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 decadent, cheesy centrepiece to steal the attention at any party, and built for comfort and joy As 2025 closes, I wanted to leave you with one of my favourite recipes: the pumpkin fondue. This started life as a Lyonnaise dish that I saw Anthony Bourdain enjoy on his TV series Parts Unknown at Daniel Boulud’s parents’ farmhouse. My adapted version could be a centrepiece of your New Year’s Eve party, where the molten cheese mixture can be spread on bruschetta and topped with pickles. Equally, however, it could be a main meal shared with friends alongside a salad, pickles and bread. Either way, it’s built for comfort and for joy. Happy New Year to you. Continue reading...  ( 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 )

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

For local jornaleros with bills to pay, staying home is not an option despite fears about the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. One local nonprofit is providing protection and support.  ( 34 min )

Three of the four corners of the University-San Pablo intersection are sitting empty. But one new tenant is on the way, and this key commercial district could be on the upswing.  ( 33 min )

Evacuating for a tsunami could take over 2 hours. Neither is enough time for people to get out of danger zones in a worst-case scenario.  ( 29 min )

The holiday is over, and it's time to start thinking about disposing of your tree. There are a couple of ways to do that in Berkeley.  ( 25 min )

Mexican Street Corn Dip takes the flavour of elotes and puts it into a crowd-pleasing appetizer! It’s creamy, smoky, tangy, a little bit spicy, and loaded with sweet corn.  Ever since visiting Mexico, I have loved elotes—and when I went vegan, I even came up with a vegan Mexican Street Corn recipe to capture that […]  ( 28 min )

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Universe, if you think about it on a truly fundamental level, is that it exists at all. And yet, not only does it exist, but there’s matter within it, which obeys the same rules everywhere and at all times, and assembles according to the physical laws governing reality to create, among other things: atomic nuclei, neutral atoms, molecules, stars and planets, galaxies, and a large-scale cosmic web. Not only that, but in at least one relatively unremarkable corner of this Universe, a planet arose some 4.5 billion years ago where life survived and thrived, eventually giving rise to an intelligent, self-aware species that can ask deep questions about the Universe they inhabit. In doing so, we’re also asking fundamental, deep questions about our own se…  ( 15 min )

With the year winding down and my inbox now filled with out-of-office replies, I thought this week’s Nightcrawler was a good excuse to recommend a couple of feature-length documentaries. The first is The Thinking Game (free on YouTube) — a five-year portrait of Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. On one level, it’s a fascinating account of how a small group of researchers pushed the limits of artificial intelligence and produced genuine breakthroughs. Beneath the surface, the film is really about long-term thinking. AI can feel like it appeared out of nowhere sometime around 2022. This documentary shows how misleading that impression is. The real story began much earlier — with years of false starts, doubt, and incremental advances that rarely made headlines. When DeepMind’s breakthrou…  ( 9 min )

What would be a good gift to buy a philosopher? A few weeks ago, I asked 10,000 people this question and got thousands of replies back. Some, of course, were funny: “A job,” “Some money,” and a “girlfriend.” Some were predictably context-appropriate: “An unanswerable question,” “Time to think,” and “A deep conversation.” Others were oddly mundane: “Socks,” “A mug,” or a “book.” When Diego said “a comb,” I think he was getting personal. (You can find the best of the rest over on Substack.) But there was one answer that really got me thinking. I am sure it was meant as a joke, but you have to be careful joking with the philosophically minded. Because quite a few people said “purpose” or “meaning.” I started to imagine the scene: My son runs over with a gilded, vibrating, and immaculately wra…  ( 7 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.  ( 12 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 )

Kids are flocking to parks and Freight & Salvage to hear librarian Michael Kwende read silly books with perfect rhythm, backed up by his bookish bandmates.  ( 30 min )

From cherished art institutions to mini-museums devoted to coffee, perfumes and lace, you’re sure to see, learn or even smell something new.  ( 28 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 )

In His Own Words (Episode 2)  ( 31 min )

If there’s one thing most of us can be certain of it’s this: that our observed, physical reality actually exists. Although there are always some philosophical assumptions behind this conclusion, it’s an assumption that isn’t contradicted by anything we’ve ever measured under any conditions: not with human senses, not with laboratory equipment, not with telescopes or observatories, not under the influence of nature alone nor with specific human intervention. Reality exists, and our scientific description of that reality came about precisely because those measurements, conducted anywhere or at any time, is consistent with that very description of reality itself. But there had previously been a set of assumptions that came along with our notion of reality that are no longer universally agreed…  ( 14 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 )

The coffee trailer that featured beans from Mother Tongue Coffee officially closed on Dec. 13.  ( 24 min )

Judy North designed two of the stained glass windows at Northbrae Community Church in 1954. She was never given proper credit — until now.  ( 29 min )

The library shared with Berkeleyside the year’s most frequently checked-out books and household tools.  ( 26 min )

In addition to leading Merritt, Feather River and College of Alameda, he taught English, worked on political campaigns and helped answer advice letters sent to "Dear Abby" at the SF Chronicle.  ( 26 min )

Imagine there’s a large, flat sheet of ice out in front of you, and someone unceremoniously shoves you across it at a high speed. What are you to do? If you’re wearing conventional shoes, without crampons or blades attached to them, you’re going to have a difficult time. Ice is a very low-friction surface, and there’s very little you’re going to be able to do to change your momentum without slipping and perhaps falling down. You’re bound to simply slide along until either you run into an obstacle or slowly come to rest, likely a long way from where you began. But if you put thin blades on the bottoms of your shoes — e.g., wear ice skates — you’ll discover that the situation is very much different in this case. As long as you can remain on your feet, with only your blades touching the ice, …  ( 12 min )

As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to practice leadership while helping others develop it. I’m Charlotte Sharpe, Managing Director of Research and Innovation at Big Think+. My role is to drive alignment between our content and platform, ensuring that what we build, design, and deliver truly serves our clients—organizations that are bringing leadership development to life within their own cultures. Across this year, our team’s work has revolved around three ideas: clarity, collaboration, and storytelling. Together, they’ve shaped how we scale leadership: both inside Big Think+ and across the organizations we partner with.  1. Clarity Scales One of our most important realizations this year is that clarity is a form of leadership. The ability to define what we mea…  ( 5 min )

We’ve grown comfortable with the idea that trauma leaves people permanently altered. It’s a compelling story, but a misleading one. Drawing on more than a hundred studies, clinical psychologist George Bonanno explains why resilience is not a rare trait or a heroic exception, but the most common human response to adversity. This video The real reason some people adapt faster than others is featured on Big Think.  ( 19 min )

Despite these times of extreme change, uncertainty, and complexity, many leaders still expect that they, and the people who work for them, should leave their worries at the proverbial office door. If that ever was a reasonable expectation, however, it clearly no longer is.   Across industries and at all levels, people are overwhelmed, exhausted, and burning out like never before. The consequence: ever-growing disengagement, which undermines individual well-being and organizational productivity and performance. In its most recent State of the Global Workplace report, Gallup found that the percentage of engaged employees dropped from 23% to a meagre 21% last year — a decline equal to that seen during COVID-19 lockdowns.  There are many contributors to this. Friction around return-to-work ord…  ( 8 min )

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After pushback from faculty, Cal’s provost says he wants to open a dialogue on academic freedom.  ( 29 min )

There were no injuries reported, according to the Berkeley Fire Department. The fire was in the same block where two buildings at the old Pacific Steel site caught fire in September.  ( 24 min )

That’s a year later than BART projected in March.  ( 27 min )

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

It was a flavorful year, with dinner parties, Michelin stars, ice cream revivals and breakfast comebacks.  ( 28 min )

Sauna Aid, a charity supported by many Bay Area saunas, has funded retreats for combat medics, led workshops for refugees and transported saunas to the frontlines in Kharkiv.  ( 28 min )

The Berkeley Community Choir and Orchestra, launched in 1966 by Oakland firefighter Eugene Jones, kicks off its 60th season Jan. 2 with three performances of Verdi's Requiem.  ( 28 min )

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: The Two Faces of Lummie Jenkins appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.  ( 5 min )

If you like lots of add-ins in your muffins, these vegan Morning Glory Muffins are going to be your new favourite! With cozy spices, a combination of carrots, pineapple, and apple for sweetness and moisture, along with a nutty crunch, they’re perfect for breakfast. I love baking muffins. Because even when I don’t have time […]  ( 29 min )

Earth, whether we like it or not, serves as a cosmic particle detector on a continuous basis. It isn’t just light waves that travel through the Universe, nor is that light merely joined by gravitational waves and ghostly neutrinos. In truth, cosmic particles and antiparticles of all types are produced in high-energy processes throughout the Universe, from the Big Bang to stars to white dwarfs to neutron stars to black holes, both large and small. When we put detectors up to detect what sorts of particles are out there, we find a virtual zoo, including: protons, antiprotons, electrons, positrons, and even still-heavier atomic nuclei, made out of protons and neutrons combined. Most cosmic rays, as we measure them, turn out to be protons, and just as you’d expect, there are more of them at lo…  ( 15 min )

Philosophers and scientists have always kept close company. Look back far enough, and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.  Before we had instruments to measure reality, we had to reason our way into it, but that intellectual lineage is what eventually gave us the scientific method. As technology advanced and the scope for observation expanded, specializations splintered off from philosophy to reconstitute as the sciences.  Astronomy cleared the sky of deities and showed us a universe governed by gravity, not gods. Geography mapped a not-so-flat Earth, then geology dated it, stratifying earthly time in isotopes and sedimentary layers. Physics folded time into space, and with it, reimagined us not as beings apart from nature, but as a continuation of its energy and mass. W…  ( 14 min )

When Simon Squibb was kicked out of his family home aged 15, he quickly built up the first of many businesses that helped him transform his name into a global brand. A gardening venture born of teenage survival kick-started the journey that would lead to the creation of YouTube’s most-watched business video: “30 years of business knowledge in 2hr 26mins.” (15M views to date) More than 18 million social media followers now watch Squibb hand cash to strangers in the street if he likes their business idea. He also bought a staircase in London with a doorbell for people to “pitch their dreams,” and now has a similar doorbell in New York, which he runs with Sir Richard Branson. Here, Squibb reveals to Big Think how he became a “professional talker” and how other leaders can explain ideas more c…  ( 10 min )

She co-founded the Middle East Children’s Alliance in 1988. Its early board included Edward Said and Maya Angelou. She was also active in the fight to bring rent control to Berkeley.  ( 28 min )

The Berkeley Hills have seen 2.5 inches of rain since Sunday, but a stronger system could bring damaging wind and flooding later this week.  ( 25 min )

As the Trump administration ratchets up pressure on hospitals to halt gender affirming care, Rainbow Families Action notches a win. Plus: What hospital systems told us they will and won’t offer now.  ( 35 min )

After nearly six decades of feeding Bay Area residents facing food insecurity, the pantry will close its doors in January 2026.  ( 30 min )

Major news stories this year have revolved around Trump’s immigration crackdown, the Tesla protests on Fourth Street, encampment clearings, new rules banning plants near many homes in the hills and more.  ( 28 min )

Abogados reportan un aumento de estafadores que se hacen pasar por abogados de inmigración y que tienen como objetivo a solicitantes de asilo en el Área de la Bahía. Aprenda a protegerse.  ( 31 min )

Flash at full volume: Jamiroquai’s website in 2003. By 2003, the internet had weathered the worst of the dot-com crash and developers and entrepreneurs were beginning to come out of hibernation. While it would take another year for Silicon Valley to start inflating another bubble — this one would be named "Web 2.0" — there was a renewed sense of optimism. Blogging and RSS moved into the mainstream in 2003, helped by the emergence of consumer-friendly RSS Readers like NetNewsWire and Bloglines. There was even now an economic model for blogging, with the launch of Google's AdSense in March. Also, online music went legit with Apple's iTunes store, and social networking began to take recognizable form with Friendster and MySpace. "Social software" was a geeky term being used in the blogosphere…  ( 6 min )

A rich cashew-based sauce makes this vegan Creamed Spinach Recipe velvety, smooth, and absolutely delicious! It’s easy enough to make for a weeknight dinner, but impressive enough to scale up for a holiday celebration. When I was working on this vegan Creamed Spinach Recipe, I played around with a few different options for the cream […]  ( 28 min )

Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children has become impossible to ignore. The post How Dad’s Fitness May Be Packaged and Passed Down in Sperm RNA first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 17 min )

Since ancient times, humanity has studied the skies. 70,000 years ago, a brown dwarf pair known as Scholz’s Star, right on the precipice of igniting hydrogen fusion in its core, passed through the Solar System’s Oort cloud. Stars, failed stars, and stellar remnants pass through our Solar System multiple times every million years. Both modern humans and Neanderthals were likely around to see this event. Unlike the illustration, however, it’s so intrinsically faint that it still wouldn’t have been visible to human eyes; today, it’s approximately 22 light-years away. Credit: José A. Peñas/SINC Cometary sightings, eclipses, and “temporary” stars date back thousands of years. This particular image contrasts the constellations of the sky as they appeared thousands of years ago with correspo…  ( 11 min )

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She co-founded Reid’s Records in Berkeley, dated Jackie Robinson, delivered cash for the Black Panthers and published a memoir about her remarkable life.  ( 29 min )

Nonprofits managing affordable housing are on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in new city fees.  ( 27 min )

The Bay Area transit agency plans a 6.2% increase starting Jan. 1, marking the third consecutive year of rising fares.  ( 25 min )

After a change in ownership in 2024, the Uptown Oakland bar and bottle shop is set to close at the end of 2025.  ( 24 min )

Attorneys have reported a spike in scams impersonating immigration attorneys and targeting asylum-seekers in the Bay Area. Learn how to protect yourself.  ( 30 min )

Read more »  ( 17 min )

Bryan Washington’s characters reveal themselves through what they don’t, won’t, or can’t say as much as the utterances they give voice to. Though he constructs his stories from the first-person perspective, his protagonists never exist in heroic isolation. Each is shaped — in ways small and large, superficial and profound, knowingly and unknowingly — by the people they interact with and the cultures they inhabit.  Most of Washington’s stories are set in Houston, where he grew up, or Japan, where he currently lives. Occasionally, as in Palaver, the author’s third novel, the two collide. A finalist for the 2025 National Book Award, Palaver tells the story of an unnamed son who moved from Texas to Tokyo to escape his homophobic brother, only to receive a surprise visit from his unnamed mother…  ( 8 min )

Most of us think happiness is something you achieve: status, money, accomplishment. Robert Waldinger’s work asks a more unsettling question: what if happiness is less about what you get and more about who you keep?  Drawing on the longest study of adult life ever conducted, Waldinger traces human wellbeing across 8 decades, from the Great Depression to old age, following people from radically different starting points to see what endures. This video The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight is featured on Big Think.  ( 12 min )

This vegan Monkey Bread Recipe is pillowy soft, sticky in the best kind of way, and full of sweet cinnamon brown sugar flavour. It’s perfect for holiday breakfasts and brunch get-togethers because this pull-apart bread is always a hit!  If you follow along with my blog, you know I love to bake bread! There’s something […]  ( 32 min )

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When it comes to science in general, and physics in particular, we don’t just want to know what’s going to happen under a given set of circumstances. We also want to know the answer to the key question of, “how much,” “how many,” or “in what amount,” when it comes to our answers. Being quantitative, and answering questions of amounts and timescales, not merely qualitative, is what separates a successful physical theory from one that must be discarded. In the expanding Universe, this is more important than ever, as questions of what we expect to form, when, and in what quantities, are essential for testing whether our theories of the Universe actually match up with our observed reality. Clearly, we live in a Universe where stars came into existence long ago: back in the first few hundred mi…  ( 17 min )

How does life build complexity from pure chance? Sean B. Carroll takes up the “staircase of evolution,” showing how random mutation and natural selection shape everything from the smallest cells in our bodies to entire species. If you want to understand the forces that silently govern life, this discussion reframes evolution as an active, ongoing process shaping every organism, including you. This video The evolutionary logic of survival and death, in 54 minutes is featured on Big Think.  ( 32 min )

Over the last few years, AI has dazzled us all. It can write our emails, optimize our workflows, and create alarmingly realistic videos. But is it intelligent? Can it actually understand things? I’m not so sure. This week, I published an essay for my Long Game column in Big Think about this idea. To do that, I tell a story about a slime mold that might just be more “intelligent” than a human — even though it has no brain. (No, I haven’t lost my marbles yet; read it and you’ll understand.) The basic premise is this: the world is pouring incomprehensible amounts of energy and capital into building systems that mimic a single, narrow form of human intelligence. But in the process, we may be ignoring a far older, and potentially wiser, form of intelligence. It’s also a type of intelligence tha…  ( 9 min )

12.5 to 12.6 billion years after the beginning of the Universe. On Earth, biological organisms are getting more and more interesting as the years tick by. As the unbroken chain of life continues, the combined factors of inheritance, random mutations, and horizontal gene transfer serve to increase the total amount of genetic information found in the genomes of the most complex organisms. This results in them gaining more specialized features, and many new characteristics begin emerging. Some organisms thrive together in colonies, with identical unicellular lifeforms binding to one another to ensure that the majority of them survive and thrive. Other organisms develop multicellularity: the ability for a single organism to produce multiple component parts — cells — that all remain bound toge…  ( 6 min )

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Also: A former Berkeley rabbi’s brother-in-law is among those who was shot during the antisemitic attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia.  ( 25 min )

CARE Court was supposed to be a new way to help homeless Californians in the grip of psychosis. But people are still falling through the cracks.  ( 35 min )

The successful teacher's strike in West Contra Costa Unified has emboldened teachers unions in Berkeley and 14 other California school districts currently at an impasse in their labor negotiations.  ( 26 min )

There are several options for enjoying the Italian holiday treat, including Starter Bakery's in-house version and Donato & Co., which is the only U.S. importer of Infermentum panettone.  ( 31 min )

Other events include a celebration of the winter solstice, a political satire show featuring "King Scrump" and an interfaith holiday concert.  ( 28 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 Noema’s Top Artwork Of 2025 appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 5 min )

Explore a shape that can’t pass through itself, a teenage prodigy, and two new kinds of infinity. The post The Year in Mathematics first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 11 min )

This December, like every December, will include a single moment — often marked by a particular day, which is December 21st here in 2025 — where our planet’s axial tilt is perfectly aligned with the invisible line connecting the Earth to the Sun. In December, it’s the northern hemisphere’s pole that’s tilted away from the Sun, while the southern hemisphere’s pole is tipped toward it; in June, the opposite situation is true. When your pole is tipped toward the Sun, your hemisphere experiences the longest days and shortest nights; when the pole is tipped away, you get long nights and short days. This remains true, solstice after solstice and year after year, no matter how much time passes. Although there are many factors at play that determine the behavior of each planet — its spin and orbit…  ( 13 min )

Smartphones and social media are hijacking our younger generation’s childhood and development in a frightening way. Clare Morell, researcher and author of The Tech Exit, is sounding the alarm. This video The terrifying ways that social media is altering teenage brains is featured on Big Think.  ( 4 min )

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia but spent her formative teenage years in Nairobi, Kenya. For most of her youth, Islam was a distant, habitual backdrop. She observed the fasts, went to the mosque now and then, and perhaps idly carried a string of tasbih prayer beads. Then, in 1985, the Muslim Brotherhood swept through her community. Under the tutelage of a charismatic female teacher, Ali transformed. The casual tradition was replaced by a rigid, politicized fervor; she put on the heavy black hijab and learned to renounce Western culture. Today, Ali is a Christian, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and a conservative powerhouse. But the path between then and now reveals a fracture in modern identity politics. When Ali first arrived in the Netherlands in 1992, fleeing a …  ( 8 min )

If asked to describe what sets a cognitively complex species like humans apart from others, many would list specific behaviors, such as telling stories, creating art, planning for the future, or navigating complex social structures. Given that, you might expect that neuroscientists attempting to understand the advanced brain would study it in action, as a person or animal moves through the world.  For much of its history, though, neuroscience has done the opposite.  “When I was a graduate student, neuroscience was almost entirely about isolating specific circuits to test how the brain controls your senses and movement,” says Dr. Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT. “You’d show an animal a stimulus, observe how it responded, and record which neurons fired.” This res…  ( 12 min )

In His Own Words (Episode 1)  ( 34 min )

The suit — seeking records related to a complaint that officers acted improperly towards people filming an encampment sweep — lays bare rising tensions between police accountability officials and BPD brass.  ( 26 min )

A group of parents and students, fearing doxing and harassment, urged the district not to comply with federal requests. And a Berkeley middle school teacher is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit aiming to halt California’s new law on antisemitism in schools.  ( 29 min )

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

The airport launched its OAK Guest Pass to fanfare on Monday. But visitors must send sensitive information to the TSA – where it could end up in the hands of immigration enforcement.  ( 25 min )

Founder Russell Kassman sold the Berkeley business in 2019 and moved to Texas. The new owner closed up shop last month.  ( 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 )

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 )

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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Physicists spotted a “terribly exciting” new black hole, doubled down on weakening dark energy, and debated the meaning of quantum mechanics. The post The Year in Physics first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 9 min )

Here in the United States, one of the greatest assets we have in our country — from a scientific standpoint, at least — is our collection of National Laboratories. A total of 17 labs presently exist, which focus on a wide variety of scientific, engineering, and energy-related endeavors. Many of these labs are places where fundamental science thrives, including: Fermilab, SLAC, and Brookhaven, where many fundamental and composite particle physics discoveries have taken place and where new experiments offer a window into fundamental reality, Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bombs were developed and where both nuclear science and explosives developments continue, Argonne National Laboratory and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, which have used physic…  ( 16 min )

Most of the decisions that shape a life don’t feel like decisions at all. They feel instead like expectations to follow a certain life – thrust upon us by parents, society, peers.  The cost of fulfilling these expectations is subtle but cumulative: fewer experiments, narrower options, and a growing sense that life is happening on someone else’s terms. This video The psychological trap behind wanting your life to “make sense” is featured on Big Think.  ( 8 min )

In the race to build superintelligent AI, high-caliber data is everything. Mercor, a data annotation startup, has emerged as one of the fastest-growing companies in history by offering something most rivals don’t: expert-labeled evaluations that benchmark the capabilities of large language models. AI evaluations (“evals”) are structured assessments that measure how well a model performs on tasks within specific domains. Instead of low-wage workers tagging data, Mercor hires doctors, engineers, lawyers, investment bankers, and other professionals to judge model outputs for quality and accuracy.  A software engineer, for instance, might evaluate code for security flaws or functional completeness, then design a rubric developers can use to benchmark improvement. Those rubrics become the scori…  ( 7 min )

The Well — December 16, 2025 A night where awe took center stage Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation gathered scientists, artists, and storytellers in Los Angeles to explore the power of awe. Some events you attend. Others you experience. Our recent gathering — A Night of Awe and Wonder — was decidedly the latter. The event, produced by Big Think in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation, set out to explore a simple idea: What is awe and how does it inform our lives, our work, and our purpose? In the interdisciplinary style you have come to expect from our work on The Well, we invited seven speakers and a musician to help us unpack the nature of awe from their vantage points. Dacher Keltner, Professor, UC Berkeley / Credit: Mik Milman Dacher Keltner opened the evening b…  ( 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 )

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 )

Browsing the indie web is like browsing a record store; you'll be surprised at the treasures you find. Photo by Josué Sánchez. I've always liked doing annual wrapup posts, from the Best Web 2.0 Companies posts on ReadWriteWeb in Web 2.0 through to the "What the Internet Was Like in {Year}" posts on Cybercultural today. So as we approach the end of 2025, I thought I'd turn my attention to the independent web — and in particular, my place on it. This website, Cybercultural, has continued to grow over 2025; but it's also been a perilous time for indie websites, due to the rise of AI and the decline of SEO. I'll start by noting some traffic trends from this year, since an indie website can only flourish if people actually visit it (or at the very least subscribe via RSS or email). Traffic Tren…  ( 8 min )

Jorge Eduardo Velazquez Sosa died after crashing into a car on California Street in Central Berkeley Saturday evening, authorities said.  ( 22 min )

Mayne Smith was part of a quartet that formed the Bay Area’s first bluegrass band, the Redwood Canyon Ramblers. He died Nov. 12 at age 86.  ( 29 min )

The New York Times reported that airport security officials around the country are sharing passenger data with federal immigration authorities. Oakland airport is in the dark about whether that’s happening here.  ( 25 min )

If federal tax credits aren’t extended, health care premiums could rise for over 74,000 in Alameda County. Few artists get health care from their art jobs.  ( 26 min )

The shop sold Panama hats, pork pie hats, propeller caps, top hats, beanies, derbies, fedoras and everything in between. Along with hats, it was long a best bet for Burning Man tickets or Halloween costumes.  ( 28 min )

The post Noema’s Top 10 Reads Of 2025 appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 6 min )

This vegan Pierogi Casserole is comfort food with a Polish spin! A cheesy potato filling is layered with lasagna noodles for pierogi vibes without the work of making dumplings by hand.  I was going to try to make a vegan pierogi recipe for you, but I have a confession: I felt daunted by the thought […]  ( 20 min )

Explore the year’s most surprising computational revelations, including a new fundamental relationship between time and space, an undergraduate who overthrew a 40-year-old conjecture, and the unexpectedly effortless triggers that can turn AI evil. The post The Year in Computer Science first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 8 min )

Every year, scientists around the world don’t just work to enhance what we know and increase our overall body of knowledge, although that’s indeed what they wind up doing. Part of the motivation for conducting science is hope: the hope that what you’re doing, research-wise, could end up revolutionizing how we conceptualize reality. Although we’ve come so far in understanding this Universe — including what its laws and constituents are at a fundamental level, and how those fundamental components assemble to create the varied and complex reality we inhabit today — we’re certain that there’s still more to learn, as many paradoxes about and several important puzzles remain unsolved. With each new experiment, observation, and piece of data, there’s an opportunity for scientific advancement. All…  ( 14 min )

There are some people in life we feel compelled to listen to. There’s something about the way they deliver their message that draws us in. Interestingly, when we look deeper, the detail of what they say seems to be less important than their delivery and their ability to capture an idea in a simple way.  The world is full of influencers, politicians and celebrities that — when you scratch beneath the surface — have remarkably little to say but nevertheless have scores of people queuing up to hear them say it. Rather than get frustrated by this conundrum, we need to learn from it. In almost every line of work, whether we’re salespeople, managers or leaders, trying to influence our friends, our families or our boss, we want what those lucky few get: cut-through.  The Cambridge English Diction…  ( 7 min )

Filmmaker David S. Goyer—the screenwriter behind The Dark Knight, Blade, and Foundation—shares the strange and awe-filled moments that shaped his life, from growing up at the “edge of the ordinary” to uncanny experiences in Israel and Tibet that were too powerful to ignore.  Speaking at A Night of Awe and Wonder, hosted by Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation, he explains how these encounters became the foundation of his storytelling. Goyer shows how awe helps us pay attention, stay open, and see meaning in moments we might otherwise overlook. This video How life changes when you start embracing mystery is featured on Big Think.  ( 15 min )

Flora & Ferment, three.one four, and Red Bay's Fruitvale headquarters were also among the recent closures.  ( 25 min )

Recent restaurant openings include Kopi Bar & Cafe, Dough Zone, and the massive HL Peninsula.  ( 27 min )

A man in his 30s died from head injuries after crashing into a car on California Street in Central Berkeley Saturday evening, police said.  ( 24 min )

Children’s Clubhouse, a new gym in South Berkeley, gives kids ages 6 months to 5 years a place to play away from home.  ( 27 min )

A sociology professor focused on feminism and gender studies at Sonoma State University, Trimberger wrote books about imperialism, single women and her experience raising an adopted mixed-race son in Berkeley.  ( 25 min )

The release of NetNewsWire 1.0 in February 2003, one of the first popular RSS Readers. So far in my history of blogging and RSS, we've seen how weblogs emerged in 1999 as a new form of personal journal, began to link to each other in 2000 via blogrolls, turned serious in 2001 with "warblogs," and then became an interconnected ecosystem called the blogosphere in 2002. In 2003, blogging continued its evolution into a new form of media publication — helped greatly by the rapid adoption of RSS Readers. In April 2003, I started a new technology blog called Read/WriteWeb (which I soon began abbreviating to RWW). While I'd experimented with blogging the previous year, my first effort — a linkblog called Modern Web — didn't stick. This time I was determined to write original posts and to regularly…  ( 9 min )

Take a jaunt through a jungle of strange neurons underlying your sense of touch, hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution and the dense neural networks of brains and AIs. The post The Year in Biology first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

Your brunch menu isn’t complete without this vegan Coffee Cake Recipe! It’s tender and moist, with a brown sugar cinnamon swirl throughout and a buttery, crumbly topping that’s impossible to resist. This coffee cake recipe is such a treat. A cake that’s made for eating with breakfast? Sign me up! While it won’t be replacing […]  ( 19 min )

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For millennia, supernovae were rare, once-per-century sights. What appears to be a double-lobed nuclear explosion is actually the result of a rare astronomical outburst known as a supernova impostor: a precursor to a supernova, rather than the real thing. A “small” nuclear explosion occurred in the massive star Eta Carinae nearly 200 years ago, but the star continues to live on on the inside, with the two expanding lobes shown here resulting from the aftermath of that outburst. Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of Arizona, Tucson), and J. Morse (BoldlyGo Institute, New York) The last naked-eye Milky Way supernova occurred way back in 1604. In 1604, a supernova appeared to skywatchers on Earth, between the constellations of Ophiuchus and Sagittarius. Known as Kepler’s supernova,…  ( 9 min )

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All across the Universe, stars are dying through a variety of means. They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, they can be subsumed by other, larger stars, or they can die gently, as our Sun will, by blowing off their outer layers in a planetary nebula while their cores contract down to form a degenerate white dwarf. All of the forms of stellar death help enrich the Universe, adding new atoms, isotopes, and even molecules to the interstellar medium: ingredients that will participate in subsequent generations of star-formation. For a long time, however, we’d made assumptions about where certain species of particles will and won’t form, and what types of environments they could and couldn’t exist in. Those assumptions were way ahead of where the observations were, however, and as our telescopic and technological capabilities catch up, sometimes what we find surprises us. Sometimes, we find elements in places that we didn’t anticipate, leading us to question our theoretical models for how those elements can be made. Other times, we find molecules in environments that we think shouldn’t be able to support them, causing us to go back to the drawing board to account for their existence. Check out our SoundCloud for direct downloads of this (and all) episodes: https://soundcloud.com/ethan-siegel-172073460/starts-with-a-bang-124-astrochemistry Where our expectations and observations don’t match is one of the most exciting places of all, and that’s where astrochemist and PhD candidate Kate Gold takes us on this exciting episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast! Have a listen, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed having this one-of-a-kind conversation! This article Starts With A Bang podcast #124 – Astrochemistry is featured on Big Think.  ( 5 min )

Hobnobs, ricotta, chocolate and amaretto – what’s not to like? I believe in divine communion, especially when it comes to food; an alliance of ingredients that come together as though they were meant to feed spirit and body. It might be too lofty to say that this semifreddo is divine, but the combination of Hobnobs, ricotta, chocolate and amaretto really does it for me. That said, there are many alliances that can be formed in the Christmas store-cupboard, so use this as a base for any biscuits, dried fruit and chocolate to which you feel most spiritually aligned. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

Not a fan of the traditional festive spread? These recipes are a Christmas feast that even turkeys would vote for Continue reading...  ( 14 min )

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

For the second year in a row, Bombera, Dominica Rice-Cisneros' Dimond District restaurant, takes home the Nosh Award for Best Restaurant Overall.  ( 25 min )

Also: A pedestrian was hospitalized after being struck by a driver in North Berkeley.  ( 23 min )

“We were told what the outcome will be: ‘You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint against the UC system,’” said a civil rights lawyer who left the Justice Department in May.  ( 41 min )

The daughter for French filmmaker is a longtime Berkeley resident and will lead discussions during the Jan. 17-Feb. 28 series.  ( 26 min )

City officials are considering raising height limits and taking other steps to spur housing development on West Berkeley’s main thoroughfare.  ( 29 min )

The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That’s the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it “America after the Fall.” It’s a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America’s long, hard look in the mirror. A generous helping of moral turpitude Depending on the prevailing panic, the nature of the Fall typically varies between half a dozen usual suspects: nuclear war, alien invasion, a deadly pandemic, technological breakdown, climate collapse, civil war — each often infused…  ( 11 min )

The post The Creative Intuition Of Frank Gehry appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 19 min )

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Years ago, an audacious Fields medalist outlined a sweeping program that, he claimed, could be used to resolve a major problem in algebraic geometry. Other mathematicians had their doubts. Now he says he has a proof. The post String Theory Inspires a Brilliant, Baffling New Math Proof first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 15 min )

This vegan Cinnamon Roll Cheesecake recipe gives the breakfast favourite a dessert-worthy makeover! With a brown sugar cinnamon swirl and cream cheese frosting, it’s cozy and decadent at the same time. Lately I’ve been playing around with my Vegan Cheesecake recipe. Not playing around with the recipe itself because, not to toot my own horn, […]  ( 26 min )

As artificial intelligence has become a mainstream and ubiquitous tool for hundreds of millions or even billions of people around the world — specifically, through chatbots and large language models (LLMs) like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Llama, and many others — it’s both enabled new pathways for problem solving and also led to new pitfalls for students, early career professionals, and non-experts seeking to mimic the illusion of expertise. While many who create, sell, or promote LLMs laud their use cases, a significant worry has arisen among students, teachers, professors, and education researchers: that students are not using these artificial tools to enhance their learning, but rather to replace it, outsourcing the hard and rewarding work of critical thought to these LLMs simply by prompt…  ( 15 min )

Quantum computing won’t just be an upgrade to the digital machines we use today – it represents a seismic shift in the entire logic that built the digital age.  Michio Kaku explains why computing on atoms (rather than on transistors) could overturn assumptions that have shaped everything from global security to modern medicine. This video Michio Kaku: How quantum computers compute in multiple universes at once is featured on Big Think.  ( 9 min )

When I look at the state of leadership development today, I believe that we are on the cusp of a revolution. After speaking with 158 L&D professionals across industries for our latest study, one thing became very clear: despite significant investment, most organizations don’t feel their leadership programs are delivering what leaders actually need. Many leaders are overwhelmed, anxious, and stretched thin. Only 40% of the practitioners we surveyed said they were even “somewhat happy” with their leadership development outcomes. That should be a wake-up call for all of us. In this moment of uncertainty and rapid technological change, leadership development can no longer be a static set of workshops or a content repository. It has to be a living system that supports real humans, doing difficu…  ( 7 min )

The transformation of urban mobility through vehicle automation presents two distinct paths: the widespread adoption of privately owned automated vehicles or a transition to robotaxi fleets. While both scenarios promise technological advancement, the robotaxi model offers compelling advantages for urban efficiency, sustainability, and social equity, but only if implemented with careful attention to policy design and public benefit. The superiority of the robotaxi model stems from several key factors. First, it promises a more efficient use of urban infrastructure. Where private vehicles typically sit idle 95% of the time, requiring ubiquitous public and private parking infrastructure, robotaxis can serve multiple users sequentially and potentially simultaneously, dramatically reducing park…  ( 7 min )

Back in the 1960s, NASA spent millions of dollars designing a zero-gravity pen. The Russians, on the other hand, used a pencil. This story — which, I admit, is likely apocryphal — underscores something we see every day across work and life. We pour massive amounts of time and energy into complex solutions for complex problems. Sometimes, the answer is as simple as using a pencil. Which begs a bigger question: Why are we all so drawn to complexity in the first place? To explore this, I’d recommend a sharp essay by Carl Hendrick titled, “Why Does Thinking Feel So Hard?” Hendrick explains why “smart,” complicated solutions can feel productive, even when they’re not. Sometimes you really do need to invent a zero-gravity pen for a very challenging issue. Other times, a bit of graphite and wood …  ( 9 min )

In the introductory chapter of her book Empire of AI, author Karen Hao explains how Sam Altman’s temporary ouster from OpenAI in November 2023 was the result of an ideological rift that tore the organization’s leadership in half. No one contested OpenAI’s founding goal — to ensure artificial general intelligence (AGI), once developed, would benefit rather than destroy or enslave humanity — but there had been growing disagreement on the best way to reach it.  One side, united under Altman, argued that the funds required to create AGI could only be secured if OpenAI transformed from a nonprofit into a for-profit entity, while the other believed the introduction of private capital into the organization would get in the way of AGI serving its intended purpose. Altman’s side won, and the rest i…  ( 12 min )

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A previous developer backed out in 2023 amid the lengthy legal battle over the site. It’s unclear how many of the building’s 100 units will be supportive housing for formerly homeless people.  ( 27 min )

The parents of 19-year-old Cal student George Mauricio Salinas, who died three days after he drowned in a pool during a party, accused Alpha Delta Phi of negligence in his death.  ( 25 min )

After winning the 2024 Nosh Award for best new bar, Tallboy, the Temescal "martini dive bar," claims the overall award in 2025.  ( 25 min )

She's been invited to teach again on campus, and will receive $60,000 from UC Berkeley. Chancellor Rich Lyons has apologized.  ( 24 min )

Henry Awayan, owner of Whisk Cake Creations and author of the new "The Ube Baking Book," shares his ube whipped cream recipe and passion for cooking with the purple yam.  ( 28 min )

Death cap mushrooms, Amanita phalloides, are thriving right now, and 21 people in California have been hospitalized after eating them this season.  ( 28 min )

Other events include holiday street markets across the city, a dance-themed film festival and a celebration of the Bay Area Lesbian Archives.  ( 27 min )

Humble and selfless, a lover of the outdoors, wordplay and family, he donated a kidney to his brother and served as a court-appointed special advocate.  ( 27 min )

The post The Death Of The Scientist appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 29 min )

We often talk about searching for truth in the world, and find ourselves at odds with people who seek it differently from how we do. But in many ways, the human endeavor of science is the ultimate pursuit of truth: the truth of our reality as shared by each and every one of us. By asking the natural world and Universe questions about itself, we seek to gain an understanding of: what the Universe is like, what the rules that govern it are, and how things came to be the way they are today. Science is neither a collection of facts nor merely a process, but rather the combination of both. All at once, science is simultaneously the full suite of knowledge that we gain from observing, measuring, and performing experiments that test the Universe, as well as the process through which we perform th…  ( 16 min )

Human history is a paradox: we accumulate knowledge at astonishing speed, yet remain vulnerable to deception, superstition, and the stories that subtly steer entire civilizations. From the first clay tablets to today’s global media systems, the structures that carry our ideas have always shaped what societies can build, believe, and destroy. That paradox is even more important in the age of AI, says Yuval Noah Harari. This video Yuval Noah Harari: Why advanced societies fall for mass delusion is featured on Big Think.  ( 25 min )

A few years ago, during a particularly chaotic period at work, I started making my morning coffee the exact same way every day: same mug, same timing, same two minutes of silence while it brewed. It wasn’t intentional; I was just too overwhelmed to think about it. But something interesting happened: Those two minutes became the calmest part of my day. Even when everything else felt out of control, I had this one predictable moment that somehow made the rest manageable. I had just experienced the power of rituals completely by accident, and it wasn’t until I left tech to study neuroscience that I understood why that simple coffee routine had been so effective. Rituals are some of the most powerful technologies invented by humankind. Most people think of rituals as elaborate religious ceremo…  ( 6 min )

Failure is inevitable, but your response to it is a choice – and it makes all the difference. Journalist Tim Harford, PhD, psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD, and organizational behavior expert Robert Sutton, PhD, reveal how failure can become the foundation of success when it’s examined and built upon. Reframing failure as information, rather than a personal setback, is what sets productive thinkers apart. This video The art and science of failing well is featured on Big Think.  ( 7 min )

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Marcel Dupree Jones’ family say his roommate at Ursula Sherman Village, Mark Dowling, was openly racist and threatened to shoot his Black neighbors. Dowling is charged with murdering Jones.  ( 26 min )

Garrett Morris and Renzo Roca opened Lucuma in Downtown Oakland with a mission to stand out from other Peruvian restaurants.  ( 26 min )

Adventurous, sporty and family-oriented, she served on the Berkeley Waterfront Advisory Board, as an aide to Loni Hancock and on the state’s Boating and Waterways Commission.  ( 26 min )

The Alice Waters project that displaced César in July 2022, to the dismay of many, is ready to debut.  ( 24 min )

Next-generation Clipper, or Clipper 2.0, rolls out Tuesday with improved features like discounted transfers, instant fund availability and contactless credit or debit card payments.  ( 28 min )

Large language models such as ChatGPT come with filters to keep certain info from getting out. A new mathematical argument shows that systems like this can never be completely safe. The post Cryptographers Show That AI Protections Will Always Have Holes first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

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When it comes to the question of the expanding Universe, all observations agree that yes, the Universe is indeed expanding, in agreement with Edwin Hubble’s earliest observations dating all the way back to the 1920s. However, the question of “how fast” the Universe is expanding is one that’s long been controversial, and remains so even today. In fact, there are two main classes of measurement one can make to determine the cosmic expansion rate, and they yield different, incompatible values. You can start with a primordial signature imprinted early on in the hot Big Bang, like the acoustic scale, and evolve it forward in time to explain what you observe today. This “early relic” method yields values for today’s expansion rate of 67 km/s/Mpc. Or you can start in the here-and-now and look bac…  ( 15 min )

You’d be forgiven for thinking AI represents a classic Faustian bargain, as every reported blessing seems tied to a sinister curse. AI will help us navigate the immense amounts of information and data created every day in the modern world, but it will also make it easier for bad actors to swamp the infosphere with disinformation. AI can enable real-time translations to spread ideas seamlessly across language barriers, but it may also make the marketplace of ideas less pluralistic by concentrating power in a few individuals. AI will make all of our jobs easier or straight-up replace us. If everything goes well, AI will usher in a techno-utopia of unprecedented wealth, leisure, and productivity — and the monkey paw curls. But this framing doesn’t match reality. In a recent interview, Bruce S…  ( 13 min )

One day in 1995, Toshiyuki Nakagaki had an idea. Nakagaki, a soft-spoken Japanese biologist, studies primordial mold and other amoeboid organisms. These creatures, which have been on Earth for nearly a billion years, have no brain, no central nervous system, nor anything resembling what modern humans might consider essential to “intelligence.” And yet, through years of careful observation, Nakagaki became convinced mold was, indeed, intelligent. Extremely intelligent. It could solve problems, navigate complexity, and even make decisions. It acted, bizarrely, as if it possessed a kind of mind, even though it clearly didn’t have one. In the 1990s, this idea bordered on scientific heresy. Most of Nakagaki’s colleagues were riding the wave of computational neuroscience: brains as biological ma…  ( 12 min )

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Peyrin Kao, who went on a hunger strike for Gaza, said he believes Cal “is capitulating to the demands of the Trump administration and using me as bait.” The university said it was responding to student complaints.  ( 28 min )

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is forcing an unprecedented $1 trillion cut to Medicaid spending. At the East Bay’s safety-net healthcare provider, staff cuts are in motion.  ( 26 min )

When the owners of Baba's House expanded by opening a bar above their snack shop, they hit a sweet spot with an inventive, tea-based drink menu and warm, welcoming vibes.  ( 26 min )

She produced many programs highlighting African American history and culture through folk tales, dance, piano, and storytelling.  ( 24 min )

Berkeley's OK means this customizable home — from a local company — can be built quickly and more easily.  ( 25 min )

From farmers markets to trivia nights, we put together a roundup of events and activities held regularly in Berkeley.  ( 37 min )

The post The Politics Of Superintelligence appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 42 min )

Peppermint Chocolate Cookies will add a little holiday magic to your day, along with some decadence! With a chewy peppermint chocolate base, melty chocolate chips and chocolate chunks, and crushed candy canes, these are the perfect addition to your Christmas cookie collection. Do you have a Christmas cookie collection too? I have to admit, I’ve […]  ( 19 min )

Visualizing how musicals use motifs to tell stories.  ( 9 min )

No matter what it is that humans do — what we think, feel, accomplish, believe, or vote for — our shared scientific reality is the one thing that unites us all. The same laws and rules govern everything within this cosmos. We’re all composed of the same raw ingredients, those ingredients obey the same fundamental laws at all times and in all places, but the way that those ingredients evolve can lead to vastly different outcomes with only the most minuscule changes in their initial configuration or environment. Moreover, some of the quantum rules that govern reality are fundamentally indeterminate, limiting our ability to predict a system’s future behavior from even an arbitrarily well-known starting point. Still, scientific truths remain true, even if there are very few who accept them. Gr…  ( 16 min )

Arianna Huffington moved to England from Greece at 17, earning a master’s degree in economics from Cambridge University where she was president of its celebrated debating society. Best known as the co-founder of The Huffington Post (now HuffPost) — acquired by AOL in 2011, then by BuzzFeed in 2020 — she became a force in shaping the digital media landscape and a fixture on various “most influential” lists. She has also written 15 books. In common with other seemingly indefatigable high-achievers, Huffington faced a physical reckoning in 2007, when burnout caused her to collapse “into a bloody mess.” Along with a fractured cheekbone she sustained a revelatory crack in her outlook on life and began to map out a significant pivot. Now, as founder and CEO of Thrive Global, she has redirected h…  ( 12 min )

Leaders need to invite disagreement, not just expect it. When the invitation to offer their opinion is not clear, teams will assume you don’t want it. Leaders often don’t realize that their status can unconsciously silence dissent. No matter how often leaders stress that no one will be punished for disagreeing, their own zeal, conviction, intelligence, and energy can be intimidating. The classic American “open-­door policy” isn’t enough to draw out dissenters. Leaders need to create conditions that empower their teams to speak up. When it has been the cultural norm to be deferential to power, or when disagreeing has been conflated with being disagreeable, leaders need to work even harder to change the norm. One leader we worked with in Singapore, Mei Chen, developed a creative way of drawi…  ( 8 min )

Explorer Victor Vescovo has spent years reaching some of the most extreme places on Earth, from scaling the tallest mountains on every continent, diving to the deepest parts of every ocean, skiing to both of the Earth’s poles, and even rocketing to the edge of space. In those environments he discovered awe in three distinct forms — mental, physical, and existential. These experiences changed the way he pays attention, teaching him to notice the quieter flashes of awe that appear in ordinary life. As a speaker at A Night of Awe and Wonder, hosted by Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation, Vescovo invites us to see awe as something we can practice every day life. This video What Earth’s most extreme places teach us about being human is featured on Big Think.  ( 10 min )

BowieNet version 3. Screenshot circa September 2003, via Web Design Museum. At the end of July 2003, in the lead-up to the release of David Bowie's latest album, Reality, BowieNet teased members with a promotional splash page and a new feature called the “Reality Jukebox.” The latter turned out to be a Flash page featuring multimedia promotions for the new album: “Firstly there are 90-second snippets of The Loneliest Guy and Looking for Water from Reality in the AUDIO section, (60-second snippets for non-members) and then there is a great new EPK (Electronic Press Kit) for Reality (Members Only) in the VIDEO section...” There was a prominent “click to order now” link on this page, which had a pink theme and used some of the imagery from the album. In addition, users were invited to become …  ( 6 min )

The epicenter of the quake, which was reported at 2:55 p.m., was near Montclair Village, according to preliminary information from the U.S. Geological Survey.  ( 23 min )

City and university police have investigated 14 instances of gunfire this year, one with injuries. There had been 23 this time in 2024.  ( 25 min )

For the second year in a row, Alice Water's Berkeley restaurant is Nosh readers' top choice for celebrations.  ( 24 min )

Other new Berkeley books: An “edgy” short story collection by Janet Goldberg, a handbook to help nonprofits integrate their missions with their internal workings and 20 years of comic book writing by Bob Levin.  ( 33 min )

This Butternut Squash Lasagna is an awesome vegan main dish for a celebration, but it’s also fantastic for meal prep! A creamy butternut squash filling is layered with plant-based ricotta and spinach, noodles, and cheeses for a dish that manages to feel decadent and wholesome at the same time. One of the little side benefits […]  ( 21 min )

A newly proposed explanation for the slipperiness of ice has revived a centuries-long debate. The post Why Is Ice Slippery? A New Hypothesis Slides Into the Chat. first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 11 min )

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The immensity of the Universe fills us with wonder. Artist’s logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe. The Solar System gives way to the Milky Way, which gives way to nearby galaxies which then give way to the large-scale structure and the hot, dense plasma of the Big Bang at the outskirts. Each line-of-sight that we can observe contains all of these epochs, but the quest for the most distant observed object will not be complete until we’ve mapped out the entire Universe. Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi; Unmismoobjetivo/Wikimedia Commons Despite all we’ve learned, however, unsolved puzzles abound. The early Universe was full of matter and radiation, and was so hot and dense that it prevented all composite particles, like protons and neutrons from stably forming for the fir…  ( 10 min )

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When you try these festive, chewy German almond biscuits, you’ll see why people have kept making and gifting them at Christmas for more than 500 years The thing I love most about these chewy, crisp, star-shaped, cinnamon-and-almond Christmas biscuits from Germany is that they date back to the 1500s. Which, much like spotting Mars in the night sky or visiting the pyramids of Egypt, makes me feel hugely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but simultaneously awe-inspired by the power of a simple biscuit to provide joy and underpin celebrations across centuries. This particular recipe belongs to my friend Friede’s grandma, Hadmuth, and is worth continuing, I think, for at least another 500 years. Continue reading...  ( 16 min )

Dependable and hard-working, Captain Hall took great pride in mentoring new recruits, offering guidance with patience and humor.  ( 24 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 25 min )

Breakfast classic and creative  ( 27 min )

City Council members plan to study elements of the fire code that critics say could shut down popular Berkeley street festivals.  ( 27 min )

The new wildfire safety rules, banning nearly everything combustible within 5 feet of buildings, or "Zone Zero," go into effect for 1,400 homes in the hills.  ( 30 min )

California unveiled an online portal to report potentially illegal activity by federal law enforcement, including ICE agents, to the state Department of Justice.  ( 25 min )

The post A New Governing Ecosystem Is Evolving appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 13 min )

Much of the ongoing discourse surrounding AI can largely be divided along two lines of thought. One concerns practical matters: How will large language models (LLMs) affect the job market? How do we stop bad actors from using LLMs to generate misinformation? How do we mitigate risks related to surveillance, cybersecurity, privacy, copyright, and the environment?  The other is far more theoretical: Are technological constructs capable of feelings or experiences? Will machine learning usher in the singularity, the hypothetical point where progress will accelerate at unimaginable speed? Can AI be considered intelligent in the same way people are? The answers to many of these questions may hinge on that last one, and if you ask Blaise Agüera y Arcas, he replies with a resounding yes. Agüera y …  ( 10 min )

With a moist cake base crowned with a swirl of fluffy peppermint buttercream, these Peppermint Swirl Chocolate Cupcakes bring an instant dose of holiday cheer to any party! Simple ingredient swaps make them vegan without any fuss. In full disclosure, it took me a while to warm up to the combination of chocolate and peppermint. […]  ( 25 min )

Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a language network in the human brain — and has found some parallels to LLMs. The post The Polyglot Neuroscientist Resolving How the Brain Parses Language first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 min )

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The Universe is filled with “stuff,” no matter where or when we dare to look. Even though the majority of the Universe is dark in the sense that we haven’t figured out how to directly detect it — with 95% of the cosmic energy density comprised of dark energy and dark matter — the 5% that comes in different forms of matter and radiation is profoundly significant. It makes up us, the planets, stars, and galaxies, as well as starlight, the plasmas and neutral gas clouds found within and beyond galaxies, and everything else we can observe. Of that 5%, in terms of mass, more than three-quarters of it is in the form of protons: the simplest and lowest-mass baryon, or particle made of three quarks, in all the Universe. As far as we’ve been able to determine, the proton is stable. Experimentally, …  ( 16 min )

What do trees and businesses have in common? For one, they’re systems. A tree dies when you starve it of water and sunlight, just as a business collapses when its resources are drained. In fact, all living things are systems: plants and animals, yes, but also organizations, relationships — even friendships. Stop responding to texts, and the relationship withers. (Unless, of course, that’s the goal. As the Gen Z might say: ghosting.) Systems rule the world, and once you see them, you can’t unsee them. Perhaps I’m thinking about them now, as we slip into the holiday season, when our own network of plans, friendships, and families seems to weave together. (The system breaks, it turns out, when you forget the baby’s diapers at a family function.) On this subject, no one is better than Donella …  ( 10 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 )

Rapper Quavo and NBA Hall of Famer Dwight Howard are coming to Memorial Stadium for a flag football game.  ( 24 min )

At a campaign launch event, Price said she wants to take a stand against billionaires, corporations, and Trump.  ( 26 min )

Ghost Town's Laurel location attracts a crowd with award-winning beer, big salads and juicy burgers, and a spacious, skull-adorned beer garden.  ( 28 min )

The man was struck near Bancroft Way Wednesday afternoon. He was declared dead at the scene.  ( 25 min )

The USGS quickly canceled a warning from MyShake on Thursday morning, and is looking into what triggered it.  ( 24 min )

City leaders are taking early steps toward putting a $300 million bond measure on next year’s ballot, but are wary after a similar effort failed in 2022.  ( 28 min )

Other events include a print sale, a meetup for bean lovers and a historical walking tour around UC Berkeley.  ( 27 min )

The post Inside The Push To Rebuild Society Around Ecosystems appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 29 min )

For as long as humanity has been looking up at the heavens, we’ve been pondering some of the biggest questions of all. It’s only over the past few hundred years that science has caught up to our vast imaginations, and has begun answering those questions for the first time in our civilization’s history. We know what the stars are: they’re much like our own Sun, except very far away. We know that the majority of them have planets, and that some of those planets are Earth-sized. We know that those worlds are composed of very similar ingredients to our own Solar System’s planets, and that they are governed by the same underlying laws of nature. But are any of those worlds actually inhabited? Here, as the end of 2025 approaches, that’s still a great cosmic unknown. We don’t yet know whether we’…  ( 16 min )

Pleasure is a dirty word. I mean this in two ways. First are the connotations or associations of the word. If a colleague asked you, “How much pleasure have you had this morning?” you might fire off an email to HR. If you saw the title “Learning to find pleasure,” or “Enjoy more pleasure,” you’d probably expect it to be in the roped-off section of the bookshop. Pleasure is frequently associated with the erotic. But second, pleasure is a dirty word because, across a variety of religious traditions and over several millennia of philosophical thought, “pleasure” has often been seen as base: vulgar, crude, and animalistic. Those who seek pleasure are no better than pigs rutting and scoffing in the mud. In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, who has li…  ( 7 min )

What makes the human brain capable of creativity? Neuroscientist David Eagleman, creativity researcher Scott Barry Kaufman, and productivity expert Tiago Forte each explore a different part of the puzzle: how humans evolved additional cortical “space,” how imagination builds on the knowledge we gather, and how organizing your thoughts in a “second brain” helps ideas take shape. Together, their perspectives explain why creativity depends on storing, combining, and transforming the raw material we collect over time. This video 3 experts explain your brain’s creativity formula is featured on Big Think.  ( 6 min )

A meta-cross-post  ( 10 min )

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

Animal rights activist Zoe Rosenberg was convicted of four counts, including felony conspiracy, in a case that drew international attention over what she called the “rescue” of four chickens.  ( 26 min )

State mediators will be brought in to help the district and teachers come to an agreement and avert a strike.  ( 27 min )

Mother Tongue Cafe & Bar is two years old, but its success is built on owner and roaster Jen Apodaca's two decades of experience roasting beans.  ( 25 min )

The program at the South Berkeley Senior Center, though just 2 years old, has quickly become a key community space for over 100 creative older locals.  ( 27 min )

MySpace in September 2003, the month after its launch. The term “digital native” was coined in 2001 by writer and teacher Marc Prensky, who wrote that “our students today are all 'native speakers' of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.” The rest of us are “digital immigrants,” which Prensky (who was in his mid-50s) defined as “not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology.” Although digital immigrants have learned to adapt to the new environment, according to Prensky “they always retain, to some degree, their 'accent,' that is, their foot in the past.” He gives the example of “turning to the Internet for information second rather than first.” On the other h…  ( 6 min )

By combining the language of groups with that of geometry and linear algebra, Marius Sophus Lie created one of math’s most powerful tools. The post What Are Lie Groups? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 9 min )

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Like clockwork, there are a series of celestial events and sights that reappear at the same time with each passing year. The Earth, revolving around the Sun in its orbit, not only sees the night sky’s constellations and deep-sky objects change along with its relative position to the Sun, but also encounters barely visible debris streams from volatile orbiting bodies — comets and asteroids — at predictable intervals throughout the year. The asteroids and comets orbit the Sun, heating up when they draw near, causing them to outgas, break apart, and emit particles. Those particles get stretched into the shape of the invisible ellipse that traces out their orbits, and when Earth passes through those ellipses, we get the same meteor showers year after year. January’s Quadrantids, April’s Lyrids…  ( 14 min )

At A Night of Awe and Wonder, marine biologist David Gruber, founder of  Project CETI and a National Geographic Explorer, traces the extraordinary journey linking humans and whales, from our shared ancestors to what we’re learning about their rich underwater communications. Through wartime recordings, bioacoustics pioneers, and cutting-edge AI, he shows how scientists are attempting to decode the phonetic alphabet of sperm whales and begin translating their ancient language. Gruber argues that understanding whale communication could reshape our sense of intelligence, ourselves, and our connection to life on Earth. This video How whales became the poets of the ocean is featured on Big Think.  ( 10 min )

Sometimes accusations of hypocrisy fail to hit home: People don’t seem too bothered by them. Here are four cases that start to unpick the view that we simply hate hypocrisy and instead show that there’s something else going on. The virtuous hypocrite Noel Biderman founded Ashley Madison, a website designed to enable affairs. What if he were faithful in his private life, despite publicly promoting infidelity? Such a scenario contains what many consider the main ingredients of hypocrisy: failing to practice privately what one preaches publicly. A study tested whether people would agree. It showed one group of people an article about Biderman that simply mentioned he had promoted adultery; a separate group saw the article with additional information that it had been discovered that Biderman w…  ( 8 min )

What is the fundamental human skill? It’s riding the crest of change and embracing the unknown, says Tim O’Reilly, tech trend visionary and CEO of O’Reilly Media. He “imbibed” this idea from sci-fi writer Frank Herbert (Dune) in the 1970s and has been “surfing the edge” of change ever since. Tim founded Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first ever commercial web portal, and sold it to AOL in 1995. He went on to become one of Silicon Valley’s most influential thinkers, known for popularizing the phrases “open source” and “Web 2.0” among others. O’Reilly Media — which Tim started over 40 years ago — has provided business and tech training to millions of users and currently serves over 5,000 companies worldwide. He has long argued that technology can create new jobs rather than laying peopl…  ( 9 min )

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More than 74,000 Alameda County residents on Covered California plans could see health insurance premiums increase if the federal government doesn’t extend tax credits.  ( 29 min )

A newcomer on the scene, La Loulou crushed the competition and elicited effusive praise from Nosh voters.  ( 26 min )

Cara Goldstein makes cards, stickers and a calendar of local sites; The shop Smiles Handcrafted offers supplies for crafting and DIY classes.  ( 26 min )

Berkeley is using local funding rather than a FEMA grant it had received to pay for a seismic retrofit at a community center, after being told the federal agency could take years to provide the money, according to the city.  ( 24 min )

To immediately enable Wolfram Compute Services in Version 14.3 Wolfram Desktop systems, run RemoteBatchSubmissionEnvironment["WolframBatch"]. (The functionality is automatically available in the Wolfram Cloud.) Scaling Up Your Computations Let’s say you’ve done a computation in Wolfram Language. And now you want to scale it up. Maybe 1000x or more. Well, today we’ve released an extremely streamlined […]  ( 10 min )

The post Inside Denmark’s Hardline Immigration Experiment appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 33 min )

Ring in the holiday season with this cozy Eggnog French Toast! With warm spices and a rich cashew-based custard, this easy recipe is sure to be a hit on Christmas morning or anytime you have a French toast craving. This eggnog French toast is basically the best thing since sliced bread. If you want to wake everyone […]  ( 18 min )

All throughout the Universe, we can see evidence for not only the “stuff like us” that’s out there, but additional forms of energy that take us beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles and forces. Sure, there’s plenty of normal matter: things like atoms and ions, made up fundamentally of quarks, gluons, and electrons, just like we are. There are stars and planets, but also gas, dust, plasma, and even black holes made from the same raw ingredients that make us up. There are also photons, or quanta of light, and the nearly invisible neutrinos and antineutrinos, all playing detectable, measurable roles in the evolution of our cosmos. But that doesn’t explain everything we know is out there contributing to our Universe. We know, from observing galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the large-…  ( 15 min )

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a surge of skepticism around the phenomenon currently referred to as the “AI boom.” The shift began when OpenAI released GPT-5 this summer to mixed reviews, mostly from casual users. We’ve since had months of breathless claims from pundits and influencers that the era of rapid AI advancement is ending, that AI scaling has hit the wall, and that the AI boom is just another tech bubble. These same voices overuse the phrase “AI slop” to disparage the remarkable images, documents, videos, and code that AI models produce at the touch of a button. I find this perspective both absurd and dangerous.  By any objective measure, AI continues to improve at a stunning pace. The impressive leap in capabilities made by Gemini 3 in November is just the latest example. …  ( 9 min )

A great way to start taking stock of your culture is to review your written artifacts, including your mission, values, and purpose statements. You’ll also want to gain a clear understanding of the roots and history behind these statements. How did you get to where you are now? Do you feel like your mission statement and written values align to how your people show up every day? Leaders with a clear understanding of these fundamental documents and histories can use them as guideposts as they build culture; or they can work to change them to better represent the culture they want to intentionally design. Brenna Davis, CEO of the nation’s largest organic produce wholesaler, Organically Grown Company (OGC), emphasizes the importance of honoring the company’s roots. She has a reverence for the …  ( 7 min )

It’s the second big Berkeley bookstore closure this year. A spokesperson for Half Price Books attributed the closure to a lease dispute with their landlord.  ( 26 min )

The crash happened around 3 p.m. near University Avenue. The rider has not yet been identified.  ( 24 min )

Joyce Tang has built Bake Sum into a nationally acclaimed pastry powerhouse in the five years since it opened. Nosh readers voted it the best bakery of 2025.  ( 25 min )

Hundreds of people were attending the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity’s party Nov. 14 where 19-year-old George Mauricio Salinas was found unresponsive. Police “do not suspect foul play.”  ( 25 min )

The Berkeley High School Development Group supports dozens of programs at the school.  ( 25 min )

The East Bay Regional Park District has unveiled its final design for the North Basin Strip, south of the Gilman sports fields, with features for walkers and cyclists. No funds have yet been allocated to the project.  ( 27 min )

Keyboardist Marco Casasola cut his teeth with East Bay R&B and church-music legends. His wife Cristina Ibarra finds daily joy in their neighborhood's quirky aesthetic. Both wonder if they'll ever be able to afford "room to grow."  ( 29 min )

KaZaA, one of many P2P file sharing services in 2002. In June 2002, Pew Research Center released a report on broadband uptake. It stated that 21% of all Internet users in America — 24 million adults — now had broadband in the home, up from just 6% two years ago. Of course, broadband penetration would continue to trend upward over the coming years. But even in 2002, Pew claimed that the internet had morphed from a "sometimes" tool for communication and finding information to an "always-on information appliance." This change in the character of the internet around 2002 led to the other trends we'll look at in this post: more interactive websites, more online music choices, more socializing on the web. A BBC report in January 2002 about broadband. Web Design: Flash to CSS One website that il…  ( 6 min )

On the 90-year saga of oral phenylephrine.

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact logically equivalent. The post ‘Reverse Mathematics’ Illuminates Why Hard Problems Are Hard first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

These rich and fudgy Peppermint Brownies are finished with festive candy canes and a white chocolate drizzle for the perfect holiday treat!  When I think of Christmas, I automatically think of PEPPERMINT and CHOCOLATE. Well, I think of chocolate all the time, but with peppermint? Well, that’s reserved for the holiday season. This is my […]  ( 22 min )

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The answer to nature’s greatest riddles are written upon the Universe itself. Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighboring galaxies. The maps show the total brightness and color of stars (top), the total density of stars (middle), and the interstellar dust that fills the galaxy (bottom). Note how, on average, there are approximately ~10 million stars in each square degree, but that some regions, like the galactic plane or the galactic center, have stellar densities well above the overall average. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC From the fundamental to the cosmic, science reveals our natural history. Our Universe, from the hot Big Bang until the present day, underwent a huge amount of growth and evolution, and continues to do so. Our entire observable Universe was approximately th…  ( 11 min )

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A stunning but simple festive vegetarian centrepiece for the whole table to enjoy Last year I wrote about how I lost my food fandango, got it back, and now simplify matters, especially in the kitchen. This means I no longer do feasts with lots of elements, even at Christmas, but I still adore a showstopper, especially one that the whole table, irrespective of dietary requirements, can enjoy together. This year’s offering is such a centrepiece, an aubergine timbale (timbale means drum) packed to the gunnels with vegetables, rice, nuts, fruit, spices and, should you wish it (you should), one of the finest cheeses to come out of Normandy: Boursin. Continue reading...  ( 16 min )

With lots of sweet corn, tender potatoes, and a rich, creamy broth, this vegan Corn Chowder recipe is every bit as delicious as the traditional version! Whether it’s Corn Nuggets, Corn Soufflé, or classic Corn Succotash, corn is a favourite in the summer months. And this vegan corn chowder recipe brings that sweet flavour into […]  ( 19 min )

It’s no secret that there is a seemingly endless string of problems to address in the world. You don’t have to look hard to find people suffering from all sorts of maladies: from illness to injustice, from war to famine, from poverty to pollution. There are some major problems facing humanity in the 21st century, and they’re all going to require an enormous investment of our collective resources if we want to solve them. From climate change to global pandemics to the energy and water crises and more, none of these problems are going to solve themselves. If they’re to be solved at all, it’s going to come down to humanity’s collective actions. But where does that leave the scientific research that doesn’t directly relate to these crises? As beautiful and enlightening as the recent James Webb…  ( 14 min )

When I was growing up, mental health was rarely talked about. Most people knew someone who had gone to therapy and generally accepted it as a necessary step in getting the help they needed. But what happened on the chaise lounge stayed on the chaise lounge. People didn’t discuss their diagnoses, and if therapy came up, it was usually in reference to the latest episode of The Sopranos.  This began to change in the aughts. The U.S. Congress passed laws to make mental health more accessible and affordable. Celebrities opened up about their struggles with depression and anxiety, and the internet offered unprecedented access to mental health information. All positive changes, but then things continued to accelerate. Today, online mental health advice is as contradictory as it is universal. Psyc…  ( 11 min )

The verb deter was coined in the English language in the 16th century from the Latin deterreo (to frighten) and first applied systematically in 18th- and 19th-century criminological texts. During the 1850s, the English criminologist T.B.L. Baker invented the noun form deterrence to capture an idea about the effects of actual and potential punishment on criminal thought and behavior. Early criminologists believed that criminals who possessed what the utilitarian philosopher (and early deterrence theorist) Jeremy Bentham called “rational agency” were susceptible to the fear of punishment. Modern criminologists argued that punishments such as prison sentences should not be seen as they had been in an earlier age: as acts of moral retribution or as efforts to reform the criminal. Punishments s…  ( 11 min )

Ever since I first read Janine Benyus’s Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, I’ve descended into a rabbit hole in search of what “intelligence” really means (and who has it). Perhaps that’s why I love the name of this newsletter so much. [It’s a worm, after all. A humble, indispensable critter buried beneath the soil.] Benyus’s central argument is that the “smartest” solutions to human problems already exist in nature. We just need to know where, and how, to look for them. (For instance: wind turbines inspired by humpback whales.) So perhaps it’s no surprise that I was riveted by a recent piece on monarch butterflies. The piece explains how monarchs actually navigate: with two independent compasses built into their biology. On clear days, they orient themselves using a solar compass.…  ( 9 min )

It’s the spring of 1951. As the Korean War escalates and the world engages in scandalized debate over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s recent conviction for espionage, students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania are gathering in small groups to take part in what they believe to be a vision test. They’re shown three lines of obviously different lengths and asked which one matches a target line. Unaware that they’re participating in a psychology experiment overseen by the social psychologist Solomon Asch, the subjects don’t realize that everyone else in their group has been instructed to give the wrong answer.  The task is simple — one line clearly matches the target while the other two clearly don’t. Yet when everyone in the room says otherwise, the students begin to doubt what they see. Suc…  ( 7 min )

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Every day, we have a choice whether we take our lives, our existence, our freedoms, and our moments for granted, or whether we express appreciation and gratitude for the good things that exist. The biggest unifier that all human beings have in common, that we all exist on the same world and in the same Universe, never gets the due it deserves. Here and now, it’s possible for us to exist, and to exist as long as our natural lifespans will allow us. This wasn’t guaranteed from first principles, but simply happens to be. At a huge number of different points in our Universe’s history, the laws of nature came together in such a way to enable our existence, and to allow us to look back today, 13.8 billion years later, with thankfulness in our hearts. Here are ten phenomena that made it all possi…  ( 10 min )

What if the genome you were born with wasn’t fixed? Eric Kelsic, CEO of Dyno Therapeutics, explains how gene therapy is moving from promise to reality, delivering treatments directly to cells and potentially curing diseases for a lifetime. This video How your body could outlive the genome you were born with is featured on Big Think.  ( 13 min )

We are at a tipping point. In the next 25 years, technologies like AI, clean energy, and bioengineering are poised to reshape society on a scale few can imagine.  Peter Leyden draws on decades of observing technological revolutions and historical patterns to show how old systems collapse, new ones rise, and humanity faces both extraordinary risk and unprecedented opportunity. This video Why the next 25 years will force humanity to reinvent itself is featured on Big Think.  ( 39 min )

Clara opens her door on Friday night. She throws the keys on the table, takes off her jacket, and plops down on the sofa. Scroll, scroll, scroll. She messages Tom to ask how his meeting went. Scroll, scroll, scroll. She goes to the toilet, puts her food in the microwave, and waits. The food will take three minutes, so Clara goes back to get her phone. There’s not a chance in hell she’ll just stand there. Three minutes staring into space? She’s not a psychopath. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Ping. Back to the sofa, TV on, Tom replies. She settles in. She won’t be doing much else until Monday morning, when work pulls her away. Of course, Clara is a foil — an exaggerated archetype representing the modern human. Her life is filled with necessity. She has to work, she has to eat, she has to go to the…  ( 8 min )

Parenting is often framed as a battle between discipline and chaos, but Dr. Becky Kennedy argues that the real story lives beneath the behavior we see.  Kennedy traces how early relationships teach children which parts of themselves are welcome, which emotions feel dangerous, and how those lessons script adult identity. This video How early attachment scars can impact us forever is featured on Big Think.  ( 4 min )

There’s an old adage that goes, “No one ever got fired for hiring [insert consulting firm here].” This rang true for many years, as there was no substitute for consulting ‘SaaS’ (‘scapegoat as a service’) — but a reckoning is coming. After nearly a decade of uninterrupted growth, the days of multi-million-dollar, multi-year contracts with governmental entities and private companies are swiftly withering away. Firms that succeeded in convincing organizations they couldn’t solve their own problems are finding their claims, value, and costs are being called into question. In just the last few months, Pricewaterhouse Coopers let go 1,500 US workers (2% of its US workforce), following 1,800 cuts in 2024. Accenture announced a round of 19,000 layoffs in 2023, with ongoing reductions continuing. …  ( 7 min )

Group intelligence is worth talking about  ( 31 min )

One more state regulator still needs to give the green light before robo-cars hit East Bay roads.  ( 25 min )

Oakland Gleaners and Alameda’s Project Pick have had record years, redistributing a combined 11 tons of fruit to those in need.  ( 29 min )

Gaps persist along socioeconomic and racial lines, but California data for 2025 show English-learners and Black students collectively made gains.  ( 24 min )

We can help you tell your story, remember your loved one or spread the word about your events. And there are a few ways you can help us, too.  ( 25 min )

A $6.5 million project will also bring long-awaited new permanent restrooms to the Tom Bates Regional Sports Complex, a hub for East Bay soccer.  ( 24 min )

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: 14,445 and Counting appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.  ( 5 min )

On the origins of Arabidopsis thaliana, the premier model for plant biology.

The Moon, by far, is the brightest object and largest object that’s visible to human eyes in Earth’s night sky. Compared to Venus, the next brightest object that appears, the Moon is thirty times the diameter, takes up almost 1000 times the surface area, and appears about 1,000,000 times brighter than Venus. Moreover, the Moon doesn’t appear as a uniform disk to us, but rather shows incredible differences from place-to-place across the surface, even as viewed from our limited perspective here on Earth. To the naked eye, these differences might just appear as bright-and-dark patches: the so-called “man in the Moon” is the easiest feature to see. But if you take a look through a telescope, you won’t just see those dark spots silhouetted against the brighter portions, but also mountain ridges…  ( 14 min )

The year 2025 might be Iran’s worst-ever annus horribilis. Only 10 months ago, there was some tentative optimism in the nation that, with a new president in the White House — albeit one who had gifted Iran its previous anni horribiles by withdrawing from a working nuclear agreement, and who, while campaigning in 2024, promised he would “solve” Iran’s nuclear issue — there might be a chance for a renewed nuclear deal and an entente with the U.S.  But as we approach the end of the year, Iran finds itself altogether without a functioning nuclear program, it having been either destroyed or buried under a mountain of rubble by the U.S.’s MOP bombs in June. The nation also lacks an effective air defense following Israeli attacks on its missile launchers and anti-aircraft batteries, and it’s stil…  ( 11 min )

AI is often framed as a force that will either replace us or elevate us in the workplace, but Google’s Organization and Leadership Development Lead Martin Gonzalez argues that the real story sits somewhere far more complicated.  The story is a puzzle comprising three challenges shaping the future of work: Selective upgrades that benefit some employees and hinder others, the human need for control that can undermine adoption, and the gradual drift toward isolated, AI-mediated tasks. This video 3 challenges that AI integration presents in the workplace is featured on Big Think.  ( 9 min )

Psychedelic research is enjoying a renaissance. Matthew Johnson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, is at the forefront of the movement to redefine our understanding of the mind and its interaction with these powerful substances.  As psychedelic compounds steadily enter the sphere of clinical trials, Johnson’s groundbreaking research underscores their potential to bring about a paradigm shift in psychiatry, neuroscience, and pharmacology. This video How one psychedelic trip can alter an entire lifetime is featured on Big Think.  ( 69 min )

For thousands of years after Aristotle, the most anyone ever said about infinity was that it was infinite. We could imagine infinity but never actually achieve it. Post-Aristotle, infinity was always idealized, never realized — a philosophical construct at best. As something that could never be reached, infinity could never be treated as a proper mathematical object, most believed. Through the millennia, some of the top philosophical and mathematical minds of their day turned their attention to the concept, pondered it at length, and inevitably gave it up. [Georg] Cantor will come to understand that better than anyone. […] His work is outstanding, but some of his ideas are way too taboo for many mathematicians. Completing an infinity implies somehow mastering an impossibly long iterative p…  ( 9 min )

Richard Branson told me the single most important lesson he wished he’d learned at the beginning: the willingness to turn setbacks into superpowers and wounds into wisdom. It was hard to imagine his earlier challenges while sitting with him in the hot tub on his private island in the Caribbean, but there have been many that he’s not only survived, he’s better off. It’s the same theme I’ve heard after coaching, mentoring, and serving on boards with hundreds of CEOs worldwide — from Charles Schwab to Jensen Huang. No matter their industry, the leaders who endure never attribute their success to flawless planning and careers. They point instead to the genius and insights that came from the moments that went wrong — and how often they tried harder each time. Setbacks as superpowers Nvidia’s Je…  ( 6 min )

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In a letter to the district, Republican lawmakers cited reports of harassment of Jewish students. School officials said the claims are old and have been addressed. BUSD is one of three districts named in the federal probe.  ( 25 min )

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

The U.S. Department of Education has launched an investigation of Cal's response to protests outside the event. The Department of Justice was already investigating the university.  ( 24 min )

Felicia Mello, a Berkeley High and Cal grad whose investigative reporting for CalMatters drove statewide change, will report on UC Berkeley and other East Bay colleges now under threat.  ( 26 min )

2 Star Market's holiday tradition started in 2002 with 20 turkeys for 50 people. This year they are collecting donations in hopes of serving more than ever.  ( 26 min )

About 20 students per year from Berkeley High School and Berkeley City College get hands-on learning through Biotech Partners.  ( 26 min )

There’ve already been a dozen false alarms this year, triggering campus-wide evacuations. Student vaping is one likely cause, but administrators also cite system glitches.  ( 28 min )

The supercollider is now being used to explore quantum phenomena, including a “magic” form of quantum entanglement. The post Particle Physicists Detect ‘Magic’ at the Large Hadron Collider first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 11 min )

The post The Moral Authority Of Animals appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 26 min )

What would you see if you could look into the past of every human being on Earth and see them as they were when they were 5 years old? You’d expect to see people possessing a wide variety of traits: some short and some tall, some heavy and some light in weight, some with larger feet and some with smaller feet, etc. Despite this variety, however, you’d fully expect that they’d all look like 5 year olds; you’d be shocked to find one that looked like a teenager, a young adult, or even a middle-aged adult. If this were the case, it would make you question — and rightly so — if what you were seeing was actually reflective of reality. But in the Universe, this is precisely what occurs when we look at the earliest, brightest, most active galaxies that contain black holes. In theory, there should …  ( 15 min )

The COVID-19 pandemic is credited with accelerating the widespread acceptance of remote work, with proponents citing benefits like increased flexibility, greater employee satisfaction, and cost savings. But when Jack Nilles first proposed the idea of “telework” in the early 1970s, the University of Southern California researcher had another goal in mind: reducing traffic congestion. It was a phenomenon that Nilles, a U.S. Air Force veteran turned NASA consultant, dubbed the “telecommunications-transportation tradeoff.” Viewing remote work as a potential substitute for commuting, Nilles sought to gauge telework’s effectiveness by partnering with a major national insurance company (whose name he still can’t divulge for legal reasons). A group of employees worked from local centers equipped w…  ( 10 min )

Whenever you observe an object, you aren’t viewing it in its present state. When one of Jupiter’s moons passes behind our Solar System’s largest planet, it falls into the planet’s shadow, becoming dark. When sunlight begins striking the moon again, we don’t see it instantly, but many minutes later: the time it takes for light to travel from that particular moon to our eyes. Here, Io re-emerges from behind Jupiter, the same phenomenon that Ole Rømer used to first measure the speed of light, while Europa and Ganymede hover on the right. Credit: Robert J. Modic Instead, we’re held back while light travels through space. As shown here, the International Space Station flies over a spectacular aurora on display in Earth’s atmosphere. At its cruising altitude of around ~400 kilometers, the l…  ( 8 min )

Restrictions on gardening have been eased in Cesar Chavez Park, but a first-ever radon test reveals possible health dangers for workers below ground and keeps preventing some park improvements.  ( 31 min )

Panes con pavo is a Salvadoran tradition for Thanksgiving but you can get those flavors all year long in El Sobrante.  ( 24 min )

Police can track vehicle movements with Flock's license plate-reading cameras and have asked for more Flock hardware to build out a network of fixed-surveillance cameras. Critics say the tools are ripe for abuse.  ( 31 min )

The shop near campus is popular with faculty and students in Cal’s art department and College of Environmental Design.  ( 25 min )

Movable Type blog entry template, 2002; via Wayback Machine. In my history of blogging so far, we've seen how weblogs emerged in 1999 as a new form of personal journal, began to link to each other in 2000 via blogrolls, and then turned serious in 2001 with "warblogs." During those early years of the form, I was aware of certain weblogs but I hadn't yet signed up for an account at Blogger or downloaded Movable Type. In other words, I was a reader of blogs — but not yet a writer. That changed in March 2002, when I paid for an annual license to a desktop blogging tool called Radio Userland. I called my new weblog Modern Web. My initial goal was to blog about "web development and e-business trends." At the time, I worked for a New Zealand power company as a "Web Manager" — I was in charge of t…  ( 6 min )

17 months since I first questioned whether anyone even needed another recipe for a basque cheesecake — the burnished, custardy and uncluttered kind that hails from San Sebastián, Spain — and concluded that in fact, I did. I wanted one that was smaller, because I didn’t want to make a 2- to 3-pound commitment to cheese [which, honestly, sounds like a beautiful thing otherwise] every time the craving struck. A loaf pan was ideal for efficiency, portability, and easy slicing. A food processor allowed us to make the batter in just minutes, even if the cream cheese was cold from the fridge. A little cornstarch instead of flour enabled the cheesecake to be gluten-free, always a win. Read more »  ( 16 min )

Competing theories seek to explain inconsistencies surrounding Alexander Fleming’s famed discovery.

Vegan marshmallows, a rich chocolate dough, and melted chocolate on top make these Hot Chocolate Cookies an instant classic! They’re easy to make and perfect for the holidays. Oh boy, you are in for a treat with these Hot Chocolate Cookies! I’m already planning on adding them to my Christmas cookie trays with this year, […]  ( 20 min )

With 30 grams of protein per serving, this Vegan Cheeseburger Bowl will help you hit your macro goals—and help you satisfy that burger craving too! Who needs a bun when you can just pile vegan burger crumbles, potato wedges, and toppings in a bowl?! After I noticed all the burger bowls on social media lately, […]  ( 19 min )

The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing. The post A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 min )

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Struggling with gift ideas? The Guardian’s expert columnists are here to help, with everything from Yotam Ottolenghi’s favourite pans to the only nail polish brand Sali Hughes uses • 305 best Christmas presents for 2025 Are you in the festive spirit yet? Or, just, well…a bit stressed? This time of year can feel overwhelming, but who better to calm the panic of Christmas gift shopping than the Guardian’s cohort of expert columnists? Want to know which M&S cardi fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley has had her eye on that gives “very posh”? Or the chocolate bars chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi is obsessed with? Beauty expert Sali Hughes has got the gifts to make Gen Z’s squeal with excitement, while Gynelle Leon selects the perfect present for the person in your life who prefers gardening to a night out. Continue reading...

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 )

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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 )

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 )

What does it take to turn South Korea's mandatory military service into a literary retreat?  ( 24 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 )