WorksLondon’s lost ringways
A monstrous plan to build major motorways through some of London’s greatest neighborhoods fell apart. But the price was the birth of the NIMBY movement, and a permanent ceiling on Britain’s infrastructure ambitions.
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Innovation prizes seem to solve many problems in science and technology. But their famous role in helping sailors calculate longitude is misunderstood, and they may work best when used to promote refinements, not revolutions.
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Gas heating is bad for the environment. But home-built heat pumps aren’t perfect either. The best option might be geothermal energy grids that take the best from both ways of heating people’s homes.
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Somehow, polyester went from being the world’s most hated fabrics to one of its favorites. It reinvented itself thanks to advances in materials science, and did it so successfully that many people don’t even realize they’re wearing polyester today.
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Some think of advances in science and technology through the metaphor of low-hanging fruit: we “picked” the easy ones, and the rest will be very difficult. But it may not be the ideas that are getting harder to find – it’s us that are getting worse at finding them.
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Duels can be brutal and even lethal. But duels emerged in societies around the world for an important reason: to control and manage violence, not just to celebrate it.
Womb for improvement
Pregnancy can be arduous, painful and for some women impossible. New technology may allow more women to have children, and save the lives of more prematurely born infants. How do we get there?
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Ireland’s housing bubble and bust has become emblematic of what not to do in housing debates around the world. The only problem is nobody agrees what actually went wrong.
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The height of skyscrapers is limited by physical, economic and regulatory barriers, but we should want to overcome them and build taller. Here’s how we can do it.
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Society has free-ridden on women for millennia, benefiting from the children they’ve had while bearing few of the costs. But as women have gained other options, birth rates have fallen.
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Many modern buildings put up today seem uglier than traditional ones around them. Some say this is because we’ve torn down the ugly old buildings, and only see the survivors. Are they right?
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It’s surprisingly hard to explain why plagiarism is actually wrong, if it is at all. But our anti-plagiarism instincts reflect practical considerations for advancing science, and we discard them at our peril.
The housing theory of everything
Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.
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Without new humans, growth will slow, and we will be less likely to reach the stars. But pro-natalism has been captured by a range of unsavoury voices. There is an alternative.
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Our success is based on scientific discovery, so it’s not surprising how much faith we put into it. But we now trust science so implicitly that our trust undermines the institution itself.
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The kitchen of 2020 looks mostly the same as that of 1960. But what we do in it has changed dramatically, almost entirely for the better—due to a culture of culinary innovation.
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How do technologies get off the ground? As well as seed funding, many of the best technologies require Buyers of First Resort, which buy products until they improve enough to get to efficient scale.
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We have eradicated smallpox, cured many bacterial diseases, and invented a vaccine for Covid-19 within the year. But for a very long time we haven’t had a single good treatment for obesity. Has that now changed?
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Could an asteroid wipe out human civilisation like it may have eliminated the dinosaurs? Big asteroids come along extremely rarely and our monitoring systems are effective and well funded. We should be safe.
How we fixed the ozone layer
The story behind humanity's greatest environmental success is too rarely told and too often taken for granted. This is how humanity fixed the ozone layer and why it matters.
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Covid-19 brought death, suffering and financial straits, so it was unsurprising that depression rose around the world. But when the data came in, we found suicide did not – and it’s a mystery why.
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Everybody loves to hate Bitcoin. Yet big business is spending hundreds of millions on it, helping to drive the price higher and higher. It’s easy to dismiss that as a marketing fad. But what if it’s not?
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Researchers have known for decades that lead poisoning damages brains and worsens crime, but millions of Americans still drink contaminated water every day. Here’s how we can fix that.
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Is the popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe a sign of art in decline? It’s common for people to assert that film, art, music and literature are getting worse. This is why they’re wrong.
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Are technology and the environment friends or foes? In this wide-ranging conversation, Nick Whitaker and Saloni Dattani discuss climate policy, activism and ecomodernism with Ted Nordhaus, director of the Breakthrough Institute.
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The conversation around science is full of ideas for reform, but how do we know which ones will be effective? To find out what works, we need to apply the scientific method to science itself.
The great reinforcer
Alongside all the successes of science in the Covid era, the pandemic has also sparked an outbreak of viral misinformation and sloppy research, revealing the glaring flaws in our scientific system.
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Critics of scientific reform maintain that transparency comes at the cost of speed. What can disciplines of science learn from each other to break free of this crisis and expand our universe of knowledge?
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Although many commentators have asserted a tradeoff between health and the economy, comparing the debt to the financial crisis, economists are uniformly in favour of spending to suppress the virus.
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As rental prices continue to climb in San Francisco, tech firms have looked to relocate in other cities. Without major housing reforms, the next Silicon Valley will face the same fate.
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Crises upend plans, force people to re-evaluate their priorities, and bring into focus new goals. Financial markets give us hints of what we can expect from the aftermath of Covid-19.
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While rents have been soaring for years in urban areas around the world, one Australian city has weathered the storm. What can the world learn from the experiences of Sydney?
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Bad incentives, muddled theory and no practical use. The condition of the social sciences has been blamed on a great variety of things; what’s really at fault and how do we know?
The daily grind
Before grinding mills were invented, the preparation of flour for food was an arduous task largely carried out by women for hours every day. How did it affect their lives and why does it remain a tradition in some places even today?
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Building traditionalist architecture today is derided as inauthentic pastiche. But this perspective turns a blind eye to the dramatic and sophisticated ways that design has been applied throughout history.
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Some of the greatest advances in technology have emerged from bringing intelligent people together to solve problems. How do tech clusters develop & how can we use them to replicate past successes?
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Electrical interference has restricted what humans can observe with existing telescopes. In order to continue making leaps as a species, now is the time for us to build a telescope on the far side of the moon.
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Scientific research today is afflicted by poor reliability and low utility, despite the best efforts of individual researchers. If we want to stimulate research that is both accurate and useful, it’s time to put science to the challenge.
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Many have argued that innovation develops in a simple linear fashion – from research to experimentation to engineering. History suggests the relationship between science & innovation is reciprocal.
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New technologies can be dangerous, threatening the very survival of humanity. Is economic growth inherently risky, and how do we maximize the chances of a flourishing future?
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In spite of major technological progress, tech is often envisioned in the media with pessimism and dread. How have people’s attitudes towards tech companies changed over time and what’s in hold for the future?
Epidemic disease and the state
Western democracies appear to have floundered in their responses to Covid-19. Is there a relationship between health and freedom, and can it be unraveled?
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Many low-income countries are unable to provide effective governance for their citizens, trapped in a cycle of slow growth and persistent corruption. Charter cities may provide an answer.
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Polls show that the majority of Americans want to reduce their consumption of meat, but many struggle to do so. What practical steps can we take to increase animal welfare and reduce their suffering?
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Modern psychiatry appears to be at a standstill, wanting for better treatment and a substantive theoretical framework. Evolutionary theory has the potential to reinvigorate the field.
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Throughout history, states struggled to maintain power, having to rely on private agents and enforcers to fund themselves and govern their citizens. How did they transition to the states we see today?
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For a time in recent history, R&D labs seemed to exist in a golden age of innovation and productivity. But this period vanished as swiftly as it came to be. How did it happen, and why did it fade away?
