UnDisciplined

For centuries, we have tended to associate consciousness with the most sophisticated things our brains can do: thought, reason, language, memory. But Antonio Damasio argues that we should be looking somewhere much more ancient, and much more humble: Hunger. Thirst. Warmth. Cold. Pleasure. Pain.His argument is that consciousness begins with a living organism sensing the condition of its own body. At some point in the history of life, being alive began to feel like something.

Moonshots are big, audacious ideas that have the potential to change the world. Today, they've become synonymous with Silicon Valley and vast corporations.But Salima Bhimani, who worked at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, helping its famous “Other Bets” arm, believes we've made the concept of moonshots too simple and too insular. Some of the most consequential innovations in human history didn't require billion-dollar startups, and some of the people with the most important ideas today may live thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, without access to its money, networks or privilege.

Moonshots are big, audacious ideas that have the potential to change the world. Today, they've become synonymous with Silicon Valley and vast corporations.But Salima Bhimani, who worked at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, helping its famous “Other Bets” arm, believes we've made the concept of moonshots too simple and too insular. Some of the most consequential innovations in human history didn't require billion-dollar startups, and some of the people with the most important ideas today may live thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, without access to its money, networks or privilege.

If you've lived in the United States for a long time, you probably know that when someone tells you a doctor is “out of network,” that’s important, or that having health insurance doesn’t necessarily mean your healthcare is free.But how did you learn all of that? There’s nothing particularly intuitive about it.Now imagine arriving in the United States from a country where healthcare works very differently. You’re given an insurance card, a link to a website and, if you’re lucky, a short orientation on healthcare terminology.This is often not enough in times of crisis, leading Akshata Balghare to investigate how much of the difficulty of navigating this system comes from the system itself… and how much comes from the way we explain it.

There are a lot of rich and powerful people in Silicon Valley who have said some strange things about democracy.It would be easy to dismiss some of this as tech entrepreneurs doing what tech entrepreneurs have always done: dreaming about moving fast and breaking stuff, and making enormous claims about the future.But the journalist Gil Durán thinks that dismissing all of this as blather would be a mistake.In his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, Durán argues that these ideas actually belong to an emerging political ideology — one that has moved from obscure books and blogs into some of the most powerful institutions in the United States.

We tend to think that using something until it wears out is good for the planet. But what do we do if the thing we’re using up and wearing out is damaging our environment along the way? When does getting rid of something that still works become the more sustainable choice?

We all know politicians, advertisers and social media algorithms are trying to influence what we believe. But what about our own brains? How do we know when our beliefs are helping us, and when we’re instead engaged in a form of inner propaganda? And how can we use this knowledge to our advantage?

When wildfire threatens a community, what determines who makes it out safely? Emergency managers, firefighters, and weather all play critical roles, but so do the choices we make before and during an evacuation. After three decades of studying fast-moving fires, University of Utah researcher Tom Cova explains what he has learned about preparation, quick decisions, and why neighbors helping neighbors can save lives.

When we think about cancer, we tend to think about what doctors can do. But what about what patients can do? How much of that is hope? How much of it is science?

The ocean takes up roughly 70% of the planet, but we still don’t know too much about everything that is out there. Most ocean life is very small, and tends to change based on the ocean’s conditions. So even if you took a sample of ocean water right now, there’s really no guarantee that it would resemble a sample taken later.A recent study by Sarah Tucker and her team offers some direction for filling in that gap.