Mohammed: the Anti-Innovator, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali click2x Transcript Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Early on, it seemed as if Mohammed's ambition was simply to go from door to door from person to person and say, "Leave alone what you believe in. Believe in the one God, the one who spoke to me through the angel Gabriel." Of course I don't argue with that.
We're More than Stardust — We're Made of the Big Bang Itself Transcript Anna Frebel: The work of stellar archaeology really goes to the heart of the "we are stardust" and "we are children of the stars" statement. You’ve probably heard it all but what does it actually mean? We are mostly made all humans and all life forms that we know of are made mostly of carbon and a bunch of other elements but in much lesser quantities. Where does this carbon come from? Well, you could say it comes from the Earth and yes that is true. And so this is how we can piece together the chemical evolution of the universe that is really the basis for any biological evolution to take place on Earth.
Why Apple Pay Is a Huge Milestone in Payments Breakthrough A service that makes it practical to use your smartphone as a wallet in everyday situations. Why It Matters Credit card fraud damages the economy by raising the costs of goods and services. Key Players Apple Visa MasterCard Google When Apple Pay was announced in September, Osama Bedier was unimpressed. Yet when Apple Pay launched just a few weeks later, Bedier was a convert. Momentum for mobile payment technologies was building even before Apple Pay debuted last fall. None of the individual technologies is novel, but Apple turned them into a service that is demonstrably easier than any other. But even if Apple didn’t invent mobile payments, it has significantly enhanced them. That doesn’t mean most of us will be ditching our wallets and waving phones in every store in 2015—far from it. Still, Apple has done a lot of things right, suggesting that Apple Pay will turn out to be a milestone. As a result, Apple is now cementing standards for the payment industry. —Robert D.
Spooky Action 101: Is Space as We Know It a Kind of Illusion? Transcript George Musser: So spooky action at a distance was [Albert] Einstein’s kind of appellation for the idea of nonlocality. Non-locality is the technical term for it. And what it means is that there’s a connection between different objects or places in the universe. This phenomenon of nonlocality that worried Einstein actually comes out in many different ways. So the example I often give is two coins. So if you think of those two coins — they’re on opposite sides of the universe or the continent or wherever they may be. Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everything Ken Prehoda, a biochemist and director of the University of Oregon's Institute of Molecular Biology, discusses his research identifying the mutation that led to multicellular animals. (YouTube/University of Oregan) If life is effectively an endless series of photocopies, as DNA is transcribed and passed on from one being to the next, then evolution is the high-stakes game of waiting for the copier to get it wrong. Too wrong, and you’ll live burdened by a maladaptive mutation or genetic disorder. But if the flaw is wrong in exactly the right way, the incredible can happen: disease resistance, sharper eyesight, swifter feet, big brains, better beaks for Darwin’s finches. In a paper published in the open-access journal eLife this week, researchers say they have pinpointed what may well be one of evolution’s greatest copy mess-ups yet: the mutation that allowed our ancient protozoa predecessors to evolve into complex, multi-cellular organisms. For this, the choanoflagellates were perfect.
How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future | Science The first thing to hit Iain Couzin when he walked into the Oxford lab where he kept his locusts was the smell, like a stale barn full of old hay. The second, third, and fourth things to hit him were locusts. The insects frequently escaped their cages and careened into the faces of scientists and lab techs. The room was hot and humid, and the constant commotion of 20,000 bugs produced a miasma of aerosolized insect exoskeleton. Many of the staff had to wear respirators to avoid developing severe allergies. In the mid-2000s that lab was, however, one of the only places on earth to do the kind of science Couzin wanted. Couzin would put groups of up to 120 juveniles into a sombrero-shaped arena he called the locust accelerator, letting them walk in circles around the rim for eight hours a day while an overhead camera filmed their movements and software mapped their positions and orientations. Couzin wanted to know what if-then rules produced similar behaviors in living things.
160 years of US immigration trends, mapped US immigration trends shifted dramatically between 1850 and 2013 —including changes in the dominant countries of origin for each state and decade, and the total size of foreign-born population — according to a new series of historical maps from the Pew Research Center. There's no argument about the fact that immigrants have consistently played an important part in American history, but the maps, based on recent US Census data, reveal lesser-known facts about immigrant population rate changes over time. The census shows us that different decades saw changing sizes of non-US-born populations. Compare, for example, the largest immigrant populations by country of origin in 1900, 1950, and 2000. In 1900, 2.7 million Germans made up the largest total percentage of immigrants. USA immigrants by country or origin in 1900. By 1950, an estimated 1.5 million Italians comprised the largest group of immigrants that year, more than a million less than the largest group (Germans) in 1900.
Scientists have used groundbreaking technology to figure out how the Earth looked a billion years ago By the time Dietmar Mueller arrived at the University of Texas as a graduate student in the mid-1980s, scientists had already long embraced a once-astonishing idea: that the continents on which all human history has unfolded, rather than fixtures of constancy, were orphans of a former grand supercontinent called Pangaea. Showered with awards, the pioneers of this theory—plate tectonics—had by and large dispersed in search of the next big challenge. But Mueller and his classmates sensed far more ground to cover. Three decades later, Mueller, now at the University of Sydney, is part of a new upheaval in tectonics, this time ignited by advances in computing power. The same leaps in big-data analysis, supercomputing, and intelligent algorithms that have shaken up finance, genetics, and espionage are transforming our view of the elusive ancient world. “It’s like detective work. To some degree, paleogeology is merely an academic enthusiasm. “It’s like detective work,” Mueller said.
Google Ventures is coming to Europe with a $100 million fund for startups Google has confirmed that it is launching a European arm of its Google Ventures VC fund, following media speculation last week. The company’s first European fund is $100 million and it will be used “invest in the best ideas from the best European entrepreneurs, and help them bring those ideas to life”. The company has an initial team of four general partners at its European office in London, which the Financial Times reports includes Google Europe exec Eze Vidra, entrepreneur Tom Hulme, angel investor Peter Read, and Code.org UK head Avid Larizadeh. The team will be based in Clerkenwell, a stone’s throw from London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ startup district, but it will invest across Europe. ➤ Google Ventures invests in Europe [Google]
Watch how immigration in America has changed since 1820 by Alvin Chang on April 26, 2016 The idea of banning an entire racial or ethnic group from entering the US isn't a new proposal. Donald Trump is far from the first person to propose it. In 1790, the US banned nonwhite people from naturalizing as citizens. The graphic above shows how these policies affect who enters the country. And we're back again to talking about restricting entire immigrant groups from coming to the US. 200 years of immigration also show how today's population came to be But this isn't just a story about immigration. In 1820, where the graphic starts, there were only about 9.7 million people in the United States, which is about the current population of Sweden. It is these people, and their descendants, who largely make up today's US population. At the end of the graphic, you can see how colorful the bars get, which is partially the reason why demographers predict the majority of the US will be minorities by the year 2044.
This Telescope Could See Back to the Beginning of Time by 2022 by Natalie Shoemaker We may be able to see the dawn of the universe by 2022. Construction on the next generation of super-massive telescopes has begun with the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). "Astronomy is like archeology; what we see in the sky happened many years ago. More powerful telescopes means researchers will be able to see further back into the history of the universe. Astronomers will be able to examine the atmosphere of more exoplanets in our ever-hopeful search for life. "Astronomy is like archeology; what we see in the sky happened many years ago," said astronomer Yuri Beletsky of the GMT in an interview with Reuters. What we often perceive as a fixed point in the universe may be long gone. It appears as a stellar constant, but the Pillars were destroyed by a supernova 6,000 years ago. Who knows, astronomers may even unlock the secrets of dark matter and energy. Natalie has been writing professionally for about 6 years. Photo Credit: YE AUNG THU / Stringer/ Getty
Yelp Directory service and online review forum Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in Columbia South Carolina. Yelp was founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. It has since become one of the leading sources of user-generated reviews and ratings for businesses. As of December 31, 2021, approximately 244.4 million reviews were available on its business listing pages. Company history (2004–present)[edit] Origins (2004–2009)[edit] Private company (2009–2012)[edit] Public entity (2012–present)[edit] In 2012/13, Yelp moved into its new corporate headquarters, occupying about 150,000 square feet on 12 floors of 140 New Montgomery (the former PacBell building) in San Francisco.[61] Features[edit] Features for businesses[edit] Relationship with businesses[edit]
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds book by Charles Mackay "Night wind hawkers" sold stock on the streets during the South Sea Bubble. (The Great Picture of Folly, 1720) A satirical "Bubble card" The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics. In later editions, Mackay added a footnote referencing the Railway Mania of the 1840s as another "popular delusion" which was at least as important as the South Sea Bubble. Volume I: National Delusions[edit] Economic bubbles[edit] Chapters in Vol I[edit] Volume II: Peculiar Follies[edit] Witch Hunter, Matthew Hopkins Crusades[edit] Witch mania[edit] Chapters in Vol II[edit] Volume III: Philosophical Delusions[edit] Alchemists[edit] Quotations[edit] Notes