Newsweek 03/23/2018

CONSERVATIVES HAVE LONG BEEN CERTAIN that Silicon Valley despised them, that its cadres of Stanford-trained engineers regarded the right with derision and disgust. In the spring of 2016, they found something that seemed to be proof of that suspicion. Six months before the presidential election, technology news website Gizmodo published a scoop: News curators at Facebook, one former such curator alleged, suppressed stories from right-leaning outlets, in what amounted to a “chilling effect” on conservative media. In response to the outcry, Facebook dumped its human editors, who had the power to either extend or curtail the reach of any news item. Within days, the network was overwhelmed by a surge of fake news, precisely the kind that human editors were supposed to filter out. An algorithm might have a difficult time…

“TRAITORS WILL KICK THE bucket, trust me,” the man said. “Those folks betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.” This statement is not a line delivered by a Mafia boss in the Godfather series. It’s an actual statement then–Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made on national TV in 2010. So it’s of little surprise that the British media were quick to blame the Kremlin on March 6 when 68-year-old former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned with a deadly nerve agent in the center of the sleepy English country town of Salisbury. It would be outrageous enough if Russia’s president ordered such a hit on British soil. But…

WHEN BENJAMIN NETANYAHU VISITED WASHINGTON earlier this month, it should have been a political triumph, a moment of exultation. For most of his 12 years in power, the hawkish Israeli prime minister was forced to work with presidents who despised him, left-leaning Democrats who talked about settlements and Palestinian statehood. Now, he has Donald Trump. Their March 5 meeting at the White House was the first since the U.S. announced plans to relocate the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem this spring. Israeli politicians had long demanded the move; Netanyahu was the one to deliver it. Ever the flatterer, he compared Trump to Cyrus, the Persian ruler who freed his Jewish subjects 2,500 years ago and let them return to Jerusalem. From there, it was off to the annual…

THREE YEARS AGO, YAIR LAPID WAS A centrist Israeli politician working as Benjamin Netanyahu’s finance minister. Today, he is a key witness in the corruption probe dogging the prime minister. He’s also Netanyahu’s chief rival in the 2019 elections. If they were held tomorrow, pollsters say, Lapid’s centrist party, Yesh Atid—which means “There is a future”—could win several more seats than Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party, though Lapid would have to form a coalition from within a weak and crowded opposition. Then again, Netanyahu is under significant pressure. On February 13, the Israeli police recommended the country’s attorney general indict him on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. The same evening, Lapid confirmed Israeli press reports that he had been crucial to that explosive recommendation. He served as a key…

The hot and acidic conditions of its natural habitat might make the virus ideally suited to surviving the hot and acidic human stomach. AS A GRADUATE STUDENT, REBECCA HOCHSTEIN spent years walking the perilous backcountry of Yellowstone National Park, searching for hidden microbes. Eventually, she found a virus unlike any other. Hochstein, then at Montana State University, found the organism in water she’d taken from a 176-degree Fahrenheit hot spring in the park. She reported the discovery in 2016 and worked with an international team of researchers to take a closer look at the specimen, now named the Acidianus tailed spindle virus. The team shot X-rays at the virus to reveal the molecules making up its proteins. They also used a $7 million cryo-electron microscope to freeze the virus and pummel it with…

“We usually have no idea that there are differences in how our neighbors perceive different aspects of the world.” SOME FAMILIES ARGUE OVER politics, others over who controls the remote. But Carol Steen and her father fight over the color of numerical digits. She once insisted that 5 was yellow. “And my father said, ‘No, it’s yellow ocher,’” she says. Steen and her father share a trait called synesthesia, in which senses are crossed. An experience in one sense stimulates an experience in another, so you might hear colors or taste sounds or see letters in vivid hues. Scientists have long suspected that this peculiar ability is written somewhere in our DNA. The Steens support that notion: Several of their distant relatives are also synesthetes. And new research, published in Proceedings of the…