Though space may be the quintessential I.C.E. environment, Musk appears to be aiming to make trips to Mars—aspirationally scheduled… | Continue reading
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” John Basinger said aloud to himself, as he walked on a treadmill.… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Decades ago, the noted computational neuroscientist David Marr… | Continue reading
Harvey Whitehouse doesn’t like how New Atheists like Richard Dawkins make religion out to be a mere “set of propositions” amounting… | Continue reading
An 86-year-old patient arrives with a grisly foot injury.1 It’s badly infected—not a surprise, given his chronic untreated Type… | Continue reading
Our humble toilet has shaped civilization. Starting in 19th-century Britain, it spread throughout the industrialized world, eliminated… | Continue reading
The notion of genius as a capability a person can possess has come under attack recently in several ways.Pxhere / Public DomainOnce… | Continue reading
An 86-year-old patient arrives with a grisly foot injury.1 It’s badly infected—not a surprise, given his chronic untreated Type… | Continue reading
The notion of genius as a capability a person can possess has come under attack recently in several ways.Pxhere / Public DomainOnce… | Continue reading
Artist’s conception of a hot Eyeball planet. The permanent day side is sun-baked and dry. The permanent night side is covered with… | Continue reading
Three of the rare Przewalski’s horses that now roam the area near the Chernobyl nuclear plant.Photograph by Sergey GaschakAfter… | Continue reading
Performance metrics are supposed to financially incentivize hospitals to improve the healthcare system. And this is exactly where… | Continue reading
“Nothing will come of nothing.”(William Shakespeare, King Lear) “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which… | Continue reading
On the Saturday afternoon of July 4, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons Pluto mission leader Alan Stern was in his office near the project… | Continue reading
In the early years of the 17th century, Johannes Kepler argued that the universe contained thousands of mighty bodies, bodies so huge… | Continue reading
The Licorne (“Unicorn”) thermonuclear test; Fangataufa, French Polynesia; 1970Photograph courtesy of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban… | Continue reading
The architecture of social media exploits our sense of right and wrong, reaping profit from the pleasure we feel in expressing righteous… | Continue reading
Far from being a symptom of linguistic indifference or moral decay, mumbling displays an underlying logic similar to the data-compression… | Continue reading
The very notion of what in the ancient world defines the human being in contrast to all other living things is simple: upright posture.… | Continue reading
I can’t count the number of times I pulled out my phone just for the feeling of unlocking the screen and swiping through applications,… | Continue reading
During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Voltaire called superstition a “mad daughter” and likened it to astrology. The… | Continue reading
A careful reading of Walden; or, Life in the Woods makes it clear that Thoreau never intended his cabin to be a solitary hermitage,… | Continue reading
An artist’s conception of Earth alongside Kepler-69c, Kepler-62e, and Kepler-62f, three of the most Earth-like, potentially… | Continue reading
In a mere 60 years, we of Earth have gone from launching our first spacecraft, to exploring every planet and major moon in our solar… | Continue reading
Technology cannot keep pace with theoretical predictions about subatomic reality coming from physics. The same applies to our ability… | Continue reading
Partisanship doesn’t just affect moral and perceptual judgments—even cold, quantitative reasoning can’t escape its pull. A 2013… | Continue reading
SETI Institute astronomer Laurance Doyle proposed using information theory to analyze animal communication systems, particularly the… | Continue reading
Ruth and Harold “Doc” Knapke met in elementary school. They exchanged letters during the war, when Doc was stationed in Germany.… | Continue reading
Lev Landau, a Nobelist and one of the fathers of a great school of Soviet physics, had a logarithmic scale for ranking theorists,… | Continue reading
I arrived for my meeting with Professor Chambers at the pleasant Cardiff pub near his office where we’d agreed to have lunch. He… | Continue reading
When Angelica Lim bakes macaroons, she has her own kitchen helper, Naoki. Her assistant is only good at the repetitive tasks, like… | Continue reading
It is a good question, but I was a little surprised to see it as the title of a research paper in a medical journal: “How Happy… | Continue reading
It is a good question, but I was a little surprised to see it as the title of a research paper in a medical journal: “How Happy… | Continue reading
Platinum-group metals in space may serve the same role as oil has on Earth, threatening to extend geopolitical struggles into astropolitical… | Continue reading
Who’s your daddy? It’s a fair question. A meta-study published in 2006 by a University of Oklahoma anthropology professor estimated… | Continue reading
Nineteen stories up in a Brooklyn office tower, the view from Manuela Veloso’s office—azure skies, New York Harbor, the Statue… | Continue reading
I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress… | Continue reading
I’ve never seen the computer you’re reading this story on, but I can tell you a lot about it. It runs on electricity. It uses… | Continue reading
“Understanding how we decipher a great historical event written in the book of rocksmay be as interesting as the event itself.”—Walter… | Continue reading
Why are we such bad judges of how others see us? Epley’s answer is that other people are novices about us, while we’re experts.“The… | Continue reading
Code is at once a force, or a means, of liberation and constraint.Photograph by Donnie Ray Jones / FlickrHow did we humans manage… | Continue reading
When it comes to the ethics of actions, such as the decision to terraform Mars, we should ask: What sort of person would do that—a… | Continue reading
“You may speculate from the day that days were created, but you may not speculate on what was before that.”—Talmud, Tractate… | Continue reading
Entomologist Richard Karban knows how to get sagebrush talking. To start the conversation, he poses as a grasshopper or a chewing… | Continue reading
You won’t have seen it on the podium, but the human brain’s mirror neuron system could have medaled at this year’s Olympic Games,… | Continue reading