As part of their conversation series with scientists, the NY Times this week runs an interview with Harvard’s Eric Mazur featuring the headline “Using the ‘Beauties of Physics’ to Conquer […]
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Who decides what “insane” means? This was the major question of Ken Kesey’s countercultural classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which illustrated how mental illness could be deployed by […]
Our Policy Forum article at Science has generated a monster blog discussion, one that is almost too much to keep up with. I continue to try to keep a summary […]
In his appearance last week on NPR Science Friday (audio), Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs framed the climate challenge not in terms of regulating pollution but rather as an energy and […]
. . Is spanking an acceptable way of disciplining children? . Opinions differ (1). Some consider it barbaric and a definite no-no, others think it merely old-fashioned but quite handy […]
n nn According to Barack Obama, “there are no blue states, no red states, only the United States of America”. That is the rhetoric one should expect from a president-elect, […]
Afters months of waiting, I have finally been able to get my act together enough to post the answers to questions you posed to Dr. Adam Kent. If you remember […]
If anyone should understand how to effectively communicate with the broader public about teaching evolution in schools, it’s Dr. Steve Case. He’s assistant director of the Center for Science Education […]
I recently received some samples of the Eyjafjallajökull ash – and you’d be surprised what you can learn about an eruption from just popping the ash under a microscope.
Dr. Jonathan Castro, coauthor of a recent Nature paper on the ascent of magma at Chaiten in Chile, fields questions from Eruptions readers.
Personally, I remember back in the 1970s when string theory fell out of favor. At the time, it was very difficult to get a job and many people dismissed the […]
The Vinland Map was discovered in 1957, bound up with a manuscript of undisputed antiquity, the Historia Tartorum. The map supposedly is a 15th century copy of a 13th century […]
We physicists used to laugh whenever we talked about some of the topics that I mention in my book, “Physics of the Impossible”—some of these include such ideas as invisibility […]
Heat death is a deceptive name. As Michio Kaku explains, entropy doesn’t necessarily refer to dramatic destruction; it’s more about how stuff just tends to fall apart.
You might have heard me speak about the equation that eluded Einstein for the last 30 years of his life: the one-inch equation that will in a sense summarize everything we […]
When children are born with severe, debilitating conditions like some forms of spina bifida—in which some vertebrae on top of the spinal cord remain unfused and open—their lives can often […]
This spring in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter […]
If Americans were paid to eat less and exercise more they might be motivated to lose some weight—and save us a bundle on health care—says Dr. Barry M. Popkin, director […]
“Remarkable claims require remarkable proof.” — Carl Sagan The “multiverse” idea—once thought to be so crazy it only belonged on late night television—has now become the dominant theory in all of […]
When I was a child and decided to become a physicist, I never dreamed that I would be traveling all over the world with a TV film crew, or lecturing […]
Changing the conversation about climate change: Graduate students from American and George Mason Universities prepare interview tent on the National Mall. WASHINGTON, DC — How do Americans respond when they […]
There was a philosopher once who had no patience with geekish hype about information technology. This application, he wrote, would never make people smarter or better. In fact, it made […]
“In fact, it is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. Some say that the only thing that quantum theory has […]
“Where is everybody?” the physicist Enrico Fermi once famously asked, disappointed that aliens hadn’t contacted us yet. Over 50 years later, Fermi would feel even more snubbed. As Paul Davies […]
Over the summer I addressed by video conference a meeting by the National Academies on state science policy advice. They’ve now produced a report based on that meeting and it […]
Over the last 20 years, the number of science and technology jobs in America has grown by about 4.2 percent per year—yet the availability of qualified U.S.-born workers in those […]
As we mentioned in a previous post, Einstein himself was worried about the possibility that time travel was built into his General Theory of Relativity. In 1949, when his good friend […]
This fall in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter […]
“Although there must be a physical limit to how many memories we can store, it is extremely large. We don’t have to worry about running out of space in our lifetime,” writes Paul Reber.
Today I review Deborah Rhode’s excellent book, “The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Work” (Oxford University Press, 2010) for Working In These Times. Here are a […]