Onze favoriete tak van wetenschap is die waar volstrekt voor de hand liggende zaken worden verklaard aan de hand van vergezochte coffeeshoptheorietjes. Zo zijn er hele faculteiten waar niemand zich kan voorstellen dat mensen kritisch op migratie zijn, waardoor het zoeken naar alternatieve verklaringen voor het stemgedrag van veel Nederlanders een heuse dagbezigheid is geworden. Voornaam exponent van deze school is Catherine de Vries, wiens vader voor zijn overlijden PVV ging stemmen, en zoiets kan natuurlijk aan vrijwel alles liggen, behalve aan de speerpunten van de PVV. Heel raar maar voor zover wij weten heeft er nooit een politicoloog onderzocht waarom mensen op de SP stemmen om vervolgens te concluderen dat dit niet is ingegeven door inkomensongelijkheid maar door - we noemen maar een zijstraat - gillende geilheid. Alleen bij stevig rechts kán de meest voor de hand liggende verklaring niet zomaar de daadwerkelijke verklaring zijn. Het komt door verdwenen buslijnen, gesloten bibliotheken en op hol geslagen neoliberalisme, en daarmee basta. Afijn, op De Correspondent legt Jesse Frederijk haarfijn uit waarom dat onzin is, stellige leestip.
Nadat stagiair William Salt werd betrapt, sloot de English Football League Southampton de deelname uit van de finale van de play-offs om Premier Leaguevoetbal. Het Engelse voetbal raakte in de ban van ‘Spygate’.
/s3/static.nrc.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/21181439/210526SPO_2033877318_south3.jpg)
In 5.000 jaar oude graven in Duitsland bleek de helft van de mensen een ‘eenling’ te zijn, zonder onderlinge genetische verwantschap.
/s3/static.nrc.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20122305/210526WET_2033862885_2.jpg)
Music is banned on Wednesdays on island of Stromboli where Rolling Stones frontman was celebrating wrapping a film
Police on an Italian island stopped a party attended by Mick Jagger – because music is banned on Wednesdays.
The Rolling Stones frontman was on Stromboli, the volcanic island among Sicily’s Aeolian archipelago, for the production of Three Incestuous Sisters, a film by the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher in which he stars.
Continue reading...Africa CDC says restrictions could increase public health risks and highlight ‘deeper structural injustice’ in global health
A US travel ban for people coming from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda or South Sudan in response to the Ebola outbreak could make the situation worse, critics have warned.
Declared a public health emergency of international concern on Sunday, the outbreak continues to spread with a new case reported in the DRC’s South Kivu province, an area under the control of armed rebel groups.
Continue reading...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI claims its new reasoning model has produced an original mathematical proof disproving a famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, which was first posed by Paul Erdos in 1946. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because this isn't the first time OpenAI has made such a bold claim. Seven months ago, the AI giant's former VP Kevin Weil posted on X: "GPT-5 found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erds problems and made progress on 11 others."
It turns out, GPT-5 didn't actually solve those problems; it just found solutions that already existed in the literature. Taunts from rivals like Yann LeCun and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis followed, and Weil promptly took down his premature post. Today, at least, it seems OpenAI didn't make the same mistake twice. Alongside the announcement, the company published companion remarks (PDF) in support of the disproof from mathematicians like Noga Alon, Melanie Wood, and Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdos Problems website, and previously called Weil's post "a dramatic misrepresentation."
[...] The proof, per OpenAI, came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, not a system specifically designed to solve math problems or even this problem in particular. OpenAI says this is significant because it means AI systems are now more capable of holding together long, difficult chains of reasoning and connecting ideas across fields in ways researchers may not have previously explored. That has implications for biology, physics, engineering, and medicine.
It turns out, GPT-5 didn't actually solve those problems; it just found solutions that already existed in the literature. Taunts from rivals like Yann LeCun and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis followed, and Weil promptly took down his premature post. Today, at least, it seems OpenAI didn't make the same mistake twice. Alongside the announcement, the company published companion remarks (PDF) in support of the disproof from mathematicians like Noga Alon, Melanie Wood, and Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdos Problems website, and previously called Weil's post "a dramatic misrepresentation."
[...] The proof, per OpenAI, came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, not a system specifically designed to solve math problems or even this problem in particular. OpenAI says this is significant because it means AI systems are now more capable of holding together long, difficult chains of reasoning and connecting ideas across fields in ways researchers may not have previously explored. That has implications for biology, physics, engineering, and medicine.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
One of the questions on The Colbert Questionert that Stephen Colbert would administer to his celebrity guests was “What number am I thinking of?” As you can see from this compilation, his answer was often, but not always, “no”.
A few of the guests said “42” but none ever said “69”?
So anyway, the Late Show is coming to an end tonight, a casualty of CBS’s newfound fealty to the Trump regime, and Stephen Colbert finally took the questionert himself. And yes, at last, he revealed the number that he was thinking of…to Robert De Niro no less:
Tags: Stephen Colbert · The Late Show · TV · video