Hasnain says:

“Let me take a guess: it would be difficult to promote a policy of “endemic infection that resembles a mild seasonal flu” while simultaneously warning the public that one in 10 infected will go on to develop a chronic illness, regardless of infection severity. In other words, it doesn’t fit nicely with a strategy of unmitigated spread where we are “living with Covid”.”

Hasnain says:

“Beyond gravitational waves, the general nature of the research suggests that the way the uncertainty principle organizes the quantum haystack could prove useful in other areas of quantum theory. The infinite array of relationships between amplitudes could enable independent cross-checks, for example, providing valuable guidance for calculations that can take months. And it may serve as a sharp test for distinguishing quantum theories that can describe our macro world from those that can’t.

“In the past it was intuition,” Roiban said. “Now it’s a clear-cut criterion. It’s a calculation, and it’s hard to argue with a calculation.””

Hasnain says:

“Under the fair-share proposal, it’s not enough for the United States just to stop adding emissions. This country needs to repay the climate debt it’s already incurred. USCAN calculates that to pay back its fair share the United States must cut its emissions by 70 percent by 2030, while contributing the cash equivalent of another 125 percent of its current emissions every year through technical and financial support to energy-poor nations.”

Hasnain says:

“Yes, these are all public figures. An imperviousness to criticism and ridicule is a necessity for celebrities or anyone in the public eye. But no matter how thick your skin is or with how much wealth, fame and power you are cosseted, being the butt of a joke isn’t fun. Sometimes, it is intolerable. When you are constantly a target — of jokes, insults, incivility and worse — as most Black women are, the skin we’ve spent a lifetime thickening can come apart. We’re only human, and so, too, are the people who love us.”

Hasnain says:

““It makes clean indoor air a priority, just like clean water,” Michaels said.

The hospital industry, he said, has “always fought against having to treat infectious disease as airborne because they put people in rooms for the most part, put a curtain around them and put someone else in the bed 10 feet away, and they think the curtains are going to protect people.”

The White House “is saying that that’s not going to work,” he added.”

Hasnain says:

“From our party game we know that, given a set of vertices, it’s not always possible to form an odd graph. But it is always possible to form an odd subgraph. One boring way to accomplish this is to do what we did above: Just pick two vertices that connect to each other and ignore all their other edges. That makes an odd subgraph, but a very small one. Is it always possible to find a large odd subgraph?”

Hasnain says:

“At the same time, standardized tests also help us identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness⁠10 because they do not attend schools that offer advanced coursework, cannot afford expensive enrichment opportunities, cannot expect lengthy letters of recommendation from their overburdened teachers, or are otherwise hampered by educational inequalities.⁠11 By using the tests as a tool⁠12 in the service of our mission, we have helped improve the diversity of our undergraduate population⁠13 while student academic outcomes at MIT have gotten better,⁠14 too; our strategic and purposeful use of testing has been crucial to doing both simultaneously.⁠”

Hasnain says:

Ugh.

“Workers called Tesla’s factory “the plantation,” and “the slave ship,” not just for the brutal work pace that everyone experienced, but especially because Black workers were routinely segregated into a corner of the factory that lacked air conditioning and work conditions were most crowded, Romby said.”

Hasnain says:

“Our failed pandemic response, which has resulted in a million deaths so far, has been predicated on the total replacement of shared moral or ethical values with individualistic assumptions about risks, benefits, and value. The realities of an infectious disease outbreak have proven deeply inconvenient for the privileged, the interests of capital, and the right-wing ideologues who work to justify those hierarchies. The rest of us must look to collective action and solidarity as the essential preconditions for meeting social needs, confronting planetary crises, and working towards a world that does not sacrifice the social good on the altar of self-interest.”

Hasnain says:

“In December, a team led by Hartmut Grote of Cardiff University reported in Nature that they had used a gravitational wave detector to look for scalar-field dark matter, a lesser-known candidate for the missing mass in and around galaxies. The team didn’t find a signal, ruling out a large class of scalar-field dark matter models. Now the stuff can only exist if it affects normal matter very weakly — at least a million times more weakly than was previously thought possible.”