People’s attitudes lag behind their times, as Hermann Broch observed. At the height of the European Enlightenment, philosophers who dreamed of universal rights accepted that men would be broken on […]
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Last night, an equal marriage bill passed the New York State Senate and was signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo. New York has become the sixth, and largest, state […]
A new antiviral drug that recently won federal approval to treat hepatitis C can effectively cure most patients of the infectious disease, which has been notoriously difficult to treat.
Nature doesn’t litter, people do. In the US that trash amounts to 1.4 billion pounds per day. And 40% of that is packaging. Recently, Greenpeace tried to provoke the global […]
There is accumulating evidence that cellphones that operate on GSM networks emit significantly more radiation than do cellphones operating on CDMA networks.
In Milwaukee, the fourth-poorest city in America, educators have launched a “guerrilla classroom” initiative that transforms urban locations into impromptu classrooms for parents and children. Across Milwaukee, playgrounds, bus stops […]
Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey wants to reverse the aging process, enabling people to lead long, very long, active lives. He believes immortality is within our grasp.
Counting on food with fake fats to help you lose weight? Better count again because a new study with rats shows that low-calorie fat substitutes can actually promote weight gain.
Now that New York’s state Senate has approved gay marriage, how will the health of the LGBT community be affected? Take the good with the bad, says a Columbia Law School professor.
An inexpensive vaccine normally used against tuberculosis has been found to reverse Type 1 diabetes while dietitians in the U.K. have found an extremely low-calorie diet to reverse Type 2.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recentlywrote that while members of the U.S. armed forces may as a group be politically conservative, “they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos.” Kristof’s […]
We all draw as kids, yet most of us stop drawing somewhere around the fourth or fifth grade. Doodles seem unserious by then, and adulthood only makes us less likely […]
In his recent essay, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” star reporter Jose Antonio Vargas recalls being sent to the U.S. at the age of 12 to live with his […]
The title of Nathan Mhyrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, a 40 lb. compendium of food history and philosophy, is meant to evoke the radicalism of 20th-century artists like Picasso and Pound, whose motto was “make it new.”
With his appointment of Chris Cerf as Commissioner of Education, Chris Christie is rebuilding New Jersey public education using sweeping, data-driven methods that have been tested (and sometimes bitterly contested) in New York City and Washington, DC.
We weigh choices about risks against the associated benefits, and the bigger the benefits, the less we worry about the risk.
This week ended up being a little busier than I expected – I had to make that quick transition from wedding/honeymoon to beginning to prepare for my field/labwork coming up […]
Amid a dearth of female role models in leadership positions in Japan comes one positive move, the government is debating mandatory quotas to get more women into public office.
As they adjust to the world’s ongoing global financial difficulties, some business chiefs are moving towards ‘conditional conservatism’ in accounting. Research shows it makes sense.
Engineers increasingly end up as company heads and could learn from the experience of self-confessed introvert and former Mozilla CEO John Lilly, who learned to be a “people person.”
Nelson Lichenstein says a patriarchal ethos was written into Wal-Mart’s DNA that today helps sustain high corporate loyalty even as wages and working conditions are eroded.
Want more authority? Acting more authoritatively is one step but you must also eliminate the limiting beliefs that undermine you. For instance, the need to be loved.
If traditional media companies fail to adapt their business models to the realities of today’s open source world, companies like Boxee will be happy to fill the void.
Now that summer’s here and the time is right to turn to reruns of various kinds, I’m trying to spend the ample time I have as a tenured professor watching […]
Jean Jacques Rousseau called cities “…the abyss of the species“. Well, they may not be that bad, but with their crowding and competition and noisy get-ahead in-your-face rat race environments, […]
Political pundits who are already naysaying the Obama Administration’s decision to release 30 million barrels of oil from our strategic reserves have no idea how Wall Street works. If the […]
Which country would have the upper hand in a full-scale cyber war between the United States and China?
There probably isn’t a flashpoint in science right now as touchy as climate (well, maybe evolution). When it comes to climate change, everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks their […]
I already wrote once or twice about the mind change in our society that we are used to getting information or answers to our questions right now, anywhere we are. […]
Gossip: you can’t avoid it. And maybe, you shouldn’t want to. Scientists have argued that gossip is an important tool for social cohesion and information transmission, allowing us to function […]