More than 60 years after her death, Lacks’ genetic material can no longer be used by researchers without family consent. Is the same true for the rest of us? Not exactly.
All Articles
Background: I came across a remarkable story, from some years ago, where someone was rather upset with Canadian game developer Bioware for including an optional homosexual element in a, now […]
For those of us who think there’s something not quite right about playing “Pac Man” on a PC, there’s San Francisco’s All You Can Arcade subscription service, which delivers machines to homes and businesses for a monthly $75 fee.
At NASA the waste management engineers are incredibly important to the entire mission, says Mary Roach.
A Quebec designer set up an installation that combines a standard “For Rent” sign with a surveillance camera, computer software, and a motorized track.
Elon Musk released the conceptual design for his Hyperloop passenger transport capsule.
A few months ago I posted a piece which has become my most popular blog post by quite a landslide.The postcovered various techniques for learning and looked at the empirical […]
When Fast Company came out with its 96 lessons for 2013 from leaders across the business spectrum, I expected to find a stereotypical list of lifestyle changes and recommendations for […]
Ideology often drives people to madness. History is full of frightening examples. The most recent may be California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a member of the House Science Committee, which […]
Adding to international pressure on Russia is the country’s ambition to host international sporting and business events, such as the 2014 Olympics in Sochi.
Much of the NSA’s data collection efforts simply work to skim private information from the vast consumer caches held by corporations like Facebook, Google, and Amazon.
Hon. Shira A Scheindlin has struck major blow to Michael Bloomberg’s and Ray Kelly’s racist and megalomaniacal “Stop and Frisk” policy. Bloomberg’s and Kelly’s policy acts in direct opposition to both the progress of our culture and of the laws they have sworn to uphold.
A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, conclude that rising temperatures and wetter seasons will aggravate regions across the world already prone to conflict.
Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with the credit system […]
A world in which great minds thought alike would be a dystopia.
The scientific mindset, Steven Pinker argues, is “indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.”
What’s the Big Idea? The words “learning” and “education” are unsexy in print – probably because for most people they unconsciously conjure up feelings of Dickensian dread and boredom. This […]
Water is among the natural resources—including oil, fish, timber, and minerals—that face increasing demand as a result of population increases and economic growth.
Looking over the summer blockbuster movies I see that “The Lone Ranger” flopped. The western, that iconic American genre, seems to be on the wane. Post-modern treatments, or westerns with […]
The country is the world’s largest polluter, but it is cleaning up faster than anyone else.
Some unconvincing reasons not to philosophize.
At Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky challenges the common assumption that automation is the cause of long-term unemployment.
Judah Folkman, the cancer researcher, is probably the most – one of the two or three most inspiring human beings I’ve ever met. I only spent two or three hours […]
Winston Churchill’s career reveals that he was pretty consistently wrong on issue after issue, place after place, time after time, and he was wrong for the same reasons he was right in May of 1940.
What would a great ad for a university of technology be? An ad, that itself, solves a problem through technology. This is exactly what the University of Engineering and Technology of […]
According to NASA estimates, up to 60 meteors per hour might be seen at the peak of the Perseid meteor shower on August 12.
The strongest determiners of depression, according to online search patterns, appear to be employment rates and climate patterns.
A survey of 240 young men and women has found that adult human crime victims receive less sympathy than do adult dogs, puppies, and human children.
In a new article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, professor Rik Pieters explains why shopping can make us lonely and why, once lonely, we turn to shopping to relieve our anti-social symptoms.
Science, along with evolutionary theory, may soothe the human soul in ways similar to religion by promoting a vision of the universe that is not random and chaotic but rather orderly and deterministic.