Science & Health
Survival of the fit enough and lucky enough
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s masterful contribution to our understanding of evolution, was penned more than 150 years ago. ...
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Reacting to pandemics
The New Testament (Matthew 11:29) describes the relationship we have – or should have – with Jesus as a kind ...
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The problem with institutional conscientious objection in our healthcare system
On the ABC’s Religion & Ethics website recently, Joanna Howe, a Professor of Law at the University of Adelaide Law ...
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Fixing Australia’s abortion postcode lottery
When the American legal precedent protecting women’s right to an abortion in the United States, Roe versus Wade, was overturned last ...
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AI and the problems of personification
In literary criticism, a commonly used term is ‘personification’, which describes when a writer invests natural phenomena with human qualities. ...
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The impact and implications of large language models
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Google Bard have attracted a great deal of publicity in recent months ...
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We need to stop treating AI like humans
The artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently resigned from Google, warning of the dangers of the technology “becoming more intelligent ...
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Our female genital mutilation laws are broken
A nurse once told me many health professionals don’t report female genital mutilation (FGM) because it could result in children ...
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Rationalists and circumcision
On 14 April 2023, it will be 10 years since I sent out the very first edition of ‘RSA Daily’. ...
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Lessons from social science forecasting during the pandemic
Imagine being a policymaker at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. You have to decide which actions to recommend, how ...
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Multiverse: Betting on what’s beyond the horizon
It’s easy to envisage other universes, governed by slightly different laws of physics, in which no intelligent life, nor indeed ...
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How amateur scientists are making important discoveries
What images does science conjure up in your mind? You may well be visualising a laboratory, equations scrawled on a ...
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