cosmic inflation stretched space flat, seeding the Universe with quantum fluctuations. From a region of space as small as can be imagined (all the way down to the Planck scale), cosmological inflation causes space to expand exponentially: relentlessly doubling and doubling again with each tiny fraction-of-a-second that elapses. Although this empties the Universe and stretches it flat, it also contains quantum fluctuations superimposed atop it: fluctuations that will later provide the seeds for cosmic structure within our own Universe. What happened before the final ~10^-32 seconds of inflation, including the question of whether inflation arose from a singular state before it, not only isn’t known, but may…  ( 11 min )

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In the 1930s, private utilities balked at the task of bringing electricity to rural America. A New Deal agency figured out how to do it more quickly and more cheaply than anyone expected.  ( 14 min )

These versatile sambal-spiked ‘meat’ balls can be adapted in any number of ways, and here they’re drenched in a delicious lemongrass coconut curry sauce Meatballs in whatever shape or form, and meatless or not, are not usually considered to be the latest thing. But they are like old friends, familiar and comforting, and, as such, I’ve been wanting to make a plausible vegan- (and tofu-) based one for some time. A little joyful nugget that could be taken in any direction, from Swedish köttbullar to Vietnamese bun cha. And here it is: I’ve flavoured the balls with a vegeatarian sambal oelek, a zingy chilli sauce and one of my favourite ingredients, and drenched them in a lemongrass coconut curry sauce to put some heat in your belly and a snap in your step. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 22 min )

The Sept. 15 arrest of a man inside the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse exposed the weakness of state and local efforts to make courts accessible and safe.  ( 26 min )

Fatto a Mano Alimentari will feature fresh pastas, Italian wines, and cooking classes; plus, FOB West will bring Filipino tacos and more to the food hall later this year.  ( 26 min )

Co-founder of Berkeley's Reid Records, Betty Reid Soskin celebrated her birthday at her namesake middle school in El Sobrante.  ( 29 min )

Jacobson co-founded the Berkeley firm JSW/D Architects, where he worked for over 40 years.  ( 24 min )

The post A Diverse World Of Sovereign AI Zones appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 11 min )

Using a relatively young theory, a team of mathematicians has started to answer questions whose roots lie at the very beginning of mathematics. The post New Math Revives Geometry’s Oldest Problems first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 14 min )

Sweet, earthy roasted beets make this creamy Beet Hummus extra delicious, and give it the prettiest pink colour! Serve this velvety smooth dip with veggies or use it as a spread for sandwiches, burgers, and more.  I don’t know about you, but I never need an excuse to eat hummus. When I first became a […]  ( 19 min )

Behind the outcome of the 2024 election  lies a deep fracture in the American dream: the choice between affordable places that stall mobility, and dynamic cities that lock people out with impossible prices. This video Why the American dream no longer moves upward is featured on Big Think.  ( 12 min )

One of the most difficult concepts for anyone — even a professional astrophysicist — to wrap their minds around is the idea of the Big Bang and the expanding Universe. Off in the far-flung distance, at the limit of what even our most powerful telescopes can see, are galaxies speeding away from us so quickly that the light their stars emitted has been stretched to as much as twelve times their original wavelength. These stretched light waves are a consequence of the expanding Universe, and they are nearly, but not quite, identical for galaxies that we see in all directions in space. Does that difference, and the fact that one direction has a slightly greater redshift for its objects than the opposite direction, tell us anything about where, all those billions of years ago, the Big Bang actu…  ( 13 min )

My earliest lessons in observation came not from a laboratory but in the living room, with my father in his tuxedo and top hat. To everyone else, he was “Big Ed,” a larger-than-life physician who was a magician, an archer, a raconteur, and much else. By day, he mesmerized patients with his easy confidence; by night, he dazzled guests with sleight-of-hand, conjuring coins from behind ears or producing endless scarves from his sleeve. To me, he was both healer and illusionist, a scientist and showman. When your father is a magician, what do you believe? As a child, the boundary between real and unreal was porous. I wanted to believe in the rabbit pulled from a hat, the floating light bulb, the miraculous escapes. But even as a boy, I began to notice the seams: the telltale flash of a hidden …  ( 6 min )

Astronomer David Kipping has built a career not just at the cutting edge of exoplanet research but also at the forefront of science communication. On his popular YouTube channel, Cool Worlds, Kipping takes viewers on in-depth explorations of subjects like planetary systems, interstellar travel, and the search for life beyond Earth. I first met Kipping at the famous 2018 NASA technosignature meeting in Houston, where the space agency first indicated they would be open to funding work on intelligent life in the Universe. As we are both astrophysicists and science communicators, I wanted to discuss Kipping’s journey from a young stargazer to a Columbia professor, his work on life in the Universe, and the challenges of explaining science in the YouTube era.  Childhood origins Adam Frank: Let’s…  ( 8 min )

One New Kingdom papyrus illustrates a curious case of power being projected along the river through sheer brinkmanship. It is a tale of two rulers and some hippos during one of the fragmented ‘Intermediate Periods’ (mid-second millennium BCE). One ruler was Apepi of the foreign Hyksos 15th Dynasty, at that time based in the delta city of Avaris. The other was Seqenenra Taa II, ruler of the simultaneous and rival 17th Dynasty, based down in Thebes. One day, Apepi sent a messenger south to Thebes to convey a complaint and an instruction to Seqenenra.  Apepi claimed that he was being kept awake at night by ‘the hippopotami from the swamp … in the eastern waters of the city [of Thebes], because they do not allow that sleep come to me, day or night, because their noise is in his ear!’ Seqenenra…  ( 10 min )

Existentialism and absurdism are two of the most popular philosophies in the world, particularly on social media. Existentialism is often represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, while absurdism is often represented by Albert Camus. All were French intellectuals active in the decades following World War II, and they knew one another. They drank, they danced, and they laughed together. But absurdism and existentialism are not the same. In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the philosopher and writer Laura Kennedy about Camus. Camus is often misidentified as an existentialist, and he is even on record as saying he was not one. In fact, as the years went on, the relationship between Sartre and Camus got frostier and frostier. So, behind the bitter op-eds and vi…  ( 6 min )

One of my best friends since we were five years old, Dr. Jeff Kaplan, gave the convocation speech at Williams College earlier this month. Like all best friends, our shared language tends to be debate: we spar over movies, politics, even which back road will save two minutes in traffic. (He’s usually right, which is particularly annoying.) After Williams, Jeff went on to Oxford, Cambridge, and then earned his PhD in philosophy at Berkeley, so it’s no surprise he now makes his living persuading people with reasoning. (I just wish he’d go easier on me at dinner parties.) His speech, which I encourage you to watch, was classic Jeff: gripping, funny, and deeply thoughtful. He told the story of Qantas Flight 32, when an Airbus A380 nearly fell out of the sky after a massive engine failure. The p…  ( 11 min )

Most explanations of human performance lean on psychology or philosophy, but best-selling author Steven Kotler argues that these frameworks are only metaphors. If you want repeatable, measurable science, you need to use biology. By understanding brain networks, Kotler explains how we can engineer peak states like flow, creativity, and focus for peak performance This video How to train your nervous system for optimal performance is featured on Big Think.  ( 8 min )

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Also: Peyrin Kao, one of the 160 students and staff whose names were turned over to the Trump administration, has been on a hunger strike for a month now protesting the tech industry's role “in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”  ( 24 min )

Resources and tips for staying safe, helping your neighborhood, and recovering from the Big One.  ( 26 min )

Harjit Kaur, 73, a longtime seamstress at Sari Palace with no apparent criminal record, says she got only ice cubes to swallow her medication, was refused meals consistent with her faith and forced to sleep on the floor.  ( 27 min )

In the latest installment of Nosh’s Gotta Try It series, we bite into the heart of Peruvian cooking.  ( 27 min )

Teachers and students have largely been left to create their own rules. But new artificial intelligence guidelines and software are on the horizon at BUSD.  ( 30 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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The post Reimagining School In The Age Of AI appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 27 min )

When it comes to the physical Universe, the notion of “nothing” may truly be possible only in theory, not in practice. As we see the Universe today, it appears full of stuff: matter, radiation, antimatter, neutrinos, and even dark matter and dark energy, despite the fact that we don’t truly know the ultimate, fundamental nature of the latter two. Yet even if you took away every single quantum of energy, somehow removing it from the Universe entirely, you wouldn’t be left with an empty Universe. No matter how much you take out of it, the Universe will always generate new forms of energy. How is this possible? It’s like the Universe itself doesn’t understand our idea of “nothing” at all; if we were to remove all the quanta of energy from our Universe, leaving behind only empty space, we woul…  ( 13 min )

Trailblazers are especially sensitive to indicators — always powerful, yet often subtle — that signal it’s time for a change.  Imagine waking up to a persistent signal. Your intuition acknowledges your many achievements but senses the potential for different experiences.  Perhaps while working your current job or engaged in daily activities, you find yourself frequently lost in thoughts of a life more in tune with your deepest passions. When the endeavors that once sparked joy and excitement in you no longer fuel the fire inside but deplete it, it’s a clear sign that a new path awaits.  At night, as the world quiets down, do you find yourself wide‑awake, your mind filled with visions that refuse to be ignored? Problems to be solved, or opportunities that have somehow chosen you, whispering…  ( 6 min )

How does self-awareness connect us to others, society, and the universe? 4 experts explain. Christof Koch, PhD, Daniel Dennett, PhD, Sam Harris, PhD, and Deepak Chopra, MD—four thinkers from neuroscience, philosophy, biology, and medicine—each share their own interpretation of consciousness, combining their ideas to paint one massive, mysterious picture of what it means to be an awakened being. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video Experts from 4 different fields define consciousness is featured on Big Think.  ( 8 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 23 min )

Casey R. Goonan, 35, admitted to lighting fires around Cal’s campus, torching a UCPD cruiser and unsuccessfully trying to firebomb a federal building in Oakland in solidarity with pro-Palestine protesters.  ( 26 min )

Immigration agents detained a man attending a court hearing at Wiley Manuel Courthouse, according to the public defender.  ( 24 min )

Other events include a panel discussion featuring Pulitzer finalist Cathy Park Hong and a performance by jazz great Carmen Lundy.  ( 29 min )

The Trump administration chose not to renew the program. Tax credits for buying an electric car also end Sept. 30.  ( 24 min )

This vegan Apple, Pecan and Feta Salad is loaded with fall flavours! It’s sweet and crunchy, with a peppery maple apple vinaigrette to bring it all together. The origin story of this salad is the same as so many salads you’ve probably made too—I had the ingredients on hand and I threw them together because I needed […]  ( 18 min )

Naomi Saphra thinks that most research into language models focuses too much on the finished product. She’s mining the history of their training for insights into why these systems work the way they do. The post To Understand AI, Watch How It Evolves first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 8 min )

The notion of the Big Bang goes back nearly 100 years, when the first evidence for the expanding Universe appeared. If the Universe is expanding and cooling today, that implies a past that was smaller, denser, and hotter. In our imaginations, we can extrapolate back to arbitrarily small sizes, high densities, and hot temperatures: all the way to a singularity, where all of the Universe’s matter and energy was condensed in a single point. For many decades, these two notions of the Big Bang — of the hot dense state that describes the early Universe and the initial singularity — were inseparable. But beginning in the 1970s, scientists started identifying some puzzles surrounding the Big Bang, noting several properties of the Universe that weren’t explainable within the context of these two no…  ( 15 min )

What if the greatest danger of artificial intelligence isn’t a single rogue system, but many systems quietly working together?  Dr. Susan Schneider calls this the “megasystem problem”: networks of AI models colluding in ways we can’t predict, producing emergent structures beyond human control. It’s also something she believes is one of the most urgent — and overlooked — risks we face today with AI today. Schneider has been thinking about these questions long before ChatGPT or Claude became household names. She is a professor and the Founding Director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University’s Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute. Her career has spanned philosophy, neuroscience, and cognitive science. In her 2019 book Artificial You, she explored what it would mean for m…  ( 13 min )

The first word that people associate with laugh is cry, and that tells us something. In word associations, the two words usually belong to the same semantic category but are set off by a salient contrast (night–day, girl–boy, dog–cat). Like laughter, tears express an emotional state by means other than the muscles of the face. They are involuntary, conspicuous to a perceiver, and unique to Homo sapiens (a conclusion flaunted in the title of the most comprehensive book on the subject, the psychologist Ad Vingerhoets’s Why Only Humans Weep). And they seem engineered to generate common knowledge. A weeping person feels the welling in his sockets and the trickle on his cheeks and sees a blurry world through his own tears, a world that contains other people seeing the same tears from the outsid…  ( 10 min )

When companies refer to “PR,” they often mean the function that drives buzz for the business by getting headlines. Many founders assume that hiring a public relations firm (or an on-staff PR lead) will quickly get them regular, glowing write-ups in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which they can then share with their target audiences on Facebook or LinkedIn to drive demand and generate leads. Or better yet, they might get physical press clippings, which are a nice ego boost, even though fewer and fewer people read printed newspapers and magazines. These clips can be framed to adorn office hallways or sent to family members to stick on the fridge. This way of thinking, however, leads companies to take a very hands-off approach to press coverage. As I’ve seen it done for years…  ( 8 min )

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I asked a counterfeit person about it  ( 9 min )

Slashdot homepage, 20 June 2000; via Wayback Machine. For the first several months of 2000, David Bowie’s website was a work in progress. BowieNet was undergoing a redesign, which had originally been scheduled to go-live at the end of January. But like many other software projects before and since, it got delayed. Finally, in May, the new version of BowieNet was launched. “There are some exciting and great new features including new 'points' system accumulator, new message boards, Beatnik enhanced pages [an interactive audio technology], web based email for all members, 10 meg of free web space, your personal profile, [and] your own account section,” wrote Paul Kinder on his fan site BowieWonderworld. BowieNet version 2 design, by Polished Solid for Nettmedia. “BowieNet Version 2.0,” as i…  ( 7 min )

Stricter towing enforcement could be paired with some sort of safe parking arrangement for people who live in RVs, but where and when remain to be seen.  ( 29 min )

From a Berkeley Hills control room, a small team from Cal’s Space Sciences Laboratory is preparing to lead its first mission to the red planet.  ( 28 min )

Temperatures will drop Wednesday but the Bay Area could be at risk from dry lightning, according to the National Weather Service.  ( 24 min )

The order comes in a class action lawsuit first filed in June by UC Berkeley law professors fighting Trump's cuts to research.  ( 23 min )

The practice has “sensory hours” for children with autism, ADHD or other special needs, and stocks “retro toys” like Aqua Arcades and Etch A Sketches in the lobby.  ( 25 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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The post Consciousness Across Three Worldviews appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 16 min )

If there’s one hallmark inherent to science, it’s that our understanding of how the Universe works is always open to revision in the face of new evidence. Whenever our prevailing picture of reality — including the rules it plays by, the physical contents of a system, and how it evolved from its initial conditions to the present time — gets challenged by new experimental or observational data, we must open our minds to changing our conceptual picture of the cosmos. This has happened many times since the dawn of the 20th century, and the words we use to describe our Universe have shifted in meaning as our understanding has evolved. Yet, there are always those who cling to the old definitions, much like linguistic prescriptivists, who refuse to acknowledge that these changes have occurred. Bu…  ( 15 min )

Why do people leave? By the time you ask this question, it’s already too late. Exit interviews might surface useful insights, but they can’t undo the fact that employees are already walking out the door. Even stay interviews—meant to get ahead of problems—become a box-checking exercise, more about HR optics than improving the workplace. In tough economic times, employee experience tends to take a backseat to productivity. Companies slip into old habits, reducing workforce investments and pushing people to “do more with less.” After all, employees should just be grateful to have jobs, right? People end up tolerating less-than-great environments to keep their paychecks. It’s an unfortunate cycle that keeps repeating. The deskless perspective This cycle plays out differently on the frontline.…  ( 7 min )

Cybersecurity veteran Brian Gumbel — president and chief operating officer (COO) at Dataminr — works at the confluence of real-time information and AI. Mainlined into humanity’s daily maelstrom of data, Dataminr detects events “on average 5 hours ahead of the Associated Press” — it picked up the 2024 Baltimore bridge collapse, for example, about an hour ahead of all mainstream media sources. The accuracy rate of its “news” is, says Gumbel, a highly impressive 99.5%. On top of that, the company’s AI systems, built on proprietary LLMs, analyze real-time events at such unprecedented speed that whole new strata of planning and strategy become possible. Soon, predicts Gumbel, “information will be automatically generated and updated as events unfold, enabling us to anticipate what is likely to h…  ( 8 min )

America’s real danger isn’t free speech. It’s silence. Founder of The Future of Free Speech Jacob Mchangama argues that free speech is not a threat but society’s strongest safeguard against violence. Suppressing expression creates a pressure cooker that can push people toward violent action when peaceful dissent is denied. While acknowledging its harms — especially in the digital age — Mchangama warns that censorship is far worse. This video The case for canceling censorship is featured on Big Think.  ( 4 min )

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: I’ve Gone to Look for America appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.  ( 5 min )

Nearly 1 in 30 staffers have already been laid off. The term “climate change” is banned from new proposals. And federal budget cuts could destroy world-class research teams.  ( 32 min )

Belotti’s uncomplicated approach to a classic comfort food is worth the splurge.  ( 23 min )

The measure would adopt new congressional lines that favor Democrats for the next three election cycles in an effort to offset partisan gerrymandering in other states.  ( 25 min )

The coming season at the campus arts venue reflects Berkeley's adventurous spirit.  ( 24 min )

The quake that struck at 2:56 a.m. Monday, was centered around the Elmwood, according to early reporting by the USGS.  ( 23 min )

Two mathematicians have proved that a straightforward question — how hard is it to untie a knot? — has a complicated answer. The post A Simple Way To Measure Knots Has Come Unraveled first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 min )

Work some veggies into your breakfast with this vegan Breakfast Hash recipe! Potatoes are paired with lots of vegetables, black beans, and a smoky seasoning blend for a savoury hash that works as a side or as a main dish. This breakfast hash isn’t the same as Hash Browns, and it isn’t Breakfast Potatoes either. […]  ( 19 min )