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An Egyptian acquaintance wrote me from Cairo this morning. I’m passing on his warning to journalists and foreigners about gangs of pro-government thugs roaming the streets there. This morning, as […]
Quick updates for today, all centered on the Smithsonian/USGS Global Volcanism ProgramWeekly Volcanic Activity Report, along with this great new MODIS image from the NASA Earth Observatory – both Sakurajima and […]
Did you know that in the world of Wikipedia the word “marriage” is classified as a “contentious issue?” The page has been protected, on and off, for the last four […]
BIG THINK’s great little interview with Danny Rubin got me thinking about the relationship between happiness and mortality. His very philosophic film is all about our “rightly understood” theme of the connections […]
A NASA telescope counting planets in one neighborhood of the Milky Way registered more than 1,200 candidates, including 54 in life-friendly orbits around their parent stars.
The report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been assailed as a confusing mishmash—poorly organized and weakened by obvious and unsatisfying conclusions.
Nobody should be surprised to see unauthorized movie downloads booming when the authorized kind remain so difficult to find. Movie studios should seek to satisfy demand.
The thought that hormones somehow “control” our moods and behaviors is a falsehood, a popular oversimplification that hinders the understanding of what is actually going on.
Michael Hartl is the author of The Tau Manifesto, which argues that, quite simply, pi is wrong. He’s also a physicist who has previously both studied and taught at Harvard and Caltech.
The American economy isn’t back, says Robert Reich. While Wall Street’s bull market is making America’s rich even richer, most Americans continue to be mired in the housing crisis.
On February 2nd Apple and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched the Daily, a digital-only newspaper available by subscription. Does the move set a worrying precedent?
The least interesting fact about the Egyptian protests is that some of the protesters may have employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with each other.
A new study finds that poor adolescents who live in communities with more social cohesiveness are less likely to smoke and be obese as adolescents.
Scientists claim the average hug lasts for three seconds, but it has long been claimed that computers could allow us to do so remotely using electrical sensors.
One of the true joys of the internet is that you can do pretty much anything (even blog) from the comfort of your own bedroom (maybe even in your pajamas). […]
Tempers ran high at Big Think’s Farsight 2011 conference in San Francisco this week when Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, accused Microsoft’s Bing of using Google data to improve its search results.
In a guest post today, my colleague Paul D’Angelo, a professor of communication at The College of New Jersey, considers how the news media have defined the role of social […]
Parag Khanna says that a choice made ten years ago—not by the State department but by American universities—could have the greatest influence on whether new Arab governments move toward or away from the West.
Life code (the famous A, G, T, and C of DNA) will be as important to the next generation of entrepreneurs as digital code (0’s and 1’s) is now.
The life code (the famous A, G, T, and C of DNA) will be as important to the next generation as digital code (0’s and 1’s) is now.
Part II of my notes from Cairo – note this should not be mistake for expert analysis on Egypt. This is simply my notes of my own experiences. Friday Night, […]
Famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil is notoriously inaccurate in his weather predictions, but there is still much that humans can learn from other species.
I don’t often blog about things other than Yemen, mostly because I dislike reading stuff from people who speak without knowing, and as I have been forced to listen countless […]
When the late Idi Amin launched a successful coup attempt against the then President of Uganda, Milton Obote, he made sure that the latter was attending Commonwealth Conference, before sending […]
The question of using genetic enhancement to raise test scores may seem like a bad joke—or science fiction. But U.S. policymakers and families, may need to start asking themselves if they can “win the future” without it.
In vitro babies should be pre-screened for severe birth defects, argues Jacob Appel. If this creates a slippery slope, parents can find “level places on it” (and maybe save money […]
The author of the Declaration of Independence and surely our most “intellectual” president, Thomas Jefferson, wrote that we have life and liberty for the pursuit of happiness. In his private letters, […]
The ice remains here in Ohio – and the weather is truly crazed. The temperature when I woke up this morning: 36F. Temperature an hour and a half later: 25F […]
Over the last several decades, both through good economic times and bad, the United States has transformed into the planet’s undisputed worry champion.