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Isogloss maps are irresistible, even if they are about cucumbers

Ask most people to describe a “robot,” and they’d probably start to describe something vaguely human-looking, maybe something a little metallic or shiny with limbs. Something like the Roboy. Or WALL-E. Or […]

In addition to all the glitz and the glam, Hart Dyke’s seen and painted the very real danger of being in Her Majesty’s Secret Service and looked upon the real face of James Bond.

Fellow pseudonymous neuroblogger Neuroskeptic(to whom I owe a great deal in inspiration) has published a fantastic piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ($) on the benefits to science of anonymity. Last November Neuroskeptic became […]

One of cartography’s most persistent myths: mapmakers of yore, frustrated by the world beyond their ken, marked the blank spaces on their maps with the legend Here be monsters.  It’s […]

Getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts. 

God know we would have satellites one day, so He left us a message 

To celebrate her Jubilee year, the Queen had a large chunk of Antarctica named after her; possibly upsetting the Argentinians and Chileans. 

However hard most political leaders try, almost whatever they do in an attempt to look fashionable and plugged into the real lives of voters, it never seems to quite work. […]

When asked last Tuesday what he considered to be the “greatest threat” to U.S. national security, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, replied:   I […]

As a Ph.D. student in Harvard’s Government Department in the early 1960s, Joe Nye asked whether Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda would be able to forge an East African Common Market […]

This week, NOAA’s Climate Service and Climate Watch magazine launched a video short course and lecture series featuring a diversity of world class experts explaining the major scientific, social, and […]

As shocking as it sounds, eugenics was a practice made popular by an American social engineering movement in the 1920s and 30s. Today, the victims of the program want redress.

To be or not to be Scandinavian, that might be the question soon enough for Scotland, if it decides to become independent. For the time being, Scotland is still a […]

Many people looking to bring new ideas to old age are still warm from the glow of LED and plasma displays at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show held in Las […]

BY ABHIJNAN REJ A Jurassic Park in the Canary Wharf? On the 6th of May, 2010, at around 2:45 pm, the Dow fell unusually  rapidly losing over 9% of its […]

“A second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” was Oliver Wendell Holmes’ assessment of Franklin Roosevelt, reflecting an old and widespread notion that the smartest and most ingenious person in the […]

A frame device is a catchphrase that instantly conveys a specific meaning and storyline, sparking conversations and trains of thought about why an event might be a problem, who or […]

Last week the MIT Center for Real Estate convened the MIT 2011 Real Estate Symposium engagingleaders in real estate finance, design, development and management. JoiningAvalon Bay’s William McLaughlin, AC Nielsen’s […]

[cross-posted atnLeaderTalk] n In my post for LeaderTalk thisnmonth, I’m going to quickly address three ideas related to video games,nschools, and learning and offer a short wrap-up at the end… […]

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JASON SILVA AND TECHNO-ECOLOGIC SCHOLAR RICHARD DOYLE Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important interconnections are to him – and how transformative, […]

Corruption slang can sound cute in foreign tongues. Euphemisms may belittle cross-border bribes but they are still illegal, warn James G. Tillen and Sonia M. Delmans.

There has long been a desire to prove a connection between Earth's geological activity and the gravitational resonance of the moon and the sun. Is there any truth to this claim?

"Ellington had many of the traits one associates more readily with the founders of religious orders or political movements than with lone artists absorbed in self-expression."

A website will analyze your emails and chats and estimate how well you are in sync with your partner, frenemy or whoever.

I have theory, it is a personal theory not quite backed up by empirical evidence, that one of the reasons so many people are single is that they are poor […]

This morning I posted on a fascinating forthcoming study that concludes that generalized messages about science are more impactful on audiences than similarly framed messages that include details on scientific […]

When attempting to communicate effectively with the public about a science-related debate, which is more important, framing the message or conveying science-based facts about the topic?  A forthcoming study (Word) […]

Released just yesterday, Physics of the Future is my most ambitious book to date. Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the […]

Despite the ever growing scientific consensus about the nature and urgency of global warming, Americans remain more divided politically on the matter than at anytime in history. The reason is […]