David Eagleman says he grew up dreaming of having a robot companion like C-3PO, but all he got was the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Why has the field of artificial intelligence progressed so slowly?
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I wanted to highlight three different pieces on Yemen that have been published in the last couple of days, mostly because they are written by a trio of bright individuals […]
Every morning I wake up with resentment about the fact that I have to shave my damn face. The ideas that grew gnarled and twisted in my mind by the […]
Soccer, or football as it’s known to the rest of the world, is truly a universal sport. Its popularity spans genders and continents, and in terms of equipment, it also has the lowest barrier to entry.
Stress has always had a bad rap because of its effect on a person’s health, but according to a recent study stress isn’t so bad at all. Scientists explain how stress can actually boost the immune system.
A new generation of college graduates has been had by the American higher education system, which insists on costly degree programs to justify its corrupting influence on society.
The modern man supposedly sympathetic to feminist goals in the Nice Guy, who defines himself according to his liberal values. But it’s just more patriarchy in disguise, says Eva Wiseman.
People who live alone and/or feel alone have a higher possibility of disability or early death, according to new studies.
The supposed luxury of cheap fashion becomes less glamorous when you realize you’ve been dressed in rags by a corporate business model that emphasizes quantity over quality.
Researchers from Glasgow University say that men who drink tea could have a higher risk of prostate cancer than men who don’t drink tea.
A new Pew poll, and the global perception captured in the chart below, leads Ali Wyne, a fellow Big Thinker, to inquire in an interesting post about the meaning of the idea, […]
“We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion year old carbon. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” sang Joni Mitchell in her song “Woodstock.” Every […]
If you ask anyone who knows me, I like to think they’d tell you that I’m a generally optimistic and cheerful person. But these past few weeks, I’ve felt like […]
OK, so I thought I was alone in this, and that it was due to incipient neural disorders or too many drugs back in the 80s, but no: It turns […]
A new digital camera out of Duke University is set to change the way we take and use photographs, surpassing the limits of human biology and expanding on nature’s power.
Let’s face a sad truth: To be a book lover in the 21st century is a hard task. In the world of the knowledge economy and of constantly being plugged […]
A new tactile sensor developed at the University of Southern California is more sensitive to the touch than an actual human fingertip. The technology will help advance prostheses and AI.
Glenn Reynolds, one of America’s leading bloggers at Instapundit, has written a very short and accessible book called The Higher Education Bubble. My review amounts to this: It has all […]
When visiting the official Google blog today I learnt about their new Endangered Languages Project. It might sound a little funny that a company who is largely benefiting from English […]
With Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley well-established, Jeff Slobotski believes that cities like Omaha, Des Moines and Kansas City may form the backbone of a new generation of tech start ups.
People are not talking enough about The Bridge of San Luis Rey. No question, it’s a well-respected novel: it won the Pulitzer in 1928 and came in at #37 on […]
Bradley doesn’t tell you how you can be better, he doesn’t tell you how you can be like him. His approach to team leadership is a combination of empathy, encouragement, and inclusiveness.
Antonin Scalia died February 13, 2016, a day before Valentine’s Day. The conservative darling defended your right to abstain from broccoli and from health insurance, but he won’t stand up for your right to pleasure yourself.
One of the interesting developments in the Asian start-up scene over the last year has been the invasion of Western venture capital firms. Someone has obviously predicted that Asian tech […]
Madrid, Spain, has become the first city to integrate smart pavement into its infrastructure. The technology will offer citizens improved Web access while collecting data on pedestrian flow.
Physicists at the Israel Institute of Technology are working on a new structure that could bring the popular science fiction device to real-world situations such as the operating room.
Right after my recent post on “psychopunditry,” I came across signs of this kerfuffle between the writer Jonah Lehrer and the psychologist Christopher Chabris (not to be confused with this […]
We may have heard about one notable religious conversion this week, but in the more than ten years I’ve been writing about atheism (yes, it’s been that long!), I’ve found […]
Can the human mind be explained as a solely material thing? Can a machine ever be conscious?
Scientists from Harvard, Caltech, and the Max Planck Institute have succeeded in keeping a bit of quantum information, or qubit, stable in an artificial diamond for more than a second.