Author: Crop Protection
It is surprisingly easy to wonder if the trees around you are conscious of anything at all when you spend enough time in a forest in the kind of profound silence where you can actually hear the wind blowing through the canopy. Whether they sense the drought, the axe, or the insect methodically biting through a leaf. Most people quickly brush this kind of thought aside, usually with a chuckle. However, despite everything, a version of that question has been the subject of debate among plant biologists for more than 50 years, and the debate remains unresolved. The current debate…
If you walk through the hallways of any major asset management company in New York or London right now, you’ll notice a certain confident energy that, if you look closely enough, has a slightly manic edge. Screens that track Nvidia, Microsoft, and the larger Magnificent Seven glow with valuations based on optimism that is either dangerously detached from reality or entirely rational, depending on who you ask. It is anticipated that Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta alone will spend about $650 billion on global AI infrastructure. That figure is frequently cited. What occurs on the opposite side of the ledger…
Every significant technological advancement has a point in its history when it transitions from theoretical to deadly. That moment seems to have arrived for artificial intelligence in the early hours of February 28, 2026, somewhere over Iranian airspace. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed when the United States and Israel attacked over 900 targets before dawn, sparking an ongoing conflict. Something more subdued and possibly more significant was operating behind the missiles and the headlines: an algorithm. The Maven Smart System, developed by Palantir and evolving from a Pentagon program started back in 2017, is the system handling…
One type of corporate narrative that is underrepresented is the one in which a business faces obsolescence head-on and resolves, defiantly and stubbornly, to continue operating tomorrow. Right now, that story is WeightWatchers. The company, which was started in a Queens living room in 1963 by a housewife named Jean Nidetch who just wanted people to stop eating alone and start talking about it, created something truly unique: a weight-loss movement based on accountability, community, and the silent discipline of point counting. It was effective for decades. In 2018, membership reached a peak of almost five million individuals. Then the…
The notion that Apple would voluntarily provide repair manuals, sell spare parts to strangers, and permit independent retailers to lawfully fix iPhones seemed as plausible as the company disclosing its source code for a considerable amount of time. Apple had been erecting political, legal, and technical barriers around its products for years. proprietary chips, parts pairing software, tight screws, and discreet lobbying against laws that facilitate repairs. The business defended the closed system with the kind of tenacity that tends to deter competitors. Then, on a Wednesday morning in November 2021, Apple declared that it was completely changing its direction.…
It was challenging to watch a video that surfaced online in March 2024 without pausing to reflect. A 29-year-old man who had been paralyzed from the shoulders down due to a diving accident eight years prior sat in front of a screen and used only his thoughts to move a cursor across it. He said the gadget inside his skull was simple to operate. He claimed to have been playing chess. He had been sharing content on social media. Like someone discussing a new laptop that occasionally runs slowly, he said, almost casually, that things weren’t perfect yet. His name…
There are layers of frozen ground that haven’t thawed since the last ice age somewhere beneath Siberia’s flat, grey-brown terrain, which for the majority of the year appears to be the end of something. There are deeper layers that completely predate modern humans. Above them walked woolly mammoths. Above them, cave lions were born and died. And things have been waiting inside, trapped in an oxygen-free blackness that has never seen light. Some of those things are still capable of awakening, according to researchers who have drilled into that permafrost and extracted soil cores. A virus that had been frozen…
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, almost casually mentioned that he had stopped using Google at a recent AI summit in Paris. Not in a big way. Not as a proclamation. As an analogy for his own behavior, consider how you might realize you haven’t watched cable TV in six months. “I realized, over the last couple of months, that I don’t use a lot of the services that I used to use,” he stated. The audience chuckled a little. Most likely, those whose businesses rely on search traffic did not. The current state of…
Reading some physics papers can cause a certain kind of vertigo because the authors are cautious and measured in their language, hedging every claim, but the implications lurking beneath the surface are nearly too big to handle calmly. In early 2025, a study based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope gave several researchers that exact feeling. The discovery itself seems almost straightforward: the majority of the deep-field galaxies that JWST has seen seem to be rotating in the same direction. Approximately two-thirds rotate in a clockwise direction. The others move in an anticlockwise direction. The split ought to…
Imagine a 25-year-old at an airport departure gate, traveling to the Dominican Republic for a vacation that she paid for with four $1,000 payments over the course of six months using Afterpay. She will tell you that it made budgeting easier. She will claim that she didn’t earn enough money to use a credit card. To be honest, it’s difficult to ignore the reasoning. When the amount on the screen at checkout is only 25% of what you would otherwise owe, the math appears doable. That’s precisely why it’s so hard to argue with and so subtly risky. Services like…