Comedian Stephen Colbert called Jeff Koons “The world’s most expensive birthday clown” when the artist famous for his giant balloon animalsappeared on his show in 2012. A year later, one […]
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Your needs can’t all be as easily fenced off as land. But that map-like model lurks behind unbalanced ideas about private and public interests. The “public good” is both bedrock […]
Flowers, the reproductive organs of angiosperms, were a novel structure that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.
In 1887, two scientists set out to measure how the speed of light changed with the Earth’s motion. What they *didn’t* find wound up changing the world. “The conclusions, the bizarre […]
The terrible injustice of Jerrie Cobb, who deserved to be the first female astronaut, yet never made it to space at all. Image credit: © 2011 501(c)(3) Non Profit National […]
Schekman compares the incentives that journals such as Nature, Cell and Science offer scientists to Wall Street’s bonus culture.
Every prediction it’s ever made has been verified, except for one. “These neutrino observations are so exciting and significant that I think we’re about to see the birth of an entirely […]
What about Earth Science? What about Math? What about all of the social sciences? And indeed, what about technology?
According to urban legend, sports stars who appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated will subsequently experience bad luck. This seems counterintuitive but time and time again the Sports Illustrated […]
The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences awarded the 84-year-old Higgs, along with Francois Englert, 80, of Belgium, a Nobel Prize in physics for their work in the discovery of the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that helps explain the very structure of the universe.
Non-interference was probably the most important thing that happened in my professional life.
“I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe,” Hawking said.
You’ll be investing 5-to-7 years of your life. What will you get back? “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” –Benjamin Franklin Recently, a number of people — of widely different ages […]
Artists have an implicit understanding of a universal biological principle: “people have limited attentional resources.”
When it comes to making predictions, thinkers who are hedgehogs barely beat “dart-throwing chimps.” Despite that, hedgehogs hog the spotlight.
“We practically know the West like the palm of our hand, but the West’s vision of the East is still a murky confusion. It is thus self-evident who would hold […]
NEW YORK – Last month, a remarkable gathering occurred in Medellín, Colombia. Some 22,000 people came together to attend the World Urban Forum and discuss the future of cities. The […]
We can never totally escape our biases, but we can be more aware of them, and, just maybe, take efforts to minimize their influence.
How an observational signature from Cosmic Inflation could herald the scientific revolution of the century “Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at […]
Does Ban Ki-moon see China as the next superpower? The General Secretary of the United Nations sent his warm greetings to Beijing Forum 2013, a governmental prestige project – thereby […]
Richard Feynman was struggling with an existential crisis only a member of the Manhattan Project could truly experience: “Put another way, what is the value of the science I had dedicated myself to–the thing I loved–when I saw what terrible things it could do? It was a question I had to answer.”
How the closest supernova in a generation — soon to be visible to skywatchers almost everywhere — is about to help us better understand the entire Universe. “I saw a star explode and send […]
I worry about what it’s going to mean as we begin to micromanage the genetics of our children.
Two months before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. imagined what would be said at his funeral. Not a bad idea for all of us.
What everyone should know about where our matter-and-radiation-filled Universe came from. “I don’t think at this point we have any way of knowing where the laws of physics came from. We […]
When all the galaxies, stars, gas, dust, dark matter and all the other forms of matter and radiation are summed together, its energy still pales in comparison to dark energy. […]
Many Americans are being misled on serious scientific issues, and science journalists have to spend an inordinate amount of time debunking myths which seemingly never die.
Over 270 robotics researchers have signed on to a proposed ban on weapons systems that can fire “without a human in the loop.”
SHANGHAI – The Wall Street Journal‘s recent investigations – those parts that went into final print – paint a rather mild picture of the stressful situation in China, mainly concentrating on […]
The idea of the “Eureka! moment” might very well prove to be the most useful concept that Archimedes passed down to us.