Author: Lori Jia
The New York Times, April 30, 2025
Consciousness may be a mystery, but that doesn’t mean that neuroscientists don’t have any explanations for it. Far from it.
“In the field of consciousness, there are already so many theories that we don’t need more theories,” said Oscar Ferrante, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham.
Continue reading “Two Theories of Consciousness Faced Off. The Ref Took a Beating.”
The New York Times, April 22, 2025 (with Katrina Miller)
Casey Fiesler, an information science professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, learned late on Friday evening that one of the three grants she had been awarded by the National Science Foundation was being terminated.
“It was a total surprise,” Dr. Fiesler said. “This is the one that I thought was totally safe.”
The grant supported Dr. Fiesler’s research on building A.I. literacy. She received no official explanation for why the grant was being terminated more than a year ahead of its scheduled end. But Dr. Fiesler speculated that it had something to do with the word “misinformation” in the award’s abstract.
Continue reading “National Science Foundation Terminates Hundreds of Active Research Awards”
The New York Times, April 18, 2025 (with Benjamin Mueller)
The Trump administration has replaced the government’s main portal for information about Covid with a website arguing that the coronavirus leaked from a lab, throwing its weight behind a theory of the pandemic’s origins that is so far not backed by direct evidence and that has divided intelligence agencies.
Covid.gov and Covidtests.gov, federal websites that used to deliver information about Covid and allow people to order tests, now redirect to the lab leak web page. Carrying an image of President Trump flanked by the words “Lab Leak,” the new page is illustrated by a satellite image of Wuhan, China, the city where Covid began spreading, and says it will describe “the true origins of Covid-19.”
Continue reading “On New Website, Trump Declares Lab Leak as ‘True Origins’ of Covid”
The New York Times, April 16, 2025
The search for life beyond Earth has led scientists to explore many suggestive mysteries, from plumes of methane on Mars to clouds of phosphine gas on Venus. But as far as we can tell, Earth’s inhabitants remain alone in the cosmos.
Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.
Continue reading “Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet”
The New York Times, April 10, 2025
For decades, fishermen sailing off the coast of Taiwan have sometimes discovered fossils in their trawling nets: the bones of elephants, buffalo and other big mammals that lived tens of thousands of years ago, when the sea level was so low that Taiwan was linked to Asia by a land bridge.
But in 2010, a Taiwanese paleontologist was presented with a particularly odd find: a fossil that looked like half a gorilla’s jaw. Scientists have puzzled over it ever since.