It is not possible for any one human to read all of the world’s great literature. Likewise, there will never be enough time to report and write all the stories that interest me. These are tragic truths, but they are truths nonetheless. Which is part of why I recently abandoned a monthly exercise I’d taken on last fall: curating and publishing a list of “must reads” in science, technology, and health from around the web—everything from the offbeat to the investigative.
Because I wasn’t sure whether my Internet Reading Club was actually useful or interesting to anyone but me, I dropped it in favor of other projects. So I was surprised to hear from one of our readers requesting a revival of the monthly column. “I regularly check Science Daily and other sources, but there is a big gap in my discovery of science articles without Adrienne’s recommendations,” Judy wrote.
For now, we’re not going to reinstate the Internet Reading Club as a monthly feature, but how could I say no to a kind request for recommendations of great journalism? For Judy, whose email made my day, here’s a round-up of 11 of the best science, technology, and health stories I’ve read from around the web this month. (And if anyone out there has special recommendations for Judy, let us know at hello@theatlantic.com, and we’ll consider adding them to the list!)
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The Detectives Who Never Forget a Face
Patrick Radden Keefe | The New Yorker
One quirk of facial recognition is that, from infancy, we tend to be better at recognizing faces of the ethnicity that we are most frequently exposed to: white people are generally better at recognizing white faces, black people tend to be better at recognizing black faces. At this point, the super-recognizer unit consists exclusively of white officers. But the Met has some thirty thousand police officers, and Davis has identified about a hundred and fifty who qualify as super-recognizers; Neville can draw on this diverse auxiliary force. One especially prolific super-recognizer who works outside the unit is Idris Bada, a jailer at Charing Cross Police Station. Bada, who is black, books fifty or so new prisoners each day. His brain is like an illustrated atlas of London’s criminal underworld. Once, he peered into a cell and recognized a prisoner who, thirty years earlier, had attended his elementary school.
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What could wreck Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars isn’t science, technology, or money—it’s ethics
Akshat Rathi | Quartz
And Musk’s plans go further than landing probes. Sending humans, who are a little more than giant bags of trillions of microbes, means almost certainly contaminating the red planet with terrestrial life. There’s also a chance our microbes could kill any delicate Martian life that may exist and we haven’t discovered yet. ... By sending humans to Mars, Musk risks not just breaking space law but also creating an ethical legacy that will haunt humans forever.
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from Technology | The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2dnysDB
