Genetically modified plants could sequester more carbon and make better biofuels, possibly offsetting five billion tons by 2050. So what’s standing in their way?
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A British study shows conservatives’ brains tend to have larger amygdalas, which are responsible for more primitive emotions such as fear.
The state of the art of art in the United States and beyond in 2010 reflected the larger unrest of the world itself. I originally wanted to compartmentalize things into […]
Raising money from people who are passionate about a particular cause is easy, but how do you convince those who have no connection to an issue to give their time and money?
Former Shell Oil president John Hoffmeister has been gaining considerable news attention this week for his warning that gas prices might reach $5 a gallon by the 2012 election. His […]
Most hot ideas and discoveries fade with time. But some scientific papers are genuine breakthroughs, whose importance only increases as the decades pass. This one, published in Science last week, […]
Niko Bell says that finding a man is not as easy for Chinese women as we might think.
Katrin Bennhold of the New York Times has a heartwarming piece for anyone planning a New Year’s Eve hookup. According to Bennhold’s friends, consenting to any sex with a dude […]
Pre-industrial societies with polygyny as the dominant marriage institution consume less alcohol than those with monogamy.
So my “True Grit” post got a lot of response (unfortunately not below) on Facebook and by email and all that–mostly critical. One particularly astute critic–Ken Masugi–accused me of being in […]
Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, and his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, apparently cannot agree on which of them will be running for the Russian presidency in March 2012.
The now-prevalent pattern of flag-rank military officers going to work for defense contractors as soon as they retire is a form of corruption, says James Fallows at The Atlantic.
The U.S.’s failure under Barack Obama to impose peace between Israel and the Palestinians makes a new war likely, says Le Monde’s Alain Gresh.
Harvard scientist Jeff Lichtman wants to build a full map of the mind by carving off slivers of a mouse brain and passing the portions through a powerful electron microscope.
The Valkyrie, slated to become the world’s first nuclear powered bomber, was a plane decades ahead of its time, pushing aeronautical engineering beyond what had been thought possible.
The Economist has invited four career economists to predict what changes will take place in the global economy during the following year. Deficit reduction is one possibility.
What is wrong with Broadway? A record number of shows are closing, with producers millions in the hole. The answer is: nothing we didn’t already know.
Maybe age really is just a number. How young or old someone feels has a huge influence on their health and how other people view them—if you feel young, you are young.
The quintessentially British tradition of taking a year off between high school and university is becoming popular in the U.S. where teens seek to broaden their horizons.
Recycling doesn’t come for free. It costs millions to pickup, sort and process all those plastic bottles, aluminum cans and cardboard pizza boxes we discard.
Good brand marketing is about getting the right emotional response from your target audience. You can get people to buy a product in many ways, but to get them to […]
2010 was a great year for art publishing, with many presses producing high quality works not only in terms of reproducing great art, but also in publishing important thinkers on […]
“Wow, how did they do that?” We were watching Tron: The Legacyin 3-D, and our friend was marveling at how 61 year-old Jeff Bridges appeared as young as a man […]
What President Obama and my lazy news media don’t seem to remember, or don’t want to address today, is something Jeff Lurie said back when he hired Vick: “I needed […]
Do we pay top executives too little? That, as Tyler Cowen points out, is the question raised by a recent paper by Bang Dang Nguyen and Kaspar Meisner Nielsen. The […]
As the year draws to a close, it’s time again to take a look back at some videos that really struck a chord with our audience this year. A glance […]
Because of the wave nature of matter, there is a finite possibility—albeit a minuscule one—that you could go to bed on Earth and wake up the next morning on Mars.
Breaking the analog world into zeros and ones results in some loss of information, but it allows for an infinite number of exact replications.
The World Wide Web turned 20 this month. To mark the occasion, its creator and protector, Tim Berners-Lee (who invented it so that particle physicists from CERN—the current home of […]
People who watch funny videos on the Internet may be taking advantage of the latest psychological science—putting themselves in a good mood so they can think more creatively.