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An analysis of recent Morning Consult poll results found that Gen Zers currently between ages 13 and 23 are less likely than the general population to identify as sports fans.

Why does the Chinese Communist Party, which actively curtails the rights of those who live under its rule, still have the support of its people? What exactly is the relationship between the Chinese people and their government? And why might a Western observer of China be obscured from the Chinese point of view? Kaiser Kuo answers these questions and more in the context of recent history, showing us what the world looks like through Beijing’s windows and the extent to which Beijing’s worldview is shared by China’s citizenry. If you need one article to explain why contemporary China is the way it is, this is it.

The conventional wisdom about how to spot a liar is all wrong.

Perseverance, the Fermi Paradox, and the Great Filter.

A visual introduction to probability and statistics.

A new study on the early pioneers of abstraction found that artists with diverse social networks were most famous, regardless of the creativity of their work.

‘Eat local’ is a common recommendation to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet. But transport tends to account for a small share of greenhouse gas emissions. How does the impact of what you eat compare to where it’s come from?

The Banaras Hindu University, founded by Madan Mohan Malaviya, blazed a trail as it blended East with West.

Search Engine Land is the leading industry source for daily, must-read news and in-depth analysis about search engine technology.

The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create its replacement. No one should mourn the death of the cookie as we know it. For more than two decades, the third-party cookie has been the lynchpin in a shadowy, seedy, multi-billion dollar advertising-surveillance industry on the Web...

The pandemic brought the business opportunity of a lifetime to Puritan Medical Products of Guilford, Maine. But even a $250 million infusion from the U.S. government has done little to quell an epic family feud.

What do we do now that there’s more in the newsfeed than we can possibly read? Can the algorithmic sample ever actually work, or do we swing back to 1:1 messaging? How do Stories rebundle that? And what happens to all the traffic that the newsfeed provides?

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

Nearly 200 years ago, Dhaka muslin was the most valuable fabric on the planet. Then it was lost altogether. How did this happen? And can we bring it back?

See discussion of this essay on the forum, Hacker News (a), Marginal Revolution (a), Andrew Gelman’s blog 1 (a), 2 (a), 3 (a), 4 (a), /r/slatestarcodex (a), Twitter (a), listen to BBC interviewing me and Walker himself about it or listen to my interview with Smart People Podcast discussing it. Note: I link to a bunch of paywalled studies in this essay. Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. For the clearest …

Truly unlocking competition in tech means increasing interoperability; an absolutist approach to privacy is doing the exact opposite.

Explore our surprisingly simple, absurdly ambitious and necessarily incomplete guide to the boundless mathematical universe.

(Cross-posted at NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.) Remember when, inspired by Sam Harris’s TED talk, we debated whether you could derive “ought” (morality) from “is&#82…

The story of a few good men's struggle, against their own commanders, their own fleet, their own ships and their own men.Want to support the channel? - https...

The successful development of mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 is ‘transformational’ and opens the doors to new types of vaccines for other infectious diseases as well as cancer, according to Dr Özlem Türeci and Dr Uğur Şahin, the co-founders of Germany’s BioNTech.

Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist turned computer scientist, has a new project: charting his every bodily function in minute detail. What he’s discovering may be the future of health care.

Violet Gibson from Dublin never made it into the history books. But she did come very close to changing the course of 20th-century Europe. She shot Benito Mussolini in 1926. Nearly a century later, the Irish capital is going to honor her.

Archival footage married with part of a Christopher Hitchens speech, showing Saddam Hussein's final purge of the Iraqi Baath Party leadership. You'll notice a couple of small details are different than Hitchens remembers. The audience is larger, and the confessor does not come in wearing chains (metaphorically, perhaps, but not literally.) We don't know exactly how many hundreds of party members were killed in this purge in the whole of Iraq, but of the 68 taken out of this room on July 22, 1979, at least 22 were executed (by their fellow party members). Sadly, the bloodbath for Iraqis and ...

Serum Institute of India may be the world’s best hope for producing enough vaccine to end the pandemic.

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

Education News: BSIP Scintists Analyse 4000-Year-Old Food Balls

Personality traits have been found to be related to a variety of health outcomes. The aim of this study was to examine how personality traits were associated with adjustment to the COVID pandemic in college students. The sample included 484 first-year university students (76% female) attending a northeastern university who completed the Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality assessment at the beginning of a semester that was disrupted by the COVID pandemic. Using a phone-based app, students completed daily ratings of mood, perceived stress levels, and engagement in a number of health promotion activities (exercise, mindfulness, adequate sleep, etc.) throughout the semester both before and after the onset of the pandemic (e.g., a within-person longitudinal design). Results, as expected, showed that mood and wellness indices generally declined during the COVID period, although stress levels actually decreased. Further, irrespective of COVID, improved mood, less perceived stress and greater participation in health promotion activities were significantly associated with a number of personality traits including neuroticism (lower), extraversion (higher), agreeableness (higher), and conscientiousness (higher). Of primary interest, mixed-effects models were used to test how major personality traits interacted with any changes in daily ratings from the pre-COVID to COVID period. Significant interactions terms were found suggesting differential impacts of the COVID epidemic for students with low versus high levels of particular traits. Higher levels of extraversion, for example, were found to be related to decreases in mood as the pandemic progressed in contrast to those with lower extraversion, for whom there was a slight increase in mood over time. These data support the conclusion that personality traits are related to mental health and can play a role in a person’s ability to cope with major stressful events. Different traits may also be more adaptive to different types of stressors.