Everyone has grown up hearing fantasy stories about the “fountain of youth.” We are still far from finding the fabled Fountain, but today the real question is quickly becoming “Would […]
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All Elephant and No Castle: a secret bestiary of the London Underground
Growing up, I always found the few Black faces in superhero comic books fascinating, like rare birds. Luke Cage, aka, Power Man, bristled with attitude like Shaft on steroids. Black […]
Mysterious in origin, but at least they look pretty on a map
This has been the “Summer of the Spill.” Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion on April 20, 2010, the epic BP oil spill has oozed into imaginations trying to […]
Penn and Teller are not like other famous duos, says Penn Jillette, the larger and more talkative of the two magicians. Lennon and McCartney, Martin and Lewis, Jagger and Richards—these relationships were […]
In the latest issue of the journal Public Understanding of Science, Lorraine Whitmarsh from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, publishes a study that finds that […]
Is ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson a PR juggernaut who takes advantage of the ideological innocence of general assignment and TV reporters?In his regular column at Portfolio magazine, former NY Times […]
A 1940 map of a fictional continent slightly resembling South America, symbolising different aspects of the new and exciting world of plastics
n n This map, made by Mahmud Kashgari bin Husayn bin Muhammad, was included in his Divanu Lügat-it-Türk, a scientific work he published in 1072 (AD) for the benefit of […]
“Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated”, Mark Twain famously responded after reading his obituary in the New York Journal. To which may now be added “Reports of the […]
AS the dust begins to settle on an extraordinary week dominated by the astonishing spectacle of a former Prime Minister peddling memoirs whose vulgarity and venality thoroughly demeans the office […]
“For me, the lesson…is that obstacles can also be advantages, that who we become is deeply influenced by what we cannot do” — Jonah Lehrer on stuttering and Tourette’s.
The famous and not-so-famous dead of Pere Lachaise
Bloomberg reports this week that News Corp., which own both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association in June—a contribution that dwarfs […]
I’ve long questioned the value of anonymous blogging or commenting. Much of the incivility online can be attributed to anonymity. And with a rare few exceptions, if you can’t participate […]
Readers in the DC area will definitely want to check out the upcoming event on June 23 at the National Academies. Details are posted below. I hope to be able […]
The philosopher Paul Kurtz has published a new position booklet that addresses much of what I have been arguing is missing–and so deeply troubling–about the New Atheist movement. Below is […]
Bora continues to play a very important role in synthesizing and interpreting the whole strange chorus that seems to be going on in reaction to our Framing Science thesis. In […]
The key to fighting Alzheimer’s disease may be a single brain protein called amyloid beta, which is the subject of dozens of current scientific studies. A recent New York Times article […]
California’s varied landscape has stood in for half the world in Hollywood movies. Here is Paramount Studios’ 1927 map of international filming locations, all set in California.
n Another traffic map of sorts. If this world map vaguely looks like it’s highlighting a remnant of the British Empire, that’s no coincidence. This map shows which side of […]
Over the past decade, best-selling books such as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point have told compelling stories of how marketers and political consultants use “influentials,” “mavens,” “connectors,” and “navigators” to […]
The transcript of the interview I did last week at NPR’s On the Media is now available. In the interview, I restate exactly what we argued first at Science and […]
Nobel-Prize winning physicist William Phillips admits that “laser cooling” is a somewhat confusing concept. How can light energy, generally thought of as a source of heat, be used to cool […]
Last week, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart announced the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” to be held October 30 on the National Mall. “Ours is a rally for the people who’ve […]
With brain scans, scientists have learned much about what happens in our heads during sleep, but they still can’t answer the simple question: why do we sleep?
On Thursday, the National Academies will be holding the second in a series of roundtable events on climate change education. Registration is open to the public. In a white paper […]
Art critic Karen Wright charts her run-ins with English painter David Hockney over the last ten years. The prolific painter has taken to photography and even drawing on his iPhone.
If extraterrestrials were monitoring American television, here’s what they would be watching. In the Fomalhaut system, for example, maybe everybody’s crazy about Miami Vice.