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What do you need to make your garden grow? As well as plenty of sunshine alternating with gentle showers of rain – and busy bees and butterflies to pollinate the plants – you need good, rich soil to provide essential minerals. But imagine you had no rich soil, or showers of rain, or bees and butterflies. And the sunshine was either too harsh and direct or absent – causing freezing temperatures. Could plants grow in such an environment – and, if so, which ones? This is the question that…

A few months ago, I quit my job at Google after 10 years to join a 40 person startup (Replit). At the time, I had a hard time expressing why I needed to make the change, even though I knew with certainty. Writing this helped me sort it out. I left because I needed to fix my work-life balance. I joined Google in early 2011. Larry Page was beginning his second stint as CEO. Everybody was talking about a secret project named Emerald Sea. TGIF was on Fridays, and…

One of the useful features of search engines like Google is the autocomplete function that enables users to find fast answers to their questions or queries. However, autocomplete search functions are based on ambiguous algorithms that have been widely criticized because they often provide biased and racist results. The ambiguity of these algorithm stems from the fact that most of us know very little about them — which has led some to refer to them as “black boxes.” Search engines and social…

A hundred kilometers away from the city of La Rioja, Argentina — and a thousand away from the capital Buenos Aires — lies the Los Colorados provincial reserve, which holds a Martian landscape filled with red soil and orange canyons. In this area, the Solar54 project will carry out a series of studies and tests of the different variables that will determine the human colonization of Mars. It seeks to recreate the environment of Mars so that space agencies from all around the globe can run tests…