Lifeboat Foundation

The weirder Goop went, the more its readers rejoiced. And then, of course, the more Goop was criticized: by mainstream doctors with accusations of pseudoscience, by websites like Slate and Jezebel saying it was no longer ludicrous — no, now it was dangerous. And elsewhere people would wonder how Gwyneth Paltrow could try to solve our problems when her life seemed almost comically problem-free. But every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all that did was bring more people to the site — among them those who had similar kinds of questions and couldn’t find help in mainstream medicine.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for the magazine and a writer for The Times’s culture desk. She last wrote for the magazine about the author Jonathan Franzen.

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Continue reading “How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million” »

We’re at the point where AI can take on mundane household tasks – if slowly. And the implications of this technology go far beyond folding laundry.

A reinforcement learning algorithm allows Dactyl to learn physical tasks by practicing them in a virtual-reality environment.

Observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope have for the first time revealed the effects predicted by Einstein’s general relativity on the motion of a star passing through the extreme gravitational field near the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. This long-sought result represents the climax of a 26-year-long observation campaign using ESO’s telescopes in Chile.

Credit: European Space Observatory

New solar energy research from Arizona State University demonstrates that silicon-based, tandem photovoltaic modules, which convert sunlight to electricity with higher efficiency than present modules, will become increasingly attractive in the U.S.

A paper that explores the costs vs. enhanced efficiency of a new solar technology, titled “Techno-economic viability of silicon-based, tandem photovoltaic modules in the United States,” appears in Nature Energy this week. The paper is authored by ASU Fulton Schools of Engineering, Assistant Research Professor Zhengshan J. Yu, Graduate Student Joe V. Carpenter and Assistant Professor Zachary Holman.

The Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative was launched in 2011 with a goal of making solar cost-competitive with conventional energy sources by 2020. The program attained its goal of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour three years early and a new target of $0.03 per kilowatt-hour by 2030 has been set. Increasing the efficiency of photovoltaic modules is one route to reducing the cost of the solar electricity to this new target. If reached, the goal is expected to triple the amount of solar installed in the U.S. in 2030 compared to the business-as-usual scenario.

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Would you want to create a better version of yourself? #clones

This robot was designed for harvesting vegetables inside greenhouses.

Skin is your largest organ. There are about 2 square metres (22 square feet) of it enveloping you right now, and it’s not the shape we thought it was.

In fact, scientists have just discovered an entirely new geometric shape previously unknown to science or mathematics, and it looks like it’s been hiding in your skin all along. By which we mean, in epithelial cells, the building blocks of the structural tissue forming our external (and internal) skin layers.

These epithelial cells are some of the most important cells early in life, helping to build structures in developing embryos that ultimately become all our different bodily organs.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Discovered an Entirely New Shape, And It Was Hiding in Your Cells” »