Showing 71 - 80 of 356
The molecular line between life and death
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/03/2023
» 'We are but one very small company [among] many hundreds of companies using AI software for drug discovery and de novo design. How many of them have ... the know-how to find the pockets of chemical space that can be filled with molecules predicted to be orders of magnitude more toxic than VX?" This is a warning that requires a little explanation.
Have we solved the floaty-bag problem?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/02/2023
» The United States has been having "a bit of a floaty-bag problem over its airspace", as South Africa's Daily Maverick news site put it.
A resurgence of alliances is an echo of past wars
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/01/2023
» Alliances are as old as civilisation. Older, actually: almost every hunter-gatherer band that anthropologists have studied, from the New Guinea highlanders to the Yanomamo in the Amazon, made alliances with other groups to try to protect themselves.
2 failed populist coups: Compare and contrast
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 16/01/2023
» Pundits are making much of the similarities between the attempted coup in Washington by Trump supporters two years ago and the one by Bolsonaro supporters in Brasilia on Jan 8, but they are missing the biggest one. These debacles were the most incompetent and half-hearted attempts to seize power illegally in the history of the world.
A shocking disclosure from Harry's 'Spare'
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 11/01/2023
» Where do you look when somebody says: "In the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two combat tours was recorded, time-stamped. I could always say precisely how many enemy combatants I'd killed. And I felt it vital never to shy away from that number.
US startup's climate gig stirs up controversy
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/01/2023
» It was the moral equivalent of a fart in a hurricane. The "hurricane" was the explosion of the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines in 1991, which boosted 17 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere.
Will we soon have unlimited clean energy?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/12/2022
» Nuclear fusion, the "holy grail" that would finally end all the world's energy problems, has been receding into the future at the rate of about one year per year all my adult life -- it was always "about 30 years away" -- but suddenly we're catching up. Unfortunately, the change of pace comes too late to save us from an acute global climate emergency.
Is Ukraine winning the war too much?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/12/2022
» When the two most senior military and intelligence officials in Washington make the same obvious error in public three times in three weeks, you have to wonder what they are really up to. Can it just be simple ignorance, or do they have a hidden agenda?
Vinland history: a question of dates, timing
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 28/11/2022
» 'If the 20th century AD were dated at the same resolution as the 20th century BC, the two World Wars would be indistinguishable in time; and the Montgomery Bus Strike might post-date the release of Mandela." So wrote the Exact Chronology of Early Societies' (ECHOES) team of palaeohistorians at Groningen University in the northern Netherlands -- and then they fixed the problem.
COP27 meet: A case of the glass being half full
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 22/11/2022
» As after every climate summit, the air is filled with shouts of rage and despair. What was agreed was unclear and inadequate, and what was left undecided or simply ignored was vast and terrifying. For example, they still haven't managed to agree that the world needs to stop burning fossil fuels.