Table Of ContentDedication
For Juliet and Miles
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Human Progress Quantified
Doing More with Less
The “Specialness” of Humanity
J. M. Bergoglio’s 2015 Review of Global Ecology
Leaking, Thinning, Sliding Ice
Glaciers
Our Collective Blind Spot
Three De-carbonizing Scientific Breakthroughs
Juice
A Call to Action
A Bridge Between the 21st and 22nd Century
The Greatest Environmental Disaster
Technobiophilic Cities
LENR Could Supplant Fossil Fuels
Emotions Influence Environmental Well-Being
Global Warming Redux: A Serious Challenge to Our Species
Blue Marble 2.0
High-Tech Stone Age
The Dematerialization of Consumption
Science Made This Possible
The Brain Is a Strange Planet
The Abdication of Spacetime
The News That Wasn’t There
No News Is Astounding News
One Hundred Years of Failure
Hope Beyond the Higgs Boson
An Unexpected, Haunting Signal
News About How the Physical World Operates
Unpublicized Implications of Hawking Black-Hole Evaporation
The Energy of Nothing
The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought It Was
Anomalies
Looking Where the Light Isn’t
Simplicity
The LHC Is Working at Full Energy
New Probes of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—and Beyond?
Supermassive Black Holes
Gigantic Black Holes at the Center of Galaxies
The Universe Is Infinite
Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
The News Is Not the News
We Know All the Particles and Forces We’re Made Of
Computational Complexity and the Nature of Reality
Einstein Was Wrong
Replacing Magic with Mechanism?
Quantum Entanglement Is Independent of Space and Time
Breakthroughs Become Part of the Culture
Space Exploration, New and Old
Pluto Is a Bump in the Road
Pluto Now, Then on to 550 AU
The Universe Surprised Us, Close to Home
Progress in Rocketry
The Space Age Takes Off . . . and Returns to Earth Again
How Widely Should We Draw The Circle?
A New Algorithm Showing What Computers Can and Cannot Do
Designer Humans
Cellular Alchemy
A Terrible Beauty Has Been Born
DNA Programming
Human Chimeras
The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering
The Ongoing Battles with Pathogens
Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics!
The 6 Billion Letters of Our Genome
Systems Medicine
Growing a Brain in a Dish
Self-Driving Genes Are Coming
Life Diverging
Fundamentally Newsworthy
Paleo-DNA and De-Extinction
The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up
Tabby’s Star
Extraterrestrials Don’t Land on Earth!
We Are Not Unique, but We Are Very Much Alone
Breakthrough Listen
Life in the Milky Way
There Is (Already) Life on Mars
The Breathtaking Future of a Connected World
Everything Is Computation
Identifying the Principles, Perhaps the Laws, of Intelligence
Neuro-News
Microbial Attractions
The Epidemic of Absence
Bugs R Us
Fecal Microbiota Transplants
Hi, Guys
The Anti-democratic Trend
The Age of Awareness
A Large-Scale Personality Research Method
The Conquest of Human Scale
Big Data and Better Government
This Is the Science-News Essay You Want to Read
Those Annoying Ads? The Harbinger of Good Things to Come
Biology Versus Choice
How to Be Bad Together
Psychology’s Crisis
The Truthiness of Scientific Research
Blinded by Data
The Epistemic Trainwreck of Soft-Side Psychology
Science Itself
A Compelling Explanation for Scientific Misconduct
Sub-Prime Science
The Infancy of Meta-Science
The Disillusion and the Disaffection of Poor White Americans
Inequality of Wealth and Income: A Runaway Process
The Age of Visible Thought
Our Changing Conceptions of What It Means to Be Human
Complete Head Transplants
The En-Gendering of Genius
Diversity in Science
The Democratization of Science
News About Science News
The Broadening Scope of Science
Q-Bio
Mathematics and Reality
Synthetic Learning
A Genuine Science of Learning
Bayesian Program Learning
FSM (Feces-Standard Money)
The Ironies of Higher Arithmetic
Broke People Ignoring $20 Bills on the Sidewalk
We Fear the Wrong Things
Living in Terror of Terrorism
The State of the World Isn’t As Bad As You Think
The Healthy Diet U-Turn
Fatty Foods Are Good for Your Health
Partisan Hostility
Cognitive Science Transforms Moral Philosophy
Morality Is Made of Meat
People Kill Because It’s the Right Thing to Do
Interdisciplinary Social Research
Intellectual Convergence
Weapons Technology Powered Human Evolution
The Immune System: A Grand Unifying Theory for Biomedical Research
Harnessing Our Natural Defenses Against Cancer
Cancer Drugs for Brain Diseases
The Most Powerful Carcinogen May Be Entropy
The Decline of Cancer
The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women
The Most Important X . . . Y . . . Z . . .
The Mother of All Addictions
The Trust Metric
Optogenetics
The State of Brain Science
Nootropic Neural News
Memory Is a Labile Fabrication
The Continually New You
Toddlers Can Master Computers
The Predictive Brain
A New Imaging Tool
Sensors: Accelerating the Pace of Scientific Discovery
3D Printing in the Medical Field
Deep Science
A World That Counts
Programming Reality
Pointing Is a Prerequisite for Language
Macro-Criminal Networks
Virtual Reality Goes Mainstream
The Twin Tides of Change
Imaging Deep Learning
The Neural Net Reloaded
Differentiable Programming
Deep Learning, Semantics, and Society
Seeing Our Cyborg Selves
The Rejection of Science Itself
Rethinking Artificial Intelligence
I, for One
Data Sets over Algorithms
Biological Models of Mental Illness Reflect Essentialist Biases
Neuroprediction
The Thin Line Between Mental Illness and Mental Health
Theodiversity
Modernity Is Winning
Religious Morality Is Mostly Below the Belt
A Science of the Consequences
Creation of a “No Ethnic Majority” Society
Interconnectedness
Early Life Adversity and Collective Outcomes
We’re Still Behind
Neural Hacking, Handprints, and the Empathy Deficit
Send in the Drones
That Dress
Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy
The Origin of Europeans
The Platinum Rule: Dense, Heavy, but Worth It
Adjusting to Feathered Dinosaurs
People Are Animals
The Longevity of News
Weather Prediction Has Quietly Gotten Better
The Word: First As Art, Then As Science
The Convergence of Images and Technology
The Mindful Meeting of Minds
Carpe Diem
Linking the Levels of Human Variation
Challenging the Value of a University Education
The Hermeneutic Hypercycle
Rethinking Authority with the Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment
Envoi: We May All Die Horribly
Acknowledgments
Also by John Brockman
Copyright
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