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Today’s installment of our series “The Future in Motion” features Joseph Sussman, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, and Douglas Malewicki, Aerospace engineer and inventor of the SkyTran.  The SkyTran is […]

Anoushesh Ansari is the world’s first female private space explorer, as well as the first astronaut of Iranian descent. Today, in a Big Think interview (conducted in partnership with the […]

Do you frequent porn sites? If you do, you’ll be pleased to know that you are a customer of one of the most tech-savvy industries in the world. It’s a […]

Chickens don’t follow the mammalian model in the way that gender is assigned to them before birth according to discoveries by scientists at the University of Edinburgh.

This week’s installment of “The Future in Motion” features a clip from an interview with Dr. Nate Lewis, a chemistry professor at CalTech. He and his team are busy developing […]

From the great Carl Zimmer comes a link to a beautiful video of a siphonophore. (Click through jump to watch.) It includes soundtrack from the scientist who has discovered many […]

Who are the artists that people who know nothing about art know? Van Gogh? Michelangelo? Picasso? For museums trying to bring traffic through their doors, drawing in the non-art lover […]

We tend to think of work done on assignment as being somehow cheaper than work springing entirely from the mind of the artist. Art on demand never strikes us as […]

If you look at the evolution of the automobile, you’ll notice that there have never been any radical changes. Will we see any in the near future? Director of Advanced […]

Connecting electric cars to a wider energy grid in places like San Diego could even out electricity production levels and earn consumers money by sharing power with the grid.

What if you could bid on a parking spot eBay-style? Let’s say you have an emergency doctors appointment; you might be willing to pay $50. But if you’re just meeting […]

Why does sustainable transit seem like such a far-off dream? Ostensibly obstructed by years of costly R&D, unprecedented political and technological breakthrough, and often some sort of sci-fi revolution, the […]

In popular culture, everything old suddenly becoming new again is a common occurrence. But never before has it been as relevant a concept to the group commonly referred to as […]

The Independent’s Liz Hoggard asks why heterosexual men refuse to emote on paper despite nearly 80 per cent of women desiring love letters.

When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber,” was arrested for trying to blow up a plane headed for Detroit on Christmas Day, the Obama administration was quickly attacked for […]

Arthur Sulzberger, the chairman of the New York Times, says his paper’s recent decision to begin charging customers for its online content in early 2011 is “a bet, to a […]

This is my 100th post on Mind Matters. Hence the cake in the pic, which was made for a wedding by Seattle’s Jet City Cakes, using H.R. Giger’s designs for […]

Bob Duggan: I’m not sure what I think about the idea of scientifically determining the creative process as a brain process. If they succeed, would they arrive at a formula for creativity? 

When you think of Pop Art, the art movement that dominated the late 1950s and early 1960s in America, you almost automatically cast up the wigged head of Andy Warhol. […]

Science is full of surprises. Like penicillin. And X-rays. And LSD. And the cosmic background radiation that is our best evidence for the “Big Bang” origin of the universe. Ever […]

On Slate’s XX Factor blog, Hanna Rosin argues that “Jihad Jane” (aka Colleen LaRose) is a feminist because she’s part of a cohort of female terrorist wannabes who have been […]

Like the first life forms on Earth, the career of John Singer Sargent rose up from the sea. Between 1874 and 1879, when Sargent first emerged from his teens and […]

President Obama has suggested in not so many words the need for a “New Deal” for America today to, we hope, match the success of FDR’s “New Deal” of the […]

“I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at,” Georgia O’Keeffe once said of her abstract works, “not copy it.” Famous for her […]

The second part of Eruptions readers’ recollections of the historic May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

How do you tell a Rembrandt from a non-Rembrandt? Even the experts have been stumped, and they’ve been stumped for centuries since Rembrandt himself passed away. Drawings by Rembrandt and […]

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 […]

The Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist weighs in on gender discrimination in science and advises young women entering the profession.

I can’t think of any artist who suffered as much in his life as Arshile Gorky. Fleeing the ethnic cleansing of Armenians by Turkish troops, he watched his mother starve […]

Since he first began doodling with crayons on yellow X-ray paper, illustrator David Small has loved art. But it wasn’t his first career choice.