James' World 2

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The iconic image of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87—sometimes referred to as the “fuzzy, orange donut”—has gotten its first official makeover with the help of machine learning. The new image further exposes a central region that is larger and darker, surrounded by the bright accreting gas shaped like a “skinny donut.” The team used the data obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration in 2017 and achieved, for the first time, the full resolution of the array.

In 2017, the EHT collaboration used a network of seven pre-existing telescopes around the world to gather data on M87, creating an “Earth-sized telescope.” However, since it is infeasible to cover the Earth’s entire surface with telescopes, gaps arise in the data—like missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

“With our new machine learning technique, PRIMO, we were able to achieve the maximum resolution of the current array,” says lead author Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study. “Since we cannot study black holes up close, the detail of an image plays a critical role in our ability to understand its behavior. The width of the ring in the image is now smaller by about a factor of two, which will be a powerful constraint for our theoretical models and tests of gravity.”

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New image of M87 supermassive black hole generated by the PRIMO algorithm using 2017 EHT data.

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Sarracenia X leucophylla.Credit…Laurence Gaume

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Not long ago, I left my home in sunny Australia to join an archaeological dig in the Siberian mountains of eastern Russia. On the first morning, I awoke cold to my core, even in a well-padded sleeping bag. I crept near the campfire and held my hands so close that the gloves began to smolder. But I kept shivering. I was cold on the inside.

As a medical doctor, I recognized the symptoms of mild hypothermia.

Siberia is a region where people surely always needed warm apparel. The origins of clothing is my special interest, a notoriously difficult topic because items of dress rarely last long. Trained in medicine and archaeology, I investigate the matter by combining what’s known about the thermal limits of human bodies and paleoenvironments. My brush with hypothermia, though embarrassing for someone with my expertise, reaffirmed my approach.

Standards of body cover vary across cultures. But many people would be mortified to be caught unclad in public. For folks in cold climates, insufficient clothing can be fatal, as I sensed in Siberia. Yet no other creatures don garments. Why our ancestors, alone in the entire animal kingdom, adopted clothes is one of those big questions that science has only recently begun to tackle.

Though many gaps in the story remain, the emerging evidence suggests clothing really had two origins: first for biological needs, then cultural.

The invisible remnants of early clothes

Archaeologists who study the Paleolithic or Stone Age tend to ignore clothing. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, considering not a single shred has survived from this ice age era between roughly 2.6 million and 12,000 years ago. Archaeologists are reluctant to look for something they will never find.

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Participating in an archaeology experiment, a contemporary woman dons fur clothing similar to what Paleolithic people in colder climates might have worn. Markus Scholz / Picture Alliance / Getty Images

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Not getting enough sleep is detrimental to both your health and productivity. Yawn. We’ve heard it all before. But results from one study impress just how bad a cumulative lack of sleep can be on performance. Subjects in a lab-based sleep study who were allowed to get only six hours of sleep a night for two weeks straight functioned as poorly as those who were forced to stay awake for two days straight. The kicker is the people who slept six hours per night thought they were doing just fine.

This sleep deprivation study, published in the journal Sleep, took 48 adults and restricted their sleep to a maximum of four, six, or eight hours a night for two weeks; one unlucky subset was deprived of sleep for three days straight.

During their time in the lab, the participants were tested every two hours (unless they were asleep, of course) on their cognitive performance as well as their reaction time. They also answered questions about their mood and any symptoms they were experiencing, basically, “How sleepy do you feel?”

Why Six Hours of Sleep Isn’t Enough

As you can imagine, the subjects who were allowed to sleep eight hours per night had the highest performance on average. Subjects who got only four hours a night did worse each day. The group who got six hours of sleep seemed to be holding their own, until around day 10 of the study.

In the last few days of the experiment, the subjects who were restricted to a maximum of six hours of sleep per night showed cognitive performance that was as bad as the people who weren’t allowed to sleep at all. Getting only six hours of shut-eye was as bad as not sleeping for two days straight. The group who got only four hours of sleep each night performed just as poorly, but they hit their low sooner.

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Photo by Photographer, Basak Gurbuz Derman/Getty Images.

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It was a Monday morning in late March. Normally, LeBron James would have been in homeroom at St. Vincent, dressed in school clothes, with a backpack containing books strapped over his shoulders. Instead, he was in a locker room at a rec center in the suburbs of Cleveland, putting on his work clothes. Moments later he stepped onto the court for a practice session one day prior to the McDonald’s All-American high school basketball game.

Scouts from all twenty-nine NBA teams were on hand for the workout. Since none of the other all-Americans had yet entered the gym, all eyes were on LeBron in his red McDonald’s jersey. His six-eight, 240-pound frame was thick with muscle through the shoulders, chest, and thighs. His chiseled figure didn’t appear to have an ounce of body fat. It was hard not to gawk at his supernatural athleticism. With an ethereal forty-four-inch vertical leap, the top of LeBron’s head was above the rim when he dunked. At eighteen, he could already jump higher than every player in the NBA. When the other high school all-Americans began trickling onto the court, the contrast between LeBron and them was stark. They were all pro prospects, tall and skilled. But LeBron was far more physically imposing, a man among boys. The scouts were also attuned to the more subtle distinctions, noting that LeBron had a habit of being the first person on the court for practice and the last one to leave. The rare combination of superior skill and indomitable drive was a priceless commodity in the commerce of professional sports.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for a scout to ascertain was what was going on inside a prospective player’s head. At a time when some of the McDonald’s all-Americans were still figuring out which college to play for in the fall, LeBron had much weightier matters on his mind. For a long time, he’d viewed it as his responsibility to provide a comfortable home, a car, and lifetime financial security for his mother. The time had come for him to formally notify the NBA in writing that he was entering the draft, where he was a lock to be the number one overall pick. He also had to choose between the three shoe companies vying for his services, a decision that would affect his net worth much more than which NBA franchise he ended up joining. But before dealing with the NBA or the corporations that were already lining up to offer him lucrative endorsement deals, LeBron had to choose a sports agent to help him navigate his next moves. It was a lot to contemplate for a high school senior.

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Simon & Schuster

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Now, Netflix is officially getting out of the DVD business. The company announced along with its quarterly earnings that it is planning to shutter DVD.com, which is the new name for its DVD-by-mail business. (You might remember when Netflix tried to spin out this business under the name Qwikster, which remains one of the worst product names of all time and lasted all of about a week. But the less we talk about Qwikster, the better.) It will ship its last discs on September 29th, and I have a sneaking suspicion you won’t need to return them.

This is an obviously good business decision, at least for a company like Netflix. The DVD business was once worth many billions of dollars annually but has cratered over the last decade: Blu-ray and DVD sales and rentals were about a $6.5 billion global business in 2021, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, which sounds like a lot of money but is less than half what it was even five years ago. In the US, the digital entertainment market is estimated to be about 10 times bigger than the physical media market. 

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Light spatters on the seafloor, creating a moving kaleidoscope of greens, blues, and beiges as seagrass sways back and forth in the current. Shoals of fish shimmer in and out of rock formations while rays fly above, casting their shadows over crabs trawling the mudflats for edible detritus. And surveying it all through two oblong eyes, the octopus glides in the open water like a frictionless spaceship. As an eight-armed cephalopod, it neither looks nor moves like its aquatic peers. Up, down, left, right, forward, or backward – all are accessible to the octopus. And though elegance and structural integrity are often inseparable in nature, the octopus can break its streamlined form at any moment, splaying its body and collapsing onto (or into) the rocks below. From the refuge of a rocky crevice, it watches and waits patiently. When prey passes, it may shoot out an arm or two to encircle an unlucky passing shrimp; or it may erupt from cover, lunging its entire body wide like a net cast by a fisherman.

The octopus may navigate its ocean home with ease, but it can seem like a creature from another planet. It populates our popular visions of cosmic beings and extraterrestrial life, with its eight arms, three hearts, and a malleable body without bones. What’s more, its ability to camouflage itself, coupled with a propensity to hide in tight holes, make it a master of disguise. If seen, a water siphon that expels inhaled water can instantly propel the creature away from danger in any direction in three-dimensional aquatic space. Its web of radially symmetrical arms allow it to crawl in any direction with equal competence, regardless of how its head is oriented. Its soft and malleable body can move through any crevasse larger than its beak. And with its two eyes positioned on opposite sides of its head, it has a near-total field of vision with almost nothing hidden ‘behind’. These abilities give the octopus a radically different relationship to its surroundings compared with other species, human or otherwise. It is a relationship free of constraints.

And what about our bodies? Compared with the octopus, human beings appear corporeally constrained. We lack the fluid mobility and wide field of vision of our (very, very) distant cephalopod cousins. Instead, we have two eyes stuck in the front of our heads. We have a paltry two legs, hardwired for forward movement. And we are bound to our terrestrial ecological niche, where our bodies must continually counteract the downward pull of gravity.

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Philosophy has come a long way since Thales argued the universe was made of water. Philosophers have produced new ideas that enrich the world around us, give us a better understanding of the universe we live in, and help us find the good life. However, philosophy is often more about the questions and methods than the answers — and in some cases, old problems remain unanswered.

Here, we look at four unsolved problems in philosophy, and for each, we ask these questions: Why is the problem so difficult? And why are the proposed solutions so unsatisfying?

The hard problem of consciousness

The hard problem of consciousness asks why any physical state creates conscious mental states at all. While we can understand physical systems very well, the hard problem goes further than merely asking “how” questions: “Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” For example, we can understand how our bodies physically feel pain, but why those physical reactions create the personal, subjective experience we call pain is unsolved.

While variations of this problem go back centuries in European, Indian, and Chinese philosophy, the current version of the problem (quoted above) was written by Australian philosopher David Chalmers in 1995. Several theories have been put forth or dusted off as possible solutions. None of them have proven decisive

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Credit: Paul Mills / Pexels

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“FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” a statement by the conservative network read.

The cable news giant said that Carlson’s last program was Friday, April 21 and that starting Monday evening, the network will air its show “Fox News Tonight” as “an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.”

Fox News did not say why it’s parting ways with the host, who has become known for his strident racism, homophobia, xenophobia and misogyny, and for leaning increasingly into white nationalist talking points. The company did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s query about why Carlson is no longer at the network.

Carlson gave no apparent indication on Friday’s program that it would be his last show. The host ended his segment by saying he and his show would “be back on Monday.”

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Tucker Carlson

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