Science

Lives saved by vaccines: 1974 to ???

Saturday, December 14, 2024

"The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine..." "Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine,” New York Times, Dec. 13, 2024. "Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years of whom 101 million were infants younger than 1 year.

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Living in the Multiverse, less interesting than the fate of bitcoin in El Salvador?

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the universe's age. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

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Sad about what's happening to Earth, suspicious of those who want to try to stop it

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Eight-in-ten Americans say climate news makes them feel frustrated about the level of political disagreement on the issue. A large share (73%) also say climate news has made them feel sad about what’s happening to the Earth. At the same time, 51% of U.S. adults say they’ve felt suspicious of the groups pushing for action on climate change (a view expressed by 75% of Republicans). "How Americans View Climate Change and Policies to Address the Issue,” Pew Research, Dec.

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