We all want to help our friends and loved ones but sociologists have found that helping too much—substituting our efforts for the efforts of those we’re trying to help—tends to blunt their chance of success.
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When people participate in market transactions, their moral standards fall substantially, supporting behavior they claim to oppose, such as child labor or meat production involving cruelty to animals.
My opinion is that IBM’s Watson computer is able to answer questions, and so, in my subjective view, that qualifies as intelligence.
A clean environment should not be a luxury. It should be what people’s rights are as humans.
The lesson of the experiments of the last few years is that the standard model of particle physics as it was in the mid 70s is perfectly adequate.
We are very, very wired to spread ideas and that’s where the power of human innovation comes from.
The magic of an orchestra is when everybody suddenly gets the same thing at the same moment.
Life didn’t come with a guidebook! We write it as we go along, and sometimes we fudge it!
This image depicts the annual “ring of fire” eclipse crossing Queensland’s Cape York in northern Australia.
I’ve always been fond of Mother’s Day. During my childhood the holiday was all about champagne cake, frisbee and family picnics among cherry blossoms. These days it’s about raucous family […]
How fear of swimming led to two very different evolutionary approaches to conflict resolution
It’s important to recognize that there’s this interplay between what the individual can do and what society can do to empower individuals to live longer and healthier, more productive lives.
The American Cardiovascular Association, the nation’s largest heart health organization, recently told Americans that owning a dog will likely decrease their risk of contracting heart disease.
“Was Hamlet crazy when he killed Polonius?”
I think we need tests and we need to apply those tests to individual teachers, to individual schools, to individual students and to individual parents.
When an unexpected, stressful event happens to us, do we ever stop to ask why? Or is it too late to ask? We fall into an abyss and ask questions later.
Rather than having a password to access your numerous online accounts and a key for your house and car, your heartbeat may one day allow you to enter all these locations.
Producing antibodies in yeast cultures rather than mammalian cells takes a fraction of the time and may substantially reduce production costs, resulting in cheaper therapies for patients.
Psychologists say a new mental state is emerging in which people find unusual amounts of pleasure in activities that are otherwise boring, such as folding towels and running hair dryers.
The FDA admits that restricting the sale of caffeinated products would be difficult to enforce and would likely provoke an emotional reaction from people who love their caffeine the way the NRA loves guns.
As soon as we abandon the first intuitions we have, that we’re the ones in control of everything, then we can start sailing into the inner cosmos and discovering all sorts of new planets and life forms and things like that on the inside of our skulls.
High school student Jeff Bliss offers to give his teacher a lesson in the video below. The teacher tells Bliss he is wasting her time and he needs to leave the classroom.
The Bosco Verticale by Stefan Boeri Architects will have the same ecological impact as 10,000 square meters of forest.
The original observation was effectively a lack of an observation. The conclusion was dinosaurs.
You should be willing to do something that will take 5 minutes or less for anybody. This simple notion is not only important for the purpose of being altruistic. It turns out that givers get good karma.
Here’s a good article that offers six explanations for why “median-income men in America” are “in distress.” Their incomes are dropping. Lots of “prime-age men” have been “dropping out of […]
Not humans, but computers, are endlessly trading parts of companies, and even generating hundreds of thousands of fake orders to fool other computers so that high frequency traders can take advantage of the confusion.
When the iPhone 5 went on sale users complained that it was too light. This was an odd objection. We prefer light products to heavy ones, especially devices we carry […]
This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be altruistic because desperate people are scared.
False coloring is used in this image to reveal greater detail. The image here depicts mystery martian morphology.