luca vanz

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.<p>One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an …

Quella dei jihadisti è una rivolta generazionale e nichilista

27 novembre 2015 12:43<p>La Francia è in guerra! Sì, ma contro chi o cosa? Il gruppo Stato islamico (Is) non manda cittadini siriani in Francia per …

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.<p>In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other …

Loss of Fertile Land Fuels ‘Looming Crisis’ Across Africa

LAIKIPIA, Kenya — The two elders, wearing weather-beaten cowboy hats with the strings cinched under their chins, stood at the edge of an empty farm, covering their mouths in disbelief.<p>Their homes — neat wooden cabins — had been smashed open. All their cattle had been stolen. So had their chickens. …

Moral luck

Two people drive drunk at night: one kills a pedestrian, one doesn't. Does the unlucky killer deserve more blame or not?<i>By Robert J Hartman</i>Read at …

Jeremy England, the Man Who May One-Up Darwin

On a sunny afternoon, at a bustling cafe less than a mile from Stanford University’s campus, near Palo Alto, and more than 5,000 miles from his home, …

Beyond the Five Senses

Telepathy, echolocation, and the future of perception<p>The world we experience is not the real world. It’s a mental construction, filtered through our physical senses. Which raises the question: How would our world change if we had new and different senses? Could they expand our universe?<p>Technology …

What the World Would Look Like if All the Ice Melted

If we keep burning fossil fuels indefinitely, global warming will eventually melt all the ice at the poles and on mountaintops, raising sea level by 216 feet. Explore what the world’s new coastlines would look like.<p>The maps here show the world as it is now, with only one difference: All the ice on …

The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked

A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?<p>This article is the subject of legal complaints …

Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future

<i>Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here.</i> <i><br>And here’s a G-rated version of the</i> …

Luddites have been getting a bad rap for 200 years. But, turns out, they were right

Things did not end well for the Luddites. The group of weavers and textile artisans in early 1800s were crushed by the British government after resisting the destruction of their livelihoods by industrialization. History, in one of its callous twists, recast their story from a workers’ revolt for …

We Need Conscious Robots - Issue 47: Consciousness

People often ask me whether human-level artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious. My response is: Do you <i>want</i> it to be conscious? I …

Our Machines Now Have Knowledge We’ll Never Understand

The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the …

Is It Time to Break Up Google?

In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.<p>They’re all tech …

Air strikes are not an effective tactic of war, but we keep using them anyway

Bombs over Baghdad? Largely ineffectual.<p>American military involvement in Afghanistan has been ongoing since 2001, making it the longest foreign war …

Great Migrations

The Real Madman

“Putin is the real world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television,” historian Timothy Snyder wrote in this space during the …

Creativity will be the source of our next industrial revolution, not machines

Growth in the first industrial revolution was driven by engineering, the second through electricity and production lines, and the third by technology and information. The modern economies that will undergo a fourth industrial revolution will not be those that worship machines, but those that …

Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’

According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, …

10 scariest theories known to man.

False vacuum. This is, in short, a scientific hypothesis that our universe is in a false phase state as part of a larger universe, like if it were a …

Every Noise at Once: Listen to 1,524 different genres, from Japanese psychedelic to throat singing to atmospheric black metal.

How We Learn to Exclude People

We start learning how to form friendships pretty much as soon as we’re born: the first time we hold a gaze, return a smile, or recognize a face or a …

How tech is reshaping male masturbation

“Let me assure you, babe. I’m absolutely ambidextrous when it comes to the touchpad mouse and keyboard on my computer. Being a right-handed …

Goodbye things, hello minimalism: can living with less make you happier?

Fumio Sasaki owns a roll-up mattress, three shirts and four pairs of socks. After deciding to scorn possessions, he began feeling happier. He explains why<p>Let me tell you a bit about myself. I’m 35 years old, male, single, never been married. I work as an editor at a publishing company. I recently …

Roast Leg of Lamb

Roasting a leg of lamb may seem daunting, but it's actually incredibly simple. In this recipe from <i>Greece: The Cookbook</i>, by Vefa Alexiadou, all you do …

Guru per sempre

. È stato un cambiamento di paradigma lento e strisciante ma finalmente possiamo annunciarlo senza paura di essere smentiti. Il giovane imprenditore …

Five numbers that will define the next 100 years

From energy to life expectancy, these crucial statistics could define Earth’s upcoming century.<p><i>(Click/pinch to enlarge)</i><p><b>How will the world’s population continue to increase?</b><p>There will be 11.2 billion of us by 2100, according to the UN’s most likely scenario. But this is a projection, not a …

The torture of Tokyo rush hour, up close and impersonal

The Odakyu Odawara Line carries one-and-a-half million people across Tokyo every single day.It starts in the suburbs southwest of the city and …

Designing Facebook for Mobile VR

Lessons from the making of the Facebook 360 app for Gear VR<p>The mission of the Facebook Immersive Design team is to enable people to experience …