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Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe? Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychism

More than 400 years ago, Galileo showed that many everyday phenomena—such as a ball rolling down an incline or a chandelier gently swinging from a church ceiling—obey precise mathematical laws. For this insight, he is often hailed as the founder of modern science. But Galileo recognized that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. Such things as colors, tastes and smells “are no more than mere names,” Galileo declared, for “they reside only in consciousness.” These qualities aren’t really out there in the world, he asserted, but exist only in the minds of creatures that perceive them. “Hence if the living creature were removed,” he wrote, “all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.” Since Galileo’s time the physical sciences have leaped forward, explaining the workings of the tiniest quarks to the largest galaxy clusters. But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”—the red of a sunset, say, or the bitter taste of a lemon—has proven far more ...
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It's Time to "Cancel" Covid Minimizing Doctors

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Throughout modern history, there have been doctors willing to use their credentials to spread lies and misinformation. They misled the public about radium, lead, asbestos, and tobacco. They helped the Reagan administration suppress coverage of the HIV crisis. They were behind the disastrous "war on drugs." Now they're doing Covid. Enough is enough. We've had enough Covid minimizing. We're tired of hearing "no cause for alarm" every single time a wave begins. We've done this for three years now. Every single time, there was a desperate need to bring back masks and install proper clean air technologies in our public spaces. Every single time, Covid minimizing doctors got in the way and stalled progress. We've had enough of the media outlets who continue to platform them. People are dying. Lives are being ruined by Long Covid. The victims include teenagers and children, people who would've otherwise had a full happy life ahead of them. H...
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The Mystery of Long COVID Is Just the Beginning At Yale’s clinic, medical sleuth Lisa Sanders is trying almost everything.

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. isa Sanders was at a large birthday party in New Haven in June 2022. It was an evening in late spring, lovely enough for the party to spill out onto the lawn. Sanders, an internal-medicine doctor at Yale, was leaning against a doorway drinking a glass of wine and catching up with her friend Erica Spatz, a cardiologist, when Spatz mentioned that she and a few other doctors had the idea of starting a new long-COVID clinic at Yale. They were looking for an internist to run it. The problem was one of volume, Spatz explained. Since the beginning of the pandemic, she — together with colleagues in the pulmonary and neurology departments — had been seeing long-COVID patients at Yale but often in an ad hoc way. Some of the doctors had become so flooded with people seeking help that they were having difficulty scheduling and treating their regular patients who came to them for everything else: lung ca...
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Along With Humans, Who Else Is In The 7 Billion Club?By Dr.Mahboob Khan

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  The revelation this week that   the Earth now holds 7 billion people , according to the U.N.'s population division, prompted a question: Who else is in the 7 Billion Club? To find out which other animals had reached that plateau, we asked wildlife experts — and they patiently explained why our innocent question was nearly impossible to answer. But then the experts gave us some best guesses. And the consensus was that humans are the largest animals on the planet to have a population numbering at least 7 billion — but they're certainly not the only ones to reach that mark. More on that in a minute — but first, let's start with the basic premise. It's very difficult to say with certainty, "Right now, there are 7 billion humans living on Earth." Because, as our colleague Adam Cole  explained in his video and audio report , for every new drop in the bucket, there's always a drop or two leaking out of it. In fact, the U.N.'s choice of Oct. 31 as The Day We...
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