A tiny town in New Mexico is proud to be the place the bomb was invented Jul 24th 2023 | LOS ALAMOS Walk around the old historic centre of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and J. Robert Oppenheimer greets you at every turn. The local event centre—which hosted an Oppenheimer festival to celebrate the release of …
Read more “Oppenheimer’s secret city is a shrine to the Manhattan Project”
Like their big-tech role models, startups embrace efficiency Jul 25th 2023 Mark zuckerberg dubbed 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency”, corporate-speak for admitting that his social-media empire was bloated. Since November Meta has cut 21,000 jobs, or about a quarter of its workforce. Bosses of its fellow tech titans have also embraced the efficiency mantra. Alphabet, …
Cooling price rises will have counterintuitive consequences for the Federal Reserve It was never in doubt. In the run-up to the Federal Reserve’s latest meeting, investors assigned a probability of nearly 99% to the central bank raising interest rates once again. On July 26th policymakers duly fulfilled those expectations, with their 11th increase in 12 …
Read more “America’s battle with inflation is about to get trickier”
An artificial-intelligence boom has turned into an everything boom Jul 25th 2023 Bull markets, according to John Templeton, “are born on pessimism, grow on scepticism, mature on optimism and die of euphoria”. The legendary Wall Street fund manager put this philosophy into practice in 1939. At a time when others were panicking about Europe’s descent …
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The conservative government prefers emphasising its military superiority Jul 27th 2023 | SEOUL The autumn of 2018 was a heady time on the Korean peninsula. Meetings earlier that year between Moon Jae-in, then South Korea’s president, and Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s dictator, had buoyed hopes for peace between the two Koreas and prosperity in …
Read more “South Korea has given up on talking to the North”
Three things need to be done to make the most of meteorology’s potential Maniac, a computer designed at Princeton after the second world war, could perform a blistering 10,000 calculations a second. This extraordinary power was applied to two main problems: modelling thermonuclear explosions and the Earth’s weather. They were the two most consequential applications …
Read more “The world’s poor need to know about weather disasters ahead of time”