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