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Scaremail fights government surveillance with the power of nonsense.

(more info here) The majority of paper mail I get is from people asking me for money. Political candidates from every state, advocacy groups, seemingly every charity under the sun, […]

Intervening on the great  Crooked Timber vs. Bleeding Hearts Libertarians debate on freedom in the workplace, Matthew Yglesias says: My standard approach to this is that in almost all political contexts, including this one, both […]

ITEM 1: When you think “female judges,” what or who comes to mind? Sandra Day O’Connor? Justices Ginsberg and Sotomayor? Hell, even the network television shows “Judging Amy” or “Judge […]

Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin’s comments about victims of “legitimate rape” caused a 30-email pile-up in my Inbox yesterday, from political and women’s organizations. The GOP would like you to […]

As I’m writing this post, NASA’s latest Mars mission – the Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity – is just hours away from its destination. By the time you […]

The next stage of 3D printing will be home-manufactured robots, say three of America’s ivy-league institutions, who have received a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation. 

Using a unique telescope at New Mexico’s Apache Point Observatory, astronomers are taking detailed digital photos, half a trillion pixels each, to make a 3D map of our amazing Universe.

A “male birth control pill” is now one step closer to technological plausibility—but not much more socially plausible than it was last week. It’s an inconceivable technology, to indulge the […]

I was raised to honor our military. One of my grandfathers was a Marine sergeant during World War II. The other was an Army lifer who served in three wars […]

Space satellite engineers are taking advantage of the power, size and cost of modern consumer electronics to build a new generation of space exploration technology. 

I’d like to get the Freakonomics guys to explain this paradox of K-12 education:  The more money you spend for your children’s education, the fewer days they’ll actually be educated. […]

Vuzix develops video eyewear and personal display devices for a wide range of applications. Their Smart Glasses allow the user to view video in both 2-D and 3-D as well utilize […]

What’s the Big Idea? What do an art exhibit, live music, and a car manufacturer have in common? A lot more than you’d think. The Avant/Garde Diaries, a digital interview […]

On the one day that we think the most about mothers, grandmothers, godmothers, and all other motherly types, it seems appropriate to ask what is the greatest Mother’s Day portrait […]

In slang, the “cheating band” used to mean that conspicuous band of paler skin revealed when a would-be cheater took off their wedding band to fool and seduce a new […]

As Rushdie humanised Muhammad – as he was always meant to be – Rushdie also humanised the faith.

The year of magical thinking about marriage, reproduction and vaginas (see reviews of Naomi’s Wolf’s hilariously trashed book) continues.  The conservative Heritage Foundation released a report last week that reprises […]

I’m not sure any of the reader suggestions to replace the deeply unpopular term “redistribution” will quite cut it as bumper sticker slogans for the fall election.  But leaving aside proposals from […]

Like most people, I’ve been thinking a lot about the shootings in Aurora, Colorado.  And over the past week, I’ve seen the tragedy dissected in all manner of ways.  I’ve […]

For most of human history creativity was something that came from the muses; it was about flashes of insight from another world. Today we know that creativity is something that […]

According to former White House Special Advisor Van Jones, it will require a patient mindset to get us to the place where the country can run on cleaner and more renewable forms of energy.

At Netroots Nation last week, I attended a panel on Citizens United, the infamous case in which the Supreme Court tossed aside decades of campaign finance laws and ruled that […]

Over the weekend, JT linked to this post on Patheos by Ben Witherington, an evangelical Bible scholar, opining about the legal basis for separation of church and state in America. […]

On a late winter day in 1922, the sound of a gun shot resounded with a loud boom in the hills surrounding the house of three-year-old Edgar Curtis. The sound itself wasn’t out of the ordinary, since the Curtises lived near a firing range. What was extraordinary was the question the boy turned to ask his mother: “What is that big, black noise?”   

If you’re an American, you probably know that this week is income-tax time. (If you didn’t already know that, sorry to tell you, but you missed the deadline.) Most people […]

In a post last May, entitled The First Trillionaires Will Make Their Fortunes in Space, we speculated about how the future explorers of space will be chasing unimaginable riches: As Peter Diamandis […]

New research out of Cambridge University in the U.K. finds that husbands who do households chores are happier and experience greater wellbeing. This finding surprised the researchers, who hypothesized that […]

[Author’s Note: I’m reposting some old favorites while I’m away on vacation this week. This post was originally from August 2010.] I’ve been writing since the beginning of Daylight Atheism […]

A Dutch woman has received a jaw implant created layer by layer from a 3D printer. The maker of the machine says human organs could one day be printed using organic ‘ink’.