Pleasure is absolutely central to human behavior because it’s evolutionary ancient.
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We’ve made a little progress, perhaps in applications, but not a lot of progress in understanding the hard problem.
The current research that is most exciting is aimed toward understanding how the brain looks now at the connectivity between specific areas.
As we learn about things more deeply and more deeply, we will discover that in fact, there’s all kinds of peripheral work to be done that we couldn’t have even imagined looking forward.
We often want something to be illegal that we don’t actually want punished in a lot of circumstances.
News of a company behaving unethically has become so common that it hardly raises an eyebrow except, perhaps, in the most egregious cases – and even then the outrage is […]
Over the past sixty years, the global birth rate has steadily declined with clockwork consistency.
90% of the news in the newspaper and on television is negative because that’s what we pay attention to.
Energy becomes literally the fuel that allows us to fulfill almost all of our dreams and what I point out to people is we do have a squanderable abundance of energy. It happens to be sunlight.
The first two words that came to my mind about the Rolling Stone cover of The Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were “craven” and “disingenuous,” but they were followed by other words. […]
Technology has a scarcity-liberating capability. It takes that which is scarce and can make it abundant.
Melville’s sentence exposes the fiction between employers and employees that employees have any choice in the matter.
It’s a great luxury for a society to take it’s 18 to 21 year olds and to let them develop as thinkers.
If you don’t recognize these scars on the lunar surface – caused by ancient asteroid collisions – that is because the Moon is locked in synchronous rotation, showing only one side to Earth.
The decay of a Bs (B-sub-s) particle into two muons is one of the “rarest measureable processes in physics.”
We live in a country so cool you can take the flag and burn it on stage in Vegas.
When you can’t have something, when it’s not going to work out for you, find a way to not want it.
If you didn’t work and you were an adult male in 1960 you were a bum and you were seen as a bum by everybody else in the neighborhood.
What has happened to the founding virtues of the United States over the last half century? The news is fairly grim.
The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces last month made it the fifth hottest June on record, tied with 2006.
The twisting path to becoming less dumb has led to many stops.
Many of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous paintings seem almost eerily silent: The Milkmaid pouring cool milk into a jar, The Lacemaker deep in concentration, the Girl with a Pearl Earring […]
Drifting in the deep, the hulking, yet streamlined mammoth unleashes a string of sound, a booming, but delicate song.
Each time it’s used, the device communicates with an iPhone app that keeps track and posts the user’s progress to a Twitter account named TweetingCiggy.
One of the reasons Joseph Campbell’s work in comparative mythology continues to resonate—some, myself included, would argue grow—is due to his ability to synthesize religious and spiritual traditions from around […]
The Vatican recently announced that following World Youth Day events on broadcast or social media can count towards a length reduction…but only if it’s accompanied by “requisite devotion.”
This month, Securing America’s Future Energy announced its inaugural “Energy Security Prize” competition for emerging and advanced technologies with the ability to significantly reduce America’s dependence on oil.
Jack Hidary hopes to model himself after Michael Bloomberg as a pragmatic, nonpartisan politician.
A Belgian business participated in a 10-day experiment in which researchers dispersed the scent of chocolate throughout the store at different times. Not surprisingly, customers lingered longer, and certain genres saw increased sales.
Scotland has its Loch Ness monster and Massachusetts has its Salem witches, but for many years Romania has resisted promoting itself as the home of Bram Stoker’s fictional vampire. That’s about to change.