Guest Thinkers — December 21, 2010

Reports of Arrest Greatly Exaggerated

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I have little confidence in Mareb Press‘ sourcing for reports of the arrest of ‘Abd al-Malik al-Huthi. There seems to be much smoke and little fire.

The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

A collage features a masked life-saver in surgical attire, a palm tree scene, and bold text reading "The Night Crawler" against a geometric background.

Business

The one concept that saved my life

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Black-and-white photo showing a disc-shaped object with a shadowed underside, floating in a blank sky—an iconic image from the UFO craze.

Books

Science fiction, Project Blue Book, and the beginnings of the UFO craze

In this preview from “The Saucerian,” author Gabriel Mckee explains how the combination of fantastical stories and obscure bureaucracy launched the “space age of the imagination.”

An artist's rendering of an alien planet and a red star.

Starts With A Bang

The evidence for biosignatures on K2-18b is flimsy, at best

A Cambridge-based team claims to find molecules on an exoplanet that are only produced by life on Earth. Don’t fall for the unfounded hype.

Cover of "Target Earth" by Govert Schilling shows a meteor entering Earth's atmosphere, hinting at cosmic catastrophe. The book explores the world of meteorites, asteroids, and comets. Text reads "an excerpt from.

The Past

How scientists unearthed the cosmic catastrophe that paved the way for humanity

If an asteroid hadn’t killed off the dinosaurs, humans would almost certainly have never walked the Earth.

A stone bust of a bearded figure with an orange band across its forehead displaying several question marks.

Thinking

The hidden power of unanswerable questions

“It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.”

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