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Abandoning circular growth, the Russian capital has started sprouting limbs across the surrounding countryside

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m writing this on the train from Washington, D.C. back to New York. I’m exhausted, washed out, and my calves are two knots of pain from […]

French physicists have successfully prevented instabilities from developing in plasma needed to run a fusion reactor, a potential source of endless and clean energy for the planet.

What is the Big Idea? The working conditions at Foxconn is about to get a lot better. At least that is the idea behind purported reforms announced last week, some of […]

No single online social network will ever replace Facebook, says Alexis Madrigal. Social networks will build on top of each other and people will belong to several networks at once.

A satirical take on the financial crisis of the 1720s

If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait a minute. So goes the saying that is loosely attributed to Mark Twain. The same cannot be said of the […]

What’s the Big Idea? As Newt Gingrich appears to have peaked, and now plunged in the polls, the latest candidate to enter the GOP Presidential speed-dating game is Ron Paul.  […]

Happy winter solstice, everyone! As you doubtless already know, today is the shortest and darkest day of the year (assuming you live in the northern hemisphere). Ancient people, who were […]

The regime of standardized testing in the nation’s public schools is expanding. Soon, children as young as 5 will devote weeks of the school year to preparing and sitting for multiple-choice exams. What is a parent to do?

High tech gadgets developed for the developing world. 

At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, more than 50 new tablet computers will be introduced, but only one is designed to bring education to the world’s poorest countries.

     There were a lot of thoughtful comments on my observations last week about the ethics of denying that climate change is real. Many felt that I was arrogant, since […]

It’s a wonderful oddity—I hesitate to say “coincidence”—that the best erotic poem in literary history should appear smack dab in the middle of the Bible. The Song of Songs (known […]

I didn’t make any New Year’s resolutions, because why would I? Why make resolutions? Why do it at the beginning of a year? As ever, the wisdom of master Yoda […]

            Majorities around the world believe that the climate of the earth is changing, that human activity is contributing to those changes, that the changes are happening so fast they […]

Following the news stories of Maurizio Seracini’s search for The Battle of Anghiari, a “lost” 1505 fresco by Leonardo da Vinci that Seracini believes is hidden behind Giorgio Vasari’s 1563 […]

Wine is a way to add great things to your life, but there is a dark side….

Last week, The Wall Street Journal published my opinion editorial, “The ‘God Particle’ and the Origins of the Universe – The search for a unifying theory is nowhere near over.” Subscribers […]

Communities of species previously unknown to science have been discovered on the seafloor near Antarctica, clustered in the hot, dark environment surrounding hydrothermal vents.

NASA has found a planet outside our solar system which could sustain life. But does it? As research continues, a deluge of new exoplanets may be discovered thanks to miniature satellites.

     Want something else to worry about? Worry about worrying too much. The evidence is building that chronically elevated stress shrinks your brain!      A study in press at the […]

The Baby Boomer generation that led America’s remarkable economic growth for so long is now a generation that is graying rapidly. America is already a nation of caregivers, with 1 […]

Scientists have discovered the smallest exoplanets yet known, and both represent the closest we have come to finding Earth’s twin. Using NASA’s Kepler telescope, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for […]

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Robert Greenberg — pianist, music historian, and author of How to Listen to Great Music: A Guide to Its History, Culture, and […]

Given the rate at which the Kepler spacecraft is discovering planets outside our solar system, it seems only a matter of time until a foreign rock is found to be capable of sustaining life.

It was a fact that on Planet Xeron 12, the gods ate small children. It wasn’t that these celestial highness’s gained extraordinary powers or insights from the experience–small people simply tasted good. Naja Krait wasn’t about to lose her only child to the greedy, Elysian mouths.   

After building a simulation, N.A.S.A. scientists think they understand how solar eruptions can trigger other explosions thousands of kilometres away on the other side of the Sun.

Scientists have a lot of influence over how we live our lives. This is mostly a good thing – and will help us weed out the snake oil from the spinach – but only a terribly naive optimist could think the “Mozart Effect” won’t strike again.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered that a steady diet of cold, fast food is what caused the rapid growth of early supermassive black holes at the dawn of the universe.