I love watching videos of animals and plants that use camera technology to reveal what is invisible to the naked eye, either by using time-lapse techniques to speed up the extremely slow or high speed cameras to slow down the incredibly quick.

In this video, biologist Adrian Smith films seven species of moths with high-speed cameras to show how beautiful and graceful they are. Films such as these remind me how limited is the range of our senses. There is an incredibly beautiful world that is all around us that we just do not see. Thanks to this technology, we now can.

You might think of moths primarily as the pesky creatures that get drawn to your lamplight and love nothing more than gnawing through your well-worn knitwear. However, as this video from the Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University shows, they can also be quite majestic – especially when captured on ‘fancy science cameras’. Shooting seven different moth species at a whopping 6,000 frames per second (fps) – compared with the standard 24 fps for film and television – the biologist Adrian Smith, who heads the research lab, guides viewers through the incredible biophysics of moth flight.

The WHO has rolled out the world’s first malaria vaccine to all children in Africa. The vaccine was developed way back in 1987. It is only 30% effective and administering it is cumbersome because it requires four doses and protection fades after four months. But given that there are more that 200 million cases and 400,000 deaths per year due to malaria, the impact could still be large.

Because of the heat and poverty, many children in Africa sleep out in the open without protective nets covering them, making them highly vulnerable to mosquito bites.

Malaria is a major scourge and the world needs a much better malaria vaccine. Maybe the new vaccine-making techniques developed to deal with the coronaviruses can be adapted to find one for malaria.

The publication Big Think, that is dedicated to disseminating articles that deal with important ideas, asked me to submit an essay that explored the main ideas of my book The Great Paradox of Science. It was not easy to do so because the argument I developed had to be closely reasoned, which was why I felt it required a book-length treatment.

But I gave it a shot and came up with a 2,000 word essay that I think gets the gist of the book fairly well. You can read the essay here. As a bonus, they have also created an audio version of the essay that lasts for about 14 minutes.

The maglev train that can run at high speeds by ‘floating’ above the track is an engineering marvel that people in the US unfortunately have no direct experience with, thanks to the gas and automobile lobbies effectively killing the train system so that what exists here is an embarrassment when compared to what exists in other parts of the world. Eric Laithwaite, known as the father of the maglev train for his development of the magnetic levitation process, takes us step-by-step through the design of the system.

Maglev (magnetic levitation) trains are elegant and audacious works of engineering that operate by harnessing the power of magnetic repulsion and electromagnetism to move traincars that quite literally float above the track – today, often at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour. In this lecture at Imperial College London from 1975, the British engineer and professor Eric Laithwaite (1921-97) deconstructs the fascinating physics at work behind his plans for a maglev train, which he first modelled in 1940s and perfected in the 1970s. Well-regarded in his time as both a lecturer and an engineer, Laithwaite presents a series of demonstrations that build, step by step, until he finally unveils a small maglev train model. The first commercial maglev train debuted at Birmingham Airport in 1984, and today Laithwaite’s engineering breakthroughs help power many of the world’s fastest trains.

It is a conceit of each generation to think that they live in a particularly unusual period of history, seeing the troubles they experience as somehow particularly difficult and looking back nostalgically to the past. For example, some conservatives in the US look back on the 1950s and 1960s as a wonderful period that they wish they could return to. Trump’s slogan of ‘Make America Great Again‘ was designed to appeal to them by echoing that sentiment. In reality, that period was one of deep segregation, racism, sexism, and homophobia, not to mention living with the fear of nuclear war that required taking part in drills. It was by no means an idyllic time.

The reality is that there is a mix of the good and the bad in each generation’s lives and how they view the past depends on which segment of the population they descended from, whether it was the ins or the outs.

But we can sometimes identify some unique characteristics that can be overlaid on each generation’s experiences. I have been trying to think of what, some day in the future, people are going to look back at this current time and see as its identifying characteristic. I think that it may be to wonder how it could be that so many people in the US who had access to good information could, and urged on by major political leaders, refuse to recognize the existence of a deadly virus that was causing a pandemic and affecting people all around them, refuse to take the vaccine that had significant evidence of being able to prevent death and serious illness, fight against common-sense preventative measures, and then when they do get sick, decide to put into their bodies all manner of untested treatments. I do not know if anything even remotely similar has happened in the past or in any other country.

This is a level of irrational behavior that speaks to some deep-seated problems in the national psyche.