“We may not know why we sleep, dream or wake up, but these states are never static,” writes author Siri Hustvedt. There is a continuum of perception from unconsciousness to full self-consciousness.
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“What if the Eyjafjallajokull ash cloud is “not just a minor volcanic hiccup, but the beginning of an event that causes in time a mass extinction of some form of earthbound life?” asks Simon Winchester.
“Combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, [play] is a central paradox of evolutionary biology,” writes anthropologist and neuroscientist Melvin Konner.
Women remain much choosier than men when it comes to dating. Is this difference a vestige of our early ancestry? Or could it be the result of something more modern and mundane?
This Monday marked the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma city bombing, an attack which killed 168 people and injured 680 more. As we know now (and as we were reminded […]
In his State of the Union address, President Obama said the Supreme Court had “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign […]
The first job my mother ever held involved plucking hundreds of dandelions by their tenacious little roots from her family’s tiny lawn. Her father had set her to the task, […]
The cover of this month’s issue of Fast Company has an excellent article by Anya Kamenetz on how smart phones are leading the charge in revolutionizing traditional methods of teaching and learning. […]
Is there anything we can do about the global increase in tropical storms? Ernst Weizsäcker, co-chair of the U.N.’s International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, thinks Hurricane Katrina may have […]
Has President Obama given up on being bipartisan? New Yorker editor David Remnick, author of the new Obama biography “The Bridge,” thinks that while the President’s political personality “aims toward […]
If you want to rile up a biologist and have no pointed stick handy, try this: Tell her that chemistry or physics are “harder,” more fundamentally “sciencey” sciences than hers. […]
Mark Twain was a great American novelist, but Nathanial Rich notes that in his own lifetime—which ended exactly a hundred years ago today—he was read more widely as a travel writer.
Researchers have found that bees see the world nearly five times as quickly as humans do, helping them to navigate through bushes and find food.
University authorities—seeing the distraction that the Internet and social media can cause—are trying a varied of methods to get students to turn off their computers in class.
“Individuals and businesses who are feeding a $700 million global market in offsets are often buying vague promises instead of the reductions in greenhouse gases they expect,” writes Doug Struck.
To promote greater transparency, Google is creating a tool to give people information about government requests for content removal and user data.
“No poet has ever been so influential, so controversial, and so little read” as Ezra Pound, writes Jamie James. After him, “anyone aspiring to be a poetic messiah would be shunned as a charlatan.”
The adoption of enhanced incentives for domestic enterprise in the Third World may help poor countries compete in the global marketplace, writes David Landes.
Several studies have concluded that obesity accelerates the process of dementia. People who are overweight in their 40s are more likely to show a rapid, pronounced decline in brain function in their 70s.
Nearly fifty years after the invention of the birth control pill, we now have a wide variety of options for contraception. Yet nearly half of pregnancies in the U.S. are still unintended.
Scientists have used DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice to 190,000 years ago. They say this may indicate how long humans have been wearing clothing.
I have good news and bad news on the JUNO front. The bad news is that my partner, Darcy James Argue, and Secret Society didn’t take home the statuette for […]
There’s no shame in making money. Making money is, after all, every company’s goal. And when our companies do well, that’s generally good for the country. Under normal circumstances Goldman […]
It’s the broadcast home of some of the most insipid timewasters on the web. So who would have ever thought that some videos posted on YouTube would ever aid a […]
When it comes to finding a successor for a top executive, an “inside outsider” might be the best option. As Harvard Business School Professor Joe Bower explains in his Big […]
Here at Mind Matters we strive to be your full-service source of octopus-cognition news. And in my last post on that, I described humans making videos for octopuses. So it’s […]
“If it’s any good, [literature] can make you feel less alone in the world...It gives you some late-night company with your memories and your sorrow.Literature does touch people; it’s not […]
A British bioethics council is asking the public whether it’s ethical to use financial incentives to encourage people to donate organs.
In a new book, Timothy Ryback examines Adolf Hitler’s private library. He asserts that books were important in shaping the Führer’s life, and looks for insights in the books’ margin notes.
While political debates might suggest that the question of climate change is yet unresolved, the world of industry and commerce is convinced that global warming is real, and imminent.